Christopher Buecheler - The Blood That Bonds
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The Blood That Bonds
Chris topher Buecheler
Smashwords Edition
The Blood That Bonds is 2009 Christopher Buecheler
Published by Smashwords.
The Blood That Bonds eBook by Christopher Buecheler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License . Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available: please visit TheBloodThatBonds.com for contact information.
Cover Art by Garry Brown
License Notes
Thank you for downloading this free ebook. As a free ebook, you are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by Christopher Buecheler. Thank you for your support.
Acknowledgements
This book would not truly have been possible without the efforts and encouragements of the following people. I am deeply in their debt:
Caryn Law and Josh (wherever you are), for comments and criticisms that helped shape a rough first draft into a more polished product.
Lauren Vogelbaum , for professional editing on the second draft.
Nora Fleming for her early interest in Two's adventures.
The aforementioned Garry Brown , for the awesome illustrations for the book and website.
And of course to my parents, Bill and Leslie , who've encouraged me in this and all of my endeavors.
Dedication
Pour ma belle pouse Charlotte.
Chapter 1
Darkness and Despair
Vermont Street. October.
Her name was Two, and she sometimes thought she could smell her death, blowing in from the cemetery that lay south of her building in East New York. Sometimes she even hoped for it. Stinking, muttering, moldering death. Cold and dark. On these occasions, she felt as if even the dirty embrace of the grave would be better for her than the squalor she lived in now. She thought, maybe, she might find some sort of peace that had been missing all her life.
Darren owned her building, like he owned the girls who occupied it. Three stories tall, four rooms to a floor. They lived two to a room, two bathrooms per floor, two kitchens in the building. Just over twenty girls, every single one of them selling her body each night at his command. In return for the money they brought him, he gave them food. He gave them shelter. He gave them drugs, and the drugs gave them escape.
Two was not supposed to be here. She reflected on that often, and if she'd ever believed in a God, she'd have cursed him now. Fickle, twisted fate had delivered her into Darren's arms. Promises of salvation, undercurrents of doubt, desire, desperation. The cold prick of a needle.
She tried not to think about it.
Darren held the plastic bag filled with heroin above her now, like a treat for a dog. Little better than a dog she was, really, down on her knees, eyes wet with tears ready to spill over. Angry, vengeful Darren, so filled with hate. Hate for his parents, who'd given him his gorgeous mulatto features and then abandoned him on the street. Hate for his ex-wife, who'd left him immediately upon discovering the nature of his business, but still found fit to take half of what it had earned him. Hate for the girls he had made his slaves, and who had made him rich. Hate for the very money they handed over to him every night.
Darren didn't know of his own hate, but it burned in him so brightly it scarred his features. Twisted, cruel lips. Pinched brow. Two might have understood this hate, seen reflected in it her own self-loathing, but Two spent most of her time thinking about the heroin now. She had no sympathy for Darren, or his girls, no sympathy for herself. Lucid existence was the time between sleep and drug, drug and sex, sex and sleep. Short bursts of clarity, ever more painful, amid an otherwise blurred, waking dream.
Beg for it, Two, Darren snarled, and Two's mouth formed words of penitence against her will, pleading through tears without even realizing she'd meant to do it. She begged apology for some imagined slight, some invented twist in her voice that had caused this punishment.
Darren, I'm sorry! I'm so sorry for what I said! But what had she said? She'd only asked for her daily ration of the drug, in the same manner she had for the past four months. If Darren had detected any real change of inflection, it hadn't been intended. But here she was, on the floor, begging and pleading for something she didn't even want. Begging and pleading and dreaming of death.
* * *
Born Two Ashley Majors, her initials - substituting the number for her first name - worked out to the approximate time she had been conceived. Her parents had thought this terribly clever. Two would have gladly held it up as evidence before God that, whatever mistakes she had made in her life, never appreciating her parents was not one of them.
For her first fourteen years, she was Ashley, and no one was allowed to call her otherwise. Maturity had lent a different outlook, and she had begun to see the name as a sign of what was becoming a fierce individuality. She would never like it, perhaps, but she was most definitely not an Ashley.
Shed left her father at the age of sixteen, her mother long in the grave. Alcohol, and the overwhelming desire to fill the void Twos mother had left, had brought rage and lust into him when before hed felt only apathy for the girl. Hed never touched her, either in punishment or in passion, but the tension and the fighting, starting around her twelfth birthday, had over the course of years grown unbearable. At times Two found herself wishing he would simply rape her, so she could have him arrested. She wondered if that was a healthy line of thought, and decided it likely was not.
She took with her very little when she finally left. She had very little to take. Trinkets, clothes, shoes these things meant nothing to her, as during life her mother could never be bothered to pass down any of the traditional, societal definitions of womanhood. Could never be bothered with her daughter at all, really, nor with her husband. Two had learned by herself about womanhood, in back alleys and cheap motels, years after her mother had died. Her education handed down by what men told her to be, what they told her to do. Promises of love, drops of blood on the sheets.
When that didnt work, when she realized she could be more than this, it came as an epiphany. A rare glimpse of sunlight in an otherwise dark life. Shed left her father, apoplectic with desire and dismay and alcohol-fueled rage. Shed left behind their hole of an apartment. She could do better on her own.
And she had, for a time.
Pool was easy, the angles naturally making sense to her. Slipping into a bar even easier. New York City cops had far better things to worry about. Bouncers knew it, owners knew it, and a patron was a patron. Particularly short, pretty blondes with good legs and a cute face. The type of girl who could entice an entire crowd of rowdy young men to stick around for more drinks, dropping dollar after dollar into pool tournaments that, invariably, they lost.
She didnt go home with these men, though many had asked, and in the end this factored into her undoing. Descent and rebirth, and descent and rebirth again. These men could not understand her, or why she spurned them. Shed leave them with a knowing smile, standing dismayed in the street. Sometimes she kissed them lightly, thanked them for their interest, but always with that mischievous gleam in her eyes, that sardonic grin on her face. The look that proved that, regardless of pretty words, she took vicious pleasure in walking away.
It was power, and Two reveled in it. The ability to make men throw their money, their bodies, their hearts at her. Lots of men. Lots of bars. She walked away from every one walked away grinning her savage grin. For eight months Two lived, celibate as a nun, feeding on the hearts of men.
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