“He was fucking mine!” The man’s breath was foul and he spat as he spoke. “You shouldn’t have come back. I could have had him back! I wanted him. You didn’t, and he still fucking chose you.”
“Fucking hell.” Miki’s breath caught as a terrifying realization spread through him. “You’re one of Carl’s.”
It was like staring up into the face of his own personal nightmarish mirror. The man twisting around underneath him was a brother of sorts, bound to him in the sticky, emotional strands of Vega’s sickness. They’d had their blood spilled and their bodies torn apart by the same man. It should have bound them closer. Instead, it was driving the other man to kill.
Miki wasn’t going to argue with a crazy man. Especially not one with a gun in arms’ reach. Doubling over, he twisted his legs around the man’s torso and pinned him to the ground. He brought the cane up and slammed its knob into the man’s head, splitting open the skin by his eye.
An enraged insanity seemed to fill Miki’s attacker. A gleam burned feverishly in his unfocused gaze, a nearly evangelical fervor strengthening him as he threw Miki off.
Miki landed hard, losing his hold on the shillelagh. It bounced out of reach, and he lay on the ground for a brief second, forcing the air back into his lungs. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the man scrambling on his hands and knees toward a clump of weeds.
He came up with the gun as Miki got to his feet with Donal’s shillelagh held out in front of him.
“I don’t know you, dude.” Miki shuffled to the side, testing his knee. He didn’t need to. As he moved, his jeans’ leg tightened around the swollen joint. There was very little give to the fabric, and fire was shooting up his thighs and roasting his balls in pain. His arm hurt like hell, with blood dripping down his hand and onto the wooden shaft. “You can walk away from this. We both can.”
“I don’t want to walk away from this… from you. Uncle Carl was mine.” The gun shook in the man’s hand, the muzzle drifting back and forth off of Miki’s chest. “Until you came along.”
“Um, did you kill him and Shing? That was you, right?” Miki reminded him, then blanched when the gun steadied to point at his head. Not for the first time, he cursed his own mouth. “Just saying.”
“He didn’t want me anymore.” He began shaking again, tears tracking through the dirt marbling his face. “I was too old, too ugly. He didn’t want to see me anymore.”
“Carl wasn’t….” Miki took another step closer, gritting his teeth against the pain. “Dude, he wasn’t worth this. What he did was wrong. You know that, right?”
“It wasn’t wrong!” Spit flew in long strands from the man’s mouth, splattering Miki’s face. “You were the wrong one. You should have stayed away.”
“Trust me, man, this was the last place I wanted to be.” The grass crackled under his feet, and Miki inched closer.
“How can you say that? He wanted you so much! What’s wrong with you? He would have given you everything!”
“Look, being here wasn’t what I wanted. Shit, you shouldn’t have wanted it either,” Miki said. “It fucks with your head, you know? The shit that he did gets into your brain and chops up all of your mind.”
Miki left off that by killing Vega, the man pretty much doomed himself to never gaining Vega’s attention.
“He used to tell me I was his special boy. Special!” The gun wavered again, its muzzle drifting toward the ground. “You know what he told me when he woke up from the drugs? When I had him in the room?”
“Can’t even fucking guess,” Miki said, shrugging, then wondered if he shouldn’t have, but the other man seemed not to care.
“He didn’t recognize me!” The spit began flying again, joined by a run of snot as he began to sob. Clutching the gun tightly in his hand, he lifted it up and waved it at the clouds, his outrage filling him. “When I told him I loved him, you know what he told me? He said I was stupid, and he couldn’t have ever wanted someone as ugly as me. Even tied up and on the ground, all he could think about was you. So, fine, he fucking wants you. He can fucking have you.”
“Pretty sure I wasn’t what thing he was thinking about there, dude.” Miki shuffled again. He needed to get the guy distracted. Anything to give himself enough time. “Did you tell him your name or just say, hey, I was one of the little kids you fucked up?”
The man spun quickly and stepped closer, bringing himself nearly to Miki’s nose. “I told him my name. I leaned over and whispered it into his ear when I started cutting him. He started crying. Then the begging started. ‘Andrew Coons, I remember you now.’ Now? That’s all he could say before I took his lips off. I didn’t want to be remembered. I wanted him to need me.”