CHAPTER ELEVEN

She glanced down at her open palms, fingers splayed open. The light from the full moon was dazzling on blood on her hands. She turned them over, in awe of the fluid that ran in the veins of a human could be so dark, so utterly black. So void of any color whatsoever.

A noise resonating from the front of the alley startled her and she quickly raised her eyes. Yet she was alone. Contented with the notion that is was merely a rat; she glanced down to her hands once more. The blood was beginning to congeal between her fingers. She brought her nose to her hands and inhaled. No taste at all. Disappointed, she brought her tongue quickly to her hand and gently flicked at the blood. It had a harsh, metallic twang. She did not cringe in repulsion, yet a small, devious smile alighted upon her lips.

She had collected Mr. Antonelli. Collected and killed the child mol-easter.

A night wind touched her bare shoulders, ruffling her slovenly hair. The night was a strange concoction of hot and cold, signaling the beginning of autumn.

Suddenly, she wanted her family desperately. She threw the blood-licked knife to the alley floor beside her with a shrill cry and pushed the vermilion hands to her face. Luxy began to weep with a vengeance, her entire soul tired and aching.

The blonde's full lips were pulled into a knowing grin. Benji had never seen lips so full and red save for those on the scarlet women. They were round and succulent, like a blood red apple, and he suddenly craved to have them anywhere on his body. His toes began to tingle and he felt himself flush as a warm sensation struck his groin. Anywhere on his body.

The blonde noticed this sudden hardness where she straddled him and her grinned widened, her tongue flicking between her lips. "So tell me your name again?" she intoned in a soft purr, arching her back and sliding her chest to his. She now was only clothed in a black corset and undergarments, the outer dressings strewn helter-skelter in the darkened room. A blood-red talon traced erratic paths down his bare chest, stopping just below his navel. Benji felt chills slither down his spine and his face heat up fantastically. He could hardly help but release a small gasp at her motions. "It's Spot," he replied as she began on his belt buckle.

"Spot, is it?" she asked, raising an eye to him. My God, he thought as his belt disappeared, she has fantastic breasts. He nodded his head in response, as her skilled fingers worked at the buttons on his trousers. "Have you known Jack long?" They too had soon joined the mess of clothes that covered the floor.

"What?" he asked in a soft whisper, not comprehending the question. Her hands were encircling his bare thighs. "Jack? You know, Cowboy?" she asked again with a sly smile, her brow arched.

"I don't know," he replied mindlessly as he watched her unhook herself from the corset and let it slide onto the bed. The urge was so great to touch her, to feel every crevice of her beautiful pink body that he had to grasp the sheets until his fingers throbbed. "I go way back with Jack," she said matter-of-factly, raising herself so she could slide easily out of her panties. They were off in a whisper. Benji did not give a fuck how she knew Jack or Cowboy or the man in the moon. He just wanted her. All of her.

She leaned over, bringing red siren lips to his ear. Tendrils of her blonde hair fell across his brow. Her breath was hot in his ear and he released a small moan at the sensation of the rush of air in his canal. He knew his veins would explode at the hot fire that was his blood. His body ached in an animalistic desire for her. He had never felt such an overwhelming physical passion to have himself inside someone as he did this girl in all his fourteen years on this earth. Dear, Christ, why did this temptress keep speaking?

"Jack must be a really good friend." She lowered herself onto him and he release a cry of the most exquisite fervor as his mind finally dissolved into flames.

The cobblestone roads were damp from the night rain and a musty smell permeated the air. The streets of the Manhattan slums were desolate, haunted by not a soul save for her. She kept to the alleyways and the facades of the dark, foreboding buildings as best she could.

Before he had struck her, he had told her he was going over to Cowboy's. Cowboy. That no good son on a bitch Cowboy. She had no notion of who he was or what his true appellation was; she only knew she hated him. Despised him. She knew this Cowboy was the reason that Benji had abruptly halted work in the factory. That he was the reason the abysses of her stomach ached with an almost primordial hunger. Benji (or "Spot," as he had taken a liking to be called) had been prattling incessantly of the one he called Cowboy. He had reminded her that he was going to visit Cowboy and some of his friends that night and he would not be back until late. He was already drunk on his ass before he had left.

You stupid worthless bitch. If you are so goddamned hungry why don't you get up off your own ass and go to the factory. Because your sister was killed and raped there? It served her right getting killed cause I'm sure it was her own fault, spreading her legs like the whore she is! That's it…why don't you go become a whore like your sister. Your dead sister and your dead mother. Someone needs to carry on the family tradition. If I hear you talk to me like that again I will take my dead Daddy's cane here and bash in your fuckin' head. Do you hear me Lux? Goddamned bitch…

She had hurled the brick at him as he walked away from her in the alleyway. He had then proceeded to pummel her with such ferocity and sheer hatred that it was only when he heard her began to choke to death on her own blood that he halted.

Benji was a mean drunk. Just like his daddy.

Void of any sight and relying on only his sense of touch, Benjamin Conlon arched his lithe back and swung his torso off the bed, grasping a hand about in the dark to find his trousers.

"So you new to this part or something?"

He found them sprawled upon the floor where the blonde had thrown them in the heat of the moment and dug deeply into the pocket, removing the paper and tobacco. "Why you ask?" he questioned matter-of-factly, returning to position on the bed with a grunt and a creak.

The mattress released a moan as it fluxed under her slight weight. He suddenly felt her skin hot and bare next to his. She placed a burning palm on his chest. "Because," she whispered, thrilled, "I would have known you if you would have been around for long."

His lips alighted in a smirk as he finished rolling the cigarette and licked the paper. "Is that so?" he echoed.

"God, yes!" she squealed, climbing on him and straddling him under the covers. "I should go scold Cowboy as it is for keeping you hidden for so long from me!"

Benji was silent as he reached to the end table beside the bed for a pack of matches. Fingering one out of the package, he quickly flinted it against the wood so that golden flames erupted from its head, illuminating the blonde's smiling face. He quickly brushed it against his cigarette, and inhaled deeply, soothing his shaky nerves. Even with his eyes downcast, he could tell the slut was beaming, grinning with want, a want to be fucked even more. She was getting impatient, and squirming around on his body.

Benjamin Conlon felt he could heave her off him, get dressed and go home. Back to Luxy, at least. But he had nearly pummeled the damned girl to death. Because she had wanted food, he had strangled her and said he would beat her head in with his Daddy's cane. He hadn't even noticed he was killing her until she had begun to convulse severely under his strong hands and retch shining, red-black blood. It poured from her small mouth, onto her pale skin, and onto his rough hands. He was then suddenly struck, not so much by sobriety but with the realization that he was killing with his bare hands his future wife as her blood oozed onto his hands. He had then released her with a sharp cry, and stepped back. She had collapsed to the ground with an inaudible sound. She was a horrid mess, her throat black with his fingerprints, and the dark blood creating a wonderful starkness with her white skin and ragged shirt. She was a heap of black hair and blood on the ground, heaving and coughing blood and uttering sounds Benji had only heard after Old Man Conlon had come home drunk from the bars and beat his wife to within inches of her life. He could not stand the sight of her, and turned to disgorge his guts in the foul alleyway.

He had taken the alcohol and the girls Cowboy offered him to rid his mind of her. But now with the naked blonde writhing upon him, wanting him, be could not even raise his eyes for he feared he could only see her, her clothing tattered and throat black with his hands and eyes piercing through the blood.

He exhaled deeply, smoke pouring from his mouth. "So, what do you want to do now?" he heard the blonde ask coyly, a flirt in her voice. He raised his eyes to her and saw Luxy, cold and cadaverous, blood congealed in her chin and green eyes regarding him with accusation. "I have to get some more to drink," he murmured softly, tossing his legs over the side of the bed and raising up to stand on insecure joints. The blonde slid off him rather unhappily and landed with her back on the bed. She considered him with a profound scowl on her full lips as he ambled across the room in the darkness to the window. It was forced open with a dejected sigh. A late summer zephyr slithered through the window, ruffling his slovenly hair.

Raising an arm, he placed a palm above the pane. "I'm sorry, Lux," he murmured as softly as the breeze. His head down, he turned his eyes to his left. She stood there in the tattered, soild men's shirt she had found in a miscellaneous alley. Her matted raven hair was pushed off her face and in the moonlight he could regard the faint scar that ran down her cheek from the Antonelli incident. She cocked her head away from him and the black handprints he could discern on her thin neck resembled a noose. He reached a hand out and cupped her cheek in his palm. He rubbed his thumb against her cold, deadskin. Her green gaze caught his and she regarded him.

Although Benjamin Conlon hardly saw her anymore, Luxy still haunted his thoughts wherever he went.

He suddenly wondered why in the name of Christ he was the Manhattan Newsboys Lodging House when all he could see was her.

"So how much do you want?"

Luxy Listin then signed her contract with the Devil. "A quarter," she replied in an uneasy voice, her eyes cautiously surmising the stout shape before her.

The dark figure took a step closer to her, pinning her against the moss-eaten brick wall. His cloaked face hovered directly before hers. "And just why do you think you are worth a whole quarter?" His voice was cracked, raspy, and his breath putrid, a mixture of nicotine, alcohol, and rotting gums.

Luxy could not comprehend an answer to this man's inquiry, yet was only aware of the overwhelmingly powerful feeling of ice cold fear that filled her veins. She attempted to step back, yet the wall hindered her. He had one hand pushed against the wall, his cloaked arm ensnaring her. With his other, he roughly grasped her bare thigh. She uttered a cry of surprise and attempted to struggle away from him, yet he simply took a hand and tightly constricted his fingers around her neck, over the bruises Benji had inflicted earlier. His hand was cold and callused despite the heat of the summer night. Delighting in the young touch of her skin, his hand inched slowly up to her flimsy panties and inside of them. He began to roughly caress her soft flesh with the tips of his fingers, before ripping them off with a snarl.

She elicited a squeal much like that of an animal with the knowledge it is being lead to slaughter would, and began to furiously writhe under him. In denouncing this behavior, the cloaked man released an irritated noise and removed his hand from Luxy, instead curling it into a fist and sending it through the darkened air and into her nose. Luxy emitted a soft gurgle as her knees buckled under her. He had snapped her bridge in two, and black, viscous blood oozed profusely through her nostrils and onto the both of them. Tiny, white fragments of bone were discernable in the sanguineous mess.

"Fucking whore, you no good fucking whore!" the figure screamed in a voice undeniably tainted with rage. He threw Luxy onto the cobblestone ground where she landed, sprawled and delirious from the pain, her buttocks in the air. "All of you no good bitches are the same. Try to con a man out of his hard earned money not even to give him your services?" He brought a thick, black boot down hardly upon her lumbar, eliciting a scream of agony from her as he pushed her ass to the ground. Shifting his weight to the boot on her, Luxy released a discordant gurgle of blood and pain as she felt more bones breaking under him. Grabbing her thick fall of hair within his grasp, he harshly pulled her head up. He released him boot from her and squatted on his haunches over her, still holding her hair. He brought his mouth to her ear. His breath was hot as he spoke. "You want to act like a bad whore? So you will get fucked like one."

Luxy did not know when he had unbuckled his beltand undid his pants, nor could she have comprehended such a thought, but as the hooded figure had promised, he did something the dead Mr. Antonelli never was able to do: fuck her like a whore.

And Ruby Danson had made the profession of ill-repute seem so effortless.