Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  “Will ye want to talk about what’s upset ye?” he asked, wondering what on earth had finally managed to discombobulate the woman.

  “No, I don’t. Suffice it to say I’ve had a wee bit of a falling out with my brother.”

  Pat quailed inwardly at the thought of what a ‘wee bit of a falling out’ with Noah Murray might consist of.

  “About what?” he asked, though he knew with a fair degree of certainty what it was they had disagreed over.

  “’Tis of no matter, an’ that’s not why I’ve come here.”

  “No?”

  “No. I—I—” she stuttered slightly and Pat raised an eyebrow. The woman truly was addled tonight. It must have been a regular donnybrook with her brother.

  “I should like to stay the night, if that’s alright. An’ yes, before ye ask, I do mean what ye think I mean by that.”

  Pat felt as though he had been hit hard in the solar plexus. He had not expected that of all things.

  “How would ye explain that to yer brother?” he asked and his voice was gruff enough to make her flinch.

  “I told him I’m staying in town tonight with our cousin. He’s too angry to check, but if he does, she knows to say that I’m there but not willin’ to speak to him.”

  He put a hand to the table to steady himself, feeling as if there were not adequate oxygen in the house.

  “Patrick, I know how you felt about your wife. I’m not trying to replace her, nor make you feel such for me. I just want this night with you before the summer is over, that’s all.”

  “That’s all, is it?” he said softly, but inside his heart was hammering and he felt lightheaded. “I—I’ll need a minute, Kate,” he said, feeling as if the walls were closing in around him.

  She nodded, but he could see the hurt in her face, as though her lack of sight had left her without the ability to hide what she felt.

  He stood, realizing he was still only half-dressed, shirt unbuttoned, feet bare. He walked outside, stepping off the porch into the torrential rain, drumming hard into his skin. He put his hands to his head, trying to find his breath. He was reeling from her words and the effect they had on him. He wanted her—aye, he had known that from almost the first time he met her, though he had not been able to admit it, but the thought of bedding another woman—a woman who was not Sylvie—stopped him cold. Yet, where the hell had he thought this was leading? The nights by the fire, the meals together, working side by side each day, their walks in the woods with him guiding her every step though he well knew she did not need the help. He had been aware of her as a woman right from the start. She had been much more than a stranger he had met at Pamela and Casey’s house one winter’s afternoon.

  He put his head against the stone wall of the house, letting the rain sluice down the back of his shirt, wishing it would cool the fever in his skin but knowing it would not. He swallowed, his chest tight with desire. Aye, he wanted her all right, as badly as he had ever wanted anything in his life. But did he have the right, even if she was willing? The look on her face cut him to the quick, and he knew he had hurt her far more than he had ever thought he could. It wasn’t realistic to think that he could remain celibate for the rest of his life, as much as the idea had appealed in the wake of Sylvie’s death. If he said no tonight, he knew there was no way they could go on, as if she had never offered herself to him in this way. Kate’s rather brutal honesty simply wouldn’t allow for that. It took the wind from him entirely to think of never seeing her again. But that, he was all too well aware, did not justify taking a step such as this if he wasn’t ready.

  And then he heard it, his father’s voice in his head, a memory culled from the depths by need.

  ‘Love is rarer than ye think, laddie. It’s a gift, an’ if the universe sees fit to present ye with it more than the once, well then, count yerself as truly blessed an’ grab it with both hands.’

  His own voice then, still in his head, but coming from the depths of his soul.

  Sylvie… Sylvie… Sylvie… please understand… please let me go… I have to keep living…

  She was still seated by the fire, pale as the driven snow but with two streaks of clear deep pink flaring in her cheeks. She was brave, this Kate, for she met his eyes as he entered the house, his body soaked with the cold rain, and he knew she saw him clearly in the only way that truly mattered between two people. He went to her silently and knelt on the floor at her feet. He took one slim hand in his own and put it to his chest so that she might feel his heart beat and know what her words had done to him. She left her hand where he placed it and with the other turned his face up toward her own. Her hand slid along his jawline, soft as down, and her fingers curled into his wet hair as she bent her head toward his. The quicksilver beneath his skin ignited, flooding through his body, setting fire to his blood.

  “Trust me,” she said softly against his mouth.

  And so he did.

  Chapter Seventy-two

  Times Gone and Still to Come…

  Casey loved the walk home from the house he was working on each night, even when the weather wasn’t as fine as it was this evening. He liked the time to review bits of the day, to go over the plans once again in his head, to think of the pleasing heft of the stone and the warp of the wood and how it satisfied something deep in his soul to build something, to see something go up instead of being blown down. He thought it fair to say he had not missed his wee, hard city this summer.

  It was his favorite time of year, August, when everything was rich and heavy, ripe in the fields, awaiting harvest and the longer, cooler nights. The hedgerows rustled in the breeze and he could smell rose petals that had tumbled to the wind somewhere nearby. Living here in the west for the summer had been an exercise filled with memory for him, as he had always spent his summers in the west as a boy, summers that were now held in an amber haze in his memory, fixed and perfect in their lineaments.

  There had been a summer that his father could not come out to the country with them and so they had gone alone, himself and his brother—himself fifteen at the time and Patrick, eleven. They had lived in an old cottage stranded high on a mountainside where the mist wrapped around them before the light left the sky and didn’t clear off until late the next day. They lived off the land, snaring rabbits, occasionally stealing milk from the cow in the field at the foot of the mountain and growing a wee garden themselves because he had to—even then—plant something, nourish it and bring it to fullness.

  They lived in perfect isolation, with the wind and rain, the sun and the stars, so close to the earth and the sky that they lost sense of being something separate from it. Thoughts there were huge, too big to be real, so you let them go with the clouds and the wind, and savored the lingerings of them sweet in your chest. They had read books by candlelight, told each other blood curdling stories and then regretted it until the dawn broke the dark of the night. They had talked about dreams, both those that were realistic and those that they had understood, even then, weren’t likely to come true.

  Women had been a theory, a dream that summer, not a reality but something perfect, lovely and transient as angels and the scent of flowers in a meadow. They had talked about what they wanted in a girl, what they hoped for and what they thought the shape of their lives with such a woman might be. Truth be known, he would have been happy with anyone halfway decent looking, under the age of thirty and over the age of fifteen, as long as she came equipped with breasts.

  Now he knew that women were like a road, beckoning a man on to somewhere grand, over the next hill to a horizon that may or may not exist, may or may not be a blessing. They were earth under a man’s feet and sun thick as honey on his shoulders. His woman though, ah, his woman was like the sea that she so loved. She was depths so deep he could not find the limit of them. She was mystery and shifting light and soul restoring dark. She was movement and change a
nd sometimes he longed to drown in her—and sometimes he was terrified of doing just that.

  He paused at the edge of the garden to watch her now, their wee girl in her arms while she displayed enormous interest in the rather large snail Conor was showing her. Never once, even during that enchanted summer so long ago, did he imagine a woman such as this, nor did he have the faintest idea how much one could love a woman. He did now. He could feel her awareness of him and knew she had sensed his presence, turned her thoughts to him as naturally as a flower toward the sun, sensing before sighting. He walked across the field toward her.

  Conor tumbled pell-mell at him, and he swept him up into his arms before the child fell. Conor was like himself, trying to run before he could properly walk. He smelled of grass and dirt and water, and Casey breathed him in, grateful for the solid warmth of his son. Isabelle was already squeaking, aware that her Daddy had arrived home, wanting his attention for herself. She was a tyrant—a wee, gorgeous tyrant—for whom he was an utter slave, and he would have it no other way.

  His wife smiled in greeting and raised her face to him, emerald eyes soft as the sun that misted down around them, and he leaned in to kiss her, to put his hand upon her and lose himself as he always did with her, as she, in her turn, did with him.

  And he knows, given the choice, he will choose to drown every time.

  Part Eleven

  Belfast, For My Sins

  Ireland – September-November 1975

  Chapter Seventy-three

  September 1975

  The Trustees

  The hall in which they met was old and drafty, with a low ceiling and a stink that was made up of the component parts of wet wool, male sweat, cigarette smoke and one that David could only identify as that of hatred. It underlay everything that was done and said in these meetings and he swore it lingered in his nose for the entire week after.

  Tonight, the smell was especially pernicious. The hall was dim, lit only with candles arrayed around the room and stabbed into sconces on the walls. It gave the building the feeling of an unholy Sabbat… which was what it was, more or less, he suspected. There was a heightened tension in the room that told him this was not the ordinary bi-weekly meeting of the murder club, as he had come to think of it. Even the night outside had a spooky feel to it, the way nights in autumn sometimes did. For if the veil between this world and that was at its thinnest this time of year, then it surely allowed as much evil to drift across as good. David gave himself a shake, thinking he had lived too long in this country and was becoming as superstitious as an old woman descended directly from the Celts.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed inaudibly. Coming here always gave him a headache.

  Around him were arrayed bankers and teachers, civil servants and men whose only occupation seemed to be that of hired killer. Each wore an air of expectancy, and David wondered just what or whom they were waiting for tonight?

  A reading of the previous meeting’s minutes, as ridiculous as they were, brought a note of reality into the hall, and David relaxed enough to let his mind wander.

  This assignment was going to cost him, regardless of what he had thought going in. A man could not see this much ugliness, could not be touched by it in the way he had, and remain unaffected. If indeed it didn’t outright kill him.

  He didn’t know how much longer he could hold Boyd off either. He could hardly pretend to be some virgin schoolboy untouched by the world, and to fend off the man’s advances was becoming more and more difficult. He had awakened four nights previous to find the man sitting on the side of his bed, his hand under the blankets, fingers groping about the strings of David’s pyjama bottoms. David had barely restrained himself from hitting him across the face and then choking him to death. He had been well trained in all the arts of both defense and offense, and could have accomplished the task given five minutes. But killing the man would most certainly blow his cover. So he had lain there in the dark, allowing the man to touch him, to fondle and grasp, all the time hearing the man’s breath shorten and tighten, and feeling a revulsion so deep within him that he was afraid the taint of it would stay, like poison in a well.

  There was a weight to such things, he knew. The way stones dropped into a bucket eventually displaced the water within, so such things displaced a man’s humanity, drop by drop, until one day feeling did not come so easily as it once had. David had always thought the lack of feeling was weakness rather than strength, because it bled a man until he no longer knew right from wrong, or perhaps worse yet, no longer cared for the difference. For himself it had always been an occupational hazard, and he had guarded against it. Only lately it had not been so easy. But that was the smaller picture, the personal one he kept within a locket, rarely opened.

  The broader picture, the one that had him here tonight was a movement that lacked any sort of vision. The Republicans had their messianic core of a united country, of a right denied for hundreds of years. The Loyalists had no such thing. They had fear and anger, disguised as bravado and domination. There was no coherency and so the movement was propelled by all the wrong things: self-interest, money, power, prestige and revenge—all of which provided the perfect recipe for schisms without number. This particular schism was bound by blood, and by keeping secrets that David was certain were going to turn his own hair white.

  The talking had ceased and David pulled his mind back to the present. A man entered, accompanied by a cold breeze, as though premonition followed him as closely as a forked tail followed its chosen demon. David shivered despite the close and fetid atmosphere of the building.

  He had never seen a man so pale, so lacking in that indefinable thing that made a person human and recognizable as such. He moved, he breathed, and David had to assume that there was blood flowing through his veins, but it wasn’t apparent on his surface. Jamie had warned him about the Reverend, but even Jamie’s rather unflattering portrait of the man had not prepared David for the reality. Here was the one man who could bring cohesion to this movement, a cohesion in which all parties were bound by hatred and mired in the past, but cohesion nonetheless. It was, in part, what David feared about him.

  The Reverend certainly knew how to speak the language of this particular tribe. From a whisper of brimstone to a high-pitched hiss, this man could gather people into the palm of his lily-white hand and make them move to his commands. David supposed evil had its attractions, though for himself revulsion was all he felt in this man’s presence. Revulsion and fear.

  David had grown so used to rhetoric that he only half heard the words until a name leapt out at him with the force of a hammer right between the eyes.

  “…We’re going to attack Noah Murray’s farm,” the Reverend said, white face aglow with a very special sort of pleasure. David felt sick. Sick and stunned, to be fully accurate. The man must be insane. Noah Murray was the most feared godfather that the Republican world had, and for good reason. David had seen the results of the man’s handiwork twice now, and neither was an image he was likely to banish from his mind, ever.

  “Noah Murray is the beating heart of the IRA in South Armagh and we need to rip that beating heart out and crush it beneath our heels in order for the Fenian bastards to understand we mean business. Our Protestant brothers in South Armagh have lived under the chill of his evil shadow for too long now.”

  The man was mad. There was no denying it, and yet it seemed that he, David, was the only person in the room who was disturbed by his rhetoric and fanaticism.

  “Only so many of us can fulfill this mission. The men who do this must be chosen carefully, for their loyalty, for their commitment to the cause of freedom for Loyalist Ulster, for their understanding of the blood sacrifice of our ancestors on British battlefields. After careful prayer and contemplation I have chosen the men who will take on this sacred mission.” He paused for effect and David felt as though the room paused with him, the very
molecules of the air halting to wait for his pronouncement.

  The names dropped one by one, blood into a living pool of men. He felt relief in some as their names were not called, jubilation in others as their names were spoken in that soft, sibilant voice, insistent as the snake in Eden. Then he heard the words he had not thought to ever hear.

  “Davey MacNee.”

  The Reverend’s eyes, as blank as the center of a dead star, met his own, and David knew that he was going to have to be very lucky indeed to survive this mission.

  Twelve of them in the end, like the disciples. Only it was not their leader who would be the ultimate sacrifice, but themselves. He understood why he had been included. He understood that the Reverend was not fooled by his cover. He understood he would have to go anyway. Lenny’s name had been spoken too, and David knew this was no coincidence. The moment of reckoning had come. He stood with the other chosen—or damned, as it were—and waited for what came next, knowing it wouldn’t be pleasant. It wasn’t.

  Held in the Reverend’s pale, fine-boned hand, the knife glowed, reflecting like a slice of starlight in the basin of water that was placed below it. David swallowed. They were going to sign their pledges in the most lasting ink of all—blood. A blade of fear sliced through his belly. He would have to do it, there was no way out of this sickening ritual. God knew he had done worse in the name of his job.

  The candle flames threw out long shadows, thick on the air, so that each man became a looming monster against the smoke-blackened walls. Perhaps they all were monsters, David thought, himself included. Monsters in the guise of ordinary men.

  His turn came all too soon. The Reverend took his hand, gripping it tightly, the lightless eyes boring into his own. David felt sick, and as though he wore a mask that was slipping sideways off his face, revealing his truth to this man. The Reverend had dipped the knife in the water and raised it now to score David’s hand, but it was not the small cut each man before him had endured. Rather the Reverend cut him to the bone on his palm, the cut long and flowing with blood.