Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  The hand clutched his, and he knew with certainty it was not his wife he touched. He jerked back, though the feeling of the hand clasping his was fading already. But he knew, for a second, he had felt the other man, the cold of him, the longing that bound the three of them in this eternal triangle. He had felt it too, the love that his wife and Jamie shared between them, and found himself a part of it, enmeshed in threads too sticky to ever disentangle. And he knew that the old woman was right, only Pamela could find Jamie, only Pamela could reach him, when he was beyond the reach of all else.

  The white tiger had been stalking him for days. Jamie knew if he did not find shelter soon, it was going to stop sliding in and out of the blue shadows of the forest and claim him for its own.

  He was exhausted and had been walking for so long that he’d lost any sense of time other than what was given him by the position of the sun and the stars. He did not know what day of the week it was, nor even the month. It was only winter, endless, white and cruel winter. Even the sounds had their own season, all the noise about him in shades of white and silver: the crunch of his own footsteps, the howl of the wind as it slapped his face relentlessly, the soft slither of the tiger always just far enough behind to scent his blood, caged within the fragile skin of a human being. He was slowing badly. It was only a matter of time. The night before… or had it been morning… he had found himself paralyzed and fascinated by bolts of ruby light glistening in the snow until he realized it was blood that patterned the white with jewel-like pinwheels. He had no comprehension of how long he stood there, but only knew the light was much dimmer than when he had stopped. And now the tiger was getting close enough that Jamie could smell its hunger and feel the echo of its pulse in his own veins, its footfall with each step of his own, each exhalation of its lungs with the crystallized outpouring of his breath, the yearning in its very cells for the repletion of another’s blood.

  He could not remember the last time he had eaten, and though the hunger cramps had left him some days ago, he knew this to be a bad sign. He was sure it was lack of food that was making him see the odd streaks of color that flashed in front of his eyes now and again. The only thing he had drunk was handfuls of snow. Nor did he know the last time he had seen another human being. Was it weeks ago, a month? Had it been in the camp, and for that matter, he didn’t have a recollection of leaving the camp. Had he been released? Had he escaped? These holes in his memory were very troubling but he turned away the thoughts as too tiresome.

  He staggered on for some time more, but the landscape seemed to barely change and he wondered if he was simply moving in ever-increasing circles. As the sun started its rapid fall toward night, he simply could not put one foot in front of another anymore and fell to his knees in the snow, his blood seemingly replaced by lead. He longed with a violence that was drowning out his survival instinct, to lie down in the snow and go to sleep.

  He fell down into the snow and barely found the strength to roll over on his back and prevent suffocation. Just a minute, or maybe two, and then he’d get up and keep moving. He lay there with eyes open and watched the skein of day unravel into the full of night. First came flowing grey-blue to tint the trees and then ribbons of lavender, shot through with reds and purples until finally the ink of night absorbed all colors and the stars came out blazing through the cold air, one by one. It seemed an entirely separate world from the pain and hardship of the one below. Against that indigo background he could see trails and roads built upon the air, bridges by which to ascend the night and walk off into universes both terrible and beautiful. There were delicate oceans of frost, breathed out, breathed in, on which flew translucent ships, with sails rimed by the fine-grained salt of stars. How he longed for the ease of such a universe, to set sail in a celestial sea. He could feel his eyes closing, and the sweet lethargy of sleep wrapping its arms about him.

  It was the tiger’s roar that woke him. Jamie started, heart pounding, scrabbling to his feet, snow falling down his collar and into his boots. Dear God he was so cold, aching in every joint and cell. Dazed with sleep, he cast around, not knowing in which direction to move. The tiger had sounded very close. He couldn’t see anything now, adrenaline clouded his vision, blurred the periphery of sight, his ragged breathing fogging the air with crystals. Then directly to the west a shape on the horizon caught his eye, a house, perhaps fifty yards away. He shook his head, confused, certain it hadn’t been there when he had fallen down. It was a structure certainly, but still looked like a thing of dreams or wishful thinking, built as though it had sprung from the pages of a Russian fairytale, onion domes capping low towers, with great hoods of snow adorning them, and steps leading up to a broad, railed porch that was almost buried in ice. But in the midst of all this, he saw a glint of gold and knew it was a latch. Please God let it be unlocked. He stumbled toward it, panic giving his legs strength to move.

  Somehow he managed to run, and knew if the tiger was going to strike, now was the time it would happen. His back was braced for attack even as he made the stairs, scrabbling up them, half crawling through the masses of snow and ice. He was certain he felt the tiger’s breath hot on his neck, could taste the blood-craving upon its tongue, but he knew to look around would be fatal. He grasped the door latch and heaved himself up. The door gave all at once and he fell into the entry, kicking the door shut behind him as he went down.

  He lay there for a moment, half worried the big cat had somehow leaped in behind him. But there was only silence, not even a snuffling or scratching outside the door. He sat up slowly, the world spinning around him. He braced his back against the door and looked around, which was, other than a hint of drifts and an echo of shored ice, an exercise in futility. For it was night and the light, even here in this ice castle with its cupolas of snow and frescoes of sparkling frost, was of the blue variant, thick with shadow, and laced with deception.

  He sat for a long time, fatigue so heavy that he knew he could not move, even if it meant to light a fire and save his own life. And so sleep, like the oldest of friends came to lay its cape of oblivion gently down.

  Jamie awoke to view the world through the finest of silver-linked spiderwebbing. At first, he wondered what sort of fantastical eight-legged beastie could have woven such a virtuosic netting and then realized it was threads of ice that had formed from his breath and floated down to settle upon each curve and line of his face. He sat up slowly, snow and ice raining off him in great glittering drifts. He looked around and gasped out loud.

  It was as though he had awakened inside a Faberge egg, where the enamel was translucent enough to allow the heart of the jewels to stream through. In the ice was every color: the sea-blue of azure, the blood of rubies, the sand of topaz, the blush-rose of quartz, the delicate lavender hue of amethyst and the warm butter of pearls. Stairways of emerald, with railings that glittered like sugar, but that would, he knew, crumble at a breath. At the top of the stairs spread a deep and mysterious lapis lazuli that hinted at another world altogether in the upper story, but he dared not attempt the climb. The one floor was enough, for light such as this was infinite, could not be pinioned nor harnessed. Its very essence was that of eternity. It fell in vortices and lattices, swirled in coruscations of brilliance, shot in rays of spangled thistles.

  He got to his feet, every muscle protesting, and walked slowly across the room to where a large Russian heater stood, delft tiles gleaming bluely through a thick coating of frost. There was a stack of birch next to it, though no kindling, and a small box of wooden matches. Jamie struck a match against the icy flint and was more grateful for that small violet and gold flame than he could remember being for anything in a very long time.

  Despite his gratitude for the matches, the fire would not catch, the wood was frozen solid with a layer of ice. He pounded it against the floor to no avail, other than setting a shower of ice particles free to swirl around him. He needed to go outside to gather dry sticks, but whe
n he scraped a hole in the frost of one window, he saw the tiger tracks clear as a water print upon silk. He looked from every window then and saw that the tracks encircled the entire structure. He was trapped like a rabbit inside a snare, one move toward the outside world and it would snap him straight through the bone.

  He returned to the fire, knowing there was little else he could do. After another half hour of profound effort, he managed a small flame on the cold wood. The flame hissed and spit like an agitated rattlesnake, but let out a tiny bit of warmth. He blew on it gently, afraid of eclipsing it but more worried that it would fizzle out on its own if it didn’t build up some strength. Once it seemed like it would hold, he stood, stamping his feet to keep the blood flowing, sluggish as that process might be. The frost had begun to melt on the window nearest the stove, water running in rivulets through the remaining ice. It was through this small opening on the world that he spotted movement outside, a speck against the unending fields of white.

  He peered until his eyes felt like they might freeze in place, widening the hole in the ice so he could see more clearly. The figure continued to advance, though the drifts of snow that blew across the landscape obscured his view of the person every few seconds.

  He had gone so long without seeing another human being that he thought, were the person an Urdu-speaking flame-eater recently escaped from the Armenian circus, he would fall on him with tears of gratitude, merely for the sight of another human face.

  But what if it was someone hostile? He dismissed the thought—how on earth would someone find him out here anyway? It had to be a hunter, of one of the nomadic tribes who wandered the frozen vastness of Russia no matter the season. The figure advanced close enough that he could see by both movement and form that it was a woman.

  A woman? What in the name of all that was good and holy was a woman doing out here in the midst of nowhere? Now there was nothing for it but to risk that the tiger was still lurking about and go out and warn her.

  He sighed, looked at the fire with regretful longing, and flung the door open. The wind slapped him in the face as if to tell him he was a complete fool to venture out again, which he thought, wrapping his ragged coat more securely around him, he bloody well was. He slid down the ice and snow that coated the stairs and bounded to his feet at the bottom, eyes watering from the cold, but still looking around for the tiger to come, sleek and boundless, from the side of the house.

  The woman was cursing, a streak of words so blue that there was an indigo cloud all around her. More startling than the words though, was the language in which they were uttered, for they were English. Jamie narrowed his eyes against the stinging cold, trying to make out her features, but her head was down as she navigated drifts of snow, almost up to her hips. He knew that voice though, knew it as he knew all the geography of his soul. It was impossible that she should be here, utterly impossible… and then the woman looked up and he thought perhaps he was dead, or that he had crossed entirely into another dimension.

  It simply wasn’t possible and yet there was only one pair of starred green eyes like those, only one face that he held in his memory in such finely drawn detail. He moved across the snow toward her, feeling oddly weightless as though he were merely floating along the top without effort, but his feet felt a terrible distance away from his head, now that he thought about it.

  And then she was there, wrapped in furs, the white of them lying against her skin like torn silk on orchids. She leaned forward and kissed his cheek, as though she’d only seen him a week before. The smell of strawberries flooded his senses and something new, a note he did not recognize in the melody of her scent.

  “Are you going to invite me in, Jamie? It’s bloody cold out here.”

  “I—I—”

  “Dream or not, Jamie, certain rules still apply.”

  Jamie was about to retort that he hadn’t known her to ever wait upon an invitation before charging in where angels feared to tread, but remembered the tiger and hustled her toward the house.

  She pulled the hood back, her hair tumbling out in wild disarray. Her cheeks were a deep rose with the cold and her eyes spilled light that warmed far more than did the fire. She laid down a bundle of sticks and opened the door on the stove to shove several inside. The fire grasped them immediately, grateful for the sustenance.

  “Really, Jamie, this fire wouldn’t warm a newt,” she said, shaking her head in disgust.

  Jamie, nonplussed now that the immediate danger of tiger attack was over, merely stood and watched her add a few sticks of dry pine from her pack until the fire was roaring in a life-saving blaze.

  Again from her pack, she unrolled a bundle of furs, thick and rich and black as night—sable if he knew his furs and he did. What he didn’t know was why she was here or how she had managed to find him when even he had no idea where he was.

  “I kept dreaming you were in danger,” she said, “so I went to see your grandmother to find out what we could do about it.”

  “My grandmother? Well, it all makes sense now,” Jamie said with no small annoyance.

  “Does it?” she asked.

  “Well, no,” Jamie admitted. “It’s just that anytime my grandmother gets involved, things tend to get confusing and complicated to a truly impressive degree. So the fact that she’s connected with you showing up here without warning, when even I don’t know where ‘here’ is, does make things a bit clearer. Though the fact that my grandmother is in the mix does beg the question of—”

  Pamela cut him off from that avenue of inquiry, by handing him a tiny bottle, saying, “Drink this.”

  He took it, surprised at the weight of it. It was silver, though dark with tarnish, strange words inscribed on its sides. But because it was Pamela, he simply unstopped the bottle and drank down what it contained. It was thick and stung his mouth like nettles, but it tasted oddly ambrosial as well. Heat flooded his body along the path of the drink.

  “Now get undressed and get into the furs.”

  Jamie was tempted to look around to see if there was a tiny door with the address ‘W. RABBIT’ engraved upon a brass plate, but squelched the thought under the stern look Pamela was giving him. And though he had no memory of shedding his clothes, he soon found himself under the furs, disturbingly bare.

  “Where is Casey?” he asked, thinking it would have been wise to ask the question before getting naked.

  “Oh, he’s here too, just a bit behind me is all.” She waved airily and producing another flask—this one copper—she drank its contents.

  “Would you mind terribly,” he asked, buried in a sable quilt that reached his chin, “pouring a bit of hot tea on my nose?”

  “Jamie,” she sighed, “please quit messing about. This isn’t a tea party and you are most certainly not a dormouse, by any stretch of ludicrous imagining.”

  She was speaking in an odd mixture of Gaelic, Russian and her own native English. Jamie wondered if the drink had been absinthe or something akin to it for he seemed to be lost in dreams that made only a dream world sense. There was no flavor of either wormwood or gall on his tongue, however, only that strangely warm and stinging taste that lingered all the way down his throat.

  Feeling giddy or drunk or high or poisoned, or possibly all of the above, he found himself declaiming in verse—

  “In my youth, said the fool, though I was learned and fair

  I was considered both a rogue and a wit,

  My reputation was sullied and bruised as a pear

  Though ‘tis true that I liked to be bit.”

  Pamela sighed as though taxed by a small, badly-behaved boy. “Alright, have it your way, but I refuse to wear a hat or drink from a dirty teacup and I insist on fresh butter for my bread.”

  And then, clad still in her furs, she said,

  “You are fair, said the maid, as I’ve mentioned before

 
; But I find you uncommonly glib

  And if you give tongue to rhyme anymore

  I shall give you a dig in the rib.”

  The fur slid from her shoulders and dropped to the floor. Underneath she was completely naked. Jamie found himself wordless with surprise. Dear God, but he had forgotten how beautiful she was. She was the poem he had never written, as perfect as unspoken thoughts traced upon an orchid.

  “Poets make the most conceited lovers,” she said. “For instance right now you’re comparing my skin to orchids, but are not sure how to tie that in with the ink of blood that runs in traceries of a thousand rivers beneath my skin. Aren’t you?”

  “Are you reading my mind?” he asked, thinking she looked rather like a stern and wildly seductive nun at present.

  “Maybe, I’m not sure. You’re a bit transparent right now. It could be that you are reading my mind.”

  “Now you’re being contrary,” he said, still trying to see around her, wondering what in hell ‘a bit behind me,’ meant concerning her husband’s presence.

  “He’s not terribly happy about me being here, but he came with me, so it’s alright,” she said in a manner Jamie found incredibly blithe for a woman wearing no more than her socks. “Besides, this is a simple thermal exchange from one body to another, the best way to warm you up.”

  The heat from the stove was intoxicating. He was drunk with warmth and when she slid into the furs next to him, he gasped aloud at the fire of her skin. She shimmered with heat from head to toe and Jamie moved toward it as life will toward the sun that sustains it.

  “Let me warm you,” she said softly, turning under him with the ease of water.

  “But—I—”

  “Jamie, it’s simple. I’m not really here.”

  “I know,” he said softly, “because I’ve dreamed this too many times. Still, I can feel you and smell you. I don’t understand—”