Page 14 of All Saints Day (Lucifer and the Saints #2)

“Yeah, the littlest Stone ‘Castle’—our Rook —he’ll be twice as strong too,” Dad ruffles my hair affectionately, the mop wild and shoe polish black just like his.

“Already solid like an ox before his balls have dropped, this one,” my father jokes crudely, the two older men sharing a laugh as I do my best to mimic their casual sips from the tall highball glass.

Even though he’s still smiling—his manner still easy and sunny—my dear old dad wastes no time getting back to business.

“Tommy, you were a little light on your last payment.” My father raises a rakish brow and purses his lips. “And you don’t have any leftover candy either, so I guess I’ve been a little concerned.” Dad snaps his wrist a few times, his large yellow gold watch rotating lazily back into place.

Tommy looks anxiously to me and then back to my father.

“Things have been a little… complicated lately, Paddy.” He sweats, wringing his hands gently. “It’s a lot of grown-up talk that probably isn’t much for Frankie,” Tommy laughs, nervous. “Probably best to leave it for another time.” He does his best to use me as his human shield.

“Don’t you worry about the boy.” My father makes to dismiss Tommy’s worries with a wave of his hand. “He’s going to inherit Castle Security along with the rest of my ‘kingdom,'” Dad scoffs. “How else is he going to learn the family business if not from his old man?”

Tommy pales as he realizes he won’t be slithering out from my father’s grip that easily.

In the memory, their voices warp and stretch—becoming muffled and far away as I slip from that recollection into yet another flashback.

Dad and I are sitting in Rosie O’Leary’s parlor; sun illuminating the fabric tapestries of Catholic Saints she’d hung over the windows of her downtown Quincy apartment like stained glass windows.

I stare at the faintly glowing image of my father’s namesake; Saint Patrick, hung in the bay window. Green robes draped around the body of a thin man with a white beard and kind eyes—a shamrock pinched between his fingers.

“What’s got you so shaken up, Paddy?” Rosie asks on the heels of another dry, raspy smoker’s cough.

Dad hesitates, nodding to me—clinging to my backpack straps in silence.

“Why don’t you pull out your video game and have a seat on the couch, kiddo.” Dad waves me over to the couch.

I do as I’m told. The Gameboy comes out of my backpack, and I sit down on the ratty couch with my back to Dad and Rosie, turning up the sound on my game so that the grown-ups feel confident I’ve stopped listening.

Of course, in reality—I can hear perfectly over the jaunty chiptune to follow each and every murmured word.

“It’s about the most recent shipment Matty’s boys brought in,” my dad hisses haltingly before continuing on. “There’re some nasty rumors about the candy he’s been circulating.”

I can’t see Rosie, but I can hear the quiet swish of her tarot cards as she shuffles them from hand to hand, my eyes wandering from the pixelated screen in my hand held to a tapestry of a beautiful young man stuck through with many arrows wrought in blue, gold, and crimson.

“I haven’t heard anything, Paddy, honest,” she sighs, the cards making dry muffled sounds as she spreads them out on her kitchen table. “But you don’t need to come to me to hear stories about the neighborhood candy,” she presses.

Even though I’m barely thirteen, I know my father’s business well enough to know that neither of them is talking about Snickers bars.

They’re talking about the drugs that my Dad’s business partner Lorenzo Genovese helps circulate throughout the city.

My dad and his so-called “Security Company” provide Genovese’s distribution hubs; bars, nightclubs, brothels, and gambling dens—with protection from other ‘self-respecting businessmen’ along with law enforcement.

A mutually beneficial relationship that constantly hangs in the balance.

I hear my father’s knuckles pop as he makes a fist.

“Had one of my dreams again,” his voice drops almost to a whisper, making my heartbeat pick up.

“About Abigail?” Rosie soothes as my eyes fall on the tapestry of my Mother’s namesake Saint; a woman with milk-white skin draped in blue robes tending a busy beehive.

“No, about…” my father’s voice trails off.

I don’t need to see him to know he’s made some kind of silent gesture toward me.

Rosie doesn’t have a tapestry of Saint Francis with his birds on her wall—but I imagine the friar just as he is in the windows of Saint Brigid’s—where Dad and I attend mass when he has the wherewithal to take me.

Unable to help myself, I squirm until I’m laid almost horizontal across the couch—careful to keep up a steady, rhythmic clicking of Gameboy buttons so that neither Dad nor Rosie catch wise to my peering over the top of the cushions of the couch to watch as Rosie pulls the first of her long, thin tarot cards from the fanned spread before her.

“Anything in particular?” Rosie fishes for details as Dad shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

I duck down just in time to catch my Father dart a glance at the couch through the narrow space between two of the back cushions.

“It’s going to sound absolutely crazy if I say it,” he lets out a worried laugh, turning his attention back to Rosie, her hooded eyes patient.

“Alright, straight to it then,” she sighs as she flips over the first card; a young knight in shining onyx plate armor with dark hair just like mine leaping forward on a white horse—his sword raised high in the air.

The knight’s sword bears a pommel that looks like the castle-shaped chess piece–the rook, the affectionate nickname my father has used for me, ‘the littlest castle in castle security.’

When the cards are upright, I struggle to read the small black lettering—but when the cards are upside down for Rosie at the table—they’re right-side up for me peeking from the couch. I squint to make out the tiny script letters: Knight of Swords.

The two of them look up at one another, and I only have a fraction of a second to hit the deck before their two? heads snap toward the couch.

Both let out an anxious laugh before Rosie breaches the silence.

“Well, alright—moving right along,” she scoffs as I press my eye to the space between the cushions, peering cautiously at her next selection.

Rosie pulls a card printed with a man and a woman in the nude standing in high grass—a small mountain range in the background against the blue sky; a host of five angels with wings in the clouds above sounding their golden trumpets as the rays of the sun shine over all.

I can’t read the text this time, but I’ve seen this card many times before; the man with his dark hair and the woman with her long, snarling red curls reminiscent of my own parents: The Lovers.

My father grips the kitchen table so hard that Rosie’s china teacup rattles in its saucer.

“It’s a long way off yet,” Rosie chuckles, clearly taken aback by my father’s stricken, ashen features. “Is this somethin’ you’ve really been worrying about, Paddy?” she tries to make light of the situation, but my father looks as if he’s seen a ghost.

“Turn the third card for us, Rosie,” he says slowly and calmly—even though Rosie can tell he’s anything but.

I sit holding my breath—my video game music is the only haunting sound for a moment that seems to stretch into eternity.

Both Rosie and my father make tiny, sharp intakes of breath—not quite a gasp.

A black stone turret rises into a stormy sky—golden lightning bolts striking the dark tower; flames pouring from every open window, two men in red and blue robes—plummeting to their deaths in the unseen below.

The memory—beginning to burn like celluloid burning away on a too-hot projector—shows the faces of the men on the tower card rendered in impossible detail, miniature portraits of Michael and myself screaming silently as they plummet to their doom.

Suddenly it’s the summer before my sixteenth birthday—the middle of July and hot as hell.

I was supposed to be at summer school, crammed into a desk in a classroom without air conditioning in the 90-degree heat with nothing but a box fan and a middle-aged man droning on about pre-calculus.

Instead, I was at home in the swishy condo unit Dad upgraded us to once his contracts started picking up big time a few years ago.

After Tommy Doyle almost got hit by the Genovese’s—Castle Security became synonymous with quality amongst the white-collar criminals of the city. Dad started doing big business—and we moved into this place with the tall windows, fancy marble and chrome fittings, and our own heated one-car garage.

My father had yelled at me to get out of bed and get a move on as he rushed out the door, but that was it.

No one was there to make sure I actually did as I was told.

It was too hot, and I had stayed up too late reading the latest Andy Pendragon’s Magic Academy book the night before.

I decided to sleep the day off in my air-conditioned room and deal with the consequences when and if my father came home that night.

In the hazy memory—I hear the muffled sounds of men shouting just before the gunshots; two loud staccato blasts that have me up and out of my bed in the blink of an eye.

Through the adrenal wash of panic, I barely register the heavy sound of the front door to our condo slamming shut—horrible moans echoing from the den beneath my bedroom.

Without thinking, I burst from my bedroom and race down the stairs to the source of my father’s pained cries.

He lies squirming helplessly in a spreading pool of his own blood.

“Dad!” I scream, slipping in the pool of blood, falling hard to my hands and knees on the hard, slick, wood floor.

Panic fills my father’s eyes as he croaks my name, “Francis!”

I reach for him—the bullet holes in his chest and stomach gushing blood.