Vampire 01 - Daughter of Darkness

had nowhere near the fire in her eyes that burned in Ava’s right now.
    “What is it, Ava? What else do you want from me?” I was sure she could stare down a charging tiger. “I turned it off!”
    She smirked and then relaxed and brushed her silky black hair away from her face. It was shoulder length and never looked dull or dirty. My dark brown hair always felt coarse compared with hers, and I thoughtit was too curly. Maybe I felt that way because Daddy enjoyed stroking Ava’s hair and rarely stroked mine. Lately, when I complained about my hair to Mrs. Fennel, she threatened to take out the ironing board and iron every strand.
    “If you keep moaning about it, I swear I will do it when you sleep,” she warned, “and if I burn some of it and you become bald, that will be on your head. Literally.”
    And that was that.
    Mrs. Fennel, who had been with my father for centuries, it seemed, always spoke with staccato efficiency. When someone said, “That woman doesn’t waste her breath,” he or she was surely referring to Mrs. Fennel. Often she went all day without saying more than a dozen words, but she could speak pages with a look, an expression. Even as a toddler, I always knew when my questions were foolish to her and not worth her answering. Ava said Mrs. Fennel was a surgeon. She could cut the waste out of any day. She never said or did anything without purpose or meaning. She had the best IWPB—important words per breath—of anyone.
    “You should be grateful she has been your nanny,” Ava told me once after I complained about something Mrs. Fennel had said to me. “I’m grateful she has been mine.”
    “I am!” I claimed, even though in my heart, I didn’t mean it. I dreamed instead of having a real mother.
    “Spoiled,” Ava muttered, under her breath but loudly enough for me to hear. “She lets you get away with too much. She never let me get away with that much.”
    I tried to be grateful, to appreciate all Mrs. Fennel did for me, but it was never easy. As an infant, I was forbidden to cry too much or too long, and I quickly realized that crying didn’t get me anything anyway. Mrs. Fennel was never physically rough with me. She never struck me or spanked me; she didn’t have to do that. Her stern looks, with those gold-tinted black eyes that were like laser beams cutting through me, were far more than enough to get me to swallow back a wail or a sob.
    Tall and thin, with a hardness in her arms and body that had me believing she was made of iron until I saw her naked once, Mrs. Fennel radiated a firmness and confidence that gave me, Marla, Ava, and, I’m sure, Brianna, a sense of security. As long as she was there, nothing could harm us. Even germs feared her. No one ever got sick.
    And yet she was so feminine at times, so concerned about our appearance, our looks, that I felt as if she had the power to sculpt us into beauties. She had bath oils (her own mixtures) that kept our skin smooth and soft, shampoos with one of her magical ingredients that, despite my unhappiness with my own hair, really did keep it soft and healthy compared with the hair of the other girls in my classes, and of course, she cooked and prepared the healthiest things for us to eat, which were mostly from her own herbal recipes. To this day, I don’t know what she gave me to eat as baby food, but whatever it was, it was homemade. There was always a gentle tug of war between her and Daddy, who tried to give us something sweet or decadent from time to time when we were younger.
    “Don’t corrupt them. There’s time enough for that,” Mrs. Fennel might say, and that was that. Daddy would back off. Someday, I thought, I would know why Mrs. Fennel, who was supposedly our housekeeper and nanny, had such power over Daddy, who was supposedly her employer. Either jokingly or maybe because she knew more than I did, Ava once said, “She’s Daddy’s mother. He got his good looks from her.”
    Despite her hard, sculptured features, Mrs. Fennel did look as if she might have been beautiful once. Her gray hair was still long and soft. She didn’t have any of those age spots elderly people develop, and her wrinkles weren’t deep or long. Sometimes they seemed to be gone anyway. It was as if she could have days of returning to her twenties or her teen years. It gave me pause to wonder about her past. Until now, at least, she especially didn’t like me or Marla asking her too many personal questions, and she wasn’t one to