Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  In the extremes of blind need, there comes a place where thought is obliterated and all is sense and feeling. But after—when the body loosens its hold and the mind reasserts itself along grey pathways—comes regret, fine as soft falling snow at first, but building until, like the avalanche, it breaks and suffocates. There was, however, no room for such a luxury as regret in the Soviet Union. The obliterating of history had eliminated the need for regret, for without a personal history, how could one have regret? How could one experience such a thing when one was no longer a self, but merely part of a machine, a nameless cog without a voice?

  The bill, he knew, would only be sent from his depths when and if he found his way home, and so until then he would keep running up the cost, for he might never survive to pay the debtor.

  He allowed nothing of his own world to come here, not even the life of the camp outside these walls. He made of his mind a compartment, and within it there was no one he loved, no places of familiarity, no memories of other bodies touched, nor eyes met, nor thoughts enjoined. He was merely a vessel.

  He had been tutored in the arts of lovemaking long ago by women far more sophisticated than this one. He knew how to touch, how to play upon the skin and the nerves until his partner cried with need and want. He knew when to stop and when to begin again, and again, and again. He knew how to ruin her for all other men who would share her bed after him. It was his small revenge and he did it with precision and great skill. He also did it with hatred, the one thing he had allowed into the vessel, into the compartment emptied of self—hatred for her, and for himself. It added an element to the events that she responded to with vigor, and his body, barren in all but sensation, understood and replied.

  He watched her now, his own clothing shed, appreciating with the male eye what her female form offered—the narrow waist and full breasts, the hips already tilting upward in expectation of what he had been ordered to bring.

  He joined her on the bed and did what he had been contracted to do.

  He had committed the cardinal sin. He had fallen asleep in her bed, something that was not permissible and foolhardy in the extreme. He awoke to confusion and an awareness that the fire must have burned down hours before for it was cold in the hut, frost already forming on the inside of the logs. The light was no longer in hues of red, but those of dawn—blue and violet, ash and mist. His head felt unnaturally heavy and he remembered the wine dimly, tasting of flowers and smoke and dark Georgian earth. It had soured in his mouth through the night and now mixed with the peaches and honey in a rancid brew.

  The silence was thick in the small room and he tried to remember how long Isay was meant to be away. He hoped there was enough darkness left to to hide his return to his hut. He tried to raise his head and found it seemed to be filled with molten lead, his arm stuck to the sheet by a substance he could not define, for his vision was swimming with dark spots.

  He smelled the blood before he saw it. The rank copper stink was unmistakable, as was the cold, clammy feel of it under his body, on his body, everywhere. He sat up, waiting for the dark swimming in his head to stop.

  She was still in the bed, and ‘still’ was the operative term. She was motionless with the sort of cold flaccidity that only came with death. Her throat was a scarlet slash, clotted around the edges to a crusted black, her skin blue and flaccid. Her hair too had been drenched in blood, was stiff and dull with it. He himself was covered in blood—all hers presumably, for he felt no mortal wounds in his own flesh. In fact, other than a headache, he felt as if all his parts were intact.

  He stood, legs wobbly and stomach surging. He had to get out of here, wash the blood off, he had to… his thoughts trailed off here… had to do what? There was nowhere to run and certainly no place to hide. The knife was on the bed. He had been lying on it, for he could feel the imprint of the handle in his hip as his senses began to return. He had been drugged—Svetlana too, or she would have fought. There was no other way for him to have slept through this carnage and he had clearly been meant to sleep through it. But who and why? Everyone hated the woman, but she was merely the devil they knew, and no one fretted about that too much. Except for her husband. The bottom of his stomach dropped out. If Isay had done this, he meant for Jamie to hang for it.

  He stumbled to the bureau, cracked the ice on the basin of water and splashed it on his face. He needed to clear his head, to think, though it wouldn’t matter if he had a map to the labyrinth he was currently in, he could not see his way out. He was naked, covered in Svetlana’s blood and the knife would have his fingerprints all over it. Not that it mattered because there wouldn’t be any testing, or even a pretense at charges or a trial. He was already dead if that was Isay’s desire.

  He looked at her, mouth slack, death’s blue mottling her skin and suffusing her face. He wanted to feel pity for her, for the fact that she had once been human, but inside he only felt terribly hollow.

  There was a noise at the door, a sound of footsteps in the kitchen and Jamie froze, the drug still carrying him in its clutch but starting to ebb with the effects of cold and adrenaline.

  Gregor’s head came through the doorway of the bedroom a second later. “Volodya sent me to find you. I was certain this was where… fuck.”

  “Agreed,” Jamie said, putting a hand to his head and wishing the spinning would stop. Of all the people who might have found him, he was somehow relieved that it had been Gregor. Dangerous he might be, but he would not be afraid.

  “Yasha?”

  Jamie answered the unspoken question in the dark eyes. “No, I did not kill her, though I am fully aware of how ridiculous that sounds given the circumstances.”

  “If you say you did not do it, I then believe you. Whoever did that…” Gregor nodded toward the blood-soaked bed and the terrible gaping throat, “hated her very much.”

  The name was there between them, the thought as clear as the knife that still lay upon the bed. Who, other than her husband, could hate this woman this much?

  “Wash the blood off your body,” Gregor said. “I am going to find you some clothes.”

  Jamie looked in consternation at his own clothes. They lay stiff and maroon with dried blood where he had dropped them by the bed. His head whirled, trying to find the thread that would unravel the horrific tapestry of the previous night. He remembered drinking the wine, getting into the bed with her, and he would swear neither of them had been drugged at that point. So the wine was not the culprit. Which left only the peaches and the honey. They had spilled at some point and mixed with the blood when it was still hot and pulsing with life. The blood was gelling now, fixed incarnadine tributaries that branched from the river of her throat.

  They had both partaken of the peaches and honey, and considering just how they had partaken of them, the drug would have hit Svetlana first and doubly hard. Another roil of nausea twisted in his guts and he bit back hard on it.

  Gregor returned posthaste with a set of clean prison garb.

  Jamie attempted to put the pants on and would have toppled over had Gregor not caught him by the elbow. Gregor merely took the pants, steadied Jamie and dressed him as though he were a particularly hapless three-year-old—admittedly, a fair summation of his current state.

  “Who told you to come to her last night?”

  “She did… I think. Or… it was understood.” His memory seemed to be a slippery thing, like a frog sliding over ice unable to find any traction to force a direction. “I—I don’t remember things very well right now.”

  Gregor fixed him with a dark, hard look that bade him pay attention.

  “You see,” Gregor said slowly and Jamie, through the torpor of the drug, understood there were two levels of conversation going on, “it snowed last night, but there are no tracks in the snow. It is pure out there, though melting now. So, you see, Yasha, things do not look very good for you.”

&n
bsp; Jamie squinted at him, trying to clear his vision. And suddenly he understood. If he didn’t kill Svetlana, and there were no tracks outside the hut, then whoever had killed her had been here when he arrived, and was still here in the cabin. What exactly they were to do about it was another matter altogether.

  “I have muddied the snow outside so that they cannot tell how many came or went. But now, Yasha, I think you should go. Take this and drink it.” Gregor thrust his daily flask of vodka-laced chifir at Jamie. “It will clear your head. You cut your quota and keep your silence. I will see you tonight.”

  “But…” Jamie protested. Gregor cut him off immediately, the hard vor showing clearly in his face and tone.

  “Do as I say, Yasha. If you want to keep breathing, just do as I say for fuck sake.”

  When Jamie walked out into the cold still of the camp, nothing moved. The entire world appeared lifeless, suspended. The guards and the crew were leaving and he fell into their ranks as though it were a normal morning, under a normal grey Soviet sky. The cold not as severe today but enough to help cut into the fog of his drug-addled wits.

  The day in the forest was exceptionally long. Later, Jamie could not remember it. He simply cut and cut, and obeyed Nikolai’s every grunted command. His head slowly cleared as the drug, whatever it had been, wore off. The bleary memory and pounding head pointed to barbiturates of some sort. No one commented on Gregor’s absence and Jamie was certain more than one surreptitious glance was directed his way that day, though it may have been his imagination, for he felt as though there was blood in every line of his skin, stinking, declaiming a guilt he could not remember.

  When they returned to the camp in the thick twilight, snow was falling again, and the camp was deathly quiet. Jamie had tensed in expectation of lights and military police, barking dogs, and a swift answer to just what the consequences of Svetlana’s death were going to be.

  Gregor met him outside his own hut, where Jamie was surprised to find himself having made it so far unmolested.

  “It is fixed,” Gregor said, offering him a cigarette as though they were talking about a dog race, not the murder of a woman whose bed he had been sharing on a regular basis. Jamie took the cigarette, in need of any sort of calming device.

  “How the hell can it be fixed?” he hissed at Gregor’s dark, stoic expression.

  Gregor took a long drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke out before answering. “Both you and I know, Yasha, who really killed her. He was hiding in the closet the whole time. He admitted that he drugged the honey and watched the two of you until you passed out.”

  Jamie felt a chill of another variety pass through him, as he remembered snapshots of the night before. He had hated the woman but physically they had not held back with one another. He felt sick.

  This tiny corner of the universe was lawless. He knew that in most camps he would be dead already, without any sort of charge or trial or even a pretense of wondering at his guilt. And there was guilt, for if he had not gone to her bed repeatedly, this would not have happened. It didn’t seem to matter that he had not had a choice in the original decision, for he had understood what the consequences would have to be. There had been something dark hanging there in the air between them before she had ever laid a hand on him.

  “I have him within my power but only to a degree. There is only so much I can do, Yasha,” Gregor said. “But I have brought him to a place where he agrees to settle this honorably.”

  Jamie looked up at the big man and wondered how he thought honor could be found in this situation.

  “It is not as though I was the first man she took to her bed that was not her husband,” Jamie said, feeling a deep longing for his own uncomfortable cold bed, for the privacy it afforded if nothing else.

  “No, but you are the first, I think, that she loved. And so it matters to him.”

  He was suddenly unspeakably weary. “What does he want, then? Whatever it is, I will do it.”

  Chapter Forty-four

  Ring of Fire

  The ring was simply a space inside a circle of snow-heavy pines that had been raked. A fire had been lit to one side, for the warmth of the spectators, he assumed, and it lent a falsely celebratory glow to the night. The ground was damp, for the snow had been cleared away. At least his feet would have purchase. How much that might matter when the intent of the evening was to kill him was up for debate, but he was glad of it nevertheless. The only thing he had on his side was his background as a boxer and the fact that no one in this country knew it other than Andrei.

  They were out beyond the borders of the camp, deep enough into the forest that no shouts for help would be heard, no pleas for mercy granted. Guards, picked for their un-seeing eyes, kept guns trained upon all present.

  When his opponent stepped into the ring of fire. Jamie knew a moment of free-falling terror. He should have known Isay would not play fair, that he, cowardly to the bitter end, would send someone else to do the dirty work for him. This man he now faced was more bear than human, big and thick, arms like great slabs of beef and solid with muscle. Jamie took a deep breath and hoped for a quick death. It was about the most optimistic thing he could think of at first glance.

  Gregor, ever the master of the succinct summary, uttered the Russian equivalent of “Fuck my mother, that bastard is huge.”

  “I noticed,” Jamie said dryly.

  He danced at the edge of the light, assessing the man, knowing that even the largest and strongest will have a weak spot—throat, kidney, a soft patch in the belly, or a weak knee. But there was no way to know this man, so he would have to find it out the hard way. His own advantages were what they always had been: quick thinking, lightning agility and always staying one step ahead. Unfortunately, he was going to have to get in close enough to take a couple of hits in order to get a better idea of the man’s reach and speed. He took a deep breath. It was best to get it over with.

  The first hit took him in the midsection and made the world go entirely black for a second. The second one glanced off the side of his head and he thought he heard angels singing. He managed to jab in a swift uppercut to the man’s jaw and then danced back from him. The big man was slow, not agile, and he was going to wind quickly—though maybe not quickly enough—and he could hit like a piledriver. Jamie could play for time but not for long, for he couldn’t risk exhausting himself, because once this man had him, he was toast.

  He was careful to avoid the fire, skirting its edge, but skirting it fine, as it was a weapon he could use to his advantage. He had to take a hard-knuckled blow to his left eye to manage it, but he got his opponent to step into the hot coals, his great weight sinking him in to his ankle. He roared with pain and stumbled out, scattering bright coals in his wake, his boot smoking and sizzling on the slushy ground.

  Jamie took a second to catch his wind and wiped a hand across his face, for despite the cold the sweat was dripping from his hairline. Somewhere in the night, Isay’s dark eyes watched him. He could feel them.

  Though he was left-handed, Jamie could lead with either, which had always given him a distinct advantage over other fighters—they never knew which direction the hit would be coming from. His trainer had once said he had never seen a fighter with a faster strike and it was what he used now, tapping the man hard around his head, in the soft part under the ribs. They danced for a long time, Jamie light but tired, for the drugs still lingered in his blood; the other man heavy and ponderous but coming on like a slow-moving train. Spinning, dodging, weaving, the faces beyond the fire a blur, though he could feel the strange lust that bloodsport brought surging up in the male animal. The night was thick with it.

  The bear-man had a longer reach even if he was slow. The power behind the blow was stunning, though it glanced off the side of Jamie’s head, for he had managed to half step out of range at the last second. But the man got in under his defenses
as Jamie reeled back. He was grabbed in a hard hug, it was like being mauled by a bear, for the air left his lungs in a rush and his ribs creaked under the pressure. He was lifted off the ground, his opponent grunting, slippery with sweat and the raw stink of brutality. The world was dancing with tiny black sprites against the background of crimson flame and inky sky. He dug his thumb hard into the brute’s eye, the only leverage available to him. He was dropped like a hot coal, smacked away like a bothersome fly. Jamie fell backward into the filthy snow, allowing the fall to take him all the way over and regaining his feet in one fluid move, even though it hurt like holy hell.

  His left ear was ringing and his eye was starting to swell shut. If the bastard got a hold on him again like he had a moment ago, it was over. He had to think of something quickly or accept death here and now. It would not be without honor, nor freedom—it would be a better death than he had come to expect here in the Soviet Empire. He could choose it. It could be on his terms.

  The fire leaped higher, the sparks touching his hair and skin, the small sting of pain clearing his mind. Gregor came into his field of view. He could only spare him a split second but saw him look pointedly toward the northern edge of the circle where the pines, thick with snow, hid a drop-off. He understood Gregor’s message, but thought it was next door to suicidal to attempt it. Then again, there was little doubt this man had been ordered to beat him to death, so inflicting some damage on him in the process seemed fairly attractive.

  Jamie angled himself around, putting his back to the drop-off. He knew it was there, but he had no idea how steep it was, nor how far the fall. He danced back to the edge, feeling it yawn behind him. He needed to bring the man to him, and bring him fast. He still had one hand clapped to his eye and blood was trickling out from beneath his palm, but the other eye was locked on Jamie with dull hatred, thick with the promise of death.

  “Yeb vas,” he said as they closed together and Jamie made an incredibly indelicate comment on the state of the man’s mother’s morals, in the most gutteresque Russian he could manage. He heard Gregor’s shout of laughter, just as the ground began to give way. He was hit with the force of an ox, all muscle and brute blind fury. They hung there for a desperate instant, suspended over the void and then fell through the scrim of pines, tree branches whipping at them, ice cascading, snow falling with them, gathering branch by branch into a cataract that enveloped them within its cold, plunging embrace.