Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  It always amazed Jamie how quickly Gregor could snap out of his transsexual persona into the sharp, hard vor that he truly was at heart.

  “I want a piano,” Jamie said, and threw another ladle of water onto the stones. The resulting clouds of steam gave Gregor a decidedly Mephistophelian aura.

  Gregor laughed, a long peal of hilarity that bounced off the low-ceilinged hut. “Oh, Yasha, you do amuse me. You are funny, funny man. A piano? Even if I could find one, how on earth would we have something that size transported here and smuggled past the guards?”

  “I have already cleared it with the Commander. I just need you to find the piano for me. It has to be a good one too, not one whose wires are rusting from sitting in some abandoned school room collecting six feet of snow every winter. Understand?”

  Gregor leaned back against the rough wall of the banya, a smile playing about his full lips while his eyes narrowed speculatively. Jamie kept his own features flat and expressionless, but allowed himself a small inward pulse of satisfaction. The bastard was intrigued and that was more than half the battle. He understood instinctively that Gregor, being the creature he was, loved nothing more than a challenge to his abilities. Jamie suspected they had been too dormant of late and were wanting some strain. He was more than happy to supply the exercise for this man’s particular talents.

  “So, I find you piano—and what do you give me?” Gregor asked, flexing one long arm and making the spiderweb on his shoulder ripple, a movement that had the effect of making the spider within the web appear to be crawling up his neck.

  “Whatever you ask,” Jamie said and met Gregor’s dark eyes fully. “I owe you my life, as I understand it. You may have what you want.”

  Gregor eyed him shrewdly, black eyes narrowing to slits. “This is too easy—where is—how do you Westerners say—the catch?”

  “No catch, only that I think you’re not going to choose sex with me. That’s too simple for you. You’re going to want something more, something permanent.”

  Gregor ran a finger over his mouth, and nodded. “You know me too well, Yasha. As much as I would like to avail myself of your considerable beauty, still I want to give part of myself to you in the bargain. I am thinking you would let me use you, but not allow it to touch you in here.” He tapped his big blunt fingers over his heart.

  Jamie knew that to do a deal with the devil, you had to be willing to give up at least a corner of your soul. This he understood. He might not like it, but he understood the necessity of it.

  “Here is what I am proposing. I am going to tell you a story, Yasha, but it will, I warn you, take many nights for the telling. Also, the telling will be painful at times, but you will bear it well, I think. But first things first. To tell this tale, we will have to go to my hut and we will need more vodka, because a storyteller’s throat must never be allowed to go dry. We will finish this bottle,” Gregor flourished a bottle that had been sitting under the bench, “and then retire to my hut. Drink.”

  Jamie drank. The vodka was flavored with pepper, a sure cure for the common cold and guaranteed to sweat out a man’s ills in the banya.

  “This story,” Jamie said, handing back the bottle and feeling rather relaxed between the steam and the drink, “does it feature anyone I know?”

  “Ah yes, Yasha, someone you know very well indeed. And someone I think I am knowing far better than he would like. But before we leave the banya, I am returning the favor of the veniki.”

  Jamie thought it was fortunate that the vodka had settled in sweet glowing pools in his brain so that he couldn’t examine too closely how he felt about having his back whipped by a naked Russian who was quite clearly aroused by the situation. He stuck his hand out and growled, “Give me back the damn vodka, I have a feeling I’m going to need every ounce of it before this night is through.”

  Morning was tinting the horizon with roses the color of a ripe peach when Jamie stumbled out of Gregor’s hut, reeking of vodka, with a head filled with lead and a chest that hurt as though glass had been scraped over it all night. This wasn’t, Jamie thought blearily, too far from the truth. He shivered, pulling his shirt together where it had been ripped unceremoniously from his back before he could take it off. All he wanted right now was the blessed anonymity of sleep.

  But before he could reach the sanctuary of his hut, Violet stepped from the shadows of the women’s building, her delicate face lighting with relief upon him, while at the same time assessing him for visible bruises and contusions. Well, she would be disappointed. The bruising was well hidden and not likely to heal anytime soon. He wished she had stayed in her hut and would not look at him with such an expression on her face. He wished the entire world would just go away and leave him in peace.

  “I was worried,” she said, the dark circles under her eyes testifying to her words. “Nikolai came looking for you first thing this morning and I noticed all of Gregor’s crew slept elsewhere last night.” At this juncture, she flushed like a frosted rose, a deep pink coming up under the morning light on her face.

  “Are you asking,” he said acerbically, “if I lost another sort of virginity last night?”

  Violet was nothing if not brave and so she stepped in where other angels might be wise not to tread.

  “Yes, I suppose I am asking that, Yasha? Have you made some sort of bargain with the devil?”

  “Gregor being the devil in this case, I assume?”

  “Yes,” she said, her small mouth pursing in annoyance. “Are you being contrary on purpose, Yasha? It’s not amusing.”

  “Well,” he replied, “I can assure you I wasn’t laughing a great deal last night. But to answer your question, I believe I was nearly naked at one point, and things did get fairly intimate but I don’t think he did anything to me that hasn’t been done before.”

  She stepped toward him, reaching out a hand to touch his face but he recoiled, weary suddenly of people needing assurance, of people wanting to touch him, comfort him, wanting more than he was capable of giving.

  The hurt flickered across her face briefly, and he felt a small whiplash of regret but was too tired to apologize.

  “Why?” she asked. “For what would you do this when he had finally come to respect you, when you were safe from him?”

  Jamie shook his head wearily. “I was never safe from him. That’s an illusion, Violet, and you more than anyone ought to know it. Gregor is a wild animal, and any appearance of tameness is only that—an appearance. He wanted something from me and he wasn’t going to rest until he got it. What it was is more complicated than I could have anticipated, that’s all. And now if you don’t mind, I need to go wash up before breakfast and the twelve hours facing me in the fucking forest.”

  Later when the forest had sweated the majority of his anger from him, he regretted his sharpness with her. She did not deserve it and it had been wrong to take it out on her. How to tell her what had happened though? How to explain what had passed between him and Gregor that long night? The disturbing thing was that in the end it had been more intimate than sex. Technically, the man had not raped him but what he had done was more insidious and longer lasting. He had shown his soft human underbelly during those long hours. He had branded Jamie with his time here in Russia, had made indelible the imprisonment of both mind and soul. He had done what he had set out to do, link the two of them eternally. Jamie hated him for it yet understood why the man had done it. For he had written Russia into Jamie’s skin, permanently carved it into his body. With ink and needles. It had seemed a small enough price to pay for Nikolai’s piano, but he had underestimated Gregor, as always.

  Shura had told him that Gregor was an artist with a needle and he hadn’t exaggerated, for Gregor had taken his time, as though Jamie’s chest were the Sistine Chapel. It had been tedious and painful and talk had been inevitable. It was, as well, only the first night of the deal he
had struck. There were several more awaiting him.

  His first mistake had been to ask Gregor why he hadn’t simply killed him after Jamie had threatened to do the same to him.

  “Is because you fascinate me,” Gregor said simply, stretching a hand out for the vodka. The bottle was half empty, their second of the night. “And also, I am finding you attractive sexually—this you find disturbing, so I use it.”

  “In the way a mouse fascinates a snake?” Jamie said, ignoring the provocation of the second half of Gregor’s statement.

  “A mouse—oh no, Yasha, not snake to mouse, snake to snake—that is why I find you irresistible. You are my soul’s mirror and a man does not find such a one more than perhaps, once in life. If you were not such a one, I would have raped you that first night in the hut and been done with it, used you when I pleased for your beauty and that would have been the end of it as far as you and I were concerned.

  “But instead, instead my sweet Yasha, I see something in you, something that can hypnotize others, something that I cannot resist myself. This annoys me, so I set to study you, to see what it is no one can resist, and I find myself. All my life I have, how to say—demons in my chest and this makes me angry. This makes me do things I do not always like. I see you have done these things too and so I look longer and one day I see you have demons in your own chest. I see this haunts you—at first I scorn this—I am Russian. I know blood is life and life is blood. There is no escaping this fact. I think maybe your country is soft in comparison, that you are a man with guilt, weak with regret. But I see this is not so either, only that your masks are held firmly in place, maybe because they have been there all your life, no?”

  Gregor had hit too close to the truth, for Jamie had always been a master of dissimulation, of distracting from the truth of what was truly happening, of what he felt at his core. Gregor was right, there was blood on his hands, though he did not regret all of it, for sometimes, it was necessary and that was all there was to it. Gregor had seen this, had seen him for what he was, because they were two sides of the same tarnished coin.

  “Yes,” Jamie said, “they have been there all my life. Except once or twice.”

  “We are both harlequins, you see. We are too fond of our masks. We lose ourselves in them. This is the danger.”

  Jamie had merely nodded and taken another drink. Gregor contemplated him for a moment, the dark eyes like a quiet scourge.

  “You have killed men?” He asked suddenly. It was phrased as a question but Jamie knew from the man’s expression that Gregor already knew the answer.

  “Yes,” Jamie said, because there was no reason not to tell the truth. Frankly, if anyone was ever going to understand, it was this man.

  “You don’t kill coldly though. You kill for vengeance, I think.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you know then, the feel of this, how it is hot and angry, but good. It gives release.”

  “Yes,” Jamie said, because it was the truth—the bloody, terrible truth—but no less honest for that.

  The strange thing was that even though he was never going to fully trust him and would always be aware that there was a chance the man would kill him for the least provocation, there was an element of honesty in Gregor that had opened that same well in himself, where admittance of the dark things that rode a man’s soul was accepted and could be spoken aloud. He thought it was possible that he had never been as open and honest with anyone in his life as he was with Gregor that night. It was insane that this man who had been alternately threatening to either rape or kill him since they had met, was now someone he could talk to as he had never talked to another, except perhaps for Andrei, and in some respects, Pamela. But even with her, this sort of brutal honesty was not possible. Certainly it was no longer possible with Andrei.

  Gregor was silent for a long while after that, absorbed in the pattern he was ink-carving into Jamie’s body. When he finally spoke, Jamie had to ask him to repeat himself as he had been half-asleep, the vodka numbing his senses enough to allow some level of unconsciousness.

  “They tell me you dream of a woman,” Gregor said, stopping to change needles and inks.

  “Do you want me to empty out all the grit in the corners of my soul?” Jamie said, the vodka settling in a hum behind his eyes and drifting through his blood like a flock of ice-winged stars.

  Gregor eyed a bottle of green ink as though he were an Antwerp diamond merchant who had just found a flaw in a large stone. Then he shrugged his shoulders and set to inking the needle.

  “The night is long and the story is but half told, Yasha, so yes, if grit is what this woman is, then sweep her out and give it to me.”

  And so, to keep from drinking all of the vodka and to draw his mind far from the ravagement of his body, he told Gregor about the woman of whom he dreamed. Spoke of her on long drawn breaths as the colors flowed and mingled beneath his skin, in ways he had never spoken of her, spoke memory on drifts of pain and the ether of vodka until the words themselves became a bridge from the past into the unrecognizable present.

  His tale wove on through the night, a river of history, and he found himself speaking of things he’d forgotten, and places he had been, people he had loved, and those who had loved him in return. He spoke of his sons, on that same river that the vodka bore him down so swiftly and ably, and they were stars in the current of memory.

  Gregor had placed a mirror above Jamie’s chest when he was done, and Jamie had gasped aloud at the colors, the forms and shapes that scrolled across his chest and down his left arm. The colors were brilliant: blood crimson, vermilion, ocher, lapis lazuli, amethyst, emerald, sapphire and violet.

  “Now you are done—now you are vor like me, and so we are family forever.” Gregor put his large hand over Jamie’s heart as he said this, and their eyes held, Jamie knowing he must not look away, no matter if it felt as though the man was pulling out the fine threads of his soul and wrapping them tight in his fist.

  The night had seemed without time, something removed, bewitched, as though it were still happening and always would be. Gregor had been right. What he had done had bound them together in some strange way, and Jamie was afraid he was never going to escape the ties of it.

  It was a full week later before Violet spoke to him again. He had attempted to apologize for his shortness with her, and though she had accepted said apology she had maintained a cool distance since. He was sitting outside one evening, quiet, watching the light fade from the sky, streaking it with long washes of lavender and heated crimson like the tail of the mythical firebird. Violet came and sat beside him just as the moon rose above the smoking stacks of the huts.

  “I’m sorry,” she said stiffly, “that morning—it was none of my business what you had done. I forget sometimes that you might want privacy, might cling to whatever shred of it is possible in this hell we live in.”

  “No, it’s I who needs to apologize. You caught me at a very vulnerable moment that morning and I didn’t want to be seen. So when you stepped out I was angry because I had hoped that night would not exist beyond my leaving the hut. But that was only a very stupid and momentary hope.”

  “No, not stupid. It is only natural to want some part of one’s life for oneself, even if it is the very dark parts. For a very long time I kept Andrei to myself, the very idea of what we had would be soiled by this world…” her small white hand indicated the world that surrounded them—the world of barbed wire, machine guns, quotas, and a forced communal life that made it next to impossible to have a private thought, much less a private life.

  “I admit I was jealous and I know how that sounds. Because I know the circumstances and that if you had any other choice…” she trailed off, sensing his discomfiture. “Still, I felt like he had something of you that I was not allowed.”

  Jamie felt a hot, not entirely pleasant moment of confusion.
“What aren’t you allowed?”

  “Intimacy with you,” she said bluntly. “You and I have been nothing but awkward with one another since your illness and yet you—you allowed that man to—”

  “Don’t assume you know what Gregor did to me, or I to him,” he said sharply.

  “Of course,” she said, embarrassed at her faux pas.

  “Violet, what about Andrei?”

  “Do you think,” she said bitterly, “that he’s not making love to Ilena several times a week? Do you actually believe that a married man can be faithful to a mistress?”

  “No, but having sex with me isn’t likely to improve that situation,” Jamie said, rather too aware that he was cutting off his very pretty nose to spite his lovely face.

  “One has nothing to do with the other. A month ago it might have, but now… now I find it’s about you, and has nothing to do with Andrei. I know right now you may not want anyone to touch you, but I think about it a great deal—touching you, being touched by you. I’m sorry, Yasha, this is the last thing you need to hear after what happened to you, but I seem to lose the ability to hide my thoughts around you. Even though it wasn’t me that you were making love to—that time when you were sick—I—I—can’t seem to put it out of my mind.”

  “I think I better show you just what Gregor did to me,” Jamie said firmly.

  He almost laughed at the startlement on her face, but knew there was really no laughter in this situation anymore for either of them. He pulled his shirt off over his head and heard her gasp before he even laid the worn garment aside.

  “That bastard!”

  She was silent for several minutes, grey eyes round with disbelief and then slowly she began to take in each picture, each story that had been carved and ink-bled into his chest and arm. A small and perfectly executed field of skulls curved in a crescent across his left pectoral, trailing from the bottom of these was a vine twined with violets, done in a purple that was almost black. Partway along the vine, nestled amongst the flowers, was a barbed wire, each point prinked with a delicate flower. Jamie knew the story each flower told, and knew that she could read the truth there on his skin.