Playground Monitor

Before the Rise of the vampires, Turquoise Boyd had donated blood perhaps a handful of times. When the Red Cross needed her type, when her daughter’s Girl Scout troop ran a blood drive for their silver award project, things like that. She filled out a form, sat in a recliner for a half hour or so while reading a book, and took the orange juice on the way out to bump up her blood sugar. The nurses were always professional and Turquoise always cherished that do good feeling afterward for a few days.

Paying her monthly blood tithe to the vampires never gave her the same warm-fuzzies, for some reason.

She stood in a short processing line inside one of a hundred identical blood banks around the city. They were more common than seven-eleven now. Even in the middle of the day, they could take over two dozen tithes an hour. Turquoise only ever took an appointment in the middle of the day. One-thirty PM—after the lunch rush, but with absolutely no chance of running into a vampire.

She’d pay their protection tithes, but even that monthly ritual gave her the heebie-jeebies. She didn’t need to see one in person ever again.