Rooks and Romanticide (33 page)

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.

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.