Blood On Borrowed Wings: A Dark Fantasy Thriller (16 page)

I watched Doc twitch the involuntary jerks of a dying man, when the circuitry is compromised and the electrics are shutting down.

I ran at the Blackwing. Had to keep him off my friend. Felt the bolt in my leg snap from the exertion, like a twig underfoot on the woodland floor. Someone moved towards me from my left, I swung my bow up fluidly and watched as the armature impaled him up into the angle of his ribcage. He lifted off the floor.

Then the world stopped.

Sound bled out and white began to wash down over all the colours and pain.

The eight year old boy looked up into my face and then down at my bow stuck in his guts. The hate and bloodlust disappeared, was replaced by the tears and fear of a boy lost, a long way from home. I watched as the light slowly faded in his confused eyes. He had brought about the deaths of my company, of my brothers-in-arms and he got what he deserved.

And, heaven help me, I was glad I had ended him.

That was the worst thing.

Glad.

What I had done was understandable, inevitable even, but my reaction? How I felt about it? I had killed a child. Killed him. And it felt justified. It felt right. It felt, well, it felt good.

I would never get over that, how could I?
     
  

Away in the distance I heard the sound of our reinforcements approaching but I was disconnected now. Inside something had slipped into the mud. I fell to my knees. An arc of blood exploded from my scalp as a club hit home. It splashed across the dappled floor and the Bethscape Woodland backdrop like incongruous paint, as if an artist had been careless betwixt palette and canvas.

It looked so red on the greens and browns.

The world stood up pushing leaves and twigs into my face. I could smell the loam, the dampness of decay and fertile sponginess of the earth filled my head, then I slipped into the dark welcoming mud.

I wanted death, welcomed it.

It felt like going home.

Drake.

*

Drake.

I felt like I was rising to the surface, but I was drowning.

Drake.

My ears filled with a rush of water and my lungs burned as I clawed for the surface, my arms scrabbling in the watery depths, bubbles caressing my skin and refusing to let go as I spiralled upwards.

Drake.

I snapped awake with a jolt and strange feeling of disorientation, at first mistaking the lamplight as sunlight on my face and my robe for an embrace. My legs kicked out involuntarily and I think I let go of a little whimper as I was birthed once again into a world full of the present and harsh realities that had felt crushingly heavy before I had slept but that now, after my dream and full colour recollections, seemed to me to be reassuringly day-to-day meaningless and banal.

I remembered I was at Pan’s even before her face swam into focus in front of me.

‘You nearly kicked me.’

‘Sorry, didn’t know where I was.’

‘Your legs were going like a little Swampland dog.’

‘Nice.’

‘Most entertaining. I was letting you sleep but then you started whimpering, like something inside was dying.’

I shook my head to try and dislodge any tattered remnants of sleep then sat up, adjusting my robe and moved my whisky glass. It had left a small wet circle on top of the table.

‘I’ll get a cloth. Refill?’

‘Yes. Please.’

She turned to go into the kitchen and I watched as her hair, still damp, splayed out fanned tendrils. The curls, now wet and the colour of dark treacle, were beginning to reassert the kinks and bends that were as much a part of her personality as her looks. I caught a pleasant, calming aroma of flowers as she went by. A few drops of bath water spotted my face and neck, not unpleasing in the warmth of the room and my thick, enveloping robe.

I heard the somehow reassuring clatter of Pan in the kitchen and slowed my breathing down. I had lots to do, even more to think about, but now was not the time. I needed to wind down, try to eradicate the aches and pains of the last few days, take my chance to rest and recharge, heal and repose.

I could think tomorrow.

As if to juxtapose my recently acknowledged malaise, Pan bustled back in, tutted as she wiped the table down, dropped a coaster, placed my drink carefully on top of it then adjusted the position of my drink so it was easily within my reach.

‘You would make someone a fantastic wife.’

‘Hah!’ she said. ‘There’s a big difference between what I do and what a wife or girlfriend would do.’

‘And that difference is?’

‘I do not cost as much.’

I laughed into my glass then sipped whisky. It opened up constricted channels in my scratchy throat as golden warmth pushed down my gullet to leave a pool of settling lava smouldering in my belly.

‘Is that good?’

‘It will do.’

Pan sat in a chair opposite. I admired the smoothness of her legs as they disappeared in the plush cotton fluff at the hem of her robe as she folded them beneath her to sit. The lamp’s amber glow diffused on the soft lines of her shins and slender, toned calf muscles.

She smiled, aware I had been looking.

‘How’s your jaw?’ I said, though I was not sure if it was an attempt to distract her or myself from the sexual tension I could feel building.

‘Still attached, though it feels like it has been replaced upside down and backwards.’

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘So am I.’ She looked far away then, distant, as if trying to focus on something beyond the clean crisp lines of her walls to some secret beyond them, lost in the Lowlands night. She was chewing her bottom lip.

‘I used you and I am sorry. Really,’ I said

‘Save it. We all use people. All of us: The politicians manipulating us with fear, deaf ears and sound-bites, the media perpetuating myths and bull to keep themselves in a job, the criminals who feed on the weak and the weak who feed on themselves, gnawing away at their one real, undeniable truth, that they are no-one, that what they say or do does not make one fucking bat-shit of difference, that bad things happen to good people. So why bother? Some pay for sex, some take money for it. Who’s using who? Huh?’

I recognised the rhetoric in the question but decided to respond anyway.

‘They are some big words for this time of night.’

‘Yes, I know. Right now I am supposed to be that, what do they call them, that’s it,
tart with a heart
where I tell you everything is going to be alright, clutch you to my heaving bosom and give you the kind of love your wife or mother never has.’

I took another sip of my whisky.

‘Or maybe I am supposed to be a giggling, bouncing bimbo who just thrives on insult and injury, because that’s what I was put on the world to absorb, from men like you. Or maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t the only one being used today, Soldier Boy. Ever think about that one?’

She sat back as if exasperated with her own outburst.

I tried to take another sip but my glass was empty.

I put my glass down and walked over to her.

Her chest heaved up and down inside her robe, her cleavage rose and fell as if powered by invisible bellows serving a furnace that had been shovelled full of coal and was now distributing the warmth equally across her neck and cheeks and placing a white hot fire in the centre of her eyes.

‘I know,’ I said.

‘Know what?’

‘That you set me up.’

‘What?’

‘It took me a while but my suspicions were aroused when you showed up in my cell. Unharmed, still smelling like the insides of a perfume bottle and pouting like a helpless child.’

She looked away, ‘I was scared, I didn’t…’

‘It was not about you, it was about them. You see, they had tortured and raped women before you, for kicks, for fun, yet they left you alone, intact, untouched?’

She started to chew her bottom lip.

‘You were dressed to impress, a sexual magnet of a woman and these depraved lunatics kept their hands off you all night?’

‘I was doped up, like you, I had no idea what was going on.’

‘That was where I had room for doubt too; so I went along with it, took you to Doc’s to see how you reacted, watched you under pressure and relaxed. And you are good, hell, I even started doubting myself.’

‘Oh wow, the great Drake was experiencing moments of mortal ineptitude.’

‘Shut up.’

She looked like I had slapped her.

‘Is that why you looked at the recording in Lacroix’s office?’

I nodded, ‘You reacted too textbook, too normal. Everything you did from the time I was shinnying up the aisle to where you were seated looked the same as everyone else in the audience. You clapped your hand to your mouth in despair and shock, ooh’d and aah’d along with the best of them, but you never, not once, acted like you were fearful for your own safety. You did not run. Did not really defend yourself either. Now how could that be, huh? That your meal ticket, the boy you took to the dance was going down and you were just cooing like the other pigeons on the side of the bandstand, not worried about the hyenas at all?’

She said nothing.

‘And all this was supposed to happen; the fight, the jailbreak, this.’

She looked at me, the fire in her eyes burned even brighter, tears began to cluster and I watched as one spilled over and ran down her cheek and jaw.

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t…’

‘I said, how fucking much?’

‘Double, and I could keep what you were paying me as well.’

‘What time are they arriving?’

‘I don’t know. Late,’ she said. She stared at something on the other side of the room then closed her eyes; a tear squeezed out and followed the wet line of the first.

‘How long am I supposed to stay here?’

‘Until after,’ she said.

‘After what? I… Oh… I see,’ I sat back in my chair, ‘seems like you are no exception.’

‘What? I don’t...’

‘We all use people,’ I said.

Temptation makes the act inevitable. The wanting itself makes the act insignificant, irrelevant, it might as well already have happened, because in your head it has.

Sin and the Internal Dialogue

Carlos Rheina

Violence and sex are the same. They both involve the giving of one’s self and the taking of something, sometimes something vital, from the other person. Sweat. Spit. Raw emotion. Passion. Dominance. It rarely involves love, well, romantic love anyway. In my experience, and for most men, it only involves a love for sex itself.

Pan stood from her chair. ‘I haven’t told them anything else. About Doc. I wouldn’t. I swear it.’ She held her hands out in front, a standard placating gesture, to negate or ward off any potential aggression, temper or rage.

I felt nothing. ‘What changed?’

‘The cells. I genuinely didn’t think either of us would be coming out of there alive, despite what they had said.’

I stared at her.

‘Plus, a smack in the chops can do that to a girl, right?’

I said nothing.

‘Look, I'm sorry. I didn’t know you. Didn’t want to. To me you were just another face.’

She was not pleading, or even apologetic. She seemed more embarrassed than recalcitrant. Though I would have preferred an unruly defensive tirade to this... this… honesty, I suppose.

I just stared at her, neither hurt nor angry.

Then she did something, the last thing I was expecting.

A total diffuser.

She placed her drink neatly on a coaster, slapped me across the face, then kissed me. Her lips touched mine even as the slap still echoed in the sparsely furnished room. Then she turned and walked past me into the hall. I followed. The angel mosaic was no longer backlit, the days sunshine had long since fallen below the horizon and been vanquished by a blanket of darkness and stars. A shape of a seraph could still be discerned in the glass, though now it looked like it had been caste from water; an improbable image that would ripple to the touch.

She opened one of the doors leading off her landing and stepped inside, I entered the room just behind her and stepped on her robe. She allowed her arms to be free from it and the robe fell to the floor with a soft hush.

She sighed in the half light, and I went to her.

She was naked.

A sheen of sweat oiled her tawny skin, her body looked firm and fragile, her nipples stood erect, ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

I did not speak.

I glanced down at myself, let my robe fall to the floor, felt the cool air chill my skin and an ultimate rush building at my centre, more aroused than I could ever remember.

‘Now,’ she said.

There was no whine to her voice, it was a soft command; not an order but a way of explaining the inevitable, the compulsion.

I went to her.

Pressed the soft mounds of her breasts onto my chest, raked my hands down her buttocks and pulled her closer; angled my head to share a breath filled kiss. Her cool tongue darted into my mouth, teasing, I closed my lips around it and gently sucked as she slowly pulled back, then pushed forward again.

I moved my fingers up the curved, taut hammock of her spine and pressed the flat of my hand against the small of her back. She rose to kiss me again, then followed the line of my jaw with kisses, working around my neck; softly bit my ear lobe. I could feel her saliva go cold on her breath and felt a twang of pleasure shudder through my body.

I lifted her and lowered her backwards onto the bed, she arched her back and the shush of cotton linen bedclothes felt heartbreakingly soft upon my skin. Lust built. The violence, the running, the betrayal were not forgotten; they amplified the urgency; to affirm life through sex, to feel pleasure; to ride on the high swoops and vertical drops of her roller coaster and scream all the way. To totally abandon the logical mind for something more important; urges, needs, primordial desires; the animals at our cores that govern all of the choices we make and yet are as divorced from logic as lust is from love.

I shouldered her legs open and tasted her; held her hands flat against the linen as I traced kisses up her body; licked the salt at her navel; tasted the warm curve of her breasts.

She writhed.

She freed her hands and raked my back with her nails.

‘I want you in me,’ she whispered.

I throbbed against the silk of her thigh.

She pulled me closer.

In.

We kissed as I entered.

She said ‘Yes’ into my open mouth.

I felt her warmth envelope me, moist and soft, holding me inside, engulfing me.

I thrust, quicker and harder.

It felt like home; a writhing, urgent glow locked us together and my sensations expanded as she closed hot and wet and firm around me. She pushed up in response, her breathing faster, shallower. A flash of red spread across her neck and chest and she pushed her head back into the thick covers and moaned, her fingers and toes splayed.

I felt the sweet friction, arched my back and pushed deep inside her.

A mad gripping heat radiated from within, I spilled over, rode the wave, grimaced and shuddered as I pumped into her; let go. Pan gripped my arms with her small hands and squeezed the tense, bulging muscles, pushed harder up onto me.

‘Yes…’

Exquisite agony ripped through my body a tremolo; bitter sweet vibrations emanating along my entire frame.

‘Yes,’ I felt Pan go rigid as if electrified and then she shuddered down as our senses collapsed in on themselves with the tender convulsions and aftershocks of something beyond both of our control, a wave being swallowed by another bigger wave.

The last thing I remember of the night was staring into her dark eyes; ebony pools so opaque and warm that, for a moment, I thought I might get lost there in the mysterious gloom; that I might disappear into the aftermath and her post-coital physiognomy; like me, or the mess I was in, had never existed.

I knew I did not have long so sought sleep fearlessly; before reality or something much worse, crashed back in.

*

The two shapes on the roof did not move. They were dark, hulking shadows, crouching like gargoyles tasting the Lowlands air with their tongues.

Words did not flow between them.

Didn’t need to.

The silence that crackled between them intimated enough.

One patted the heft of his bow, not for reassurance, but for preoccupation; a fidget borne of frustration and impatience, longing for action. The other stared with his one good eye at the empty body bag they had brought along and then looked up at his partner.

The breeze plastered their long overcoats to their legs and flapped the tails like noisy flags, cracking in the wind; the bulk of their wings barely visible beneath. They both disliked having to wait before moving; both eager to finish what they had started. Yet neither one spoke of their desire to do so. They were stuck fast in the obdurate mud of servitude, of being professional, of sticking to their fucking plan.

Croel eventually broke the silence,

‘Coyle’s men down there yet?

‘You are looking at the same scene as me Croel, keep watching.’

Mckeever’s eye brightened, he adjusted his stance that was now less gargoyle like and more that of a dog, sitting up and panting.

They did not have to wait long.

‘Here they come. Send in the drones.’ Mckeever jabbed a perfunctory thumb down at four men, walking along the cracked pavement below, singing and sharing a bottle. One of them looked up, saw Mckeever’s hand gesture and mistook it for some kind of signal and elbowed the other two into a pre-emptive state of alert.

Mckeever calmed them with a subduing palm.

They quickly reverted back to their charade of betting non-existent credits on static insects.

‘Amateurs,’ said Mckeever.
   

‘They might as well turn the neon on that advertises we are up here.’ Croel spat on the roof. ‘Amateurs or not, they will have him cornered or ejected quicker than Pan can drop her perfumed knickerbockers.’

‘And then?’ said Mckeever.

‘Then, either way, we fall out of the sky like autumn leaves.’

He patted his bow again and Mckeever’s wings flexed against the straining material that bound them.

‘And cannonballs,’ said Mckeever.

‘Yes. Cannonballs,’ said Croel.

*

I swung my legs carefully out of bed and cringed at the mattress as it groaned under the redistribution of my weight.

‘I’m not asleep, you know.’

I dragged my robe towards me from the floor and put it on.

‘Is that it? Are you just going to leave?’

‘Thought you would be used to that.’

She was silent on the other side of the bed.
  

‘Anyway, it’s a bit late, or early, in the day to be playing the abandoned lover card; you fucked me over remember. I have probably stayed far too long as it is.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

 
I stood to go.

‘Drake, have you thought about what they are going to do to me if you leave and I don’t make the call, let them know?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and walked into the kitchen to collect my still damp clothes from the drying rails and bench backs.

I heard her bare feet slapping on the floor as she followed me in. Her hair had dried in clumpy strands and a purple bruise was beginning to announce itself on her lower jaw. She squinted in the harsh kitchen lighting and raised a hand to shield her eyes. Her robe gaped at the plunging curved angle of her breasts. I felt nothing.

‘You are just going to leave me here, in the shit?’

‘It is your mess, Pan, you created it, I have enough problems.’

‘But they’ll…’ She let the sentence peter out without conclusion.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they probably will.’

I struggled into my wet clothes. They felt clammy and stuck to my skin in sharp creases and cold handfuls.

‘Please,’ she said, she reached her hands out to me and I looked at them like they were alien objects; plague ridden, rotting lumps of meat tainting the air.

‘You’re a big girl. Deal with it.’

‘Look, please… you don’t know what it was like. They would have killed me if I did not help them.'

I gathered my things.

 
'I could have called them, tipped them off, you know, when you were in the bath, but I didn’t, don’t you get it?’

‘Oh yes, I get it, you realised you backed the wrong horse half way through the race and now you want to switch rides.’

‘No, that is not it. I’m sorry, truly I am, and I am asking you for help. Please.’

‘I know what a big deal it is for you to ask for help, but what did you expect Pan, a reassuring pat on the back and forgiveness?’

‘I forgave you,’ she said.

‘For what, the punch in your mouth or the fuck of your life?’ I regretted it as soon as I had said it, but I had wanted to hurt her, to get away.

‘You know nothing about weakness or loss,’ she said, ‘I live it every day.’ Her eyes glazed again.

‘The difference is, you choose it,’ I said and started putting the wet laces back into my boots.

‘Well, you just bumble and work and fuck and drink and stomp through life like it owes you a living. Fuck anyone who gets in your way or worse, gets under your skin,’ she said.

One of the laces was split at the end and I had to twist it into a point to get in through the eyelet.

‘Well Drake, thanks for the fuck and the fun weekend.’ She balled her hands into tiny fists and took a deep breath. ‘Thanks for nothing,’ she said.

‘You double crossed me, remember, and now you stand there and deliver a “the trouble with Drake” lecture?'

‘Look, I know everyone has had their share of knocks but you just bottle them up and carry them around like a tank of septic piss which spills over into your everyday and sours everything. Gives you all the reason you need to wallow in self-pity, to be selfish. Yet you won’t even talk about anything real. Like Bethscape Field. About the friends you lost, about…’

‘You want to see loss?’ I whispered. I leant towards her, shoved the words through gritted teeth, felt my breathing running away from me. Blood rushed to my cheeks and face and filled all of my senses with a tingling numbness, a panacea woven blanket of stilting white noise. There was fury there and something darker, something much more sinister: self-pity. I was feeling sorry for myself and I let all of the frustrations from the day, from the betrayal, from my life, percolate through my inner defences and build up a mounting head of steam.
  

She shrank away from me then, recognising the torment in my eyes but mistaking it for a threat of violence.

‘Their names,’ I whispered, ‘the names of the fallen, they are tattooed on my back, every one of them, I carry them around with me,
that
around with me every day of MY LIFE.’

‘I didn’t mean to…’

The bitterness rang out from my body like a sour bell, injustice spurred tears into my eyes and blocked my throat. The dream from earlier brought all of their faces into focus, laughing and chatting and mocking me on point as I returned the lump of wood back to the child. It was my fault. I had let them down. And every time I relived it, I saw what I should have done, how I should have reacted, how their lives could have been saved if I was better at doing my job. I saw the child’s face contorting, his body going limp on the end of my bow. I think I screamed.