Vampire 01 - Daughter of Darkness

me?
    I had gone upstairs, snuck into Daddy’s suite in order to satisfy my desperate need to know more about myself, and all I had done was create more mystery, more dark places. It was like unwrapping one of those boxes I dreamed would be under a Christmas tree and finding only another wrapped box. Frustrated, I put my mother’s picture inside my English lit textbook and set it aside on my desk. Then I went to my bedroom window and looked out.
    Twilight was passing into night. A cloudless sky was beginning to reveal the brighter stars. A tiny cyclone of emotions was spinning up from the pit of my stomach. I felt myself begin to breathe faster and harder as my heart went into a gallop.
    When Daddy had swooped down on Mark Daniels just outside this window, I had seen the fear and terror in Mark’s reddened eyes. He had resembled a child struggling against a powerful adult. Before he was swallowed up in the darkness, he had turned toward me, and for a fleeting moment, he once again looked like the Mark Daniels who had charmed me at school, who had tempted that part of me that longed to be like everyone else. Had he been pleading for my help?
    But I saw his fangs again, too, and a wave of rage overtook any sadness I had felt. Something hard and muscular unfolded and awoke in me. I hadn’t admitted it to myself until this very moment, but I had had the urge to go through that window and help Daddy destroy whatMark had become. It had flowed through me with such heat I thought my skin had begun to melt.
    And then later, after it was over, when I had finally closed my eyes again, I had sunk into my bed like a body in a coffin, reaching up to pull the lid down over myself and shut out the world outside.
    It struck me that, like Daddy and Ava and Brianna, I was welcoming the darkness. I was no longer afraid of the darkness. The darkness had become my friend, too. It made me think of the most important question of all.
    That question still echoed down the long corridor of my sleep and into the morning light and still reverberated and haunted me, which I feared it might do forever and ever. Even now, perhaps more than ever before, because of the mystery I had begun to unravel, I could hear it clearly. Only now, I heard it in a voice unlike my own, an older female voice, but one with a sweet and concerned tone, a loving voice, asking more questions.
    Who are you, Lorelei?
    Really.
    Who are you?
    And what are you becoming?

12
 
Who Are You, Lorelei?
    If Daddy knew I had gone up to his suite, he didn’t come down in the morning to confront me about it. Mrs. Fennel said nothing to me, either. Only Ava seemed to sense something different about me. I could see it in the way her eyes followed me about this morning, how thoughtful and studied she was. Suspicion fell from her eyes like tears. Unfortunately for me, this was the one morning she had an early class, so she was there at breakfast.
    “What’s wrong with you today?” she asked me.
    “Nothing. I’m just a little tired, I guess.”
    “We don’t get a little tired,” she said. “You have no reason to be tired at all, Lorelei. I hope you’re not still thinking about Buddy.”
    “Who’s Buddy?” Marla asked.
    “Never mind,” Ava told her. “Well?”
    “No,” I said, but I was sure it wasn’t firm enough of a no.
    “Right,” she said out of the corner of her mouth reserved for skepticism. “You let me be the one who thinks about him.”
    Her words were like tiny knives sticking into my stomach.I avoided her eyes and hurried Marla along so we could leave for school, but my mind was never free of the thoughts she had deposited there.
    “What’s Ava talking about? Who is Buddy? Why does she want you not to think about him?” Marla asked. “I thought we were sisters. Why are you keeping secrets from me?”
    “It’s nothing, Marla. Ava is overreacting. He’s just some college boy I met when I was with her at UCLA the other day,” I said, trying to sound as casual as I could. “I made the mistake of telling her I thought he was good-looking, and you know how Ava gets when you mention a boy is good-looking.”
    “As good-looking as you thought Mark Daniels was?” Marla asked. I glanced at her. Already, at her age, she could look as mean and angry as Ava.
    “He’s different,” I said.
    “Oh, you can tell the difference now? That’s a relief. I won’t have my life at risk because of your romantic notions,” she said. She not only looked more