Blood On Borrowed Wings: A Dark Fantasy Thriller

by Darren Stapleton

  I shuddered minor convulsions as I circled to land back on the ledge where Doc was waiting. He started berating me before my feet hit the floor, and just like that, the nagging doubt had dissipated.

  The icy chill remained.

  A secret is a noisy and restless escape artist.

  Aphorisms for Life

  S. Petti

  CHAPTER 81

  ‘I don't remember it.’

  ‘That is supposed to be my line,’ Doc said, making notes. ‘It was during your training. You were trying to outmanoeuvre your brother; he was the much more proficient flier as I recall: faster, stronger.’

  ‘Did you two ever think of marrying?’

  Doc ignored the jibe and continued.

  ‘You climbed to the upper limit training would allow. Bleecker shouted you down over the earpiece. Though, in the still of that day, I think everyone on Nimbus and its neighbouring planets would have heard him without any modular amplification.’

  I nodded, remembering.

  ‘He said, “Either you’re deaf, Slayer, or we got a problem.”’

  ‘And you, Drake, ignored orders; training protocol, physics, medical advice and … and reason. You kept climbing.’

  ‘The air was still. The thermals strong. The wind flat and futile. Perfect conditions.’

  ‘You tried the triple loop.’

  ‘Nearly had it too.’

  ‘You blacked out after 520 degrees, not even halfway.’

  ‘The G’s nearly ripped my wings off.’

  ‘Blacked out at the nadir of your revolution. It was like watching someone throw a power switch. You went from featherweight to deadweight in an instant, started your freefall.’

  ‘I don’t remember that part.’

  Doc smiled. ‘The point is: you tried.’

  ‘And failed.’

  ‘Maybe. But Bleecker saw something in you that he did not see in your brother.’

  ‘Recklessness.’

  ‘Yes. That’s it exactly.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Well, kind of. Caution never breeds action, Drake, it informs it. Recklessness means risk, yes, but it also means something is going to happen, and fast.’

  ‘My brother should have lead us. Been at the apex of our formation. He might have … he …’

  ‘Don’t you see, Drake? Caution can never be abandoned, it is a permanent resident, just as recklessness can never be taught and dwells primarily in the youthful and stupid.’

  ‘And I was a steaming heap of both.’

  Doc nodded. ‘But recklessness can be taken, Drake, and tempered, hewn into bravery and decisiveness. Informed by caution but never dominated. That’s what Bleecker saw.’

  ‘What Bleecker saw was an eighteen year old falling to his death.’

  ‘It’s the ground that kills us, not the fall,’ said Doc.

  ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘I said … erm … I don’t know. What did I just say?’ He looked lost for an instant, then confused, then lost again.

  ‘You just recalled something that I said at Newt’s funeral.’

  ‘Did I really? What was it?’

  ‘Progress or happy accident. Maybe it’s from your life before the assault, maybe that is how I knew it in the first place, that I had heard it from you in some bar or seminar before Bethscape.’

  I realised I was frowning and relaxed.

  ‘What did I just say? What was it?’ Doc asked.

  ‘Never mind. You were talking of my recklessness.’

  ‘The backup trainees caught you in that training academy net. Broke one of their wrists with your weight and velocity as I recall.’

  ‘Kiall. Skinny kid. He was not happy.’

  ‘Must have been his writing hand.’

  ‘I believe I said something similar to him,’ I said.

  Doc wrote something in his book.

  ‘I was selfish, Doc. Most children are. Self-obsessed. Egotistical, and yes, I suppose reckless.’

  'Yes, Drake. I agree. But have you changed?'

  ‘I am not so reckless anymore.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Doc and closed his book triumphantly.

  I frowned at him, purposefully this time.

  ‘Should not everything else have changed but that, Drake?’

  He walked off to his sleeping quarters. Doc often did that, break away from conversations enigmatically or abruptly. He blamed his short term memory saying ‘why should I bother with the insignificances of small talk, when my politeness should be assumed?’ It did make perfect sense. Especially after I witnessed him once saying goodnight at a cocktail party for nearly two hours. I was surprised he had not worn a track into the plush carpeted floor that night doing laps of constant circles, nods and waves.

  I leaned beyond Doc’s chair and picked up one of his notebooks and flicked back to the first page. It was too early to turn in, so I stood, walked over and gathered the seven different coloured notebooks that I could see. I sat and a sigh escaped me that sounded like a Lowlands’ train coming into station. My wings screamed a now familiar protest at being bound and bunched at my back. I shuddered. It was hard to get used to. I did not know if I ever would again.

  Happy for the distraction I turned to the red book first. I mean red should denote a warning, danger, have something of significance, and I almost missed it. Amidst the pages denoting plant watering levels, washing cycles and recent weather formations, I saw what Doc had written about my visit, when I had gone straight to his home from the concrete cellblocks with Pan.

  I tried not to read what he had written about her, but just as easily as trying not to think about something will most certainly place it at the forefront of all conscious thought, trying to ignore the words about her was impossible. A strange sadness settled into me then, not regret though. No. Just a deep sadness that things had gone the way they had, for her. For all of us.

  I read the passage after that and once I was halfway through, stopped and reread it more carefully:

  Pan -

  Password question - What did she call my plant?

  Password answer - May Blueflower

  Drake - west, from Deadlands swamp.

  Smells of rotten eggs. Likes Pan.

  D had hit Pan (contusion to mandible)

  Watered plant 1.00pm

  D escaped (but was meant to/helped to?)

  People with big resources wanted him out of way

  Tied to brothers killing? Framed?

  Bethscape?

  Angelbrawl? Jackdaw?

  Blackwings?

  Take out rubbish.

  Being framed?

  Rose/Leonora? (Election looming?)

  Teabags.

  I followed the asterisk to the footer of the page.

  *Coincidence - Newt killed and D locked up at same time? Way of getting rid of both brothers?

  I do not believe in coincidence. That a fate awaits us regardless of personal choices or circumstances is a fallacy born to perpetuate apathy, to subdue and strangle. We choose our own place in this world and must admit to that. And time and location and serendipity has nothing to do with it. Nothing. My behaviour since leaving the Deadlands, no, since stepping foot in the Angelbrawl Arena, had supplied them with a multitude of transgressions to pin on me. I had done that. Not fate. Me. I had used Pan, I have used Doc, I have dragged strangers and organisations and myself through the dirt and to what end? To do exactly what they had expected me to do. Be reckless. Take action. Be selfish.

  Back when Pan and I had seen Doc, in his humble home, sat amongst the books and framed qualifications of someone as close to genius as I would probably ever meet; he advised me to do the opposite, the unexpected. And what had I done?

  Been reckless.

  Been selfish.

  Took whatever action I thought necessary.

  I looked at Pan’s photo then and felt a flash of anger and regret. She looked tired and bruised, but intelligence was evident in her piercing eyes, beneath the cu
rled ringlet that I had watched her roll around her finger a hundred times. She far outshone the superficial gloss of the photograph. I looked at her face, she smiled right into the centre of my selfish, cold heart. I felt something well up in my chest, cloying, scratching in the corners of my eyes and narrowing my throat to a pinhole. It felt a little like panic.

  So I went with it. Did not tamp it down. At the nadir of my revolution. Hung on to the arms of the chair so tightly, my knuckles white, the veins in my forearms bulging; I felt the soft timber give beneath the flimsy upholstery.

  I felt fearful. I felt full.

  Fearful because I knew what was coming and hoping it would soon be over, one way or another.

  I ripped out the pages, the key ones, to protect Doc, walked over to the dwindling fire. What he did not know couldn’t hurt him. Though I cannot pretend that as I watched the small pages curl, char and burn in the hearth, that I did not feel some degree of guilt amidst the satisfaction.

  I grabbed my bag and scribbled a note in Doc’s most current book, left it open on his chair so he would see it first thing.

  Before I left, one hand on the door handle, I turned and looked into the dying fire. Pan’s photograph was the last remnant to go. It edges curled then its centre bubbled colours to brown then white and her image was twisted into smoke and scorched from the room, from my sight forever.

  I did not need it anymore.

  Worry is to prudence as lifeboats are to sailing.

  Necessities Bare

  Thomas Aureile

  CHAPTER 82

  ‘Is this line secure?’ he said into the telephone.

  ‘It’s always secure, Vedett, you know that.’

  ‘Prudence, prudence, always prudence, Leonora - my mother always used to say.’

  ‘You had a mother?’

  He chuckled. ‘Of sorts.’

  The line crackled empty static.

  ‘Vedett, I have work to …’

  ‘We’re ready.’

  Leonora was silent.

  ‘All systems go,’ Vedett said.

  ‘What does that even mean?’

  Vedett could tell Leonora’s patience was wearing thin.

  ‘You want me to spell it out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We don’t even need Drake to be at the rendezvous site anymore. We have enough to bury him. When your legal team are through, he will have life sentences stacked so high, you’ll be looking up to see the top of it from Nimbus’ plateau. You can blame him for Newt, for all of it, even the kiss.’

  Silence.

  ‘He will have his counsel begging for the death sentence.’

  ‘He does not seem the type to beg.’

  ‘They all beg, my esteemed friend. All of them. Have you seen what happens to Slayers, ex or otherwise in the Deadlands cells? Maybe you should insist on a custodial sentence. Prolong his suffering. I have contacts on the inside who would love nothing more than to …’

  ‘We want him disgraced and gone, Vedett. In that order. But he needs to be there. It all hinges on him showing up. That is what the whole charade has been about. We want him entirely discredited and then erased so we can use him for this.’

  Vedett continued as if she had not spoken. ‘We have multiple murders and motives, subterfuge, escape from a police holding cell and assault on three officers, stealing of “evidence”, we even have his DNA ready to be planted somewhere.’

  ‘I dare not ask.’

  ‘It’s on a bloodied towel Coyle found at a crappy hotel just out of town, though I appreciate your reticence.’

  Leonora shuddered as she heard Vedett lick his lips.

  ‘Coyle had a plan to tie him in with the Blackwings, we can still use it too. In fact, it is probably more intact now Coyle has been decommissioned.’

  ‘Decommissioned?’

  ‘Yes, in three separate locations.’

  ‘So, all systems go.’

  ‘Don’t you get it, Leo?’

  ‘Don't call me Leo.’

  ‘Coyle has done much more for us in death than the muscle bound water bison ever did for us in life. Now the Blackwings have got his body, in instalments, I even dropped some of his bodily fluids on their front lawn …’

  Vedett could imagine Leonora’s screwed-up face at that one, and continued enthusiastically, ‘and now he is the link between Drake and Mckeever and Croel. You have all three of them where you want them.’

  ‘Three birds with one stone. All witnesses gone. Winged opposition crushed.’

  ‘Yes...linked by one bestial dead police officer.’

  Silence.

  ‘Just one moment.’ Leonora covered the handset with her hand whilst she spoke in mumbled background tones to somebody Vedett assumed was Rose.

  ‘I thought the Blackwings were out of this already,’ said Leonora.

  ‘They will do as they are told. But they want a piece of Drake, desperately, we could drag them down too if we wish.

  ‘We?’

  ‘Figure of speech,’ said Vedett.

  ‘Hmmm. What about the Doctor?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He’s missing and we can only assume he’s with Drake.’

  ‘He will not be a problem.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Leo, when we find him, we will get him into custody, give him a few more boots to the head, then claim diminished capacity. We can lose him in any secure unit we like and the best of it is, he will not even be aware of anything leading up to this whole fiasco. Without his notes he is a blank page, Leo, and you can fill it in with an ink of your choosing.’

  ‘Don’t call me that. Do you think that he has performed the operation? Gone for the wing bait?’

  ‘We have no way of knowing. I suppose your first chance to really find that out will be when Drake flies in through your open window whistling like a bluebird.’

  More mumbling away from the handset.

  ‘Vedett you have to flush Drake out, get him to be where we want him. A custodial sentence is not the goal here. Bigger things are in motion.’

  ‘I know but it is difficult to influence him when I don’t know where the fuck he is. You ladies have to be so, ah, dramatic.’

  ‘It’s important that it appears that Drake has done everything of his own volition. Without him there to play his part, this will all be pointless. I told him enough about our big day to get him interested, though I did not tell him enough to seem too revealing or loose lipped.’

  ‘Our big day?’ Vedett said.

  ‘Figure of speech.’ Leonora said, not missing a beat.

  ‘Loose lipped eh? Was that before you were both seen eating each others face off outside Horizon HQ?’

  Leonora said nothing.

  ‘I have an idea that should flush him out,’ Vedett said, ‘but it will cost you.’

  ‘Why am I not surprised?’

  ‘I am renowned for my, ah, entrepreneurial spirit.’

  Crackling silence.

  ‘He needs one more prod in the right direction. Persuasion is a fine art, Leonora.’

  ‘Or a constant monotone buzzing in the ear.’

  ‘In particular, I will be prodding someone he knows, and it should set the right dominoes falling.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘The “when” is up to you, Leonora. Say the word and I will make the visit, Drake will not be too far behind.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then,’ Vedett lowered his voice, ‘he will come.’

  Leonora was silent at first. ‘You love this, don’t you?’

  ‘I love nothing. I prefer to call it morbid fascination.’

  Silence.

  ‘Well. Save it for something more noteworthy. We are ready. We have the location, men and resources,’ Leonora said.

  ‘Are you ready? Are you really? Because I do not want to be around for the end of it. Too many unknown variables.’

  ‘And that is how we want it Vedett. Unknown. You will be paid hands
omely for your time and discretion, as always.’

  ‘Do not underestimate him, Leonora. He has his brother, his whole old regiment at his back, and, from experience, I try to steer clear of fucking with family, friends or charity.’

  ‘I did not think you were so discerning.’

  Vedett was quiet. When he spoke again his timbre had dropped a subtle notch, his voice lowered. ‘You better take him down, Leo, and take him down fast, before this whole mess derails.’

  ‘There will be a time for that Vedett, and you will be far far away when it happens. And do not call me Leo.’

  She felt a crawl of revulsion as she imagined the sickly smear of a grin creeping across his face.

  ‘I have some pressing business in the Deluvian Plains, there is a chief wanting me to invest in a little business...they need my, ah, expertise. I will finish up here then be on my way.’

  ‘I’m sure the desert will suit you much better than Primary House, Vedett. I do not want to know your personal…’

  ‘You are part of my business now, Leonora. Do not forget that.’

  Without saying goodbye, Leonora replaced the handset and turned to Rose. ‘Vedett wants a rush on his credits, the drop will have to be made tomorrow.’

  ‘Arrangements can be made.’ Rose picked at a loose thread at the hem of her jacket.

  ‘I didn’t think he needed credit, thought he did this more for sport and kicks.’

  ‘Oh yes, he does, I am sure of that.’ She rolled the loose thread into a small ball with her forefinger and thumb, her lip curled as she nonchalantly flicked it to the floor. ‘The rush is not because of some dire financial strait, Leonora; it is rather because he thinks we may not be around much longer.’