Read Online Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels by D.J. Goodman - Free Book Online Page A

top of the stairs he was able to
finally pick up the pace and run to the bathroom, then Peg made
sure he was settled into his room and went back downstairs.
    V was down in the living room examining Peg’s
glass pot pipe with a bemused look. Marijuana was something V had
given up herself when she’d turned her back on booze, and she’d
never fully approved of the fact that Peg still did it. But she let
it slide as long as Peg stayed away from the bottle.
    “So tell me what’s going on,” V said. She
said it in a way that somehow managed to sound forceful and
commanding while still being compassionate. She’d been that sort of
person for as long as Peg had known her, although admittedly when
they’d first met Peg had not yet been a person that could
appreciate it.
    Peg had gone to her first AA meeting when she
was twenty-seven, shortly after her attempt at suicide but long
before she would stop cutting. Tony hadn’t been in her life yet,
although that was in the near future. Peg had been very confused
about the direction of her life, although she still hadn’t managed
to hit what her fellow alcoholics called “rock bottom.” She hadn’t
really believed yet that she had a problem, or so she told herself
at the time. In retrospect she must have understood that on some
level or else she wouldn’t have showed up at the stupid meeting at
the Lake Area Club. She hadn’t even lived in Oconomowoc for very
long and she hadn’t thought she was going to stay. In the last
three years she’d had seven different addresses and lived in three
cities, usually crashing on the floor of some casual acquaintance
that she hadn’t yet managed to irrevocably burn. This just seemed
like one more inconsequential stop on the road to… well, she didn’t
know where she was going and she didn’t really care.
    Yet something had drawn her to the Lake Area
Club that day and she’d sat through a meeting. She hadn’t actually
said anything, instead just sitting in the back of the room
listening to everyone else tell their sob stories. She’d hated
every moment of it except for one. One particular young man, he
couldn’t have even been old enough to drink legally, was going on
about how he’d been ordered to show up at meetings and how he had
to drink because he was such a sensitive artist type and it was the
only way to calm his inner demons. Peg had desperately wanted to
call bullshit on him, but she got the impression that would have
been frowned upon. So that made it all the more surprising when
someone else did it instead.
    V was in her early forties at the time,
although Peg didn’t yet know her as V. She’d introduced herself to
the group at the beginning as Vivian, and from the way she
presented herself it was evident that she had some standing around
here. So when she spoke up to the kid about how he didn’t have the
slightest fucking clue what it meant to have “inner demons,”
everyone else sat up straight and listened. The kid, on the other
hand, didn’t seem to take the hint.
    “Don’t go telling me what I do and don’t
know,” the kid said. It appeared as though he had almost added the
word “bitch” at the end, although the look on V’s face had probably
been what stopped him. “You don’t know about my home life or how
overbearing my mother was. My dad was working all the time…”
    “Those aren’t demons. Those are imps.
Gremlins at best. You want a real reason to drink yourself to
death? Here you go. My dad raped me when I was a teenager. When I
tried to get away by marrying the boy I loved, my father killed him
and made me watch.”
    The boy clammed up. Peg wasn’t sure if that
was really what Alcoholics Anonymous taught as the best way to
share your story, but Peg still wanted to applaud the way this
tough old broad had shut the pretentious dickbag up.
    Peg didn’t attend another meeting until many
months later after she had started seeing Tony. Somewhere along the
line she had seen that there was