In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4)

by Cindy Brandner

  “I don’t remember much after that, just that I woke up about twenty hours later, toe tagged in the morgue. They were getting ready to bag me and ship me home. You can imagine my confusion when I came around, tagged and nearly bagged. They’d pulled us out a couple of hours after we’d all been killed and the doctors said they couldn’t find a pulse in me. They were shocked to find me alive, called me Lazarus for the duration of my stay in the hospital.”

  “Do you remember anything from that time—when ye were dead?”

  Eddy looked at him, the brown eyes shrewd. “No, just a lot of blackness for the most part. It was real quiet, you know, the kind of quiet that makes a man itchy. But there was a bit in there—maybe it was just a dream—I was walking with my brother back home, on the reservation. Up in the hills where the stones stick up like a ridge of spine and the pine smells like the coldest, cleanest thing in the world. It felt real, it was part of why I was so certain I was dead.”

  “How did ye end up here?”

  Eddy shrugged, a gesture of great eloquence with him. “How do any of us end up out here? It’s the city of lost souls, San Francisco, people searching for meaning, people looking to disappear, people who ain’t got nowhere else to go and know it’s warm enough to live on the streets most of the year. It was the place to be for a while there, now everybody is just lost and drifting. It’s a city for ghosts. Don’t you wonder sometimes, Mick—I mean maybe we really are ghosts, you can’t remember anything and I can’t forget. Don’t you feel like you’re walking around without any skin some days, like the light and the dark just go through you and nothing stays, nothing remains? Like maybe I never came back from ‘Nam and you never left Ireland? Like maybe this here is purgatory.”

  “Aye, some days I wonder, other days I know.”

  “You know?”

  Mick struggled a little to say what he felt. It wasn’t easy to explain how sometimes he caught a glimpse of the world before and it made him feel even more transparent in the here and now, as if he were part of the air, could melt into the fog and drift away over the sea and no one would know the difference.

  “It’s just that there was a time that I think I was seen and known, an’ I think I knew my place in the world. I had roots, now I feel like I’m always at sea in a really small boat.”

  Eddy tipped his beer can at him in salute. “Well, here’s to ghosts, the one that is me—because what the fuck else would you call a man who was toe tagged and dead for twenty-four hours—and the one that is you.”

  Mick laughed, though it was a hollow sound. “Because what else would ye call a man who has neither past nor name to call his own?”

  This time neither of them laughed.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  The Maid From the Sea

  HE HAD BLOOD in his eye and fury in his heart. It was the combination that worked best he’d found, except this time the blood was literally in his eye, which wasn’t such a comfortable thing. Around him was the buzz of men high on fight adrenaline, even though it was just that of spectator. It had been the same through time, from the gladiator ring to the carnival fights of early America and then to the professional world of boxing. Men lived vicariously, their own blood rushing and the beast that lived inside each man waking up and roaring as they watched, going to the entrance of the cave and sniffing the wind for the enemy. Every wrong, every slight, every downtrodden moment of a man’s life could be soothed for a few minutes by watching two other men beat the hell out of one another. It was basic and it was male. It was an acknowledgement of their own dark side without becoming part of it. Controlled violence was an opiate—a blood-mad, vein-rushing opiate.

  The fight was in a big drafty old barn out beyond Altamont. It was also worth two thousand dollars to him. This would be no twenty-minute knockdown of some guy who thought he was tough. This was going to go the distance. He was going to have to reserve some of his energy, keep some of his bigger punches back, and not use everything up in the first fifteen minutes. He felt that out-of-body sensation he always got before a fight, and he took a few deep breaths, trying to bring himself back down to a place where he could feel his bones and muscles and the thunder of adrenalized blood pumping in his ears.

  The man was big, not as big as he was, but heavier through the chest and shoulders and thicker through the legs. His head was shaved and his skin was so dark that it shone with a dull blue gleam in the flickering propane torches that lit the barn. He was silent too, moving light and quick on his feet, dancing in and out while he took Mick’s measure. And then just when Mick thought he couldn’t bear the pre-fight tension anymore, it began.

  Mick started out with basic combinations—jab, jab, hook, right cross, jab, hook to the body, cross to the shoulder. Jab, uppercut to the jaw, left hook to the other side. Jab again to make space so he could back away, catch his breath before he pressed forward again. His blood calmed, and he could feel his bones again, he was back with his body and it was working for him like a well-oiled machine. They broke at the ten-minute mark, took a rest and rinsed out their mouths with water. Back in the fight, closing in, smelling the other man’s sweat and blood. He still felt light on his feet; the pain hadn’t found him and weighted his blood yet. The thrum in his head was there—left, right, left, left, right and then right, right, left—up and down, head, body, body, head—always changing up his combinations, trying to anticipate the other fighter’s combinations before they came. This man was good, the best he’d fought so far, and he wasn’t entirely certain he could beat him. He liked that, liked the uncertainty of it. Most of the men he’d fought so far had been little more than barroom brawlers. This man understood the art of it. Mick took a few hard punches, a right cross to his ribs that took his breath for a few seconds, and an uppercut that snapped his head a little. He jabbed and went to move in with a left hook when suddenly his peripheral vision went out, like someone had shut off a light. There was a flash in his head like a camera light going off, bright and brilliant and he saw a boy’s face, just a wee boy, there and gone just as fast. The blow to the side of his head hit like a mallet and stars exploded in his view—big scarlet ones blossoming like poppies on a black sheet. He shook his head and danced back, giving himself a second before the man pressed his advantage.

  He felt a moment’s regret; the doctor had been clear about not aggravating the injury to his head in any way. The doctor didn’t understand, that a man with no past and plenty of anger didn’t always care if he lived or died. The truth was this, right now, locked in sweat and blood and fury with another man was the only time he did feel fully alive—roaring, blood and adrenaline pumping, shot up into the ether alive. The man locked in this space with him felt the same and the two of them fed off each other. The bastard knew how to box, he really knew, he moved and punched and jabbed and threw across the body blows that telegraphed power and pain even before his fist made contact. The exhaustion was going to set in soon, it did after a certain point, there was no help for that. He needed to find an opportunity before then, before he found that place of exhaustion because his knee was starting to pain him and if he got too tired it might seize up all together and then he would be nothing more than a punching bag for the man.

  He saw his opening a couple of minutes and three bruising hits to his shoulder later. He took it with a jab and then a feint to the right so the man would think he was going to bring in a hard right cross. Instead he hit him with a left uppercut that snapped the man’s head back and dropped him like a hundredweight of flour to the floor. He took a breath and backed away, letting the referee start the count. Here now with the stink of sweat and blood all around, and the numbers slowly building—one, two, three, four, five, six—he was content, he was alive, he was whole.

  The win was still thrumming through his blood when he entered Molly’s. He wanted the quiet of the place. He wanted to wet his throat and settle his blood before the pain set in. Win or lose, there was always pain, a man couldn’t give nor receive those sorts
of hits without pain paying him a visit later.

  Molly Malone’s smelled as pubs always did—spilled beer, smoke, and the fug of male bodies not necessarily well-washed. Molly always lit a peat fire on cold nights and he liked the smell of it, it calmed him and made him feel a fractured yearning at the same time. No yearning was ever whole for him, because he had no understanding of what it was he yearned for.

  He reviewed the fight in his mind. What he might have done better, what the other man had done better, his combinations, his surprises, and the angle of his hits. There was always something to learn and store away, something to focus the next weeks of training upon. He wasn’t a fool, he knew violence had a cost and he knew it was an animal a man fed at his own peril. He felt a narrow blade of pain down the right side of his head, where the worst of his injury had been. It happened sometimes and was on the opposite side of where the punch had landed. It was just pain. Except this time it wasn’t.

  “Violence is like a chained beast, boyo, an’ if ye feed it too much it will just want more. An’ then one day when it gets strong enough on all ye’ve fed it, it will break that chain an’ there will be no controllin’ it after that. D’ye understand?”

  It was a strange echo, a voice inside his head that came from the very bottom of that deep well where his former life seemed to have drowned. A voice he had known once, a man, one he had trusted implicitly. How it was he could understand that but not actually recall the man to whom the voice belonged, he didn’t know. One of the doctors had told him it was likely he had lived largely by instinct, and had known he could rely on his instincts to guide him well in life, he said it was why he functioned as well as he did in his present world. The gist of it seemed to be that if he allowed instinct to guide him now, it might well lead him back to himself. Tiny echoes in a well that went on forever, and sometimes those echoes made him feel that it was more hopeless than if the silence had just stayed in his head the way it had been, like a snowstorm, ever falling but making no sound. Like the little boy who had flashed across his vision during the fight. Gone now, no matter how he tried to grab at the thin echo of the memory.

  “Hey, Irish,” said a voice off to his left. He turned. It was Bridget, form slender against the hazy light in which she stood.

  He smiled. “Hello.”

  “Can I sit?” she asked.

  “Aye, suit yerself,” he said, the words rough but the tone amiable enough.

  She sat beside him, so close that her arm was touching his, the scent of her in his nose immediately. Her perfume was spicy, and not entirely to his taste, but she smelled like a woman nevertheless and that was no bad thing after a night in the ring with a sweating, bleeding man.

  She put a finger to the hand he had on the table, and traced the bruises and scrapes on his knuckles. Her hand looked delicate and impossibly white in contrast to his, big and brutal looking as it seemed to him suddenly. A hand that was capable of violence. He felt a sudden wash of shame go through him, that he had been flush with satisfaction over that violence only a moment ago. He curled his fingers under, not wanting to be touched.

  “I saw you fight tonight. I’ve never seen anyone fight like that. You scared your opponent and I don’t think that man scares easily. You got a lot of anger in you, man. I guess what I wonder is why? What drives you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, voice rough and the cold copper taste of blood in his throat suddenly. “I guess it’s because I don’t care like the other men do.”

  “Don’t care?” she queried, her own voice soft.

  “If I live or die.”

  She nodded, and the mere movement flushed a wave of scent off her. He felt slightly sick with it.

  “You want to come back to my place tonight?” she asked. She moved her hand from the table to his leg. He swallowed, and almost choked on his beer as her hand slid over his thigh leaving no room for doubt, or anything else for that matter, about just what she meant with her offer. He turned to look at her, and those blue, blue eyes cut through him, her gaze cauterizing as it traveled. “No strings,” she said, “just sex.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t.”

  He couldn’t have said why he turned her down; it made little sense to him. The woman was beautiful and desirable and his body was, even now, stirring to her touch. He longed for oblivion at times, the sort found with another body, another’s flesh and touch and desire. Something in him recoiled, he just didn’t understand what, or maybe he did—a woman he didn’t know from a life he couldn’t remember. It was ridiculous really. His body seemed to feel it was more than ridiculous and bordering on cruelty.

  Bridget got up and went to the bar, and he took a deep breath that didn’t contain her scent. She would order her usual, gin and tonic, heavy on the gin. She tossed a look over her shoulder at him, eyes slightly narrowed, reminding him of a Siamese cat with her pointed chin and blue eyes. Most men would count themselves lucky to be propositioned by such a woman.

  Several moments later she was back, not quite ready to give up it appeared. She put a shot of whiskey and a pint of Guinness on the table in front of him.

  “I don’t drink whiskey,” he said, “but thank ye for the beer.”

  He took a sip to be polite, and let it sit on his tongue before sending it down his throat. He allowed himself one pint of the black stuff, and he’d already had that, anything more and he was playing with fire.

  He felt a flash of resentment toward her. He wanted to be quiet with his thoughts, even though Eddy was meant to meet him here shortly. The resentment was followed by guilt. It wasn’t her fault, after all, that all he really wanted was to steady himself and see if he couldn’t summon that wee boy’s face into his mind again. What she wanted he knew she could get anywhere and with someone far more willing than he was.

  He had expressed some frustration around this particular issue when Molly had asked him why he never had a woman with him. Her reply had been to the point. “It’s because you burn, sweetie, that’s all. The women can smell it, it’s a slow burn, but ye’re all the more attractive for it. Besides have you seen yourself?” She quirked a darkly-penciled eyebrow at him and grinned. Mick grinned back; Molly had never made a secret of the fact that she would have been more than happy to keep him in bed for a week or two. She had gone on to express the idea that if he did decide to ‘get busy’, which she said with more primness than he might have imagined coming from Molly, with some lucky girl, let it not be little Miss Bridget.

  “Because she’s trouble, I’m sure Eddy has told ye that already.”

  “Aye, he has. She’s not a worry, Moll,” he’d said, but Molly had merely given him a rise of her well-painted brow as if to say she was very dubious about any man’s ability to sniff out female trouble. She might, he thought a moment later, have had a valid point there.

  “Hey Irish, why don’t you tell us a story,” Bridget said, loudly enough that several heads turned toward them. There was a mocking light in her blue eyes. She was angry that he had turned her down, and determined to make him pay in whatever fashion she could. “I figured you’d know how to tell a tale, the Oy-rish are supposed to be grand at that, no?” She was mocking him he knew, but he felt the tingle of it in his blood as if this was natural to him, the telling of a tale beside a fire, with a drink in hand.

  “I can give it a try,” he said coolly, calling her bluff, though heaven knew just what material he could draw upon to fabricate a story. He relaxed in his chair, threw back the whiskey even though he knew it was a bad idea and then rolled his shoulders to loosen them a little. He was silent for a long moment, looking for a silver glimmer somewhere in his mind with which to begin a tale. He sensed this might have once been familiar territory for him and that a tale could be made to tell itself once it had a start, but the teller must at least find the beginning in order to give the story its first breath. He cleared his throat and began, voice soft and low so that anyone who cared to listen would have to gather in close.

  �
��There was a man, once, who lived by the shore of a distant land, a land of mist an’ green soft fields that unfolded like velvet thrown out upon an expanse of rock. Now this man was lonely, though he didn’t so much notice it for he was busy all the day through workin’ his fields and tendin’ to his cattle. Durin’ the nights though, when the wind blew from the west an’ the stars were thick as salt poured into the sky, he would feel the lack of another, of a woman’s warmth an’ tender voice.

  “One day, after his work was done an’ he was feelin’ that strange ache which is known to the lonely, he was wanderin’ on the shore, for the sea was only a few miles from his farm an’ he liked the light of the water at the close of day. He saw somethin’ move down near the tidemark, an’ he thought it might be a stranded seal, too far up the sand and caught there without water to return it home.

  “An’ then the seal stood upon two legs, an’ he saw that it was no seal at all but a maid so fair she brought the sting of tears to his eyes. She wore only a silver green cloak which she untied an’ let drop to the ground.

  “She had the eyes of the sea children, green an’ deep as a night without a moon. Her hair fell in a tumble of luxuriatin’ smoke to the small of her back, black as a crow’s wing with the light of emeralds and sapphires within it. An’ the skin on her—ah, ’twas like white roses borne in on the waves, come from a far land.

  “He had heard legends of such women, an’ it was said they made the very best wives. They were said to be under the rule of Lir, Lord of the Sea, an’ came from the land beneath the waves.

  “He crept as close as he could, watchin’ the maid as she bathed in the new moon’s light, naked as a newborn upon the cold strand, seaweed fronds ribbonin’ through the smoke-black hair. He recalled what he had heard of such cloaks, that they aided the wearer so that they might roam from one realm to the next, from sea to land.