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now Saturday
midday. I should have been hanging out with my parents today,
listening with half an ear as my father foretold all sorts of
highly improbable scenarios. They must have been half mad with
worry by now, not having heard from me since Tuesday. I usually
phoned at least every other day. I asked Annie for a way to contact
my parents and let them know that I was still alive. She smiled at
me and told me that the boys had taken care of all that. I had
apparently been whisked away by a secret boyfriend for a surprise
holiday. The alleged boyfriend had visited them on Monday and told
them about it, and they had been warned not to say anything to me,
or it would spoil the surprise. Ha! I bet they were just so excited
by the idea that I had an actual boyfriend, that they swallowed the
story whole. If only they knew, I thought bitterly.
    I wondered if
they had told Maddie. They knew she was staying with me, and I
hoped they'd contacted her. She was no fool, and I didn't think
she'd fall for that cover story as easily as my parents had. I
needed to get out of here. Maddie would be worried.
    I asked Annie a
few times when they would be letting me go, and she just looked at
me and said, "That depends."
    "That
depends on what?" I wanted to know, but she just smiled again and
said the boys would tell me. That's when I asked her why she called
the two vampires 'the boys', and she explained that they were her
brothers. Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather.
Turns out her mother had been chosen by their father a couple of
years after she had been born, and she had grown up here with a
vampire for a stepfather and two vampire brothers. She'd married at
the young age of eighteen, and had Stephanie shortly afterwards.
Her husband had turned out to be a complete jerk, and had slapped
her around once too often. She had returned home with Stephanie in
her arms, and had stayed ever since. Her husband had disappeared
off the face of the earth, and she had thanked her stepfather when
she had found out about it. He had apparently explained that she
was family, and that's what families do. Not my family, but then we weren't a bunch of
psychopathic vampires. I kept my thoughts on this subject to myself
though, as it seemed as if Annie was genuinely very fond of them,
and I didn't want to hurt her feelings. She and Stephanie were the
only people in this hell hole who had helped me in any way, even
though they worked for the alleged vampires. I wondered if I'd be
able to get them to help me leave.
    Stephanie
turned out to be a fount of knowledge on all things vampire, and
she held forth at length on various subjects. She told me that
their fangs only came out in times of hunger, or great lust. I
didn't like the way she looked at me sideways at this and giggled,
but I pretended not to notice. She also explained in detail that
most of the rumours about vampires weren't true. For example
vampirism was not a weird type of infection. Vampires had
apparently originated when a rogue protein molecule that had
hitched a ride on a meteor had been ingested by a human a couple of
thousand years ago. The human's body had undergone changes as a
result, which rendered them very different. Their underlying
humanity meant they were still able to breed with humans, but other
than that they were a completely different species. All male. Lucky
me, I thought dryly.
    I asked her if
she knew why they had chosen me, and she looked at me
quizzically.
    "Of course,"
she said. "It's because you smell right. They have a superb sense
of smell, and they were quite excited when they got a whiff of you
a couple of weeks ago. They've been keeping an eye on you ever
since. They had to grab you on Tuesday, because they could tell
that you were close to ovulating, and that drives them crazy. Plus
that's kind of the point."
    "Is it?" I
gazed at her in horrified fascination, almost afraid of what she
was going to say next.
    "Sure. You are
here to help them make baby