Daughter of Darkness (Kindred 1)

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, too. He’s worried you might be at it like a rabbit and put us all in some danger.”

I gasped. What had I possibly done to give him that impression? “Did he really tell you that?”

“Of course. He tells me everything he thinks about you and discusses every change he notices, no matter how small it might seem to be.”

I expected that because she was older, Daddy would confide in her about things before he would confide in me, but not such an intimate thing about me. I always thought Daddy and I had a very special, honest relationship.

“You must always tell me exactly what you’re feeling, Lorelei,” Daddy once told me, “and I will do the same with you.”

I was deeply disappointed, but I didn’t complain. Even the smallest suggestion of dissatisfaction with Daddy or the smallest criticism of him could bring down thunder and lightning from either Mrs. Fennel or one of my older sisters. For them, that was blasphemy. Just as worshippers could be excommunicated from any religion, any of us could be excommunicated from this family. No one came right out and said such a thing, not even Mrs. Fennel, but I felt it. I had been plucked out of nowhere and could be dropped back into it, dropped into a world without any family, without any daddy, much less any mother.

Sometimes, maybe because of books I read or movies I saw, I tried to imagine how hard and lonely it must be for those foundlings who never find a family to take them into their lives. How cold it must be to have an institution for a home and paid bureaucrats substituting as relatives. I had no doubt that any of them would gladly trade places with me, no matter what the obligations and rules were here. Here there was at least a real home, where there was at least a daddy to show you real love and affection. I knew that as much as I needed Daddy, as much as we all needed him, he needed us, and that was too precious to surrender.

After a moment, I asked Ava, “How old were you when you did it with a boy for the first time? You said you had all these feelings when you were younger than I am.”

She looked at me again, more of a coy smile on her lips now. “Who said I have even had a first time?”

“You haven’t?”

She laughed. “Look at you. See how you’re surprised? Aren’t you more interesting, exciting, if men are not sure?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know much about men and what they think or how they think,” I admitted.

She lost her humor quickly. “Well, I’m telling you that you are more mysterious and that it is important. It is always the obvious girls who are the most uninteresting. It is essential to have a cloak of mystery about you, Lorelei, especially since you’re one of us. You would think you would know that yourself by now, but I keep forgetting how immature you are sometimes.”

“I’m not immature.” I pouted for a moment and then added, “If I am, it’s because I’m not permitted to do anything, to experience anything, when it comes to the opposite sex. I haven’t been out on a date or even to a party, have I? Well, have I? Girls much younger than I am have been out on dates and gone to parties. Some of the kids in my class think I must have done something really terrible to be so restricted or that we’re religious nutcases.”

She laughed and then said, “Who cares what they think?”

“I do. It’s hard, Ava. Don’t tell me it wasn’t hard for you, too.”

She looked at me with an uncharacteristic softness for a moment. I knew that meant she was going to tell me something important. “Well, Daddy agrees with you about all that. He thinks you’re just about ready to go out with me, but he’s worried. He doesn’t think you’re as instinctively prepared as Brianna and I were. He wants me to start to teach you things you need to know, prepare you, and show you how to be more attractive, more sophisticated, and especially more cautious.”

“He does?”

“We will go on some dry runs first so I can observe you in action and you can observe me and learn something. Consider it on-the-job training,” she added out of the corner of her mouth. Then she sighed so deeply I thought her chest would crack. “Your sexual education is my newest obligation, but it’s something I always knew would come.”

“You sound upset about it. Didn’t Brianna do the same for you? Was she upset about having to do it?”

“That was different.”

“Why?”