Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  “Somethin’ has happened here alright, or they’re accustomed to treating strangers with a cold shoulder. Meaning they’re either paid to keep quiet or scared into it.”

  On the fourth door, Pat pounded hard enough to wake Robert the Bruce himself, should his spirit still be lingering round. An old man, who had evidently forgotten to put his dentures in, popped his grizzled head out of the top of the half door.

  “D’ye think I’m deaf or are ye only tryin’ to make me so?”

  “I want to know if ye’ve seen anyone or anything unusual today, someone who normally wouldn’t be around the island, or didn’t belong.”

  “Well, there’s yerself,” the man said, and spit casually to the side of the door.

  Pat drew in a short, impatient breath through his nose, eyes black with anger.

  “Listen, tell me if ye’ve seen anything or I’ll make certain yer missin’ more than yer teeth before I’m gone.”

  The old man eyed Pat up and down, taking in his size and general air of ferocity.

  “Ye’ve not the most charmin’ way of askin’ a question, but aye, I’ll have seen something today that was out of the ordinary way of things. It’s best if I don’t go into details”—he flashed a look at the cottage across the way and Pat turning, saw another curtain twitch—“but if I were you, an’ lookin’ perhaps for a man, I’d head to the point out there.” He nodded curtly toward the headland some distance up from the huddle of cottages, visible nevertheless. “I was out walkin’ the cliffs earlier an’ saw some men that had no business hereabouts except of the wrong sort, if ye take my meanin’. They had a man amongst them that didn’t seem to be there voluntary like. ‘Twas a distance off, ye’ll understand, but he seemed to be like yerself in appearance.”

  “What’s the quickest way to get where I’m going?”

  The old man looked ruminative for a moment. “Ye look to be a strong lad, so best if ye see if ye can go straight down the cliff face. There’s a big cave at the bottom, but the tide is comin’ in and it fills to the top at the peak. There’s a narrow set of footholds, not so much stairs as toeholds, but manageable. Watch ye the birds though, they tend to get just the bit agitated when a human comes into their territory. Have yer friend here bring the boat round.”

  “Why do ye think it’ll be that particular cave?” Pat asked.

  The blue eyes were cold but frank. “Because it’s the one to use if ye want to kill a man an’ leave no trace of the body.”

  Pat nodded. “Thank ye for speakin’ to me. It seems it might have been dangerous for you to do so.”

  The man squinted one watery blue eye at Pat. “I’m too old to be intimidated. No one is goin’ to tell me whom I can talk to, an’ if they don’t like it I’ve got an old rifle here they can have a chat with. Now best ye hurry. The tide is on the rise already.”

  They ran across the headland, the wind scouring the cliff top. Pat’s heart was in his throat and he hoped to hell Casey was where the man thought or there was no way to reach him before he drowned. There were few deaths his brother would fear more than one by water.

  At the edge of the cliffs, they looked down. The sight took the breath from the both of them.

  “Christ,” David said, “I don’t know if I can even get the boat in there. It’s a half mile back to go get it, and by the time I…”

  Pat finished his sentence for him. “It would be too late. I’ll climb down. The old man said it could be done.”

  “He did,” David agreed, adding, “but we’re talking about someone without a tooth to his head. Patrick—” David seized his arm with one hand, pointing to the sharp rocks near to where the cave’s entrance ought to lie.

  Below, so small as to seem little more than a speck borne on the tide, was a dark head, only just above the waves that were coming in ever higher, rough with grey bearded crests.

  “Casey,” Pat breathed, and all hesitation left him. His brother appeared to be barely clinging to the rock, possibly even unconscious, and Pat knew instinctively that he wasn’t going to be able to hold on much longer. Pat stripped off his shoes, socks and jacket, flung them aside and took the measure of the cliff. It was extremely steep and slick as ice with bird shit. The shit of thousands of birds to be precise, most of which seemed to be shrieking, wheeling and diving in the air at present. They were going to be pissed as newts when they discovered him in their midst. He sized up the chutes of stone one last time, determining the best path, or the least suicidal might be more accurate. He then turned to David.

  “Go back and bring the boat around. I’ll grab Casey and swim out beyond the rocks.”

  “Pat—” David began, but stopped at the look on Pat’s face.

  “He’s my brother. There’s no choice about it. Just don’t be too feckin’ long about fetchin’ the boat, aye?”

  “Alright, I’m gone. Just don’t break your damn neck, Patrick Riordan, or I’ll never forgive you.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” Pat said and then he was gone down over the cliff face.

  It was the slap of the first wave in his face that brought Casey back to a hazy consciousness of his surroundings. The second one slapped harder and brought him up choking on salt and the taste of kelp. The pain came flooding in with the consciousness and he thought drowning might not have been such a terrible fate, despite his lack of love for the sea. And drown he would if he didn’t get up and away from the water, for he realized each wave was just a wee bit higher. The tide must be coming in. There was enough light playing upon the walls for him to realize that there were no watermarks upon them, which meant this cave filled to the top when the tide peaked.

  Already the water was at least three feet deep and he knew his time was running out quickly. The thought of trying to drag his body through that churning, freezing green mass was more than just formidable, it seemed downright impossible. He didn’t know if he had the strength for it. Then again, he would drown if he stayed here. Then again, he might well drown if he went. He wasn’t certain he could walk, and swimming against the tide was going to be more than just a wee bit difficult.

  He slid into the water, gasping as the cold verdigris filled his mouth. Everything hurt. He could barely lift his arm to pull himself up and get his head above the water so that he could drag in a ragged breath. His chest felt like it was filled with glass and he wondered if they had broken all his ribs. His left hand didn’t bear looking at, so he didn’t. The water was cold enough that it numbed his extremities, which was a blessing.

  The water was higher already, flooding in fast with the racing current. Those off Rathlin were particularly vicious and bloody cold, not to mention as temperamental as a woman, going this way and that and confusing the hell out of a man.

  A rock scraped his side hard and caught in his shirt, the tide flooding over his head immediately. He couldn’t take in enough air to buy time and his fingers, broken and numb, were hardly functioning at all. He twisted sideways as sharply as he could and felt the shirt rip away. The water was nearly to the cave ceiling now and he would have to dive down to get under the lip of the opening. He was so tired, limbs dragging as if they were weighted with iron. He might well just sink like an anchor straight to the bottom.

  He managed the dive in the end, though he was certain he wasn’t going to bob back up once he was under the stone overhang. When he did come up, his lungs were filled with an icy fire that felt as though it were going to burst out of his chest. One leg was dragging badly, the knee next to useless.

  There were rocks not far beyond the entrance. If he could just make it to one of them, he might cling there for a bit, weigh his options, and pray to God someone saw him before the sea took him. He struck out for them with what strength he could muster, kicking hard with the leg that wasn’t hurt, though that was a relative term. He bobbed up and down with the waves. At the top of one it seeme
d like the rock was right there. On the next he was spitting out water, feeling the stream of salt in his nose and eyes, and it would appear leagues beyond his reach.

  He wanted the things a man always wanted in these moments, respite, time to clear his head, a surge of strength, his Daddy, his wife, to hold his son and be bloody anywhere else but here in this predicament. But in the perverse way that the universe often worked, he got a rock with a seal sitting upon it instead.

  The seal looked at him as though it were of two minds whether to slap him over the head with a flipper and watch him sink or just let him go down on his own. He pulled himself up as far as he could onto the rock, knowing that it too would be under water soon enough. But he couldn’t go any farther right now. He needed to rest a bit, and then… well, best not to think about that overmuch, as there weren’t really any options beyond trying to make his way around the island to a place where there was a spit of land not drowning in tide. And that he could not do. He hadn’t the strength. He had heard that drowning was a peaceful way to go and he hoped it was so.

  It was, he thought fuzzily, rather beautiful out here, wild and majestic, a reminder of how small man was, how insignificant in the grander scheme of things. The pain was manageable now, mostly because he couldn’t feel his body except for his heart thudding heavily in his chest. Pamela was going to be furious with him, and the wee lad and the new baby… Christ, he couldn’t think of it. He laid his head against the rock, feeling the soft slickness of kelp beneath his cheek. If he was going to die, then out here, free and at the mercy of the elements, was preferable than at the hand of a hate-filled man. If it must be, it was better so.

  The dark, when it came, was fast, but quiet and gentle with him.

  The birds were screaming, panicked at the strange human only a few feet away from them. Pat could feel the flap of their wings, their piercing shrieks deafening. His hands were slick with fear and bird shit, but he kept moving slowly and carefully. The sun had slipped down the horizon and left the chutes of stones thick with shadow. His world had been reduced to a claustrophobic whirl of feathers and thick webbed feet, of fear and cacophonous noise, enough to make a man lose his hold and fall to the rocks below just to make it stop.

  He paused and took a breath, only to find himself face to face with a puffin that seemed none too pleased about Pat’s loitering on his bit of rock face. The bird was on a ledge roughly eight inches deep, one that Pat had been standing on a few minutes before. The foothold he had now was just the wee bit more shallow and precarious.

  The puffin eyed him with gravity and, Pat thought, a tinge of hostility there deep in its tragic gaze. Eye to eye, despite his superior weight and height, he felt rather at a disadvantage. It was the lack of wings and the sheer drop of the cliff below him into the boiling maw of the sea. The puffin waddled forward and spread its wings. Pat could not back up. Then the puffin jumped up onto his head, flapped its wings twice and settled there as though it had mistaken his curls for an ambulatory nest.

  There was simply no dignity in being done to death by a puffin. It was too dangerous to flap his hands about, as the drop to the rocks was far enough to do permanent damage. If the damn bird wanted a ride down the cliff-face Pat had no choice but to be his chariot. He took a tentative step down, foot searching delicately for purchase, and found it on a narrow two-inch wide shelf. The bird sat complacently through his movement, as though this were a Sunday jaunt and he a stoic gentleman taking in the sights upon the head of his footman.

  The rest of the journey down was accomplished with a great deal of cursing under his breath, two slips that caused him to pray wordlessly and with great fervency, and the puffin remaining throughout, clutched to his scalp. There was no shore here so it meant a drop straight into the water. Already he was in past his knees, the tide surging hard enough to knock him into the cliff face each time.

  He gently shook his head, praying that the puffin would take a hint and fly away home. It tottered to the edge of his skull and, bending over, looked upside down into his face.

  “Ye have to go, wee fellow,” Pat said, and the puffin, apparently of an agreeable frame of mind, went, with two vigorous flaps launching itself into the air. He eased down into the water, needle cold and over his shoulders. He would have to swim straight out. He could see the top of Casey’s head, indigo amongst the sea clogged greens and blacks and rippling colors of the world of stone and water.

  The sea here was no gentle maid with sandy shores beckoning. It was roiling and green-black, foaming like mad horses on the gallop and cold as a siren’s heart. There were rocks just under the surface, like steel-clawed maenads, waiting for a man to float too near. Pat let go of the rock he was holding and surged out toward his brother. It only took a moment to lose his bearings. He got his head up high enough to spot Casey’s head again and continued toward it. The cross current was strong though, and he had to compensate by pulling hard to the right so that the sea would pull him back to the left and he would hopefully end up where his brother was.

  The current was pulling hard on his legs and he was choking on the waves that slapped him in the face every time he came up for air. He couldn’t see Casey any longer and felt panic begin to course through his muscles. Had the man slipped off into the sea? And if he had, how the hell was Pat to find him beneath the waves? He looked up, eyes stinging and blurred with salt, and found that the rock his brother had rested upon was next to invisible. Panic seized him, sending a surge of adrenaline through him giving him the energy he needed to swim the final length to the rock, only to find it submerged under a few inches of water and his brother nowhere in sight. He dove under the water, the swift-building waves pounding at him, making it impossible to see more than a few inches around him. He reached out, touched the rock, hoped to God it was the same one, and felt down it as far as his lungs would allow. He came up again, drew breath into sheared lungs and felt the force of the bright green breakers, cusped with foam, push and pull to the tilt of the world.

  Down again, past the thick satiny mermaid ribbons of kelp, into the deeps where far below, if you believed the legends, lay a lost land where those with the ears for it could hear the bells that still rang in drowned towers. Down, down until his lungs were heavy as stone and aching with tension and then, miraculously, a hand, barely clinging, caught there by some wisp of fate. Pat grabbed onto it and pulled up with all the force in his chilled muscles.

  They broke the surface of the waves, coming from the chilled lands below into the twilit air of the world above. Pat grabbed the rock with one hand and pulled his brother to him with the other, turning his face upward to the sky so that he might breathe, if indeed he could.

  He couldn’t tell if his brother was alive or not. Casey was so bruised and battered that he was almost unrecognizable and what Pat could see of him was fish-belly pale, tinged green about the edges.

  He heard the rumble of the boat then and looked over the rock to see it breaching the dark green waves that parted over its hull like horses composed of mercury, shimmering and scattering to the edges and converging again on the plane of the sea.

  He swam, towing his brother with him, out beyond where the rocks could savage the boat’s hull. His muscles were screaming with exertion and cold and it seemed to take an eternity to reach the small, bobbing craft.

  David pulled Casey in, with Pat providing as much leverage as he could from below.

  Once in himself, he collapsed beside his brother, streaming seawater, so cold that he could not feel anything other than fear at how still Casey lay in the bottom of the boat. David was bent over him blowing and compressing his chest.

  “I’ll do it,” Pat said grimly. “He’s my brother.”

  Life/Death. The line was so fine and he had been near it more than once himself. He understood the siren call that existed on the far side, how it seemed at times simpler just to let go, let the tide take you where i
t would. But he was not going to allow his brother that luxury today. He started the compressions, timing them ruthlessly, determination and fury informing every cell of his being.

  A thin stream of seawater trickled from Casey’s mouth. His face was still that dreadful shade of white with the bronzy green tint around the edges. Pat prayed, a rosary of grim panic turning over and over in his head and heart. Breathe, press, press, press, breathe, the rhythm of it the only thing in the universe. He couldn’t feel the boat rocking beneath him, nor the wind that whipped them nearly blind. Waves were coming up over the side so that Casey lay in a foaming pool with fronds of seaweed clinging to his clothes. As though he had left the core of himself behind in the drowned abyss below, with its bells that forever haunted the place between worlds.

  “Pat…” David ventured.

  “Shut up, do ye hear me? This is not happening. He is not focking dying from drowning. I won’t have it,” Pat said and went back to breathing for his brother, moving his chest with as much force as he dared to exert, being that the man’s ribs felt like shattered glass under his flesh.

  “Don’t you goddamn dare,” he hissed and hit Casey’s chest with the flat of his palm. “Ye don’t get to go this way, not now, so just get that out of yer head, ye bastard.”

  The trickle of water turned to a stream, gushing out and causing Casey to choke. David turned him on his side, slow and deliberate. Gasping, he fought for air, the terrible blue-green of his skin slowly turning to white.

  When Casey’s breathing steadied, David eased him onto his back once again. He still looked utterly drained, horribly pale, dark hair threaded with fronds of kelp. He looked like a merrow brought up from the bottom of the sea after a particularly rough night on the tiles. He looked, thought Pat, like Holy Hell.

  One dark eye cracked open and sighted itself hazily upon Pat’s face.