Kate waved a hand at her. “‘Tis no trouble at all, ye know we love to spend time with them. I’m glad Noah was able to help Lewis.”
“He saved his life, no thanks to me. I couldn’t even find his pulse.”
“Noah’s good in a crisis,” Kate said. “He’s got the medic trainin’ so no fault to ye, I’m sure I would have given him up for a ghost too. I’m very glad he’s goin’ to survive though, I know he’s been a dear friend to ye.” She continued on in her brisk manner, changing the subject to something more comfortable. “Miss Isabelle had a snack, an’ she’s a fresh nappy on her bottom, so she ought to sleep well for ye.” She handed Isabelle to her, and Pamela held her daughter’s sleepy body next to her own, feeling the sweet, warm weight of her. She leaned her cheek into Isabelle’s cloud of dark curls and breathed her baby in—she had been bathed and put in fresh pajamas and she smelled sweetly of talc and the special chamomile soap she made for Isabelle’s delicate skin.
She held her for a bit longer, and then carried her up the stairs, placing her gently in the crib. True to Kate’s prediction, Pat was nodding off over the book he was reading to Conor. He opened his eyes at her entrance and stood, looking back down at Conor who was sprawled out, deeply asleep, with two books still clutched fast in his hands. Pat gently pulled them away and placed them on the shelf under the window, the one Casey had built and she had painted with crescent moons and stars.
They moved out into the hall, Pat manfully suppressing a yawn. He walked down the stairs behind her, pausing at the bottom to give her a quick hug. Then he and Kate put on their coats and shoes and readied themselves to leave.
“Are ye all right, then?” he asked, pausing on the doorstep, Kate’s hand in his own.
“I’m fine, Pat. I think I’ll just have a bath and go to bed. I’m exhausted.”
“Aye, I would imagine ye are.” The dark eyes met her own and she knew he didn’t really believe that she was fine, but then she hadn’t been for a long time. This was her new normal in life, and in ways she had never thought possible she had adjusted and learned to live with it.
The house was too quiet when they left. There weren’t even dishes to tidy away, for Kate had left everything in apple-pie order, the way she always did every time she visited. Noah was the same, she realized; anything that required fixing he saw to it without even asking her, he simply did it because he knew it was necessary.
She drifted up the stairs, tired in body, but not yet in mind. She went to check on the children first, to make certain Conor was still covered and warm, and that Isabelle wasn’t fussing as she sometimes did in the first hour of sleep.
The children’s room was warm, for unlike her and Casey’s room it only had one exposed wall, whereas the master bedroom was on the corner of the house, and caught the chilly winds that sometimes came sweeping through of a night. Both children were still fast asleep, Conor on his back with the covers already pushed off and away. She bent down and kissed his forehead, pulling the blankets back over him. He stirred slightly in his sleep, and then turned and clutched his old bunny to his chest. Isabelle was breathing deeply, making the soft cooing noise she made when she was completely relaxed. A slice of moonlight fell across her flushed cheek, her tiny rear end in the air the way it often was in sleep. Pamela missed standing in this room with Casey, watching their children sleep, exchanging soft talk, freezing into silence when one of the children stirred and then creeping out the door together and only releasing their breath when they were past the squeak in the hall floor.
She went downstairs and made herself a cup of tea, a brew with catmint and valerian to help her sleep. Then she took the old stone gin jar from the shelf above the Aga and filled it with hot water, screwing the cap on tightly so that it wouldn’t leak in the bed. She paused at the bottom of the stairs, feeling a weight in her body like that of dread. She thought briefly about curling up on the sofa with Rusty for company and just pulling the old afghan over her. She shut her eyes and took a stair and then another, and then another. Before she knew it her hand was on the door of their room. She turned the knob and went in. The room smelled of dried rose petals and peat ash. She mostly used it these days to change her clothes and that was about it. Occasionally she would light a fire in the hearth, to get rid of the damp, but she had not slept in her own bed since Casey had disappeared.
The moon was just a sliver off full and it bathed the room in distilled silver, suspending every item and delineating their features—the curve of the tall dresser, the worn round of the chair back in the corner of the room, the stones of the fireplace and the graceful arc of the canopy over their bed. It was as if even time was frozen here and she might turn and find Casey in the bed, reading from the Farmer’s Almanac and thinking out loud about which moon was best to plant kale beneath.
She undressed slowly, not bothering with the light. Her mind was caught fast somewhere outside that byre and she could still smell timothy laced with blood. She was too tired to take a bath, so she settled for a wash with hot water, sponging down her body and scrubbing her hands in the small basin she kept on the bedroom dresser. She combed her hair back from her face and put on an old jersey of Casey’s; it was the thing she most often slept in. She could pretend sometimes that she still smelled him in it—wood and water and that dark note that always brought a flush through her body.
She stood for a time, looking at the room, at the empty bed. The sheets were probably slightly musty even though she did occasionally wash and change them, despite not sleeping in the bed. Tonight though, she wanted to be alone with her thoughts, and not crammed in beside Conor who, while generally an accommodating bed mate, did tend to kick off all the blankets several times a night, leaving her shivering.
She took a breath. “You can do this, Pamela Riordan,” she said, her voice overly loud in the still silver night. She tucked the gin jar between the sheets. The soft linen was cold to her touch but the heat of the gin jar released the scent of the lime water with which she had pressed the sheets. She pulled on a pair of wool socks and took another breath, the trapped bird that lived inside her chest beating its wings a time or two. Maybe she couldn’t do it. Maybe she should just go down the hall and curl up next to her son. Then as clearly as if he truly were there in the room with her, she heard Casey’s voice from the last night they had shared this bed. She had been worrying out loud about Isabelle’s temperature, being that it had seemed a touch high to her and the baby had been fussy much of the afternoon.
“Come lie with me, darlin’,” he’d said, that look in his dark eyes that she knew so well. The look that said her worries would wait for the morrow, and for now she could just lie in his arms and let the world fade away.
She got in the bed, holding tight to the illusion that he was there, his body having warmed the sheets and that she could curl up to him and be instantly thawed. Just the touch of him was enough to bleed the tension from her usually. If not, there was always sex, which finished the job every time. Casey had caught on to this early in their relationship and had used it to his advantage many a night. Not that she had protested, for it was an effective cure for more than one ill.
She hugged his pillow to her chest, burying her face in the edge of it. She thought she could smell just the faintest trace of him there still. “Casey, I need your help, I don’t think I can get through this without you. I know that’s ridiculous, but you promised me once you would haunt me, you’d come to me if I needed you. Well, I need you, man. I need you so badly.” Her voice sounded small, even in the great still of the night. Not a voice to summon either man or ghost. She knew her man, though; she knew the language which had always summoned him, the language they spoke with such ease to one another.
She stirred and stretched out, restless and wanting. She closed her eyes and ran her hands up her body, cupping her breasts through the worn cloth of the shirt. It was ridiculous this, thinking that by pressing her own bare skin against material his had once touched that she was someho
w bringing him back, conjuring the phantom of his touch and his heat to her body once again. One hand slid down between her legs, touching the ache there. She remembered what Noah said, about sex being an assertion of life. It was indeed that, and with Casey it had been something more—something, as he had once told her, that was sacred. She missed him so, missed him in all the parts of their shared life, missed this at night, him next to her, inside her, missed the things he had whispered in her ears, the soft things, the smutty things, the romantic things and the moments of need which were so intense that only silence would do. She feared it would always be so for her, that even if she learned to move on in all the various ways of the world, she would still feel that dread hollow at the core of her being—both emotional and physical. She wondered sometimes if a man would ever touch her again with desire and love, if she would ever want and need again as she had with Casey.
She lay for a long time, her eyes watching the moon swim across the floor, trembling and silver-white, reminding her of other nights, nights that seemed as if they had taken place in another land and another time which was no longer her own.
Finally, long after midnight, with her feet wrapped around the gin jar and with Casey’s pillow once again clutched tight to her chest she fell asleep.
She could feel him in the bed. The heat he always emanated, the heat that warmed her to the core and she turned toward it unconsciously, body aware of him down to her last cell. She felt his hand, a shock of heat and roughly callused ridges, against her skin, moving like water along her thigh, pushing up the shirt she wore. She gasped softly, arching so the cloth rose higher.
“I’ll not leave ye,” he said soft in her ear, and she could feel the warmth of his breath, the heat of that long body pressed against her own, so that she rose to meet it, opening to it, needing and wanting with a blinding heat that obliterated all thought. God, how she had missed him, missed this, missed the oblivion of it, the intimacy that went beyond the physical joining of the two of them, the thing that solidified the foundation of what they were. The ache which she had carried inside for so long now was for the fit of her to him. His hands took her hips, raising her for deeper penetration and she gasped, turning her face into the pillow, the feeling more than she could bear. But he moved relentlessly, driving her before him on a ceaseless torrent of sensation and she cried his name out loud, so that she awoke to the echo of those two syllables dying away against the bedroom ceiling. His name was there on her lips, her body rising up to meet him again, his scent heavy on her—that scent of wood and earth, and something deeper and darker, something that bound her to him even now through the barriers of time and space.
And then it was gone, and so was he.
Chapter Fifty-four
An Acceptable Level of Violence
COMING FROM THE WARMTH AND JOLLITY of a wedding reception to the dark and rain of an unseasonably chilly night in Belfast was a jolt to one’s system, Pamela thought, hurrying along the pavement and wishing she had been able to find somewhere closer to the hall to park her car. She had been hired to photograph a wedding party, and while it had been a pleasant afternoon and evening, she was now wishing she had departed a little earlier. She had left her equipment at the hall, locked away, having made arrangements to pick it up on the following Monday. Walking through the city at any time put her nerves on edge, it could hardly be otherwise with all the violence that was a regular occurrence here and she didn’t want expensive camera equipment slowing her down. Not that the countryside in which she lived was in any way immune to the violence that regularly tore Belfast apart at its seams. Three days before a couple had been shot to death in their home out past Newry, their two-year-old toddler shot four times in the legs and left for dead. He had been found collapsed sobbing on his mother’s dead body, covered in both her blood and his own. The story had horrified her even more than usual, not just because of the terrible tragedy of it, but also because it told her that children were not off limits in this wretched conflict.
Sometimes she felt numb to the tragedy, exhausted by yet another bloody tale. The fear and anxiety never went away, it couldn’t in such a land, and yet she realized that she had become accustomed to it in ways she would not have dreamed possible even a few years ago. When, she wondered, had all this become so damnably familiar? It was what Jamie had once referred to as ‘an acceptable level of violence’. That grey area in which people could still function in a normal manner, despite inhumane acts occurring around them on a weekly basis. Her eyes turned toward the mountain upon which Jamie’s house sat. She couldn’t see the house from where she was, but she could picture it in her mind’s eye, lit up, warm, golden and alluring, rather like the man who owned it.
Given her druthers tonight, she would have gone up to that fairy tale house on the hill and stayed there. Conor and Isabelle were safe and tucked up at Gert and Owen’s house and she didn’t need to be home for a few hours. But Jamie was away on business in New York and would be for the next several days. Without his presence the house wasn’t the same welcoming haven that it was with him home. Though the truth was, things were still occasionally strained between them since that night in his study. She supposed it was naïve to expect anything else.
She realized suddenly that she had allowed her mind to drift, and that was a mistake she could not afford here in the dark streets of Belfast. She found, much to her horror, that between her hurry, the darkness and the rain, she was hopelessly turned around and wasn’t entirely certain where she was now. One wrong turn was all it took in this city, one wrong turn and you entered through the portal of a nightmare. She stopped and checked around her as best as she could in the murk, but she didn’t see a familiar landmark. Beside her rose brick walls topped with razor wire. The walls were far too high to see over and there was nothing here on the street by which to orient herself. Please God that she hadn’t unwittingly stumbled into a Loyalist area. Up ahead of her there was a young man walking swiftly, head down, hands jammed in his pockets. Beyond him she saw the lights of a pub, or at least she thought it might be. She would head in that direction and pray it was a Republican establishment, where she could ask for directions, or at least stop for a minute to get her bearings.
She took a breath, pacing herself, and keeping the distance between her and the young man to where she could see him but not where he became too aware of her presence behind him. There was no way to know which tribe he belonged to and until she knew where she was, it was too great a risk to get close to him. She had walked two blocks in this manner when she heard a car moving slowly along the road behind her.
She glanced over her shoulder; there was no such thing as too cautious in this town. She moved in toward the wall, preferring to stay in the dark and the illusion of shelter which the wet bricks provided. Up ahead there was an open space of a block, where a bomb had gone off six months earlier and there was little but rubble left. The car would be gone before she had to cross that open space though. She put her head down, picking up her pace a little. The small action was a saving grace, for a spray of shattered brick hit the side of her face a second later. Before she understood what was happening, instinct drove her to the pavement. She felt her stockings tear, and there was a sharp pain in her knees. Her ears were ringing with a hot, red sound as bullets rended the air around her head. She scuttled closer to the shelter of the wall, though the refuge it offered was illusionary at best. She could feel the terrible strange energy that automatic weapon fire left behind on the air. She looked ahead, the car was a block up now and the young man who had been walking ahead of her was nowhere to be seen. It was ominously quiet. She thought she should make for the pub posthaste, in case the car came back around. She took her shoes off, not wanting the heels to slow her down, and ran crouched low to the ground and tight to the wall. She hadn’t gone more than twenty feet when she realized that the young man hadn’t disappeared, but was lying terribly still in the middle of the sidewalk. She dropped onto her knees beside him, and tou
ched his shoulder, praying that, by some miracle he had survived the barrage of bullets. Then she saw his head, in the dim halo of light thrown down by a street lamp just up ahead, and knew that there was no way he was still alive. There was so much blood, dear God, it was everywhere. She was kneeling in it, the slick warmth of it in marked contrast to the chill of the rain and the cobbled stones beneath her knees.
There was a car coming up behind her again, long and purring, dark in tone, and sounding exactly to her panicked ears like the previous car. It was getting too close for her to outrun it and try for a mad dash to the pub up ahead. If she ran they would see her for certain, if she remained huddled here, they might well see her too, but it was the better of two very bad options. She lay down flat on the cobblestones, the young man’s blood soaking into her clothes instantly. She was using his body as a shield, because it was all there was. She was counting on the fact that they wouldn’t come to take the body; they would leave it dumped as a statement.
The car was moving more slowly. Her whole body was jumping with nerves, like electrodes were attached to every few square inches of her. She was certain now it was the same car—long and dark and made for prowling along the streets like a jungle cat seeking prey.
She chanced a look over the rise of the young man’s chest, noting that he had mother-of-pearl snaps on his shirt. It was the tiny details that seemed carved out in a supernal dimension in such moments. Across the rain washed pavement, the car was almost stopped, and there was a man looking out the passenger window. His face had been covered with a balaclava, but now in the wake of the shooting, he had pulled it up and off his face, likely thinking both she and the young man were dead. He looked strangely familiar. The voltage on her nerves suddenly shot up, for she recognized the narrow grey eyes and the overly long chin. It was Constable Blackwood.
In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4) Page 58