The Vampire Pirate's Daughter

by Lynette Ferreira

  About the Author

  Book Description

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  THE VAMPIRE PIRATE’S DAUGHTER

  LYNETTE FERREIRA

  This Smashwords Edition published in July 2013

  First published in April 2011

  Copyright © Lynette Ferreira

  The right of Lynette Ferreira to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  Print Book ISBN 978-1-304-26430-5

  Cover Image: www.wallsave.com

  Visit Lynette Ferreira at:

  http://bit.ly/LynetteFerreira_Blog

  http://bit.ly/ReadwithLynetteFerreira

  About the Author

  Lynette Ferreira is also the author of the following:

  My Recycled Soul

  When We Love

  For-Never

  William The Damned (A Vampire Pirate)

  SPAM (Would you take the risk?)

  Believe

  Viral

  New Dawn

  Forever Young

  All Over Again

  Would you remember ME

  Only in my Memories

  In the End

  What My Soul Does When I Am Asleep

  The Dark, Dark House

  The Tokolosh

  The Beginning of a Life Misunderstood

  My entry into the Abyss

  My Child, My Life

  Fifteen Seconds Ago

  GASP!

  She Loves Me … Not

  Easy Formatting for your Print Book

  Lucas

  For Shea Carlyle, Amy Trotter, Sinead Gouws, Taylor Ferguson

  and Rebecca Hadfield.

  I heart the way you always nagged me for more books.

  I will always miss you!

  “Who wants to live forever?”

  Book Description

  When Susie turned sixteen, the vampire virus which was dormant in her grew stronger and ate away her human cells. Amanda and Shayne came to her rescue. She had to either step over the final barrier to becoming a vampire or succumb to the virus and die. However, when Amanda held her wrist, dripping with blood in front of Susie’s mouth, she could not resist.

  Two hundred years later, Susie is lonely and bored. Shayne and Amanda have kept her safe and protected her from life and from the savage vampires who have not adapted to living in the light, and all Susie wants is to be mortal. She wants to be like the meager mortals surrounding her and be daring, to challenge death and to purposefully defy it. Most of all though, she wants to experience love.

  Her life takes many twists and turns, and then she finds unconditional love where she never, ever expected it to be.

  Chapter One

  I am bored and lonely.

  The mega cup of coffee in my hand is cold, while the sun shines hot down on my shoulders. I put my feet up onto the supports of the chair across from me, and I keep my face in the shade, because the brightness makes me pull my eyes together and it gives me a headache.

  I have been lost in my own thoughts, dreaming of my past, for hours, looking absentmindedly at the people walk past me. A million faces, all of them unfamiliar.

  Then I see him and I sigh despondently, while my eyes follow him sadly. His dark hair falls across his brow, and his eyes look toward me, but they do not see me. He walks past me and toward the group of kids standing in front of the cinema. They greet each other laughingly. He must feel my eyes on him, as he turns and looks over his shoulder. I continue staring, but still he does not see me.

  Although I am only sixteen, I have never experienced romance. I have seen it many times. I have experienced it through the people I see walking along a river. I have longed for someone to look into my eyes and know that they only see me. Someone to whisper softly in my ear that they only want me, and that they love only me.

  I have an instinct that tells me it would be great to have someone love me. I wonder what it would feel like to grow old. To be like the meager mortals around me, to roll a dice, to live on the edge, to be daring and know that it might kill me. I have been around the world. I have seen the world change. I have had a million different hairstyles, fashions. I belong a hundred miles from anyone, but there is a yearning inside of me and I need to know what it feels like to fall in love. To tumble head over heels in love, and to have someone stumble for me. I wonder how it feels to love someone unconditionally as I have read so many times in books.

  The server walks toward me again and this time she smiles when she catches my eye. She has been around to my table a few times this morning, but I have ignored her on purpose.

  I smile up at her now. “The bill please.”

  She opens her leather folder and she places a slip on my table.

  I lean down to get my bag, where I left it lying on the floor next to my table and I pick it up onto my lap. After pulling the zipper open, I dig into the bag, which is hopelessly too big and impractical. Eventually I find my purse and then I take out a few notes and smile toward the server who has stepped away. She comes toward me again and I give her the money.

  She says friendly, “Thank you. Please come again.”

  Smiling in return, I push the chair I am sitting on backwards and then I get up.

  If Shayne could hear my thoughts now, not that he can, he would be upset. He loves his extended life, but I am bored and lonely. There is nothing I can do, nothing exciting. What fun is there in bungee jumping, when you know that you would never die? Is the action of jumping down an impossibly high bridge with only a rubber band attached to the ankle, not ultimately, purposefully defying death?

  I walk away to the parking area and toward my car. When I am close enough to my car, I press the button on my remote and I can hear the doors unlocking from a distance away - a loud popping noise. I get into the car and back it out of the parking spot. After I pay for my parking ticket, I drive the short distance home.

  We live in a gated security estate. We moved here a month ago, after we came here on holiday a year ago. The crime is so high and nobody seems to care if people go missing, it does not even reach the newspapers, so it is easy for us to maintain our lifestyle without suspicion falling on us too quickly. It is not so difficult getting what we need to sustain us in modern times. It used to be that people were more frightened and wary of strange things, but these days there are actually people who want to be like us. There are people who commit worse crimes on a daily basis. We kill for survival, while there are those
who kill for absolutely no purpose.

  I stop in front of our house. It is a double storey building and the neighbors live hopelessly too close. The spaces the houses are built in are limited, and sometimes I miss the wide-open spaces of long ago. Peering briefly into the large Koi fish tank standing to the left of our house, I walk toward our front door, which has a large elephant carved into it. I push the heavy door open and I can hear the television on in the back.

  I walk through the house toward the sound.

  In the living room, I see Shayne sprawled across a chair. The large brown leather chairs are wide enough to sleep on and you cannot help it when your body naturally gravitates horizontally onto them.

  I look at Shayne amused. Sometimes I think he is only fooling himself, saying that he is still enjoying himself. I am sure that sometimes though he must also feel that sense of purposelessness and now I can see the boredom on his strong face. He has a prominent nose, which he always refers to as his roman-tic profile. His clipped reddish brown hair is short in the back and on the sides, and then he likes to gel the front so that it looks like bed hair. I have told him a million times that this has gone out of fashion, but he likes to say that he does not follow fashion, and that he is a trendsetter.

  “Where is Amanda?” I ask him.

  He looks up lazily. “Didn’t you see her at the mall?”

  “No.”

  “She left about an hour ago, to go shopping. I do not know what she wants to do with more clothes.”

  “You mean shoes.” I sit down on the single chair.

  He is watching a National Geography show about sharks and I join him, but I only stare blankly at the screen. I have swum with sharks before, so the show is uninteresting, because I know everything there is to know about sharks already.

  I hear Amanda arrive, before she stops in front of the house and I unfold myself from the chair, stretching my legs. I walk toward the kitchen.

  The many packages in her arms hide her when she walks into the kitchen. She near drops them onto the counter and then I start rummaging through the bags looking for a mini-size chocolate mousse container.

  While I am looking through the bags, Amanda says, “Susanna! Stop that. Pack away the things instead of just pushing them aside.”

  Usually I am just Susie, so now I grunt, but start packing it away anyway. She is obviously in a foul mood. Shopping has never had a calming effect on her. She is from an era where food magically appeared on her plate, presented by servants.

  I find the mousse, but leave it to one side, while I continue to pack away the groceries, which is mainly meat.

  Amanda stands just outside the backdoor and she lights a cigarette. She hates the newest craze where people have decided that smoking is bad for you and she could no longer smoke where she wanted. When she goes off on one of her rants, she always insists, mockingly, that smoking only harms her. Second hand smoke is no worse than pollution – surely. She does not smoke inside the house because admittedly she also thinks it smells awful and that it is a bad habit. A bad habit she does not even get any enjoyment from at all.

  She finishes her cigarette and then she comes in. Her addiction fed, she is calmer and she smiles. “Thank you, Susie. You must come see what I bought.”

  I pick up the chocolate mousse from the counter and I follow her out of the kitchen and up the stairs to her room.

  She upends the bags one after the other onto the bed in her room and then she ruffles through the pile. She finds what she is looking for and holding it up in front of her from shoulder to shoulder, I see the green top. It is nice, but not something I would wear. Amanda likes bling and shine, whereas I like to wear whatever the latest fashion is. I do not prefer designer to department store for everyday clothes, but it is always nice when the clothes have a fitted feeling.

  I say, “It’s nice. The color suits you. What else did you get?”

  I look through the pile of clothes on her bed with one hand and then I sit back against the headboard, with my legs pulled up in front of me. She shows me what she bought and I eat my mousse. Although I cannot taste the decadent chocolate, I love the texture on my tongue. I love the way my tongue folds into the curve of the spoon when it licks the mousse off it.

  Later when she has squashed her clothes, labels and all into her overfull closet, she changes the subject from clothes to me. “Are you enjoying school here?”

  “I suppose so. You know kids are also home schooled here and nobody will come knocking on our door when I do not go to school?”

  “Yes, but it gives you routine.”

  I hate it when she assumes the mother figure; she is only twenty-six and we are not even family. “Yeah, I know and routine gives me purpose.”

  She smiles. “There you go. We all have our purpose. Shayne works at the University as a History Professor and you go to school.”

  I interrupt her, “And you keep us all together - the hardest job of all. I know, don’t remind me again.”

  They have promised me that this will be our last move for a while and I only have to go to school for the next year and then university – again. This time around though, I can start working. People stay younger looking for longer these days, so it will be safe for me to join the workforce. I am looking forward to not moving too soon again. It is getting more and more difficult moving around with customs, passports and transfer cards. Also, the invention of networks and the internet has restricted our movements slightly. I have had so many forged birth certificates I cannot remember the real year I was born.

  Maybe I will be able to make some friends, where before I had to avoid them or when I did make friends, I had to leave them behind like junk collected along the way.

  I have lived with Shayne and Amanda since the day I turned sixteen, two hundred years ago.

  Chapter Two

  Two hundred years ago, a week before I turned sixteen I became seriously ill. I remember waking up as if it was yesterday. Most of my memories over the years have faded, because there are just too many things to remember, but some moments have burnt into my memory forever.

  The morning of my birthday, I woke up and my stomach had a queasy feeling, spasms in my abdominal area made me cringe and fold up into myself. I could not get out of bed and all my muscles were cramping, so I stayed in bed and by the time evening arrived, I had a fever.

  Carla, the girl who was my mother’s servant and her close companion before my mother died, sat next to my bed by now, and every so often, she rinsed the cotton cloth, wringed it and then neatly folded, placed it back on my forehead. She spoke softly to me in French, and those days I spoke French fluently.

  She often told me little snippets of my mother, like the first day she met her, how kind my mother was. She never ever spoke about my mother and my father together though. When I used to ask her, she would tell me to ask my father. Before Amanda, she was the only mother figure I had.

  The man, I then thought of as my father, Francois, and the doctor were standing in the corner of my room, the gaslight barely touching them, but I could hear every whispered word. I heard the doctor say that I would not make it through the night, and when he left, Francois walked worriedly to the side of my bed. He sat down next to me and he took my hand into his.

  He sent the servants from the room and after they left, he whispered softly, “Oh, Susanna.” He had a distant look in his eyes and I was not sure if he was talking to my mother or me. I have the same name as my mother and she died giving birth to me. Sometimes he would get confused and I would think he was calling me, but then Carla would gently touch me on the shoulder and shake her head sympathetically. I heard the servants talk amongst themselves and they all thought he had gone a bit loony since my mother died. When this happened, I obviously felt guilty because unintentionally I killed my mother. My birthday was always sad for my father, because it reminded him of my mother’s death.

  I smiled up at him weakly anyway.

  He softly continued, “I have sent for a
specialist, so if you hold on until morning, he will be able to help you.”

  I felt confident that I would be able to do that, although I felt extraordinarily weak. We did not speak and he just sat there next to me, holding my hand in his and now and again, he would moisten the cotton cloth on my forehead.

  I woke after a fitful sleep and I noticed that he had also fallen asleep. His head had dropped down onto the bed next to me and his face was close to our hands entwined together.

  A shadow danced across the wall in my room and the gaslight sputtered.

  I inhaled deeply when I saw a man and a woman come out of the shadows and they slowly walked toward my bed. They were smiling friendly, but I still felt apprehension. Then with relief, I thought that they were the specialists my father was talking about and it was probably already morning and thankfully, I held on. I had made it.

  The man remained standing erect by the foot of my bed and for a brief moment I considered that he might be the grim reaper, here to collect my soul. I turned my head toward the sleeping figure of my father afraid, but he was still fast asleep.

  The girl knelt down next to my bed, on the opposite side of my father. The faint light from the lamp shone on her face and I saw how beautiful she was. Her skin was so smooth; I had the urge to touch it. Her eyes were rich mahogany and her lips were faintly pink. Her dark blonde hair hung over her shoulders and reflected the light like a mirror.

  She leaned toward me and her hair fell forward softly. She whispered in my ear, barely audible, but I could hear her every word clearly, “Dear Susanna, you are grown up now and this might come as a shock to you, but I want you to trust me.”