Daughter of Light

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  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  ‘Forbidden Sister’ Excerpt

  About V.C. Andrews

  Prologue

  It was as if the curtains suddenly had been closed on the bedroom window. The full moon was blacked out, as was the clear night of stars. The room was in pitch darkness, and all I could hear was the sound of my own heavy breathing. A breeze crossed my face, and then I felt a familiar warmth on my neck, the soft, moist warmth of loving lips. It was how he always kissed me good night, never on my cheeks or lips but always on my neck.

  “Daddy?” I whispered, and waited. There was no response, just the heavy silence careening through my ears and down into my cringing heart. “Are you here?”

  Slowly, my hand trembling, I brought my fingers to my neck and felt something hot and liquid.

  Panicked, I lunged for the night-light, flicked it on, and sat up to look at myself in the mirror over the dresser across the way.

  I was bleeding.

  I had been bitten.

  But I couldn’t scream, and I couldn’t breathe. I leaped out of bed.

  And then . . .

  I woke up.

  My body was so tight that I felt as if I were wrapped in a straitjacket around my breasts and stomach. I realized it was my own arms embracing me. I was hugging myself very tightly to keep from falling apart. I was so closed up inside myself that my heavy breathing sounded as if it was coming from someone else. Outside the bedroom, the fingers of the wind scratched at the windowpane. The cloud that had covered the moon slid off like a thin slice of melting silvery ice and floated toward the horizon. When I relaxed my arms, I was still clutching my hands together so hard that I sent pain up each wrist.

  “Get hold of yourself, Lorelei Patio,” I whispered at the image of my stark-naked body in the mirror. Under the now radiant moonlight, my skin took on a brassy glow, and my eyes, which had flamed with fear, gradually cooled into frosted orbs, glittering and flickering out until they darkened.

  I took another deep breath and then, still trembling, returned to bed. I could hear the sound of whispering in the walls, but I couldn’t make out any words. Gradually, it stopped, and I closed my eyes, the lids dropping like the lids of two tiny coffins.

  It wasn’t the first time I had had this nightmare, and I knew it wouldn’t be the last.

  But this was the sort of nightmare that would shadow my days and turn every face that looked my way into a possible mask of deception.

  I could trust no one, not even myself, for there was a part of me that hated what I had done and what I was about to do.

  But a greater part of me refused to retreat.

  1

  Every time I glanced into the rearview mirror to see if we were being followed, Moses, the tractor-trailer driver who had agreed to give me a ride, grew more and more suspicious, his eyes widening, his long fingers moving nervously on the steering wheel as if he were playing a piano. I knew he was having this reaction to how I was behaving, but I couldn’t help looking back to see if they were pursuing me and wondering if, with their amazing senses and insights, they could find me anywhere, no matter how far and how fast I was traveling away from them. Maybe running away was just plain stupid and futile after all.

  But I had no choice.

  I had learned that all of us, all of my sisters, were in our family solely to bring someone to Daddy, someone upon whom he could feed. We were his fishers of men. That was our purpose while we lived with him. As the others had done, my older sister Ava was moving on to fulfill her own destiny, and so the responsibility to help Daddy now was falling to me. I had been nurtured and trained for this purpose, a purpose I think I had always refused to recognize in myself and now was determined to reject.

  Ava was always suspicious of me, even when I was much younger. Early on, she had sensed something about me that Daddy hadn’t or maybe didn’t want to admit, especially to her or any of my other sisters. I wondered if he had ever said anything about me to Mrs. Fennel, our nanny and housekeeper. I always felt she watched me more closely, scrutinized everything I did and said, and observed me more than she did any of my sisters with her suspicious narrowing eyes. Whatever it was about me that triggered this concern, I was sure Daddy believed I would overcome it. Never in his history had he been wrong about one of his daughters. Why should he be wrong about me, the daughter who seemed to be his favorite?

  Surely there was something in me too powerful for me to deny or to overcome. I might not like who and what I was, but what difference could that make? To my father, I was like all of my sisters, all of his daughters, some meteor cast into space, unable to stop or change direction. My genetic destiny was just as inevitable. I wrestled nightly with these conflicting emotions. My moans and groans surely were overheard and raised more concern. We weren’t supposed to have nightmares or bad dreams. We weren’t supposed to agonize over questions like the ones that were born out of the womb of my all-too-human conscience.

  Every question I asked, every note of hesitation in my voice or look of disapproval in my eyes, surely sounded more alarms. I could sense that they were all talking about me even before my defiance and flight. The echoes that were born in our house didn’t die quick deaths. They lingered in the walls. They were the whispers I heard in the darkness, whispers that were like coiled wires attached to a time bomb that would soon explode.

  “Lorelei will disappoint us.”

  “Lorelei will endanger us all.”

  “Lorelei is a mistake as real and as difficult to face as a deformed human baby.”

  Eventually, I had to be put to the test. I was commanded to make the boy with whom I had fallen in love, Buddy Gilroy, my first prey, my initial gift to Daddy to prove my loyalty and to show, once and for all, that deep down I was no different from any of them. I wasn’t permitted to fall in love, anyway. None of us was. I had already gone too far, and to correct the situation, I was to deliver my love to my father, who would absorb him into his own darkness forever and ever. Daddy could wipe my mind clean of every passionate memory.

  Refusal was not an option, and failure was fatal, for if I had a greater love than the love I had for my father, I was abhorrent to my sisters, my own kind, and a major disappointment to him. It could signal the end of his line, the crumbling of his crest, and the final howl of fulfillment on a moonlit night while everything around him slept in awe of his beauty and power. Silence would come crashing down like a curtain of iron and reduce us all to dust, which the envious and eager wind could scatter over the four corners of the world.

  They had ordered me to bring Buddy to our house in California and serve him up on a silver platter of betrayal, but in the end, I couldn’t do it. I told Buddy that my father was dangerous and was adamant about my not seeing him anymore. I tried to make him understand that there was no changin
g my father’s mind and that if Buddy didn’t leave me, I would be unable to protect him. I said everything I could to drive him away, but he loved me too much.

  He was under the misapprehension that my father was probably some organized-crime boss. Little did he know how much I would rather that were so, would rather that were the reason I told him my father was too dangerous and we couldn’t stay together. I thought I had rescued him, but my sister Ava went behind my back and got him to come to the house. I saved him at the last moment, but he saw Daddy, saw what he was, so in the end, I had to violate one of our precious ten commandments. I had to tell him the truth about us, about who and what we were.

  Even though he had seen Daddy in his most frightening form, he had trouble believing it. Daddy once said that, as with the devil, the best thing going for us was that most people thought we were a fantasy.

  “They made the rules so ludicrous that it was always easy to hide our existence. They can’t see us in mirrors. We can’t be in the daylight. We cower at the sight of a cross. We flee from garlic. Please,” he said. “Let them keep it up. I’ll bite into garlic like an apple.”

  At the time, I still believed I was an orphan, and Buddy insisted on coming along with me to visit the orphanage I had discovered in Oregon. I was hoping to find my real mother. By the time we arrived, my sisters and Mrs. Fennel were already there, and the reality of who and what I was came clearly home to me. Rather than accept it, I fled and once again saved Buddy from a horrible fate.

  I relived most of this while I sat silently in the cab of the tractor-trailer that carried me farther and farther into what I hoped was the safer darkness. I had hitched a ride with a truck driver at the restaurant Buddy had taken me to right after our escape when he went into the bathroom.

  “So what are you really running away from, Lorelei?” Moses asked me.

  Moses was an African American man who looked to be about fifty or so, with graying black hair but a strikingly full, white, neatly trimmed mustache. His ebony eyes caught the glow of oncoming automobile headlights. They seemed to feed on them and grow brighter. To me right then, he resembled Charon, the mythical ferryman who transported souls to the Greek version of hell, Hades. Where else would I end up?

  He turned to me. “Who’s chasin’ you?”

  “My old self,” I told him. “I’m looking to peel off the past, shed it like a snake sheds its old skin, and start somewhere new.”

  He laughed. “My, my, at your age? That’s somethin’ someone like me might say. What are you, all of sixteen?”

  “Eighteen, almost nineteen,” I said.

  “Hmm.” He hummed skeptically. He focused those ebony eyes on me like tiny searchlights and softened his lips into a small smile. “A pretty girl like you could get anyone to believe what she wants him to believe, I guess, but you better be careful out there. There are people who’ll say or do anythin’ to win your trust, and they won’t have your welfare in mind. No, sir. That would be the last thing on their list of what’s important to them. Yes, sirree, the last thing.”

  “I know.”

  He nodded. “Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t. I don’t know what sort of street smarts you have, girl. You look too sweet to be strollin’ through any gutter, and believe me, I’ve seen plenty who’ve wallowed in them.”

  “I can handle myself better than you think. Looks can be deceiving,” I said.

  He laughed.

  Once, I remember Daddy saying that if this one or that one knew the truth about us, he would shiver in his grave. Moses surely would, I thought, even after spending only ten minutes listening to him and sensing what he feared in the darkness through which he traveled.

  “That’s for sure about looks,” he said. “Whenever I defended someone my mother thought was a good-for-nothin’ and said somethin’ like, ‘He looks like a decent person,’ she’d say, ‘The devil has a pleasin’ face, or how else he gonna get the doorway to your soul open enough to slip in?’ ”

  “Your mother was a very wise woman.”

  “Yes, sirree, she was. Only like every other wise guy, I didn’t listen enough. Where else do you get anythin’ free like you get good advice from those who love and care for you? But we are all too stubborn to accept it. Gotta go find out for ourselves,” he muttered, like someone angry at himself. “Gotta go make our own mess just to prove our independence.”

  He was probably right. However, I certainly have to do that, I thought. I have no choice but to find out everything for myself now.

  A vehicle with bright headlights came up behind us quickly. Moses had to turn his rearview mirror a little.

  “Damn idiot driver,” he mumbled. “What’s he think he’s gonna do, drive right through us? I oughtta hit the brakes and have him gulp a tractor-trailer.” He laughed. “That would give him one helluva case of indigestion.”

  I held my breath when the car pulled out to pass us. I anticipated seeing Ava’s face of rage in the passenger’s-side window, her eyes blazing, her teeth gleaming, and her skin as white as candle smoke, but the vehicle didn’t hesitate, and there was only the driver, who didn’t even turn our way. He went speeding on ahead indifferently. I relaxed, blowing air through my lips.

  Moses heard it and turned to me. “Sometimes you can’t just run away from stuff, Lorelei, no matter how bad it seems to be,” he said.

  He could see how nervous I was. I’ve got to get better at hiding that, I thought. “I know.”

  “Sometimes you’re better off stayin’ and fightin’ it off.”

  I didn’t respond. How could I even begin to describe what Buddy and I had fled from just a short while ago? When I had visited what I believed was the orphanage from which I had been taken, I had made the most shocking discovery of all. I wasn’t really an orphan. My mother was one of my father’s supposed daughters, and therefore, I had inherited that part of him that I feared and hated the most. I had no choice but to hope I could overcome it. I thought that would be possible only if I put great distance between myself and them. But my older sister Ava had made it very clear to me that escaping who we were was not only impossible but dangerous. She claimed we needed one another. There was another species of us, the Renegades, who would prey upon us as quickly and as easily as they would prey upon the normal. It was all a matter of territoriality.

  “You need to be with your own kind,” Ava had said. “One of us alone has no chance out there.”

  Buddy and I had just managed to escape from the house where all of my father’s daughters had gathered. It was then that Buddy finally believed what I was telling him, but he still wanted to be with me, to love me. He told me how much he believed in me and how much he believed that I would be different if I stayed with him. In his mind, we were some version of Romeo and Juliet, only we would not make any fatal mistakes and lose each other.

  After we had fled, we stopped at a diner where he hoped he would convince me. I knew in my heart that if I hadn’t gotten away from him by hitching a ride with Moses when Buddy had gone to the bathroom, he would probably have died a terrible death. How ironic. To keep the man I loved alive, I had to desert him and hope he would forget me. He would always be my true love, but the love I could never have.

  “Exactly what are your plans, girl?” Moses asked. “I’m goin’ only so far here.”

  “I thought I’d make my way to San Francisco,” I told him. It really was an idea I had been contemplating. I thought I could get on a flight and go east. I had no specific destination in mind. The only thing I could think of was just to get away, as far away as possible.

  I glanced at the rearview mirror when another vehicle drew closer.

  Moses looked, too, and then he turned to me, looking more worried. “You don’t think the police are after you, now, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Whoever you’re leavin’ behind wouldn’t want their help to get you back?”

  “No, they would never go to the police,” I said.

  He shook his head. “T
hat don’t sound good. If you ain’t eighteen, I think I could be in some trouble if we get pulled over, you know.”

  “I understand. I’m eighteen, but is there a bus station coming up soon?”

  “Yeah, there’s one at the restaurant I occasionally stop at for some dinner.”

  “I’ll get out there and catch a bus. You’ve been very kind. I don’t want to make any trouble for you.”

  “I hope you ain’t makin’ any for yourself,” he replied.

  “I’m okay.”

  “You goin’ to family, at least?”

  “Yes, I have an aunt living in San Francisco,” I told him. Spinning lies came to us as easily as spinning webs came to spiders. It was part of our DNA. “She’s always been quite fond of me and has invited me many times. Finally, I can go.”

  “Yeah, well, San Francisco is a great town. What kind of work do you hope to do?”

  “I’d like to be a grade-school teacher eventually,” I said. “I’ll probably go to college in San Francisco.”

  “That sounds good.” He looked at me and nodded. “At least you don’t look like some of the girls I see hitchin’ rides on the highway. Most of them look like they’re into somethin’ bad already, drugs and stuff.” He tilted his head a little, widened his eyes, and said, “And you know what I mean by stuff, dontcha? It gets so that everythin’ is up for sale.”

  “That won’t be me, ever,” I said firmly.

  He smiled. “You sound sure of yourself.”

  “I am,” I told him, and thought about something my father had once told me: “We’re high on life,” he had said. “We don’t need any drugs, and we would never lose respect for ourselves.”

  No, I thought now. We don’t need drugs, but we’re trapped by a worse addiction. Was I an absolute fool to think I could overcome it? Perhaps my only hope was to fear and hate my father. If I could learn to find him detestable, I could subdue all that was like him in me.

  A part of me wanted this very much, perhaps that part of me that Ava had recognized. But despite all I had learned and all that had nearly happened, it wasn’t easy to hate my father. For most of my life, he had been a wonderful, loving parent who wanted me to benefit from his years of wisdom and knowledge. I simply had no idea how many years there were, but despite what he was and what he could do, he rarely appeared to be anything but gentle and kind to me. I couldn’t just forget all of those wonderful private moments we’d had together, our walks and our conversations, and the way he would often comfort me at night when I was small. Even now, even after all I had seen and done to enrage and disappoint him, I couldn’t believe that he would hate me as much as Ava insisted he would. Of course, I understood that if I succeeded in escaping, I’d have no one but myself probably for the rest of my life, however long that would be.