Read Online Vampire Blood by Kathryn Meyer Griffith - Free Book Online

went anywhere without the other. Jenny’s thoughts turned melancholy as she watched them together.
    Why couldn’t her parents be that faithful to each other in their old age?
    Jenny slowed her horse down, turned and rode the long way across the field, her thoughts full of her early childhood. How her and her brothers used to ride every day in this very field when they were young.
    They’d had a lot of horses once. Eventually they were all sold over the years for debts. The family could never get ahead.
    Thus had their secure childhood slipped away in fragments, more each year.
    Remembering her teenage years with still painful embarrassment—her mother’s clever evasions when the bill collectors had started coming out to the farm angrily demanding their money or never having enough for the final bill when she was sent to the grocery store—Jenny prodded Lightning into trotting a little faster. As if she could outrun the memories.
    That was when her mother had really begun drinking.
    The wind had picked up, and the mist attacked them like something hungry and alive. Lightning began to snort and prance nervously, his eyes rolling as if he were afraid of its curling fingers, and Jenny finally jumped down. With a light slap, she sent him towards the barn before the storm hit. She watched the horses gallop off together and then she headed home. The ground crunched beneath her feet, and the rising wind whipped at her loose hair.
    It was getting cooler. It felt good on her sunburned skin.
    She scrambled over the fence that ran along behind her trailer and slid in the back door as the first sheets of rain hit.
    Once inside, she slumped at the kitchen table. She felt too weary and disgusted to do more than sit and stare at the darkening windows. The rain drummed against the outside of her trailer like mad tapping feet, making her feel as if she were in a giant, black belly of some primitive sleeping carnivore.
    The shadows were beginning to claim the day. Inside it was dark.
    She got up and groped her way by touch through the living room, until she found the lamp and switched it on.
    Soft light flooded the gloomy corners and scared the monsters away.
    The trailer was a cramped, no-frills twelve-by-thirty footer she’d bought in St. Augustine’s with the last of her savings after her divorce. She’d pulled it all the way down here behind her brother Joey’s old truck that she’d borrowed three months ago and parked it. It wasn’t much: a cramped kitchen, a long, narrow living room, one bedroom and a bath—but it was all hers. She’d fixed it up real pretty. It was home.
    Better than having to go live with her dad.
    She’d refused to take any money from Benjamin when she’d divorced him, wanting nothing from him but her freedom.
    Not feeling like going into town, she opened the refrigerator’s freezer and yanked out a frozen dinner. Turkey and mashed potatoes. Her favorite. She popped it into her tiny microwave oven and pressed the correct buttons. She left it humming behind her as she moved into the next room and collapsed on the flowered sofa.
    She’d been doing a lot of deep thinking all day.
    God, she pleaded, as she hung her head in her hands and the drops of rain tap-tap-tapped, dancing on her tin roof, don’t let me end up like my parents. Old, broke and alone. Not like them, she begged the emptiness. Please.
    She wiped the tears away. I don’t have to end up like that if I don’t want to, she told herself firmly. I still have time. I can still change life.
    By God, she thought fiercely, I’m going to find a way to do it, too.
    I have to.
    She let her eyes rest on the cloth-covered lump on the bottom shelf of her bookcase. Her laptop. The one she hadn’t touched in years. For some reason she hadn’t gotten rid of it. It was out-of-date. Might not even run if she plugged it in.
    She pushed herself off the sofa, walked over, and uncovered it. Dusty. She opened it and ran her fingers across the top of its