One Blood by Qwantu Amaru, Stephanie Casher Read Free Book Online

because of it…”
     
     
    * * * * *
     
     
    Randy began two different lives in the wake of his mother’s death.
    In public, he played the part of the grieving only son of the affluent businessman. He attended school, studied hard, and hung out with friends. But he never shed a tear. That would have brought on a severe beating from Joseph for certain.
    In private, he was in agony. He didn’t sleep, eat, or pray. His brain was on a never-ending doom loop. Before long, he fell apart like a long buried skeleton.
    One day, while desperately searching for some way, any way, to relieve himself of the crushing grief, guilt, fear, and shame, he took a steak knife in one unstable hand. Before he knew what he was doing, he slashed his upper forearm in a swift motion, reminiscent of a violinist with a bow. After nearly fainting from the sight of his own blood bubbling up to the surface of his pale skin like lava, the sensation of vertigo was quickly replaced by a surge of adrenaline and release.
    Eventually, he graduated to butcher knives and long precise cuts to his upper thighs. He even grew accustomed to the additional sting from the sour-smelling vinegar he used to cauterize his self-inflicted wounds. Nothing compared to the merger of pain and exuberance he experienced whenever he plunged a knife into his flesh.
     
     
    * * * * *
     
     
    “ So you wish to curse your father to punish him for killing your mother, correct?” Madame Deveaux recapped.
    He nodded.
    “ Why a curse?” Madame Deveaux asked after a moment’s reflection. “Are you afraid to get your hands bloody?”
    Randy stared at her over the shimmering globe. “No. I’m not afraid. But there is a certain symmetry to doing it this way. You interrupted me before I could finish my story…”
     
     
    * * * * *
     
     
    One afternoon after the cutting started, Randy was wandering deep in the stacks of the Lake City Public Library, planning more self-inflicted incisions, when a book spine caught his attention. He pulled out the book called The History of Magic and cracked it open. Hope whispered to him from between the dusty pages.
    He devoured the tome, chock-full of true stories about apparitions, divination, witchcraft, and spirit-rapping. Afterward, he became obsessed with all things occult, reading everything he could get his hands on. Most of the books dealt with the homegrown magic of Hoodoo and the religion of Voodoo. They described New Orleans as the epicenter of American magic.
    Randy began daydreaming of one day possessing the power to bring his mother back from the dead. But those plans got derailed when their maid found his stash of bloody rags and damning books, prompting Joseph to ship him off to a boarding school in France.
    While exiled, Randy had the opportunity to meet distant relatives and learn more about his origins. His father had always expressed extreme pride for their ancestor Luc Lafitte, a French buccaneer famous for many things, including the founding of their hometown, Lake City, in 1802. However, Randy quickly learned that his French kin didn’t share the same affection for Luc. To them, Luc and his direct descendants were decayed branches that had thankfully rotted off the family tree.
    After weeks of searching the library of his boarding school for the French version of Luc’s story, Randy uncovered Le Roi des Pirates , (The Pirate King) , which described the beginnings of the Lafitte lineage in America. Apparently Luc had made his fortune hijacking Spanish ships in the Gulf of Mexico, eventually settling down in Lake City. The Lafitte’s had always been an opportunistic clan, and Luc possessed the foresight to open a French trading outpost in Lake City that became a strategic center for French military operations. He married the daughter of a French aristocrat who eventually gave him a daughter and two sons.
    Luc’s life then became very unremarkable until his apparent suicide three days after his oldest child and only