Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  Pat walked over to the window with the baby. “Aye, yer a braw laddie. Yer Grandda’ would have loved to have been here to see ye.” He glanced up at Casey. “Daddy would be so pleased an’ proud. I can hardly believe that yer a daddy yerself now.”

  “Aye,” Casey said softly, his eyes on the tiny hands waving above the blanket’s edge. I suppose I am at that.”

  “Don’t fock it up,” Pat said lightly, but Casey heard the harsher words beneath the light tone. You have been blessed. Don’t screw it up or I’ll kill you.

  “Aye, point taken man,” Casey said, tone just as light, but knew all the same that his brother too could translate. If I fock this up, ye’ll be welcome to kill me.

  He looked back toward the bed to find his wife eyeing them both with thinly veiled amusement. Apparently, she was no slouch at translation either.

  They lay facing one another, the baby carefully couched between them. From downstairs came the sounds and smells of sausage and potato cooking. Gert had the entire household well in hand. The sounds of chat and laughter drifted up the stairs, for Gert had insisted on feeding the doctor as well as Pat.

  Pamela was tired and knew she ought to sleep, but couldn’t bring herself to rest yet.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked quietly, not wanting to disturb the baby’s peaceful contentment.

  “Like a man who knows there’s a God in heaven,” he replied, index finger wrapped snug in his son’s wee fist.

  “And all’s right with the world,” she finished softly.

  “All will be right with his world,” Casey said firmly. “I’ll see to that.”

  His eyes glanced up from where they’d been fastened to his son’s face for the last half-hour. “Ye ought to rest, darlin’. I don’t like how pale yer lookin’.”

  She laughed, and a small fist shot up, catching her directly under the chin. “Casey, I’ve just given birth. Pale is the least of how I’m feeling. Besides, I don’t think I can sleep until we’ve named him.”

  “Aye, the laddie deserves a name after the day he’s had.” Casey ran a thumb over the small fuzzy head and the baby gave a stretch that seemed to involve every cell of his being and emitted a great yawn that gave his parents a good view of healthy pink gums and tonsils. “Would ye like to name him after yer Daddy?”

  She blinked in surprise. “I thought we’d name him Brian for your Daddy.”

  Casey gave a slight shake of his head. “No, I thought of it too, but it doesn’t feel right. I’d like the wee man to have a fresh start, an’ that requires a new name, don’t ye think?”

  She nodded as the baby began to turn his head, small tongue working furiously in search of his mother’s breast.

  She sat up, Casey tucking pillows behind her back, and loosened her clean nightgown, baring one breast to the bundle now in her arms. He rootled impatiently, making small snuffling noises like a truffle pig.

  “Ye can’t fault the laddie for knowin’ what he wants,” Casey said, laughing even as tears filmed his vision and the baby’s snuffles turned to outraged squawks.

  “Ouch,” Pamela said as the baby managed to locate a nipple and clamped onto it fiercely, his entire being visibly relaxing as his tiny jaw worked vigorously.

  There was a slight draft from the doorway and Finbar stuck his big, tousled head in.

  “Come in, gadhar,” Casey said, voice gentle, knowing the dog was confused by the day’s events. “See, she’s alright. No one has hurt her.” He moved back a bit so Finbar could rest his worried countenance on his mistress’ face. The dog padded around the bed, big nose in the air, sniffing a whole array of new and elaborate scents. He sat by the bed, sagging against it when Pamela stroked his head.

  “Look at ye, will ye? Yer like a queen surrounded by adorin’ subjects,” Casey said, taking in the air of utter contentment that surrounded his wife. She had never looked more beautiful, albeit pale and exhausted, yet with a glow that made her positively luminous—a Madonna wreathed in lilies. He leaned forward, tears stinging his eyes, feeling a profound and overwhelming gratitude toward whatever forces in his life had brought this moment into being.

  “Have I said thank you for my son,” he said, voice low and rough with emotion.

  “Not in the last five minutes,” she said and leaned toward him, bestowing a soft kiss on his forehead. “You had a bit to do with him as well, you know.”

  “Perhaps we’re meant to name him Conor. Look—” Casey nodded toward the dog.

  She looked to where the baby’s hand lay curled tight into Finbar’s fur, small ivory-pink digits pearlescent against the rough wool of the dog’s coat.

  “Conor means ‘wolf-lover’,” Casey said with a smile.

  “Conor,” Pamela murmured to the rounded head at her breast, “Conor.”

  “Does it agree with yer tongue then, Jewel?”

  She took Casey’s hand and laid it on their child’s head as though in benediction.

  “Conor Brian Thomas Riordan,” she said, pronouncing each name distinctly as if to test the fitness of them.

  “A new name for a new life an’ two to remember those who live in his blood.”

  She nodded. “It’s right. Conor it is then.”

  The newly named Conor was asleep, head falling back in the pure exhaustion of the newly born. One kelp-colored eye rolled back in his head, an eyelid, pellucid as the interior of an oyster shell, tipped over the exposed white, depositing inky lashes onto the flushed cheek.

  Pamela turned to Casey, eyes half-shut with exhaustion. “Do you know what your own name means?”

  “Casey?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, it comes from the surname O Cathasaigh, an’ Cathasaigh means vigilant.”

  “Vigilant.” She stroked a hand down the side of his face. “It suits you.”

  “Aye? Then go to sleep, Jewel, an’ rest easy, for I’ll keep watch over you an’ the babe.”

  Casey found sleep didn’t come easy that night. He was too excited by the baby’s safe arrival and with Pamela coming through it equally unscathed, being that he had been her only medical help through the labor itself. He felt a need to keep watch over everyone as they slept.

  He lay down on the bed just to be near his wife and son, to listen to them breathe in the still of the house and know them safe and whole.

  He could feel Conor start to move and stretch in his wee bed. Pamela had nursed him an hour before and the baby wasn’t fussing. When Casey got up and bent over the cradle, Conor merely looked up at him with that inscrutable ancient look that newborns wear, as if they are a tiny bit confused by the world in which they’ve landed but are also the harborers of universal truths and unfathomable secrets.

  “We’ll let yer Mam sleep a bit more, aye?” He picked Conor up and tucked him tight to his chest, adjusting the blanket so that no cool air would hit his skin.

  Pamela was resting soundly, Finbar on the floor by the bed, still worried about his mistress though he raised his dark eyes to Casey questioningly at this unprecedented disruption in the nightly routine. Casey clicked his tongue at him. Finbar rose on his gangly legs and trotted downstairs with them.

  In the kitchen, he opened a window, letting the spring night flow in and around himself and the baby. The moon was a sharp quarter slice of pearl against the indigo of the April dark. The scent of green growing things was thick on the air and he could taste the tartness of sticky buds upon his tongue, the mint of new grass, the effulgence of fresh-turned earth. Conor stretched and wrinkled his tiny nose, blinking solemnly at his father.

  “Ye’ve picked a fine time to make yer entrance, laddie,” Casey said, tucking the blanket more firmly around the baby, realizing suddenly what he had come downstairs to do.

  Outside the dew was heavy on the grass. He was barefoot and the wet didn’t b
other him. A soft wind ruffled his hair and stirred the flannel blanket that shrouded the baby. He took a deep breath to still the tremor he felt throughout his body, relishing the sharp and heady smell of rising pine sap in his very cells.

  “Yer Granda’ loved such nights, said he could feel his own sap risin’ in the spring an’ ‘tis true that the man couldn’t keep himself still, nor sleep much in the springtime. He was a fine man. Ye’ve the look of him about yer wee mouth. Pure Riordan stubbornness in the set of it.”

  Conor stretched up, tilting his chin to Casey as if to emphasize the point his father had just made.

  A rift valley opened in the luminous clouds, exposing Vega low on the horizon. His Daddy’s star, deep blue and twinkling in the restless night air.

  “Look there, laddie,” he turned so that Conor faced the horizon. “’Tis yer grandda’ sayin’ hello to ye.”

  To love someone with this immediacy was a little bit like being hit hard, when you weren’t expecting it in the least. To be this afraid suddenly, so that the world seemed unbearably dangerous to someone so small and fragile and new.

  He couldn’t hold his son and not see, in some measure, the face of the daughter they had lost. Their time with her had been so brief, but he remembered every detail of her, how her tiny face looked like a translucent petal not ready to open fully. How perfect each finger and toe was, how like shafts of sea-drowned pearls her small bones were. And how, in the short hours they had been allowed to spend with her, he felt as though he had lived and died a thousand times and had seen the reflection of those feelings in his wife’s face.

  He always knew her age, and could see her as she would be now, an eager little girl proud and proprietary of her new brother. He thought of all the stories he would never tell her, the advice and wisdom he wasn’t able to pass down, and hoped that she was with his Da’ where she could have all those things that he so cherished from his own childhood.

  “Take care of her, Da’, an’ watch over us too while yer at it, if ye wouldn’t mind,” he said softly.

  He stood in the night, under the stars, until his son fell asleep, secure in the strength and love of his father’s arms.

  Chapter Eleven

  Dirty War

  David sat at his desk and looked out over the night lights of Belfast. He had been sitting thus for over an hour in an attempt to marshal his thoughts and decide how to write out the events of the last several weeks in an official report. What to tell, what to leave out? It was always a fine line, a judgement call on an operative’s part. Some things had to be told in order to reassure one’s superiors that one was actually doing one’s job in a satisfactory manner. Some things had to be hidden so they didn’t suspect one was doing one’s job a little too well.

  He sighed, tapping his pen against his forehead. There was so much he could not even begin to describe, how he felt an utter stranger to the life he had left behind in England, how some days he thought with the facet of his mind which had become ‘Davey’. In order to be effective, one had to become the ‘other’ until that other felt more natural than your own self did. Many days this life was the real one, the one you had put away seemingly the outer shell, the shed chrysalis left behind and, David thought, hollow at a distance.

  Originally, David had been run undercover with the Military Reconnaissance Force, his youthful appearance and air of innocence a useful tool. But the MRF had become too corrupt, with agents gone native and no controls effectively exerted. The entire thing had blown up when it came out that a group of them had headquartered in a massage parlor and were dabbling in business that had little to do with espionage or intelligence gathering. David had disgraced himself in an entirely different manner and almost gotten himself killed one night down in South Armagh.

  There were several intelligence agencies operating in Northern Ireland and little communication or cooperation between any of them. There was Special Branch, the elite of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. There was MI5, and even MI6—supposedly restricted by its charter to intelligence gathering outside of the United Kingdom—had a dirty finger in the Northern Irish pie. Once the MRF was disbanded in disgrace it had left a hole in the intelligence chain and thus, 14th Intel had been born. They were a handpicked crew, the upper echelons staffed with SAS officers. Nominally, he was attached to 14th Intel but his position within it had been left deliberately murky. Essentially he was on his own, and so if he got himself into a bad situation there would be no calling in the cavalry to rescue him. It hadn’t been stated outright, but was understood nevertheless. Truth was, he preferred it this way, as terrifying as it could be at times. It did blur the lines, but at least it kept him free from the turf wars that the various intelligence companies engaged in as often, if not more, than the ones they conducted with the sectarian forces. Even there things were very murky, because it was clear to David that some high-end people were in bed with the more radical factions of Loyalism and screwing around freely.

  It wasn’t even a case of the right hand being unaware of what the left was up to. That was far too simple for Northern Ireland. There were hands without number here, and no knowing to whom they were attached, nor for how long, nor why. David had never seen a war zone so confusing. And it was a war zone, despite what the government and military mouthpieces said to the contrary.

  Though that stance begged the question—if this wasn’t a war, but merely a police action, why the hell had they brought in the army, the SAS and MI5? The government wanted to be seen to be actively doing something, but wanted no blood on their hands. Soldiers were trained to obey orders. The risk in not obeying was either court martial or death if disobedience occurred in a combat situation.Yet when the soldiers obeyed orders, and the resulting fallout was a black eye, they were left to take personal responsibility for their actions, as the government and army brass distanced themselves from the poor squaddies they played as pawns on their political chessboard. For boys that were often away from home for the first time, and wet behind the proverbial ears, this was more than confusing. It was a betrayal that would erode their view of life and country for the rest of their lives. David knew this only too well, for it had done just that to his own view of his country and her dealings in Northern Ireland.

  The Catholic/Nationalist community had long accused the British forces of being in collusion with the Loyalists but the official voices had ballyhooed this as rampant paranoia or media huckstering. David feared it was neither. No one trusted anyone—and with good reason.

  They were an odd people, the Northern Irish, unfathomable, hard as nails at times—hard faces, hard voices, hard lives. He had never seen a people more family oriented or who would take a bullet for a friend without hesitation. Their loyalty to tribe was half the problem. It was next to impossible to break that code, to get in under the wire. And even if you did, something would always be wrong—your accent too generic, your views not quite on target, your way of communicating and understanding revealing you as ‘other’ to a people who lived on trip-wire instincts.

  Northern Ireland was, of course, too close to Britain. A part of Britain officially, though unofficially David knew they never really had been. The planting and partition of Ireland might be one of the most grievous historical errors any country ever made. But Britain could not admit she had a war within her own borders, and this effectively tied the hands of the army and intelligence services.

  Everyone here was playing their own game, fighting a turf war that had nothing to do with bringing peace to this war-torn province. Everyone wanted a piece of the action. At times, to David, it seemed like a enormous game, without any hard and fast rules. Everyone looking to either snatch or broker power, to play the propaganda war, to justify criminal butchery by claiming it was provoked.

  A half hour later he only had three things written down. First, his contact with Jimmy Sandilands and the information that had come from that association. Then t
he surveillance results from Boyd’s office and home. There was next to nothing there; Boyd seemed to be a suspicious bastard by nature. David was certain Boyd didn’t scent anything wrong with David, because he was blind where he chose to be. Lust would do that to a man. He shook off the distaste that he felt when he saw the look in Boyd’s eyes or felt his breath on his neck.

  The last item on his list was one over which he hesitated. He felt a marked antagonism toward involving the Riordans in anything official, of committing their names to paper, or admitting he had any contact with them. He never had put Patrick’s name to any document, and he would not. It seemed a sacrilege to do so, as though he were laying something fragile and beautiful in front of strange eyes that would not see anything but information to be used against either himself or Patrick.

  He laid the pen down and stood up. The last of the light was gone and deep night lay over Belfast, softening the lines of the hard little city. It might, in the view of the world, be a bit of a provincial backwater, but he was more at home here than he had ever felt in London. Sometimes he forgot that he had another country, that people here saw him as foreign, as other, as the enemy. It was a dangerous sort of amnesia and he ought to know better than to indulge in it.

  He had long understood that his country was not innocent here in Ulster, that in fact Britain had much to answer for in the formation and continuation of the Troubles. In light of recently gained knowledge, he had to admit it was far worse than he had ever imagined. In England, only the glory of the Empire was taught in the schools. History was never taught in its fullness, hidden were the truths of man’s unending cruelty to man, his subjugation of other races and the blood that bought colonies and kept them. What he had learned through his time with the Redhand Loyalists told him it was entirely within the scope of possibility that British military forces actively fanned the sectarian flames in Ulster to detract from their own culpability.