Page 26 of Her Dark Salvation

But he hadn’t quite hit the mark. Not all Sources gave up their necks willingly. Some did it out of necessity, for survival. Those were the people I wanted to protect. The people who had no choice. Like my mother.

I shot back the whiskey, trying to ground myself in the present, but those images I hated so much barreled straight through my defenses and forced me to watch.

Pumping my short, eleven-year-old legs, I sped down the alley as fast as I could despite the slick, ice-covered cobbles. Italy had declared war on the United States, and the school sent us Italian kids home early, worried about unrest in the North End. I slid to a stop in front of the stairs that led to the basement room where I lived with Mamma, Papà, and my baby sister, Gina.

The cracked wooden door opened with a creak. It wasn’t much warmer inside, but I slammed it shut to save the heat. “Mamma?—”

I froze. Mamma sat at the table, head tilted to the side. Two fading welts and a single drop of blood dotted her neck. A finger swiped the blood away. It belonged to a man I’d never seen before. His eyes glowed a deep red, and he licked the remnants of his meal from his finger.

His eyes landed where I stood in front of the door. Then they fell to the floor, and his shoulders slumped. He stepped back, pulled two dollars out of his coat pocket, and handed it to Mamma. “Grazie,” he said.

Mamma’s eyes held mine, and she shoved the two dollars into the pocket of her tattered sweater. “Prego.”

The man stepped past me and out the door.

Mamma and I stared at each other.

Gina let out a wail from her basket. Mamma got up, slowly, exhaustion weighing down her slight frame. She picked up my baby sister and bounced her on her hip until she stopped crying, then sunk back into her chair.

“Vieni qui, Marco.”

I met her where she sat, trying to make sense of what I’d seen. Bonded blood demons didn’t share their necks. Mamma and Papà only drank from each other.

She took my hand. Her fingers were cold and bony; Mamma had grown so thin. But her grip was firm and steady.

“That two dollars will feed this family for a week. Longer if we’re lucky. My blood is a small price to pay. But we can’t tell your papà. It would kill him. He works so hard.” Her strained voice cracked with the truth, and her eyes filled with tears. But Mamma was too strong to cry. She swallowed and cleared her throat. “I do what I need to do to provide for this family. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mamma.”

“Good. Now, why are you home so early?”

I slammed the rest of my whiskey and poured another.

Mamma and I never spoke of that day. No one else knew she’d sold herself so we wouldn’t go hungry. But the image was branded into my memory.

The love and devotion between my parents had been the only steady force in an otherwise unsteady life. When you’re poor and your stomach aches from hunger, when you watch your father leave every day to find work only to come home empty-handed, when you’re eleven years old and life is that uncertain, there’s a constancy in your parents, at least there had been for me. And walking in on another man at Mamma’s neck had rocked my foundation.

From that day on, blood demons fed out of necessity; there was no room for pleasure. Sources provided a service purely transactional. Decades later, I understood life wasn’t so black-and-white. I understood desperation, sacrifice. But the die had been cast. Those beliefs had anchored my formative years, and I’d held on to them for so long, they’d become my truth.

A knock at the door snapped me back into the present.

“Yes.”

Anna, quiet as a mouse, slipped in through the door and closed it behind her. She looked down at her hands, clasping and unclasping them, her face still etched with worry.

“What is it, Anna?”

She cleared her throat and lifted her eyes, the light brown nearly consumed by her dilated pupils. “Was that…” She balled her shaking fingers into fists, and her nervous energy did uncomfortable things to my chest. “Was thattheVincenzo Valenzano?”

“Yes.” I sipped my whiskey, hoping to deaden the impulse to take her into my arms and tell her she shouldn’t worry, that I’d protect her.

She nodded and tried to appear relaxed even though her hands flexed open and shut. I could have strangled Vinnie.

“Does he…” She swallowed. “Does he come here often?” She asked her question quietly, as if whispering the words might ensure she wouldn’t receive an answer she didn’t want to hear.

“No. Never, actually.”

She nodded again, then looked askance and tucked an errant piece of hair behind her ear.

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