Daughter of Darkness (23 page)

As quietly and as softly as I had come up the stairway, I descended. When I reached the bottom, I hesitated. I had a cold feeling at the back of my neck telling me someone was behind me, but when I turned to look, I saw no one, not Mrs. Fennel or my sisters and certainly not Daddy. He wasn’t home, but it really felt as if something was following me. Maybe he was able to leave his spirit here to watch over his things. I hurried on to my room and quickly shut the door behind me. Then I went immediately to my desk, and on a pad, I wrote the address of the orphanage from which I had been taken so I would not forget it.

After that, I sat on my bed and stared at the picture of the woman who could be my mother, looking again for any resemblances between us and trying to figure out what she was like from the way she held her head, from her eyes and her mouth. She looked happy in this picture.
Had she been with my father when it was taken? Had I been born yet? What did her voice sound like, her laugh? How could she leave me behind? What if she saw me now? Would she recognize 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 what
Mark 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 like Ava now, she also sounded more like her.

Why was Ava having more of an influence on Marla than I was having? I was the one with whom she spent most of her time. After school, she was usually in my room, not Ava’s. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so flippant with her when she started asking me more questions. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so eager to get her to go to Ava. I wondered if she thought I didn’t like her or want her around me. Now that I thought about it, she had been avoiding me more and more in the house. These suspicions were about to be elevated.

After a few moments of silence between us, Marla suddenly said, “Don’t look for me after school today.”

“What? Why not?”

“Ava is coming for me.”

“When?”

“Before the final period. She has permission to sign me out, you know. Daddy made sure of that.”

“Where are you going?”

“She didn’t say exactly. She just thinks we should spend more time together.”

I was silent. Why was Ava doing this now? Were things going to move this quickly?

“You know,” Marla said, almost as if she had developed the ability to listen in on my thoughts, “she’ll be leaving us sooner than we think.”

I turned to her.

“In fact, we’ll all be leaving Los Angeles,” she continued.

“How do you know this?”

“A little bird told me. How do you think?”

“No, really, Marla. Do you know anything about that?”

“I heard Mrs. Fennel and Daddy talking this morning.”

“Daddy didn’t come down this morning.”

“No,” she said. “You have that wrong. Daddy didn’t come home until this morning.”

“Oh. What did they say?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t be the one telling you this. Maybe you should go to Ava,” she said spitefully.

“I never told you to go to Ava with your questions
unless I really didn’t know the answers, Marla. Don’t be a little bitch.”

She laughed. “I heard Daddy say the arrangements were being completed. He thought maybe another two months or so at the most, and most likely sooner. That’s what I heard.”

“You’re sure? He said another two months or so at the most?”

She shrugged. “We’ll have a family meeting, and he’ll tell us everything when he’s ready to tell us. But you know what I think now?”

“What?”

“I think Ava will be leaving before we move.” She smiled. “And then you’ll be my big sister. That’s why she wants to spend more time with me.”

Another two months or so? That meant possibly two more hunts before we left.

Was that my heart thumping, or had we gotten a flat tire?

The commotion that had begun in my mind didn’t stop all morning. I don’t think I heard more than a few words my teachers spoke. I know I did poorly on a quiz in math. I couldn’t stop thinking about Buddy. He had such a trusting smile, such innocence in his eyes.

Even when I sat eating my lunch in the noisy cafeteria, I couldn’t get myself to stop thinking about Buddy. I opened my purse and found his phone number. For a while, I just sat there looking at it. It felt hot in my fingers, as hot as the greeting cards Ava claimed lovers sent each other. The scribbled numbers were a way of connecting myself to him, resurrecting his face, his smile,
and his trusting eyes. I had not come as close to kissing any boy as I had come to kissing him that night at Dante’s Inferno. His lips haunted me now.

When I rose and walked out of the cafeteria and out of the building, I knew that what I was about to do could be the beginning of the end for me as far as my family went. Ava’s recitation of Mrs. Fennel’s warnings about love replayed in my mind. “Men and women of high intelligence will do the most foolish things in pursuit of passion. Because their passion is so all-consuming, they will want to possess the object of that passion. It will drive them to sell out their own family…”

I took out my cell phone. Was I terribly afraid? Yes, so frightened my fingers wouldn’t work the tiny buttons. I had to sit on a bench and take deep breaths to try again. Slowly, I brought the phone to my ear and listened as the call went through. It rang twice, and I flipped the phone closed.

I can’t do this
, I thought.
Once I do this, Daddy will hate me forever. I can’t.

I stood up to go back inside the building, but my feet felt glued to the ground. There was a tumultuous battle going on inside me, my heart against my mind.

Why call him?
my mind was asking.
What can you say? Where do you expect it to lead, anyway? A date? It would be like playing with fire. You would be teasing him, giving him hope that something could come of a relationship.

I didn’t trust Ava. I had nightmares about what she might do, regardless of the restrictions Daddy placed on her. I could call Buddy to warn him.

But how? Would he believe what you told him if you
dared to tell him? You’d be betraying your family, betraying Daddy.

But what if you don’t tell him anything?
I thought.
What if one night, you heard Ava’s car drive up and you saw Buddy Gilroy step out of it? Would you just watch in silence, or would you cry out? And what would you cry out? “Run”? “Watch out for my daddy”? What?

Wouldn’t it be better to avoid that scene, and what better way is there to avoid it than to go to him, to warn him ahead of time?

I sat on the bench again, but before I could decide, my cell phone rang. It was not outside the realm of my thinking to imagine that Ava or even Daddy knew I had tried to call Buddy. I let it ring again, and then I flipped it open and said, “Hello.”

“Who is this?” I heard. “Huh? You called me, but I couldn’t answer it in time. Is this Elsa?”

“Elsa?” I asked.

He laughed.

Who was Elsa? Then I remembered. That was Ava’s phony name the night we went to Dante’s Inferno. He must have given her his cell-phone number, too. Otherwise, why would he even think it was Ava calling him? She wasn’t lying to me, then. She had come on to him, and she had him infatuated with her. I felt like hanging up and really trying to forget him, but I didn’t. I couldn’t.

“No,” I said. “It’s Lorelei.”

“Lorelei? Really?” The excitement in his voice encouraged me.

“Yes, although I guess you were expecting someone else.”

“No, no. I wasn’t expecting anyone else. What a great surprise. Please. Where are you? When can I see you?” His eagerness made me smile.

“What makes you think I want to see you?” I teased.

“Hey, when a prayer is answered, I never question it,” he said.

I looked at my watch. Since Ava was picking up Marla, I didn’t have to return directly home after school. If I left early and Marla found out, she would surely tell Ava. No, I had to tolerate the rest of the school day, although it was going to be as useless for me as the morning had been.

“I’ll meet you at three-thirty on the Santa Monica Pier,” I said.

“Three-thirty?”

“Is that all right?”

“I’ve got to cut a class, but that’s fine. I hate the class anyway,” he said. “I’ll be there.”

Another thought occurred to me. “Really, Buddy, was Elsa supposed to call you today?”

“Sometime soon,” he said. “Why?”

“If she calls, please don’t mention I called you or that you’re seeing me.”

“No problem.”

“It’s very important. If you do mention it, I’ll never be able to see you again.”

“Okay. How’s this? Elsa who?”

I smiled to myself. That was the reaction from him that Ava had expected if my name was ever mentioned.

“Great. See you then,” I said, and hung up before I could change my mind.

What had I done? At least four times before the school day ended, I paused to step outside and call him again to cancel, but every time, I resisted. When the final bell rang, I hung back so that Ava and Marla would leave the parking lot before I appeared. I stood by the doorway and watched Marla get into Ava’s car. As soon as they pulled away, I hurried out to my car. Just as my fingers had trembled when I had gone to insert the keys to Daddy’s desk drawers, they trembled again. When the car started, I sat back for a moment and took deep breaths.