Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  For only he understood the elements of this game fully. Only he knew the motivations, the injustices, the great wrongs that underlay it and why it must be played out to its very end. Fate had decreed it so long ago, and Lucien Broughton was a great believer in Fate.

  Chapter Forty

  Two’s Company

  For much of his life Pat Riordan had been an incurable, if cautious optimist, but of late he was finding his optimism at a low ebb. How he was to keep the Fair Housing Association going and get through law school, not to mention working with his brother in order to pay his bills, he did not know. Seated behind his overflowing desk at the former institution, he looked up towards the dingy ceiling, appealing to whatever power might be up there. But if it were hovering outside in the pissing rain, it could hardly be considered a sane entity. Then again, the Irish weren’t terribly picky about the mental health of their many saints and deities. Take Saint Columban for instance, a man prone to trouble if ever there was one, but deified by the Irish Catholic Church.

  He was tired, and it was a bloody filthy afternoon outside, making the thought of the trip home terribly unappealing. He often kipped here though, for the wee home he had shared so briefly with Sylvie was merely an empty shell now, a place to store his clothes and occasionally eat a meal and rest his head. He slept more soundly here, despite the cramped quarters and the inadequate length of the chesterfield.

  He looked around the small space where he often grabbed naps between bouts of studying and keeping this mad wee business going. Though he didn’t suppose he could fairly call something that leaked money like a sieve a business. He suspected Jamie funded it partly as a tax deduction. Instinctively, he crossed himself as he always did when he thought about Jamie and his long, inexplicable absence, and offered a wordless prayer for the man’s safe return.

  Fifteen minutes later he was well stuck into his studies, even if there were times the law seemed like a mess of snakes wherein a man could not tell head from tail—much less which head belonged with which tail—when the door opened letting in a gust of rain and cold air. He looked up in surprise to find the woman who had piqued him so recently at Casey’s house. Just Kate.

  She stood in the doorway, umbrella in hand, clad in a smart raincoat and sensible shoes. She looked in his direction without the slightest trace of a smile. Rather, she looked thoroughly businesslike.

  “Can I help ye?” he asked, thinking it wasn’t likely she had come seeking his help for housing and at the same time wondering what it was she did want, and how she had managed to get herself to his own doorstep.

  “Kate Murray,” she said briskly. “Perhaps ye’ll remember meeting me at Pamela’s house a few weeks back?”

  “I could hardly forget it,” he said tartly, immediately regretting his tone, for a soft wash of pink ran up her neck into her face.

  “I’m sorry. That’s hardly a hospitable greeting.” He rose from behind his desk and walked around to where she stood. “Ye’ll come in, please. There’s a chair here, an’ then perhaps ye can tell me how I can help ye?”

  He helped her with her raincoat and she sat, waiting for him to sit back down, for she faced herself toward his vacant chair as if she saw its exact placement. She was neat as two pins in a white twinset and charcoal grey skirt. He sat, folding his hands together and placing them on the desk. The woman made him nervous though he couldn’t have said why, and he was also suddenly aware that his face was in need of a shave, and his sweater had seen better days.

  “Now then,” he cleared his throat to give himself time to form his next thought and the woman hopped in neatly as a bandbox sprite, cutting off his words before he could even think them.

  “I’ve come to work for ye.”

  “Pardon me?” he said, for whatever he had been expecting, it had not been this.

  “I’ve come to work for ye,” she repeated, as though he were particularly slow, which admittedly he felt in her presence. “Can ye honestly say ye don’t need the help?”

  He opened his mouth to protest but realized he really did need the help, though he was mystified about how she thought to provide it.

  “I don’t mean to be indelicate,” he began, and wasn’t surprised to be cut off before he could finish his thought.

  “I won’t be able to take on the paperwork, but I can deal with people for ye. I’m good with people. I’ll answer the phones, make the tea an’ keep the place tidy.”

  Pat wondered how she knew the place was untidy—which it was to an egregious extent.

  “Ye don’t need to pay me, if that’s what yer worried about. I don’t need the money. I’d just like to do something useful other than keep house for my brother. I thought perhaps ye could use the help.”

  Her tone had become a tad snippy and Pat sighed. He looked toward the ceiling, thinking the universe had an odd sense of humor in how it arranged to answer one’s appeals.

  Within two weeks, he wasn’t sure how he’d managed before she came along. When he arrived on the days the center was open, there was already tea prepared, the mail sorted and the filing done.When he queried how she managed it, she explained that she wasn’t stone blind and could see things if brought up very close to her face… which made him wonder why she had allowed him to believe she couldn’t see a blessed thing upon their first meeting. However, he knew when a universal appeal was answered in such an efficient manner, one did not question it too closely, especially when the answer was—it was soon clear—far better equipped than he to sort out the riffraff from the people who genuinely needed his help. She did not suffer fools gladly, but had endless patience for those who needed assistance filling out paperwork, and the fortitude to push through all the bureaucratic red tape they encountered on a daily basis. She freed him to do what he did best, and that was get out into the community to deal with people face to face and decide how best to meet their needs.

  They took to having afternoon tea together on the days when they were both in the office, sorting out the paperwork, answering each other’s questions and just generally decompressing from another day living in the wilds of Belfast.

  It was on one of those afternoons, when the phone had managed not to ring in twenty minutes and they were both comfortably quiet over their afternoon biscuit and tea, that he asked her why she didn’t have a man in her life. A question which, he ought to have known, would cause her to bristle.

  “You needn’t worry yourself on that score,” she said, in her straightforward manner. “I’m not in the market for a man, and if I were I wouldn’t set my sights on you.”

  “Whyever not?” he asked, half to egg her on, and half out of real curiosity. Kate, lovely as she was, didn’t seem to have any sort of social life outside her secluded existence with her brother. There were obvious reasons for that, but he sensed there was more to it than what met the eye.

  She gave him one of her crisp looks, as though she were assessing how big of an eejit he was just at the moment. At such times, it was hard to believe the woman could not see more than the vague outlines of things.

  “Because I had a man I loved very much, but he’s gone now and I am not fool enough to think I’ll find his like again. As to why not yourself—well, it’s clear to me, Patrick Riordan, that your own heart is well and truly broken. I’d be an eejit dyed in the wool to take on such a thing.”

  “Oh.” He nodded, nonplussed—mostly because it was baldly true. “May I ask what happened to yer man?”

  “He was a Prod and a soldier, and he’s dead now—shot on duty.”

  “My God. I’m sorry, Kate.” He thought it was a miracle the man had been killed on duty, and not tortured to death by her brother.

  “I don’t need your pity, man, any more than you need mine.”

  “Right,” he said briskly, feeling as though she had verbally smacked him in the head, not the first time he’d felt so a
nd not, he was certain, the last either.

  “Ye will have had yer own loss as well.” She said in a more conciliatory tone.

  “An’ how do ye know she’s dead? Maybe she just left me.”

  “Because her presence is everywhere that ye go but ye never speak her name. So I expect that she died, an’ did not merely leave ye. Besides, I suspect yer not the sort of man a woman leaves voluntarily.”

  “Aye, she died,” Pat said quietly, “died by a car bomb that was meant to kill me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He was tempted to bite back at her that he had no need of her sympathy either, but her tone was so sincere that he kept his tongue still.

  In an odd way, they fit one another, he realized. They were both broken, both wanting to be left to get on with the tasks at hand, both keeping their heads down and moving forward as much as one could in this uncertain land.

  In another odd way, he realized he didn’t feel quite so alone anymore.

  Chapter Forty-one

  March 1974

  Finola

  The cottage sat at the bottom of the Kirkpatrick estate, buried in the surrounding woodland. It reminded Pamela somewhat of the quintessential crone’s cottage in fairytales. When she had first stumbled upon it, she had questioned Jamie as to the occupant. His rather cryptic answer had been that he was the tenant of the woman who lived there. She had her suspicions about the mysterious woman, though the cottage had sat empty for quite some time now. Today it looked as though someone had been around, if not in residence. She rode Phouka up to the low wall where a weathered gate hung between two ivy-clad posts.

  She was not here on a pleasure ride today, as she had been that Christmas morning long ago. She thought it was high time she and the occupant met.

  She slid down off Phouka, looping the reins over a gatepost.

  “Can I help ye?” said a sharp voice directly behind her.

  She let out a small yelp and clutched at her heart. “I—I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that—“

  “That anyone was home.”

  “No,” she replied, tone tart enough to match the woman who faced her. “I just didn’t realize you were right behind me.” She turned. “I wasn’t snooping, I usually ride this way and this is the first time the cottage has been occupied.”

  “Aye,” the woman said, narrowing her green eyes in assessment. “That’s true enough. I’ve been away for a time, and am only now come home.”

  Pamela took the opportunity to study her features, looking for genetic traces of James Kirkpatrick, but saw few. She was small, but not with Jamie’s whip-like grace and her skin darker than Jamie’s simmered gold.

  In the bones of her face, though, Pamela saw echoes of Jamie’s feline grace, distilled by time and sex into something softer but no less formidable. Her hair was a pale chestnut with a haze of silver hoarfrost glinting out here and there. And her eyes… there genetics had played its arrow straight, for she had eyes of dark jade, elongated and as capable of cold fire as were her grandson’s.

  “You must be Jamie’s…?”

  “Grandmother. Not that it’s any of yer business, one way or ‘tother, but yes, the man is my grandson on his mother’s side. Before ye ask—don’t deny it. Ye’ve yer lips pursed up to ask just that.”

  Which rather, Pamela thought, put her in her place for she had been about to ask that very question.

  “Well, as long as yer here,” the woman said, “ye might as well come in for a cup of tea.”

  “I really shouldn’t—I—” she stuttered, completely unnerved by the sight of Jamie’s eyes looking out of an old woman’s face.

  “Ye’ll come in for tea. It doesn’t take that long to drink a cup, an’ frankly ‘tisn’t anyone I ask in, so feel flattered that I have.”

  Pamela was certain ‘flattered’ wasn’t how she felt. Terrified came close, but didn’t quite describe the array of emotions currently set loose in her stomach.

  She followed the woman inside, her head almost grazing the lintel for it was low in the fashion of cottages built a hundred years before.

  “Sit where ye please,” the woman said, putting down the leather bag she had been carrying.

  Pamela sat on a low stool by the hearth and took a steadying breath.

  “Have you been traveling?” she asked, sitting upright, hands folded in her lap as if she were back in Catholic school with a particularly strict nun for her teacher.

  “Ye could call it that, I suppose.”

  She wasn’t one to share more information than strictly necessary, Pamela saw.

  “My name is Finola and you, I expect, will be Pamela.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Well, it’s past time we met then.” The tone of the woman’s voice indicated that while the meeting might be overdue, it was not necessarily one considered a pleasure.

  Finola was silent while she made the tea, her movements quick and light but firmly no-nonsense.There was something of Jamie about her there too, for he also was a being of precision and grace. She wondered how much he saw of her when he was home. It struck her as very odd that he had never mentioned his grandmother other than the cryptic comment about tenancy, and Pamela had never chanced upon her in all the times she had stayed under Jamie’s roof.

  “He comes for dinner most Saturday nights,” Finola said and handed her a steaming mug that smelled beautifully of catmint and lemon balm. “That’s what yer wonderin’, isn’t it? Why ye’ve not seen me before?”

  The woman sat down across from her, tucking her neat little feet upon a low footstool.

  “Are you a mind reader?” Pamela queried, starting to feel a tad nettled at having her thoughts so easily read. Jamie had the same annoying habit.

  Finola laughed at that. “No, but every thought ye have shows in yer eyes, lass. Here, drink yer tea while it’s hot an’ save yer breath to cool yer porridge.”

  Pamela obediently sipped her tea, which tasted lovely and had an immediately soothing effect. She looked about the tiny cottage with interest. It was rather spartan in its furnishings, and all the pieces that were in it were well made but not ornate. The hearth dominated the main room, and had a brisk fire crackling in it. Overlying the warm smell of burning peat was the scent of herbs, both fresh and dried. She could identify the sharp spike of rosemary and the oiled pleasantries of lavender, as well as something peppery and warm. A narrow set of twisting stairs led up to the second floor, where she assumed the bedrooms were.

  “He doesn’t speak of his mother a great deal,” she ventured, thinking that someone had to start the conversation. “But I’ve seen pictures of her. She was lovely.”

  “Yer not one for the small talk, I’ll see. Aye, my daughter was lovely, but she was a wild spirit from the day she was conceived. Always restless, always burning. She loved her wee lad to distraction, don’t get me wrong, but her mothering was of the hit and miss sort. Smother him with love one moment, flit off the next. It wasn’t good for him, but he had others in his life who kept things on a more even keel. Kathleen and I never saw eye to eye. She was an artist. If ye’ve seen the painting with the strange wee faces an’ such in Jamie’s bedroom, then ye’ll know she had a gift. Even that was unstable though. Sometimes she could paint an’ draw, but often she couldn’t settle herself enough to work at it.”

  Pamela knew the painting Finola meant. She had liked it so much that she had moved it from the master bedroom to the study. The scene was of a bewitched hollow at night, with all the nocturnal creatures abroad and a full silver moon setting the scene aglow. Every leaf seemed a thing of trembling movement, the neat-faced foxes on the brink of putting a paw forward. But despite the moon, it was a work with a dark, diaphanous quality, enchanting one moment, chilling the next, depending on the light and the mood in which one viewed it. She had spent many long minutes study
ing it, for it seemed that no matter how often she looked, there was always some element she had missed before. A new face would show up as part of a leaf, or eyes seemed to be watching her though she could not locate the source amongst the small faces, some wizened as walnuts, others round as a wheel of cheese yet as mysterious as the depths of a lake.

  “She was very talented.”

  “Aye, talent she had but art is a demanding mistress, an’ Kathleen could never devote herself to one thing for more than a day or two at a time. I could understand that when it came to her art, an’ every other career she thought to pursue, but a husband and a wee child are a different kettle of fish altogether. That’s where Kathleen and I disagreed, an’ rather permanently, I might add. I lived away for a long time, an’ wasn’t here when she died.”

  “I’m sorry,” Pamela said, meaning it.

  “Aye well, ‘twas my own fault. I was stupidly stubborn an’ paid the price of it. I imagine though, yer here to speak of Jamie, not his mother.”

  “Yes, I am,” Pamela said, aware she was a glass pane through which this woman could see very clearly.

  The woman’s gaze was assessing, the green eyes sharp as a needle. Her hands, small and brown, cupped her mug of tea and when she spoke it was in a manner Pamela had not expected.