Vampire 01 - Daughter of Darkness

fallen in love with someone and married her. It was as if love were a disease, Daddy had been infected, and she was the result. She made it sound as if she were a scar.
    “What’s wrong with falling in love?” I asked her when she complained.
    “Love is poison for us,” she replied, and would say no more about it, no matter how many times I asked.
    If it had been responsible for my being Daddy’s natural daughter, I thought, I wouldn’t call it poison.
    At times, Ava looked so much like Daddy that it was as if she were cloned. Rarely, if ever, did Daddy talk about Ava’s mother, and Ava hated to talk about her. She would get furious with me if I made the smallest reference to her. All I knew was what I had gleaned from Mrs. Fennel and the tidbits Daddy revealed. Her name was Sophia. I was told she had died in childbirth.
    “Were there any pictures of your mother?” I asked her once.
    “If there were, I don’t care to see them,” she told me.
    “Aren’t you even a little curious about her?”
    “No!” she said, practically shouting back at me. “Stop talking about her. For all I know or care, I was hatched,understand? Not born. You can consider me half an orphan.”
    How could she be even half an orphan? She at least knew who her mother was and who her father was, although Daddy was as real in my mind and in my affections as any daddy could be. Why was she so bitter about her mother, treating her as someone who had tricked or corrupted Daddy? How had he met her, anyway? What made her so different from other women he had known? Why couldn’t anyone talk about it? Why did we all have to swim in so much mystery? Sometimes I thought I would surely drown in it. I was barely keeping my head above water with the little bits of information Mrs. Fennel threw in my direction from time to time as it was. I felt like some caged animal kept moments away from starvation.
    Ava had one of those Mrs. Fennel impatient and annoyed expressions on her face right now.
    “Come off it, Lorelei. Stop giving me that innocent look. You don’t lie here in your room and just listen to your music,” she continued, lying on my bed and looking up at the ceiling. “You lie here and fantasize about sex with one or another of the boys in your school, fantasize about wonderful kisses, their tongues on your tongue, their lips moving down your neck as they slowly undress you,” she said softly, with such an erotic feeling I felt myself tingle.
    She turned on her side to look at me. Her breasts ballooned, and her eyes brightened impishly. How could any man resist her, resist those inviting lips? Would I ever have her power? It both excited and frightened me to think I would.
    “I…”
    “Please. Don’t bother denying it. I can practically hear your dreams through the wall, and I know the reason you’re so flushed sometimes. It comes washing down over you, doesn’t it? You feel like you might drown in your own sex, like your heart might burst because it’s beating so hard and so fast, and all that simply from images, thoughts. You can’t even begin to imagine what the real thing will do.”
    I nodded. No sense lying to her. It was that way exactly. Satisfied with my confession, she smiled again and lay back to look at the ceiling.
    “Don’t forget, I was your age, too, and went through exactly what you’re experiencing. I will admit that I was doing it when I was younger than you, but it was the same, so stop trying to deny it.”
    “I didn’t say I don’t imagine myself with any of the boys. I said I don’t have a crush on any of them. There’s no one I would die to be with, Ava. I swear!”
    “Crush? Do you teenagers still use that term? I don’t care what you call it. You have it, this longing. Sometimes your body aches because of it.”
    She grinned like a cat and then turned back to look up at the ceiling again. The way she stared at it made me wonder if she saw something on it. I glanced at it, too. Daddy was asleep right above us. Was that what she was thinking? Was she saying these things to me knowing he could hear her? Daddy could hear us in his sleep, even if we spoke as softly as we were now. He once told me he didn’t sleep. He drifted in the darkness, floated like an astronaut in outer space.
    “Let me tell you something, little sister. Don’t be so eager to give it away,” she warned, clearly referring to my virginity.
    “I’m not.”
    “No sense denying you want to, Lorelei. Daddy senses it,