Rooks and Romanticide (34 page)

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.

 

 

L
EVI
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 provided 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.”

Cain moved against his leg. Perhaps it was because Levi was accustomed to the smell of gunpowder and the ringing in his ears, the almost merry jingle of ammunition as revolvers and pistols were reloaded, but he thought that the warmth and twitch of Cain's body was very tempting, and here, below the painting and the candles, he could take Cain again and again right on the velvet prayer stools. What a creature he had become, what a monster of a man, to think something like that during a gunfight! Cold metal and murderous intent had become normal to him, then.

Levi looked at Cain again, the brutal and terrifying shadows of his icy gray eyes. There was no meticulous Earl here, just a man imprisoned by his own dark, cold desperation, shooting a gun with exquisite aim. He looked innocent and savage all at once—no elegance, only lethal intent. Levi wanted to smile.

Yes, there was a parallel here, wasn't there? This gunfight between them was like the conflict of their souls, the internal war between right and wrong and death and salvation. Because Levi loved the monstrous, homicidal look on Cain's face and the way his body twitched with the gunshots. He loved it. He desired it in a desperate, carnal, primal way. He was hungry for it. Ravenous.
Sex
.

The Blond One was laughing again, a maniacal laugh. It echoed around the ruined sanctuary. Levi wanted to hit him for it. He tried to look around, to gauge where everyone was. How was this fray supposed to end? Were they going to run out of bullets and come to an impasse, where nobody knew what to do next? Would BLACK not be satisfied until Levi did something drastic and regrettable?

Two loud shots shattered the eerie silence between firing. One hit the icon of the Theotokos again, scraping across the gold leaf of the Virgin's face. The second didn't seem to hit anything, but Cain went tumbling into the Flemish stand with all the prayer candles, and the most frightening part of it was that he didn't make a sound.

Cain
.

What happened next was something of a blur. Levi sprang to his feet, acting wholly on impulse, and by the time he blinked to clear his vision and understood that he had done something, his ears rang and he watched in the upper gallery as Claude fell over the balustrade and hit the sanctuary floor, his face and neck a simple smear of dark crimson red.

And Levi still had his gun aimed, and he'd fired the bullet that had blazed right through Claude's throat and its gushing arteries, because Claude had climbed above like a sniper.

The Blond One's cries of distress sounded to Levi as if they came from underwater, muffled and far away. The Blond One—no, he deserved to be known by name. Spider.
Petyr
….

Levi watched, in a state of dumb confusion, while the world moved a little too fast for him to keep up. Petyr stumbled up the altar steps, dropping his gun and falling to his knees near Claude, whose glasses had bent in his fall from the balcony. His hands were still twitching, and Petyr held one tightly, bawling so hard his scrawny body shook, and it was hard to think of him as a gunslinger, for at that moment he seemed just a broken soul.

Tempt not a desperate man.

Suddenly Levi's cousin William was there next to Petyr and Claude, his mouth moving, but Levi didn't hear a word. Will checked Claude's pulse. Petyr rocked to and fro, the very image of agony. And wasn't there a long-running joke between them all, that Petyr and Claude were lovers? How terrible, then! Oh, well. That was life. And Claude had shot Cain, after all.

Nobody was shooting anymore. The tension in the air had soured. The gunfight was over. Levi had shot Claude in the face, or the throat—somewhere in that fatal vicinity. Blood had probably spattered in the gallery like it pooled on the altar floor.

Tempt not a desperate man.

In one sudden dizzying rush of clarity that left his ears ringing again, everything swung back into focus, and Levi turned to Cain and the prayer corner.

Cain's hair was tousled and his face drawn tight. He leaned against the candle stand with his hair falling in his face and his arms limp in his lap, breathing with great labor. He seemed to sense Levi's eyes and lifted his hands slowly, pale fingers shaking. Levi had to gather willpower to wrench his gaze from the awful blooming
red
across Cain's left shoulder and throat.

Cain had dropped his revolver. Levi kicked it aside, hearing BLACK as they became panicked with Claude's gory demise. Petyr screamed and screamed. Levi heard him kick something over as they tried to calm him. Levi crouched on his haunches and grabbed Cain's hands, pressing them to his face to let Cain know he was there. Cain's eyes flashed, so alive and bright still. Oh God, he was going to suffer—