Vampire 01 - Daughter of Darkness

altogether. It didn’t much matter how you refused them, either. Your excuses could sound quite plausible, but the result was always the same. You weren’t going to be there. You weren’t going to embrace someone’s attempt at a closer friendship.
    I used to think,
I know we’re different, but can’t we just pretend we’re not once in a while? Can’t I do the thingsother girls my age do?
Finally, one day when I was about Marla’s age, I asked Mrs. Fennel just that, and she said, “No,” but with such an accompanying angry, biting look that I dared not even think it again.
    Ava said we didn’t need school friends. We had each other, and we had Daddy.
    It was true that Daddy did his best to occupy us. He took us to shows and on trips and even permitted us to attend his parties sometimes. If he ever invited a woman to dinner, we were all there at the table as well. Whoever she was, she was always impressed with our manners and our polite and informed conversation. More than one of his dates said something like, “You’re raising them by yourself better than most couples raise their own children.”
    “You simply nurture what’s already in them,” Daddy would tell them. “You give it room to grow, to breathe. You have patience. It’s like this wonderful wine,” he would say, looking at the decanted wine. “If you don’t rush it, it will be smooth, the flavors full.”
    Of course, I didn’t realize it when I was very young, but now I knew that whenever he spoke to one of his women like that, in his silky soft voice, she was practically having an orgasm. I remember looking around the table and seeing the sly, almost smirking smile on Brianna’s face. She would look down the whole time Daddy spoke. Ava was mesmerized and was just as curious as I was about the women Daddy had brought to our table and later would bring to his bedroom. We could see his power unfold right before our eyes, and that made us idolize him even more.
    “We’re taking the convertible?” I asked Ava as she headed for the Mercedes. Daddy had three cars: two sedans, one of which I used for school, and this convertible.
    “Of course. We want to look the part. We’re on the prowl,” Ava said.
    “Like wolves.”
    “Better than wolves,” she replied, and finally laughed at something I said.
    Now that we were on our way, I was feeling as if I had fallen into a blender. A variety of emotions were swirling around inside me. I was frightened, nervous, excited, and even a bit numb. I waited for her to continue talking and explain why she didn’t go to these places normally. When she didn’t follow up, I asked her why not.
    “This sort of a place is a college hangout. College boys are usually too immature for me and too gregarious.”
    “Gregarious? What do you mean?”
    “They hang out in clumps to give each other moral support. The worst are fraternity guys with their rah-rah, boom-bah. Those pins and sweaters and hats drive me nuts. And these sorts of young men gossip more than women do. Take my word for it. When they return from a date, they have to give a blow-by-blow account, and they usually exaggerate to make their buddies jealous. They are, in a word, too dangerous for us. So, as I told you, Lorelei, nothing will happen tonight, not in the sense we mean, understand? This is really and truly just a field trip, an experimental little journey.”
    I nodded, but she didn’t see it. We rode on.
    “That’s not to say there isn’t a great deal to learnfrom these college boys. You want to know what to say, how to say it, and when to say it. You want to know when you return a gaze or a glance or when you fish with your eyes and hook with a smile. This isn’t like some harmless flirtation in class, either. These young men aren’t at this place to find little high school romances. They’re not there to find a girl they can go steady with and write home about. Most of them, anyway,” she added. “There are always the dreamers.”
    “Dreamers?”
    “Why shouldn’t there be some of them looking for their miraculous soul mates? You’ve got to be able to recognize them and, for the most part, stay away from them. The men we want are those who want no lasting relationships. They won’t care if they don’t learn all about you in one or sometimes two nights. They want to go to bed with you, have a laugh, and go back out there with no promises left on the table. Some men,” she said, smiling, “give women they’re with