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  Bad Blood

  The Cripulet Book One

  Ren Hamilton

  Bad Blood

  Copyright © 2021 by Ren Hamilton

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  1st Edition: May 2021

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  Prologue

  Alcoholics define rock bottom as that hellish yet divine moment when they can sink no lower into the pit of poisoned madness. Then there are two choices; let the hole collapse and suffocate in the self-dug grave, or begin a painful escalation upward. Charles Duvaine did neither. Though he’d given up the bottle weeks before, he still lingered midway down, wedged between the walls of the pit, daring it one last chance to suck him into the molten core and incinerate him. While free of intoxicants, he was prisoner to his despair, leaving his bed only when his biological functions demanded it.

  But rock bottom found Charles despite his indifference, rising to greet him that morning in the form of a tiny clawed foot pressing against his lower lip. As slumber’s grip loosened, he felt the trail of fur on his cheek, a brush of silken pelt. His eyelids fluttered. In a tumble of twisted sheets, he launched himself out of bed, swatting the mouse off his face with a yelp. The creature hit the floor and broke into a panicked scuttle, running in circles until it finally took refuge under a pile of dirty laundry. Charles looked down at the rumpled bed, where tiny black pellets dotted his white sheets. “Oh, that does it,” he said, wincing. “This has got to end today.”

  He examined the rest of his bedroom, repulsed. The previously beige carpet was now a blotchy abstract of curious stains. Laundry formed misshapen mountains across the floor, eclipsed only by six months of neglected trash. His eyes were drawn back to the mouse droppings on his sheets and his jaw stiffened. It was bad enough he’d let his once lovely beach house fall to hovel. But now he had mice, the token representatives of degeneracy.

  He managed a sleepy grin as he tugged his bathrobe on. Part of him relished the disgust he felt. It was an indication that he was returning to normal. Two weeks ago he would have barely flinched upon waking with a rodent on his head. But he hadn’t been sober then. An army of mice could have marched across his face, waving banners and beating tiny war drums. He either wouldn’t have noticed or wouldn’t have cared.

  His bare feet padded the carpet as he moved from his bedroom to the outer hall, dodging empty rum bottles and pyramids of trash along the way. Morning sun streamed through the skylights, serving only to better display the filth he’d created. There was barely a square foot not soiled with some manner of garbage. The beach house had three floors, each with multiple rooms, and he’d succeeded in shitting up all of it. Bravo for consistency.

  Clinging to the railing, he moved down the flight of steps that spiraled into the first floor. To his delight, his legs were free of the tremors he’d experienced when he’d first given up the bottle. Pausing, he surveyed the squalor below. The anesthetic shield of drunkenness gone now, he could clearly view the mess he’d made of his house. And his life. He flinched, watching a mouse exit a pizza box. Again, his revulsion comforted him, validating his return to the world of the living. I cringe, therefore I am.

  In the kitchen he counted thirteen red lines drawn through the previous days on the calendar. He picked up the marker and made another triumphant slash. He’d been sober for two weeks. It might not sound like much to an outsider, but having been drunk for six months, Charles viewed it as quite an accomplishment. Grabbing his cell phone off the charger, he searched for a cleaning service and found one called ‘Fresh Start’. The name seemed to correlate with his current mission. He wondered if they could get the house back to its original splendor, the way it was before he’d gone into a state of drunken recluse.

  Charles hadn’t planned on becoming a drunk, but he supposed no one ever did. He didn’t wake one morning and randomly decide to kill enough brain cells to devolve him on the evolutionary scale. He glanced at the empty rum bottle in the kitchen sink, with its colorful illustration of the virile Captain Morgan. They should change the label, he thought, and replace the jolly pirate with a drawing of Cro-Magnon man. It would more accurately depict the liquor’s effect on modern man. But that wasn’t fair to the rum company—or Cro-Magnons, for that matter. Nobody told Charles to drink a bottle a day for six months. He’d written that prescription himself.

  In his defense, his list of gripes was a long one. Tragedy walloped him twice in under a year. They never found the culprit that hit his wife Marie’s car, sending her over a guardrail to her death. An accident, the police had said. He hated the word. Accident. It made it all sound so simple, like spilling a glass of milk.

  It was a mere three months later that Jeffrey was speared in the throat on a hunting trip. Mistaken for a deer, the police said to Charles. His vibrant twenty-one-year-old son, mistaken for a piece of venison. Marie’s death had been shattering enough, but hearing the news about his son was like swallowing poison. He knew that once it sank in, it would slowly kill him. And since he’d always felt quicker was better, he determined to help the process along with a little poison of his own. Captain Morgan was glad to oblige.

  So Charles became a cliché, crawling inside a bottle to escape the pain. He’d turned easily to the bitterness, like one of those ‘life done me wrong’ characters in a tough guy movie, sitting in the dark with the curtains drawn, brooding with his glass of booze.

  During his binge, he’d convinced himself that he must be cursed, though was hard pressed to determine what act could possibly deserve all this horror brought down upon him. He wasn’t a perfect man, but didn’t think he was bad man. He’d made business deals that benefitted him to the detriment of others, but that was just corporate America, nothing a thousand other people didn’t do every day. He’d cheated on a few girlfriends in his youth before marrying Marie. He’d used his privilege to get out of some parking tickets, and perhaps he wasn’t always as patient with his children as he should have been. Maybe karma had come to collect, though the retribution hardly seemed to fit his meagre crimes. If karma actually worked that way, he knew a lot of men who’d done far worse and were living quite well with no trouble sleeping and no dead family members to grieve.

  But amid his breakdown, he hadn’t been thinking straight, and it was fear of his imagined curse that prompted his retreat from his oldest son, Joey, his last living child. He’d abandoned Joey, thinking it in his best interest to steer clear of his cursed father, lest he have an accident too. Perhaps ‘abandoned’ was not the right word. Joey was twenty-eight years old, hardly a child. Still, Joey had needed his father and Charles ha
d not been there.

  His heart was heavy as he recalled Joey pounding on the beach house door, begging his father to come out of seclusion. Charles would make his amends to Joey, but not until he got himself and his surroundings cleaned up. Joey had been through enough without having to witness the disgrace his father had allowed himself to become.

  With this thought, he dialed the number of the cleaning service and spoke with a man who agreed to send someone out for an assessment. Charles imagined their reaction upon entering the house, which looked so well kept from the outside. He’d mentioned the horrendous condition of the rugs, but the man insisted his service could clean any carpet. They probably figured Charles was some uptight cad from the rich neighborhood, belly aching about a little spilled caviar. They were in for a shocker.

  A cockroach scuttled into the rum bottle in the sink, reminding Charles he also had to call an exterminator. He was reaching for the phone when the doorbell rang.

  The sound startled him. He certainly wasn’t expecting company. Up until two weeks ago the sound of the doorbell meant the booze had arrived. For months he’d survived, if one could call it that, by having sausage pizzas delivered daily, along with a bottle of spiced rum. Rum and pizza. What more could a man want? Quite a bit more, he’d finally decided, which was why he’d cancelled all further deliveries.

  The doorbell buzzed again.

  “I’ll be right there!” he called out, pulling his filthy bathrobe together to hide his even filthier tee shirt. He stopped at the gold rimmed mirror and gave his hair a futile smoothing. All his life he’d been hearing about how handsome he was. If my friends could see me now! His black hair was arranged in greasy points. The tufts of gray at each temple, which had once given him a distinguished air, now stuck out on either side of his head like a mad scientist. His pale blue eyes had turned an ominous gray, just a shade lighter than the circles beneath them. The doorbell persisted. Charles decided that whatever asshole was at the door deserved to see him looking this way, for showing up at nine in the morning on a Saturday.

  When he opened the door, he thought he’d begun hallucinating. The young man on his porch was dressed in a red naval jacket, with gold trim and a double run of gold buttons down the front. He wore a matching red pirate style hat and a large gold hoop in one ear. The hair was definitely a wig. Thick black curls ran down the stranger’s shoulders nearly to his waist. The face makeup was as white as his gloves; he looked ready for a stage performance. The eyes were overdone as well, with thick black liner and lashes that had to be false. Charles blinked, shaking his head in an attempt to clear his vision. The Captain Hook drag queen was still there.

  “May I, um, may I help you?”

  The young man smiled. “Mr. Duvaine?”

  “Yes, I’m Charles Duvaine. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m Kenny from Forest Bluffs Liquors. I have a delivery for you.”

  Charles shook his head. “There must be some mistake. I cancelled all deliveries from your store two weeks ago.”

  The oddity put one gloved hand to his mouth. “Oh I am so sorry! I don’t know how this could have happened!” His vocal inflection was high-pitched and sing-song, and Charles got the impression he was putting it on for the sake of theatrics.

  “That’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Why are you dressed like that?”

  “Oh this?” He did a little spin. “It’s Forest Bluffs Liquors twentieth anniversary. It was the boss’s idea that we dress up for deliveries. I’m Captain Morgan. Get it?”

  Charles forced an awkward smile. “I get it.”

  “It is your drink of choice, isn’t it?” The pirate pulled a bottle out of a velvet sack on his waistcoat. Charles stared at the tall thin bottle with its enticing amber liquid and miniature picture of Captain Morgan, which looked eerily like the stranger at his door. He felt his resolve stumble as the liquid in the bottle swished back and forth in the stranger’s gloved hand. A wave of dizziness overtook him and he clung to the door for support.

  The pirate’s smile dropped. “Hey, are you okay?” he asked, taking Charles’s arm and leading him inside to the nearest chair. Charles put his head between his knees, forcing long full breaths until the tremor passed. He sat up finally, embarrassed. The delivery boy glanced around the room and wrinkled his nose at the trash. He tried to hide the gesture by coughing, but Charles had seen it.

  “Thanks. You can go now. I’m fine,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” the stranger asked, with concern that seemed genuine.

  “I’m sure. I haven’t been feeling well lately, but I’m fine now. Really.”

  The Captain Morgan thing nodded. “I understand. I have just the thing.” To Charles’s amazement, the pirate swished over to the dry bar and grabbed a glass from the display. He unscrewed the bottle cap and poured a few inches of the golden liquid. Charles watched stunned as he returned with the glass and knelt down, waving it under his nose. “This is what you need, isn’t it? This will make you feel much better.”

  Fumes invaded Charles’s nostrils and his mouth watered. It had to be a bad dream. Was he still sleeping? Asleep or awake, it was time to order Kenny the delivery boy out of his house. “Please go,” Charles said, his voice strained. “I don’t want a drink. I’ve cancelled my orders with your store. Go back and take me out of your computer.”

  The pirate stranger remained kneeling, grinning like an overgrown theatre puppet. “But this will make you feel better. Won’t it, Charles?”

  Charles couldn’t believe the guy’s brazenness. He lashed out and knocked the glass out of the stranger’s gloved hand. It bounced onto the rug and liquor shot out in a spray of amber. The pirate stared down at the spilled rum, scratching his chin. Black-rimmed eyes looked at Charles with mock concern. “That’s gonna leave a stain.”

  Charles leaned forward. “Maybe you don’t hear so well. I asked you to leave. Can’t you see I’m detoxing here? Take your bottle and get out before I call the police.”

  The young man stood. He went back across the room and snatched the open bottle off the dry bar. Charles was sure he’d leave immediately, after the way he’d been berated. Instead, he sighed deeply and walked back to the middle of the room. “You’re not being very cooperative, Charles. After all, I’ve come to give you what you want.”

  Charles stared at the costumed stranger, the first shivers of fear tightening his stance as he realized something was very wrong here. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “I don’t even know you. How the hell would you know what I want?”

  “Well it’s obvious isn’t it? Just look at this place.” He did a little twirl, gesturing at the mess. “You’ve been holed up here for months, Charles. You quit your job. You’ve cut yourself off from your friends,” he hesitated, “from your son.”

  The words slapped Charles. “How do you know about my son? Who are you?”

  The stranger took a step closer. The painted face had gone blank. “You want to disappear. I’m here to help you do that. That is what you want, isn’t it? To disappear?”

  He continued toward Charles, swinging the bottle rhythmically from side to side. Instinct told Charles to run for the door, but he didn’t trust his trembling legs. The stranger stopped before the chair and offered the bottle. Charles glared at him, waiting for his strength to return so he could beat the little son of a bitch to a pulp.

  Closing the distance, the pirate pushed the rum bottle nearer until it was mere inches from Charles’s lips.

  “I quit drinking,” Charles said through clenched teeth.

  Captain Morgan shook his head. “Not today.”

  “Get the hell out of my house.”

  The young man studied him a moment, then turned away, circling the room. “Okay, Charles. Enough with the pleasantries. You’ve been an enormous pain in the ass to me. Do you know that? I’ve had to readjust my entire schedule to accommodate your little whims.”

  “What? I don’t even know you. What the hell do you want from me?”
<
br />   He shrugged. “What do I want? Well, that’s a long story. I wouldn’t want to bore you with the details. Actually, that’s a lie. The truth is I don’t want to bore myself telling you the details. So I’ll put it to you frankly. I need your blood, Charles. Your blood. Trust me when I say it’s very important.”

  Charles frowned, confused despite his fear. “You want to kill me? Why?”

  The pirate raised an eyebrow. “Kill you? You see, that’s interesting. The thing is you were supposed to kill yourself, Charles. It would have been so easy. One of those drunken nights, I could have slit your wrists with your own razor while you were passed out. Nobody would have known the difference. They all would have assumed you did it to yourself, what with your being a basket case and all. But no. You had to quit drinking and fuck it all up!” The painted face flared with anger for an instant, then the maddened smile returned.

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you get it, Charles? Nobody’s going to believe you killed yourself if you’re suddenly stone cold sober and calling cleaning services to come to your house. So now I’m forced to improvise. I’m a patient man, but your little recovery has thrown quite a monkey wrench into my plans. So take the bottle, and drink the damn rum.”

  Charles narrowed his eyes. “No.”

  The painted mouth went stiff. “Fine. If you won’t take your medicine like a big boy, I’ll have to force it on you.” With one gloved hand, the costumed stranger dragged him from the chair. Charles fought wildly but the assailant ultimately toppled him to the floor and pinned his shoulders down with his knees. Charles worked to twist himself free but the sinewy youth had surprising strength, and held him firm. With a curl of his lip, he forced the bottle into Charles’s mouth. “Drink it, damn you!”

  Charles clenched his teeth, stopping the bottle’s penetration just before his tongue. The mystery assailant grabbed his chin, and with a grimace of rage, squeezed his jawbone until sharp waves of pain forced his mouth open. He jammed the bottle into his mouth and down his throat, taking part of a tooth along with it. Charles tasted blood, warm and metallic on his tongue.