Vampire 01 - Daughter of Darkness

morning,” she said. There was no point in asking her where he had gone or why. She wouldn’t tell me. She would act as if she didn’t hear me. I stood there for a moment, thinking, and then turned to return to my room. But I paused at the bottom of the stairway. I looked up and wondered if I dared. I could hear Mrs. Fennel still in the kitchen. Quietly, my heart pounding, I walked up the stairs.
    Normally, it wasn’t often that any of us were in Daddy’s bedroom even in our other homes. Besides a bathroom in the hallway on the second floor, there was Mrs. Fennel’s bedroom. She always slept near him. Her bedroom and his had en suite bathrooms. The hallway bathroom was there for the guest bedroom that had been incorporated into Daddy’s before we moved here. The wall between them had been removed, and this grand suite had been constructed.
    The flooring of Daddy’s entire suite was a very soft, fluffy white carpet. The walls were covered in velvet with black trim. His bed was a dark cherry wood with a headboard that had what he told us was his family crest embossed. It looked like a crown wrapped around a shape that resembled a human heart.
    “Don’t ask me to tell you exactly what it means,” he told us. “It’s so old that no one really remembers, but it is striking, isn’t it?”
    His suite had double dark cherry-wood doors, both lightly embossed with the same family crest. I once told him I thought it meant “the king of love.” He liked that very much and told everyone who visited what I had said.
    “She’s so imaginative,” he said, and then shrugged and added, “Who knows? Maybe she’s right. Even if she isn’t, I like it, ‘the king of love.’”
    It always brought laughter and smiles and pats on the head to me whenever Daddy told his friends. Naturally, both Marla and Ava were jealous.
    There were many artifacts in Daddy’s room, very old portraits of relatives in gilded frames, ivory carvingsfrom the Far East, framed scripts or letters written in Gaelic and some Slavic dialects, beautiful jeweled boxes, statuary from Greece and Italy in wall niches, some old clocks, wall tapestries from the Middle Ages created in France and England, and a marble table on which were many interesting things he had collected or had been given through the years—lockets, small pearl-handle knives, and, strangely enough, some bones encased in glass. He never spoke of them, and I never asked him about them, but we all understood they were the bones of his ancestors.
    A part of his suite was a sitting area furnished with nineteenth-century French settees, foot rests, tables, and embroidered chairs. Daddy had a very valuable collection of original recordings of great opera singers as well as popular American, English, French, and Italian singers. When he was relaxing in his room, he was content to play those rather than use the tapes and MP3 players we girls had, even though the sound was scratchy. It was his way of recapturing some sweet memory or another.
    The other pieces of furniture in the bedroom matched the bed. There was a large chandelier above the bed. He had bought it in France at some auction and claimed it had once hung in Marie Antoinette’s bedroom.
    “I tell any of the women who’ve slept here to eat cake,” he said, joking about Marie Antoinette’s famous response when told the people were starving and had no bread. “Let them eat cake,” she supposedly said. “I so admire anyone who will not permit the misery around us to interfere with his or her pleasure,” Daddy said.
    I opened the doors slowly, as silently as I could, andstood there for a few moments, just looking at everything. As always, the suite was pristine, not a spot of dust on anything. The chandelier was dimly lit, even though it was still quite bright outside, and the sunlight streaked through the open curtains, making crystals glitter.
    What had brought me up here was the thought that maybe, just maybe, somewhere in his suite, in a drawer, in a box, somewhere, there was something about me, about my origins. Just contemplating going into Daddy’s room without his permission was terrifying, but here I was, driven by this overwhelming need to know myself better.
    I took off my shoes so I would leave no trace on his immaculate rug. Even so, I was convinced Daddy would enter his suite and know I had been there. No matter how careful I was, he would know. I had to risk it. I took a deep breath and crossed into the