He caught but a glimpse of Hurley’s smirk before it vanished, but it was enough.

When men like him curved their mouths, it did not matter in which direction they went. A smile was as good an indication of malicious intent as any frown.

It was enough to disorient the ‘little’ shadow into a short-lived smirk of his own. Gone as soon as it twisted to life, but for a reckless moment it had lived. Show me, Hurley requested – no, that had not been a request. Show me. It held all the expectation of someone that knew they would not be denied.

Malachi followed after him, cold fingers returned to fret at the insides of his pockets. Neither he nor his mother bothered to acknowledge one another.

“Mr. Hurley,” addressed Miriam, dabbing at her dry cheek once again before lowering her hand.

“Thank you. And thank you for taking the time to come by, dear. Lyle did always love seeing you and your father.”

The priest coughed behind them and turned away to cover it. His mother’s gaze darted to the back of his head, hawk-like, before she offered her best attempt at a saddened smile. It looked strained instead.

“…As I was saying. I am sure that my husband would appreciate you being here.”

Malachi’s cough, meanwhile, caught Levi’s gaze and he waved off the confused look his brother shot him. He swiveled back to face the widow and the parasite, passed them, and came to rest at the side of his father’s open casket.

Still dead. As expected. Cold now, should anyone dare to touch him. Pliable too, now that it’d been long enough for his muscles to stiffen and release again. No longer slave to a well-worn scowl, he looked kinder in death – but he was still a corpse.

He could only look so pleasant with a layer of makeup covering the bruising of his broken neck.

Chris smiled politely at Mrs. Brennan’s doting attention on him and him alone. Smiled genuinely when he heard that cough behind her. He shook his head and sighed, supposedly in remorse.

Oh, God. He was so giddy about what he was going to get a peep at next, it was almost hard to contain. Here he thought the oily fucker had just old-man croaked early from too much America.

“Those two were gin and tonic. It’s like losing an uncle.”

He hoped each and every one of his uncles got a nice rope around their necks, too. Actually – he hoped they died in new and exciting ways – what kind of boring burr went over and over to the same whore when there were so many others to trample sample?

“Thank you,” he sighed with a practiced, appreciative smile – the same smile he’d been taught for gifts he didn’t want.

What would really be a gift was some alone time with that body … was he pliable yet?

Even when Levi and Mara’s gazes turned to the cough, Zechariah kept his eyes carefully trained on Mara. God knew what Chris was getting up to, but last funeral he had brought Zechariah to? He had … touched the corpse and then touched his hand afterward. Ew.

“Lyle’s little friend here has been wandering amiss,” Chris said, sympathetically, like he’d just brought back their lost dog. “I think he wanted to say a few words.”

Speaking to Malachi directly was a rather novel development; the third person hinted direction likely felt far more familiar. Besides – how better to get Mrs. Brennan to ignore what Chris was up to than imply she might have to listen to the orphan?

His stroll was casual … but the way his eyes searched Lyle’s neck before all else was telling. This sharp bitch couldn’t fight back now, could he? Had he found his senses beginning to slip, and done the world a favor with the old rope? Or had someone else … helped him along? Chris looked at Lyle’s wilted body the same way most of his lessers looked at prime rib.

It would have been better if he were younger, but--… nah, Lyle was too big a target. Then he eyed the successor next to him. Let his gaze meander over Mrs. Brennan, then Levi. Not one of them gave a living fuck about Lyle … except, perhaps, the orphan.

He looked the orphan dead in the eye, and touched the grotesque bend in Lyle’s cold, powdered neck.

“How did it happen?” he murmured, fingers still on the dead neck.

If calling her adopted son Lyle’s little friend would have fazed anyone, it was not Miriam Brennan. The only woman that had, perhaps, even more unflattering names for the priest than anyone else – oh they were not always terribly creative, but they conveyed a point: that Malachi was nothing but a burden she’d been gracious enough to accept.

Malevolent, Malicious, Malaise, Animal – what she lacked in eloquence, she made up for in zeal.

The mere idea of having to sit through one of Malachi’s sermons was enough to make her grit her teeth. Air hissed through them, and Miriam let her critical eye wander to the man beside the casket.

A few words. How fitting. That was all that Lyle had ever bothered to give to her, and to his real son too, for that matter.

“How thoughtful,” she said, before she tore her gaze away. She stepped aside to let Chris carry on towards the casket, where the priest quietly regarded the corpse of his father.

Malachi did not miss the over-eager searching of the younger Hurley’s gaze. It would have been impossible not to, this close. Perhaps his assumptions had in fact been correct, in daring to think that Hurley held some morbid curiosity and would be as entranced with the cold body as he was.

What he had not expected was for Hurley to reach out and touch it.

Dark eyes shot wide. Malachi had plucked the glasses off of his father’s corpse, sure, but that had not required much contact. He had been there when the body was found, he’d touched more dead parishioners than he could count anymore. This, though, was… strange.

And it forced those dark eyes ever darker, by a fraction of widened black pupils.

“…He had locked himself in his office for hours,” whispered Malachi. He had been in London for only a day when it happened. “I tried the door later and it was open.”

Lyle’s neck was too far stretched for it to have been only a couple of hours. Try as they might have to restore him, his spine had pulled farther than anyone’s was meant to. If he had been hanged, he had dangled there for longer.

Hurley had no reason to touch him. At least if it were Levi’s fingers, or Miriam’s, or his own, they might have had the reasonable excuse of sentiment. Malachi scratched at the interior of his pocket.

“I found him hanging by the fire. Cold, but- he was so close to it. His whole back and shoes were hot to the touch.”

Oh! The magic of repulsive little Malachi. If he grabbed him by the collar and pushed him at the back, would he part crowds ahead of them like Moses the sea? What were miracles but divine malice, directed at the right people?

The look Malachi gave Chris was perverse. That was a first. Usually, he had the luxury of making onlookers blanch. Instead, the damned orphan looked on the way some of his friends looked at burlesque dancers. Problems violating this corpse: unlikely. Instead, he faced a new predicament: getting Malachi’s old man alone.

Cold, light eyes studied Malachi. Was he docile enough to slaughter like a lamb? Have a round with a still-warm corpse in addition to cracking open a cold one? Get to watch the light go out in this nothing’s eyes as he stacked them one on top of the other?

He’d bring his gun, just in case. Concoct a story about going to pay his respects to dear Lyle, who had been like an uncle to him, when all of a sudden this crazed, gangly thing leapt out of nowhere in a rage. Mrs. Brennan, no doubt, would back him over the orphan out of principle. Or maybe the little creep would just be content to watch him fuck his dead keeper. Trustworthy help was nonexistent, after all – Lyle should have known that.

The murderous look shifted to something less … imminent, when the orphan saw fit to ply him with details. He shook his head to the first part and sighed ‘sadly’ … while his hand encircled Lyle’s bent neck and squeezed, as easily as a child might grasp his fingers through sand.

“Poor guy,” he said, sporting a boner.

Another sigh, this time through the nose – though it sounded suspiciously close to a laugh.

“So,” he whispered back, “you’re saying his dying wish was to go out like a rack of ribs?”

He glanced to and fro, then bent forward and sniffed.

What was that look? He’d seen feral dogs friendlier than that. It was almost as if Hurley was the one being wronged, and not the grieving son that had to watch him touch his dead father.

It also did absolutely nothing to help his situation. If there was one thing he had not expected to have to deal with, it was getting turned on by a rich, heartless bastard at his own father’s funeral. The absurdity alone made it impossible for him to just ignore it, as much as he might have wanted to.

Malachi was hyperaware of every breath, every ‘sad’ little sigh; had his father’s death simply stripped him raw? Left him all too sensitive to every shift, too aware of every possibility?

Hurley squeezed the dead man’s broken neck, but all Malachi could think about was that cruel hand constricting his own.

He closed his eyes. Squeezed them shut ever tighter still, on the off-chance that once he opened them, he might see something easier to wrap his head around than three stiffs in one man’s funeral.

For all the solemnness he tried to maintain, the ghost of a smile cracked his façade.

“It would have been a far better use of his body, don’t you think?”

Why was he saying this. Why was he saying this to Chris Hurley.

“It’s rather wasteful, this. Letting him rot when he could have been put to use,” Malachi finally dared to open his eyes again. Why was- did Hurley just… smell it? The corpse? It smelled of chemicals and powder, how pleasant could that be?

Right, right. Malachi was weird, but this man was… really weird.

Suddenly it struck him that Hurley’s fascination might have been entirely different from his own. And- fuck, he had just said ‘put to use’ when his odd guest was over here holding the corpse by the neck and sniffing it.

“…He’s to be buried in the morning,” Malachi whispered, against all alarms that sounded in his head.

A feral dog who’d seen a bone he decided was his.

Fortunately (unfortunately?) for Malachi, Chris was not paying all that much attention to the effect he was having on him. Too tall. Too experienced. Too alive. Not like this supple, painted bitch under his hand, well past his prime but still worth a round.

How many times had Lyle talked down to him? More than one round. A round for every orifice. Perhaps some new orifices. His dirty money worked as well as any other, but he did nothing but talk out of line to his betters. Had he thought of he and his father as some social climbing ingrates, like Zack? Little rats that had to dig their way into accreditation, for their unpredictable mongrel blood?

Chris wrinkled his nose in disgust, pressed against the jut of his neck to push it out more prominently. He finally took his hand back, digging out his cigar case with his clean hand and thumbing through the remaining cigars with his corpse-strangling right. Peach powder swept a stripe across them. He almost wished he’d finished his last, but he closed and pocketed the box once more.

His gaze slid to Malachi at his comment, neither impressed nor particularly shocked. What was this creature Lyle had scraped out of some opium den gutter? A rat?

“Right,” he smirked, though that unfriendly look in his eyes had returned in full force. “He starved his little guard dog.”

Cultured men fucked corpses and tossed them out afterward, clearly. Was he seriously going to have to wrestle with this mutt so he could fuck the damned thing before Malachi galloped in like some indiscriminate scrap hound? Fuck, shoot, fuck the bullet holes too.

Again, that look passed like a storm as more important information came his way. Buried in the morning. Meaning Chris wouldn’t have to pay anyone to dig him up and haul him out, or get dirt on his dick, or even undress in an uncomfortable environment to do his deed. He’d be waiting, inside. In his casket. He could make as much of a mess as he wanted below the shoulders – and none would be the wiser!

Chris bit back a moan.

“Do you have the key?” he whispered back.

Ah. He starved his little guard dog.

That one struck a nerve.

Pierced it quick and hard enough that Malachi did not even have the time to fully register before it was gone, and the moment had passed without any outward sign of the dread that it inflicted upon him. Did Hurley know? How did he know?

Malachi side-eyed the rest of the church, peering across the crowd for any faces turned their way. He’d never worked the senior Hurley, nor had he done anything close to the son. His father had never deemed them useful enough. More trouble than they were worth, he’d said, but had someone else told them, or was the insult just that – one of many jabs thrown his way like the scattering of a shotgun, with the hope that at least some of them would hit.

His gaze slid – slithered – back to the corpse-toucher. Was he smart enough to figure it out, was the question. Unfortunately for Hurley, the flippant jab only served to remind the little guard dog of his own power in the room.

“I do,” Malachi whispered. A smile crept across his face, even as he barely restrained his teeth from chewing at the inside of his cheek. God, he wanted a cigarette. He wanted Hurley’s finger. Anything to occupy his mouth.

The toxic little bitch wanted to take him up on his offer, then? Have his way with his father’s cold corpse after hours? Ha, ha, ha. Malachi wanted so badly to know what kind of unfriendly look he’d get if his evening plans were ruined.

He might have even let him, had the bastard not finally offended him for real.

Malachi’s features softened into something more neutral, and he took a hand out of his pocket to make the sign of the cross. As he did, he whispered, “it’ll be empty tonight, after the others clear out and mother and Levi go home.”

What a thought: a priest paving the way for someone to enter a church and violate his dead father. Malachi’s hand slipped back into his pocket, where Lyle’s spectacles pressed cold against his fingers.

“Knock, and I’ll let you in. Leave his face alone and I won't bother you.”

Luckily for the little orphan, Chris did not see when his shot actually hit.

Unluckily for the little orphan: this wasn’t the last of that method.

Then, Chris’ attention was upon him once again, now that he had something desirable to offer him. He couldn’t imagine this sad little hanger-on had many motivations or thoughts of his own. Church did a beautiful job of caning those out of the less fortunate, and he could only imagine that doubled for a man who had to regurgitate The Word.

It was delayed, but then Chris matched his smile with unfeeling eyes.

“Perhaps I was wrong about you, little shadow,” he spoke softly, with a touch of affected nostalgia. “Perhaps it is finally your time to shine.”

Then his face shifted back to solemn, and his hands into his pockets.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said more loudly.

Was he the only one to tell this hungry little pervert that? Oh, he hoped so. He turned to head back toward Zack.

Somehow, Zack had ended up on the receiving end of a long, boring speech about how no one would even need horses in a hundred years! As though he could sense an impending cosmic disturbance, his shoulders tensed the moment Chris turned away from the casket. Again, Chris smiled.

All was right in his world.