“Look,” Charles says. “You know I feel bad for you. I try to be a good brother. I bring girls to your stupid dinner parties and let them sit around like stuffed bears while you pour out pretend tea. All I want is for tonight to be different, Jenny. Just one night. For me.”
“Fine.” I whirl around and stalk back into the dining room. I stop short, so short that Charles, just behind me, almost walks right into my back. If he didn’t have such good reflexes, he would have.
You are still sitting where you were, at the table, and I think of what Charles said about tea parties. You look stiff as a doll with little red spots on your cheeks like paint. Mr. DuChamp is standing beside you, one hand on the back of your chair. He smiles when he sees us.
“Hello, children,” he says.
“There’s a place set for you,” I say, even though, really, the place was for your friend.
He laughs, probably unconvinced, and runs his finger through the dust on the sill. “Regrettably, I have already eaten.”
“Oh,” I say; then, remembering my manners, “How do you do?”
He smiles indulgently. “Very well, thank you, excepting one thing.” Then his demeanor changes, his face darkens, and he stands, still clutching your hand. You stare at him in horror. “Excepting that you were supposed to bring my master tribute not six months past.
“I have tried to contact you and nothing. You, my charges, embarrass me. Did I not instruct you better than this? If I, who manage all my master’s affairs, cannot manage you, what must I look like?”
I look over at Charles. His expression is determined but not surprised.
“Charles?” I say. “What tribute?”
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.