Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (101 page)

Inside he made himself eggs and sausage for dinner, looking out the window every few minutes to check, he told himself, the advance of the storm. The wind had picked up considerably and the clouds on the horizon were black outlined in silver. It was going to be a terrible one. He was going to have to catch that demon, Phouka, and put him up in the barn.

Phouka, like the bad fairy for whom he had been named, proved very hard to catch and cantered around the field neighing and kicking his heels up. The rain broke just as Pat, sweating and swearing, got him into the barn and settled for the night. The horse gave one long last whinny as Pat shut the barn door and then the rain broke in a deluge so thick that he could hardly see across the yard. The dash to the house was enough to leave him dripping in the entryway beyond the porch.

He stripped off his shirt and pants in the boot room and dried down with the towel Pamela left there for the purpose. There was an old flannel shirt of Casey’s hanging on a hook and he shrugged it on over his damp skin. He put on clean blue jeans and filled the kettle, thinking he should probably do some reading as outdoor work was going to be out of the question for the rest of the night. It was dark as the underside of a nun’s habit out there already and the rain pounded the earth, the sound echoing back up like a thousand military drums. His skin still felt as though quicksilver ran beneath it, crackling and dividing, making him as restless as the trees and animals. He reached for his books nonetheless, a good hour of reading about torts law ought to bleed the restlessness right out of him. He was only just settled so when several things happened at once.

Thunder boomed so loudly it rattled the thatch of the roof. Rusty bolted hissing off the kitchen sofa, tripping Pat, who had risen from his chair, as he shot across the floor. Pat knocked his head hard on a post. The lights went out and there was a knock on the porch door. He was clutching his head, biting down on calling the cat several unflattering names as he opened the door. Through the haze of pain in his head he saw Kate, clutching a bag to her chest. The light outside was blue and she was outlined as though someone had taken a luminous pen to her and drawn her bold against the wild night. He pulled her in, and slammed the door behind her. Her very arm seemed to hum with the storm’s electricity where he touched her.

He was as blind as Kate in the dark that clapped down inside the house but he took her by the hand and guided her carefully into the kitchen. He rummaged about, stubbing his toes and cursing under his breath, until he found the box of candles his brother kept handy for emergencies and lit a few of them, scattering them around the kitchen.

“Are ye mad, out in the storm like this? How the hell did ye get here?” he asked, an irrational wave of anger washing over him at her foolhardiness. “Come sit by the Aga an’ I’ll get ye some towels.”

“I walked,” she said simply.

“On yer own?”

“Yes.”

Looking at the white set of her face, he decided that calling her a damn fool woman could wait, even though he felt sick at the thought of her out in the storm, unable to see more than the most basic outlines of things. He got the towels for her, keeping back one to blot at his own head, which appeared to be bleeding—damn that cat anyway, and himself having just climbed a treacherous elm two nights past to rescue him.

“I was goin’ to have some tea. I’ll make ye some to take the chill out of ye.”

“I’d prefer something stronger, if ye have it,” she said, head coming out of the thick folds of the towel like a woodland flower emerging from the soil. He noted that her customary brusqueness was absent. He poured a couple of inches of Connemara Mist into one of the crystal whiskey tumblers Pamela kept out on the sideboard, handed the tumbler to her and watched as she swallowed it down in one go. Apparently the woman was not in a sipping frame of mind.

“Once more, if ye wouldn’t mind,” she said and held out her glass. Pat refilled it and, placing the bottle on the table, sat down across from her. She swallowed this one just as quickly and took a deep breath, her eyes hidden in the chancy light of the candles.

“Will ye want to talk about what’s upset ye?” he asked, wondering what on earth had finally managed to discombobulate the woman.

“No, I don’t. Suffice it to say I’ve had a wee bit of a falling out with my brother.”

Pat quailed inwardly at the thought of what a ‘wee bit of a falling out’ with Noah Murray might consist of.

“About what?” he asked, though he knew with a fair degree of certainty what it was they had disagreed over.

“’Tis of no matter, an’ that’s not why I’ve come here.”

“No?”

“No. I—I—” she stuttered slightly and Pat raised an eyebrow. The woman truly was addled tonight. It must have been a regular donnybrook with her brother.

“I should like to stay the night, if that’s alright. An’ yes, before ye ask, I do mean what ye think I mean by that.”

Pat felt as though he had been hit hard in the solar plexus. He had not expected that of all things.

“How would ye explain that to yer brother?” he asked and his voice was gruff enough to make her flinch.

“I told him I’m staying in town tonight with our cousin. He’s too angry to check, but if he does, she knows to say that I’m there but not willin’ to speak to him.”

He put a hand to the table to steady himself, feeling as if there were not adequate oxygen in the house.

“Patrick, I know how you felt about your wife. I’m not trying to replace her, nor make you feel such for me. I just want this night with you before the summer is over, that’s all.”

“That’s all, is it?” he said softly, but inside his heart was hammering and he felt lightheaded. “I—I’ll need a minute, Kate,” he said, feeling as if the walls were closing in around him.

She nodded, but he could see the hurt in her face, as though her lack of sight had left her without the ability to hide what she felt.

He stood, realizing he was still only half-dressed, shirt unbuttoned, feet bare. He walked outside, stepping off the porch into the torrential rain, drumming hard into his skin. He put his hands to his head, trying to find his breath. He was reeling from her words and the effect they had on him. He wanted her—aye, he had known that from almost the first time he met her, though he had not been able to admit it, but the thought of bedding another woman—a woman who was not Sylvie—stopped him cold. Yet, where the hell had he thought this was leading? The nights by the fire, the meals together, working side by side each day, their walks in the woods with him guiding her every step though he well knew she did not need the help. He had been aware of her as a woman right from the start. She had been much more than a stranger he had met at Pamela and Casey’s house one winter’s afternoon.

He put his head against the stone wall of the house, letting the rain sluice down the back of his shirt, wishing it would cool the fever in his skin but knowing it would not. He swallowed, his chest tight with desire. Aye, he wanted her all right, as badly as he had ever wanted anything in his life. But did he have the right, even if she was willing? The look on her face cut him to the quick, and he knew he had hurt her far more than he had ever thought he could. It wasn’t realistic to think that he could remain celibate for the rest of his life, as much as the idea had appealed in the wake of Sylvie’s death. If he said no tonight, he knew there was no way they could go on, as if she had never offered herself to him in this way. Kate’s rather brutal honesty simply wouldn’t allow for that. It took the wind from him entirely to think of never seeing her again. But that, he was all too well aware, did not justify taking a step such as this if he wasn’t ready.

And then he heard it, his father’s voice in his head, a memory culled from the depths by need.

‘Love is rarer than ye think, laddie. It’s a gift, an’ if the universe sees fit to present ye with it more than the once, well then, count yerself as truly blessed an’ grab it with both hands.’

His own voice then, still in his head, but coming from the depths of his soul.

Sylvie… Sylvie… Sylvie… please understand… please let me go… I have to keep living…

She was still seated by the fire, pale as the driven snow but with two streaks of clear deep pink flaring in her cheeks. She was brave, this Kate, for she met his eyes as he entered the house, his body soaked with the cold rain, and he knew she saw him clearly in the only way that truly mattered between two people. He went to her silently and knelt on the floor at her feet. He took one slim hand in his own and put it to his chest so that she might feel his heart beat and know what her words had done to him. She left her hand where he placed it and with the other turned his face up toward her own. Her hand slid along his jawline, soft as down, and her fingers curled into his wet hair as she bent her head toward his. The quicksilver beneath his skin ignited, flooding through his body, setting fire to his blood.

“Trust me,” she said softly against his mouth.

And so he did.

Chapter Seventy-two
Times Gone and Still to Come…

Casey loved the walk home from the house
he was working on each night, even when the weather wasn’t as fine as it was this evening. He liked the time to review bits of the day, to go over the plans once again in his head, to think of the pleasing heft of the stone and the warp of the wood and how it satisfied something deep in his soul to build something, to see something go up instead of being blown down. He thought it fair to say he had not missed his wee, hard city this summer.

It was his favorite time of year, August, when everything was rich and heavy, ripe in the fields, awaiting harvest and the longer, cooler nights. The hedgerows rustled in the breeze and he could smell rose petals that had tumbled to the wind somewhere nearby. Living here in the west for the summer had been an exercise filled with memory for him, as he had always spent his summers in the west as a boy, summers that were now held in an amber haze in his memory, fixed and perfect in their lineaments.

There had been a summer that his father could not come out to the country with them and so they had gone alone, himself and his brother—himself fifteen at the time and Patrick, eleven. They had lived in an old cottage stranded high on a mountainside where the mist wrapped around them before the light left the sky and didn’t clear off until late the next day. They lived off the land, snaring rabbits, occasionally stealing milk from the cow in the field at the foot of the mountain and growing a wee garden themselves because he had to—even then—plant something, nourish it and bring it to fullness.

They lived in perfect isolation, with the wind and rain, the sun and the stars, so close to the earth and the sky that they lost sense of being something separate from it. Thoughts there were huge, too big to be real, so you let them go with the clouds and the wind, and savored the lingerings of them sweet in your chest. They had read books by candlelight, told each other blood curdling stories and then regretted it until the dawn broke the dark of the night. They had talked about dreams, both those that were realistic and those that they had understood, even then, weren’t likely to come true.

Women had been a theory, a dream that summer, not a reality but something perfect, lovely and transient as angels and the scent of flowers in a meadow. They had talked about what they wanted in a girl, what they hoped for and what they thought the shape of their lives with such a woman might be. Truth be known, he would have been happy with anyone halfway decent looking, under the age of thirty and over the age of fifteen, as long as she came equipped with breasts.

Now he knew that women were like a road, beckoning a man on to somewhere grand, over the next hill to a horizon that may or may not exist, may or may not be a blessing. They were earth under a man’s feet and sun thick as honey on his shoulders. His woman though, ah, his woman was like the sea that she so loved. She was depths so deep he could not find the limit of them. She was mystery and shifting light and soul restoring dark. She was movement and change and sometimes he longed to drown in her—and sometimes he was terrified of doing just that.

He paused at the edge of the garden to watch her now, their wee girl in her arms while she displayed enormous interest in the rather large snail Conor was showing her. Never once, even during that enchanted summer so long ago, did he imagine a woman such as this, nor did he have the faintest idea how much one could love a woman. He did now. He could feel her awareness of him and knew she had sensed his presence, turned her thoughts to him as naturally as a flower toward the sun, sensing before sighting. He walked across the field toward her.

Conor tumbled pell-mell at him, and he swept him up into his arms before the child fell. Conor was like himself, trying to run before he could properly walk. He smelled of grass and dirt and water, and Casey breathed him in, grateful for the solid warmth of his son. Isabelle was already squeaking, aware that her Daddy had arrived home, wanting his attention for herself. She was a tyrant—a wee, gorgeous tyrant—for whom he was an utter slave, and he would have it no other way.

His wife smiled in greeting and raised her face to him, emerald eyes soft as the sun that misted down around them, and he leaned in to kiss her, to put his hand upon her and lose himself as he always did with her, as she, in her turn, did with him.

And he knows, given the choice, he will choose to drown every time.

Part Eleven
Belfast, For My Sins
Ireland – September-November 1975