The Blood That Bonds by Christopher Buecheler

his vampire nature. Theroen reminded her
again not to fight the trance. Sit, watch, understand.
    His parents. Mother, hair blonde, eyes blue,
tall and broad through the shoulders. Lithe but full at the bust
and hips, she was a picture of beauty standing at the window in
Theroen’s tiny room, singing lullabies, whispering softly to her
young child where they might someday go, what they might someday
see.
    Father, dark in hair, dark in eyes, like
Theroen himself. Grecian in ancestry, but without the wiry curls,
which had been ironed from his head by the passing of
generations.
    Theroen, child of no more than a year, black
hair, brown eyes, his mother’s pale skin, the face a combination of
features that would someday serve to make him a handsome young man.
His face would make women shake their heads behind his back. A
priest? Looking like that? A waste.
    Theroen did not know if his memories of this
time were accurate, or fabricated from stories and assumptions. He
believed them to be honest recollection, but would never truly
know. In these memories, mother and father fight sometimes. Living
is difficult. The house is small, drafty, uncomfortable. The
theatre has not called in weeks. They have no roles.
    In London, though, there is work. Father
makes trips there, auditions repeatedly, desperate, despairing. The
alcohol is beginning to take hold of him even now.
    He is granted reprieve when the notice
finally arrives. An actor is needed. He has been called. At three
years of age, Theroen said goodbye to the land of his birth, a land
he would never see again.
    Never? Two asked, pulling back from the vision momentarily, never in so many years?
    Never has there been time,
nor any great desire, Theroen
answered.
    It was a happy childhood. London before the
industrial revolution, a thriving metropolis, dirty to be certain
but still possessed of a remarkable charm Two could find no words
to describe. Theroen, age nine, running through the streets ahead
of his mother and father. Running to see the players in the square,
the Italian entertainers with their puppets and music and dancing.
Laughing and running, never seeing the horse bearing down on him,
its rider as distracted by the sights and sounds as Theroen
himself.
    The horse tried to clear him, but failed.
Theroen remembered the sharp crack of its hoof against his
forehead, the blooming brightness in front of his vision. He
remembered the second hit, coming as the back of his head connected
with the cobblestones. The force of the impact was tremendous. He
imagined that everyone in the world must have heard the sound of
it.
    All of this was clear in
his mind, but Theroen remembered no pain. Only the flat, hard
cracking sound and then rolling, horrified faces rushing toward
him, the world graying, fading. His mother, tears pouring from her
eyes, pulling at her own hair as if somehow in injuring herself she
might heal her son. It’s all right,
mamma, he wanted to say. It doesn’t hurt.
    Darkness, then. The clip-clop noise of horse
hooves, but this time he moved along with them. There were rushed,
babbling voices, more weeping, a rough hand holding his.
    Even Theroen could not entirely piece
together the events that followed. Vast blank spaces lay in his
memory, interrupted by photo-flashes of consciousness. A bed
somewhere, his father sitting in a chair, looking out into cold
London rain and weeping without realizing it. Rough shadow of a
beard, unkempt hair. Staring and weeping. It was the most
frightening vision Theroen could recall, worse even than when the
bottle finally took hold of the man for good. Theroen had never
seen the man looking so forlorn, would never see him so again.
    Another period of blankness, and then his
mother, leaning over him, wiping his forehead with a damp cloth.
She was singing to him, those old lullabies. He’d asked for the
songs to stop some years ago, a young man in a child’s body, no
longer needing the comfort they brought. But now? Oh, now they