Blood Ties Read Online Free PDF

the announcement of my decision meant nothing to her—which, for all I knew, it didn’t—“safe journey, then. Do you know where you’re going?”
    â€œI’m keeping my options open.”
    â€œHow about home? Certainly it’s been a while since you last visited with friends and family.”
    â€œHome.” I laughed bitterly. “You obviously don’t know Gunk.”
    â€œGunk?” Page clearly had no idea what I was talking about. “You mean, like . . . the crud that gathers in the corners of your eyes while you sleep . . . ?”
    â€œNo, that’s the city where I was born.”
    â€œYou’re joking.”
    â€œI’m serious. Well . . . calling it a ‘city’ might be kind of joking. Town. Village. Hamlet, actually, and even that might be kind of generous. It’s somewhere east of Brightwood.”
    â€œAnd it was actually called Gunk?”
    â€œIf we’re going to be strictly accurate and aboveboard and all, I have to admit that that wasn’t its actual name. But that’s what my brothers and I called it.”
    â€œAha, so there,” said Page. “See? You have brothers. You can go and visit them.”
    â€œNo, I don’t have brothers.”
    â€œBut you just said . . .”
    â€œI have none. I had three. Three older brothers.” I sounded rather conversational about it. It was not without effort, for even though it was quite some time ago, the recollections were still like an open wound for me. “My eldest brother, Jason, was killed in a duel with an irate farmer, who also happened to be the husband of Jason’s last sexual conquest.” Those circumstances resonated particularly strongly for me when I considered my own activities earlier that day. “The duel was fought using pitchforks, and my brother, who had never done an honest day’s work in his life, made the fatal mistake of holding the farming tool the wrong way round.
    â€œThen there was the second eldest, William. For whatever reason, even though he wasn’t the closest to me in age, William was the one who I always felt the greatest kinship to. I got much of my sense of humor from him, and when I was reluctant to join in the family tradition of earning money through scams and bilking, William was the one most inclined to support my decision instead of calling me ‘weak’ or ‘gutless.’ I preferred the prospect of being a street performer, you see. Having people give me their money willingly in compensation for my efforts to entertain them, at all of eleven years old. Of course, as the audiences would gather, laughing heartily at my jokes, my brothers would work the crowd and relieve them of their purses and valuables without their knowledge.”
    â€œAnyway, shortly after Jason wound up on the business end of a farming implement, William was arrested for trying to run a con game on the wrong person: a passing plainclothes town’s guard. He was taken to Bowerstone and was never heard of again.”
    â€œFinn, I’m so sorry,” she said softly.
    â€œBut wait, there’s more!” I said with far more exuberance than I should have displayed, as if this was something that was genuinely a good thing. “There was my big brother, Quentin, who contrived to accumulate enough gambling debts to have a price put on his head. Quentin’s death I remember most clearly of all, because I got to see it with my own two eyes. When the assassins and bounty hunters came to collect his suddenly valuable head, I did what I could to protect him. But no matter how accurate the shots from my rifle, nothing could change the fact that I was shooting peas instead of bullets. I had not yet been able to afford a real weapon, you see,” I continued when I saw the question in her eyes. “My brothers had instead gotten me a pellet gun because they’d discovered my knack for shooting with nearly