by J. I. Radke
As if in answer to the gunshot Cain had fired at the face of the crucifix, which now lay scattered about the altar, another round of gunshots came in response from outside St. Mikael’s.
BLACK had finally arrived.
The petty men he’d hired knew they were to let BLACK into St. Mikael’s, and that they did. Cain and Levi stood patiently in the flickering light beneath the ruined crucifix as if waiting to start a diabolical mass. They must have looked like evil angels to the Ruslaniv gang.
BLACK slipped in tentatively, weapons drawn. They drifted in and out of the shadows, slants of light skipping over them. They were wonderfully trained, but their attitudes were irreparable.
The light danced. Cain felt like he could recognize them all: the one with red hair like a lion’s mane, whom Levi called Eliott in a faint whisper as he walked in; the lady, voluptuous and snarling; two with neatly clipped dark hair; one with a head of golden hair. They came bearing a rotten proud audacity. Seeing them brought Cain’s vicious determination and loyalty to the forefront, that begrudging, smoldering hatred he’d stoked for so long under the guise of revenge.
“Good evening, BLACK,” Cain said kindly enough, except he spit out the name of their gang like it was poison.
“Rook!” the lady cried suddenly, sounding surprised as she boldly approached the altar.
Cain’s hand tightened on his gun. His body tensed. The girl only gestured with her chin, snarling at Levi.
“What are you doing here? I thought you’d been told to flit away!”
“Witch,” Levi greeted, and Cain realized with a surge of disgust that they had code names for each other. How cute. “‘Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary…’ Well, you catch my drift.”
The woman snorted. One of the men with glasses cocked his gun, ready to fight already. Everyone seemed to bristle when this one spoke, voice clear and concise. “I’m tearing up at this reunion, but can we just get to what you want, Earl? Don’t waste our time.”
“Excuse me,” Levi hissed, hopping down the steps of the altar to stand between Cain and BLACK. “I think you’re forgetting who is leader, Snake. Unless, of course, you’ve all decided I’m no longer sound enough, but he is?”
“That’s not it,” Eliott said. “He just feels freer to be an asshole in your absence.”
“Shut up, Lion!” the Blond One hissed. He hardly looked older than Cain, a crazy vigor about his youthful face. Cain felt like he recognized him, a shivering but inhibited hunch. He knew him, and not from that night at Brackham’s. No, before that. “Nobody cares what you think!”
Christ, they weren’t in any condition to be a gang. They hated each other. Cain was in awe of this. He laughed incredulously and cut through their paltry disagreements, crying out, “Do you know what happened in the year after my parents were killed?”
They all quieted. The death of the former Earl and Lady Dietrich was a common enough history, especially to them. Levi looked absolutely terrified of what Cain might say next, and Cain was satisfied by that.
In the strange way of gangsters, it was time for wits and words to be exchanged without the fear of a gun going off, because that would err against the tacit, internal code of the gunman’s honor. Cain paced beneath the altar, kicking some scattered plaster around. He stopped, momentarily stricken by the sight of Christ’s mournful eye in a chunk on the floor. He picked it up and stared at it, then put it respectfully by the few glowing candles.
“My parents died,” he announced. BLACK was listening to him with an eerie sense of respect—patient, or objective at the very least. Overhead, St. Mikael’s bells should have tolled for the hour, but the rector and bellkeeper had been chased out earlier. Cain graced all the others in the sanctuary, scattered among the pews, with a cold gaze. He continued, “I found them in Lovers’ Lane. And then your old friend Oberon took me and gave me to Father Kelvin, here below this very church.”
The name Oberon seemed to stir some sort of emotion in nearly all of them. Cain didn’t plan on giving a long heartfelt story about the tragedies these dogs had bestowed upon him, but he wanted to shake each member of BLACK to the core before he killed them. It was an outlet for the turmoil swirling so thick inside his chest, and it felt good to cut the words out effectively.
Cain shook his head, frowning in a travesty of disbelief and sadness. However forthright, whether they cared or not, he couldn’t help but be coldly dramatic about it. It felt so good to be a few bullets away from revenge.
“I never told anyone about what happened to me at the hands of Kelvin. But you all know, don’t you? You know about all the boys and girls, the little lambs brought to slaughter in that putrid hell. A circus! Ha! Leave it to you Ruslanivs to fail in the creation of sin too. But where did the kids go afterward? They certainly aren’t below us now, are they? Oh, are they grown-up prostitutes now? Do they run their own businesses? No, I’m sure they were all sent away with Father Kelvin too. Weren’t they?”
Cain uttered a resentful laugh. The mismatched members of BLACK stared at him. “No,” he snarled in an icy tone, “I’ll never alert the authorities of what happened here below St. Mikael’s. Why further tarnish my pride that way? No, nobody ever asked me. And either way, I refuse to talk about it. All anyone needs to know—and all, indeed, anyone does know—is that from those long hellish months, I emerged even more determined to find my parents’ murderers and kill them. And do you know where that led me, my friends?”
Levi stood with a grave sort of respect near the balustrade of the altar. BLACK showed looks of fury and impatience, of shock and fault on their faces, and Cain stood close to the altar where the crucifix hung, just in case he had to dodge from a spray of bullets.
He longed to enrage BLACK. He longed to hurt them before he slaughtered them.
“Somehow looking for the culprits led me to St. Mikael’s again, and eventually to BLACK. Your Lord Ruslaniv is very good at covering mistakes. Do you know how long it took me to finally confirm that the BLACK who kidnapped me was the BLACK who killed my parents? Oh, I always knew, deep down, but I can’t exact revenge on hunches, you see.”
Eliott burst forward, lowering his weapon. He looked utterly distraught. Cain followed him with his Rapier out of reaction, but Eliott didn’t look in the least dangerous.
“Are you listening to yourself?” Elliot cried, laughing for all the disbelief written across his face. “You just admitted that the BLACK you want isn’t here!” He turned, beseeching Levi now. “Levi, I thought you were going to explain that to him!”
Levi was unyielding and inscrutably silent. Eliott looked panicked. The rest of BLACK appeared perplexed. Cain was confused and a little intrigued, but he didn’t care. His heart pounded. He had BLACK before him.
He raised his voice, before anyone else could interrupt. “I’m giving you an option tonight, BLACK. Kill me now if you truly want to win this feud between our families, or accept conquest and kiss my feet before I kill you and burn your bodies with St. Mikael’s tonight!”
His voice cracked and wavered. His words echoed.
They should have been shooting by now. Cain’s defiance, his mad threats—he was brazen and careless with his words and certainly the BLACK Levi had trained with could have taken him out long ago. It was five against one, was it not?
Ah, but they were in disrepair.
BLACK had become their own downfall.
Or maybe it was that they still respected Levi’s ultimate guidance beyond their own instincts or boiling pride. BLACK was not shooting at Cain, and Cain was not shooting at BLACK. It hit Cain then that whether or not BLACK sided with Levi, whether or not they understood what was really going on here, not a single soul—not even Cain himself—wanted to pull the trigger until Levi said it was all right. How painfully honorable.
And suddenly there was chaos in the sanctuary.
“Levi, you were supposed to tell him!”
“I didn’t have a chance to say it again—”
“Collusion! There’s collusion between the Rook and the Lion!”
“Shut the fuck up, Spider—”
“BLACK was involved with it? BLACK did it?”
So at least one of them hadn’t known about Oberon and Quinton and the others. Cain laughed wickedly, tickled by this. He looked at the lady gunslinger, who seemed particularly distressed, and before he even realized he was capable of such spite, he said tenderly, “It’s really a shame that Oberon is dead now. I could always tell he didn’t like Father Kelvin or the whole plan, and he was so kind to me while I worked below this church. He was so very kind, and a surprisingly good fuck too.”
The woman—had Levi called her Witch?—sprang forward, shrieking something in that harsh gypsy slang as she whipped out two ornate revolvers, which she aimed at Cain recklessly. Levi dived over and stopped her with an outstretched arm, but she was too hysterical to fire. She just continued to scream.
Suddenly they all spoke rapidly in that foreign tongue—Eliott, the Witch, Levi, the others—that familiarly coarse but beguiling clip, and Cain fought a cringe. He saw Father Kelvin’s again, the gross Eastern decadence, the sound of everyone shouting in that ascetic language, the violent stutter of gunshots, and the way it felt to run away and leave those things as echoes. But here they were again, swirling about him, and for a moment Cain found it very difficult to breathe. The red-haired one’s voice carried.
“Levi, you were supposed to explain to him that it was Quinton and you couldn’t stop him!”
Cain cocked his gun and stormed to the edge of the altar, aiming at Eliott. His theatrics had blinded his judgment, and it came back to him, in one shuddering rush. “You killed my aunt!” he howled, through all the other strained voices. “You killed Aunt Ophelia!”
Eliott stared with wide eyes, but there was no terror in his face, just a gunslinger’s critical thinking and apprehension. His eyes were bright and his face stony. He stood unmoving as if daring Cain to shoot. Cain couldn’t.
The Blond One they’d called Spider hopped up on a pew, cutting through all the other voices with a manic laugh. “Wrong, Earl! I’m the one who shot those fatal bullets! I shot the Lady, and did you know that I remember her from when we were younger and I came to your manor to play?”
Cain uttered a helpless growl, feeling another sharp stab of betrayal in his chest. Yes. That was where he knew the Blond One. Petyr Byron. He was Petyr Byron!
Cain threw his fist against Levi where he stood with his arm tight around the Witch. “You stole my friend!” he screeched.
“He stole your friend!” The Blond One danced around on the pew, waving his guns.
“You killed Aunt Ophelia!” Cain spun on his heel, mayhem bursting inside him. The call to action pulsed through him, cold and fierce. He shot at Petyr—Spider—but he didn’t hit him. Petyr dropped off the pew and crouched behind it, ready to fire back. Levi began speaking to him in that rapid foreign dialect again, and Petyr began to argue back. It seemed like a vicious disagreement.
Everyone was shouting again, an incomprehensible whirlwind of voices—screams, hisses, echoing, that invisible choir that warbled in the back of Cain’s head.
Cain felt cold. There was chaos inside him and commotion in the sanctuary, but a single strand of desperate clarity pierced the confusion. A chill zipped through him. He didn’t care, he didn’t care, he wanted to see them dead. Dead like his parents, dead like Aunt Ophelia, dead like his soul.
He pointed his gun at the red-haired one, the one named Eliott, the one who’d told him he was attacking the wrong group—and then there came the familiar, chilling sound of a trigger being cocked, and it was very close to his ear.
Cain’s eyes widened.
The muzzle of the ROOK was against his temple, and his heart gave a sickening thud. The entire sanctuary went quiet. All eyes fell upon them there at the front of the pews. Cain drew a wavering breath, looking up.
Levi stood with his gun to Cain’s head. In the candlelight, Levi looked as young and tortured and sad as the face of the Christ before Cain had shot it.
Tears stung the backs of Cain’s eyes, emotion thickening in his throat. His breath came in cold bursts, panicked and full of blind instinct.
“So this is how it will end, then?” Cain whispered. He looked up at Levi, brow knotting as his vision doubled, and then trebled. Beautiful Levi, his handsome face and his dark depthless eyes that expressed nothing but love sometimes, and how was that even possible? How was it possible for a trained killer to be so full of unquestioning love?
Funny how he thought about that now, with Levi’s gun to his head a second time.
SCENE EIGHT
LEVI KNEW his men and comrades.
He could tell by the looks in his comrades’ eyes, shining bright and ruthless.
His comrades…. His family, and his friends. He was certain—he would bet money—that outside St. Mikael’s, as the night deepened and the brumal winds swirled, the petty shooters Cain had hired were dead, unconscious, or struggling in the ice and snow, choking on lead. No, this night never had a chance to end well. From the start it had been a death wish, and a death wish alone.
Within the warmth of St. Mikael’s, as the candles flickered, the words on his gun looked so tragic next to Cain’s beautiful face, that dark hair and those pale gray eyes.
“As the head of BLACK, I should kill you.” Levi spoke slowly and evenly, words carefully measured, although his heart was pounding at such a clip he thought it might burst. He was surprised his hands didn’t quake. Ah, the cold emotionlessness ingrained in him paid off at times, didn’t it? “I’ve said it before—it is very much like you to want to die by the hands of your only real friend.”
Cain looked in complete shock. Levi could sympathize. He wondered what was running through the minds of his team. What did BLACK think, truly, now that so many revelations had been unearthed? What did they think of Levi’s merits as a leader, seeing him with his gun to Cain’s head? What did they think of his secret involvement with the former BLACK? About his involvement with the Earl Dietrich? Did they think he’d shoot Cain here, now, closing the grueling chapter of irony that his brother had slain the former earl, and tonight BLACK might again watch the son of Lord Ruslaniv murder the head of the Dietrichs? Was that what they were thinking?
Surely, by the look in the Blond One’s mad eyes, the cold impatience on Claude’s face, the tragic uneasiness of Eliott and Will, the panting confusion of the Witch as she shifted to and fro and looked utterly torn between crying and screaming with everything that had been said. She had been so close to Oberon. Her heart must have been ripped to pieces discovering his hand in the catastrophe of two years ago and his deplorable actions with Father Kelvin.
“Tempt not a desperate man…,” Cain whispered, breathlessly, and Levi bristled. The moment in which Cain met his eyes again with such tenderness felt like eternities of raw beauty, but it was short-lived. There was but a brief rustle of linen as Cain shifted his aim and fired once in the Blond One’s direction.
It just barely missed Petyr, biting slivers of wood from the pew above the stiff velvet upholstery. Levi had fought with Petyr enough times to know exactly what would happen next, and as if in a waltz with death itself, Levi hooked an arm around Cain’s neck and spun him along, evading the bullets as Petyr’s gun went off.
Levi fired back, removing ROOK from Cain’s temple. He shot to scare the Blond One, but the Blond One just scowled at him from between the pews, like a wild animal.
Those gunshots were a crux. The discordant staccatos and deafening pops meant the beginning of the end, and Levi thought, Indeed, tempt not a desperate man….
The real showdown started then.
Light reflected off the barrel of his gun as Cain aimed for the Witch. She shrank into the shadows, firing a round toward the altar. With his arm around Cain’s neck, Levi staggered back and sank down into the corner that cradled the Theotokos and its prayer candles, and the little alcove pr
ovided a bit of protection as they wriggled into the dark. Minds fell to deeper instincts, and the tension snapped.
It was a conversation in bullets, simple enough. They ricocheted. They chipped the beautiful ceiling and woodwork, the Doric columns, and organ case. Candles went tumbling. The organ played eerie notes as if possessed, as somebody shot into it by accident and hit the strings inside. All the old sixteenth-century fixtures of the parish were going to be destroyed, and the lingering smell of altar incense mixed with the stench of gunpowder.
Below the prayer candles and icon, Cain whispered, “Why, Levi, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were protecting me.”
“You’re mad!” Levi seethed in his ear. “You’re absolutely mad! There’s a window in the eastern gallery we can escape through, and we can try this again.”
“I am not signing a pact with you.”
“Cain, for the love of God—”
“I need release from this hatred, Levi!”
Levi didn’t shoot. His body was stiff and cold with urgency, but he hardly thought of it. There was a brief pause in fire. BLACK knew he had Cain in his grasp, and they weren’t going to shoot for fear of harming their leader. Ah, how deeply loyalty ran, even when they thought him an unfit commander. But really, what was going to happen now? Were they going to waste all their ammunition in scare tactics or would the night end in blood? BLACK had not expected to see Levi tonight. It had completely thwarted their plans to kill. Perhaps the same went for Cain. If that wasn’t the case, surely someone would have been dead by now.
Levi looked up at the painting of the Virgin Mary and the baby Christ, and he thought about Cain shooting the face of the crucifix as a bullet grazed the surface of the Theotokos, all the candles flickering as it zoomed by. All right, so they weren’t going to shoot at them for fear of hitting him, but that shot had been fired as if to say “Come on, then, out with the Earl.”
