Coal Gets In Your Veins

By: Cat Rector

Sometimes the horrors live close to home.

In a small corner of Atlantic Canada, Laurel is doing her best to live a decent life in what's left of a former coal mining village. Deep down, she wants more, but it's hard to reach for anything with her husband's boot on her neck. Change is hard, but after two decades of surviving, she's running out of reasons to stay.

Just up the hill, right under Laurel's nose, lives a vampire who is mourning the great loves of his life. Penny Harbour is the perfect little purgatory for Spencer. It's remote, quiet, and everyone's blood tastes wrong. What better way to punish himself than with a town full of people he can't eat? Change is hard, but after years of isolation, he's almost ready to start living again.

But sometimes trauma stays in the blood. Sometimes it flows in the water and contaminates the earth. Passing from one heart to the next, slowly blackening everything it touches.

In Penny Harbour, pain refuses to let go.