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.