“What’s the matter?” she said, looking up at him. Her eyes were full of hurt innocence.

He steeled himself. “You know what’s the matter.”

“I love you, Stormy.”

He held on to her arms, looked away from her face. “I don’t love you.”

“I—”

“I don’t like what you’re trying to do.”

“I’m on your side! I’m the one who told you you have to stand up for yourself, you can’t let your family boss you around and make all your decisions!”

“I am standing up for myself.”

“That’s why your family hates me!”

“And I’m standing up for my family.”

“I have nothing against them,” she said, and tears welled up in her eyes. “They’re the ones who don’t like me! They don’t like me because I’m poor. They don’t like me because I love you more than they do and I think about your feelings and what’s good for you and not just what’ll look good and save face for the family.”

“They don’t want me to see you anymore,” he said. “And I don’t want to see you either.”

“Fuck your family,” Donielle told him.

“No,” he said. “Fuck you.”

The tears stopped flowing, her face hardened. “What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

“That’s the way you want it?”

“That’s the way it’s going to be. Get out of here. I never want to see you again.”

“What you want and what you’ll get are two different things.” With a flip of her hair, she turned and walked away, and he thought that from behind she didn’t look like a child at all, she looked like a dwarf.

That lessened the attraction somewhat.

Lessened it.

But did not get rid of it.

He closed the door. Behind him he heard the click-tap of his grandmother’s cane on the floor, and he turned to see her standing by the foot of the stairs.

“I can’t find Billingham,” she said.

“I… I think he’s gone,” Stormy told her.

There was a brief flash of lucidity, a quick second in which he saw panic and fear and incomprehension on her face. She knew the butler had been part of the House, and she knew that if he was gone, something was seriously amiss. Then her usual tight expression of stoic immobility settled into place, and she said, “You will have to serve in his place, then.”

Stormy nodded. “Do you want me to help you up the stairs?”

“No,” she told him. “I want you to draw my bath. I will bathe tonight in blood. Have my tub filled with goat’s blood. Temperature tepid.”

He nodded dumbly, watched her struggle up the steps. From far down the first-floor hall, he heard his mother wailing, heard his father bellow, “Billingham!”