Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels by D.J. Goodman Page A

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