Rooks and Romanticide

by J. I. Radke

  “I cannot,” he reminded gently, although Eliott’s hurried insistence on his return sparked a chilling sort of excitement in him he hadn’t expected to feel again so soon. Maybe refusing to tend to the pain in his chest kept a pit of feelings alive, blanketed and forgotten otherwise.

  “You have to,” Eliott said, eyes wide. He spoke low as if talk like this was really dangerous in a city of exile. “The Earl’s calling out BLACK at St. Mikael’s Church in four days. I think he means an end this time, Levi. For good, he means an end.”

  For a moment, Levi was apathetic.

  Then an eerie shudder passed through him, which left him all mixed up and anxious inside, but he couldn’t discern from which deadened emotion it stemmed.

  He met Eliott’s eyes, lighting his very last Persian cigarette.

  “An end,” Levi reiterated skeptically, but he understood. He understood Cain much more than Eliott ever would, and if Eliott was picking up the sense that this calling out meant an end to the feud, then there was seriously something dark and pivotal stirring. Dear Lord, at St. Mikael’s too. The very monument to the heartbreak, shame, and trauma in Cain’s soul.

  This was the crux, he realized. This was the beginning of what one might call the crescendo of the entire saga.

  “I saw him,” Levi said, before he realized the words had even formed on his tongue, and then he frowned at himself for speaking without thought. Eliott didn’t understand, though. Levi sighed, running a hand through his hair. He looked at Eliott grimly, his mouth bitten into a thin line. He had to say it. Like a man in the confessional with a priest, he had no other choice if he wanted peace inside. He had to say the words aloud. “Three years ago, when Quinton and the others ambushed the Dietrich house, I saw Cain, in Lovers’ Lane. I’d wanted to do something to intervene, but I had no spine.”

  “Bullshit!” Eliott snapped.

  A few old men reading the paper over luncheon glanced over from their table. Eliott waved an apologetic hand.

  “I didn’t,” Levi insisted. “I had no mind of my own then. Quinton and BLACK told me about their plan, and from that moment I could have done something to stop it, but I didn’t. I sat there, and they went out and killed so many people and then delivered an innocent to the devil’s playground.”

  Eliott looked at him as if he couldn’t grasp the gravity of it all. Levi didn’t blame him. He licked his lips. “It was so bloody because of me,” he husked, and although it ached so terribly to know this, and worse yet to admit it openly, it was almost too easy to wear a mask of nonchalance. It always was. Was that a bad thing?

  “It’ll be bloodier if you don’t come back with me,” Eliott urged, and the look on his face startled Levi. There was a dark sort of understanding there in his eyes, the faint appearance of pride and doom like a man on his way to war. It chilled Levi, and mildly comforted him at the same time.

  Eliott shrugged idly, glancing out the window as if it were too hard to look in Levi’s eyes anymore. He went on, quietly. “It’s going to be far bloodier if you don’t come back with me and try to dissuade the Earl. You’re his friend, after all. At least that’s what everyone’s been saying.”

  There was a moment of silence between them in which Levi knew that Eliott understood the depth of his entanglement with the Earl Dietrich. And there was no condemnation, and no ignominy, and no judgment. Levi sighed. He didn’t deserve somebody like Eliott. He’d never asked for his support and companionship, and he did nothing to reciprocate it anyway. He wished Eliott would stop handing it out so openly, because it would never be treated for its real worth.

  “You didn’t bring me more cigarettes?” Levi prompted, smirking faintly at Eliott’s chagrin.

  “No….” Eliott chuckled meekly, a tired and defeated laugh. “You have to come back to New London for them.”

  SCENE SEVEN

  THE WHOLE city was talking about it, as they talked of everything, and they closed up their shutters that night because when the fray began, they needed to be inside or they’d be in danger.

  Even petty gangs retreated, afraid to impose upon this rumored showdown. They didn’t want to be involved—they were just innocent civilians, after all, and this was a fight between the Earl himself and the noble Ruslaniv gang. But they closed themselves up with a guilty curiosity because the air was volatile that night, and everybody knew why.

  Within St. Mikael’s, hardly a particle of dust stirred for the stillness.

  St. Mikael’s was a beautiful church. Its Elizabethan roots were clear to see. Gables and spires and smooth stone delivered a chilling beauty. As a winter rainstorm brewed overhead, as trite as nature could be at times, Cain wandered between the gleaming, wondrously rich woodwork and stalwart Flemish chairs in the sanctuary of St. Mikael’s. There was the golden altar where the baptismal font sat, the forest of stumpy red candles, and the classical pediment and balconies up high where even a whispered breath echoed back down upon him.

  Indelibly, intrinsically Eastern it was inside, almost gypsy with its iconostasis stacked neatly below the crucifix. The crucifix peered down at Cain sorrowfully. Was it wrong that he felt no regret and no apprehension, looking into the molded face of Christ painted with blood and a crown of thorns? Was it wrong that he felt strangely peaceful, strangely protected in this place, which smelled of old burnt-out tapers and melting wax as all the fat candles flickered? Incense and wine and the timeless, familiar scent of old parchment, choir books, dust, and age, and moisture in the rafters.

  Below these beautiful wooden floors, he’d been a prisoner for almost a year. He’d been corrupted. He’d lost two kinds of innocence and gained all the self-possession in the world, and wasn’t that something? It certainly was. It was a harrowing sort of analogy, wasn’t it? Here, up above, the breathtakingly spiritual with all the saints’ faces like guardian ghosts, and down below—not on ground level, no, but farther down, secreted below the streets of New London—had been a labyrinth of wicked chambers like the seven circles of hell.

  That was something. That parallel to heaven and earth and hell that was this church, St. Mikael’s.

  In the silence, Cain imagined he could hear a choir. Stationed at all the most relevant corners of the sanctuary were the collection of gunslingers he’d brought with him to confront BLACK. Onyx, Devi, Warren, and Hans, their names were. They each possessed uniquely extensive criminal backgrounds. They were perfect to hire for the night. His family’s security was unneeded.

  “It’s all a rumor,” Cain had told his uncle earlier, curtly, unable to look at Bradley’s face without becoming enraged. “Whatever you heard about me ‘calling out’ the Ruslanivs is all rumor. I didn’t know we were operating by gossip now, Uncle. Why don’t you have some more scotch?”

  That had quieted him, and Cain’s weapons belt and guns had chattered as he’d quietly made his way down over the edge of his balcony, cold fingers dirtied by the lattice and vines. Bundled up against the night, surely he looked as rugged as he ever had, and he met with the petty fighters he’d hired just outside the Dietrich estate so they could make their way to St. Mikael’s, that wicked, wicked place.

  Cain stood with hands clasped behind his back, squinting up at the Theotokos that sat among all the glittering candles in the dark of the church. The doors had been unlocked. They were always unlocked. And why not?

  Cain studied the icon with an unswaying concentration just short of a trance, head tipped to one side. The flecks of gold in the sad religious painting glinted in the flickering light, and Cain was almost moved by it, except that he hated it for its evocative beauty and luster because it belonged to Ruslanivs.

  There was a small sound from above, up in one of the galleries. It was a light scuffle—the sound of a gun being drawn, the scrape of movement.

  Cain backed up to see the left balcony. His hand shot for his revolver, and he squinted though the dim light of the sleeping church, but when he felt the recognition click, he wasn’t really shocked deeply. He’d only be
en hoping for as much as he found anyway.

  The whites of Levi’s eyes glinted in the darkness where he crouched, the perfect gunslinger, up in the gallery. Devi had caught him coming in through the painted-glass window there, thus the sounds of the gun. Cain smiled faintly. His heart fluttered, and a sense of relief did not seem strange to him, if only because it was warped and distorted by the madness of resolution. This was what he’d wanted. Levi.

  Cain drew his revolver, leveling it with what he could see of Levi in the upper shadows of the sanctuary. Devi kept his pistol trained on Levi’s lovely head. Levi looked like a ghost tonight, all loose linen shirt and no regalia. Just a broken man. God, his hair was even uncombed, a loose and wild blond mane breaking into curls at the tips. Rough-and-tumble looked delicious on him, as always.

  “Are you alone?” Cain called up from the first floor, confident Levi would answer truthfully.

  “Yes” came Levi’s reply.

  Ah, that cool, familiar timbre. Cain glanced over at Hans and Warren. One lingered near the confessional booths and the other near the side doors.

  “Patrol the outside,” Cain ordered quietly, gesturing with a brief tip of the chin. “All of you. Let me talk to this mutt myself, and whatever you do, don’t come inside. It’s fine.”

  The church fell still again. These men Cain had hired were professionals. They knew how to patrol a building, and they were, after all, receiving handsome remuneration.

  Cain moved up the steps near the altar, standing there below the left gallery. He kept his Rapier aimed, out of practice, and he looked up at Levi imploringly where he danced through the shadows, mirroring Cain’s movements. He was like a raven, flitting about in the dark. Or a spirit, a devil. His grace and elegance was unsettling at times, as it was then, his face a perfect mask of acceptance as he stared at Cain behind his own gun. Was this what a lovers’ quarrel between trained fighters was like? There was something romantic about the tension, sensual in a very primal way.

  With the fearlessness of an acrobat at a circus, Levi hoisted himself up and over the gallery balcony and leapt down to stand near the altar with Cain.

  Cain’s heart gave a sickening lurch. He wasn’t afraid of Levi. He was afraid of himself. He was afraid of the way he lowered his gun—the way he trusted this Ruslaniv in front of him—and he was afraid that the emotion that worked through him at seeing Levi again after his banishment would interfere with the steady, cold resolve about this night he’d had for the last few days.

  Footsteps, and then Levi touched his face, and suddenly Cain wasn’t ruthless anymore, he was a mess of pain and love that came together into one lovely ache. Maybe he uttered a tiny strangled sound of defeat. He lowered his gun and shrank forward, resting his head against Levi’s chest. Again he thought he could hear the echo of a choir, ghost voices in the parish, but it was just a whispering memory of liturgies from his childhood.

  Levi smelled like cigarettes and dirt, and the cold, sweet metal of his hidden weapons. He lifted a hand. Cain tensed, but Levi just put a palm to the back of his head, protectively, soothingly, and Cain stared at the Theotokos with his ear to Levi’s shoulder. He could hear Levi’s heartbeat and his breath.

  “So is this an ambush, or is it just a battle?” Levi prompted.

  He spoke so respectfully, so evenly, picking through Cain’s strategies in a soft voice as if the church truly deserved his veneration. But it did, it did, the beauty of it did, not the corruption of it, and above all its depravity, it was still beautiful.

  “I think you know what it is.” Cain’s fingers twitched on his gun. “Where were you hiding, Levi?”

  “I wasn’t hiding. You know very well I wasn’t hiding. I was sent away.”

  “I faced it like a man, and you ran away, leaving me alone with it all!”

  “That pride of yours will be your downfall.”

  “Levi, I knew you’d come if I did this.”

  “Again I beg, what are you planning this night?”

  Cain tried to pull away. He didn’t mean to sound cold and pitiless, but that was what he was. That was what he felt, at least. He shrugged idly beneath Levi’s hands, and in the otherworldly silence of the St. Mikael’s sanctuary, his voice was cool and composed as he explained. “I’m going to kill them all.”

  Levi’s mouth crashed into his, and at first Cain backed away, startled, but then Levi chased his kiss again. He held him crushingly tight to his chest, there below the doleful face of the Christ, the tall crucifix above the altar whose molded face seemed to be full of pity now. The candles danced, and the echoes of gunmetal as Cain struggled in Levi’s grip bounced off all the eaves and resounded back to them.

  The kisses were rough, not out of lust but out of desperation. Cain didn’t know what to do with his revolver. He couldn’t put it away. He’d hear if the petty gang was apprehending somebody outside the little church, though. He was safe for now. So as they backed into one of the chairs near the altar and Levi sat down heavily, fingers curled in Cain’s lapels to prevent interruption of the kiss, Cain laid his Rapier down on the communion table and climbed onto Levi’s lap, reciprocating the affection with just as much violent fervor.

  It hurt to kiss Levi. It hurt his lips, because the kisses were hard. It hurt his pride, because this wasn’t what he’d intended for tonight. It hurt his heart in a grand way, because it was Levi, oh, it was Levi after so long. And it hurt his soul, because the face of the Christ on the crucifix above them stared down in disappointment, and the tristful face of the Virgin peered at them with that omniscient sorrow of hers, and Cain dreaded each passing second for fear a gunshot would sound to alert him of the presence of BLACK. They were coming, after all. It was inevitable. These pure moments were few.

  Cain was a sinful, sinful, errant man, dirty and depraved and debauched and blasphemous. Levi yanked the Dietrich coat from his shoulders and tossed it aside, running his hands possessively up and down Cain’s back as if he’d never before felt him in his life and would never again be able to.

  There was a terrible ache in Cain’s chest that felt like hope and despair commingling together, something wholly intimate and indescribable. It was a wretched feeling, one he didn’t feel equipped to handle. It left him trembling as Levi’s mouth trailed warm kisses down his neck and his hands spread across Cain’s thighs covetously. Despite the rush, or perhaps because of it, Cain thought that if they kept on like this, if they had enough time, he would very well give himself to Levi right there below the mournful painted eyes of the statue of Christ and the other effigies.

  It occurred to Cain suddenly, in one cold, clear current of thought, that this could perchance be a dire distraction.

  It pained him to jump off Levi’s lap, but that was what he did. It pained him to whip up his revolver again and look over the top of it at Levi, but he did. He knocked down a candle, thankfully unlit.

  The gun trembled in his shaking hands. He was so torn between glaring and sinking to his knees. His face twisted with it. Did he look monstrous?

  “Where are they?” he barked, scowling at Levi. His heart ached.

  “Who?” Levi husked, innocently enough, but there was a sudden shadow on his face. His eyes hardened into a simple dark stare that expressed nothing but the reflection of dancing candlelight. His mouth drew in a tight line, and he sat far too casually there, arms propped on the chairs beside him and legs crossed.

  “BLACK!” Cain hissed, gesturing with his gun.

  Levi didn’t seem all too worried with it pointed his way, except for a subtle spark in his eyes as they followed the revolver’s every twitch. “I don’t know where they are,” he said slowly, carefully, as if speaking to an unpredictable child in the midst of a tantrum. “I came here alone.”

  “How did you hear of all this, then?”

  “You’ll never trust me, will you, Cain? Not all the love in the world could ever make you trust me.”

  “How did you hear of it, Levi?”

  Levi regarded
him coldly as if he was really going to refuse to answer, and then he licked his lips, stirred stiffly, and confessed, “Eliott came to Yekaterinburg and begged me to come reason with you.”

  “So this is all a ruse,” Cain surmised, laughing loudly in disbelief.

  Levi was immediately offended. He stood up, towering over Cain, unafraid of his weapon anymore. Cain quieted in an instant.

  “I was hoping,” Levi spat, looking nothing but resolve incarnate now, “that my disclosure of Eliott begging me to come back would convince you of BLACK’s inability to contend against you. I’m sorry, not their inability, as we’re all the best gunslingers you’ll ever fight, but their incapacity to contend against you. They don’t know the depth of your grudge as I do. They don’t shoulder the guilt of it as I do. They’re ignorant of it, don’t you see? And Eliott risked his integrity, his freedom, to beg me to come back to reason with you. If that doesn’t show you at least a glimmer of BLACK’s true colors, I don’t know what will!”

  Levi’s voice echoed in the church. A silence fell, thin and dangerous. Cain heard only his heart thundering in his ears, and the pop of a candlewick or two as the crucifix grimaced at him. His skin crawled. He shook. He felt as if he might explode in a vicious outburst that he couldn’t control, and he felt so tiny and callow beneath the Christ’s painted eyes, he lifted his Rapier and shot its effigy face.

  Plaster rained down on all the little candles, and immediately after blowing the face of Christ to pieces, Cain understood he was damned.

  He was broken inside, and demented, and unfixable, and he was irretrievably damned. He’d never imagined he’d feel such regret for shooting the face of a damn statue, but it was so beautiful, so placidly sad, and he was damned. They were all damned.

  Levi looked a little panicked by Cain’s sudden fire. He reached out. Cain didn’t avoid his touch. He let Levi draw him close and press a kiss to his temple then whisper, “This hell needs to end.”

  There was no moment of resolution there. There was no moment of peace in the tumult that seemed to hold every one of them in its grip. There was love, of course, but it was part of that maelstrom.