Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (62 page)

“Well, yes,” she said, with some asperity, “I do know how it sounds, but it’s the only thing I can think of to find out if my dreams are really telling me something or not. And the thing is—well, the thing is, I need you to come with me.”

Casey’s eyebrows, already raised, shot up into his hairline. “Might I ask why
I 
now need to be involved in this insanity?”

“Because I’ve need of your hands on my skin,” she said, meeting his eyes despite the ice water gathering with force in her stomach. Casey’s eyes were the color of heavy smoke, a sure sign of a good fury building in him. “To bring me back. Finola says it’s the only way to be certain—to be certain that I don’t die in the trance.”

“Well, I’ve the need to put my hands on yer skin, but it won’t be in a way you fancy, let me tell ye, woman,” Casey said, and she swore she could see small puffs of steam emerge with each word.

“I’m goin’ out for a wee walk. I need to think.” She could hear him grumbling under his breath about ‘fockin’ mad women who would never leave a man in peace’.

He was gone long enough that she had time to bank the fires, feed Conor one last time and put him down, then have a warm bath and put herself to bed. Once there though, sleep proved entirely elusive. She tossed and turned, tried to read, but couldn’t focus on the words and finally lay on her back staring at the ceiling, listening to the rain start on the roof. She tried counting sheep, but gave it up once the sheep started to turn and glare at her, with a suspiciously familiar dark-eyed gaze.

She was about to get up and go downstairs to add another few rows to the sweater she was knitting for Conor when she heard Casey come in. Feeling a surge of cowardice, she remained in the bed, pulling the quilt up to her nose.

Casey came directly upstairs and into the bedroom. She chanced peering at him over the top of the blankets. He was wet with rain and still looked hot enough under the collar to ignite small fires but the lines about his mouth told her he had come to a decision.

“Ye needn’t hide under the blankets like a wee dormouse, woman, as much as I’d like to stick ye over my knee an’ give ye a good tannin’ at times, I’ve never done so, an’ I don’t intend to start now. Though I’ll tell ye, it was a near thing tonight.”

She pushed the quilts back and sat up. “Well?”

“Well, what?” His voice was muffled, as he pulled his sweater off over his head.

“Will you do it?”

He drew in a deep breath and sat down on the side of the bed. He gave her a hard look that made her squirm and wish that she had stayed under the quilts.

“Did it ever occur to you two meddlin’ women that he might not
want
to be found?”

“But why…” she trailed off at the look on his face.

“Why—why because the man can’t fockin’ have ye, woman, that’s why. An’ frankly if that shoe was on my own foot—an’ I’ve thought it was goin’ to be a time or two—I’d leave too. I wouldn’t want to see ye, if I couldn’t have ye. The bloody man told me it was him or me before he left.”

“What?” she said and Casey blinked as though it had only now occurred to him what he’d said.

“Aye,” Casey replied, tone a trifle grim with the memory. “He staked his claim to ye in fairly clear terms. But the truth is, Pamela, I owe him.”

“You owe him?” she asked, feeling that she sometimes did not understand either Jamie or Casey very well at all.

“Aye, I owe him, much as it galls me even to say it. He was more than fair—he walked away when ye were vulnerable an’ he could have pressed that to his advantage. He didn’t have to do that, an’ I can only imagine how much it cost him. So,” he breathed out heavily, “if ye honestly feel he’s in danger, if ye think these dreams of yers are tryin’ to tell ye that he needs help, then I suppose we have to do whatever we can to help the man. So yes, I’ll come to the witch’s wee cottage with ye, an’ I’ll lay my hands on ye if that’s what ye need from me. But,” he glared down at her, eyes lit with black flame, “I think it’s fockin’ mad what the two of ye are doin’ an’ I swear, woman, if anything happens to ye…” he shook his head as words failed him.

She drew him down to her, cradling his head to her breast. “Nothing will happen to me as long as you’re there with me. Finola said you are my anchor and I know it for truth.”

He moved his face up toward her own, his eyes no longer smoky with anger but dark with feeling.

“I need yer hands on me too, Jewel, now an’ always—an’ if…”

“Shh,” she touched her mouth to his own, silencing his fear with the warmth of her touch, the security that her own body provided his, a connection to life itself and a reassurance that this would always exist between them. For it always had, this heat and light and fire, a sustenance that fed them and bound them together each time until the web was so tight she often felt she didn’t breathe fully until Casey came home at night.

She settled herself under him opening to him and he buried his face in her neck, whiskers rasping like stiffened velvet, causing her to gasp and arch up against him. He sighed softly, and in the language of his skin and her own, she knew that though he had agreed, he was afraid of the deal he had struck.

Chapter Forty-six
March 1974
All the Colors of the Rainbow…

To say the drive to Finola’s cottage
was fraught with a white silence would be to vastly understate the tense and rather grim mood that surrounded both Pamela and Casey. They had discussed themselves blue about the probability of this ‘focking plunge down the rabbit-hole’, as Casey was calling it, amounting to anything that could be quantified on the scale of hard, cold reality.

His wife, during one of these conversations, had given him the delicate arch of one sooty eyebrow and said, “What is reality though? In the time of the Greeks, they only saw a few colors, rainbows were tri-colored. Did that mean that all the colors we can perceive now didn’t exist? Or that we merely were not equipped to see them yet? And that there aren’t dozens more colors that we can’t see now, but will someday?”

Casey suspected that the foray into a discussion of the Greeks and their color blindness was merely a diversionary tactic and refused to be thus distracted. He had then been treated to an exegesis on inward evolution, and being tuned to the ‘finer’ vibrations of the universe. She wound this up with a tart, ‘a man who had a ghost save his life ought to be less of an obstinate ox in his thinking.’

They had been touchy with each other for the next few days, though they had discussed the drugs that Finola would be using on Pamela—aconite and hemlock. Looking them up in one of Pamela’s green-stained herbal primers had done little to soothe Casey’s worries on that front.

“They induce a sort of delirium that will allow me to leave my body, so to speak,” she had said calmly, whilst spooning pureed apples and oatmeal into their son’s mouth.

“Did the good Lord in all His wisdom not hand ye a dose of fear an’ common sense before ye landed in the world, woman?” Casey had asked in exasperation.

She shrugged, making plane noises to encourage Conor to open his wee mouth for the last spoonful. “It’s been done many times before. Finola is well learned in the ways of medicines and herbs. She won’t let anything happen to me. Witches did it for centuries to induce the sense of flying.”

Casey had thrown his hands up at that particular bit of logic and gone out to feed Paudeen and to work on the barn. Then he’d gone for a long walk and smoked far too many cigarettes for a man who had quit months before.

What it came down to was Jamie, and Pamela’s complete belief that his life was hanging in the balance of all this occult mumbo-jumbo, and that was where, Casey admitted ruefully, his wife had him over the turnstile. He owed the man, for Jamie had given him back his life in a few angry and ultimately clarifying moments.

All of this had brought them here, on this March night, to the far reaches of the Kirkpatrick land. They had to walk the last couple of miles, after leaving the car parked at the cypress gate. There was no road into the cottage, and indeed Casey wondered if they were going to be able to find it at all in the dank twilight.

“Perhaps ye have to be drugged ahead of time to actually find the place,” Casey said, shivering and clutching Pamela’s hand tighter in his own. She squeezed back and after contemplating the fork in the narrow pathway that extended ahead of them, chose the left-hand option.

They had to walk single file after that, the trees clustered tightly around them in their spare spring garb. Oak trees, dense with tightly closed buds, hissed in the night. The air was chill with mist, and the sounds of the city did not penetrate here. It might have been another world entirely, far removed from the small battered streets of the city below. Though he was well used to the country and as comfortable as any man amongst the fields, trees, and hedgerows, Casey found that Jamie’s land unsettled him. It was almost as if it belonged to an entirely different sphere, an enchanted fairy hill where one could disappear and re-emerge several years later, confused and confounded by the changes of the world around.

The path they trod continued to narrow until Casey had the sense that the trees limbs were trying to ensnare them. Certainly he had enough twigs in his hair to testify to it.

They might have missed the cottage if it weren’t for the flickering light that shone from its windows. It was low and built partly into a small hillside, so that it seemed an organic outgrowth of the bracken and the trees and stones that surrounded it.

A small puff of wind, chill and thick with the scent of decaying plant matter, blew into their faces.

“Is that a whiff of brimstone?” Casey asked, only half in jest.

“It’s dill,” Pamela said in the matter of fact tone that was starting to annoy the hell out of Casey.

“Are ye not a wee bit frightened by the thought of committin’ what amounts to black magic?”

“It’s not black unless you use it to harm others,” she said, raising her hand to knock on the door. It swung open before her knuckles could make contact.

“Good, I see ye’ve managed to convince yer man to help,” said the small figure in the doorway.

Pamela went in without hesitation and Casey wondered just how well acquainted she and Jamie’s grandmother had become. He had a feeling that Jamie wouldn’t be any more impressed than he himself was by this friendship.

The lintel was old and low, the cottage must date back to at least the sixteen hundreds, though it was obvious to him it had been modified in the last decade or so. Still, the original bones were in evidence enough that his builder’s eye could date it to within a few decades. He ducked in behind Pamela, closing the door against the spooky atmosphere of the night.

He eyed the woman directly, a challenge in his stare that clearly stated he would brook no harm coming to his wife and that he was here to prevent such a thing from happening, the woman’s grandson be damned.

She eyed him just as directly in return. Yes, she looked a woman fully capable of both the knowledge and implementation of dark arts. The cottage, lit only by the fire, was warm and seemed far too snug against the chill night to be the stage for this insane act to which they were all committed. The kitchen was the center of the home, with the ancient hearth against the south wall. Near the fire was a bed—undoubtedly the scene of the sacrifice, he thought.

“Come and sit,” Finola said, and Casey realized he’d forgotten his manners in the face of coming events.

He put his hand out to shake the woman’s own, but she took it and held it between both of hers rather than shaking it. Casey felt an odd vibration where her skin met his—a heat as though energy were crossing from her to him and then looping back again. She merely continued to hold on, her fine fingertips searching the web of lines that crisscrossed his palms.

She tilted her head to the side and nodded. “Interesting.”

Casey cocked a brow. “What’s interestin’?”

“The lines of yer hand. They’re a wee bit odd. I’ve only ever run across one other set like yer own. But never mind, we’re not here to discuss yer future.” She let go of his hand suddenly and turned to Pamela.

“Ye’ll need to drink the tea right off, and then we’ll get the herbs on ye.” She handed Pamela a steaming mug, which she drank down quickly, not even flinching at the heat.

“Will it hinder things,” Casey asked, seating himself on a low stool by the fire, “if I don’t particularly believe in all this…” he made a gesture with his hands to indicate that he didn’t have words to describe the situation in which he found himself.

“Ye don’t have to believe. Ye merely need to be here. Ye’ll hear a great deal about this sort of thing in scientific studies, where they try to put it under a microscope in a lab, but it’s been practiced for thousands of years. Some people are more open to it than others, an’ some have a natural talent for it. Yer wife falls into both those categories.”

“An’ how can ye know that?” Casey asked, a suspicion growing in him.

“She’s done well on the last two tries, and I trust it’ll be even easier with you here this time.”

“The last
two
tries?” Casey gave Pamela a look that said volumes in both content and context.

Pamela merely shrugged and pulled her sweater off over her head, and then proceeded, to Casey’s immense consternation, to unbutton her blouse.

“What the hell are ye after doin’, woman?” he asked, standing and blocking any view of her with his own body.

“She has to be naked for this,” Jamie’s grandmother said calmly. “The ointment needs to be rubbed on bare skin.”

Casey, quelling a desire to pinch himself, asked, “An’ what am I meant to be doing?”

“Nothing just yet, other than calmin’ yer nerves. Yer purpose here is to keep her safe, an’ to bring her back should ye sense something that ought not to be there in the psychic landscape.”

“Aye, an’ how am I to know what should be there an’ what shouldn’t?”

“Trust me,” Finola said, “ye’ll know if somethin’ is wrong. It’ll present as a dark presence an’ there’s no mistakin’ the feel of such a thing.”