Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels Read Online Free PDF Page A

wouldn’t try to call anyone, Zoey finally seemed satisfied
enough to allow Peg to go back upstairs. Peg didn’t even know what
she intended to do upstairs but she had to step away. If she didn’t
get a moment to herself she was certain her mind would completely
break down.
    As it happened, Peg didn’t even make it
completely up the stairs. When she got to the last two steps her
legs suddenly began to shake beneath her and she fell to her knees.
She managed to steady herself with the grab rail to keep from
falling back into the basement and leaned forward at least enough
so her face was over the solid hardwood floor outside the door
before she puked. After three solid heaves, what little food she’d
still had in her gut from breakfast finished coming up and she sat
there, half in and half out of the stairwell, her entire body
shaking, her heart pounding, her eyes watering both from vomiting
and the stench, and her mind frozen and blank. She wasn’t quite
sure how long she sat there. She realized after a while that her
eyes weren’t just wet from watering but that she was actively
sobbing. That was fine for now, she figured. Just let it out.
Whatever the fuck was happening to her, she just had to let it go.
That was what her therapist always told her.
    Therapy. That was something for her mind to
attach on while it tried to rearrange itself with this new
impossible situation. Therapy hadn’t always helped before. The
first time she’d seen a therapist had been six months after Zoey’s
disappearance, but she’d only gone twice before stopping. The next
time she went it had been court ordered after her suicide attempt
several months later. That time had lasted longer, almost five
months, before she’d stopped. Finally she’d started seeing a new
one shortly after she’d met Tony. By then she had finally felt like
she was ready to heal, that she had to heal if she wanted
things out of life such as a family.
    The second therapist, the court-ordered one,
had asked her once what she might do or say if Zoey ever came back.
Peg had told her to fuck off because there was no way that was ever
going to happen. The little bit that the investigation had turned
up pointed pretty obviously to the fact that Zoey had been taken,
not that she had run away. No one ever just took a nineteen year
old girl just to have companionship for a while, and it was highly
unlikely that someone involved in human trafficking had suddenly
decided that a place like Sheboygan would be the next hot spot to
find women. No, it was a fact known by all but said by almost no
one that Zoey was dead. Wisconsin had had its share of serial
killers in the past and it didn’t seem impossible that another one
was out there. The police had even told Peg’s family that there
were one or two other open cases in the southern Wisconsin area
that looked superficially similar, but no hard evidence had ever
been found to put them together.
    In that typical stubborn therapist way,
though, she hadn’t been willing to take Peg’s fuck-you as a true
answer. And so Peg had been forced to think about it. As much as
she had wanted to just dismiss the question with a sarcastic
answer, she’d found it a question she’d actually needed to
consider. And it hadn’t been one she could forget about even after
the therapy session. There was of course the obvious answer that
everyone would expect from her: she would be happy to have her
sister back. Any other answer and people would think she was a bad
person. But the more she’d considered it the more she realized it
could never be that simple. The circumstances under which Zoey had
vanished led to many people laying at least some blame on Peg, and
that included Peg herself. Zoey wouldn’t have been there that night
if Peg hadn’t gotten her that fake ID, and Peg hadn’t realized her
sister was gone for an unacceptable amount of time. The police
investigation had looked at family and friends as possible suspects
at first,