Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (11 page)

“You can sit there and ask any question you
like about what happened to her. Go ahead. Let it make you feel
better. But I don’t care anymore. They’ll never catch who did it.
He won’t get what’s coming to him. But you? You were supposed to
protect her. Instead you tried to teach her to be that same kind of
partying little slut that you were and she’s gone because of it. No
matter what you do, no matter what you say, you will know. You will
always know. Whatever happened to her, you did it. You killed her.
Do you understand me? Do you fucking get it? You’re the one and
only you. No one else. You.”

Anita stopped. For many seconds Peg could
hear nothing from the other end of the phone other than heavy
breathing. She waited for one last barb or attack. Instead the
phone went dead as Anita hung up.

Peg took the headset from her ear and dropped
it on the table. She finally realized that her cheeks were
completely wet and her entire body shook. No, that wasn’t right.
Her entire body shook except for her right hand.

Slowly, carefully, Peg put the blade against
her right upper arm, just below the shoulder and to the right of
the Virgo symbol tattooed there in black and red ink. No matter
where she did this on her body, she never touched that tattoo. It
wasn’t even her zodiac symbol. It was Zoey’s.

She’d learned the perfect ways through trial
and error. Trying to cut herself on her stomach was no good. She
wasn’t that much overweight, only a few extra pounds, but that thin
extra padding of fat made the skin too springy. She could push the
blade into it and leave little more than scratches, and scratches
were never enough. They were annoyances, itches. What she needed
was pain. She had to have it. It was the only relief for the
pressure, the only way to make the pain inside make any sense.

She put the blade to her skin. Pressed.
Waited for an initial sting. Pressed harder. Waited to get used to
it again. Then when the blade was pressed firmly in its place she
slid it down.

She gasped. Or at least she thought she
gasped. She couldn’t be sure. All her concentration was on that
single sliver of skin high on her body as the pain hit her. Yes. Oh
yes. It hurt. She knew it was bad. She knew it was dangerous. She
didn’t care.

It was pain, but it was relief. Sweet relief,
the pressure slowly diminishing.

She finally opened her eyes and looked at her
arm. At first it only looked like a scratch, small and nothing to
pay any attention. Then the blood started to well up, filling the
tiny crevasse of skin she had created. It wasn’t right, though. It
hurt, but enough. There needed to be much more pain before she
could be okay again. She again put the razor at the top of the cut,
this time with her eyes open, pressed it in as deep as it would go,
and pulled down again. Her breathing quickened as the pain hit her
again. Better. That was better. The blood covered the edge of the
razor, a strangely beautiful dark red against the flame-darkened
metal. She repeated the action one more time, and the waves of pain
made her heart beat faster. Finally. Finally. Yes. This did it.
This made it all better.

One cut was never enough. Her body would tell
her when it had had enough. When she’d last done it years earlier
she had been able to continue cutting herself for half an hour
before her hand was shaking too bad to continue, but she already
felt spent this time after ten minutes and five separate cuts
moving downward over her arm like a small but particularly vicious
animal. None of the cuts went below the point where the sleeve of
an average t-shirt couldn’t cover it. Despite how long it had been
she still remembered that much. She’d gone into a job once—working
at a pizza place—having forgotten to stop above the sleeve line and
then had to think fast for a lie that could properly explain why
she was bleeding. That same day a coworker had been particularly
nasty to her and caught her at one point with a chef’s knife in her
hand held in a particularly threatening manner. The coworker hadn’t
bothered her for the rest of the day after that, but Peg hadn’t
actually felt compelled to use it on him. Instead she had been
fighting every urge to roll up her sleeves right then and there and
use it on herself.

There was one part of her ritual that she had
forgotten after so much time, though. Blood ran down her arm, not
in thick rivulets like in the movies but in slow trickles. One tiny
stream went around the curve of her muscle and, after hanging there
for several moments, dripped a single drop of dark blood onto the
table top. Once upon a time she had been so practiced in this that
she could have controlled herself after each cut long enough to dab
at it with some gauze and apply some peroxide. This time, however,
it hadn’t even occurred to her. She’d had to do it immediately, no
waiting, with no further attempts at safety or cleanliness.

Another drop hit the table.

“What are you doing?”

Peg looked up. Zoey stood at the other end of
the basement, the light casting peculiar shadows on her face. Her
head was cocked to the side in a manner that somehow managed to be
both cute, like a kitten, and predatory, an owl contemplating
whether or not to fly down from its perch and snatch up some tiny
prey animal.

“Zoey,” Peg said. She’d intended it as the
start of some sort of greeting, maybe an excuse, but she couldn’t
make herself say anything more. She looked down at her arm and the
way the blood moved over it. No gushing. It just flowed, slowly but
smoothly. It was an image that had always managed to fill Peg with
both relief and repulsion at the same time. Never had she had
reason to wonder what it would look like to someone else, though.
Dimly she understood that Zoey probably looked at it like a lion
staring at a steak. Zoey even had her mouth open slightly, and Peg
could see the sharp points of her teeth through her lips.

Even knowing what Zoey was, however, did not
make that her first and foremost concern. Instead she realized that
this was her sister, the one woman whom Peg had grown to put on
some kind of holy pedestal after so many years of absence, and she
was seeing Peg in a manner she had never allowed another living
person to see her before. Not her mother, not V, certainly not
Tony. The one time he had seen this had been well after the fact.
Suddenly Peg had an intense sensation of nakedness, except somehow
this was deeper. She’d been physically naked in front of many
people. She’d allowed quite a few men and one woman to actually be
inside her. But never in any of those times did it feel anything
remotely like now. This wasn’t the mere absence of clothes. This
was pure vulnerability.

“Just give me a moment and I can explain,”
Peg said quietly. She reached for the gauze to start daubing at her
wounds.

Peg felt the wind against her face before she
registered the sudden pain in her wrists, and not the good pain,
not the pain she had just finished giving herself. She didn’t
understand what had caused it until she blinked and saw that Zoey
was now standing over her, both her hands tightly wrapped around
Peg’s wrists.

“What are you doing?” Zoey asked again. This
time there was something more in her voice, something distinctly
unpleasant. It was like the inhuman noise she’d made earlier but
more measured and controlled. Peg watched the way Zoey’s stare
stayed on the blood, following the little drops that tickled their
way down her arm.
Food
, Peg realized.
She’s not seeing it
as my blood. She’s seeing it as food
. That probably made Peg
herself food as well. She recalled the moments of fear she’d had
earlier when thinking about Zoey’s new nature, but that fear didn’t
return now. Instead she felt relief far greater than she had given
herself while cutting.

She’s going to kill me
, Peg thought.
She’s going to sink those fangs into me and drain me and I’ll be
dead. After all this time I’ll finally be dead.

Good
.

She wanted to remind herself that she had
plenty of things to live for. She’d built a wonderful life for
herself. She had Tony. Best of all she had Brendan. In these
moments where she wanted her life to finally end her therapist had
told her to focus on all the good. That only proved, however, that
her therapist, along with anyone else who tried to say such a
thing, didn’t truly understand what it felt like in these moments.
The best parts of life weren’t enough. The good didn’t matter.
There was only one thing that mattered, and it was that her mother
was right. She was a bad person. She was nothing. She was the
person who had turned her sister into this thing.

Zoey moved her head closer to the wounds,
sniffing them, but she stopped as these thoughts went through Peg’s
head. She looked Peg in the eyes, although she appeared to be
focusing less on Peg’s face than on something beyond, like she was
seeing something just behind Peg’s head.

“Why did you do this to yourself?” Zoey
asked. Then, after a few seconds where Peg didn’t answer, “This is
about me?”

Are you reading my mind?
Peg thought.
Zoey didn’t answer, didn’t even seem to realize she’d been asked a
question, but Peg knew there was something more going on here.

“I’m sorry,” Peg whispered.

“Sorry?” Zoey asked. She moved her face
closer to Peg’s arm, only inches away now, and for a time neither
of them moved. When Zoey finally went for her it was not the savage
attack Peg had expected. She put her mouth to the topmost cut and
pressed her lips on it gently but firmly. Peg’s breath caught at
the sucking sensation. These were not the actions of someone who
intended to kill her.

“You’re like this because of me,” Peg said.
She was certain she knew what Zoey would say next. It was the same
tired statements everyone said. This wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t
done anything wrong. She had no way of knowing. And no one ever
understood that Peg didn’t want to hear it anymore. Deep inside she
knew she was at fault, and there was only one thing she had ever
wanted to hear in response. It was the one thing she had never
thought she
could
hear because it could only come from
Zoey’s lips.

Zoey stopped sucking and looked at her again.
Peg’s heart beat harder as she remembered every fantasy she’d ever
had about this moment. Granted, in none of those fantasies had her
sister’s mouth been covered with Peg’s own blood, but in so many
other ways they went just like this. That was how Peg knew she
wasn’t actually going to say the words. There was no way this
moment could happen. It was a dream that she didn’t deserve.

Except it wasn’t a dream. Zoey said the
words, slow and precise so that Peg had no chance of
misunderstanding them.

“It’s okay, sis. I forgive you.”

Peg was too stunned by the moment to respond.
Zoey took her finger and ran the tip over one of her teeth, ripping
a deep gash in it that immediately welled with blood. She pressed
the finger to the wound she’d just drunk from then moved her mouth
to the next. While Zoey drank Peg watched the first cut stop
bleeding and pull itself closed.

Zoey repeated her actions, drinking then
fixing, until all the wounds Peg had given herself were healed with
almost no scars.

The next morning
Peg woke long enough to tell Tony she wasn’t feeling good and then
call into work before falling back into bed. When she woke a second
time the sun was coming in bright, almost too bright, through her
bedroom window and she felt a deep satisfaction and contentment on
a level she wasn’t sure she’d ever had. She smiled at the ceiling
and even laughed to herself a little as she realized that
everything that had happened the day before was real, not just a
dream. She couldn’t bring herself to get out of bed yet, though.
The blankets were too comfy against her naked skin and she wanted
to savor this feeling for as long as she could.

After the cathartic and strangely intimate
moment between Peg and Zoey in the basement, they’d talked for a
while, or at least tried to talk. Zoey had still been somewhat
dazed and occasionally incoherent, so Peg had been the one to do
most of the talking. She’d given Zoey a Cliff Notes version of her
life, starting with the rift that appeared in their family after
Zoey’s disappearance and going on through Brendan’s birth. Zoey had
looked sad at much of this and she occasionally asked questions,
only half of which didn’t sound like gibberish to Peg. She was
starting to get a feel for the tone and patterns of Zoey’s talk,
however, and that allowed her to finally ask a few more questions
that had been bothering Peg all day.

The first questions, the obvious ones, had
still yielded little Peg could understand. Any questions about who
or what had taken her and changed her into a vampire were answered
with the same talk as earlier, a confused word salad involving a
“mish-mash” and “eyes that walk.” This talk visibly upset her, so
Peg tried to approach it from a different direction. When she asked
Zoey what had happened on the night she disappeared, Zoey gave her
slightly more coherent answers.

“Living Dead Girl,” Zoey said. “Crawl on
me.”

“Zoey, I’m sorry but…” Peg stopped and
thought back to that night. That wasn’t just more jumbled words,
that was a song by Rob Zombie. She thought back to the night and
tried to remember anything she could from before the point where
she’d realized Zoey was gone. Although she couldn’t be certain it
seemed possible that the song had been playing at some point. Maybe
Zoey remembered the moment she was taken with the same clarity as
Peg.

“A boy bought me a drink. Blue eyes. Black
fingernail polish. Cute. Nice boy.”

Peg just nodded. She thought she knew who she
was talking about. The police had questioned a young man that
several witnesses had said was probably the last one seen with
Zoey. Nothing had come of it and he’d been able to alibi out. Peg
remembered hearing several months later that he’d gone to jail for
beating his girlfriend, but she didn’t tell Zoey that. Let her
continue to think that the last person she’d talked to that night
had been nice.