Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  The drive was an eternity and he cursed the narrow, bumpy roads all the way to the village. He knew he must look a madman entirely as he brought the car to a screeching halt outside the pub and rushed wild-eyed to the phone.

  His hands were so slick with sweat that he dropped the receiver twice before managing to make a connection. The line in Casey and Pamela’s house rang and rang but was not answered. He tried Pat’s line and got the same.

  He stepped away from the phone and swore out loud. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” He received a filthy look and a stern finger from a poe-faced matron with a net bag of shopping neatly hung over her arm.

  Where the hell were the Riordan men anyway, or even Pamela, who might know their whereabouts? The men who had been set loose would not scruple at killing an entire family. He had a sudden vision of wee Isabelle in his arms only a few days ago, and thought he might be sick right there in the street. He had to make a decision, go to Casey’s home and warn them or find Pat and remove him from harm’s way—if he could, if it wasn’t too late—if one of the brothers wasn’t already dead. He knew what Patrick would want, knew exactly what he would say. He wished the bloody man would get out of his head.

  He had been a fool thinking he had any control over this situation. It had gotten away from him long ago and the strings he had held were always greased with the duplicity that existed between his own government and this godforsaken country.

  He put the car into gear, popped the clutch and began to drive in one direction, only to make a U-turn a few feet later. And then David Kendall, who had not believed in God for a very long time, put the gas pedal to the floor and began to pray.

  It was like being a child lost in a dark forest with night setting in quickly, dropping blackness down in great winding spools. His adrenaline had settled to a steady thrum and he felt light and disconnected. It happened sometimes and it usually wasn’t a good sign. Today, it no longer mattered. He had not been able to find either of the Riordan brothers, but it had come to him while searching around Pamela and Casey’s house that he knew what was wanted, and by whom. He understood the endgame now. When you no longer knew where to go or what to do, you went back to where it all started. And so, as he had always been fated to do, he went back to the beginning.

  He moved through the rooms of the Malone Road house one by one. He had dreams like this often, one empty room leading into another, an endless labyrinth of vacant rooms in a house silent but heavy with sunshine and the scent of dust long undisturbed. The dreams had started long ago, after Edward had died. His beloved older brother, his brother with a soul too fragile for the harshness of the world. He shook his head. He could not think of Edward now. He needed to focus, find Boyd and kill the bastard. It was what ghosts did, slid in and took care of business, and disappeared, maybe for good this time.

  For so long now he had felt like an impermanent thing, a spider husk driven before the wind, a bird without a map imprinted in its beak and wings, a Lost Boy who could not find his way back from Neverland. It had always been a risk in this job, and once you stepped over that line you could never step back. It was an alternate world. He had slipped beyond the edge place just like in a tale Pamela had told him once, deep in the night by a fire built of earth, tucked away in a watery wood.

  There was only one door he hadn’t tried. The heavy wooden one on the other side of which lay a set of twisting stairs that led up, up and away to the top of a dusty tower. There was always a tower in the old tales, for climbing up was another form of edge place, of passing from earth to air. He opened the door and it creaked loudly beneath his hand but it did not matter. Boyd would be expecting him and noise would not alert him to anything he did not already know. Still, David took the stairs carefully, hugging the perimeter of the curving brick wall. Up, up and away to the very top.

  The room was a perfect round, filled with the late afternoon light like a gourd brimming with poisoned honey.

  Pat was kneeling, head bowed, hands tied behind his back and a gun held to his temple. Boyd stood behind him. David’s eyes returned to the man kneeling on the floor. He was badly bruised around the eyes and blood trickled in a steady stream from somewhere behind his left ear. Two more men stood against the wall, silent, guns in hand. It explained how Boyd had subdued Patrick in the first place. He never had been able to handle his wet work himself.

  “I wondered when ye’d figure it out, Davey-boy.”

  “I should have killed you two weeks ago,” David said. It was a relief to speak in his own voice. To feel the clipped consonants of his upbringing, the gilded edges of the world into which he had been born and which he had ultimately abandoned. He felt a shaft of longing for it suddenly, for the security of having a name and a place in the world.

  “Ye should have killed me the day ye met me,” Boyd replied, smiling, a slick thing that spread over his face like oil across water.

  “What do you really want, Boyd?”

  “Ye know what I want, Davey.”

  Yes, he knew. It was why he was here, after all.

  “David, don’t. He’ll only kill us both,” Pat said with a calm tone that was admirable under the circumstances.

  “You—shut the fuck up,” Boyd said, shoving the gun muzzle deeper behind Patrick’s ear. David saw the look on Pat’s face and knew it was one of warning. But it was too late for that.

  “I want to know how big a traitor ye are, Davey? Will ye trade places with this Fenian scum? Will ye give over yer life to save his?” Boyd was sweating, but his breathing was slow and calm. He was enjoying his moment.

  The other men remained silent, as if they had been turned to pillars of salt and were beyond seeing and hearing. He knew they only awaited Boyd’s command and they would come back to life.

  The lightness in his head increased, almost as if he were floating now. The decision was no decision at all and he wondered how Boyd had known that.

  “I will, but he has to be clear of here. You have to let him go without any sort of harm, Boyd. I need your word on that.”

  “Ye have it.”

  Somehow David knew the man meant it. Pat had only been the bait. It wasn’t his blood that Boyd wanted to spill.

  Pat fixed his dark gaze on David’s face and shook his head ever so slightly. David felt as if, for a second, the entire world was held within that gaze. It was pleading with him not to do it, not to make a sacrifice on this scale. David gave him a crooked smile and shrugged, ever so slightly. For him, it was already done. The border of that edge place lay far behind him and this was only the passport that would confirm his citizenship there.

  “Slide yer gun over to me—I won’t harm yer friend here but I need to know ye won’t just shoot me the minute he’s clear of my hand.”

  David crouched and slid it across the floor. Boyd managed to grab it without ever taking the bead off Patrick’s ear. The pillars of salt were still.

  “You need to cut the ties on his hands,” David said, the lightheadedness feeling like the soaring beginnings of a fever, removing his emotions from the situation. Fate, he knew, sometimes felt like a fever.

  “He’ll find someone in the street to cut his hands free—if he can,” Boyd said nastily. “I’m not takin’ any chances with a bastard his size. Ye come an’ kneel over here an’ give me the knife ye wear on yer ankle, Davey. Then yer friend can go.”

  David knelt and one of the pillars of salt came to life, moved and tied his hands behind his back, and all the time he felt a strange tingling numbness climbing his body, like the touch of moth’s wings, light and airy.

  He could smell Pat, both the sweat of fear and his blood, but also that scent he carried with him always, like a field after the rain came down. David wanted to close his eyes on it and let it be the last of the things he sensed in this world. But knew he could not.

  Pat got to his feet unsteadily, wincing as he
did so. He was still bleeding from his scalp but it was only a trickle now. He walked across the room, limping slightly. David swallowed and spoke, feeling the barrel of the gun against his own head now and knowing there would be no reprieve, no white knight on a charger. Not this time. Reality was creeping through the fog of the lightheadedness. He looked up at Pat and met the dark eyes with the trust he had known as a simple given from the day he met him.

  “Please ask Pamela to tell Darren what happened, to tell him I’m sorry there wasn’t time for goodbye. She knows where to go and what to say.”

  “I will, man. But David—please don’t do this.”

  “Pat, just go, or he will kill us both.”

  “David…”

  “Patrick,” David’s voice was gentle, but it carried with the force of its conviction in that room, a room atop a tower that already smelled of the blood that would soon stain it. There would be no happy ending for any of them today. Death hovered in the air and it would have its due. “I have no choice. There isn’t any way back. This is my mess. So I’m begging you to get the fuck out of here.”

  Sweat beaded his forehead, his hair slick with it. His arms, tied behind his back were like corded wire, and the pain cleared his head slightly. He saw the sapping of his strength in Pat’s eyes as though they were a reflecting pool. He had told him once, long ago, that he was well versed in the art of killing, but what he had not added was that he knew how to die quickly, if he needed to. Only he did not want an audience for it. He did not want that dark gaze as witness to what a man could become in extremis.

  “Patrick,” David said, the words slipping up into the ether of the tower, “if my friendship has meant anything to you, you’ll do as I ask and go. I don’t want any of this blood on you.”

  Pat put his hand to the doorknob. David hoped the man understood that he was giving him his future by this act, keeping him free to live a life of merit, of honor, with the possibility of happiness, however tenuous. He was giving him the gift of a love that had never been welcomed but had always been unconditional and without strings, despite the futility of it. But, as he had once told Patrick, maybe only the fact that it had existed was the thing that mattered. The only return on that love that Pat could give to him was to walk out of this room and not look back. David looked deep into those dark eyes and saw in the single second that held them all hostage, that Patrick understood all those things and knew there was only one choice left to the both of them. He had to leave.

  And so he did.

  Chapter Eighty-two

  Fault Lines

  He must have gasped when he saw the headline, for Kate turned from the files she was tucking away and asked sharply, “What is it? Is it bad news?”

  “No, not bad,” Pat said, “only I didn’t know that he…” he trailed off, for he had not talked to Kate about David yet, not the fact of his existence nor his demise. And the latter was not something he could speak of just yet, and maybe never would.

  The headlines were a clarion, shrieking off the page, a picture of the house on Malone Road, looking entirely grim and foreboding, with the words ‘House of Nightmares Tumbling Down’. The byline was Muck’s. David must have taken all the evidence he had gathered over his time in the house directly to Muck. David would do that, to spare him, Patrick, the danger of the middleman this one last time.

  Pat skimmed the article. Muck had outed Boyd as a British tout. This made Boyd a marked man who would be lucky if he had another twenty-four hours left on his clock. Pat hoped they were as miserable a twenty-four hours as any man had ever had to endure. The story went on, disclosing the charnel house of perversion that the old mansion had been. Muck left no stone unturned and the worms were all there now in the glare of the media. David had done what he had always aimed to do, and saved the boys in that damned house. Pat wished with every fiber of his being that the man was here to see it. At least David knew Muck had the suicidal courage of his own convictions and that the story would be written. At least he had that much the day he climbed the stairs into the tower.

  Kate was standing near him now, wordless, and he thought he might fall to pieces if she so much as touched him. He closed his eyes and she did touch him then, her hand soft on his back. He turned his face, blind and she took his head to her, stroking his hair. David’s death had broken open something inside him, something he had held in check since Sylvie had been killed. He could feel it cracking as though his heart were filled with fault lines, his soul composed of shifting plates that were threatening to buckle.

  “It’s alright,” she said quietly and he felt strangely reassured, as if indeed things might be alright now, even if never the same.

  “Was he very dear to you?”

  “Who?”

  “The friend ye lost. I’m blind in my eyes, Patrick Riordan, but not so blind in my heart. Ye’ve been grievin’ these last days. I could feel that clear, much as ye tried to hide it.”

  “Aye, he was dear. He was the best friend I ever had.”

  “Ye can break if ye need to. I can bear the weight of it,” she said, and he could feel it, the fault lines widening, the plates shifting to build the pressure up until he would not have control of it.

  “Can ye?” His words came out half-choked, pushing past his throat thick and pained. “Because I don’t think I can.”

  “Aye, I can, for it’s none so hard,” she said so quietly that her words fell light as snowflakes to touch his bruised skin, “to bear what ye can of another’s pain, when ye love them.”

  Chapter Eighty-three

  The World Both Under and Over

  The air was alive today, the breeze sweet but brisk with winter scent. Casey Riordan surveyed his bit of land with satisfaction. The fruits of the garden had long been picked and put up: the burlap bags filled with root vegetables, the onions hanging in loosely plaited bunches, the gleaming rows of jars filled with jewel-toned berries. All of this gave him a deep sense of satisfaction, a guard against the cold season ahead, an assurance of warmth and full bellies to ride out the winter winds and storms.

  Velvety grass, skimmed with a milk frost of new snow, filled the hollows and dips between the trees. Beneath the snow the soil contrasted in thick black rills. Irish land had oft been described as black butter for its richness. The irony of such a thing was not lost on any Irish man or woman that a land so fertile, so lovely, was also tilled to its limits in blood and tears, which ought to have salted and destroyed the very soil beneath all their feet and yet still gave in plenty.

  He began to walk, long strides into the woods. He liked to check the boundaries of his property once a month, see what might need mending, trees that may have fallen and just generally take stock of things. In his hand, he held a small bouquet of wild things: leaves blushed crimson from frost, silvered twigs smooth as a woman’s skin, and the drifting bits of seedpods that remained behind long after the seeds had flown. Today was also a pilgrimage of sorts, a strange pact he kept with a woman who had long flown herself.

  He shivered a little as he walked beyond the pine coppice where the branches were feathered with snow. The day was cold, but his shiver had more to do with the fact that there were times in this wood when he felt that someone watched, someone neither evil nor benign, but most assuredly there.

  He knew what his wife would say, witchy woman that she was. She would tell him it was one of those edge places where there was a fracture in time or in the world itself that allowed bits of other worlds to flit through, or creep in, she would say, and he could see her in his mind’s eye, her eyes dark with enchantment.

  “You know when you sometimes catch a wee bit of someone else’s conversation, just snatched words, or someone says your name, but no one is there? Or you see someone just for a flash, and then you look and there’s only empty air? Those are the cracks in our world. Those are the holes in the borders between this world and that
.”

  The woman knew how to put a chill up a man’s spine, that was certain. But he knew what she meant all too well, for he had enough experience of the inexplicable things of the world to know there was much between the earth and the heavens that defied logic and scientific explanation.

  A land this old, this rich in history, was layered deep in overlapping worlds. He often had the sense that if he turned at just the right moment he would see creatures from another time and place crossing through the borders of his own, just as Pamela had described.

  Such thoughts brought to mind another place, one that belonged to the past, one he hadn’t thought about in a long time. Once, when he was a boy, he had been out roaming the woods and had gotten lost. He wasn’t one to panic in such situations as he knew that only led to getting more surely lost. On that ramble, though, he had come across an ancient crannog in the midst of a bog. He thought the bog must have been a pond or wee lake long ago but had dried up over hundreds of years and become ground, albeit of the loose and shifting sort. He had very carefully picked his way across that ground, and spent the afternoon inside of the daub and wattle building. It had been a magic place, as if time did not exist inside it and he might have been himself or a woad-faced warrior from centuries long gone. He had never told anyone about it, not even Pat, to whom he confided most things. Over the years he would go there from time to time; it had been a secret that was all his own, a place where he could step out of the world. He considered that this was how it was with Pamela at times, that in their most intimate moments, in their bed and in their life, there came into being a place where they stepped from the world, a place only the two of them could go, a beautiful secret known solely to them.