Page 34 of Cruel Endings

With a flourish, Artemis flings open the door to the cabin, and I follow him inside.

The one-room cabin has been wired with electricity. It’s air-conditioned with a single overhead light. A plexiglass box on a stand contains a faded brown book. Those seem to be the only concessions to modernity.

Ancient wooden cabinets line one wall with deer-antler handles. In the middle of the room sits a hand-hewn wooden table and chairs, and I see the faint outline of a faded stain on the wooden floor next to a pot-bellied stove. “Isaiah’s blood,” Artemis says proudly, following my gaze. “So strong that it never faded.” Yeah, because they never cleaned it up.

He points at the plexiglass box. “That is the family charter, in a book bound by Jedediah’s skin. We all memorize and abide by the rules of the charter.”

His skin? For fuck’s sake.

Up against the wall, by an ancient window that probably hasn’t opened in a hundred years, is a bed made of rough wooden timber with a mattress covered only by a sheet.

“When we first claim a woman, we bring her in here,” he says. “The sinners Maria and Sarah and Jess, the women who served us this morning, they all were broken in on this very bed.”

I sit down on one of the wooden chairs. I have a feeling this is going to take a while.

I glance out the door at his son and his nephew. “You’ve all been talking about a challenge. What’s that about?”

“It’s why my son died.” That faint, fleeting look of sorrow visits his face and makes him look almost human. Then he goes all lofty and hard again.

“I currently occupy the seat of the family patriarch. The patriarch can be unseated any time by a challenge from any other male family member. Then the patriarch has a choice to either step down or agree to a fight to the death with his challenger. Tradition. We only use knives. With the strength given to him by the Lord, Isaiah left his cousin’s shotgun behind and hunted Jedidiah down with a knife in the woods behind this cabin. We do the same.”

“Who did you kill to get your position?” I ask. “Your father?”

He gives me a sidelong glance. “No, my father died in a car accident.” He looks a little disappointed at that, as if his father should have picked a more honorable way to die. “I bested Solomon’s father in a challenge. I’ve raised Solomon since then; he was twelve, but I knew he was worthy. His younger brother wasn’t. Weak little bastard. When I showed him his father’s body, he cried and cried.” He shrugs. “He joined his father one minute after. Solomon didn’t even blink when his brother died. Franklin men don’t cry.”

“Who killed Robert, then?” I ask. “And why?”

His face twists and then smooths again. “Most likely someone hired by either Troy, or Benedict, who issued the challenge. They’re brothers. Relations of ours from a branch of the family that split off from us in the 1890s. After they told me to step down or face them in the forest, Solomon and Paxton threw their hats in the ring.” He says that with pride. “And now there’s you, and there would have been Robert if he’d been smart and stayed on the estate. The other men in the family, those who don’t have the physical prowess, chose not to challenge. Nineteen men in the family qualify, all together. You make twenty.”

Troy and Benedict. I’ll have to dig up everything that I can on them. “They don’t live here?”

He shakes his head. “No, they live on their own estate a few hours from us, called the Promised Land. They’ve got a similar setup. Large property, their land is isolated, they follow the charter, and we all partake in hunts together. We visit on occasion and enjoy punishing their sinners, and they visit us here. They claim their women a little differently, but still within the charter rules. We take turns, sometimes on their land, sometimes on ours.”

A little thrill shivers through my body at the thought of a hunt.

He runs his fingers over the rough wooden bed frame, reverently. “Nobody from that branch of the family has been patriarch in the past sixty years. I knew their challenge was coming, though. Troy and Benedict have been training for this their whole lives, waiting until they were sure they could beat me.”

“Why didn’t you just have them killed before they got the chance?”

He looks mortally offended at that, dropping his hand from the bed frame. “Are you calling me a coward? We don’t kill each other outside of a challenge. There are rules.”

“Such as?”

He begins reciting. “Once the challenge has been declared, every challenger has the right to kill any of the other challengers as long as they are outside of their home estate, and every male challenger who is last standing at the end of that time meets in the woods, wearing only jeans and sandals, all armed with the same type of knife. Whoever emerges alive is the new patriarch. None of us will have been in that section of the woods before. It’s walled off and guarded. That way we go in without any advantage.”

I arch an eyebrow. “I wasn’t aware of the challenge, but they tried to kill me.”

At that, he looks a little discomfited. “I believe Robert told them you had thrown your hat in the ring. That was wrong of him. If you wish to withdraw, I can formally notify the other contenders that your name was entered in error.”

The more I hear, the surer I am that I’m a descendant of truly evil creatures. It goes beyond my level of depravity. Something I thought damn near impossible.

This challenge sounds more fun than an all-day pass to an amusement park. It’s something I was born to participate in. The best part? I get to take out these insane fuckers all in the name of a hunt they created.

“Hell no.” I grin fiercely. Again, I see that light of approval shining in his eyes.

“So the winner of this challenge, what do they get?”

He smiles, a grim, faraway look in his eyes. “Everything that matters. The great and glorious honor of being the patriarch. The final voice in all family disputes. Management of the family businesses, as overseen by a board of directors, of course. The right to rule the Franklin Empire as long as they can keep it.”

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