Chapter 25 #2
“Do it and let us be done with this,” came a voice from the bottom of the stairs.
Damien looked to see his prisoner, armed with a knife, blood dripping from its edge.
“You faked the attack,” he said.
“I needed to convince you,” Ezekiel said, slowly descending, the pistol’s barrel never shifting from Damien.
Light flickered against the walls of the stairwell, far greater shadows than should have been created by lamp or candlelight. The bitter tang of woodsmoke began to reach Damien’s nostrils. Ezekiel became aware of it, too.
“What have you done?” he demanded.
The prisoner grinned. “Getting me some revenge on both of you. You for dragging me into this, and him for keeping me locked up!”
Damien was dividing his attention between the two men, who were drawing closer, step by slow step. The only way out of the cellar was the staircase that they stood on. For the prisoner to escape the fire he had started, he would need to go through Damien and then Ezekiel.
“You were in this together?” Damien said.
“Me and others. Paid by him to map a path through the woods and get into the house! Not enough!” the prisoner said.
“Why, Ezekiel? I would have embraced you as a brother. I would have shared Winterleigh with you,” Damien said.
Then he noticed the loosely laced shirt that Ezekiel wore. It was open enough that he could see the man’s chest. See where the red mark that Damien had previously been shown, which had helped convince him of Ezekiel’s identity, was gone.
“Are you even my brother at all?” Damien hissed.
“I am a true Archdall. You are the impostor!” Ezekiel shouted.
“Look at my face. It is reflected in dozens of portraits all over this house. The Archdalls are fair-haired and blue-eyed, going back to our Saxon ancestors. You are the one born on the wrong side of the sheets. And your face is proof! I should have been duke!”
Smoke was beginning to seep out of the door, funneled upward by the chimney effect of the stairwell.
It stung Damien’s eyes, making him want to cough.
But Ezekiel had descended a few more stairs in a rush, rounded a corner and now had a direct line of fire to Damien.
His face was red and contorted into a rictus.
“I grew up in poverty. My mother worked as a common governess, and I had to take a trade!”
Ezekiel spat the word as though it were an obscenity.
“While you squandered your rank and your position in society, I had to live as a peasant. The true Duke of Winterleigh! I plan to rectify this injustice now.”
Damien saw death reaching for him with skeletal hands. Saw the masked man standing above Ezekiel on the stairs, laughing at Damien’s futile struggles. Saw Maria in his mind’s eye, outside and safe, but praying for him. He saw Ezekiel’s flinch moments before he pulled the trigger.
This was a man who had never shot a man before—and who had just realized that pulling a trigger with the certain knowledge of causing another’s death is not easy.
As Ezekiel pulled the trigger, Damien dropped to the stairs.
The shot grazed the stock of the rifle, an inch from Damien’s face.
Splinters of wood stabbed at him. The shot continued down the stairs where the prisoner was rushing upward, knife ready and teeth bared.
Damien saw the man snatched from his feet tumbling downwards, where flames were beginning to fill the doorway.
He looked up, blood dripping into his eyes. Ezekiel was looking down at him in horror, knowing that he had no time to reload the pistol. Damien brought the rifle to bear on his brother, cocked it and settled his finger on the trigger.
He is my brother. The memories he has of our mother cannot be faked. We might not have the same father, and he could be right. Maybe he is the legitimate heir. That is irrelevant. He is still my brother.
The fires of hell were reaching for him as he sighted along the rifle barrel, holding Ezekiel’s life in his hands.
Then he lowered the rifle. Ezekiel gaped at him as Damien slung the rifle over his shoulder and ascended the steps, two at a time.
He cowered away from his brother, but Damien ignored him, passing him and continuing to stride away.
“I will not kill you, Ezekiel. I do not have it in me. Stay there if you want, and the fire will do what I cannot. Or come with me and live.”
He reached the door and looked back. Ezekiel still cowered, his face contorted in hate and fear.
“Just give me the house! Give me the dukedom! You don’t need it. You don’t want it. You live as a hermit. I know. I’ve been spying on you for months. It is wasted on you. It should have been mine!”
“Maybe it should. But it isn’t,” Damien said. “And a new heir will be in the world soon. The line will continue through me.”
“No! You haven’t suffered! If you had, you would understand. I can’t just give up and go back to being a pauper when I should be a duke!”
He was coughing as he spoke. The wooden stairs were beginning to smolder and smoke. Ezekiel looked down to where the body of his spy lay, wreathed in fire. The knife, long-bladed and deadly, lay a few feet from the bottom of the stairs. Damien saw where Ezekiel was looking and shook his head.
“Do not try it,” he said.
Ezekiel screamed his rage and darted down the staircase, hand outstretched for the knife. Damien didn’t move. Saw him reach it. Saw him take it and turn, running back up the stairs with his weapon, his eyes on Damien. Filled with hate.
The stairs chose that moment to surrender to the fire.
Ezekiel’s fury fled from him as the stairs collapsed beneath him.
Damien saw the look of surprise on his brother’s face.
Then there was nothing but flames. He turned away, closing the door but already feeling the heat through the floor.
The door would not stop the fire for long.
As he ran through the halls of Winterleigh he saw how widespread the fire in the cellar was. Smoke billowed through cracks in the floor and had broken through in several places, tearing hungrily at floorboards, reaching ever higher.