Vampire Blood Read Free Page A

previous owner hadn’t done as well with it and had gone broke. Joey had gotten it for a song. It was Joey, an amicable, charismatic character, who’d made the place a success—and his fantastic cooking.
    Joey was thirty-six and divorced (like everyone else in the world). Jenny and Joey were so much alike, both storytellers, but his gift was verbal while hers had always been the written word.
    They got out of the car. Jenny’s blue jeans felt damp with the heat, and her T-shirt was already splotched with her sweat.
    She gazed up at the closed theater as they walked by with a yearning wistfulness.
    “Had some great times in that theater, Dad. Some of the best memories of my childhood. I hate it looking abandoned like that.” She nodded at the Rebel, patting the crossed, aged wooden boards over the elaborate doors as they passed it.
    The theater was a two-story rambling anachronism that had originally been built in the nineteen twenties. In its day, it had been the height of fashion in movie palaces with its crystal chandeliers, etched mirrors, velvet staircase and ornate upper balconies, a fairyland decorated in what Jenny had always fancifully thought of as a sort of Spanish Renaissance.
    The theater was one of the oldest buildings in Summer Haven, and somewhere around the nineteen seventies the rest of the shopping center seemed to spring up around it. Some years after that, the old white elephant of a movie palace closed its doors for good and died. The owner had decreed it was too expensive to run when he’d declared bankruptcy. And now, who wanted to go to the movies when there were big screen television sets?
    It’d never died in her memories.
    She could still smell the buttery popcorn, feel the plush velvet carpeting beneath her tennis shoes and feel the prickliness of the chairs on her bare legs below her shorts just like it was yesterday. She could still see Joey, Thomas, Jeff and herself laughing as they came tumbling out of those same doors on a long-ago summer’s night. Their faces reflected like mirrors what they’d just seen: horror, delight and pathos. The theater liked to show the real moldy oldies late Saturday nights.
    She’d been swept off her feet by spectacles like The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur . Ah, and how she’d loved those old monster movies: Godzilla, The Blob, Count Dracula and The Mummy.
    Jenny took a deep breath, glancing down.
    “What’s this?” she wondered aloud, kneeling to touch a large red stain on the sidewalk in front of the theater’s door. When she lifted her fingers and turned them over in the sunlight, they were sticky and wet. She sniffed them. Blood?
    Her stomach churned, and she hastily wiped her fingers off on the old boards. Rising to her feet, staring up at the theater with puzzled eyes, she whispered to no one, “Wonder where that came from.”
    Her father had already reached the restaurant, though, and hadn’t heard her.
    “Coming?” He turned around at the door and was giving her an impatient, hurry-up look.
    “Yeah,” she answered drily. No sense in mentioning the blood to her father, he wouldn’t care anyway. Mind your own business, he’d say. Like always.
    Inside Joey’s restaurant, they found two empty stools at the counter.
    Joey’s Place had been a donut shop once, and it still reminded Jenny of a donut shop. The walls were brilliant white, and a counter with attached white and red stools lined the whole back of the smallish room. The floor had a nondescript red carpet. Joey had repainted everything a cleaner white and had hung lots of campy, framed pictures of old movie posters (he was, like her, an obsessed movie buff) and travel posters along the white walls to give the place some color.
    It gave a person something pretty to look at while they ate, Joey had explained. The mix created an eccentric, but unique atmosphere that Jenny found had unexpectedly grown on her.
    It was different.
    The place this morning was crowded as usual though it