The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires(101)

She clamped her lips together, let go of Korey’s feverish wrist, and tried to haul James away by the shoulders, but he struggled to stay latched to her daughter. Feeling like an idiot, Patricia grabbed a soccer cleat from the floor and hit him in the head with its heel. Her first blow was a silly, ineffectual tap, but the second was harder, and the third made a knocking sound when the cleats hit bone.

As she struck him in the head with Korey’s shoe over and over again she heard herself repeating, “Get off! Get off! Get off my little girl!”

A sucking slobbering noise ripped through the quiet of the room, the sound of raw steak being torn in two, and James Harris looked up at her like a country cousin, mouth hanging open, something black and inhuman hanging from the hole in the bottom of his face, dripping viscous blood, eyes glazed. He tried to focus on Patricia, the shoe held back by her ear, ready to bring it down again.

“Uh,” he said, dully.

He belched and a line of bloody drool dribbled from the corner of the proboscis hanging beneath his chin. Then it began to curl back up on itself, retracting slowly into his gore-slimed mouth.

My God, Patricia thought, I’ve gone insane, and she brought the cleat down again. James Harris rose, seizing her wrist in one hand, her throat in the other, and he threw her against the far wall. She took the impact between her shoulder blades. It punched all the air out of her lungs. It loosened the root of her tongue. Then he was on her, breath hot and raw, forearm across her throat, stronger than her, faster than her, and she went limp in his grip like prey.

“This is all your fault,” he said, voice thick and slurred with liquid.

Blood coated his lips, and hot specks of it sprinkled her face. And she knew he was right. This. Was. All. Her. Fault. She had exposed her children to this danger, she had invited it into her house. She had been so obsessed with the children in Six Mile and Blue that she hadn’t seen the danger to Korey. She had driven both her children right into James Harris’s arms.

She saw a lump move down, down, down his throat as he swallowed whatever apparatus it was he used to suck their blood. Then he said, “You said this was between us.”

She remembered saying that in the car earlier, and she had only meant to stall him, to buy more time, to keep his guard down, but she had said it, and to him it had been another invitation. She had led him on. She deserved this. But her daughter didn’t.

“Korey,” was the best she could manage through her constricted windpipe.

“Look what you’re doing to her,” he hissed, and wrenched her head to the side so she could see the bed.

Korey had pulled her arms and legs in on themselves, retracting into a fetal position, muscles twitching, going into shock. Blood spread on the mattress beneath her. Patricia closed her eyes to let the nausea pass.

“Mom?” Blue called from the hall.

She and James Harris locked eyes, him totally nude, his front a bib of blood, her in her nightgown, not even wearing a brassiere, the door standing a quarter of the way open. Neither of them moved.

“Mom?” Blue called again. “What’s going on?”

Do. Something, James Harris mouthed at her.

She reached up and touched her fingertips to the back of the hand that held her throat. He let go.

“Blue,” she said, stepping through the door and into the hall. She prayed that the flecks of Korey’s blood she felt on her face wouldn’t show. “Get back into bed.”

“What’s wrong with Korey?” he asked, standing in the hall.

“Your sister’s sick,” Patricia said. “Please. She’ll be better later. But she needs to be alone right now.”

Having determined that this was nothing that required his attention, Blue turned without speaking, went back into his bedroom, and closed the door. Patricia stepped back into Korey’s room and turned on the overhead light just in time to see James Harris, naked, squatting on the windowsill. He held his clothes balled up against his belly like a lover fleeing an angry husband in some old farce.

“You asked for 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.