The Children and the Blood by Skye Malone, Megan Joel Peterson Read Free Book Online

mother had sent him to his room early, joking that Santa couldn’t arrive till he was asleep. He’d hurried to bed, only to wake to their apartment door bursting open and his mother screaming. To his bleary mind, fireworks seemed to be going off, though later he’d learned they were guns. Hooded men stormed his room, knocking over his toys and stuffing into bags anything of value they could grab. Through the open doorway, he saw his mother lying on the floor, and as he’d run for her, something heavy hit his head from behind.
    When next he woke, he was curled in the back of a social worker’s car with a bandage on his head. Dizzy and confused, he’d asked for his mother, only to receive a sympathetic glance from the man in the driver’s seat. His mother and father couldn’t come right now, the man explained. Cole was going to stay with some friends for a while.
    In the following days, Cole learned they’d shot his father in the hallway, taking him from behind and using his key to get into the apartment. His mother had been next, and if not for the cops arriving swiftly to a neighbor’s frantic 9-1-1 call, Cole would have been third.
    And for all that the police had rushed to the scene, they’d never captured the ones responsible. Fingerprints led nowhere. The thieves used the fire escape to slip away unseen, and no tips gave clues to the criminals’ identities. For most of the world, it became just one more cold case in a long list of violent tragedies, regrettably forgotten.
    No relatives came to take him from the office of Child and Family Services, though he knew he was the only grandchild on either family’s side. Not a single one even bothered to call. And to his ten-year-old self, the message had been clear: in their eyes, Cole may as well have also died.
    Eight years drifted by, and in the midst of this zealously maintained world, everything from his life before took on the quality of a pleasant dream. Deep inside, some part of him clung to the memory of his father’s voice and the smell of his mother’s hair, because except for his memories, nothing of Clara or Victor Jamison remained. Due to being collected as evidence, every item from his past life had been taken from him. Years later, they still sat rotting in a police archive, inaccessible in case they were needed someday for a trial.
    Opening his eyes, Cole sighed. Ignoring the fact that propping his tennis shoes on the blankets would make Melissa scream, he lay back on his bed and tried to put the dark thoughts behind him. In a few more months, it would all be over. Graduation was drawing near, and if he could just hold out that long, he could start working on a life that would have made his parents proud. Whether or not the Smiths approved of college, they couldn’t stop him from applying. And with scholarships and grants, or loans or anything, he would find a way to pay for the educational ticket that meant he’d never have to come back here again.
    A shout from the living room made him sit up in alarm. Accustomed to the racket of the Smiths’ fights, he could tell neither of them had made the sound. Brow furrowing, he hesitated and then crossed the room silently and cracked open the door.
    Angry voices, speaking too low and fast to understand, rose from downstairs. Confusion growing, he slipped into the hallway and crept to the top of the stairwell.
    “–and you are losing control of him,” Vaughn snarled, all semblance of toadying gone. “Drinking? Getting into car accidents? You have one job to do, just one , and you cannot even accomplish that.”
    “We’re keeping him under control,” Melissa said, her pleading tone so strange it made Cole pause. “It’s fine, really. The truck thing was just an aberration. It won’t happen again.”
    “He could have died , you stupid girl!” Vaughn snapped, his voice rising briefly before dropping low again. “That boy is the only insurance you’ve got, and you just blithely let him run off