I asked myself the same question. Surely there was something in me too powerful to deny or to overcome. I might not like who and what I was, but what difference should that make? To my father, I was like all my sisters, all his daughters, some meteor cast in 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 were surely 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 any 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 was surely soon to 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 not 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 for 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, dust that 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, 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 changing of 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 it was 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, like 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 was brought 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 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 about fifty, 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 now, 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 remembered 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 he looked like a decent person, she’d say, ‘The devil has a pleasing 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 had to do that, I thought. I had no choice but to find out everything for myself now.
A vehicle with its headlights bright came up behind us quickly, the reflective light blinding. 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 oughta 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. It 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.
“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 decided to visit 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 that I could overcome it. I thought that would be possible only if I put a 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 each other. There was, after all, 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,” she 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 he 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 this 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.
“So, 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 when I thought about where I would go was just to get away, get as far away as possible.
I glanced at the rearview mirror when another vehicle drew closer.
Moses looked, too, and then 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. “That 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, 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, don’tcha? 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.”
V.C. Andrews® Books
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Following the death of Virginia Andrews, the Andrews family worked with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Virginia Andrews’ stories and to create additional novels, of which this is one, inspired by h
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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