The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix Page 0,131

true value.”

Her stomach slowly turned inside out. He passed Alhambra Hall and she wanted to shove open the door and jump out of the car. She wanted to feel the asphalt slap and cut and scrape her. It would feel real, not like this nightmare. She made herself look at James Harris again, but she didn’t trust herself to speak. She kept quiet until he pulled up in front of her driveway.

“I need time to think,” she said.

“What are you going to tell Carter?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Patricia said, and made her face a mask. “Not yet. This is between us.”

She fumbled with the door handle, and as she did, she dropped Francine’s license onto the floor of his car and slipped it beneath the passenger seat with her foot.

It wasn’t his wallet, but it was the next best thing.

* * *

—

She woke up in the dark. She must have turned off the bedside light at some point and didn’t remember. Now she lay there, scared to move, stiff as a board, listening. What had woken her? Her ears strained, scanning the darkness. She wished Carter were here, but he was on another drug company trip to Hilton Head.

Her ears wandered through the dark house. She heard the higher-pitched heat coming through the air registers, the ticking sound it made deep in the tin ducts. Behind the ticking came the high-pitched rush of warm air, and the drip from the bathroom faucet.

She thought about Blue. She needed to reach him, somehow, before James Harris got him further under control. He’d lied about a rape, but she didn’t think it was too late. She needed to give him something he’d want more than he wanted James Harris’s approval.

Then she heard it, behind all the house sounds, the deliberate sound of a window sliding open. It came from down the dark hall, from behind Korey’s closed bedroom door, and in a flash Patricia realized Korey was sneaking out of the house.

She kicked herself. No wonder Korey acted so exhausted in the morning. No wonder she seemed so fuzzy headed. She was sneaking out of the house every night to see some boy. Patricia had been so caught up with Slick and James Harris and all these other things that she’d ignored the fact that she had two teenagers in the house, not just Blue. And there were plenty of normal, everyday risks to worry about.

She threw back her comforter, slid her feet into her slippers, and padded down the hall. There was a furtive, rhythmic sound coming from behind Korey’s door and she realized that maybe Korey wasn’t sneaking out, but this boy was sneaking in. She snapped on the hall light and threw open Korey’s bedroom door.

At first she didn’t understand what she was looking at in the spill of light from the hall.

Two pale, naked bodies lay on the bed, and she realized the one closest to her was James Harris, his muscled back and buttocks moving slightly, rhythmically, pulsing like a heartbeat. He knelt between the smooth long legs of a girl with a flat stomach and firm, upturned, underdeveloped teenaged breasts. His mouth was affixed to a place on her inner thigh, right next to her pubis. Her hair was spread out across the pillow, her eyes were half-closed in ecstasy, and she smiled with abandon, a smile Patricia had never seen before on Korey’s face.

CHAPTER 35

Patricia fell on her daughter, shaking her shoulders, slapping her cheeks.

“Korey!” she screamed. “Korey! Wake up!”

Obscenely, they kept going, latched together, pulsing like an engorged sack of blood. Korey gave a small mew of pleasure and one hand drifted down, ghosting lightly across her stomach, toward her pubic hair, and Patricia grabbed her wrist and yanked it away and Korey began to squirm, and Patricia had to get James’s head out from between her daughter’s legs, and she looked down at him, and her stomach gave a warning flop. She was going to throw up.

She clamped her lips together, let go of Korey’s feverish wrist, and tried to haul James away by the shoulders, but he struggled to stay latched to her daughter. Feeling like an