Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  “Our children must be raised in the Church. If your ministers are not preaching the pure, true faith of our fathers, then we must have them removed and replaced with true and zealous men of God.”

  “Roman Catholic educational institutions must be outlawed. Religious education must only be taught at the hands of evangelical Protestants.

  “The Roman Catholic Church must be declared an illegal body. History has shown us that the Great Whore of Rome conspires with the darkest forces against the liberty and fortunes of mankind. For generations this evil has blighted our land. It must be destroyed so that our fellow countrymen will have an opportunity to enter the True Faith. Only then will Ulster be undivided!”

  David felt sick. Could this madman actually be proposing to take down the Catholic Church and apparently espousing any method of achieving that end?

  “For God and Ulster!” The voices echoed in bloody counterpoint and David joined them, though adding an amen to what this man had just said curdled his insides.

  The voice had been quiet, smooth as ice and twice as cold, despite the fire and brimstone content of the speech. Every man in the room was riveted, and David wondered if it was only he who was disturbed by the talk of blood running through the streets in rivers, and how the voice caressed those words as though the very thought of such savagery gave the speaker sensual pleasure.

  He had an uneasy sense that he ought to know that voice, that it was buried somewhere deep in the memories of his last stay in Belfast. He felt a tingle along his bones and the quickening of his own blood told him here was the man he sought. This was the power behind the dark whispers, behind the movements taking place on the periphery of outright violence. This was the man that would, indeed, make the streets run crimson with blood.

  After, there was tea but no pretense at civility. A dark force had arisen in the room with the hidden man’s words and it tainted the very air, laying its staining oil on each of their skins. David was certain he was the only one feeling dirty though. The man stayed behind the screen for a short time, then left silently, but one could feel an ice-cold miasma in his wake. David felt he could breathe again, despite being surrounded by some of the most violent men in the kingdom. He listened to the talk and occasionally added some small comment himself, to make it look like he was a budding radical, though not terribly politically savvy. He wanted them to think he had potential as a foot soldier but little more. They were less likely to suspect him in such a role.

  He excused himself a few moments later, asking for the use of the toilet. McCarthy directed him to the back of the house and the room two doors before the kitchen. He entered, counted to twenty and then slipped back out, hoping his luck would hold for a few minutes. He darted up the long stairs, years of subterfuge making the shadows his natural element.

  He found himself in a long, dark hall with several doors branching off it. Christ, it would take a month of Sundays to search all these rooms, and there was no guarantee the proof of what this house harbored was even here. Yet, by the pricking along his backbone—a thing he had learned to trust during his years as an agent—he felt certain something was here.

  About a third of the rooms appeared to be occupied. He could hear the murmur of voices behind some doors, the deep breath of sleep in others, and the muffled sound of crying behind one. He paused for a moment, knowing what it was to be a young boy, lost and alone in the world. One could have parents and a safe, warm house and still know such things all too well. For now there was nothing he could do to help these boys without compromising his cover. So he moved on, quiet, carefully avoiding the creaks such old houses always had in abundance.

  A flash of pale color caught his eye halfway down the hall and he halted, freezing in place until he could assess the danger, or lack thereof.

  Standing in a room to his left, the door slightly ajar, was the man from behind the screen. His back was to the door, but David didn’t need to know what he looked like to recognize him. The presence was undeniable. Some people left an impression upon the air around them. Not many had such force, but he knew a few that did. James Kirkpatrick and Casey Riordan being the two that came immediately to mind. This man’s presence was more of an absence, like that of a candle suffocated in the dark. A second ago it might have scorched you, but now it was only a tracery of smoke upon the air. Yes, an absence was what it was; an emptiness that sent skitters along David’s skin like the touch of an icy wind. As hair-trigger aware of this man as he was, he knew without a doubt that the man also knew he stood there, watching him. He did not turn, because he did not need to acknowledge him. It was enough that they both knew.

  He caught a glimmer of pale hair in the light from the window but no more. Not blond as his own hair was naturally, nor the distinctive light-catching gold of James Kirkpatrick, but a shade as pale as water. The silhouette was unnaturally still, yet the tension that came off the figure was almost febrile in its intensity. David could not angle his body any farther to see at what the man gazed, fixated. But knowing the topography of Belfast as he did, he would be able to narrow the possibilities once he was out in the streets.

  He left quietly enough, not wanting to overplay his hand all in one night. Still, he didn’t leave unnoticed. He could feel someone open the door at his back and come down the stairs as he headed for the shadows of the street.

  The man followed him into the roadway, stride heavy, not bothering to disguise or muffle it. He didn’t care if David knew he was behind him.

  He made a small show of glancing over his shoulder. It was McCarthy himself. Either the man suspected him or he had fallen into the trap David had set.

  “Hold up, lad,” the man said, puffing slightly in an effort to catch up. David slowed and turned, a quizzical yet wary look on his face. McCarthy drew even with him and David had to stop himself from instinctively stepping back. The man put the fine hairs on his neck up. David had long experience of such men and he knew how dangerous they were.

  “Yer the young lad from Liverpool, am I right?”

  “Aye,” David said, hoping he sounded truculent enough to pass for a boy in his teens.

  “Ye’ll forgive me for sayin’ so, but yer lookin’ a bit weary round the edges. Are ye in need of a meal or a bed? Only Donald didn’t say where ye were staying. We’ve accommodation for young men such as yourself, alone in the world an’ in need of some warmth an’ the charity of our Savior.”

  David had to refrain from pinching himself, wondering if it could be this simple.Yet if his years in the spy world had taught him anything, it was that humans were very willing to trust blindly when it concerned something that they wanted. He was grateful, however, for the dark and the overhanging bough of the elm tree he stood under, for the man would not see the look of loathing that he knew was in his own eyes. Loathing and victory, for a part of tonight’s goal had been just this, for David to find a more permanent way into this house.

  “I’d be obliged to ye, Mister, for I’ve been sleepin’ rough on the streets for the last three weeks.”

  “Come with me then, son. We’ll have you set right in no time.”

  I just bet you will, you bastard, David thought and suppressed a little whoop of victory as he followed the man back toward the house.

  He was in. Now he only hoped he would survive long enough to do what needed to be done. There would be blood indeed, just whose wasn’t entirely clear yet.

  Chapter Three

  February 1973

  The Map of Love

  The bed sat in a pool of firelight, a safe oasis at the end of a long day. Pamela had warmed towels and a blanket in the oven until they were almost unbearably hot. She spread the blanket across the bed and Casey, naked, lay down flat on his stomach, heaving a sigh of relief.

  “Are you sore?” she asked, straddling his back and reaching for the lotion she had made up expressly for this purpose.

>   “Mmhm,” he murmured. “Spent half the day offloading stone for the retaining wall an’ ye know my back doesn’t take as kindly to that sort of work as another man’s might.”

  She did know, for as strong as Casey was his back had been damaged too badly, too often, for it to have the sort of strength it once had.

  In the half-light from the fire, the skin was a fine web of silver scars, the design that of a crazed spider, with long runnels of healed tissue branching off from the trunk of his spine. It was oddly beautiful, set against the broad and well-muscled canvas of his back. At the very edges, the scarring was fine as twigs outlined in hoarfrost.

  She ran her fingers into the channels of damaged skin, her flesh and bone like ivory keys against the silver and shadow of his. She often thought she was more familiar with the nuances of his body than she was with her own. It had become a map of love for her, each scar a road, each bone and dip and hollow another feature in the geography that drew her as irresistibly as the moon pulled on the tide. This thought made her bite her lip to halt the laughter. With Casey’s rather jaundiced view on large bodies of water, it wasn’t likely he would care to be compared to the tide. Blissfully unaware of her thoughts, he groaned and took a deep breath of contentment.

  “Lord woman, ye’ve a strong hand on ye. Ye’ve untied all my knots. Will ye tell me a story then, Jewel?” he asked as she relaxed into his back, the weight of her body keeping his muscles stretched and smooth beneath the skin. It had become a ritual between them. After she rubbed his aches and pains away, he would ask her for a bit of her history, a few bones of her past, dug carefully free from the mines of childhood. He had done this so gently, so slowly that it took months to realize she had finally shared her entire past with him.

  “Will you want the time I went sailing with President Kennedy then, or the time I was kicked out of ballet class for bringing my horse with me?”

  “Ye went sailin’ with the President?” Casey half turned, giving her an incredulous glance.

  “Well, technically he wasn’t President at the time, just the junior Senator from Massachusetts.”

  “Oh well, hardly worth the tellin’ or the hearin’ then, is it?” Casey said with no small sarcasm.

  “Then I’ll keep my tongue still,” she said.

  Casey rolled an eye in her direction, no mean feat for a man on his stomach.

  “If ye do it’ll be the first time for it. Alright, then I give. How the hell did ye end up out on the sea with JFK?”

  “My father and he moved in many of the same circles. They took me along sailing one afternoon. I remember it like it was yesterday. My father told me to pay attention because I was going sailing with the future President of the United States and it would be a memory to cherish someday.”

  “And was it?”

  “Oh yes, he was magic, even to a small girl.”

  “Did he seem even larger than life in person?”

  “Yes, he did. He was tanned and healthy and wearing an old unraveling sweater and jeans, if you can imagine. He was simply glorious; you know one of those men who are carved out from the air about them somehow and you know they won’t live as ordinary mortals do, that fate and history have destined them for something much larger.”

  “Ye could,” Casey said acerbically, “be describin’ James Kirkpatrick here, ye know.”

  “I think Jamie seemed a tad glamorous even to the Kennedys.”

  “I should have known,” Casey snorted, “the bugger is friends with the Kennedys, isn’t he?”

  “Well, he was with Bobby—Robert that is,” she hastily amended, not wanting Casey to see just how tightly knit that summer community had been.

  “Mostly just, is it? ‘Tis alright woman. It wouldn’t surprise me did the man have a direct line to the Pope.”

  Pamela thought it was perhaps best to let the subject of Jamie lie. Neither he nor Casey had ever spoken of what had happened between them but she knew there had been a confrontation of some sort and that neither man had emerged from it feeling particularly warm and fuzzy toward the other.

  Casey must have sensed her mood for he switched topics himself.

  “Do ye remember where ye were when ye heard the President had been killed?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, recalling with a terrible clarity the stark shock of that day. “I was in a store, buying a chocolate bar on my way home from school. It was on the radio and I remember a shock wave went all down my body, rippled from the top of my head to my feet. I dropped the chocolate on the floor and just stood there. The man behind the counter looked as if he’d turned to stone. It felt as though the world stopped just for a second. You could feel the earth skip a heartbeat and no one was breathing. It felt like we would never breathe properly again. I couldn’t comprehend how he could be gone, how there could be a blank space in the universe where that strong, amazing spirit had existed. He and his brothers seemed immortal somehow. All of a piece with the American dream: sailors, dreamers, doers. I think the American dream was bruised for all of us after he died. It still existed, but it wasn’t golden anymore.”

  “It must have been quite the time an’ place while it lasted, though.”

  “It was,” she said, aware that her tone brooked on the wistful.

  “Ye miss it, don’t ye?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because, darlin’, I saw ye in that element, didn’t I? Ye fit with that world. With the sailboats an’ big summer houses an’ the politics an’ all the glamor that goes with it. I don’t doubt yer Da’ wanted ye to marry a man of that ilk, someone like a Kennedy or a Fitzgerald. Didn’t he?”

  “Yes, it was what was expected of me, that I would marry well and within the Irish American aristocracy. The Kennedys were the stratosphere though. I’m sure my father would have settled for a lesser satellite.”

  “Yer Da’ will have been fond of Jamie then, I suppose?”

  “Yes,” she said knowing there was little use in coloring the truth. “He was fond of Jamie. Apparently they kept in touch long after that summer on the Vineyard.”

  “I wonder what he’d have thought of me. Had he lived, Jewel, he’d likely have chased me off with a shotgun.”

  She had wondered herself at times what her father would have thought of Casey, an ex-IRA rebel who worked with his hands and had spent five years in prison. Likely he wouldn’t have been terribly impressed until he knew the man behind the history.

  “You’re a finer man than any I’ve ever known,” she said, stroking the side of his face with one hand, his stubble rasping pleasantly against her oiled palm.

  “It’s only that it intimidates a man a bit to know that ye came from such wealth an’ privilege, that ye were meant for country clubs an’ big homes on the ocean. I wonder that all this,” he indicated the room with a wave of his hand, though she knew he meant the world beyond this room as well, “doesn’t seem a wee bit shabby to ye? I took ye from that world, like pluckin’ a jewel from its proper settin’, an’ perhaps I’d not the right to do so.”

  “That world was a lonely place for me, Casey. Maybe I would have found my place in it when I was an adult, but maybe I wouldn’t have. No, I belong here with you, with the dog, the cat and the sheep, in a house that creaks in welcome each time I step over the threshold, in a wee hollow filled with flowers. A house built by a man who hammered every board into place with love. You’re my home, man. I would never be happy elsewhere.”

  He took the hand that still rested lightly on his jaw and kissed it.

  “I may not be able to give ye the sailboats and summer homes, but I can promise ye this one thing, Jewel. As long as I am alive in this world, you will always be loved.”

  “Thank you for that,” she said quietly, depositing a kiss on the back of his neck. She moved awkwardly off his back and lay down beside him. She pu
t her face into the hollow at the base of his skull, the crush of his curls soft beneath her cheek. His hair had grown long over the winter, though he kept threatening to shave it off the minute he found the time for it. She rather hoped he wouldn’t though, for he had beautiful hair: thick, dark and loosely curled. Tonight it smelled of pine pitch and rock dust, elements with which he had worked that day. She loved the luxuriant silkiness of it and privately thought he looked like a wonderfully sexy pirate. It was not a thought she voiced aloud, knowing he would shave it off that second, lack of time be damned.

  “Will we ever speak of it, d’ye suppose?” he asked so softly that it hardly registered.

  “About what?” she asked on the rise of a yawn. The heat of his body near her own and the vapors of roses and lavender, chamomile and honey all combined to make her sleepy, not that she needed much of a nudge in that direction these days. Casey’s next words, however, brought her fully alert.

  “About you an’ Love Hagerty,” he said, voice still quiet, but now with an under-note of pain with which she was all too familiar.

  She was silent for a long moment, heart thudding hard in her chest. She was certain that Casey must be able to feel it, as closely as their two skins lay together.

  “I—I don’t know. What would we say?”

  “I don’t know, Pamela, only that I think as much as it hurts the both of us, still we’ll have to speak of it one day.”

  She didn’t respond, though she knew his words were not framed in the form of a question, but rather a statement of fact that neither of them wanted to face.

  Though they did not speak of it, she knew that didn’t preclude either of them thinking about it, and she was sensitive enough to her husband in all his various moods that she knew when it was occupying him. A darkness would come down over him, visible even in the shade his eyes took on, and he would leave the house for a few hours. She never asked where he went during those absences, for fear that he might actually tell her.