The Blood That Bonds

The Blood That
Bonds

Chris
topher Buecheler

Smashwords Edition

The Blood That
Bonds
is © 2009, 2010, 2011
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.

First Edition (eBook): October, 2009
Second Edition (Print): February, 2011

First Edition Cover Art
by
Garry
Brown
Second Edition Cover Art by
Adrian Dadich

The Blood That Bonds is a work of fiction.
Names, places, and incidents either are a product of the author���s
imagination or are used fictitiously.

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
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original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to
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Dedication

Pour ma belle épouse Charlotte.

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible
without the efforts and encouragements of the following people. I
am deeply in their debt:

•
My editors, Elise Vogel
and
Lauren
Vogelbaum
, whose work helped me
not only catch any number of typos, misspellings, and grammatical
flaws, but also helped to shape the book into what it is today. If
any error remains, the fault is mine, not theirs.

•
Caryn
Vainio
and Josh (wherever you
are), for comments and criticism that helped shape a rough first
draft into a more polished product.

•
Nora Fleming for her
early interest in Two’s adventures.

•
Adrian Dadich
,
for the excellent print cover illustration, and
Garry Brown
, for the
terrific illustrations for the eBook and website.

•
Diana
Laurence
, for the kind words,
advice, and back-of-the-book quote.

•
My parents, Bill and
Leslie, who’ve supported me in this and all of my
endeavors.

•
My fans on
Facebook
and
Twitter
, who thrill me with
their interest, enthusiasm and participation.

•
And once again, my
beautiful, brilliant wife
Charlotte
. We met because
of this book, and it is because of her encouragement and love that
you hold it in your hands today.

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.

She’d left her father at the age of sixteen,
her mother long in the grave. Alcohol, and the overwhelming desire
to fill the void Two’s mother had left, had brought rage and lust
into him when before he’d felt only apathy for the girl. He’d 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 didn’t 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. She’d left her father,
apoplectic with desire and dismay and alcohol-fueled rage. She’d
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 didn’t 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. She’d 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.

Eventually they tired of it. Patrons began
complaining. Bouncers began carding. Bets around the pool table,
even when Two could manage to enter the bar in the first place,
dried up. People had heard of her. Two was forced to give up the
pool earnings, and her tiny studio apartment with the mattress on
the floor, the only piece of furniture she owned.

One bar remained, the only one at which
she’d allowed herself to develop friends. The owner, Sid. The
bouncer, Rhes. She didn’t play her game here. She didn’t taunt the
men, break their hearts. It was here she went when she wanted a
glass of beer and a conversation. It was here she turned now,
desperate for somewhere to stay. Rhes offered the use of his
apartment. Two didn’t decline the offer.

Her relationship with Rhes was entirely
platonic. This surprised her; surprised both of them. Two was
attractive, young, charming. Rhes was in his mid-twenties, with a
powerful build and a handsome face. Two would have broken her
celibacy for him, if he’d asked. Sometimes she wished he would.
Rhes never did, and Two came to realize that he could not. He knew
her age. He knew her past. It would have felt like taking advantage
of her, regardless of her own willingness.

After nearly eighteen months of living with
Two, Rhes had been forced to turn her out. He was in a new
relationship with a young woman named Sarah, a blind girl he had
met with her seeing-eye dog at a jazz club, and this new girlfriend
worried about him sharing a studio apartment with a teenage
runaway. Eventually Sarah warmed to Two, and would likely have
accepted her as a roommate in a new, larger apartment, but by then
it was too late. By then Darren, and the needle, had hold of Two.
For better or for worse, it would change her life forever.

* * *

“
Please, Darren …” Two
whimpered.

Darren, towering above her, the bag still in
his hand, the sneer on his face half grin, half expression of
disgust. She could see this excited him, plain as day. To her own
surprise, she found that she couldn’t blame him for it. Two knew
the aphrodisiac of power. Hadn’t she played with it for years
before, outside of those dimly lit bars that lined the city
streets?

“
You were a bad girl,”
Darren growled. Two repeated his words, agreed with him, petulant,
her breath hitching. But now the tears were drying. She thought she
knew how best to resolve this. Was her lower limp trembling just a
bit more than necessary? Were her eyes just a bit
bigger?

“
I was a bad girl,” Two
said again, and arched her back, drawing out the words like warm
honey on her tongue.

Pain flashed across her face, sudden,
explosive, unexpected. Two recoiled from the blow. Darren’s expert
delivery rarely left marks, but it hurt no less than any other
slap.

“
Don’t play that shit with
me, girl.”