As though they took them off by their own volition, Peg thought. If she remembered her vampire lore right from her teenage days of reading Stephen King and Anne Rice, then it seemed likely that whoever or whatever had taken Zoey had been able to put some kind of whammy on her, a hypnotic spell or a trance or something like that.
“Did they have anything else?” Peg asked.
“No, there was nothing else,” Anita said.
You’re lying to me again, Peg thought. I can hear it in your voice. I can always tell because you sound like you’re proud of it.
“Did they give any idea about whether they thought it was someone local?”
“Are you deaf, Peggy? I told you there was nothing else.”
The pressure built through Peg’s body, but she thought maybe she could control this. The blade was a temptation, but she could fight it. She was sure of it. She had to be strong enough after all this time.
“Or maybe a pattern to the disappearances?”
There was a long pause. “Maybe.” Anita sounded a little deflated. Maybe just this once Peg had stood up to this woman long enough to actually win.
“What was it?”
“All the disappearances were around a central spot. The further from that area, the fewer disappearances.”
“And what was that spot?”
“Lake Winnebago.”
Lake Winnebago. Peg had hoped for something a little more specific than that. Other than the Great Lakes that bordered Wisconsin on its east and north sides, Lake Winnebago was the largest lake in the state. There were at least four cities of some significant size surrounding it and who knew how many smaller ones. As a clue, it wasn’t a terribly helpful one.
“They weren’t able to pin it down any better than that?”
“If they had, don’t you think they might have found something? They’re the FBI. If they didn’t find anything else then there wasn’t anything else to be found.”
On that one Peg finally got the impression that Anita was telling the truth. The phone call wasn’t a total wash, but what little she had gotten out of the woman wasn’t enough to be very helpful. She supposed she should be grateful, though. She could just hang up now, put the razors away without having needed them, and she could go upstairs to snuggle with Tony.
“I guess that’s about all then?” Peg asked.
“What, you got the little tidbits from me you wanted and now you’re going to hang up?” Anita asked.
“No. Mom, I didn’t mean it like…”
“How do you even live with yourself?”
“Wait, what?”
“How do you do it? No, wait. I’ve got a much better question, and I want you to answer me honestly, okay?”
“Mom, maybe I should get going…”
“Why haven’t you killed yourself yet?”
Peg closed her eyes and held her breath. The pressure inside had started to dissipate without her even realizing it, but now it was back, hitting her hard.
“What did you just say?” Peg asked quietly.
“I’m pretty sure I didn’t stutter,” Anita said. “I asked you why you haven’t killed yourself yet. You already tried it once. I would think that practice makes perfect.”
Tears started forming even under Peg’s closed eyelids.
“Because I’m pretty sure the world would be a better place without you in it,” Anita said. “God saw fit to bless me with two daughters, but the Devil had to be the one who took Zoey and left you. He took the good daughter and all I had left was a selfish, egotistical, lying little whore.”
Just hang up, Peg thought. Don’t let her get her hooks in you again. You don’t have to listen to this. You don’t deserve it.
But she did. After so many years of hearing it on a constantly repeating basis, she knew that she did.
“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.
Chapter Ten
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.
“Then… then I was there but I wasn’t. I walked outside but I didn’t. Emotions told me to follow them. There was a car. I got in it.”
“What kind of car? Who was in it?”
“Eyes that walk. Eyes…” She was getting upset again, and Peg made soothing noises until she calmed back down.
“It’s okay. What else do you remember? What happened next?”
Zoey shook her head violently. “Naked. Blood. Pain. Screaming.”
“Can you say where you were taken?”
“Underground. Dripping water. Fangs in the ceiling. But a building first. Stinks like dead fish.”
“And… is that where you’ve been?”
“Cages. Waiting for the fruit to ripen. Harvest time is coming.”
Blood Harvest (Book 1): Blood Fruit Page 8