Brotherhood

Italy, nowadays

With a pout that was anything but reassuring, he stared at the dark alley where the secondary exit of the pub gave the staff the opportunity to sneak away. It had taken him almost two months to arrive in that town in Northern Italy and, to do so, he had to collect favors from all over, starting from the least expensive informants and finally arriving in the presence of the most demanding ones - all riffraff, certainly, but nevertheless useful for the ultimate goal he sought. None of those men had dared to ask him questions, after all they were the ones paid to give answers and, so, they had done. One by one the pieces of an unknown map had added up, until someone had been able to tell him precisely where in Europe at least one of his brothers was, the one who most of all he would have liked to have at his side in a similar shipment.

With a throbbing heart and anxiousness to itch the palms, the man had thus decided to abandon everything and reach that kind of relative, avoiding possible troubles in any way.

The journey he had undertaken from the Czech Republic up to there, however, had certainly not been pleasant: he had to move discreetly, grabbing the most impossible and imaginable last minute, finding cheap accommodation and continually checking the current account balance to be sure not to get the card blocked - not to mention the various unforeseen events that took place in the middle of that adventure. Yet there he was, waiting for someone - or rather, something.

The barman, a guy who had tried in vain to trick him by telling him that he had no idea who the person he was looking for was, had not seemed so smart and, with the right techniques, he would have gotten out of his mouth the information needed to find Z'év.

Obviously, to do so, he had to wait for him to come out of that kind of hovel, at least to throw out the trash; but apparently, that all too well-trained guy did not seem at all willing to reduce the grueling wait that had been going on for hours.

What a bore!

The boy rubbed the base of his nose, remaining leaning against the wall in order to go as unnoticed as possible. He hated doing certain things: patrolling, lurking, threatening and acting like a criminal in general, only that he had no other ways of finding someone who didn't want to be tracked down - even if that someone was a relative.

Although for a short time, he had believed he could finally say goodbye to that life made of small and big brutalities, but then something had changed and everything had started moving again as always: a wheel that hadn't stopped turning yet, even if it had significantly slowed the trend.

Either way, he was now there, waiting as the worst killer of the designated victim.

He hadn't seen Z'év for nearly thirty years, but he realized that deciding with certainty a precise date had become, at that point in his life, something tiring. The count and the measure of time he had long lost them: the years had begun to slip between his fingers like grains of sand and, without realizing it, what seemed to him to be short periods were actually decades. It was a fact that, however, the abandonment of the brothers he remembered well and, if not on a temporal level, at least how it had happened - especially that one had been imprinted in his memory with fire, even if he would never admit it.

He remembered that day more clearly than many others and, perhaps, it would have been one of those he would have had a hard time forgetting, if he ever succeeded.

In the house there had been a furious quarrel, born of that mourning so felt as to have scratched the hearts of those present; they had screamed at everyone, blaming mistakes and faults, pointing fingers and gritting their teeth until, in a short time, they had each gone their own way, leaving him alone in a home too crowded with memories.

He had heard every single insult that had filled the brothers' lungs, every tear that had fallen to the ground; he had waited patiently for the sound of broken things to stop rumbling on the walls and, when he finally got out of his room, he had not found anyone waiting for him, only the pieces of what they had been.

What a shitty period, he told himself suddenly, interrupting the nose massage and the faint flow of memories that was trying to overwhelm him. Still, it had to be said, despite all he had to endure, that had been the worst moment of his entire existence.

Puffing he finally moved his fingers away from the septum.

But how long did it take to close that bad place? If he stayed in the alley for a few more hours he could have remembered his whole life from the beginning, moment after moment and, to be honest, it was the last of the things he wanted to do - not that evening, at least.

With a stroke he detached himself from the wall, approaching the door that connected the back room of the pub with that corner of town full of garbage that, even to his not too developed sense of smell, was beginning to annoy.

Okay that eternity was long, he told himself, but at the moment he was in a hurry.

He tried to snatch some sound that could help him, to see if it was possible to enter from there without having to break the lock, but in the end he realized that no one would miraculously appear and, at that point, yet another puff poured out from his pale lips, slightly purple.

Sometimes being cold-blooded could have been annoying.

Of his most peculiar characteristics, the young man had made the list of pros and cons dozens of times; that, for example, was an obstacle in interpersonal relationships. It often happened, in fact, that people began to look at him blindly, believing that he wore his girlfriend's lipstick or that he was a kind of Emo a little too grown up. Moreover, when he tried to approach some girl or any person with whom he had to come into "physical" contact, he often found himself having to justify a colder than normal body. And with the bartender he had tried to persuade, it must not have been otherwise: who knows what that guy thought, finding him in front of his face. But those were just a few of the downsides to his appearance.

He turned dejected, ready to return to his hidden corner and resume the grueling wait.

From the place where he had lurked he had managed to keep an eye on even the bell tower, a pale turret that stood in the middle of the reddish roofs of the houses and on which he had slowly seen the hands move, transforming eleven o'clock into midnight and then almost into one in the morning. Was it possible that no employee felt the need to go home? And how long would he have to wait before he could frighten that innocent, as well as incapable liar, of a bartender? He was really beginning to be sick of it, both from waiting and the smell of rottenness, yet even from the increasingly rigid temperature.

Another snort broke the quiet. Although patience had been, over time, one of his best qualities, in recent years he had seen it slowly wane, making him more and more restless every day. Perhaps, he found himself thinking, it was a consequence of being left alone and running out of time. Since he was born he had never had to deal with the only company of himself, yet, from the division of the family, those occasions had carved out great space in his life - the ardor of meeting those who interested him, was a kind of hound on his heels.

It was at that moment, while he found himself facing all those personal complaints, that a very subtle, almost imperceptible noise stopped him in the middle of the alley. Light chills ran down his spine and the gaze flashed in the dark, peering over his shoulder to see who, or what, was moving around him.

Unfortunately, unlike some of his brothers, he had not been given the gift of a good sense of smell or hearing; all he could boast were two eyes capable of see trought the darkness of the evening, pupils sharp as blades and able to pierce the veil created by the shadows.

Regardless of how careful he was, however, he found nothing beyond his back.

Nothing.

Yet he was sure he had heard a sound like a quick step, a furtive run worthy of an animal - and he didn't know whether to be happy or worried about it. So he waited for a few seconds, in order to make sure that everything had remained motionless as he had left it and, finally, he returned his attention to the corner where the he would continue to wait for that demented bartender; maybe it was just a stray cat, or some rat looking for food.

He narrowed the eyes, angrily pulling a strand away from his face. Among the various options, he did not deny it, there could also be that of an auditory hallucination due to fatigue; after all, sleeping had certainly not been his priority in the last few days. Before he could actually walk again, however, he found his face pressed against the rough concrete of the building he was checking. With his jeweled hands open near the face, and the feet stuck on the ground, he had slightly reduced the impact of the rest of the body on the wall, avoiding annoying damage.

Certainly, he admitted, he wasn't prepared for such a surprise, but his muscles had still acted in the best way.

He gasped a little, feeling a slight pain on the cheek and the annoyance of being caught off guard moved his soldier's pride.

It must be said, however, that thanks to those peculiarities that he had previously denigrated so much, the impact did not seem to destabilize him in any other way - the pain, when he perceived it, was always an ephemeral sensation.

However, regardless of all that, there was the confirmation of his suspicions: someone had decided to visit him.

The boy cursed through clenched teeth, suddenly realizing that he had dirty the dark coat that he liked so much and that, despite his anger, he did not have to react on impulse: there could be anyone behind him, from an unsuspecting human to one of those fanatics that haunted them for... well, a little too long for his taste.

"If you want to rob me, I warn you I have no cash" he snorted, reciting the poor penniless farce with less emphasis than he normally used. He had already wasted all his energy on crouching for hours waiting for a person who apparently wouldn't show up; he had no desire to waste any more time - pity only that the answer he received was a guttural growl, a sound born from the depths of a body animated by the desire to kill. He recognized it effortlessly, feeling familiar and nothing, in the presence of that call, could prevent him from smiling. Oh, how much he liked it!

A shiver ran down his spine, arousing him, while his hands tingled, recalling to himself the longing for the struggle, the ardor of a melee. It would have been wonderful!

Intoxicated by that sudden desire, he made a quick movement, slipping out of his beloved coat: the only thing that the aggressor's hands had managed to grasp with a certain concreteness - the padded shoulder straps in fact, in their favor, had the ability to shield the meat.

Rubbing the skin of his face against the wall, where some slight lines of blood went to draw, he lowered himself on the knees, managing in a moment to be on the ground and away from the clutches of the one who had dared to challenge him. He twirled on tiptoe like a Casatchok dancer and, with the elasticity of a snake, pushed himself close to the figure behind him, seizing it threateningly.

Anyone who had witnessed that scene would have been shocked by the speed of his movements and the sinuosity of that body which, at first glance, could have seemed anything but agile. In his abundant meter and eighty, with the physique of a real warrior, that guy did not seem to be able to boast such shrewdness, and yet it was precisely that that made him so lethal, a weapon of skin, muscles and bones.

He clasped his fingers around a pale, long, hot neck that he had wished to be able to feel the consistency of for a long time and his eyes were lost, amused, in the blood-colored ones of Z'ev, the one for whom he had come so far.

"Shalòm Alexandria Vàradi."

"Shalòm Levi Nakhaš."

And a sinister smile painted on the faces of both.