After that for a while she opined that men were a waste of space, except for her pa whom she loved, and her granpa Vince whom she remembered with love, and a visiting professor from Cambridge, UK, whose mind she loved, and any young man at a party who didn’t believe he was God’s gift, supported the Demons, and could make her laugh.
So on she wandered toward her inevitable First, more certain than ever who she was and where she was going, and never suspecting, for all her analytical brilliance and eidetic memory, that she was ignoring a message she’d started to hear all those years ago on her eleventh birthday which began in blood and ended in nightmare.
2. Una familia buena y devota
Twelve thousand miles away and some five months before Sam Flood woke to her eleventh birthday, a boy in Jerez de la Frontera in the Spanish province of Cadiz in the region of Andalusia had woken to his sixteenth.
His name was Miguel Ramos Elkington Madero, known to friends and family as Mig.
The Elkington came from his English mother, the rest from his father, also Miguel, as had been all elder sons of the Madero family, whose business records outlining their involvement in the Spanish wine trade went back five centuries.
He and little Sam had absolutely nothing in common.
Except wine.
And blood.
But his was flowing from his hands and his feet.
He rolled out of bed and padded across the cool tiles to the bathroom. The hour was early and his parents and younger brother, Cristóbal, still slept. He stood under the shower and let the water flow over his upraised hands, down his arms and the length of his golden brown body till it washed over his feet, bearing with it the bright red stain.