Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  “Yer quick to accuse, Lenny. Maybe yer the guilty one.”

  David looked round in surprise. It was the boy he had privately nicknamed Milquetoast for his pale coloring and mild demeanor. The boy who should not be involved in this, who was too young for this much blood and terror, but he was pleasantly surprised by this display of courage. He flashed him a look of gratitude across the mucky ditch.

  “Shut the fuck up or ye’ll be eatin’ yer teeth fer tea,” Lenny retorted. Another barrage of bullets closer than the last silenced them all. Noah’s men knew they were in the ditch and had probably counted on the fact that they would end up there eventually.

  David looked over, counted heads—six of them. Six of the twelve, the rest most likely dead. He couldn’t help but speculate how many more of them would be dead before the hour was out. Lord, let one of them be Lenny.

  Another spray of bullets bit into the dirt two feet out from the edge of the ditch. Thick clods of mud and grass sprayed into their tight domain. The world was drawn down to this corner, bullets and blood and the heat and stink of the man next to you, the slippery metallic smell of fear like cold iron coated in frost.

  He smelled something else suddenly, beyond the fear and sweat and blood. The ditch itself, the water they were all standing in, was not water at all but something flammable. The smell was faint but it was there. David reached down, dipped two fingers into it and knew for certain. It slid like oil, slicking his skin. It was why they had been driven into the ditch—the whole thing was going to go up like a bomb.

  “The ditch is filled with gas!” He yelled it even as he scrambled out onto his chest, for the gunfire had not ceased in its fury. He was crawling as fast as he could for the woods, for the water-soaked forest floor and beyond. It was the only hope for any of them. Even as he thought it, he felt the strange silence that preceded an explosion, as if the world stopped for the narrowest second and drew breath like a dragon, before exploding in a universe of fire.

  The screams when they came were primal, drawn from the oldest part of the brain, which had always feared fire, had always known flame’s danger and pain, even before the first touch of flesh to leaping, dancing crimson.

  David made it to the forest’s edge, but he still felt the heat so strongly it was like liquid poured over his body, melting his skin, evaporating his hair, pushing him blind deeper into the trees, trying to sink his body into the sanctuary of loam and moss and root. He crawled belly tight to the ground, scraping his hands and face, eyelids so raw they felt fused together until he feared he would not be able to open them when he found the courage to try.

  He pulled himself with his elbows when his hands hurt too much to continue. He could feel blood welling from the injured one. Darren was going to be furious to see his handiwork destroyed. The vision of the man’s anger, those soft brown eyes that could scathe with a glance, cheered him slightly. He attempted to open his eyes and was relieved to find he could. He sought the shelter of a massive elm, knowing he needed to stand and think for a moment and decide on the best pathway out of this inferno. He had lost his gun during the explosion and he thought of it with regret. It was likely melting in the ditch right now. He felt for the knife he kept strapped to his ankle. That was gone too, lost in that same explosion that had turned the universe on its ear. He checked himself over. There was blood, more than could be accounted for by his injured hand, but it belonged to other men.

  His joints were greasy with adrenaline and he knew he needed to move quickly. He was aware which direction to head now that he was righted. It was as simple as going over two stone walls, through a small stream and edging around a field or three and then he would be home and clear.

  But life, especially in South Armagh, was never quite that simple. For there under the spreading branches of an oak tree stood Lenny, a smile on his face so cold that it made the morning seem balmy by comparison. His face was seared, eyebrows gone, the rest a raw and terrible red, but his hatred was unimpaired. Here it was then, the moment they both had known to be inevitable.

  Beyond Lenny and the treeline, the fire still roared, painting the man in front of him in shades of gold and red. David felt it, the shift that came when the universe distilled itself down to a fine point. Your life or his, your blood or his. But Lenny had a knife and David’s was gone. This would not be a dignified death by any means, but he wasn’t going to go easy, knife or no. Particularly not at the hands of this insane bastard. The blade came up, a flash of quicksilver in the fog, and he could taste the cold metal of it as it slashed down. He caught Lenny’s wrist hard on the downward stroke.

  Bone slid against bone, the blade of the knife coming close as a whisper, close as a lover’s impending kiss to his throat. He only had one option and was going to have to take it, pain be damned. He grabbed the knife, feeling the slick of the blade in his palm, cutting through flesh like it was butter, cutting through tendons with little more effort. He took the pain and put it away for later. He couldn’t afford it right now.

  A fight was never a clear-cut thing, a fight for one’s life less so. It was a messy, heaving, grunting mass of muscle and bone and blood and often it was only luck that made one man walk away while the other lay on the ground, never to move again. He was smaller than Lenny, but he was also quicker and long trained in the art of disarming his opponent. That skill might help him—or it might not. It all came down to luck and whether it was smiling upon a man. Apparently it was his lucky day for suddenly with a wrench of blinding pain, the knife was his, hilt slick and hot in his good hand, so that he could barely grip it. There wasn’t time to think nor plan, only to execute.

  The knife went in to the hilt and David felt the impact of it all the way into his shoulder and chest. His hand was numb and wet with blood, his own and Lenny’s mingled, one living, one dying.

  There was no time to do more than breathe once, twice, to let go of the knife, to back away, to hear the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic gunfire one last time, and then the world exploded in a great blast of bright stars.

  David came to with a start. He was suffocating and couldn’t understand where he was for a moment nor how the hell he had gotten there. He moved convulsively and a weight slid off his chest with a wet thunk. He felt his own chest gingerly. It seemed to take an eternity to bring his hand up. His chest was soaked, but the fact that it was clammily cold told him it wasn’t wet with his own blood, or if it was, he wasn’t still actively hemorrhaging. He suspected it was the other man’s blood.

  He sat up, having concluded that his head was more-or-less in one piece. The world swam for a bit and the feeling was coming back into his extremities now that he had removed the corpse from his chest. His hand was frighteningly numb, his legs hurt so badly that for a moment he was scared to touch them for fear they were riddled with bullets. And then he realized that the pain seemed rather familiar. He was sitting on blackthorn branches, the tree looming over him, dark and ominous against a starlit sky. He had been unconscious for a long time.

  He scanned the area quickly. It was dead quiet—no pun intended. Noah Murray and his men must be long gone. Around him lay complete and utter carnage. The very stillness told him every man was likely dead, though he checked to make certain that someone wasn’t just unconscious. Lenny had fallen onto him, shielding his body from the last of the bullets. The irony of that was almost comical. Beside David lay a heavy branch, cracked at its base where it had torn away from the tree. It had knocked him out, possibly saved his life, though he thought the reason for that was somewhat more mysterious.

  It was a gruesome business, checking corpses. He did not bother with the bodies in the ditch, there was no way they could have survived the flames. He tried not to think of Milquetoast and how horribly young he had been. He tended only to the men who had died by fire of another sort. His hands touched blood, bone, intestine, flesh chilled beyond what breath allowed. There was no light whats
oever to guide him. Had Murray’s men counted, he wondered? Would they know later, when the deaths were reported, that one corpse was missing?

  What seemed a small eternity later, David ascertained that, indeed, everyone was most certainly dead. He took a deep breath, the rank stink of blood gagging him momentarily. It had the effect of clearing his head to an awareness of how horribly awry things had gone tonight. This had turned into what the Americans so succinctly called a ‘clusterfuck’. There was nothing he could do to alleviate the damage because he had about five minutes to disappear into the landscape, judging by the dull thump of helicopter blades he heard in the distance, before the wrath of the British army came down on the surrounding countryside. And here, it must be remembered, he did not exist.

  He wiped Lenny’s blood from his face, shouldered a gun he found in a dead man’s hand and, clutching his re-injured hand to his chest, spared a last look for the men who littered the ground before disappearing behind the blackthorn tree, and into the night. He had only a lingering thought for what he had seen a split second before he had blacked out—a man standing against the inferno, eyes the color of gentian, but as cold as an Arctic spring. The resemblance to his sister was uncanny, but with none of Kate’s humanity in the man’s face. Not blind in the least, he had looked into David’s eyes and raised his gun.

  And so the question was—why hadn’t the man shot him? Why on earth had Noah Murray allowed him to live?

  Chapter Seventy-six

  Priest’s Confession

  The church was chilly and dim in the evening light. At first Casey thought Father Jim wasn’t there, but off on some priestly errand of mercy and had left the church doors open for those who wished a quiet sanctuary. He sat down in a pew and took a deep breath, what felt like the first proper breath in days. He could feel knots in his shoulders and all along his spine. The tension in his body had not gone unnoticed by his wife either, and several times in the last weeks he had noticed her watching him with worry written plainly on her features.

  He knew better than to hide things from her, or to think that he could. But there was no way to tell her these things: dark whispers, half-felt threats and formless worries. Well, not formless when it came to those grafting bastards, but beyond that, it was only rumor in the form of averted eyes and tight smiles, and men who did not linger to talk to him in the streets, men who once would have. Telling her would have served little purpose other than to deepen the shadows already in her eyes.

  The truth was he didn’t want to bring this world, with all its brutal and ugly reality, into his home. He didn’t want the weight of it on them in every conversation, over every cup of tea, in every room, in their bed.

  He stood, feeling a weariness in all his bones he was quite certain he was too young to possess. Father Jim stood quietly waiting for him, shoulders broad but visibly bowed in the dim of the chapel.

  “Casey, have you come to see me or are you here for some quiet contemplation?”

  “A wee bit of both, I suppose, though mostly I’ve come to ask a favor of ye.”

  “Come to my office then and we’ll have a cup of tea. It’s perishing in here tonight.”

  Father Jim’s office was off the main body of the church and just large enough to contain a desk, two chairs and a small hearth. It was neat and tidy though, and had a warm, pleasant atmosphere that, Casey thought with no small cynicism, relaxed the sinners enough to make them ‘fess up promptly. It looked out over a small garden, dripping with moisture this evening, under a pitch-dark sky.

  They made small talk until the tea arrived. Hot and perfectly brewed, it steadied Casey’s nerves. It was warm by the fire and he felt some of his knots loosen, and his spine sink gratefully into the chair back.

  “How did it all start for you, Casey?”

  “What?” Startled from his ruminations, he slopped a bit of tea into his lap, the burn of it spreading along his thigh.

  “What it is you’re here to talk about.”

  He sighed. He forgot now and again how prescient this man was, even if that was part of the reason he trusted him as he did. His own natural instinct was to blurt out what he wanted, but for some reason he hesitated, for something else lay in the air about them, something as weighty and clinging as sand. So he sought another route toward what he needed to say.

  “It’s a strange power that country has over a man,” he began, words coming slow and thoughtful. “I mean borders are artificial things in a sense, an’ yet more blood has been spilled because of imaginary lines set to paper than over anything else, except perhaps religion. We’ve a fatal dose of both here in this nation. It’s a wee bit of dirt an’ rock, stuck in the midst of the Atlantic an’ of little matter to anyone that lives beyond its shores other than as a sentimentalism they pull out now an’ again on a cold day in March or on election day in America. So I ask myself why we’re killin’ ourselves over it? Why does it matter so much to have a land to call yer own?”

  “If we knew the answer to that question, Casey, we would never see another war.”

  Father Jim had not so much as blinked at this sideways approach. But then, Casey supposed, priests were well used to people rambling round the edges until they could get to the heart of things. His tongue felt awkward, yet there was nothing false about what he had to say, and it bore relevance to why he was here.

  “The Provos are fighting for their vision of the future an’ the Loyalists are fighting to keep the past intact. It’s a losing prospect either way.”

  “You ought to have stayed away boy, and that’s a fact. If you had to come back home, then go live in the Republic where things aren’t a matter of life and death every day.”

  “What of yerself though, Father Jim? This isn’t even yer country. The first time I met ye, ye were here on holiday, so why don’t ye leave this place?”

  Father Jim shook his head, and Casey noticed suddenly how deeply grooved were the lines that bracketed the man’s mouth and how much more grey there was in his hair than there had been just a scant few months ago.

  The priest sighed, and it was a sound that came up from the depths of his being.

  “Because there’s something here, isn’t there? That even if we left, we’d long for it all the time, no matter if there was an ocean between us and this bloody little bit of land or merely a false border and an hour’s trip by car. This place is like a siren that lures you onto the rocks repeatedly and yet you can’t stay away, because there’s no one like her in the end.” Father Jim slapped his hands against his thighs as though he could dismiss his strange melancholy by sharp movement. “But you’ve not come to listen to an old priest blather away like some great sentimental poet, not that a man can escape poetry in this land. It might be better for us all if we could. What is it that you really want to say to me, Casey? What is the favor you need?”

  Casey looked into the priest’s stark grey eyes and saw fear and worry there that matched his own. He had come to the right place, for if anyone understood the darkness that lurked on the other side of everyday life in Belfast, it was this man here.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. It was simple, plain white and there was no address adorning it, only a name. He handed it to the priest, who looked at him questioningly as he took it in hand.

  Father Jim raised a heavy brow. “This letter is for James Kirkpatrick.”

  “Aye,” Casey said quietly. “The fact of the matter is, Father, we still aren’t certain where the man is, but should something happen to me an’ he is returned by then… well, there’s certain things I would have him know, an’ I don’t think my wife is a likely messenger for that, do you?”

  “No, she isn’t.” Father Jim tucked the letter into his pocket. “Now tell me, Casey, is something likely to happen to you?”

  Casey gave the priest a hard look, and decided that truth was the best route, f
or Father Jim would know half-truths and obfuscations when he heard them.

  “Well, a man never knows really when his last dance comes up on the card, but in my case just now, there’s a bit more to it.”

  So he told the priest all of it, about how he had been out delivering contracts and had seen his name and dates of birth and death painted on the wall of the two-up-two-down he had lived in as a boy. About the men who had held his wife and children hostage in their own home, about the graft that had been going on now for months on the construction sites, and about the job he had taken on for the Simon brothers.

  Father Jim was silent when Casey finished. Then he let out a long breath and shook his head.

  “How much of this does Pamela know?”

  “Everything except the writing on the wall, so to speak. I can’t tell her. She’s only just had Isabelle and she’s fighting tooth an’ nail to keep Jamie’s companies together. The police haven’t outright accused her of the murder of Jamie’s uncle but the suspicion is there. She’s too much to deal with as it is. I need to be her sanctuary right now, not more trouble.”

  “Casey…”

  Casey put up a hand to halt the words. “I know, Father. I know the sensible thing. It’s not as bad as I’ve made it sound, only that should somethin’ happen, I’d like ye to pass along that letter to Jamie.”

  “You’re a good man, Casey. A good husband and father, and those are no small things to be. Pamela and your children need you, so be careful and do what you must to be there in their lives.”

  Father Jim poured him another cup of tea though Casey had not asked for it. He knew a delaying tactic when he saw it.

  “What is it, Father?” he asked, for the weight was still there in the room, and not all of it was his.

  The priest smiled, but it was a thing of exhaustion.

  “It’s nothing really, only I have come to understand that a person, even a priest, perhaps most especially a priest, can’t really ever separate God and the gun here. No matter how a man might try, they come together, don’t they?”