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Damon gave some thought to the idea of whether Daisy would be mad at him. In fact he knew she probably would be. It just wasn’t much of a deterrent. And it wasn’t that he thought she wouldn’t find out—he knew she would. He planned to tell her himself. But he went to her house on Saturday anyway while she was slaving away at the pie shop, and Karen welcomed him in. Karen genuinely liked him, although given her track record of character judgments he didn’t read too much into it. He certainly didn’t have to work hard to charm her, though.
Karen made him some tea and they sat in the kitchen, talking. Mostly Karen was talking, about herself and her terrible life, the way screw-up drama queens often did, and Damon listened and nodded sympathetically. It was entertaining in a shallow way, like watching a soap opera on occasion. He could imagine that it got old fast, though.
At the appropriate moment he leaned forward and caught her eye. “I’d like to hear more about Daisy’s childhood,” he said, applying the full power of the mesmerism he’d honed over the years. “Tell me your first memory of Daisy.”
Karen’s face went slack, her gaze distant. “I was scared,” she said softly.
Damon pounced on this eagerly. “Why were you scared?”
“Because I didn’t want to be pregnant,” she replied. Damon sat back, disappointed. “I wanted to leave my boyfriend—he was bad news—but I didn’t know how I could raise a child on my own. All that responsibility, all that money…” Damon sighed in boredom but allowed her to continue. She was addressing some point beyond his left shoulder anyway, in a vampire-induced trance. “But I never regretted it, not for a moment,” she avowed. “Even before she was born my little Daisy made me happy.”
“Thanks, that’s really interesting,” Damon said, snapping the woman back to reality.
She blinked at him with a start. “Oh, I’m sorry, honey, what was I saying? You know, I just get so carried away sometimes I can’t even remember where I was going with a story! Aren’t you sweet to sit and listen, I’m probably boring you to tears. Where was I?”
“You were just saying we should ask Grandma Rose about her memories of Daisy as a child,” Damon replied politely.
Karen looked slightly confused, but this was a woman who often woke up in places she didn’t remember being at, so she generally tried to go with the flow. “You know, that’s a great idea,” she agreed, standing. “Let’s go see if she’s awake.”
Damon met her outside the pie shop that evening as usual. It was a nice night so he hadn’t brought his car—Daisy didn’t seem to mind the walk, even if it was cold and she’d been on her feet all day. “You’ve been up to something,” she predicted when she saw him.
“Be fair,” he insisted. “You could say that every time you saw me, and have a good chance of being right.”
She gave him one of those little cat-smiles that drove him crazy with their secret amusement. “Just reading your body language,” she claimed. “Are you going to tell me, or is it meant to be a surprise?”
He paused a moment, even though he knew what he wanted to say. No last-minute second-guessing, not now. “You’re good,” he finally told her with a kind of back-handed admiration, referring to something beyond the current conversation.
Daisy didn’t catch his meaning, but that didn’t bother her. “Do you mean that morally, intellectually, physically?” she joked slyly.
He wasn’t sure of the first one, but the last two, definitely. That wasn’t his point, though. “Supernaturally,” he replied. She raised an eyebrow at him, maddening in her patience. “But I’m surprised you haven’t taken any precautions with your mom and grandma,” he went on, purposefully obtuse. “No vervain-filled charms for them,” he finally clarified, “to protect against compulsion.”
Daisy’s nose wrinkled slightly in distaste. “What could you possibly want to compel my mom or grandma to do?” she asked, more curious than outraged at his suggestion.
It wasn’t exactly the reaction he was looking for, so he escalated. “I just wanted to ask them about your childhood. Because those photos your mom was showing me the other day were obviously fake.”
There, he got a little tightening of the jaw, a little pursing of the lips. It wasn’t much, but with Daisy it was like an angry shout.
“Obviously?” she repeated coolly.
“Vampires have excellent vision and perfect recall,” he reminded her smugly. “I can tell when a picture’s been PhotoShopped. And not just to get the red-eye out.”
“Really.” She sounded skeptical, which he didn’t like. “And what, exactly, did you learn when you used your advanced vampiric compulsion abilities on my mother and grandmother?”
Yes, she was definitely mad now—her language was more formal and her tone frosty enough to make the evening seem balmy. Damon rose to the challenge. “You’re good,” he repeated with a casual shrug. “Grandma Rose is a little fuzzy before the last few years, but that could be attributed to old age. Your mom, though, has it all, in exquisite detail, back even before you were born.”
“Really,” Daisy said again, but this time she sounded pleasantly surprised, which threw him off. “I just thought the alcohol might be damaging her memory,” she added, reading his expression of confusion.
“Damaging the memories you gave her,” he surmised, feeling like he was losing the conversation.
“I guess if they’re memories of me, then yes, I gave them to her,” Daisy allowed.
Damon stopped her on the sidewalk, his frustration growing. “No. You planted them in her brain. At some more recent time.” About as subtle as a sledgehammer by now.
“Oh,” she said, drawing the syllable out like she finally understood what he was getting at—and wasn’t bothered by it. “Like you do?” she added, pointed as a wooden stake.
“Don’t turn this back on me, I hate that,” Damon snapped without thinking.
“Right, because we were talking about something I did wrong,” Daisy remarked coolly, resuming her walk. “Which affects you how again? Are you on the Photograph Integrity Squad?”
He was not so irritated that he missed what could be construed as an admission. “So you did PhotoShop them!” he accused gleefully.
“Sure,” she admitted easily. Too easily. “We have so few family photos, I wanted them all to look as good as possible. I did a lot with focus and glare, removing red-eye”—she gave him a little smirk as she said this—“erasing my mom’s exes, covering up the bruises on her face and arms.” She gave him a look to see what he had to say about that.
He wasn’t buying it. He couldn’t. It was too prosaic. “No,” he said slowly, grasping at his disbelief.
Daisy wrapped an arm around Damon’s, which somehow made him feel like he’d lost, lost so badly that she wasn’t even mad at him. He clung to the image of her pursed lips and icy tone earlier—he’d riled her then, so there must be something to his idea. “So, my mom has detailed memories of me, and I’ve given you a plausible explanation of why the photos were altered,” she summarized cheerfully. “What exactly are you accusing me of, again?”
“Mind whammies,” he persisted. “I think you can do them. And now, I know how good you are.”
“By the absence of evidence I’ve left behind,” she agreed, humoring him.
“No, no, no,” Damon realized suddenly. “By the fact that you’re talking to me in that tone I hate, and yet I don’t want to rip your throat out.”
“I’m sorry,” Daisy told him, slipping her hand into his. “It’s just that you don’t make much sense sometimes.” Damon rolled his eyes. “But really, the only way I influence you is in the normal way a girlfriend might,” she told him, and she sounded sincere. “If you’re going to get all paranoid about ‘mind whammies,’ we could always spend some time apart, let you clear your head.”
“Don’t pull that ‘I’m gonna break up with you’ ultimatum c—p,” Damon told her, though her tone suggested she really wasn’t.
Daisy stopped him and met his gaze. “I just don’t want you to worry that I’m controlling you somehow,” she said, and there seemed to be genuine concern in her eyes.
“You mean, other than in the normal way a girlfriend might,” he shot back, but without much venom. She smiled up at him, the way no normal girlfriend would at that remark. “A particularly evil and manipulative girlfriend.”
At this Daisy outright laughed and resumed walking, with Damon right by her side. “Opposites attract, huh?” she said dryly. He smirked a little, not at all displeased to be called evil and manipulative himself. “But really, Damon,” Daisy added in a serious tone, “I don’t like you compelling my mom and grandma that way. Please don’t do it again, okay?”
He started to answer, then stopped himself, then tried again, then growled in frustration. “I feel bad about doing it,” he ground out, in an unapologetic tone.
She gave him a dubious look. “Well, at least you’re in touch with your feelings.”
“Are you making me feel bad about it?” he asked, and she gave him an exasperated look. “I can’t tell. I’m really confused.” Well, slightly confused. But mostly playing to the side of her that liked to be order to his chaos. Because he was manipulative, too. Although obviously not nearly as good as her.
“Maybe you just like me,” she teased happily.
He slid his arm around her shoulders. “Well, thanks to your mind whammies, you’ll never know if it’s real or not,” he warned breezily. “I know girls care about that kind of thing.”
“Some of us are just in it for the sex,” she shot back.
“And a successful diversion,” he announced. “Why don’t we go back to my place?”
“I’ll sneak out after I’ve gone to bed,” she countered. “Thanks to your little walk down memory lane today, my mom might be feeling sentimental tonight and eager to see me.”
He made a little growl of frustration, not having thought of that. “Well don’t be too long.” He felt compelled to spend more time with Daisy—but was that a poor choice of words, or not?