Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (43 page)

Jamie knew who Gregor was from the first day. He was hard to miss. Gregor was a large man, built like a predatory animal, all muscle and sinew but with flesh enough to know he was getting more than his assigned share of food. He stood firmly atop the pyramid that comprised the thieves’ society here. He was called
nayk
behind his back—‘the spider’—because he sat at the center of the camp’s web, feeling every shiver and tug on the strands and reaching out to strike and bite when least expected. Jamie could feel the man’s eyes on him several times a day, sending fine, primitive threads of danger down his spine. He was a man to be avoided until one could not avoid him any longer. Jamie was no fool, and so he knew that the time would come when he would have to reckon with Gregor in one fashion or another.

He had absorbed the environment quickly, observing the various groupings and camp hierarchies, knowing that if he was to survive with his skin intact he needed to get the lie of the land as quickly as possible. The camp OC was a small, slightly oily personage with sly, lurking eyes that always looked for some infraction or misdemeanor for which he could punish one of the unfortunate inmates. Those who were not under Gregor’s keeping, that was. Those were victims of an altogether different sort of punishment, one which Jamie strove not to think about too deeply.

The work, as hard and mind-numbing as it was, seemed to be the one thing that kept them all going, because it induced such exhaustion that one didn’t have the wherewithal by nightfall to dwell too long on the accumulated misfortunes of the day.

Jamie asked about the old man when Shura was shaving his head. It was a necessary evil, Shura told him, to avoid the plague of lice. On the subject of Nikolai, he had shrugged in his eloquent Georgian manner and said, “Nikolai will only speak when it is absolutely necessary. Otherwise he gets by with grunts. Even the guards let it pass. Nikolai is like big oak tree that has been here so long, and is so immune to pain and fear that everyone just walks around him.”

“And what about Vanya?” Jamie asked, curious about the beautiful youth who came each day to the forest with them to look after the horses that were used to haul the logs away and helped to serve the two-legged beasts their lunch ration. Vanya, who was disturbingly androgynous and had eyes the color of smoked violets, was also shunned by most of the inmates. He did not speak when he handed Jamie his bread, but there was something in his eyes that looked like a question, or an appeal, depending on the day.

A funny look passed over Shura’s face and he shrugged. “Vanya is
peederaz.
You understand?”

Jamie feared that he did indeed understand.

“
Peederaz
is like camp whore. He is chosen by the long timers. He is at their mercy, to use as they please, to rape, to humiliate. The
peederaz
sleeps on the floor, he’s not allowed at the table to eat, nor in the showers when others are there. He cleans the hut and he’s forced to have sex with anyone who wants it, any time. If he refuses or complains, then he’s beaten or stabbed and then those long timers,” Shura spit to the side in disgust, “will simply move on to another victim.”

Jamie felt sick to his core for the boy, though the situation did not surprise him. A young man who looked like Vanya was always going to attract the very worst sort of attention. To a certain extent he understood, for all his life his own face and form had brought him attention which, at times, he had been ill equipped to manage. There had been a period during his late teens and early twenties when he had been propositioned by older men on a weekly basis, merely because his beauty had made them lose their normal sanity to the point where they no longer cared what they risked. But his inclinations had not led him that way and he had broken at least one heart very badly over it.

“Any other advice?” he asked, trying to ignore how naked his scalp felt now that Shura was done shaving it.

Shura ruminated for a minute, mobile mouth drawn down. “Just this—
ne veri, ne boisia,
ne prosi.
” With that he collected his tools and tucked them away under his mattress.

It was sound advice, Jamie thought, if a tad bleak.

“Don’t trust, don’t be scared, don’t ask.”

Chapter Twenty-nine
March 1973
Prince of Thieves

Jamie’s first encounter with the
vor v zakonye
was less than pleasant, though he had never expected tea and civility.

He had been here six weeks and had acquired the rhythm of camp life soon enough. It was as unimaginative as the food. But under the daily routine, under all the head counts and quotas and the unvarying diet, under the exercises and obedience to regime there was a tension that simmered like the cauldron over a witch’s fire, waiting to boil over and wreak havoc.

He had been noticed. He had expected it. One could not be a new quantity in a prison setting and not be an oddity, but when one was foreign and fair, as Shura had so succinctly put it to him, one was in for more than a normal share of attention. It was not possible to skim beneath the radar in such a place. Their lives were lived within breathing distance of each other and sometimes not even that. Privacy was a commodity that came at a very high price. One he did not have the coin for at present.

He was walking back to his hut one evening after choking down the thin soup and hard, crusty bread that constituted supper. Though it was still bone-chillingly cold, he thought he noticed a slight warming in the temperature. The compound was long and narrow, with the
vor
hut sitting in the center so that one had to pass it to get from the dining hall and administration to all the other huts in the compound. There was no avoiding it, nor the harassment of Gregor and his minions if they felt so inclined.

Rounding the corner of the long hut, it was immediately apparent that some sort of commotion was taking place. He cast a quick, surreptitious glance at the guard posts but none of them seemed to have noticed—or they were being selectively blind and deaf, because it was something to do with Gregor. Shura had been completely accurate in his assessment of the camp hierarchy. Gregor ran things and anyone who didn’t like it wisely kept his opinion to himself.

He took in the scene in front of him. A crowd of men had the boy Vanya cornered, a dove surrounded by wolves and, like a true dove, there was nothing he could do to prevent what was going to happen. The camp whore he might be, but Jamie could see clearly that the boy was terrified.

Vanya looked at him, desperation tightening the fine skin over his high-planed bones, and he held Jamie’s eyes for a second before he was shoved through the door of the hut. Jamie took a deep breath, trying to ignore the adrenaline that flooded through his body.

He knew he ought to let it alone. Vanya had a role to play in the camp and earned extra bread by it. Shura had told Jamie that it was little different from how the boy had earned his bread before the gulag. It might make no difference to him how many or who. And yet… the look on that delicate face and the dense appeal in the violet eyes said otherwise. Jamie sighed and swore softly under his breath. There was no choice in the matter and little use standing out here in the snow telling himself there was.

He strode forward and hit the door hard, braced for what he knew he would see. Jamie was no stranger to the world’s darker pleasures, nor to the odd turns lust often took, but he knew this act had little to do with desire and much to do with a violent domination that Gregor sought to impose on each person in the camp.

Vanya was bent over one of the rough-framed beds, his shirt in tatters on the floor, his face shoved into the reeking mattress to the point of suffocation. His pants were down around his knees, and the fragile line of his backbone stood out in sharp relief against his pale skin. Blooms of red washed the surface of his skin where he had been manhandled.

No one turned around at his entry for they were too intent on the spectacle in front of them. Jamie moved further into the hut, steeling his senses against the reek of male lust.

“Let him be. Surely even you can find someone more willing,” Jamie said loudly, though his knees were fully aware of the fool his tongue was making of him.

Gregor turned, his large frame gleaming with menace, a blaze of white-hot lust smearing his features and Jamie understood at once the magnitude of the mistake he had just made. Behind him, he felt the men close ranks, blocking off any escape he might have imagined making.

Gregor took his hands off Vanya, who immediately scrambled into a corner, huddling into himself in a pitiful effort to cover his naked form. Gregor stood and stepped closer. The heavy scent of the man’s brute carnality hit Jamie full in the face.

Instinctively, he stepped back but was shoved forcefully forward by the men at his back. Gregor grabbed him and spun him round, shoving him up hard against the rough wall of the hut. His left arm was hiked up excruciatingly high against the ridge of his spine. It would take no more than another inch to break it. He gritted his teeth and pushed his forehead hard into the wall. There was no room to move, no space to draw a breath between him and the man that held him with such terrible force.

“Are you willing to take his place? Are you willing to be my
sdelat kozyol
? Are you, Jamie? Because that’s a trade I’d be very happy to make. Oh very, very happy, indeed.” Gregor laughed, a low, oily sound that made Jamie’s stomach roil like a terrorized snake. He knew the term. A
sdelat kozyol
was a homosexual slave, a person apart in the camp, used for his body but not considered human. Like Vanya.

He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. The man’s hold was like iron locked against his back. Panic built under his breastbone, spreading up his windpipe in a cold, greasy slick. He had to stop. He needed to breathe. If he passed out he knew exactly what would happen to him and he wasn’t sure he would survive it, either physically or emotionally.

A rough finger curled around the shell of his ear and stroked down his neck to his collarbone. The man’s mouth whispered in his ear, wet and hot.

“You are very warm-blooded, Yasha, no?”

The long body pressed even harder against his and he felt the man’s erection pushed into the small of his back. Panic was close to taking over now. Never mind what harm he might incur. It no longer mattered. There was only the animal drive to survive.

The utterance of his name was an obscenity in the man’s mouth. Jamie knew what the use of the diminutive of his name from this man meant. It was a sign of disrespect, of placing him on a lower level, of saying they could do with him as they liked and that they would.

Gregor grabbed him by one shoulder and spun him around again, huge callused hands pinning him swiftly, though even had he been able to slip in a punch, it would have done him little good. The men were packed around him like hungry wolves that could smell blood on the air. Each one had the congested look in his face of lust for blood, lust for another’s pain, salivating for something Jamie prayed he would not be forced to give.

Gregor’s eyes were nearly black, dense as tar with hunger. Jamie did not blink. He knew he must not be the first to look away. Men like Gregor fed on fear, glutted themselves with it and were never satiated. Their appetites would always call for more. Jamie knew if the man smelled or sensed it on him, he would never be rid of him short of killing him, which wasn’t a measure he was prepared to take… yet.

Still, his throat was dry with fear, his entire body panicked at the thought of what was about to happen to it. There was little choice in the matter. He could not talk his way out of this, nor could he overpower the opposition. It made him think of Pamela and that terrible night so long ago when she had been raped by four men on a train. Then he had felt a murderous fury, and now he felt the fine edge of a terror that she had experienced for hours.

Then from the doorway, a deep voice, heavy with the rumble of disuse, spoke. “You leave him alone or I will shoot you where you stand. Don’t doubt my word. I have nothing to lose.”

“Go away, old man,” Gregor said, though he eased his hold on Jamie’s arm a little.

Nikolai’s response was to shoot the air directly above Gregor’s head. Gregor swore but backed away from Jamie—not far, but enough to allow Jamie to take a shaky breath.

Gregor turned, his entire frame one of killing menace. Yet standing so near, Jamie sensed a hesitation. Jamie remembered Shura’s words about Nikolai and how he was the one exception to all the rules.

Nikolai never wavered. The gun was as steady in his hand as though he merely held a flower. Gregor must have read the intent in the old man’s eyes for, much to Jamie’s relief, he took his hands off him and backed away a little.

Nikolai nodded at the men in a way that must have been command enough, for they began to file out of the low-slung hut, one by one, some muttering curses under their breath but most silent and avoiding eye contact with the old man who held the rifle in his clawed hands as if it were an extension of his own arms.

But Gregor, it seemed, was not quite done with him yet. Before he followed his coterie out the door, he turned to Jamie and smiled, a thick cloying thing that spoke of horrors Jamie had never imagined.

“Not tonight then, my sweet,” Gregor said, pupils still dilated with lust, “but soon. I promise you, very soon.” And then he was gone, vanished into the night without a sound, as if he had truly become the demon he seemed.

Jamie fell to his knees in relief, furiously rubbing his ear where it was still wet from the man’s tongue and breath. He wanted nothing so much as a hot shower to wash the man’s insidious touch from his skin.

“You shouldn’t have done that, but thank you all the same.” Vanya said. Nikolai had seemingly vanished into the evening air without a word.

“You’re welcome,” Jamie said. “Don’t worry. He won’t touch me.”

“How can you be so certain?” Vanya asked, pulling himself up into a sitting position.

“Because I’ll kill him if he tries it again,” Jamie said, and knew he meant every word.

Vanya stood and pulled on his pants without shyness.

“How—?” Jamie began, but halted his tongue, for it was none of his business.

But Vanya seemed to understand the unspoken words for he shrugged, the amethyst eyes opaque with some emotion Jamie could not put a name to, and thought perhaps it was best that he did not try.

The boy turned back and looked at him. There was no shame in him, only a sort of singularity that Jamie had encountered once or twice before in his life.

“It is only a body. It is not who I am.”

Any reckoning with Gregor would have to come soon
. Jamie knew he could not afford to wait too long, and waiting only stretched the agonizing tension out to its limits, leaving him with the feeling that it could snap back on him without warning.

The compound itself was secure enough, and the guards would often retreat to their hut to play cards and numb their boredom with the anesthesia of cheap vodka. They made a patrol of the area once an hour, more time than Jamie needed.

The ground was hard as steel, the dirty snow caking thickly in his cuffs. Jamie crouched beneath the window of the long hut, waiting for the last of the grumbling conversations to die down to the small night noises of sleep. Then he used footholds he had mapped out during the last week to climb up, silent as a snowflake drifting upward through the air, onto the roof.

All his senses were heightened, the scent of the smoke from the guard’s hut thick and gelid in his mouth, the wind sliding with chill fingers around his body like a frost harlot. His thoughts were slippery and he knew this wasn’t the best time, yet could not think of a better to do this deed.

The windows were shut, but it was only the work of a moment to open the one he wanted. A fetid fug hung in the hut, where multiple men slept. He slid over the lip of the roof, grasped the upper edge of the window, and slipped through noiselessly. He landed on the floor lightly on the balls of his feet, ready to spring, scenting the area like a cat. He knew that Gregor’s bunk stood alone to the far left of the hut. He had chosen a window some way from the bunk so that his eyes would have time to adjust to the dark before he made his way there.

The end of a crossbeam hung over Gregor’s bed, smoke-blackened and soaked with the animal miseries it had witnessed. It was his silent ally. He swung up lightly, the wood rough under his palms. His blood was fizzing and he knew he needed to keep a cool head or risk making a mistake.With Gregor being the size and temperament he was, it was not a risk Jamie could afford to take. He could not let Gregor dominate him in any way, shape or form.

He hung above him, and the man stirred in his sleep, softly mumbled words slipping from his mouth. Jamie froze, hanging like a spider on a very dangerous web. It took a few moments—moments that seemed like hours—before the man settled again. He began to snore, just as Jamie felt his hands slipping on the beam. He let out a little of his breath and then let himself down onto the bed carefully, so that his weight was distributed evenly, no more than a vague disturbance on the air.

For a criminal, Gregor slept deeply. Jamie slipped the knife from his teeth into his left hand. His knees were to either side of the man, who slept on his stomach. He grabbed the man’s chin hard and pulled his head up, clamping the jaw shut so that he could not yell and alert everyone in the hut. He put the knife to the prominent adam’s apple.

“Don’t fucking move,” he hissed, his Russian guttural with threat. The pressure of the knife was enough to kill the man with the slightest move, but not enough to draw blood. Not a fool, Gregor didn’t move, but lay taut beneath Jamie. Jamie’s knees held his arms to his sides as effectively as a vice. He didn’t have the Russian’s size, so he had to take him at a disadvantage like this and hope that his size wasn’t equalled by agility.

Jamie pulled the massive head back a little further, the neck arched at its apex. Any further and it would break. His own muscles were strained to the point of snapping but the hand on the knife remained steady, increasing the pressure inexorably. He would not cut him, for that would be to shame the man and he could not afford to do that. He leaned in to Gregor’s ear and spoke in a whisper as intimate as a lover’s but as cold as the ice that surrounded their prison.

“Touch me again without my permission, and I will kill you. Make no mistake about it. I know how to make it slow and hard for you. Do you understand?”

He eased the pressure just enough so Gregor could nod ever so slightly, not enough that he could so much as grunt for help. He wasn’t quite so jazzed on his own adrenaline as to think he would make it out of this stinking hut alive if even one man awakened and became aware of his presence.

It was time to go. His point was made and now he needed to move like the proverbial greased lightning. With a last judiciously placed squeeze of the man’s neck, he was up and off him, hitting the floor as lightly as a cat and with as little noise.

He slid out of the window, tumbling into the trampled snow, coming to his feet like an acrobat and running low and fast before he was fully upright. Behind him, where he had expected a roar of outrage and a flurry of movement, there was only stillness and the sound of his own breath. The guards were still in the hut, their raucous laughter spilling out onto the night. He kept his body low in the shadows, half expecting a knife to land with a thunk between his shoulder blades. He had squeezed the carotids just long enough to daze Gregor and give himself the needed seconds to slip out the window and away.