Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (78 page)

You could write it down like a fairytale, the beautiful golden prince, the well-born young woman with half the kingdom pining after her. Except that in the fairytale everyone always drifted off to live happily ever after and in real life that rarely, if ever, occurred. The princess wasn’t already married to someone other than the prince, nor was she older than the prince by several years. And the prince didn’t tell her, kindly, gently, that he didn’t love her in the right way and that he should never have gotten involved with her in the first place. No, such stories were saved for real life. And real life, this princess had long ago discovered, was hard.

No, a fairytale wouldn’t do, unless it was one of the old ones with blood and pain at its root. For princesses do not try to overdose themselves with pills and end up in hospital making up tearful explanations/lies with an extremely sore stomach their only ailment other than a broken heart—which wasn’t audible to doctor’s stethoscopes, nor visible on their x-ray machines.

Over the course of many years she had kept his memory as distant as she was able, indulging only occasionally, for enchantment remembered at a distance becomes dark. Inevitably, she heard accounts of his life as the years moved along: his marriage, the loss of his sons, the suicide of his father, the scandal concerning that ludicrously young girl who had lived in his home for a time. Sometimes it was idle gossip at a dinner table, sometimes it was told with an edge of malice by someone who suspected her long ago affair. Her heart had ached over the deaths of his children, for she had always felt Jamie should have children, lots of them to fill his beautiful home. Despite often hating him, she had always thought he would make a wonderful father.

The affair had never been spoken of to anyone, not even those who felt themselves her confidantes or might have forgiven her the infidelity, knowing her husband as they did. She had much to protect and even more to hide. For James Kirkpatrick did have a son, living and thriving, a beautiful boy by any account, who had just turned nineteen on his last birthday. A son who was also her own.

Chapter Fifty-seven
November 1974
Waiting

The Riordan land was roughly shaped
like a slice of pie, with the large end a rounded arc that bordered Lewis Guderson’s land. The point of the slice was the long windy drive that led up and onto the country road that ran across the tip of their property. The sides of the slice were bordered on one side by a thick copse of pine and a stream that cut off the corner, and on the other a dense wood of oak, hawthorn and, at the very back corner, a small stand of evergreens. Other than the bit immediate to the house, they had left the land as it was. Casey culled the dead wood in fall and Paudeen grazed in the grassy parts, but beyond that it was pristine land untouched for decades. Long ago it had been a working farm but had lain abandoned for so many years that it had grown over in a wild profusion of shrubs and trees and plants.

David had used the Riordan woods more than once to shorten the distance between the wee farm he visited often—only three miles beyond their own—and to where he left his car parked behind an abandoned church, long unused and out of the way but convenient to his own purposes. Few, if any, saw him cutting across country this way, and so he lessened the risk of exposure for himself, and more importantly, for the man he visited.

The warmth of that visit was still there, glowing like his own secret sun between his body and the damp wool of his sweater. There had been no actual sun that day, but that was not a rare thing in Ireland. The woods were dripping with moisture, the air gelid, pregnant with water. The light was heavy—greens and blues, the deep shades that were normally found only in dreams and blood and here on the cusp of winter.

He saw Pamela just as he was about to jump over the stream. She must have noted his approach for she didn’t startle, merely looked up at his arrival from where she stood on the far bank, wet to her knees and barefoot in the cold twilit air.

In the aqueous atmosphere, she blended into her surroundings, a creature of water, a mermaid stranded on land, or one of the selkie women whose hide had been stolen away from her, preventing her return to her ocean home. Though his desires did not tend toward women, he could appreciate beauty regardless of the gender in which it came wrapped. There was something singular about this woman that made her more than just another lovely face and form, something that made her stand out from both her surroundings and the people around her. He thought perhaps it was her inability to be anything other than what she was. She had never learned how to camouflage herself from the world.

He crossed over a fallen log and trod through the soaked plant life to stand beside her, noting that she was damp through but seemingly undisturbed by it. The scent of waterlogged mint and comfrey rose from under his feet, a comforting note in the eerie atmosphere. She was, it was apparent, totally unperturbed by his sudden appearance in her woods.

“It’s not what you’d call a soft night,” he said by way of greeting.

She turned toward him, a faraway look on her face, as if he were pulling her back unwillingly from a strange land of which he could have no knowledge. But then she smiled, and the feeling disappeared slowly, like a ripple on a pond.

“If you mean the evening seems a little bit intemperate to be going about barefoot, you’re right. I was standing in the water earlier.”

“Doing what?” The question was out before his good manners could still his tongue.

“You might think I’m a bit crazy if I tell you.”

David didn’t laugh, for the atmosphere seemed to forbid such a light act. He merely waited for her to continue—or not—as she chose. She quirked a brow at him as if to say she knew exactly what he was doing. Well, he was learning, he supposed, having spent so much time with the Riordan family of late, what tactics worked best with whom.

“I have a sense often of being watched, and sometimes I come out here to challenge it—whatever it is—to come out and show itself, to tell me what it is that it wants.”

“What do you mean? Like the man who was watching you when Casey was interned?”

She shook her head, her dark hair a billow of ink against the watery twilight. “No, not that. Not anything human, nothing I can describe without sounding like a superstitious old woman. It’s just a sense of something watching, waiting, a presence that’s neither good nor bad.”

David, who was normally unflappably upper crust British in his regard for supernatural phenomena, felt a chill rise up his backbone and crest at the base of his skull, like a thing with featherless wings had brushed all along his length. The very land here seemed to hold great reserves of ghouls and specters and things best not seen, but sensed nevertheless. And so one could not entirely avoid picking up on such things, regardless of the phlegmaticness of one’s race of origin.

“Does it scare you?” he asked, knowing that the woman beside him, for all her delicacy of appearance, did not frighten easily.

She shook her head in the waning light, green eyes dark as the night fast closing in around them. “No, it doesn’t frighten me. Only I wonder sometimes…”

“Yes?” David prompted, wanting to get in out of the night and thinking that a hot cup of tea was most definitely in order.

She shrugged and gave him a ghost of a smile. “I wonder what it is this presence is waiting for.”

The creeping upon his spine became more pronounced at her words and he thought he could feel it himself there in the dim light, this presence of which she spoke, ancient and implacable. He shivered involuntarily. She had said it wasn’t a bad presence but neither did it feel warm and fuzzy.

“You haven’t asked what I’m doing here,” he said, wanting to break the tension and at the same time wondering why he was bringing it up when she had been polite enough to let it lie.

“David, your business is your own. Now, shall we go have some tea, if you’ve the time for it?”

And that, thought David, told him that she knew exactly what he was doing cutting through her land. He felt a small knot of fear that Patrick knew also but then reminded himself that it would not matter to Patrick Riordan whom he bedded.

“Does anyone else know?” he asked.

“Casey has seen you pass through once or twice. Neither of us has a reason to tell anyone, so you needn’t worry. Besides, we’ve no wish to have it abroad that a British soldier visits our property. It wouldn’t go down well with the locals, now would it?”

“No, it wouldn’t.” He felt a wash of shame, for his thoughts had only been of himself and Darren, not of the risk to this woman and her family.

She turned for the house, and David followed with no small relief toward the warmth and walls that would banish their respective chills.

“This thing, when you challenge it, does it ever come out to tell you what it wants?” David asked, wrapping his coat tightly around his frame and wondering how Pamela managed to look impervious to the wet and cold of the night. He had meant for his question to be light, to break the dark spell of the evening. It did not, however, come out that way, and so she answered him as he had asked.

“No, it doesn’t. But I can still feel it. Waiting.”

Chapter Fifty-eight
November 1974
When the Road Bends…

A faint light winking in and out of the trees
like a particularly impertinent boy was Pamela’s only indication that she was nearing her destination. Casey, coming along behind her and swearing vociferously from time to time as thorn bushes caught at his clothing and hair, commented rather mildly, all things considered, that it would be nice if occasionally they could go on a proper outing.

“A meal, maybe the cinema,” he said, then halted to peer through the shrubbery at the lights ahead, “ye know, just for the change of pace, as an alternative to crawlin’ about in the dark like a couple of thieves or spies. Not that we’d have to give up the espionage permanently or anything, but just now an’ again my nerves could do with the rest.”

Pamela merely kept walking, for she knew Casey’s sarcasm grew with his level of nervousness and wouldn’t be helped by protestations on her part. In all honesty, the man had a point. She had been told to meet someone who apparently was without a name, here in the woods that skirted the edges of Jamie’s property, in the pitch black of a late autumn evening. It wasn’t, to be blunt, a situation designed to soothe anyone’s worries. Still, the message had come to her through a friend and she trusted that no harm was intended her.

They came out into the clearing rather precipitately, suddenly seized from behind and pushed out forcibly by strong hands.

Casey swore, and before Pamela could warn him, she found herself looking down at her husband planted on a man’s chest with a knife to his throat. Casey Riordan was not the man to attack from behind, though she was a little shocked by the appearance of the knife and wondered when he had started carrying one on his person.

The man pinned to the ground was grinning, white teeth a brilliant gleam in his swarthy face.

“Johnny!” she exclaimed in delight. “Casey, let him up. He’s a friend.”

Casey removed the knife from the man’s throat and helped him up off the ground.

“Sorry, man,” he said, “but ye took us rather sudden-like there.”

Johnny brushed the leaves from his clothes and grinned. “Ach, that bitty wee knife didn’t scare me.” He turned to Pamela, one gold earring winking in the firelight, and grabbed her in a bear hug that lifted her right off the ground. He put her back down and held her out at arm’s length.

“So, my sweet, have you danced back into my life only to break my heart by dancing back out like you did last time?”

“Last time?” Casey echoed, tone rather grimmer than Johnny’s.

“I spent some time traveling with Johnny and his family,” she replied. “He taught me how to dance the flamenco.”

“In which,” the man kissed the tips of his fingers as though recalling an ecstatic vision, “the student far outstripped the teacher.”

“You are as much of a flatterer as you ever were.” She leaned forward and kissed his cheek, remembering her time traveling the hills and roads of Ireland with this man and his enormous family. It had been a magical interlude, filled with strange adventures.

“It’s likely I’ll regret askin’ this,” Casey said, “but how did ye manage to fall in with a band of gypsies? Did they fetch ye direct off the plane?”

“Ah! Ye’ve not told the man this story?” Johnny asked. “She did the dance of the seven veils for us one night and after that—” he sighed and lifted his eyes heavenward, “we were but putty in her hands. All those veils knotted so ingeniously so that they fell just so… Such a Salome as she was that night there has never been before, nor since. That a
gadjo
could dance with such fire was a revelation.”

“Oh, I have no doubt of that,” Casey said dryly. “I shall have to ask her for a private performance one of these nights.”

“Ye will not regret it my friend. ‘Twill put the oil in all yer hinges just to see it.”

Pamela felt that it was high time to get things back on a more formal footing before Johnny made any more references to her previous exploits.

“Johnny, you know why we’re here?”

“Of course I do,
scumpete
. Just follow me.”

They came out into the center of the small clearing, an enormous bonfire in its midst, with hundreds of firefly sparks drifting upward into the frosty night sky. The fire was ringed by caravans, some modern and gleaming with newness, others that had seen many miles of road and field. But there was one that held pride of place, as though the rest were merely courtiers to this queen. It was an old
vardo
in the tradition of Eastern Europe, barrel-topped, painted a vivid red, with gilding and bright blue shutters, an immaculately painted blue door with a brass knocker and a delicate set of stairs leading up to it. There was even an ornate gable peeking out from one end.

Casey had gone quiet as they were directed toward the stairs, as if he sensed who was on the other side of the door. He had never met the woman but he had heard enough about her to harbor some trepidation.