Children Of The Damned

Damon

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I was just wondering if you needed someone to talk to. You were so upset last night, but I didn’t want you to think I was talking advantage, so I left. And then you didn’t call.”

“Damon, I’m tired,” she said, and I could see it from the bags under her eyes. “Wait,” she said, as if she had finally caught what I just said. “Did you really expect me to call?”

“I don’t know…you know what, I’m sorry I came here. It was obviously a mistake.” I turned to leave, but stopped when she stepped out onto the porch.

“Hey, wait,” she said, and as I turned around I saw her holding her hand out as if she was trying to stop me with the motion alone. But she didn’t really need to convince me. I wanted to stay.

“It’s warmer inside. Would you like to come in?”

I smiled in response and walked back up the porch and over the threshold. Ana padded through the house to the kitchen in her sock feet, hips swaying in that uninhibited way that I think she only let loose behind closed doors. It was incredibly sexy.

“Can I get you some coffee? I need some. In fact, if I don’t get some in my system soon I am going to collapse.”

“I would love some.” It’s good for blood circulation in vampires.

“How do you take it?”

“Black, like my soul.”

She laughed, a sweet, rich sound. “Me too. But I need a little sugar in there. What’s the point of being evil if you can never be sweet?”

I hoped that was a rhetorical question.

“I’m just giving you a hard time,” she informed me.

“Oh, well I think I can take a little abuse.”

She smirked at that as if she wasn’t sure whether or not to believe me, and then she walked away, hips swaying, up the stairs. I followed, surprised that I let her take control of every situation so easily.

“And this is my room,” she said, placing the cups of coffee on her desk before bending over to pick up some stray socks and pajama bottoms from the floor, throwing them into her half full hamper.

I liked that her room looked lived-in, unlike Caroline’s, which was always freakishly clean. Her walls were lined with bookshelves full of old classics, many of them from the 1900’s. I saw Jack London’s Call of The Wild, and immediately decided I liked her twice as much as I did before. I also noticed that her shelves were mercifully lacking in vampire novels like Twilight. I never understood why people had come to believe that vampires were more closely resembling faeries, rather than the scarily accurate vampires depicted in Anne Rice novels.

I walked over to her iHome, and looked at the song that had been playing on her iPod before she turned it off. It was Belle and Sebastian’s “I Want The World To Stop”. Seriously, this girl was amazing.

“You like Belle and Sebastian?” she asked. I could tell she was disappointed she hadn’t been able to sneak up on me.

“They’re great.”

“So,” she began. “Why else did you come here? Other than because I didn’t call.”

“Is it so unbelievable that I might just want to get to know you?”

“Your reputation precedes you. Remember that I don’t have much to go on when I want to decide whether or not to trust you.”

“Well, then maybe you should try and figure out who I really am before you pass any judgments. You haven’t had any prior experience with me that would really tell you whether I am good or bad.”

“Last time I wanted to believe the best about someone, I ended up really regretting it. I had heard he was trouble. I didn’t listen. It turned out they were right, and I was wrong. How is that for prior experience?”

“What happened?” I asked, even though I already knew the basics.

“There was this guy last year in California. I was interested in him. He was a musician, which should have been my first clue to never trust him. But he was charming and he always had a compliment for me. But he had a reputation as a bad boy. My friends all told me I should stay away from him. Apparently his last girlfriend got a restraining order on him, but it all sounded so gossipy that I didn’t really believe any of it. And being a stupid girl and a bad friend, I just thought that they were jealous he was interested in me and not them.

“It wasn’t long before he asked me on a date, and then that date became two dates and three. Then we were a couple. Everything seemed perfect until my friend Chris came home to visit from college. We hung out since we were little kids, and we were nothing more than friends, but then my boyfriend; Richard was his name, well…he got jealous. He used to make up reasons why I should bail on Chris.

“Then he started lying about him, saying he did things he would never do. I broke up with him after he walked into my house one night during a family dinner with Chris. He just punched him in the face and accused me of cheating on him with Chris. That was when things got ugly. My dad had to physically remove him from the house, and I called him at his house later when I knew he would be home to tell him I was breaking up with him. My parents and Chris thought it would be best that way, because Richard was getting way too violent. Chris told me only unstable people acted that way. I could help but agree. After all, I knew now that my friends were right to warn me.

“At first I just thought it would be a nuisance to break up with him, but then I found out it was going to be much worse than that. After I made it clear I didn’t want to see him anymore, he was so furious. He yelled at me and called me horrible things. I hung up, but then the phone started ringing again. I let it ring and ring for a few minutes. Then I made the mistake of picking up the phone again. He called me every name under the sun and told me if I ever tried to leave him again, he would kill me. I don’t think I have ever been so afraid in my entire life as I was when he threatened me. Because I knew he wouldn’t stop with me if I made him angry again. He would hurt Chris, and maybe my friends. After all, the didn’t want me to see him either. All I could think of was the fact that there was this huge mess in front of me and I had no one to blame for it but myself.

“A few days after that he showed up at my house and acted normally. But we all knew better. He wasn’t going to trick us again. But when my parents and I would let him in, he pulled out a gun and shot out all the windows in the front room. We had a cop on duty in the neighborhood ever since the night that he hit Chris, so when the shots were fired, he heard the sirens and it scared him off. We didn’t wait long after that. We started staying ion a motel. We didn’t tell anyone where we were staying. My dad had a moving truck in the next morning to pack all of our things. We were out in less than two days. We called Sheriff Forbes and told her everything she needed to know, and then I was on a plane to Virginia with my parents. And now I’m here. End of story.”

I sat there in shock for a moment. I didn’t know I could still experience shock after all these years of not functioning like a normal human being. After all, I wasn’t a human being.

“I had no idea…”

“No one does,” she said as if it was normal to keep something like that bottled up inside of you for months. “Seriously, you are the only one other than my parents and Sheriff Forbes that know all of the details. Don’t. Tell. Anyone. I am trusting you enough to keep this to yourself. Let’s see how you do with that.”

“I won’t tell anyone. I can promise you that. But are you telling me that you can actually lead a normal life while you know that he is still out there somewhere, living and breathing?”

“I can’t just live in fear. That’s not living. I never want to be that way again. Those few days of terror were enough to last a lifetime.”

Who would have known that an innocent girl like Ana could have gone through something so terrifying. It was frightening, even by my standards, especially when I knew if In were human I would have been in danger, just like she was. I found that it helped if I put myself in human shoes. I had been a vampire too long to fully be able to do it, and I hadn’t wanted to be human for so long that even when I was still able to act that way, I didn’t want to.

Ana smiled a soft, shy smile in my direction and sat next to me on her bed, where she leaned over to her iHome and hit shuffle on her music library. Death Cab For Cutie played in the background on a low volume as she retrieved her coffee from the desk and sat down, taking small sips of the scalding hot liquid. I took gulps, feeling it burn down my throat. It reminded me of the first time I had ever drank blood, and how it quenched that thirst inside of me that had been eating me up inside. I would have died, yet I didn’t. I took the blood into my system and became what I am today.

“Hey, your eyes,” I heard Ana say, and I turned away, rubbing them with my fingers and focusing on anything but the blood. Not the blood.

And then, just like that, I was done with the craving. It was one of the many benefits of keeping up a healthy diet of human blood. Stefan would have taken much longer to adjust, but then again, he was living on a moral plane way above my eye level.

“Are you okay?” she asked, and reached out to touch my arm. It rested, small and trembling on the elbow of my leather jacket.

“Yeah. I’m fine,” I said, looking up again and smiling. “So, what do you do for fun?” I asked her as she laid back on her bed, resting her hands behind her head.

“Nothing, really. This town is boring. I mean, shooting pool at the Mystic is only fun for a while. And I’m too good at darts. It stops being fun after a while. Plus, no one will play with me anymore because they’re tired of losing. I used to do Cross Country back in California, but I got out of it when moved here. Plus, I think it’s too late to try out for the team now.”

“I’m sure they would make an exception for you. Besides, you were on te other side of the country when they held tryouts.”

“I’m not sure. It doesn’t feel the same anymore. I mean, I Haven’t gone out running in the mornings like I used to.”

“Maybe that’s part of why you’re sad.”

“Excuse me?”

Wow. She really could rip a guy’s head off. “I’m just saying, I wouldn’t blame it all on Richard. Maybe if you start running again, it will be like you’re taking control again. And the endorphins can’t hurt either.”

“I’ll think about it.”

It was clear that she wasn’t going to let me think my idea was going to work. She was smart enough to know that I wanted control, and that she shouldn’t give it to me. Unfortunately, she was rather transparent.

“Shoot, it’s really late. I need to be getting to bed.”

“But tomorrow is Sunday,” I said.

“Yeah, and I am in charge of the Miss Mystic Falls Float. So I need to make sure that everything is in order. As much as I trust Matt to get the job done, I still have to double check because if anything is messed up, I am going to get the heat for it, not him. I was supposed to oversee the actual building process, but he sent me home early.”

I didn’t like the dreamy look she got in her eyes when she talked about him. I could just imagine what was going through her head right then and there. Maybe she was thinking about kissing him. Or worse.

“Well then, fair lady, you seem fatigued, so I will let you retire for the evening. What are your plans tomorrow, other than float duty?”

“I am going to have to see. Matt may want me to come over for while. He still hasn’t tried my spaghetti or my garlic bread, which I will have to remedy eventually.”

“That sounds delicious.”

“Yeah, you’ll have to try it sometime.”

“I will take you up on that some time. I promise.”

“Goodnight, Damon,” she said, waving at me in a tired, half-hearted sort of way that told me her mind was on other things besides me.

“Goodnight, Ana. Sweet dreams.”

“You too.”

I went home that night, determined not to play the part of the peeping tom and watch her move about her room at night and write in her journal like she usually did. But instead of having sweet dreams, I stayed up all night thinking about all the things she had told me, and how she said she was trusting me to keep it to myself. That was the first time in a long time someone had trusted me with personal information, since Katherine had told me what she was.