Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (7 page)

“Zoey?” she asked again as she came back
downstairs, the growing panic evident in her voice. Then she went
back to the basement door and found it ajar. She opened it all the
way and called down. “Zoey?”

There was a grunt that might have been an
attempt at an answer. Peg went back into the kitchen to grab the
bags of food, then hurried downstairs, making note on the way down
of all the places along the wall and railing that Zoey had touched
with her filth-covered hands earlier and would need to be cleaned
before Tony came home.

Peg had almost expected Zoey to be back in
the hidden corner where she’d found her, but instead Zoey was over
in Tony’s corner, sitting on the floor and staring at something in
her lap. Peg didn’t recognize it until she got closer and saw it
was the shoebox full of old snapshots that she kept in the upstairs
closet. She’d always meant to put them in an album, but frankly a
few of them were too hard for her to even look at, let alone
organize. She didn’t have anything recent in there, not since she’d
started taking most of her pictures digitally, but even those had
been taken mostly by Tony. Peg had come to the conclusion that
memories she couldn’t bring back without a visual reference were
probably memories she didn’t want anyway.

“Zoey,” Peg said softly as she came closer.
Zoey looked up with an expression of alarm until she saw it was
only Peg, then she went back to pawing through the pictures. Peg
sat down on the floor next to her, wincing at some of the aches and
pains in her legs. She was only thirty-four but that wasn’t too
young to have the beginnings of arthritis, according to her doctor.
She tried not to let Zoey see that, however. She wanted Zoey to
remember her more as the person she’d once been.

As though reading Peg’s mind, the first words
out of Zoey’s mouth were “You changed your hair.”

Peg pulled a strand of her hair in front of
her face so she could look at it. The last time she’d seen Zoey her
hair had been short and dyed black with red streaks in it. It had
long ago gone back to her more natural brownish-red, although she
had to dye it now and then to get rid of the one or two grays that
persisted in showing up. She also kept it longer now, although
usually pulled back. She didn’t have time in her busy life to worry
about her hair in the way she once had.

Zoey’s hair, Peg realized, was the exact same
color and length it had been when she disappeared. Yeah, it was
time to start addressing things like that.

“I brought food,” Peg said. “I figured you
might be hungry.”

She pulled out the first bag and set it
between them. She saw Zoey’s eyebrows perk up at the thought of
food, but when Peg pulled out the sandwiches that interest seemed
to wane. Peg had been afraid of that.

“Do you not want any?” Peg asked.

“Dry and dead for a while,” Zoey said.

“I’m not really sure what that means, but I
think I have a clue.” Peg took a deep breath, hoping she was wrong,
then set the other bag out as well. “I have this as well.”

She didn’t bother handing it to Zoey. Instead
she just left it there, waiting to see what she would do. Zoey
opened up the bag and looked inside, stared for a long time, then
closed it back up. But she did not hand it back to Peg asking what
that was about. Peg didn’t take that as a good sign.

“Zoey, we need to talk. Is that okay?”

Zoey didn’t stop flipping through the
pictures, nor did she make eye contact with Peg when she said, “I
haven’t talked in a long time.”

That, at least, sounded like it might be true
and not just rambling. “I did as you asked. I didn’t tell the cops
that you were here. Are you afraid of the cops? Is the person that
took you maybe a cop?”

“The eyes are watching the cops. They watch
everything. They don’t have anything else to do but watch.”

“Okay. I suppose I can accept that for now,
but if I don’t tell the cops I’m still going to tell my best friend
V.”

Zoey dropped the photos to spill out over the
floor. “You can’t. The eyes are watching.”

“Okay. Okay, I get that, or at least as much
as I can, but if I’m going to help you I can’t do it alone. I need
help. V can do that.”

Zoey’s eyes narrowed, and it appeared to take
a lot of concentration to say what she said next. “Do you… trust
her?”

“With my life. She was there for me at times
when no one else was. And as it is I’m already going to have to
hide you from my husband, which I honestly don’t know how we’re
going to accomplish that.”

“Husband.” Zoey’s fingers searched through
the pile of photos on the floor and eventually came out with a
picture from their wedding. To save money at the reception they’d
put disposable cameras on each table and let the guests take the
pictures. The picture in Zoey’s hand showed Peg and Tony dancing
crazy to some song Peg couldn’t remember. “Him?”

“Yeah, that’s him. That’s Tony. And my son’s
name is Brendan.”

Zoey looked at the picture for a long time.
Peg didn’t say anything, just letting her process all this. When
she spoke again her voice was soft. “What year is this?”

Peg took a deep breath, trying to ignore just
how troubling a question that was. “2013.”

Zoey paused again to do the math in her head,
a process that seemed difficult for her. That was worrying as well,
as she’d always been the smarter of the two of them. “Eleven
years.”

“Yes.”

“Eleven years,” she repeated. She put the
photo back in the shoebox. She followed up with the others
carefully stacking them all, putting all the years away neatly.
“The fruit has been growing. Eleven years and now I’m ripe,
Peggy.”

Peg almost said that she wasn’t so bad now
that she’d had her shower before it occurred to her that she wasn’t
talking about her smell at all. “You said that before, Zoey. What
is that supposed to mean?”

Zoey shook her head. “No. No no.”

“It’s okay. If you don’t want to say yet you
don’t have to, but I’ll have to know everything soon. Do you
understand? It’s the only way I can protect you from whoever’s
after you.”

“The fruit is ripe,” she said softly, then,
louder and with more determination, said, “I need a mirror.”

“I think…” Peg stood up and went over to
Tony’s things on the desk. Underneath his acrylic paints she found
the small mirror he’d bought when he’d gotten in his head that he
should try doing self-portraits. “Here.” She went behind Zoey and
held it in front of them. “I don’t know why you want it but…”

Her sentence stopped in a gasp. She took away
the mirror, refusing to believe what she had seen. Zoey looked back
at her with sad, wide eyes.

“Put it back. I want to see,” she said.

Peg took a step back from her sister before
she realized what she was doing. This wasn’t right. She had to have
been seeing things. Her mind was all worked up and playing tricks
on her.

And yet…

The strength. The sun. The teeth
.

And now the mirror.

“Peg,” Zoey said. “I want to see.”

Peg almost said there was nothing to see. She
didn’t want to get close enough to Zoey again to put the mirror in
front of her. As much as she wanted to believe there was some
logical way to explain all this there was no way she could put it
together that didn’t come across as insane.

She’s still your sister
, she thought.
She won’t harm you, even if she is
…

Peg stepped closer again. Much slower this
time she held the mirror up in front of Zoey at such an angle that
she could see the reflection as well.

There was nothing wrong with the mirror.
She’d hoped for a second that it had somehow gotten warped and that
was the reason for what she’d seen. But when she angled it to look
at herself there was no problem with the image. She changed the
angle ever so slightly to look at Zoey.

All the stories and legends, it appeared, had
some amount of fact to them but were not completely true. Zoey did
indeed cast a reflection. But it was blurred beyond the point of
recognition. It was as though some force was interfering with the
light before it could reach either her or the mirror, resulting in
a reflection that was warped and hazy, like a funhouse mirror seen
through a thick fog.

“Zoey,” Peg whispered. “What happened to
you?”

“It planted a seed,” Zoey, her voice solemn
and quiet. “The seed grew. They were going to pick the fruit. I had
to get away.” Zoey took the mirror out of Peg’s hand and turned it
away, absently placing it in the shoebox with all of Peg’s
memories. She put the rest of the pictures on top of it, closed the
lid, set it aside, and then opened up the bag.

Peg turned away and refused to watch, but she
could clearly hear every sound as Zoey ripped the plastic off the
hamburger. Instead of the sounds of chewing, though, it was
followed by gulps as Zoey held the raw meat over her mouth and
drank the bloody juice.

Most of the signs of
Zoey’s presence were gone by the time V arrived with Brendan. The
shit was cleaned off the walls leading to the basement and Peg had
aired out the house enough that she thought she could get away with
claiming it was nothing more than a particularly noxious toilet
overflow. The smell of pot also helped, as Peg had smoked a bowl to
help calm her extremely frayed nerves. Zoey was still downstairs,
although she was now back in her hidden corner. Peg had given her
several blankets and pillows so she would at least be somewhat
comfortable, and the girl had promptly fallen asleep. There was at
least that. No matter what she was now, she was still human and
alive enough that she needed rest.

There was a knock at the door, but Peg didn’t
go to answer it. She sat on the couch, her hands folded in front of
her, not wanting to move. The last several hours had been draining
in ways she had never been able to imagine, and that was saying
something considering how well she remembered the days following
Zoey’s disappearance.

“Peg?” V called from outside. “Are you in
there?”

“It’s unlocked,” Peg called back. V opened
the door, having trouble considering one arm was full of Brendan’s
bag and the other full of Brendan himself, squirming and fussy. V
set him down and he ran across the room to leap in Peg’s lap.

“Mommy!”

Peg hugged him tight. “Hey there. How’s my
little man, huh?”

“Sleepy, I hope,” V said. “He was running all
over at my place and talking up a blue streak. I gave him a snack,
so hopefully he’s about ready to calm down for the day.”

“I hope so, too,” Peg said.

“Jesus, Peg. You look like absolute sh… er,
garbage. You even look worse than when you dropped him off, and
that’s saying something.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Peg
said.

“So are you going to tell me?”

“Give me a minute.” She looked down at
Brendan. “Mommy has a lot of things she needs to talk about with
Aunt V. You think you can play quietly in your room for a little
bit?”

“Mommy, I need to go baffroom.”

“That’s fine. We’ll go to the bathroom
first.”

Peg held his hand as he went up the stairs.
She would have picked him up and taken him herself to make it
faster, but it wasn’t that long ago where he hadn’t been able to
take the stairs by himself. The fact that he could do it now filled
him with an adorable childish pride and Peg, even in her current
state, couldn’t deny him that. The strangely determined look on his
face as he gripped the railing, stepped up a stair with one foot,
then brought up the next made her forget some of the mind-numbing
revelations of the day. The time wasn’t too far in the past where
she would have been unable to hide her impatience with this kind of
task, but now it gave her a strange kind of joy she’d never known
earlier in her life. At the top of the stairs he was able to
finally pick up the pace and run to the bathroom, then Peg made
sure he was settled into his room and went back downstairs.

V was down in the living room examining Peg’s
glass pot pipe with a bemused look. Marijuana was something V had
given up herself when she’d turned her back on booze, and she’d
never fully approved of the fact that Peg still did it. But she let
it slide as long as Peg stayed away from the bottle.

“So tell me what’s going on,” V said. She
said it in a way that somehow managed to sound forceful and
commanding while still being compassionate. She’d been that sort of
person for as long as Peg had known her, although admittedly when
they’d first met Peg had not yet been a person that could
appreciate it.

Peg had gone to her first AA meeting when she
was twenty-seven, shortly after her attempt at suicide but long
before she would stop cutting. Tony hadn’t been in her life yet,
although that was in the near future. Peg had been very confused
about the direction of her life, although she still hadn’t managed
to hit what her fellow alcoholics called “rock bottom.” She hadn’t
really believed yet that she had a problem, or so she told herself
at the time. In retrospect she must have understood that on some
level or else she wouldn’t have showed up at the stupid meeting at
the Lake Area Club. She hadn’t even lived in Oconomowoc for very
long and she hadn’t thought she was going to stay. In the last
three years she’d had seven different addresses and lived in three
cities, usually crashing on the floor of some casual acquaintance
that she hadn’t yet managed to irrevocably burn. This just seemed
like one more inconsequential stop on the road to… well, she didn’t
know where she was going and she didn’t really care.

Yet something had drawn her to the Lake Area
Club that day and she’d sat through a meeting. She hadn’t actually
said anything, instead just sitting in the back of the room
listening to everyone else tell their sob stories. She’d hated
every moment of it except for one. One particular young man, he
couldn’t have even been old enough to drink legally, was going on
about how he’d been ordered to show up at meetings and how he had
to drink because he was such a sensitive artist type and it was the
only way to calm his inner demons. Peg had desperately wanted to
call bullshit on him, but she got the impression that would have
been frowned upon. So that made it all the more surprising when
someone else did it instead.