The Blood Thief

Chapter 2

A short, faded navy shack stood faintly against a backdrop of mist. A meek shrouded boy sat scrawny and bundled up in layers of wool cloth and animal hide, resting his head against the short wood pillar that connected the three-step stairs to his doorway. The stairs were only needed in the warm seasons when the snow would retreat a foot or two, as it had that day. Reen found a common comfort in the mornings when the sun was not yet up. He could wear his hood down without any risk of burning. His wiry, stringy brown hair lay draped over his ears and the back of his neck like heavy curtains, framing his pointed, skeletal face. A red, checkered bandana clung to his nose and mouth, disappearing behind his messy hair.

It was custom to hide his face and body so commonly. Despite what one may suspect, it was not for the cold.

The doctor who would come far too regularly when Reen was just a child gave it a particularly long and complicated diagnosis: a blood disorder manifesting in an odd porphyrin deficiency.

Reen always just called himself sun-shy.

Tightening of the skin doesn't take well to harsh sunlight, and his already skeletal face was made more inhuman by his top lip, which always seemed to draw backwards slightly in a ghost of a snarl, letting his front few teeth stick out and his voice to come out in a slight lisp.

Reen was not a pretty sight. Beyond the hair that hung heavily at the sides of his head having a texture like fishing wire, his body was reminiscent of an underfed, shaved dog which bore the complexion of a pale, mummified taxidermy. From time to time, he'd appear with some colour, but only the red scarring blisters from remaining in the sun for a minute or two too long. He bore a face that only a mother could love. And his mother did.

Gellin Jaysom was a very young and attractive woman who had evaded the net of cooks that would so commonly snatch up members of the Jaysom family. She only ever came back when she absolutely needed it, for money or food or extra means of warmth; backing away from meddling with the heroin and cocaine that would be a major market in the shady area of Fort Grislock: the west corner near the mountain.

Reen was a product of meddling with cooked substances. An influential cook named Laoni Jaysom—Gellin's brother—had prepared a package of money and favors, only to take more from Gellin than she had bargained on the wings of crack-ridden desire. Reen never met his father, as it had been a mere 2 years after Gellin's last run in that Laoni found his mobile-home and meth lab burnt and his body transformed into a dark husk. He was disposed by the request of Big Boss before the police could track down Laoni's origins.

Living as a single mother has never treated Gellin well, especially with Reen's expensive health condition. Reen found himself majorly untreated. Therefore, instead of curing his disease, he learned to live with it and cope with it. But on the days that it simply proved too difficult, Reen would lay in the basement, wrapped up in as many blankets he could find as his mother worked her ass off at the supermarket as a clerk, just to scrape together enough money for food that night; or maybe, if they were lucky, for his medicine.

While Reen's illness couldn't be medically treated, Vitamin D pills could aid to compensate for his severe lack of light, a mixed concoction of medications and calcium could keep his bones strong and metabolism high, and he had been prescribed special crèmes and injections for when his skin burns.

The doctors told Gellin that unless he could regularly take in blood with healthy hemoglobin, Reen would die within his first 6 years.

This is why at 6 years old, Reen was already highly proficient using a rifle.

"A little lower there, keep it steady, do you see 'im back there?" Gellin whispered.

The night had swallowed up the town, covering it in a deep blanket as snow fell softly from the sky. Deep in the purple woods, a 6-year-old boy crouched behind a fallen log, his fur-rimmed hood up and a bandanna covering the bottom half of his face while thin-slit night-vision goggles covered the rest, spinning and whirring to slowly zoom in. He peered through the green-tinted visors down the length of his barrel, which was pointed directly at the head of a red-breasted deer. Gellin, clad in a winter coat, long auburn-red skirt and matching goggles sat right behind him, tracing his eyes to his prey.