Blood Run by Christine Dougherty Read Free Book Online

where the big Victorians had all been converted to multi-family use, and one small apartment complex had popped up when the township found it was lacking the correct ratio of affordable housing.
    She’d lived in the apartments with her foster father, Ricky Russo. Her foster mother, Crystal, had died five years prior when Lea had been twelve. Her foster mother’s death hadn’t affected Lea because she’d only been with the family for three months before the woman passed. She’d died of a heart attack, which wasn’t surprising–she must have been somewhere in excess of three hundred pounds. And she’d had a temper. In three months, Lea had already figured that much out. Plus, she’d received the bruises to prove it.
    Ricky was much milder. He barely spoke, in fact. He didn’t work because he was on permanent disability, and when Crystal had died, he’d turned the three other foster children back into foster care, but he’d held onto Lea. He’d needed the rent subsidy, for one thing, and for another, she was easy. An easy kid. Quiet like him. In fact, the two of them barely spoke to each other. If they had even one short conversation a week, it was a lot. He’d never been mean, never yelled or beat her, never molested her–something the social workers had hinted at time and time again in their questioning of her, uneasy with the single father parenting–but he also didn’t love her. He couldn’t even really be said to have liked her. She kept herself and her room tidy. She got passing grades. She never asked for anything. They lived as two strangers in semi-crowded circumstances. For Ricky, it could have been called a shame that he never got to know the shy little girl living in his care.
    But for Lea, it had been more than a shame, it had been emotionally devastating.
    She’d never lost the sad, empty, yearning that a life without love had caused. When Ricky had disappeared in the vampire plague, Lea had made her way to the school and fallen in with Mr. West and the handful of other kids. He was her favorite teacher, as he was the favorite of many of the students. She’d often daydreamed her way through his class, imagining that Mr. West were her father.
    In the past year, as she’d turned seventeen and spent more time under Mr. West’s direction, the yearnings had become more complicated; less innocently definable. She’d felt something adult, something sensual, in her feelings for him, and Mr. West, sensing it, had begun to hold her at arm’s length. He didn’t realize the extent and confusion of Lea’s feelings…he only saw it as an inappropriate crush…something he’d had to deal with a few times before with other students. He could not have known that what he considered wholly appropriate behavior on his part only served to reinforce Lea’s feelings about her own unlovability.
    She stirred the raviolis and ran a hand over the soft flannel, overwhelmed by Mark’s small gesture. To Lea, there were no small gestures…any kindness, especially from a male, was enough to spin into dreams of real love. She dumped the raviolis into three bowls and turned to the table.
    “What happened out there yesterday? I know something scared you, and we never talked about it last night.” Mark tried to put his hand over Promise’s, but she drew it back to accept the bowl from Lea.
    “Thanks, Lea,” Promise said and set her bowl before her. She lowered her chin onto her hand as her food cooled. “I went to look for that cabin…you know, the one everyone says is out there?” Mark and Lea nodded, and Promise continued. “I thought if I could find it, that maybe we could come back with gasoline or something and burn it down. But I didn’t find it. And it’s so dark in parts of those woods…it’s that what-do-you-call-it? That vine Mr. West talked about?”
    “Kudzu?” Lea supplied tentatively, not looking up from her bowl. Promise was one of the only people she felt even marginally comfortable enough