Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (107 page)

The frost came down hard in mid-November
, and the entire countryside took on the appearance of an enchanted fairyland with frost bejeweling the hedgerows and tree roots, and spangling silver threads across eaves and chimneys and round about the skeletons of decaying plants.

The moon rose full as a wind-billowed sail over the hills, shimmering with that deep-forged silver that came only this time of year. It was so bright and big that it looked near enough to touch. It was the night Casey had been waiting for.

“Will ye come outside for a bit, Jewel? I’ve something to show yerself and the wee ones.”

They bundled the children and themselves up against the cold. Isabelle’s face, topped with a pink bonnet, looked like a petal slowly emerging from the heart of a flower, and Conor in his corduroy coat and blue woolen cap so resembled his grandfather that it sent a shaft of sweet pain through Casey’s being, to see him so.

Outside, a deep calm held the night in its hand, and the entire universe was distilled in silver spirits down to this small corner. To breathe in was to take some part of that distillation into one’s very cells, to recall the beauty of it for years to come. With it came the sharp delineation of scents that cold enhanced and brought bold upon the senses: peat smoke and earth, the amber of pine and the soft decay of late autumn.

Rusty sat atop the peat pile, gazing up at the moon, his ragged ears lit so that they resembled cuts of worn lace. Casey ruffled the cat’s head, and Rusty gave him a derisive feline look before returning to his lunar contemplations.

Even Isabelle, known to squawk at any change in temperature, was rendered silent by the strange atmosphere of the night and the great swimming orb that rode the horizon.

“Now, son,” Casey said in a quiet tone to Conor, “we need to be quiet an’ go canny through the trees, for nighttime is when the fairies are abroad an’ we don’t want to disturb them.” Conor’s eyes were wide and dark, and Casey squeezed his hand in reassurance. The child did not frighten easily though, never had. He had an inner core that made him seem far wiser than his years ought to allow. In this way too, he reminded Casey of his father.

It was a small way into the wood, this thing he would show them and they heeded his words to stay hushed and not disturb the creatures of the night, fey or otherwise.

It sat in a small clearing, framed by dark pines that rose against the moon in inked shadows. At first it seemed part of the landscape, the remains of a tree long fallen. But then the outlines came clear: the turreted towers, the winding staircases, the lines that followed the crooked ways of wood and moss and lichen and stone, of feather and leaf and moonlight.

Pamela gasped and Conor said, “Da?”

“’Tis a home for the Auld Ones,” he said to Conor, kneeling beside his son and taking him in the curve of his arm, relishing the warmth and solidity of him against his side.

“Here, Jewel, give me the baby so ye can have a good look.”

Pamela handed Isabelle over and he propped her carefully against his chest, mindful of the wobbly head.

Conor stepped forward from the shelter of Casey’s arm and gazed at the fairy house with pure wonder while his mother dropped to her knees in front of it, clasping her hands together in delight.

“When on earth did you find the time to make this, man? It’s amazing.” Her face turned toward him, flushed with cold under the brim of her red cap, eyes lit with wonderment.

Casey shrugged. “It just sort of grew on its own in the way things sometimes do, ye know? As if they were there waitin’ to be built, hoverin’ in the air.”

It was built from old branches, mosses, lichens, found things: a chair made from a fossilized stone, a bed canopy cunningly constructed of the seed vessels of translucent lunaria, blankets made from the veins of leaves and tumbled delphinium petals, bits of vine twined around wee staircases leading up to each floor and two turreted towers. The roof was shingled with bark from windfalls and it glimmered, frost outlining the rough edges. There was a kitchen with pots and pans made from acorns, a stove constructed entirely of birch bark and small shelves chock-a-block with jars formed from empty seed pods. The floors were strips of driftwood as were the stairs, which twisted and twined around the castle like a vine growing round a tree. There was a laundry room with a scrubbing board of tiny stones and sticks, an ironing board made from a crow’s feather, ash bark dressers in little low-ceilinged bedrooms, a wheelbarrow in a potting room built of seashells, a cradle made from a walnut shell and lined with pussy willow buds. One tower was an observatory and Casey had even fashioned small telescopes with discarded ends of brass. The other tower was a library, the shelves crooked and loaded with books made from leaves, and paper threaded with summer blossom. There were titles stenciled on the spines and Pamela read them one by one, understanding dawning in her face and bringing tears to her eyes. There was not, of course, a nail to be found in it as Casey explained to his son.

“Iron has neither mercy nor warmth, and so it is that the Auld Ones cannot bear the touch of it. So ye must never bring it near them nor build them an abode with other than wood and moss and water and bark. And ye must always bring a wee bit of moonlight down to bless the house.”

He held his hand up, making a circle of forefinger and thumb, wrapping the moon there in his fingers to give as a gift to his son. Small and straight-backed, Conor stood with his face tilted up toward that great round, cupped now and floating all dusted pearl within his father’s palm. It appeared, Casey knew, as though he were setting it gently on the roof of the fairy house.

They stayed for a time in the wood, watching Conor investigate each room of the house and all its wondrous details. Casey sat back on a stump, joggling Isabelle on his knee in an effort to distract her from the cold.

Later, when Isabelle had been nursed and put to bed, and Conor was tucked up snug in his, Pamela came to him and put her arms around him, looking up into his face. He put one hand to the delicate line of her jaw, her skin still flushed shell-pink from the cold.

“I read the titles on the books in the library,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Aye, well,” he said, “it’s for Conor an’ Isabelle. They can add to it as they like when they’re older. But mostly, Jewel, I had you in mind as I built it.”

“Why?”

“Because of the little girl that ye were who maybe was lonelier than the woman admits. I wanted to give her some magic an’ wonderment.”

“I love you, man.” She sighed and turned her cheek against his chest. He could feel her blood beneath her skin, the pulse of it against his own and the enchantment of the iridescent night still there in both of them, casting its peculiar, still magic.

“An’
that
, darlin’,” he replied, “is my magic an’ wonderment.”

“I wish,” she said, “that I could hold this moment with both hands and that it could be this way always. Just the two of us with our babies, safe and sheltered. Why can’t time just stop for a bit?”

“Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of Heaven,
That time may cease and midnight never come.’”

She pulled back and looked up into his face. “Casey Riordan, did you just quote
Faustus
at me?”

“Aye,” he said, smiling. “All yer quotin’ at
me
has worn off over the years, I suppose.”

He stroked her hair, the twined silk of it furling soft under his hands. Through the window the moon peeked, slowly weighing anchor behind the pines and the hills. He knew there was no answer to his wife’s question; only that all things changed and one could no more stop it than one could halt the waning of the moon or the growing of a child. The knowledge of that was both the bitter and the sweet marrow of life, no matter how silver the night, no matter how the blood sang beneath the skin, no matter the love and the joy, all things changed.

Still, none could blame a man if, now and again, he wished to hold the moon in his hands and stop time for a space. Because wishes were, and always had been, for the impossible things of the human heart.

Chapter Seventy-nine
November 1975
Belfast, For My Sins

It was the sort of morning that came rarely in Belfast
this time of year. The sky was washed a clear, fragile blue and the sun mellowed the prevalent red brick to a roseate hue. David was struck by the sudden feeling that this was now home. He had been here in one capacity or another, with only brief absences, for four years. Normally operatives were cycled out on a regular basis—unless they were so deeply embedded in the community they’d been sent to infiltrate that pulling them out would collapse the entire house of cards they had built over their time. His own house of cards was so high and so fragile at this point that he was rarely even checked on, and hadn’t reported to his superiors in such a long time that he half wondered if they had forgotten about him entirely.

His life was here now, whether his minders remembered him or not. It was something they warned you about, something you were trained to steel your mind against. But operatives were human and formed relationships and sometimes even committed the cardinal sin of sympathizing with the natives—to the point where they thought they were one. A mistake like that could get you killed. He knew this all too well, as he had made just such a mistake. He wouldn’t be here today, walking this narrow little street, watching the gulls wheel overhead, had Pat Riordan not saved his life. He had been kidnapped by a crew of IRA men down in South Armagh, and taken to a field to be shot when Pat Riordan had come to his rescue.

There had been no repercussions to his return from the massacre at Noah Murray’s farm. This worried him, and told him it was time to take his irons out of the fire.

In the wee hours of the morning he had packed up his scant belongings and left the boys’ home for the last time. He had everything he needed now, all the evidence required to bring justice—albeit too late for some—to the boys in that castle of nightmares. He had the target lists for the kill squads too, though he was aware that they mutated all the time according to the Trustees’ current whim. Beyond those two things, there were a few loose ends that needed tying up, some job related, most personal.

He had long ago learned to compartmentalize his life. A man had to in his line of work or he would go mad. The danger was that you compartmentalized to the point where you couldn’t remember any longer where you had left certain aspects of yourself, such as your humanity. He had seen more than one man lose that aspect entirely and forget that he was dealing with human beings and that human beings, despite rhetoric and rough tongues, were terribly fragile things.

The building where his meet was scheduled was an old office front, half deserted as so many buildings were in this city. The stairway was narrow and dank with a warren of offices at the top that seemed little more than ratholes. Which perhaps was a bit too apt, David thought, suppressing an unseemly smile before tapping politely on the opaque glass pane with the neat lettering,
George Felton, Building Inspector.
He wondered how many people had wandered in here looking to have a building inspected. But knowing the man behind the door, it was likely he would take a perverse pleasure in conducting said inspections.

A dry voice bid him to come in and he pictured the man behind the voice. He had never known him as anything other than George Felton but David would lay good money that George wasn’t his real name. Their interaction had always been scant, as they worked on a cell system and a need-to-know basis that kept contact to the minimum.

Everything about George’s personality was bland, down to the dun coloring of his hair and eyes. There wasn’t anything about him that a man would remember later and that was what made him good at his job. There was a reason people called agents at this level spooks, for all of them were like ghosts. There were days he himself felt so unreal he half imagined that he was invisible. The only time he truly felt real these days was when he was in the grey farmhouse just beyond the Riordan land.

He opened the door and went in. His boss was seated behind the desk, head bent over an official-looking document. He wondered briefly about him, if he had a family somewhere, if he went on holidays or had fights with his wife. It was hard to imagine, for he had such a dusty appearance that David imagined him here all the time, suspended between their visits, always signing documents, always dressed in the dreadful brown suit that looked as if it had been worn by some British bureaucrat since the end of the Great War.

David placed the canvas bag he had brought onto the desk.

George looked at it without enthusiasm. “What have you brought me, David?”

“It’s all there, what’s going on in that house, what’s going on in much fancier places than that. Everything we need to put all these bastards in jail is there. Everything is documented, dates, times, and the films are numbered.”

A silence asserted itself as the man looked blandly at the bag. David got a very bad feeling as the silence stretched too long. His hand twitched, as it was wont to do since the latest series of injuries, and he put it behind his back.