When I came to my senses again, I way lying outside in the grass of one the beautiful gardens, my nightgown was drenched in my own blood, and Jean-Jacques des Étoiles was with me.

"You have done something really stupid tonight," he stated matter-of-factly before I could even begin to speak. "You have no idea how close that was!"

"Why do you care?" I asked and sat up, realising that Zaza would ask me what I had been up to if I came home looking like this.

"I do care because your childish behaviour is putting our entire species at risk," he said through clenched teeth.

"So, what? I'm a child!" I shouted angrily because I couldn't believe his attitude. I had no idea what had happened, but it was clear to me that my passing out had been some sort of a medical emergency which would have required the attention of a professional physician. Instead of getting help, all he seemed to be doing was to put me down.

He quickly put his hand over my mouth and shushed me. I would have tried to bite him with my teeth, but he managed to shock me to the core with what he said next. "Don't get sassy with me, daughter!" When he saw my shocked facial expression, he continued: "Even though I expected that a child of mine would be smarter, you still don't know who you are and what you are. You're certainly not Zaza's daughter as there is no resemblance."

Zaza had always told me that I looked just like my father, and I realised now that it was true: My features were quite similar to his. I didn't know why I had never noticed it before or why I had never questioned the attention he had lavished on me. Perhaps I hadn't wanted to question it, or perhaps I had just been too young. But now I was beginning to comprehend that I was a nobleman's daughter, probably a servant's "bastard" just like so many other boys and girls who lived in Versailles.

"In fact, you're not just my daughter, but you are a vampire as well." And once he had said it, he let go of me.

"You're totally crazy! Vampires don't exist in real life!"

"And little kids don't normally need to drink blood every day, but you need to do that!"

I had known for a long time that something about me was different from Zaza and Chouchou, but I had never been able to pinpoint what it was. But when he said I was a vampire, I couldn't believe it at first. On the other hand, a little voice in my head told me that what he had said about the "juice" was true: I knew nobody else who drank it. So was I a vampire? Was I a monster who would eventually kill a lot of people?

"For the past eight years, I have come to you and put my reputation at risk to help you hide your true nature! Because it needs to me hidden, or there will be consequences for all of us!"

"Are there more people of our kind?" I asked even though I was not so sure whether "people" was the appropriate term.

"There are a couple of vampires at the court," he admitted. "Most of them don't stay here for long. We recognise each other, but we never ever talk to each other because it would be too risky. And we certainly don't hunt together because that would be extremely dangerous. But you see, I am ready to teach you all you need to know now that you are aware of your true nature."

"So there are more things I need to be aware of... apart from keeping away from metal crosses?"

He sighed. "Yes, you've got a lot to learn. There is also a lot I can learn from you because you are the only living offspring of a vampire that I know."

In the years that followed, my father stayed true to his word. He taught me about the history of our species first. It turned out that he knew a lot because he had done some quite extensive reading over the centuries, and as he was able to read books in a lot of languages, he was probably one of the world's leading experts on vampirism. He also told me that he had begun to write a book to teach me about our kind. It was a weird attempt at chronicling the history of the vampire species in Europe, and he let me read it even though he hadn't finished the book. I found out later that some of information in the book was inaccurate.

For example, one of the chapters dealt with a dear friend of his whose name was Louis and whom he hadn't seen in over a hundred years. From what I gathered, he has been a physician at the time of the Great Plague who had only become a vampire when he himself had caught the disease and a vampire had turned him. I suspect now that Louis was the one who turned my father into a vampire because the two of them were also lovers. But that was not necessarily the kind of information a father wanted to pass on to his daughter, so I was only to find out about my father's romance with Louis later on.

If there was one thing my father was afraid of, it was that he didn't know how I would develop. Until I was thirteen years old, I grew like a normal human child and only showed my true vampire face when I was drinking blood. I never felt the need to feed on blood or to bite anyone the way my mother had when she had been pregnant with me, which I think now was due to the fact that my father gave me blood on a daily basis. He said it was animal blood as there were a lot of rats and mice he could kill at Versailles. Actually, might have been the most attentive "cat" ever to roam the grounds of the palace; and under his supervision, I became a pretty good animal hunter as well.

So I knew what I had to do when my father had to go to his lands in Lorraine to help his tenants survive the winter of 1788/1789. Although the weather had been bad in the years before, that winter turned out to be a true disaster: The rivers were frozen, and a lot of snow blocked the roads. My father's tenants didn't have much food left and were dying as bad weather had ruined their harvest and they could not afford to buy a single bread or even flour (The weather in Berlin this winter seems to be mild by comparison as there is no snow on the ground yet). My father knew he would risk losing his fortune if he didn't go home, but was hesitant to do so nonetheless because he didn't want to leave me behind. I assured him that I was old enough to take care of myself and would follow his instructions. Unfortunately, what he didn't realise was that I was twelve years old and not so different from any child of that age: Once my father was gone, I did what I wanted to do, and I wanted to have a good night's sleep.

So I hadn't hunted and hadn't had blood for a few days when I was out with Chouchou in the snow one day. We had actually stolen one of the sleighs the queen had imported from Austria years before and were having fun with it when it toppled over. I remember that my head lay near Chouchou's hand after the fall, and the proximity of his pulse and blood awakened my instinct at once. I couldn't really help it. Before I knew what I was doing or could even keep myself from doing it, I bit him and drank his blood. Thus, I was doing the one thing my father had always been afraid of as he had often told me he had no idea what would happen to me when I started drinking human blood.

Chouchou screamed in horror when he saw me or at least a monster with sharp teeth who was wearing my clothes and tried to fight me off initially, but he couldn't. Nonetheless, I heard his scream and some part of my consciousness began to fight my vampire instinct and tell me that what was doing was wrong and would get me into a lot of trouble, no matter how great real blood tasted. So I managed to stop somehow and apologised to him.

Naturally, Chouchou was furious. "Why did you do that?"

"I don't know," I lied. "But let's not tell maman about it, okay?"

And the poor boy loved me so much that he didn't tell anyone about my peculiar taste for his blood.

That was the beginning of the end, of course. Once I had gotten used to the taste of real blood, I didn't want animal blood anymore. My father was not around, and I could barely control myself since it was pretty comfortable to bite Chouchou as well: Unlike the rats and mice, which I needed to track down and catch, Chouchou was asleep in the bed next to mine at night, and I could comfortably bite him as often as I wanted to do it and drink as much of his blood as I wanted to drink. I did notice, however, that he was getting weaker in the following months, but he never talked much about it - just like he never talked about the bite marks all over his body. He even tried to protect me when he insisted all of a sudden that he was old enough to wash himself and didn't need to have his mother around, which was why Zaza never found out what was going on.

When my father returned in the spring, the political situation in France was getting more and more desperate, and I decided that I did not want to add my behaviour to his worries. In retrospect, I should have told him because even I realised that my behaviour was getting out of control because I found it increasingly harder to break away from Chouchou at night.

You know, I regret what I have done to Chouchou to this day. He was my best friend and "brother" even though we were not related, and he loved and trusted me enough to keep quiet about my true nature. And I killed him. I did not realise what I had done at first, of course, because I didn't know what it meant when a person's pulse is gone until I murdered him. He died in his sleep on the night of my thirteenth birthday because I could not stop myself from drinking too much of his blood.

I was so horrified when I discovered his stiff, cold body at 5 o'clock in the morning that I wanted to scream. But I couldn't because I knew I was responsible for Chouchou's death. So I quietly went to my father's quarters, woke him and told him what had happened. I expected him to be mad at me and yell at me, which is exactly what he didn't do. He must have noticed how scared I was and simply took me in his arms. Then, he called for his carriage, packed his bags and left Versailles with me within two hours.

To this day, I don't know when Chouchou's dead body was discovered and what sort of an explanation they found for his death and my disappearance. Perhaps they imagined that an animal had climbed through the window, killed Chouchou and dragged me away.

My father and I left Versailles in the middle of a political storm that would become a full-blown revolution a few weeks later with the incident at the Bastille and the plundering of estates belonging to noble families. To some extent, I think that was why Chouchou's strange murder never made it into the newspapers and why we could escape as easily as we did.

We escaped to Rome first and then went to Greece. It was pretty strange to spend the year of the French Revolution abroad on what would have been regarded as a Grand Tour by many young men at the time. During that time, my father not only showed me the world. Since we never stayed long in the same place, he could also teach me a lot about killing humans, and I became quite good at it.

After a while, it also began to become clear that I was not growing anymore: I would always stay thirteen, the age I had just reached when I had killed Chouchou. At the time, I didn't think it was so bad, but my father was terribly upset about it because staying so young would have some disadvantages for me that were beyond my grasp at the time - such as the fact that I would never be able to get married to anyone as my mind would get older.

My father and I returned to Paris briefly during the Terreur in 1793 because the prospect of drinking a lot of blood for free was just too good to be true.

That's when my father met Louis again. I think he had been looking for him everywhere he went. Without any doubt, Louis was a gorgeous vampire and the prettiest man I have ever laid my 137-year-old eyes on: His looks were golden, and he had huge emerald eyes. He was just perfect.

From the first moment I saw them together, I knew these two men had a very special relationship with each other. They disappeared together in my father's room that night, and both of them were gone in the morning.

My father left me a short letter which essentially said that he needed to live his own life now and that I was a big girl that was able to take care of herself. The letter ended with one brief advice: "Don't kill too many people!"

I have been trying to find my father ever since. Sometimes I got pretty close, but he has always outsmarted me. I followed him and Louis to Berlin and even to Russia during the reign of Napoleon, I was looking for them in London during Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee celebrations, and I know for a fact that they lived in California when the terrible earthquake occurred in San Francisco a couple of years ago.

I know that because Louis was killed in one of the fires that devastated the city afterwards. A vampire should never use his real name if he wants to stay anonymous, and Louis was using the one my father had given him in his 18th century history when he was practising medicine in San Francisco.

It was a lucky coincidence that I was in New York at the time of the earthquake and heard about a collection of 18th century antiques that had been found in the rubble of one of the houses in San Francisco. When I stood in the rubble that had once been their house, I discovered so many things that had once belonged to my father and that had not been identified as antique objects yet. I thought my search had come to an end because it was clear that a terrible tragedy had happened here and my father had been a part of it. One of the neighbours told me the doctor who had lived here had shared the house with "a cousin of his," but only the strangely deformed skeleton of the doctor, which the neighbours had been able to identify because of the clothes the dead man had been wearing, had been discovered in the house so far. On the other hand, the neighbour added that it was possible the other man had been burned beyond recognition or was still buried in the rubble - and after having said this aloud, she crossed herself.

So for a few years, I tried to come to terms with the possibility that my father had died in San Francisco- until I saw his picture in a newspaper.