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

down and grinding her face in the
mud.
    “Zoey?” she asked again as she came back
downstairs, the growing panic evident in her voice. Then she went
back to the basement door and found it ajar. She opened it all the
way and called down. “Zoey?”
    There was a grunt that might have been an
attempt at an answer. Peg went back into the kitchen to grab the
bags of food, then hurried downstairs, making note on the way down
of all the places along the wall and railing that Zoey had touched
with her filth-covered hands earlier and would need to be cleaned
before Tony came home.
    Peg had almost expected Zoey to be back in
the hidden corner where she’d found her, but instead Zoey was over
in Tony’s corner, sitting on the floor and staring at something in
her lap. Peg didn’t recognize it until she got closer and saw it
was the shoebox full of old snapshots that she kept in the upstairs
closet. She’d always meant to put them in an album, but frankly a
few of them were too hard for her to even look at, let alone
organize. She didn’t have anything recent in there, not since she’d
started taking most of her pictures digitally, but even those had
been taken mostly by Tony. Peg had come to the conclusion that
memories she couldn’t bring back without a visual reference were
probably memories she didn’t want anyway.
    “Zoey,” Peg said softly as she came closer.
Zoey looked up with an expression of alarm until she saw it was
only Peg, then she went back to pawing through the pictures. Peg
sat down on the floor next to her, wincing at some of the aches and
pains in her legs. She was only thirty-four but that wasn’t too
young to have the beginnings of arthritis, according to her doctor.
She tried not to let Zoey see that, however. She wanted Zoey to
remember her more as the person she’d once been.
    As though reading Peg’s mind, the first words
out of Zoey’s mouth were “You changed your hair.”
    Peg pulled a strand of her hair in front of
her face so she could look at it. The last time she’d seen Zoey her
hair had been short and dyed black with red streaks in it. It had
long ago gone back to her more natural brownish-red, although she
had to dye it now and then to get rid of the one or two grays that
persisted in showing up. She also kept it longer now, although
usually pulled back. She didn’t have time in her busy life to worry
about her hair in the way she once had.
    Zoey’s hair, Peg realized, was the exact same
color and length it had been when she disappeared. Yeah, it was
time to start addressing things like that.
    “I brought food,” Peg said. “I figured you
might be hungry.”
    She pulled out the first bag and set it
between them. She saw Zoey’s eyebrows perk up at the thought of
food, but when Peg pulled out the sandwiches that interest seemed
to wane. Peg had been afraid of that.
    “Do you not want any?” Peg asked.
    “Dry and dead for a while,” Zoey said.
    “I’m not really sure what that means, but I
think I have a clue.” Peg took a deep breath, hoping she was wrong,
then set the other bag out as well. “I have this as well.”
    She didn’t bother handing it to Zoey. Instead
she just left it there, waiting to see what she would do. Zoey
opened up the bag and looked inside, stared for a long time, then
closed it back up. But she did not hand it back to Peg asking what
that was about. Peg didn’t take that as a good sign.
    “Zoey, we need to talk. Is that okay?”
    Zoey didn’t stop flipping through the
pictures, nor did she make eye contact with Peg when she said, “I
haven’t talked in a long time.”
    That, at least, sounded like it might be true
and not just rambling. “I did as you asked. I didn’t tell the cops
that you were here. Are you afraid of the cops? Is the person that
took you maybe a cop?”
    “The eyes are watching the cops. They watch
everything. They don’t have anything else to do but watch.”
    “Okay. I suppose I can accept that for now,
but if I