He shakes his head. “Six living girls.”
I turn back to Mr. DuChamp. He is frowning, like he’s trying to puzzle out something. “You did not receive my message?”
“I received it,” Charles says. “I tore it up.”
“That is unacceptable,” says Mr. DuChamp.
“I don’t understand.” It’s you, speaking in your tinny little human voice, like the voice of a fly. “What’s going on?”
Mr. DuChamp turns to me. “Ladies,” he says. “Perhaps if you were to retire to the parlor, I might speak to Master Charles in private.”
I already know you’re not going to go along with it. You don’t understand that requests for privacy must always be honored. You are already sputtering as I take hold of your arm. I squeeze, just a little, and you turn white.
“Ouch,” you say. “Ouch, what are you doing to my arm?”
“Nothing,” I say. “I’m not doing anything.” My mother used to do that when I misbehaved in the supermarket. She would pinch the skin in the crook of my arm and smile a syrupy smile like the one I’m smiling now. Although she couldn’t pinch as hard as I can, now. “Ladies retire to the parlor after dinner.”
You’re looking at Charles. “I’m not going anywhere with your creepy little sister.”
“I’ll be there in a minute,” Charles tells you. “Stay with Jenny.”
You go, but not quietly. Whining the whole way.
All the furniture in the parlor is covered in big white sheets. It’s more convenient that way. When they get blood on them, we can take them away and launder them and put them back clean. The sofa looks like a fat white iceberg, surrounded by smaller icebergs, floating in the darkness. You cough and sneeze a little, choking on all the dust. There’s a fireplace full of dead ashes and windows that have had plywood hammered over them. I wonder if you’re starting to realize this isn’t a normal sort of house.
I push you down on the couch and go back over to the door. If I stand just behind it, I can hear Charles and Mr. DuChamp, but they can’t see me.
“It’s not right,” Charles is saying. “It’s one thing to kill people because we have to, because we’ve got to live, but those girls were so scared. And I didn’t know anything. I hurt that one girl real bad because I didn’t know how tight to knot the rope. And another girl just sobbed for the whole five-hour drive. I hate it. I’m not doing it again.”
“That is the very point of etiquette, Charles. It instructs us as to how to do things we don’t want to do.”
“I won’t do it,” Charles says.
“That is very rude. And you know I do not tolerate rudeness.”
“What’s going on?” you say, tremulously, from behind me.
“He’s going to kill Charles,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound all that different from yours.
“What are you?” you ask. You must be sobering up. “What’s he?” You point at Mr. DuChamp.
I bare my teeth at you. It’s the easiest way, really, to show you what I am. I’ve never done it before in front of someone I wasn’t intending to kill right away.
Your eyes go wide when you see the fangs, but you don’t step back. “And he’s one, too? And he’s going to hurt Charles?”
You’re so stupid. I already told you. “He’s going to kill him.”
“But. why?”
“For not following the rules,” I tell you. “That’s why rules are so important.”
“But you’re just kids,” you say. You’re used to second chances and next-time-there’ll-be-consequences-young-lady. You’ve never had your mother killed in front of you. You’ve never drunk your brother’s blood.
“I’m old,” I say. “Older than you. Older than your mother.”
I know why Charles didn’t tell me about the tribute, though. It’s because some part of him still thinks of me as little too. He’s been protecting me from that, just like he’s been protecting me by staying in the old house, even though he no longer wants to. It’s not fair. He was right before when he said he was a good brother. He shouldn’t get killed for that.
“Well, do you have a stake?” you ask.
I don’t point out that this is like asking a French aristocrat if they have a guillotine around. Instead I point toward the fireplace.
You are surprisingly quick on the uptake. Not sophisticated, of course, but with a sort of rough intelligence. Street smarts, Mr. DuChamp would say. You grab the fireplace poker and without a second glance head out the door into the dining room.
I lean around the door. Mr. DuChamp has Charles up against the wall. His big hand is around Charles’s neck, and he is squeezing. He can squeeze hard enough to crush Charles’s neck if he wants to, but that wouldn’t be fatal. Right now he’s just having fun.
When we were just starting to learn how to feed, the hardest part for me was moving out of the stalk and into the strike. There’s an awkward moment when you get close to your victim but haven’t actually lunged. It can seem an impossible gulf between planning and actually doing, but if you hesitate, you’ll get noticed.
You obviously don’t have that problem. You swing the poker against the side of Mr. DuChamp’s head hard enough to make him stagger back. Blood runs down his cheek, and he opens his mouth in a fanged hiss.
Before he can get his bearings, I clamp my mouth on his throat like a lamprey. I’ve never drunk the blood of one of my kind before. It’s like drinking lightning. It goes zinging down my throat, and all the time Mr. DuChamp’s fists are beating on my shoulders, but I don’t let go. He’s roaring like a tiger in a trap, but I don’t let go. Even when he crashes to the ground, I don’t let go, until Charles leans over and detaches me, pulling me off the corpse like an engorged tick so full and fat it doesn’t even care.
“Enough, Jenny,” he says. “He’s dead.”
6. NEVER START CLEANING WHILE YOUR GUESTS ARE STILL PRESENT.
A lot of people think that when vampires die, they explode or catch on fire. That’s not true. As death sets in, our kind subside slowly into ash, like a bowl of fruit ripening into mold and rot on speeded-up film. We all stand in a sort of triangle, watching as Mr. DuChamp starts turning slowly black, the tips of his fingers beginning to crumble.
You start crying, which seems ridiculous, but Charles takes you into the other room and talks to you softly like he used to talk to me when I was little.
So then it’s just me, witness to Mr. DuChamp’s final end. I take the little broom from the fireplace and sweep what’s left of him among the scorched wood and bones.
When you and Charles come back out, I’m standing there with the broom like Cinderella. Charles has his arm around you. You look blotchy and red nosed and very human.
“We’re going to have to run away, Jenny,” he says. “Mr. DuChamp’s master knew where he was. He’ll come looking for him soon enough. I don’t know what he’ll do when he finds out what happened.”
“Run away?” I echo. “Run away to where?” I’ve never been anywhere but here, never lived anywhere but in this house.
You explain that you have an uncle who has a farmhouse upstate. You and Charles plan to hide out there. I am welcome to come along, of course. Charles’s creepy little sister.
This is what Charles always wanted — a real girlfriend, someone who will love him and listen to music with him and pretend that he’s a regular boy. I hope that you do. I hope that you will. You might be stuck with each other for a long time.
“No,” I say. “I’m okay. I’ve got somewhere else to go.”
Charles furrows his brow. “No, you don’t.”
“I do,” I say and give him the evilest look I can manage.
I guess he doesn’t really want me to come to the farmhouse, because he actually drops it. He goes upstairs to pack up his stuff, and you go with him.
The remains of dinner are still on the table. The glasses full of wine. The four plates, only one of them with food on it. The remains of our last dinner party.