He was right. To a point anyways.

She was a complete human, and if the family decided to turn against her, she'd be no better off than a baby lamb against a hungry lioness.

But that didn't sate her aching curiosity. She wanted to know what was going on in the family. Why they sent her to sleep when they wanted to talk about her. Why they kept buying her tons and tons of clothes. She sighed.

Blair took in a breath and cleared his throat.

"Antilania sees things that might happen. Premonitions, I suppose. She calls them visions. And depending on what decisions we made, those premonitions change or are carried out as-seen. Antilania saw that someone would come to us for a visit. And then we saw a girl, and then it was a long visit, and then an extended stay, and the night you came, she saw you in distress. It kind of took us by surprise. So, now, obviously, you'll be needing clothes, and we have the means of buying you them. And Aimee and Greyson count it as an insult when you don't take advantage of their gift." He said, hitting the point home.

"Way to make me feel like a jerk," she pointed out.

Blair shrugged, but he was bearing her a toothy grin. "I wouldn't lie to you," he replied simply.

They were trying to make her feel at home. Unless she spontaneously got her memory back, she would be staying at the Allen house for a very long time, according to Antilania and Blair, thus why they gave her a personal room and had started, just started stocking her closet,

Clearly not everyone disliked her as Antilania did.

"It's not that she doesn't like you," Blair interrupted.

Charlotte snorted. "Are you kidding?" she asked, disbelieving him. "She hates me."

"No, she doesn't" Blair stated clearly. "She's just careful."

"Because I'm oh-so terrifying," Charlotte replied with a laugh.

Blair didn't say anything. "Just…don't be so quick to judge us, okay?" he asked her. "We're a little more than you realize." Then, he smiled at her, and Charlotte felt her stomach drop.

His brown hair let his eyes light up his light features, and she suddenly felt the need to fix her hair and get dressed, as she was still in her P.J's.

She stood up awkwardly. "I'll keep that in mind," she said to him.

"I'll know if you do," Blair told her, and let her go up the stairs to Max, who was without a doubt, waiting patiently, putting together his television.

So, there was something going about her, it wasn't just her imagination. It was probably bad, knowing her luck. Well, she didn't really know it. But she didn't feel lucky.

Charlotte climbed the stairs, and found herself trying to look pretty doing it. How to look pretty going up the stairs was something beyond her knowledge, but Antilania did it perfectly.

"There you are!" Max exclaimed, opening the door before she got a chance to knock. "Sorry," she apologized. "Aimee caught me and then Blair and I started talking.

"Oh," Max replied indifferently, and went back to hooking up his new TV.

"You…have any trouble?" Charlotte offered, sitting on his futon.

Max shook his head. "Nah," he replied coolly, laying down and scooting in behind the TV. "I've done this for so many years; I could do it with my eyes closed." He told her.

"And your thumbs tied together," Charlotte mumbled under her breath. Max jolted with laughter behind his entertainment box.

Charlotte frowned. "What do you mean by that? So many years?"

"Well," Max grunted, pushing up off the floor to move his television back. He pressed the ON button on top, and the static-y sound of a TV came on and TV land was on the screen. Max patted the box proudly and turned it back off.

"After so many years, it gets old when you have to keep appliances and stuff. So I taught myself to fix them."

"But you randomly buy Mercedes Benzes?" Charlotte asked, confused.

"Well, we don't have to buy them. But we choose to. We donate the old ones to charities and nursing homes and stuff. Same with the TV's and the other stuff like clothes."

Charlotte shrugged. At the rate they bought things, they were donating cars and TV's and furniture every year.

"Aimee cooks a lot, which is why we got her a bunch of new Kitchen Aid stuff." Max continued.

Well, that just didn't make any sense. Aimee cooked for a family that didn't eat??
"She cooks for neighbors and people who can't afford a night meal." Max seemed to answer her thoughts, which he probably picked up on with his Christmas Light Power.

"Oh," was all Charlotte said.

How quaint. It was like the typical do-gooder family, except their stereotype for being evil vampires. Granted, no one was supposed to know who the Allen family really was, and if they found out, there was no doubt in her mind the Antilania would threaten them within centimeters of their life.

"So yeah," Max added uncomfortably.

----

Max finally got his TV to the settings he was satisfied with, and he looked at Charlotte after picking out two movies from his collection. "Which one?" he asked, showing her Mulan and Peter Pan by Disney.
Charlotte laughed. "Oooh," she crooned sticking her tongue out of the side of her mouth. She reached out and tapped Mulan. "This one." She said.

"Do you remember these movies?" he asked.

Charlotte reluctantly shook her head after studying them for a while.
Max's jaw dropped. "Seriously?" he asked. "Every kid watches Disney." He added, putting the DVD in its slot.

"I remember when this guy first became popular." Max added, tapping the name on the DVD.

Charlotte giggled. "You sound like an eighty-six year old man." She told him.
Max gave her a look out of the corner of his hazel eyes.

Charlotte looked at his perfectly straight nose, perfectly situated between his perfect eyes.

"Try like…a five hundred year old man." He told her, and Charlotte's eyes grew big.
"Wow," she said. There was no way he was that old.

The movie started with a Disney logo and commercials for new movies that came out I the summer of 1996.

"How old is this movie?" Charlotte asked, settling into the side of the couch.

"Uhm…a little over ten years old," Max told her. "But the guy who created them, Walt Disney, was a genius. Anyway, we keep them because in two hundred years or so, they're going to be worth a lot of money. Not that we'd sell them because of the money. But they'd be major collectibles." Max told her, and he stopped talking when the movie announced the feature presentation.

About halfway through the movie, Charlotte announced that she had to go to the bathroom, so Max paused it and waited patiently for her to come back.

When she did, she found that Max has rearranged the couch so that she might be more comfortable.

"Aw, thanks Max," she crooned and went to sit down.
"No problem. I just don't know how you were comfortable. The frame had to have been digging into your back."

Charlotte shrugged and held a pillow close to her chest as she watched an epic battle scene and Mulan fired a rocket into the side of a mountain.

That was when Max put his arm along the back of the couch, touching her back.
At first, it reminded her of those guys who put their arms around girls at the movie theatres after pretending to yawn or stretch, and her body grew tense.

'What if he's just comfortable?' she thought. 'It's his house anyway….' She added to help calm her nerves, and her shoulders relaxed, allowing her to watch the rest of the movie resting against his side.

---

"That was a good movie," Charlotte said once the credits starting rolling up on the screen.
"Glad you enjoyed it. There's like two hundred more made by the same company, so don't worry about running out of good movies,"

Charlotte's jaw dropped. "You're serious?" she asked.

Max shrugged. "More or less," he replied.

"Woooooooww…" Charlotte gasped, staring at his collection in the corner.
She looked up to see Max staring at her with an odd expression. "So…now are you getting along with the fact that I'm a vampire?" he asked.

"I've been pretty good about it, don't you think?" she replied casually.

Max nodded with a slight shrug, and rubbed a spot on his chin where a goatee might go. "I suppose." He mumbled. "But I still think you should be scared of me."
Charlotte nodded. "Maybe so." She agreed. "And I might be if I remembered who I was. But seeing as I don't I can't be scared of anything because I have nothing to base my….scaredness off."

Max sighed. "That's your only reason for not being just a little bit frightened of me?" he asked.

Charlotte's tongue appeared at the corner of her mouth.

It was the only reason. There was no reason to be afraid of them when they'd explained to her numerous times that she was in no danger. They'd taken her shopping for Pete's sake. How could she be afraid of someone who spent such a vast amount of money of her? They'd even named her.
The more she thought, the more she wondered, "Who is Pete anyway?"

"Unless you give me a reason to afraid, then no, I'm sorry. You don't give me any doubt in my mind that I'll make it through the night."

Max gave her devil eyes. "We could change that," he told her with a sadistic grin.

The ending credits ended and static filled the room. Max jumped to turn it off.

"What about you? What's your past like, Mr. 500-year-old-man?"

Max smiled and sat back down next to Charlotte. "It's very colorful, that's for sure." He told her.

Charlotte listened intently.
"I was born in 1508 when Charles V came into power over Spain and Rome. I lived happily for eighteen years. My father was a veteran general for the army after being in several wars and he was awarded some high position and he received lots of payment for his honor and bravery or something in the wars. Aimee was my nursing maid when I was a baby, and remained in the house after she turned into a vampire. It wasn't as hard to resist blood lust back them for newly changed vampires as it is today, for whatever reason that may be." He recalled.

"So…you wore togas?" Charlotte asked.

Max laughed. "Yeah," he said. "Seems kinda silly now, huh?"

Charlotte shrugged. "Continue." She instructed.

"Oh. Anyway, the Bubonic Plague was going around and everyone was always scared to get that. People died by the thousands every month. My father thought that it was impossible to get because we were nobles. But that Charles' Court started getting sick in Rome, so we left for Spain which was the worst thing we could have done. Anyway, Aimee had come with us because one of my Father's seven wives had just had a baby,"

Wow, SEVEN wives…

"When we got to Spain, Charles told us that the death rate from the Plague wasn't near as bad as what the peasants called the "Sweating Sickness."

It sounded eerie to Charlotte.
'The Sweating Sickness.'

Kinda like a Steven King novel.

"Basically, you die because you had a temperature. They said, 'you could be dancing at nine and dead at eleven."

"Wow…" Charlotte interrupted again.

Max gave her a look, but continued. "John, my newborn half baby brother got it first and he died within six hours of getting to Spain. So my Gather decided it wasn't safe, obviously, and we were to leave in the morning."

Charlotte could picture Max's father in her mind. A bossy nobleman with a black goatee and black beady eyes.

"My father died two hours later, and I came down with the sickness not long after because I was in the room my father died in to say goodbye."
Max was staring at the cloth on his bed, rolling it between in fingers.

"Not many human memories stay with us because they're so indefinite and limited, but God, I remember the pain. It was absolutely awful. Pain ravaged every part of my body. I had seizures and uncontrollable cramps. It burned like Hell's fire when I had to go to the bathroom and if felt like my head was between two slabs of stone and they placed the castle of France on top."
Charlotte's mind drifted to Max's head like that with the Castle of France on it, and she mad a face, glad that such a sickness didn't exist anymore, except for PMS.

"Aimee was crying non stop at my bedside and I vaguely remember her sobbing about how sorry she was because of what she was going to do. She told me that my pain was almost over but it had to get worse before it would get better."
'What could be worse than a squished head?'

"I was thinking that my ribs were going to break or something. Possibly my head, and then I was going to go to Heaven." Max squished an invisible ball between his big hands, and then lifted his hand to the sky.
"Instead, Aimee changed me." He finished simply with a shrug.

"Just like that?" Charlotte asked, obviously disappointed. "She didn't drink your blood or anything?"

"Well, blood wasn't as hard to resist back then as it is now-a-days. People weren't too healthy back in 1508. There wasn't an exact source for any vitamin, so we just ate food. Now, there are loads of diseases that we didn't know about and people were dying from like scurvy or iron-deficiency because doctors didn't know what was going wrong... Now you can go to the store and buy over-the-counter iron-supplements or eat an orange."

"Why couldn't you just eat an orange then?" Charlotte asked, confused.

That was simple enough, right?

"Because no one knew that you had to eat fruit regularly. And most fruits were hard to come by, even when you had money." Max explained. "Anyway, I was changed to a vampire, and here I am, then, now and forever." Max opened his arms wide, gesturing to himself.

So, he was alive for everything. All the American wars…Hell, he was alive when Chris Columbus in his newspaper hat found the New World and declared the world was 'pear-shaped'. What an idiot.

He was alive for all the French Kings, the Chinese Emperors, Queen Elizabeth, Queen Victoria and even Hitler.

"Did you know Hitler?" she asked.

Max, who had been staring off past her, refocused on her again with piercing hazel eyes.

"Sadistic bastard, which he was. Yes, I knew him."

"Wooooww…" Charlotte mumbled for possibly the tenth time that day.

"Who, your father?" a voice at the door startled Charlotte.

Max grinned. "He was too, but no, we were talking about Hitler, actually."

Aimee nodded, and Charlotte realized he'd been looking at Aimee.
"Your father was almost as bad. He could have been, given the teensiest bit of power." Aimee spat in her tickling-water voice.

"And I'm his son." Max reminded her carefully.

Aimee snorted. "You're no son of Julius DeMarcus the III." She snapped. "Which is why I kept you for my own. I just wish I could have saved the baby, even though his mother was a shrew"

Charlotte was amazed. She'd never dreamed such ugly words could come from such a beautiful woman. She pictured Aimee as a dignified woman who kept her mouth shut.

Guess she had more to learn about the Allen's.

"What about Blair?" Charlotte asked Aimee, hungry for more.

When Blair first told her about their state of being a vampire, he'd said that Aimee had created him.

Aimee smiled at her. "Blair was a victim of a gang mass-murder. Irish settlers joined together one night and started stabbing any Roman they saw, regardless of age, gender, or status. I met Blair on my way home from the DeMarcus'. His mother was carrying him and she begged me to save him. I told his mother that he could live, but he would never return home. The woman gave Blair to me, and I never saw her again. Blair was with me as a servant in the DeMarcus' home."

"So…Blair is technically older than Max…" Charlotte said, piecing together the puzzle.

Aimee nodded.

Geez, the whole lot of them are ages old!!

"So now that you about us, I'd like to introduce myself properly. Charlotte, I'm Aimee Allen," Aimee stretched an arm out to her. She nearly expected Aimee to tack 'vampire' onto the end.

"Nice to meet you Aimee, I'm Charlotte…No Last Name."

Aimee smiled, back to the dignified woman Charlotte pictured her as. Then, Aimee looked at Max.
"Max," she began. "Blair is going to go with you when you go shopping." She announced.

Charlotte saw the muscles in Max's jaw tighten. "Okay," he replied simply and with that, Aimee turned and left.

Charlotte smiled at Max once Aimee was gone. "I love her," she said and leaned back on his couch, having sat up at the intensity of the story.

She was finally starting to feel like she belonged at the house. She felt comfortable with just about everything that went on.

Max looked at his watch. "Well, it's four. And…Aimee, Greyson, Antilania, and I need to go out…" he told Charlotte and stood up, sighing.

"What?" Charlotte responded. "Going where?"

Max put a hand on her shoulder to calm her down. "Just until early tomorrow morning. We'll be back by the time you wake up."

Charlotte stumbled over a fold up chair and tripped forward in her haste to black Max's way out. Max reached out and firmly set her right.

"But wait," Charlotte said, oblivious to his movements to help her.

"Why do you have to leave?" she asked desperately.

Seriously? Why just leave her with Blair? Not that she didn't like him or was scared of him. She was actually quite fond of him.

But he didn't make her dreams go away.

And if anything that was the thing she was scared of most. Lately, they hadn't been as violent but she was completely conscious and she spoke with the creature that seemed to know everything about her. It seemed to know everything about her, and she knew close to nothing about herself.

Max smiled at her gently, and pushed some hair out of her eyes.
"Don't' worry, okay?" he said.

His voice was so gently, and compassionate, and it washed over her fears like a tidal wave.

It was going to be okay because Max said it was going to be okay.

"Okay," she replied, mesmerized by his hazel eyes.

"Nothing will happen to you." Max added reassuringly. "Come on. Let's get you some dinner." He added, grabbed her hand, and squeezed it.

"Alright," Charlotte sighed, and she turned to leave, Max trailing behind her.

They were downstairs where Aimee had a plate of macaroni-and-cheese waiting for her.

"OOOOH!" Charlotte said excitedly. "Thank-you Aimee!" she squealed.

Aimee smiled. "My pleasure. Max, I'm going to bring this to the neighbors and then we can leave." She said.
The spoon headed towards Charlotte's mouth stopped so abruptly that the macaroni fell off.

Max nodded. "Alright." He replied.

When she was gone, Charlotte said, "You're leaving so soon?"

Max smiled. "Yeah," he replied.

Charlotte harrumphed. "What are you guys going to do?" she demanded.

Instead of refusing to answer like Charlotte expected him to do, he leaned forward, the sparkle in his glowing eyes dancing. "His face was lifted up in an amused grin. "We're hungry too," he said to her.
Charlotte's eyes got big and her mouth formed a circle. "Oh," she said simply, and scooped macaroni into her open mouth.