Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  Even at the tender age of five Gregor would have been a challenge, Jamie knew. Much as he himself had been. An entity that existed outside the norm and was thusly, and perhaps naturally, rejected.

  “I wanted to show them I was special, thinking that would make them take me in. So I cut myself to prove it, so they would know I was like my mother, that I did not bleed, that I had silver beneath my skin, that I could not be broken no matter what they did to me. I cut too deeply, too bravely. I was foolish. I ran with blood in front of them. And they beat me for it. With sticks and stones and kicks and curses.”

  “For, of course, there was no iron beneath the skin. There was only a child,” Jamie said, only his tone was not soft as it might have been for that long ago child.

  “They left me there in that field to die. One could not expect more than that, for they were wild things just as I was, though I learned a valuable lesson that night. I could bleed. I could die. I would never let another person see me bleed. I would give them only the iron of my soul. But you, Yasha, to you I give blood. And to me, to me you give nothing of yourself.”

  “You want my blood? I could open my veins to you, allow you to drink me to the dregs. It would not be enough to quench your thirst.”

  The dark eyes were lustrous with memory and something more, the taut muscle of the big body still as stone. “I know this, my Yasha, but it does not stop me from the wanting of it.”

  “Life often consists of wanting without having, or at least, I have found it so myself.”

  Silence reigned for a long moment, their eyes holding through the steam and heat, neither flinching nor blinking. Obsidian to emerald, the language of the ether, no less powerful in its intent and meaning than all the words of the world’s infinite lexicon.

  “My wolf that I told you of long ago, I found her when she was just a puppy, her mother killed by a hunter, she left for dead. I fed her on my blood those first days, until I could give her the blood of another. It is how she survived.”

  “I was not aware that a wolf could be suckled on blood.” It was given the tone of a question but they both knew it was not.

  “Oh yes, Yasha, they can smell it from thrice nine lands, just like in the old tales. And once they smell it, they will come for it, have no doubt.”

  “Your story,” Jamie said, softly, but with a softness that held flint at its core, “is like a pearl dissolving in wine, a beautiful tale perhaps, though not based entirely in truth.”

  Gregor looked at him long and deep, the dark eyes as unfathomable as the stars to which he could not give names. And then he used the language of the camps to give salve to the wounds of stories that defied all reason, all humanity, to stories that made the teller feel vulnerable.

  “If you don’t believe it, consider it a fairytale.”

  Chapter Sixty-three

  April 1975

  Phoenix in the Ashes

  The world wheeled on, stars fell from the heavens, tides crashed upon the shores, skirmishes took place upon borders: some lost, some won, some both. In England, there was inflation, scandal, corruption and collusion and a trembling ceasefire with the mad cousins from across the chilly sea. In Vietnam, a war ended and did not end—without resolution, without victory, a thoroughly modern war with all its hideous consequences. In the East, the flow of black gold to the West was lessened considerably. Prices soared and machines were silenced.

  And as was wont to happen every year, poets and saviors died, as did musicians and spies, diplomats and artists, soldiers and con men. A President was toppled from grace and a nation lost what was left of its innocence.

  The Cold War ground on as it had for many years. It too was a war with casualties, though these were rarely made public and often those who fell in the fight simply disappeared into a chill grave in foreign soil, with their family and loved ones never knowing the truth of their fate. Dissidents were caged in Emperors’ prisons under the guise of madness and the Soviet machine, grey as the dullest iron, ground on.

  Sometimes men lived to tell their tales, but sometimes they did not.

  And in a far corner of Russia, in a small labor camp forgotten by some and remembered by others, none of this was known, for perhaps little of it mattered, for none of those who dwelled there were going anywhere and the world seemed a distant place of little consequence. Time passed slowly here, and dates on a calendar page ceased to have the meaning they had once held. Time was measured by the growth of a child, by the change of seasons, by the falls of snow and the warm winds arriving from the south.

  Perhaps these people were lulled by the rule of a benevolent dictator. Perhaps they had forgotten what they needed to, and remembered only that which seemed necessary to survival in a deep, dark forest, forgotten in the empire’s hinterland.

  Perhaps they had forgotten the one constant of the world, of the universe itself. All things must change and neither happiness nor misery is the natural state of man. The pendulum swings and all things change, and then the pendulum swings again.

  It is the way of the world, both this one and that.

  It was an April evening, and the snow was in full melt when Jamie came through the gates after a long, raw day in the forest and saw a familiar figure standing outside the guard’s hut. A short, abrasive man stepped away from the figure’s side and approached Jamie before he could join his comrades at dinner.

  “Comrade Valueve requests your presence,” he said in short guttural bursts. Jamie gritted his teeth in dislike. Comrade Yelivosky was short on brains but long on loyalty to the State as well as possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of how to make human beings suffer. He looked like nothing so much as a stunted boar.

  Andrei came out on the small porch of the guard hut and walked toward him, hair a-shimmer in the evening air, his walk that of a man who had business to conduct, and not of the pleasant sort.

  Jamie heard Gregor say something low behind him, and realized the big man had not gone ahead to the dining hall but had waited to see if Jamie would need him.

  Jamie turned and nodded to him. “It’s alright.”

  Gregor gave Andrei a long look and then headed off to eat.

  There was shock in Andrei’s face at the sight of him. Jamie was all too aware of the sight he must present. He had never regained his weight after the fever and was carved down to his essentials of muscle and bone. His hair, recently shaved, was no more than a bright stubble, hands rough and calloused from his time in the forest. Right now he felt annoyance as he was going to miss his time in the nursery with Kolya before dinner, and from the look on Andrei’s face, this wasn’t going to be a pleasant chat over a decent meal.

  “We need to talk,” Andrei said peremptorily. “Follow me.”

  Having little choice in the matter, Jamie fell into step with Andrei.

  “He is a friend?” Andrei jerked his head in the direction in which Gregor had departed, as they walked toward the guard’s hut. There was a look upon his face as though he had smelled a three-day corpse.

  “He has become a friend,” Jamie said, thinking ‘friend’ seemed a strange word to describe the détente he and Gregor had declared between them.

  “This is what you call an alliance? This is what you think is wisdom? You think such a man cares about others, cares whether you live or die?”

  “Yes,” Jamie said dryly, “it’s true love. We’re buying a little dacha on Lake Baikal, as soon as Gregor gets parole.”

  “It’s not funny, Yasha,” Andrei said prohibitively.

  “No, I don’t suppose it is.”

  Andrei paused on the doorstep of the guard hut to glare at Jamie.

  “You think someone like that man, that filthy thief, has loyalties? Have you lost your mind, Jamie?”

  “Maybe,” Jamie shrugged. “What does it matter at this point?”

  “You know th
at it matters, Yasha. You are being ridiculous and naïve and you know it. Do you do this just to anger me?”

  “Whether you want to admit it or not, we’re in here, not you—so yes, in order to survive I’ve had to form alliances, make deals, do things I normally wouldn’t.

  “So what are you now, vor?” Andrei sneered.

  “In some ways, yes, I guess I always have been. I suspect that’s what he recognized in me and it’s why I wasn’t gang raped and left for dead three days after I arrived,” Jamie spat out, suddenly very, very angry. It was true, he realized. His own dark history, his own crimes, the blood on his own hands were the things that had appealed to Gregor enough to stay the invisible knife that was always in the man’s hand. He knew the man under the skin and had to admit that the man knew him too.

  The ham-hocked Comrade had followed so tightly on their heels that he stumbled into Jamie as they crossed the threshold of the ramshackle building. The guard’s hut was empty at present and would afford them the only privacy available in the camp. Inside, Andrei sat, Comrade Yelivosky standing to porcine attention behind him. Jamie began to get a very bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. Still, they might have allowed him the courtesy of a chair, whatever they were up to. It was very warm in the hut. He knew it would shortly make him sleepy and as tired as he was, he might well drop off on the spot.

  It was one of the stranger meetings he had experienced with Andrei. The questioning began slowly, questions about the productivity of the timber cutters, about quotas, about meeting required limits, and a great deal more mind-numbing Soviet double-talk. If there was a code wrapped inside this talk, he was too tired and too hungry to decipher it. After he had endured a half hour of it, he couldn’t take any more.

  “May I go now?” he asked, voice as courteous as a blooded scalpel. “I’d like to have a little of my evening left to me, now that you’ve made me miss dinner.”

  “Just what is it you’re so eager to get back to?” Andrei asked, eyes narrowed and body leaning forward as though he were barely restraining himself.

  “My wife and son,” Jamie said, wanting to cut to the real purpose of this visit and force the inevitable confrontation. Andrei would have come on his own had he the choice. He must have been saddled with the good Comrade at the last minute and been unable to wiggle his way free.

  Andrei’s eyes were the hot blue they always became when he was furious. Nothing could be said in front of the fat wee Comrade. Even Andrei’s minders had their limits when it came to loyalty and Jamie had long suspected that Yelivosky had been assigned to keep tabs on Andrei’s every word and action. He had the strong feeling something was being telegraphed to him—a warning, a reprimand, a threat? He couldn’t tell. His own fury was too full, flooding out from his chest in crimson billows, making him impervious to danger and good sense.

  Andrei stood and crossed the room in three strides, then lifted his hand and brought it across Jamie’s face with a savagery that rocked Jamie off his feet. He caught up hard on the wall, fighting down the desire to put his hands to his face and check if all his teeth were still in their sockets. The blow had been dealt with unrestrained ferocity and so Jamie knew that it had not been for Comrade Yelivosky’s sake but had been delivered out of Andrei’s jealousy and rage toward him. Nevertheless, it had served the double purpose of relieving Andrei’s feelings and pleasing the Comrade, who had a small smile tucked into his chins.

  Jamie used the wall to prop himself up. The pain was already subsiding but the shock to his system wasn’t so easily banished. This moment had always been inevitable between him and Andrei, like a song that heads toward its apex from the opening note, to shatter itself in splendor, but shatter itself nonetheless. The prison camp and Violet and now Kolya had only brought it to a more rapid head. But Jamie found a certain reckless thrumming in his blood, for he no longer cared. Instead there was a fury that made him want to wipe that imperious face of Andrei’s all over the floor for what he had done to Violet, regardless of the reasons, regardless of the rules and brutality of this country. Andrei might love Violet but it was Jamie who cared for her on a daily basis, who was her husband and who was father to Andrei’s son.

  Andrei walked in tight to his body, every inch of him a threat. “Stop this defiance now, or I’ll be left with no choice but to put you in isolation. Do you understand?”

  The chill of Andrei’s eyes met his own with the force of a hammer unlocking the trigger on a gun. Take this no further or I will not answer for the consequences. Violence often spawned an intimacy that demanded its due, violence that shimmered between them like a deep blue flame, drawing them into a tight vortex that seemed both inevitable and desirable, consequences be damned.

  “Fuck you,” Jamie said, spitting blood on the floor. “Fuck you—you Soviet whore.”

  Andrei’s eyes were incandescent now with fury, chest heaving with the need to do more than just hit Jamie.

  “You want to kill me right now, don’t you?” Jamie asked in English so the Comrade could not understand what was taking place, for it had swiftly become personal.

  “That’s what you do with traitors,” Andrei said, voice stripped of its ice and hauteur, down to something so primal that it demanded response.

  Jamie laughed, a fine spray of blood flying from his lips as he did so. “I’m a traitor? If I’m a traitor, what the hell do you think you are, Andrei? You’ve betrayed every ideal you ever claimed to hold dear.”

  “I might be a Soviet whore, as you call me,” Andrei hissed, “but I would never take your woman from you.”

  “Well, if you didn’t leave your woman locked up in a fucking prison I might have higher morals about taking her away.”

  “So you admit it, then.” Andrei looked oddly pleased, as if now he could go ahead and finish Jamie off without troubling his conscience.

  “It’s a wee bit hard to deny it being that I’ve married her and that I am father to your son.”

  It was a few words too far for Andrei.

  “Leave,” Andrei barked over his shoulder at Yelivosky. The Comrade blanched, but had the sense to exit swiftly, his small ham feet skittering out the door as fast as they would take him.

  Andrei shed his coat and gloves, tossing them carelessly onto a chair, a smile of white-hot fury on his face. “I am going to take you apart, you bastard.”

  “Come on and try,” Jamie said, moving out from the wall. He laughed in Andrei’s face, knowing it was like the waving of a red rag to a bull and felt a rush of pure adrenaline alongside his rage, something that felt akin to joy.

  His training in the ring had never left him and before his journey to Russia he was still sparring twice a week at the gym. His muscle and sinew responded instantly to Andrei’s attack, feinting and coming back with a jab that wiped the surety from Andrei’s face. But Andrei was no slouch with his fists either and he had the advantage of proper nutrition and rest on his side. He landed a blow to Jamie’s ribs that made Jamie catch his breath and hold it for a moment. It exploded out a minute later as he planted a right uppercut to Andrei’s face, the jolt of it carrying all the way along his arm.

  Andrei called him a very impolite Russian word, dancing back from him and regrouping. Jamie pressed his advantage—following, crowding the man, not giving him a moment to recover from the blow—the urge to inflict damage, to hurt, to maim so strong he could taste the delicate blood flavor of it on his tongue.

  Like fire forced through a narrow glass aperture, love subverted will become a self-destructive flame that emerges darker and with greater force, consuming all in its path, cracking and melting the vessel in which it is held, laying waste to things that are too fine and fragile to survive such force.

  There was neither the grace nor the choreography of fight that was an art within itself. This was fury and hurt and betrayal and a terrible grappling of flesh and bone. And a great need
to wipe free the mind and emotional terrain of one’s soul of all history with this person, a repudiation of all the higher feelings one had held for this ‘other’.

  They fell across the floor, clumsy-footed as bears now, stupid with anger. The stove stood in the center of the room, a rotund belly-barrelled thing, balancing on delicately artful legs so that a good wind might have knocked it over. They hit it with the force of two freight trains in rushing motion, uncaring of damage inflicted or havoc wreaked.

  The scent of scorched skin and hair stirred up in the mix of blood and sweat and raw anger. Hell smelled this way and they were locked tight in one of the inner circles. So much so that neither noticed the small, blue flames creep out from the coals that flew across the floor, settling with appetite in corners, under papers, along ancient and moth-chewed boards, expanding with silent rapidity.

  Jamie’s breath raked in and out of his lungs like salt on a wound. His hair was wet with sweat and his hands were slick with blood. He felt roaringly alive, felt the whisk of blood through vessels and saw every detail of the room around him, though Andrei was the focal point of it all. There was a burn on his back that throbbed, not yet with agony, but soon.

  There was a ribbon of blood running from the corner of Andrei’s eye and Jamie’s mouth was awash with the particular salt of that same fluid. He laughed, the sharp-edged feral laugh of a man caught up in the potent intoxication of violence. It was a high unlike any other, and one didn’t feel pain during the execution of it. Unfortunately, when the adrenaline ebbed, the pain came on with the force of a steam train.

  The entire wall behind Andrei was sheeted in flame, glowing crimson and flickering tautly on skin and hair. He could feel the strength and hatred of it, how it consumed without guilt or thought. It fed in his veins, heating his blood beyond thought and reason.

  Andrei rushed him, yelling something in his face, shoving him hard so that he was flying backwards, barely able to keep his footing. He couldn’t understand what Andrei was saying, only saw his lips moving, for the blood pounding through his head deafened him. They stumbled through the door, ashes and soot and bright, stinging sparks falling on their hair and skin and clothing.