Blood Like Mine
“a brutal, blood-filled story of an exaggerated protectiveness, revealing the height and depth of the maternal instinct, mother love to the nth degree.”
For two years, FBI Special Agent Marc Donner has been tracking a serial killer who leaves behind a trail of mutilated animals and the bloodless bodies of child predators, heads internally decapitated and throats torn out.
Rebecca Carter has been on the run for longer than that because she is the accomplice and aide of that killer, her 12-year-old daughter Monica, aka Moonflower.
“We’ll keep going. We’ll keep fighting. We’ll keep surviving, because that’s all we have left. Life for its own sake. It’s not much, but I’ll fight for it until my last breath.”
Their paths are destined to meet but Agent Donner’s hunches pay off. Rebecca is arrested, but Moonflower escapes. Rebecca is quick to confess to the crimes and admits the child with her is her daughter, though Agent Donner points out a discrepancy.
“Monica?” he asked. “Your daughter?’
“Yes,” Rebecca said, “My daughter.”
His gaze lifted from the page to meet hers, his eyes locked on her.
“According to my notes, your daughter died fifteen years ago.”
“That’s right,” Rebecca said. “And then she came back.”
Monica had been attacked in a park on her way home, declared dead, but two days later her body disappeared from the morgue, and Monica herself returned home with a terrible thirst that only one liquid could quench. Since then, she and Rebecca have been on the run, moving from town to town, luring the guilty to become Moonflower’s prey.
“It was not, could not be Moonflower. This thing straddling the woman’s back, this creature with its sunken features and bared teeth, whatever it was, it wore Moonflower’s clothes, her skin, her hair. But it was not Rebecca’s daughter. It couldn’t be. Could it?”
Rebecca doesn’t stay in custody long. Moonflower attacks the jail, killing one, wounding others—and those who don’t die soon kill themselves because of what they turn into.
Creatures like this don’t exist, and the witnesses refuse to believe what they saw. Everyone is urged to have sudden amnesia to be declared hysterical. Everyone except Donner who is now in disgrace because of his insistence on the identity of the killer. He’s lost family, friends, his job because of his relentless pursuit of this killer, and he isn’t going to give up now.
He and Rebecca are both determined in their goals. but a mother’s love may be stronger than one man pursuit of justice.
“She is human. This is the first and last rule, because it is the truth. She is Monica Carter, my daughter, my Moonflower, and she is first, last, and always a human being.”
Told through the story’s omniscient narrative as well as letters written from Rebecca to Moonflowers before her daughter’s birth and up to their last encounter with Donner, this is a brutal, blood-filled story of an exaggerated protectiveness, revealing the height and depth of the maternal instinct, mother love to the nth degree.
Rebecca is determined to protect her daughter, to continue believing in her humanity in spite of the obvious contradiction, no matter what she has to do.
It is interesting to note that the word “vampire” is never used in this novel, though the implication is so clear it would have to be only the most unintuitive reader who misses it, as is the idea that there are more Moonflowers in the world who have managed to stay better hidden.
The last chapter practically begs for a sequel with the title not Blood Like Mine, but Blood Like Ours. This can’t be where Agent Donner, Rebecca, and Moonflower’s story ends, but like the heading of the last chapter, can surely only be the Beginning . . .
This novel needs to be dramatized. Kudos, Mr. Neville!