Vampire 01 - Daughter of Darkness

room.
    “C’mon,” Buddy begged. “Who are you? Where do you live? When can I see you again? You and I had a great time that night. Don’t say you didn’t.”
    “I’m not,” I said.
    “So?”
    Something in me wanted me to be reckless, to be a little rebellious, and it wasn’t only his good looks and sweet personality.
    “My name isn’t really Diane,” I admitted.
    “Oh. What is it?”
    “Lorelei.”
    “Why did you tell me it was Diane?”
    “Caution,” I said. “We’ve been stalked.”
    “Oh. Well, I won’t stalk you if you don’t want me to, but boy, I want to very much.”
    I smiled. Surely, he was too sweet and innocent to be dangerous. He didn’t have Mark Daniels’s cocky attitude, either.
    “Why don’t you give me your phone number, and maybe I’ll call you?” I told him.
    “Really?”
    “Really,” I said, and he wrote it out quickly on a slip of paper and handed it to me.
    “So, are you coming back here tomorrow?”
    “No.”
    “Why did you come today?”
    “Maybe I’ll go here someday,” I said.
    “So you’re not in college? You’re in high school?”
    I realized I had already said too much, but as Mrs. Fennel said many times, you can’t unring a bell. Before I had to reply, however, Ava returned.
    “Let’s get the check and go,” she said. “We don’t want me to be late for my next class.”
    “Hey, let me take care of the check,” Buddy said. “That’s the least I can do for telling a white lie.”
    “Yes, redeem yourself,” Ava said.
    I stood up. “Thank you,” I said.
    “My pleasure.”
    We started out.
    “He’s telling the truth,” Ava whispered. “I checked him out on my BlackBerry. His father is a dentist in Long Beach. No renegade there.”
    “Good.”
    “I’ll speak to Daddy, but I don’t think he’ll want him.”
    “What? Want him? What do you mean?”
    “You know,” she said, smiling.
    I looked back at Buddy, and then I tried to get my heart to stop thumping loud enough for everyone to hear.

11
 
Love
    I sat in my room and stared at Buddy’s phone number. What Ava had said frightened me for a while, but then I comforted myself in the knowledge that Daddy forbade Ava from involving herself with any young men from her college because of the obvious greater possibility of being discovered. Nothing was more important to him than her being careful about this. I recalled how angry he had been when Brianna had brought home the married man. He had almost moved us away from where we lived in New York immediately. No one, not even the best and most intelligent fugitives, could disappear as quickly or as well as Daddy and his family could. As I had nearly very painfully learned, the only ones who had any chance of finding us were the renegades.
    Why was I so concerned about Buddy, anyway? I had never thought much about any of the young men either Brianna or Ava had brought home to Daddy. Maybe I just never wanted to think about them. I didn’t want to know their names or anything else about them. As long as they remained vague, I didn’t have to think of them as actual people. Except for the time with the man Briannahad brought home and the time with the stoned man Ava had brought home, I had never witnessed Daddy with anyone else all these years. Those occasions plus the way he had attacked Mark Daniels were the only violent incidents I had witnessed in my life. For someone else, that might sound like enough, but considering what we daughters were responsible for, it wasn’t very much. After all, it went on at least once a month for all our young lives.
    But recurring and troubling visions in which I saw Buddy Gilroy on that stairway were beginning to haunt me all times of the day and night. There were other boys in school and young men I had seen who were attractive, Mark Daniels being the most attractive, perhaps, but there was something special about Buddy, something different. He wasn’t simply handsome and sexually interesting. There was something gentle, soft, caring in his eyes. As trite as it certainly would sound to Ava, he struck me as sincere in a very human sort of way. To put it simply, I didn’t feel he was only eager to get into my pants. I thought he really and truly wanted to know me, to spend time with me, and might very well be satisfied spending a day just walking and talking with me.
    Oh, we’d want to kiss, to touch, even to go farther and be completely intimate, I was sure, but there wasn’t that frenzy