Original Stories Fan Fiction ❯ Game of Revenge ❯ Chapter 8

He had never wanted to be a criminal. He had dreamed of becoming a doctor, a farmer, of taking care of his family so they could be happy again, like before Daddy died. Kyle was four when his father was killed in a railway accident. He remembered waking up in the middle of the night and wandering into the bright, cheery yellow kitchen to see Mommy sobbing, a letter clutched in her hand. How he had gone up to her and pulled on her sleeve, and asked her what was wrong, and how she had choked on her tears as she grasped him to her bosom and held him tight and wept and wept and wept and told him that Daddy wasn't coming back, that something had happened and he wasn't coming back, not ever. And Kyle hadn't understood at the time, but he knew it was bad and he patted Mommy's arm with his chubby toddler hand and told her it was ok, that he would take care of her and of Sissy Adriana, who was only a few months old at the time. But Kyle didn't know that, he was too young.

They had done well at first, Mommy went to find work, and got a job at a sweatshop sewing buttons onto jackets. But she had to work long and hard to keep her babies fed, but there was never really enough. Kyle often saw Mommy pushing her own food onto his and Addi's plates. Then Mommy started coming home later than usual, and when Kyle asked she said the manager was asking some of the workers to stay later to earn more. But she didn't tell him the true intentions, what horrible things she had to do so that they could live the life they knew.

But even that wasn't enough. They had to sell the furniture, the china, the jewelry. When Kyle asked Mommy why all her pretty things were going away, she just smiled and told him that they would be back, she was just loaning them out. Just for a little while.

Kyle could hear her crying every night now, and he cried too, for he was beginning to understand.

One day, when Kyle was 9 and Addi was 5, Mommy left them. They had just given up the house, the last thread to the old days, when times were happy, when they smiled and laughed. The streets were cold and hard to sleep on, and Addi cried because she wanted her bed, and because she was still too young to understand. But Kyle did, and he held his sister tight while Mommy slept beside them. When they tried to wake her up, she wouldn't move. Addi screamed at her,

“'Ake up, `Ake up, Mommy!” But the woman curled up beside her children remained cold and quiet and still.

Addi cried as the hospital men in white coats came and put Mommy in the carriage with the big black horse that snorted ice from its nose and created thunder with its hooves, and carried Mommy away, leaving them all alone.

Kyle didn't cry. He couldn't. He took his sister's hand and led her through the streets, looking for shelter, for some sort of substitute for the warmth they had lost. The first night they slept on a park bench, Kyle stayed up all night, watching his sister sleep. He looked up at the stars and promised,

I will never let anything hurt you, Addi. Nothing is going to happen to you, and I'll fix everything, and we can be happy again.

Kyle learned in the months to follow how to be tough, to fight to survive, but he never let his sister have to become what he had. He watched out for her, gave her the best bits of food, as he had seen his mother do, and kept her safe from the harsh reality of the back roads. He stole what they needed, and found them shelter every night, and trusted no one, not even those he counted as friends. He had seen alliances change in a flash, and he would have nothing of it. He would keep her safe.

They spent a year together in the wilds of the city, scavenging for food like the dogs that roamed beside them. Addi had begun to understand her first week there, and now she was proving herself to her brother as one who could help fight off the terrors of the night.

It was this desire to prove herself that ultimately destroyed the promise Kyle had made to the heavens, for Adriana was persistent in her attempts to thwart her brother's protective guard. She began to sneak off by herself, quickly at first and then longer, wandering farther and farther away.

That's when they found her.

The city had always been filled with the less-than-savory types, the scourge of humanity that sulks along the bottom of society, the lowest of the low. Kyle knew this, his years on the street had taught him well, but Adriana, in this sense at least, was clueless. The two that found Kyle's sister, his last filament of happy times, they saw this in her, and they grabbed it. By the time her brother found her, Adriana was broken, bleeding, and the men who killed her, tortured her, were leaving her there to leak the last drops of her life onto the uneven cobblestone. They thought they got away with it, unseen, unnoticed, but Kyle saw, and he understood.

He held her in his arms, and brushed her hair from her bruised face, calling her name,

“Addi, Addi!”

“Ky…”

“Shhh…I'm here now, Addi, and nothing's going to hurt you, sissy, I promise.”

Adriana smiled at her brother, and tears streamed down his face as she left him all alone on the cold street.

(I promise…)

He never forgot them. The two men who killed his family, their faces were burned into his retinas and his memory. When he saw them again, he saw them as they had been that day, laughing and shameless and thinking they had got away. But they hadn't. And Kyle was not going to let them. He tracked them through the town that day, and waited outside the tavern they went into that evening. Waited and waited, sharpening the switchblade he carried in his pocket to hunt rats in the alleys. That's all these were to him. Big fat rats that needed to be killed or they would destroy everything else. But Kyle had nothing else but the switchblade, and if the men wanted everything he had, he was going to give it to them.

They left the tavern in a cloud of fumes, and Kyle stalked them into a dark alley, cornering them, trapping the rats. He lashed out, one, two, three strokes, ten flashes of silver in the dark, the splatter of tainted rubies poured from the first rat as he fell. The second was harder. It had seen its comrade in sin fall to the boy, and Kyle could see the glimmer of recognition in its eyes as he turned, blade dripping.

“Hello, rat. I'm Kyle Tompson. I believe you've met my sister.”

Silver carved the air, screams rent it to pieces. Kyle left the bodies there in the gutter, the switchblade lying in the pool of poison.