Of Light and Darkness: The Vampire's Daughter

stairs to her bedroom. She really didn’t need to be quiet. It wasn’t like Valek could wake up because of any noise she made, but it felt respectful.

The window in her room was left open from the night before and a soft, early evening breeze made the translucent curtains billow inward like dancing spirits. Her entire room was white and delicate, with soft accents of light yellow. It looked like a room out of a doll’s house. Valek had created it for her. He always treated her like his doll, which was why it was impossible to imagine him as the monster Meredith Price described him as.

Charlotte peeled off the white blouse, damp jeans, and sneakers, and replaced them with a black dress with sleeves to her to her elbows, and a hem that fell just above her knees. She slipped on matching black flats and sat on the edge of her bed. This was the way Valek liked her to dress. Delicate — his doll. But it was impossible whenever she went out hunting for him. The less attention she drew to herself, the safer. She noticed the way Evangeline's friends had goggled at her the other night. She would be lying if she said it didn’t bother her.

She stared at the floor as Mrs. Price’s words echoed in her head. You can never be too careful.

“Oh!” She’d almost forgotten the bandage. She leaned over and slowly unwrapped the dressing to reveal a completely normal, unscathed leg. It felt as though nothing ever happened at all. Despite her questionable choice of conversation that evening, Meredith Price was an amazing healer.

Out of the corner of her eye, Charlotte caught something small and gold glimmer faintly on her windowsill. A lightning bug had landed there. Funny. It was a little late in the year for lightning bugs. Careful not to scare it, she reached for a small, glass jar on her bedside table filled with pencils for her sketches. As slowly and quietly as possible, she dumped them on her bed and moved the jar over the tiny, twinkling fly until she was confident enough to lower the jar mouth and trap it.

It buzzed around inside, clinking against the sides of the glass in a pathetic effort to escape. Charlotte gingerly slid her hand underneath and turned the jar right side up to peer inside. The tiny thing continued to fly around feverishly. She found the top of the jar in her drawer.

“There,” she said when she secured it. “Valek will like you, I think. You’re like a tiny piece of the sun.” She smiled and set the jar back on the table.

Charlotte collapsed backward, glanced at the clock, and then stared up at the ceiling. 7:45. Time seemed to be moving at a glacial pace as her mind spun with too many thoughts. This was the first time in a while she felt like she had nothing to do, and the feeling was unwelcome. She continued to think — always a dangerous thing to do alone. And what most dangerous, was she continued to think about Mrs. Price and what she said about Valek.

She thought about the chapter in Vampire Anatomy she had opened up to last night; the pages on the daily death of a Vampire, and the scientific illustrations of the decomposing monster. Streams of warm sunlight depicted as poisonous rays — the punishment for eternal damnation by God.

She heard Mrs. Price's voice reverberate once more in her head again and frowned. Charlotte rose from her bed after a few minutes and decided to do something she hadn’t ever dared to do before. She wanted to see Valek, actually see him for what he truly was. Meredith’s insensitive comments left a million questions buzzing around in her mind, and she felt he was the only one who could provide any answers. After all, what about him was so awful he felt the need to hide it from her? Surely, death was not something as grossly depicted as it was in her book — something he needed to fight so hard to conceal. The hauntingly graphic images on the pages of her volume were not something she could accept without seeing the truth. She knew the rules and they were simple — stay out of his room unless he was awake. There must have been something more. Perhaps he truly was something monstrous, and she had merely been in denial all her life. Her mind instantly flashed to the vision of Valek wiping the blood away from his mouth the night before. But she wouldn’t focus on that now as she shoved the image to the back of her mind. Grabbing the lightning bug off her nightstand, Charlotte crept into the hallway.

Moving almost silently, a trait she picked up from so many years of living with a Vampire, she made her way closer to his bedroom. The large windows to her right painted long shafts of golden light across the dark, dusty hallway floor. She could see his door in the shadows, shut tight against the world, a few feet in front of her. She pressed her ear against the cool wood and heard nothing but the hollow echo of an empty room behind it. Charlotte’s heart continued to thud in her throat as she mentally braced herself for what she was about to see.

She took a deep breath and slowly turned the handle, cracking it open. She peered inside, barely seeing into the heavy darkness. Black, velvet drapes shut sunlight out from every surrounding window. A small string of light filtered in from where she stood, making a soft, orange beam all the way to the foot of his bed. Afraid of what might happen if it were to reach his skin, she quickly closed the door behind her.

The room’s atmosphere was like a human mausoleum, the air stagnant, chilled with death. Her eyes could not adjust to the deep blackness. Holding up the lightning bug captive in the jar, she found it was no aid at all to her vision.

This is stupid, she thought, even as she continued to sneak slowly to his bedside. She should just go back to her own bedroom. She wasn’t supposed to be here. What good could possibly come out of seeing him this way? Yet she continued to creep closer to the bed, finally making out the dark figure in the center of the mattress. The hair on the back of her neck bristled as she leaned over the long corpse before her.

Valek lay there, a shell of the way he normally looked. His arms — bones with a thin layer of skin — draped gracefully over his chest. His hair, now gray and bristled, lay neatly on the cool pillow around his sunken skull. Charlotte’s eyes widened as she examined him closely. His eyes did not open when she traced them with the tips of her fingers. It felt like they never would again. He was nothing but a weathered corpse, merely glamorized by the magic of the moonlight at night.

To Charlotte’s surprise, a single tear slid down her cheek. So this was why he never wanted her here — why her strong father figure never cared to burden her with this secret. She knew he just couldn’t ever let her see him this way. She thought of how lonely it must be to die every single day, forever alone. She wished he would let her be close to him the next time this happened.

He would always wake up, Charlotte reminded herself to keep from sobbing. Valek, who had found her and raised her, was neither man nor monster.

Thunder whispered to her miles away and soft rain patters began across the old roof. Setting the faintly glimmering jar on Valek’s nightstand, she pulled one knee up onto the bed and then the other. She touched his forearm gently, carefully, as if she might shatter it. He felt colder even than normal. Charlotte stroked his hair, long and silken during the hours of the night, now brittle on the pillow. She turned so she lay next to him.

Charlotte took his arm and wrapped it around her shoulders, resting her face on his chest. His body felt so fragile, and the rotting stench of his deathly flesh permeated the area around her, but she didn’t care. More tears fell as she listened to the rain pound heavier above them. She wondered if he could somehow feel her there next to him. A sob broke from her. The sound of the storm began to fade out in her mind as she drifted off to sleep.

Chapter Four The Spider’s Burrow

A few hours later, Charlotte's eyes fluttered open to meet the white walls of her own bedroom staring blankly back at her. She had been tucked snugly under her bed sheets. Her white curtains flailed around violently in the storm now invading the open window. She jumped from her bed and forced the pane closed against the wind gusts. She glanced at the cuckoo clock hung on her wall. It had already turned ten. How could she have slept so long?

She frantically scanned the room for her shoes, which had been parked neatly by one corner of her bed. Her heart sank when she figured out she had in fact not dreamt what she thought she had after all. She really had mustered up the guts to go into his bedroom. She was in a lot of trouble. Charlotte slipped on her flats and hurried out the door.

She stood very still at the top of the stairs, hands clasped under her chin, listening. She didn’t hear anything and wondered if Valek was even home at all. Did he have a patient? She wondered how angry he was with her. He