Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  Still he shook so that his teeth chattered against each other. The universe had boiled itself down to this moment because this was life at its most basic—blood and bone and fang and fur, whose belly was exposed first, who staggered first and gave over his throat for the kill. He understood suddenly why the wolf stood patiently there, even if he did not understand how a feather could summon a wild beast. He could do it, could slip into the skin of a wild thing, become that thing, and take it over, until he no longer needed the shield of its fur and fangs. He could become it, but he would lose something of himself in the process. It was inevitable that it should be so. Still, he did not see how else to live through the next few minutes. He could not fight the wolf as a boy. He could only fight him wolf to wolf. He grasped the feather tightly in his hand and let go of himself in a way that he had never known a boy could.

  At first he thought he had been wrong, for he lost his vision and was swept with a wave of pain so vast he really believed he was about to die. Was he lost in the jump, falling even now into an abyss from which he would not be able to deliver himself? Had this been the Crooked Man’s plan all along?

  He landed with a thump that rattled his bones down to their marrow. His sight returned, not in the form he was familiar with but a different kind of seeing, low to the ground, a seeing that took in the slightest stir of wind in the shrubbery, the twitch of movement that told of prey, a scratch on bark, moss turned over by a fleeing paw. A seeing that demanded swift movement, and a terrible stillness like nothing he had ever known as a boy.

  The black wolf sprang on him at once, before he had time to fully fit to the contours of his new being, tackling him to the ground in a fury of claw and tooth and muscle that felt like a strangling vine, thick with hatred and venom. Death, he realized could come swift in this moment.

  Movement was instinctive, movement was life, and so he moved: twisting, writhing, fangs snapping, meeting air that tasted of pine and earth, meeting fur and coiling serpent-slippery muscle. Meeting bone, tasting marrow, feeling the give and roll of your own hide and sliding, ripping away from the enemy, even the pain a strange form of joy, because it spurred your own violence, your own blood hunger. It was a state of being in which the senses crossed over, blended and were not one distinct from any other.

  He felt the burning rake of claws gain purchase in his side and then rip out, freeing blood to flow. The black wolf was terribly strong, and Jack knew he would not have more than a fleeting chance to best him. He would have to hope he didn’t die before that chance showed itself.

  Then the black wolf had him down, flipped over on his back, and the pain in his side was like fire scything his bones from his hide. This was how death came then, swift and under a low, dark sky, the air cold as an icy razor. Suddenly the black wolf whimpered low in his throat and pulled himself out of the fight with a great shudder of his stinking hide. Jack was thrown, rolling over and up, finding his paws sinking into the boggy ground. He looked through the blood haze that clouded his vision to see what had happened, thinking perhaps he had wounded the black wolf more profoundly than seemed possible.

  It was as clear as pawprints in the snow that this was not the case. The black wolf looked relatively unharmed but was afraid, lips curled up, baring his fangs, the line of fur down his back stiff as quills. He was looking at the flower that Muireann had given Jack at their parting. It must have been loosed from his pocket when his clothes fell away from his wolf body. He didn’t understand what it was about the flower that could possibly be scaring the black wolf. It gave him a chance though, and chance by its very nature had to be seized. So he took the precious fear of the black wolf and righted himself, feeling the slippery letting of blood into fur as he moved.

  He stood straight and looked into the black wolf’s eyes. They were silver like coins, like the moon, both fathomless and depthless. They stood thus, the wind blowing over and through them and a strange knowing passed between, a language without words, one of instinct and marrow, one that was so old it had been born along with the wind and the seas. It came into his mind in pictures, shadow paintings like drawings on a cave wall seen only by firelight. The flower was Muireann’s life, its essence held there within the undying petals, a final gift to him, a cloak of protection and love. He knew this in an instinctual way, just as he now knew that how a raven flew in the wind told of his fortunes in the hunt and that when the ice groaned in winter it was asking for snow to come down and lay its blanket of comfort over it. He knew that the land itself spoke in varying tempers, soft, fluting words for the green of spring, hard and wrath-filled for great cold. Just as he knew that now was his moment to strike, when the black wolf was, for just a moment, afraid.

  He sprang and attacked all in one movement, rage flowing like boiling mercury through his blood. When you only had one shot you went for the throat, because it was the only guarantee of death. He bit hard, teeth clamping down, piercing, tasting the hot rush of blood, cartilage and life on his tongue. It was thick and sweet and salt, it was the taste of victory, it was the taste of life. He must not let go, must not allow the Crooked Man to slip away, to haunt his life once again.

  He flipped him, the universe tilting as the big black wolf tried to use the momentum to drag him down. It was a feeble attempt, for life was ebbing swiftly now, the way it did in the wild.

  Jack felt the sudden stillness, that stillness that went beyond life, the one that only existed on the other side of the boundary. The black wolf was dead. Whether the Crooked Man was or not remained a mystery, one he did not have the time to solve. The pain in his side was tipped with both ice and fire and he was afraid to look at it for fear it was a mortal wound.

  He opened his eyes to see his vanquished foe and felt a ripple run straight down his spine, his ruff rising in response. There was no bloody corpse here in the grey woods, no brush of chill wind over cooling fur and blood, just the skeleton of a wolf, a wolf long dead to judge by the roots and tendrils of dying autumn vines attached to the bone, growing round and through it. He shook his head back and forth, retreating from the skeleton. What madness was this? He could not have imagined it all, could he? If so, it meant he was utterly mad himself, a fear, he admitted, that had lurked beneath the turmoil in his mind all along.

  He looked down, catching his breath on pain. There were his dreams, wind-rattled against the bones of the wolf. They had changed, for the dreams that the Crooked Man had held inside him were just little rocks, dull and unremarkable, yet still he knew they were his own that had once seemed as brilliant and faceted as the finest jewels. Jack swallowed, feeling sick. Was this what he had travelled all this way for? Was this worth everything he had lost in his journey? The place where he held the loss of Muireann still felt raw around its edges and now he feared it always would. She had known when she gave him that flower that she was giving him her life. And he had been such a fool that he had taken it, not understanding in the least the sacrifice she was making, that she had been willing to die for love. He would carry the wound of that, as well as the terrible beauty, always.

  He understood finally that there were no absolute triumphs in any battle worth the blood, because such a fight always took something away before it bestowed victory’s thorny crown.

  It took some adjustment, going back to his own body, becoming a boy again, fitting spirit to elbows and knees and upright movement. Nose twitching and itchy because it could not scent things from two hundred yards, could not taste scent on the air like a river of perfume. He felt awkward and clumsy and out of sorts but gradually, as he moved across hills and through streams, with winter’s thin light surrounding him, he realized that he had retained some of his wildness. Some strange instinct that had stayed behind in his soul now transferred to his own body. His body healed, though he would always carry a long and jagged scar that ran the entire arc of his bottom rib.

  And then one day, Aengus loping at his side, he came up over
the rise of a hill, snow swirling down softly through the air… and he was home. There was his house, held safe in the lee of a hill, there the great wood in which he had originally been lost, there the stables and horses, and servants and hearth. There his mother and his father. They were so happy to see him, he felt guilty that he wasn’t ecstatic about being home.

  After the initial flurry of emotion at his return, his parents, he could clearly see, weren’t entirely comfortable with all the changes in him. But then he supposed parents never were. He had changed, indeed it was as the owl woman had said—he had looked into the Crooked Man and the Crooked Man had looked into him, and he had loved and been loved and lost that love. Such things changed one forever, put dents and fissures in the heart which made it both more open and more closed. Other things had changed too, for his senses were keen as a snake in the grass or an owl on the wind. He could hear the grass grow under the stars at night, taste the earth in every vegetable, feel the wind change direction even when he was indoors. He could see the shadows that lurked at the edge of everything: seashore, forests, fields, fences, roads, staircases, closets, bookshelves, and borders. He could not explain the changes to his parents and was sorry he could not. The changes weren’t only in him, for Aengus had aged since their arrival home. Suddenly the dog’s bones were creaking, his muzzle snowy, his eyes cloudy, and he preferred to spend his days beside the fire in the kitchen, curled up on a bed thick and warm rather than running constantly at Jack’s side. Jack felt like he was missing one of his own limbs, an extension of his body that had been both freedom and companionship.

  Life took him back eventually, into school uniforms and math exams, into rugby games, and girls and horses and books and cups of tea on cold nights. But even then he never knew when the wild sensing (for so he thought of it) might come upon him and he would think he heard the clack of the Owl Woman’s needles and her strange hooting tongue, or a stray breeze would tickle his nose as he was fielding a ball and he would smell the greenness of Muireann just for a second. Or he would see a strange color such as those that only existed in the spinning woman’s world. Once he was riding his horse down near the edge of his father’s kingdom and he thought for a moment that he saw the leaves flicker with unnatural fire and begin to form a man. But when he checked it was just the wind moving the leaves against a small hummock of earth, though he thought he smelled a strange burning in the vicinity. It no longer frightened him, for now, seeing as he did with different eyes, he was no longer a boy and would never be one again. Some days that made him sad but most days he did not mind so much.

  He had known when he returned home it would be to a place strange in its familiarity, for if there was one constant in the universe it was this—it changes. People, landscapes, friendships, dogs and love, it all changes.

  But what he had once told Muireann was equally true, true as anything in life, in this world or that, in dark or light, lost or found; the things we put into our heart stay there forever. The mind, well practiced in its mercies, forgets. The heart, that ruthless and tender organ, does not.

  Part Twelve

  Bread and Salt

  Russia – October-December 1975

  London – December 1975

  Chapter Eighty-four

  October 1975

  Departures

  It had been a week since he had held his son. He had not realized how much he had come to depend on those touches of humanity, how deep he had allowed himself to be drawn into the quicksand of human warmth and assurance, of family. He worried that the child would forget him. It was so simple at this age, for memories to slip free, to love the arms that were most familiar, the ones that could be counted upon.

  The day had been long, with blue hints of cold in the air, and Nikolai’s hands had been so bent and stiff that he had not been able to hold the saw properly. They were under quota, though barely, for Jamie had done his best to make up the slack. It meant less food at dinner and he was already exhausted. He just wanted to go back to their small hut and to their tiny circle wherein, even if safety was an illusion, still it felt real enough to pretend.

  Gregor was sitting on a stump outside the communal hut that Jamie shared with Nikolai, Shura and Vanya, big hands latticed and loose on his knees. His face was grave.

  “Yasha,” the big man said, “we must speak.”

  “Kolya?” he said, a choking fear rising in his throat, for the baby had been running a slight fever last time he had seen him. But Gregor shook his head.

  “Violet?” he asked, aware that his heart was beating harder than it had been only seconds before. He did not like the look on Gregor’s face. He had seen such faces before in his life and they never boded well.

  “She is gone,” Gregor said flatly.

  “Gone?” Jamie echoed. “What do you mean—gone?” It occurred to him with a gut-twisting nastiness just how many meanings that particular word held.

  “Some men came today while we were in the forest and took her away. Shura told me.”

  “Men?” he said, starting to feel like a stunned parrot.

  “Yes, Yasha,” Gregor said patiently, “the sort of men that I believe you are well acquainted with yourself.”

  It would not do to say the word aloud, but it hung there between him and Gregor anyway. KGB, the secret police. The men who could make you disappear as though you were no more than smoke threshed by the wind, and who could make you wish you had never been born at all before they did so. The question was, why?

  “Kolya?” he asked again, a stunning blow of adrenaline hitting him in the stomach.

  “He is here. She did not take him.”

  The relief almost took him to his knees, as did the pain for Kolya. He could not imagine circumstances under which Violet would leave her son behind if she had any choice in the matter.

  “Your friend is here,” Gregor slapped his hand to Jamie’s shoulder, dispersing a little of his shock. “He is waiting in the hut you shared with the woman. I did not wish for you to go in not knowing.”

  Gregor never used her name. Jamie wondered why he had not comprehended that before. It had been a mistake of rather epic proportions.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because,” Gregor replied, “I did not think you told her anything she did not already know.”

  “You knew?”

  Gregor shrugged, eyes unreadable. “I suspected, that is all. I did warn you, Yasha, that wolf is always wolf to man. But sometimes the wolf is a woman.”

  “No.”

  Gregor raised an eyebrow. “No? Then consider it a fairytale.”

  Jamie walked away toward the hut. He stumbled a little and realized he couldn’t feel his legs properly. Shock, yes, shock would do that. So might an avoided truth.

  Facing Andrei was like walking into a looking glass, for the expression on his face mirrored the one Jamie felt on his own countenance.

  “Where have they taken her, Andrei?”

  “I don’t know. They just told me that I had visiting privileges today. I came and was told she was gone, but had left Kolya behind.”

  “Andrei—if…” he trailed off. Andrei understood all the implications and hardly needed it spelled out.

  Andrei looked at him long, the blue eyes dense with pain and another emotion that looked a great deal like pity.

  “They said she did not struggle, but went with them quietly, Yasha. She was not taken by force.”

  “But she didn’t take Kolya.”

  “I know,” Andrei said flatly.

  He knew the face he presented Andrei with was a perfect blank, because he didn’t know how to feel or what to say. The scope of such a betrayal—if it were indeed such—was beyond his comprehension. If it were not a betrayal, then he could not even touch those thoughts. He could not live and think of such things happening to her.

 
He heard someone saying ‘no’ over and over and realized in a dim, distant way that it was himself, and that he could not stop. Andrei was staring at him but he understood. The pain of it was there in his face, burning incandescent.

  “Yasha, you have to go. You have to take my son and go. Don’t you see? If she is KGB, we don’t have much time left. And even if she isn’t then you must go before it’s too late. They will take him from us, Yasha. He’s almost of an age where they will put him in an orphanage and he’ll die there.”

  “But you—”

  Andrei shook his head. “I cannot take him, for what if one day I am not there to care for him? I cannot trust Ilena to do right by him. I will not have him suffer for my sins.”

  Jamie nodded, numb, aware he was in a room, standing, breathing, but unable to orient himself in time and space. Andrei was right. They would have to get Kolya out one way or another. If he disappeared into Russia’s nightmare system of orphanages, he would die, or perhaps even worse, survive. He would also be told that his parents had abandoned him and that only the State cared for his welfare.

  “What sort of fools were we?” Jamie asked.

  “Her story was designed to make us putty in her hands. The father shot after years in a gulag, the harsh mother, the old servant, her rebellion to the State—all of it. When you look at it from a certain angle, they are things for which we both have a weakness. Maybe some of it was even true. Who knows?”

  Yes, Violet would have been wise enough to weave in pearls of truth to the chain of lies. In fact, the most effective lies were those that were so close to the truth as to be almost indiscernible from it. In the West, you might share bits and pieces of your life story, casually and without worry but in Russia the rules changed. Here it was not safe to do so, so that people only got the scattered crumbs of another’s story, for the core must be held tight against betrayal. Because the core was all you had if you found yourself in the basement of Lubyanka, on your knees, your only company a man they called ‘The Electromonter’. Your core was your only refuge when the pain began, and went on for weeks and months, until you were turned inside out and no longer knew your own name or would happily sell your mother for a reprieve or for the privilege of death.