The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix Page 0,133

this,” he said, and then he was gone and the window was just a big black rectangle of night.

Korey whimpered on the bed. It was the sound of her having a nightmare that Patricia had heard so many times before, and in sympathy she made the same sound back. She went to her daughter and examined the wound on her inner thigh. It looked swollen and infected, and it wasn’t the only one. All around it were overlapping bruises, overlapping punctures, all their edges torn and ragged. Patricia realized this had happened before. Many times.

Her head was full of bats, shrieking and bumping into each other, tearing all coherent thought to tatters. Patricia didn’t even know how she found the camera or took the pictures, how she got to the bathroom, how she stood in front of the sink running warm water onto a washcloth, how she bathed Korey’s wound and put on bacitracin. She wanted to bandage it, but she couldn’t, not without letting Korey know she’d seen this obscene thing. She couldn’t cross that line with her daughter. Not yet.

Everything seemed too normal. She expected the house to explode, the backyard to fall into the harbor, Blue to walk out the door with a suitcase to move to Australia, but Korey’s room was as messy as usual, and when she went downstairs the sailboat lamp burned on the front hall table like normal, and Ragtag raised his head from where he napped on the den couch, tags jingling, like normal, and the porch lights clicked off when she flipped the switch like normal.

She went into her bathroom and washed her face, hard, with a washcloth, scrubbing and scouring, and she tried not to look in the mirror. She scrubbed until it was red and raw. She scrubbed until it hurt. Good. She reached up and pinched her left ear until it hurt, twisting it, and that felt good, too. She got into bed and lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling, knowing she would never sleep.

It was all her fault. It was all her fault. It was all her fault.

Guilt, and betrayal, and nausea churned in her gut and she barely made it to the bathroom before she threw up.

* * *

—

She made every effort not to treat Korey differently the next morning, and Korey seemed no different than she was every morning: sullen and uncommunicative. Patricia’s hands felt numb as she packed Korey and Blue off to school, and then she sat by the phone and waited.

The first call came at nine, and she couldn’t bring herself to pick up. The machine took it.

“Patricia,” James Harris’s voice said. “Are you there? We need to talk. I have to explain what’s going on here.”

It was a cloudless, sunny October day. The bright blue sky protected her. But he could still call. The phone rang again.

“Patricia,” he said to the machine. “You have to understand what’s happening.”

He called three more times, and on the third, she picked up.

“How long?” she asked.

“Come down and listen to me,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything.”

“How long?” she repeated.

“Patricia,” he said. “I want you to be able to see my eyes, so you know I’m being honest with you.”

“Just tell me how long?” she asked, and to her own surprise her voice broke and her forehead cramped and she felt tears in the hinge of her jaw. She couldn’t close her mouth; there was a howl inside that wanted to get out.

“I’m glad you finally know,” he said. “I’m so tired of hiding. This doesn’t change anything I said last night.”

“What?”

“I value you,” he said. “I value your family. I’m still your friend.”

“What have you done to my daughter?” she managed.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said. “I know you must be confused and frightened but it’s no different than my eyes—it’s just a condition I have. Some of my organs don’t work properly and from time to time I need to borrow someone’s circulatory system and filter my blood through theirs. I’m not a vampire, I don’t drink it, it’s