As usual, thank you so much to each and every one of you who has taken the time to read along with my story. You honor me with your time and attention. Thank you Atreyu429 for your grammatical corrections, tips and honest opinion on the development of the story so far and as usual Stunt, you are a saint. Thank you for reaching out, I always love to read your words. The story got to you, didn't it?

Hold on tight, there is still much to write and read my friends!

-Old Night

-0-

The sight of Tomas made Nikita feel distantly sick. He'd known the young man since he was a boy and the sight of him now had a perverse quality to it. A feeling of wrongness that he couldn't shake away or even begin to figure out how to fix.

He lay in his bed, his abdomen swollen just past the point of acceptable normality. Like he had taken an enormous breath that his chest refused to release. Instead he drew shallow, little moaning breaths as he fought to exhale. The breathing of the agonized and the dying.

"How did this happen?"

Nikita turned to his younger brother.

Running his hands through his hair, James fastidiously scratched his scalp out of anxiousness.

"How did this happen?" he repeated. His speech was clipped and angry.

The man stepped forward and brought up his little brother's chin to look up at him once again.

James looked like he'd been mauled by a panther.

Or more likely a ghoul, if the deep bitemark on his cheek was anything to judge by.

He and his friends bore the same kind of wounds and abrasions with only Stanislav being relatively unscathed save for a little bruise on his right hand's knuckles. Tomas had gotten the worst of it by far however, two black eyes with a split lip and a crushed nose. Its cartilage was bent at a thirty degree angle and the flesh around it was split open and pulped. Nikita imagined a long knife's pommel slamming across his face.

Over and over again.

How the little cut had come to the abdomen he could only guess. Initially the bandages gave him the impression of a gunshot wound but that hadn't been it. This wound looked ruddy and unpleasant as though it had been bandaged by unexperienced hands trying to improvise rather than fix. The incision itself had been cauterized several times with superficial burns Nikita had no problem imagining came from a spoon heated hot red by a lighter.

"It was the Exile. He came at us, we defended ourselves."

The elder brother rubbed his mouth out of nerves as anger began to tickle the tips of his fingers. He gestured for James to stand and then backhanded him as hard as he could across his wounded cheek.

"Don't you dare fucking lie to me, brother! How did this happen?! Gods help you if you lie to me again, when my hand flies it'll do so with a closed fist."

James squelched a scream when his hands went to the side of his face. The pain was astounding, he could hear his heartbeat in his head. His hands came away with fresh blood.

"Why are you giving the benefit of the doubt to a degenerate and a traitor? He did this to me and he did that to Tomas!"

"Because the Exile didn't give a shit about you and he doesn't care what you think. Why would he fight you?'

"I confronted him after his Turian bitch assaulted Alexandra after she went to check up on him! He lost it and hit me."

"Why would Alexandra go check up on him? His birthstone is broken."

"Because whatever he is now, he is still human. She was concerned about what the turians were doing to him."

"That's not how it works. He is dead to us in name and deed. We do nothing to him because he does not exist."

James spat on the ground and his face contorted in swollen pain.

"And you expect me to believe you and the boys went to confront the Exile without weapons?"

"We were armed. Brother why are you asking me these things?"

"Why were you armed on this particular night?"

"Because we knew he was."

"So Alexandra decided that instead of bringing up the assault to Elder Luxemn or her father she would be best served if she brought it up to you? And you decided it would be prudent to arm yourselves before taking the law into your own hands? And where is Alexandra by the way?"

"I don't know."

Nikita stepped away as his tapping foot competed with Tomas' labored breaths for the most abrasive sound in the still room. The older brother shook his head as a quiet dread began to churn his guts and make him sick. Like a sunburn being rubbed raw by a nagging finger he felt the words and questions bubble up to his mouth. He didn't like the taste of them or the look on James' face as he'd questioned him. His little brother was keeping the truth from him. Alexandra had a habit of running when she was in trouble, her absence spoke volumes.

"Did you set out to murder the Exile?"

James' eyes flickered to his brother's hand, a closed fist. He bit his purple lip and said nothing.

"Am I dying?"

Both brothers looked at Tomas' supine form as his eyes listlessly stared at the ceiling.

"No." said James without conviction.

The older brother stepped by and sat at the edge of the man's bed.

"Yes." he said.

"Tomas, you must tell me what happened."

James turned away and stared at the corner of the room, he didn't want to hear or see anymore.

"We went to find the Exile after Alex told us what happened. We followed him to Calo Park, all the way up to the bench behind the hill."

"Who drew first?"

"James."

"Is he dead?"

The younger brother turned venomously and sneered.

"Oh yes. He is dead."

"Then where is he?!" bellowed Nikita hard enough that he made both younger men jump.

"Where did you leave the body? Out in the park to freeze?!"

Neither men said anything as the elder brother screwed his eyes shut. Without another word he turned and sped away leaving James' apartment. In a night and half a morning Nikita's life had been thrown to the wind. Everything was ordered and everyone had a place and their own set of rules to follow. And now his baby brother murdered the Exile and just left his body out there to rot in Calo Park. Without a thought to the police, to their clan members who'd stumble upon it or to honor's sake.

The man winced at the sound of Sindri's name in his mind's eye.

I don't believe for a second you started it Sindri. You deserved to be exiled but you didn't deserve to be murdered.

The morning was already late when Nikita passed by the Apothecary, it's windows were shuttered and it was dark inside. On any other day the place would be bright on the inside and aliens would be plainly visible in the waiting room. But not now, today the Apothecary empty and cold.

Nikita continued on to the field of Calo Park and to the large willow tree that sat lonely atop the hill. Making past it he reached the broken furniture and broken table being looked over by several clan members.

The snow had been badly churned as though much had occurred last evening.

But there was no body.

Nikita started to bitterly nod as one does when knowing they are out of options. Again and again he thought long and hard about the short and quick answer to the missing body. No beast could have claimed it this deep in Grennik. If James had done him in the turian sisters would have reported him missing and the area would be cordoned off as a crime scene after he'd been found.

Or he'd survived.

Nikita knew deep in his heart his brother had made a mistake. Sooner or later the butcher's bill would come due. And he feared the price could be more than he could bear.

-0-

James sat by Tomas as his friend fought for breath and began to lose consciousness in a strange state of half awareness. He sifted through his memories of his life with him at his side as one does with a delicate old scrapbook. He'd cherished Tomas' company, even when his friend made him mad. Like when they'd competed over a close race to determine who was fastest. Or when they'd argued over who could pursue Alexandra. And like now when he'd told Nikita everything.

It didn't matter, not really. Lying was not a Darskirri trait. He'd shamed himself by even trying. Pity that the Exile had had such a talent for it.

Not that he'd be lying anymore to anyone.

The memory of the fight exhilarated him, his thumping heart kept a steady backdrop to the whining breaths of his dying friend. It brought a smile to his face to think of how Tomas had simply tackled the Exile well after they'd joined blades. He cried out then when the traitor gave him a shallow stab into the ribs but Tomas refused to let go or get off him. Lukas held down the blade arm and it brought such savage joy to his heart when he saw the look of abject terror on the exile's face when he brought up the hatchet before swinging it down.

It took two swings to sever the hand below the wrist and only one blow for the other. The Exile screamed, it was a louder sound than he'd ever heard made by another human being.

Tomas rolled off of him then, clutching his side and crying in pain.

James fell upon the Exile immediately after and straddled him, pulling him up by the lapels of his ruined coat.

He smiled faintly. He couldn't actually remember what he'd wanted to say to the dismembered traitor, not when he sunk his teeth into his cheek and strained to rip.

Thankfully Lukas had been on hand and struck him across the back of the head. Limply the man struggled to get out from under his cousin to no avail.

A sudden awareness came to the traitor as James held his own long knife, taken from his severed hand, to his neck. The Exile was frightened, he saw that much in his eyes. But there was something awful in there too. A feral determination to live that unnerved him. Even now, he was fighting to get his cousin off of him and kicking at Lukas as he held his legs down. His bloody stumps pushed at James' face in an effort to shove him off despite the fresh pain.

He wasn't sure what possessed him to ask but the words fell out of his mouth quick and hard like stones.

"Why are you like this? Why did you choose them over us?"

Through gritted teeth and agonized tears his cousin replied.

"I did it because you hated them more than you loved me."

The knife was dragged, quick and hard across his neck and in an instant the warrior was gone and only a dying man remained. The Exile sprayed his cousin in the face as he swallowed a wash of his own blood and spit and immediately coughed it back up. James had fallen off of him and wiped, panicked at what his former kin had managed. He could taste his sour blood like poison in his mouth.

He remembered spitting and washing his face with snow as his friends came to his side. Opening his eyes and looking at his adversary once more he couldn't help but laugh. The man was clutching at his slit neck with the stumps on his wrists. Reaching down he grabbed one and then the second severed hand and kicked his cousin over as he gurgled and spat and wheezed.

"Serves you right, you piece of shit."

Grabbing Tomas and helping him to his feet he took his battered friends and walked away and left the drowning man to his fate.

The memory pleased him. He'd at once washed away the shame of the tournament and the dishonor of the clan.

It occurred to James at that moment that Tomas was silent.

Thoughts of violence played across James' mind and glazed his eyes over as he thought of killing the turian sisters. Then who else deserved to die?

Certainly Sindri Bogatyr was a sickness, a cancer that would have eaten through the spirit of the Darskirr. Who was he to impose his misguided tolerance of the aliens on all of them? He was a sign of changing times and better he was dealt with now than after a generation had been reared in the shadow of his clinic. A generation who would reach out with a friendly hand at those who would look to take advantage of them, rob them or kill them. The Exile had to have been mad, truly mad. After the atrocities commited against the Dubeka Darskirr this man now saw fit to parade a pair of turians about town like they belonged.

Alexandra had said he'd even gone so far as to allow the elder sister to wear the poncho his mother had made him with her own two hands. This man symbolically took an alien that had abused and tortured his clan and garbed it in the clothes of the dead and smeared blood onto its lips in an imitation of a mouth and treated it as human. He'd paraded a true abomination pretending to be an honest woman and asked them to give it a chance.

They are not evil at all, they are just like us humans.

James laid his hand on Tomas' chest as his friend lay cold and still.

"This isn't over, Tomas. I won't let your death be in vain. I won't rest until Grennik is free of them."