Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (64 page)

Jamie awoke to view the world through the finest of silver-linked spiderwebbing. At first, he wondered what sort of fantastical eight-legged beastie could have woven such a virtuosic netting and then realized it was threads of ice that had formed from his breath and floated down to settle upon each curve and line of his face. He sat up slowly, snow and ice raining off him in great glittering drifts. He looked around and gasped out loud.

It was as though he had awakened inside a Faberge egg, where the enamel was translucent enough to allow the heart of the jewels to stream through. In the ice was every color: the sea-blue of azure, the blood of rubies, the sand of topaz, the blush-rose of quartz, the delicate lavender hue of amethyst and the warm butter of pearls. Stairways of emerald, with railings that glittered like sugar, but that would, he knew, crumble at a breath. At the top of the stairs spread a deep and mysterious lapis lazuli that hinted at another world altogether in the upper story, but he dared not attempt the climb. The one floor was enough, for light such as this was infinite, could not be pinioned nor harnessed. Its very essence was that of eternity. It fell in vortices and lattices, swirled in coruscations of brilliance, shot in rays of spangled thistles.

He got to his feet, every muscle protesting, and walked slowly across the room to where a large Russian heater stood, delft tiles gleaming bluely through a thick coating of frost. There was a stack of birch next to it, though no kindling, and a small box of wooden matches. Jamie struck a match against the icy flint and was more grateful for that small violet and gold flame than he could remember being for anything in a very long time.

Despite his gratitude for the matches, the fire would not catch, the wood was frozen solid with a layer of ice. He pounded it against the floor to no avail, other than setting a shower of ice particles free to swirl around him. He needed to go outside to gather dry sticks, but when he scraped a hole in the frost of one window, he saw the tiger tracks clear as a water print upon silk. He looked from every window then and saw that the tracks encircled the entire structure. He was trapped like a rabbit inside a snare, one move toward the outside world and it would snap him straight through the bone.

He returned to the fire, knowing there was little else he could do. After another half hour of profound effort, he managed a small flame on the cold wood. The flame hissed and spit like an agitated rattlesnake, but let out a tiny bit of warmth. He blew on it gently, afraid of eclipsing it but more worried that it would fizzle out on its own if it didn’t build up some strength. Once it seemed like it would hold, he stood, stamping his feet to keep the blood flowing, sluggish as that process might be. The frost had begun to melt on the window nearest the stove, water running in rivulets through the remaining ice. It was through this small opening on the world that he spotted movement outside, a speck against the unending fields of white.

He peered until his eyes felt like they might freeze in place, widening the hole in the ice so he could see more clearly. The figure continued to advance, though the drifts of snow that blew across the landscape obscured his view of the person every few seconds.

He had gone so long without seeing another human being that he thought, were the person an Urdu-speaking flame-eater recently escaped from the Armenian circus, he would fall on him with tears of gratitude, merely for the sight of another human face.

But what if it was someone hostile? He dismissed the thought—how on earth would someone find him out here anyway? It had to be a hunter, of one of the nomadic tribes who wandered the frozen vastness of Russia no matter the season. The figure advanced close enough that he could see by both movement and form that it was a woman.

A woman? What in the name of all that was good and holy was a woman doing out here in the midst of nowhere? Now there was nothing for it but to risk that the tiger was still lurking about and go out and warn her.

He sighed, looked at the fire with regretful longing, and flung the door open. The wind slapped him in the face as if to tell him he was a complete fool to venture out again, which he thought, wrapping his ragged coat more securely around him, he bloody well was. He slid down the ice and snow that coated the stairs and bounded to his feet at the bottom, eyes watering from the cold, but still looking around for the tiger to come, sleek and boundless, from the side of the house.

The woman was cursing, a streak of words so blue that there was an indigo cloud all around her. More startling than the words though, was the language in which they were uttered, for they were English. Jamie narrowed his eyes against the stinging cold, trying to make out her features, but her head was down as she navigated drifts of snow, almost up to her hips. He knew that voice though, knew it as he knew all the geography of his soul. It was impossible that she should be here, utterly impossible… and then the woman looked up and he thought perhaps he was dead, or that he had crossed entirely into another dimension.

It simply wasn’t possible and yet there was only one pair of starred green eyes like those, only one face that he held in his memory in such finely drawn detail. He moved across the snow toward her, feeling oddly weightless as though he were merely floating along the top without effort, but his feet felt a terrible distance away from his head, now that he thought about it.

And then she was there, wrapped in furs, the white of them lying against her skin like torn silk on orchids. She leaned forward and kissed his cheek, as though she’d only seen him a week before. The smell of strawberries flooded his senses and something new, a note he did not recognize in the melody of her scent.

“Are you going to invite me in, Jamie? It’s bloody cold out here.”

“I—I—”

“Dream or not, Jamie, certain rules still apply.”

Jamie was about to retort that he hadn’t known her to ever wait upon an invitation before charging in where angels feared to tread, but remembered the tiger and hustled her toward the house.

She pulled the hood back, her hair tumbling out in wild disarray. Her cheeks were a deep rose with the cold and her eyes spilled light that warmed far more than did the fire. She laid down a bundle of sticks and opened the door on the stove to shove several inside. The fire grasped them immediately, grateful for the sustenance.

“Really, Jamie, this fire wouldn’t warm a newt,” she said, shaking her head in disgust.

Jamie, nonplussed now that the immediate danger of tiger attack was over, merely stood and watched her add a few sticks of dry pine from her pack until the fire was roaring in a life-saving blaze.

Again from her pack, she unrolled a bundle of furs, thick and rich and black as night—sable if he knew his furs and he did. What he didn’t know was why she was here or how she had managed to find him when even he had no idea where he was.

“I kept dreaming you were in danger,” she said, “so I went to see your grandmother to find out what we could do about it.”

“My grandmother? Well, it all makes sense now,” Jamie said with no small annoyance.

“Does it?” she asked.

“Well, no,” Jamie admitted. “It’s just that anytime my grandmother gets involved, things tend to get confusing and complicated to a truly impressive degree. So the fact that she’s connected with you showing up here without warning, when even I don’t know where ‘here’ is, does make things a bit clearer. Though the fact that my grandmother is in the mix does beg the question of—”

Pamela cut him off from that avenue of inquiry, by handing him a tiny bottle, saying, “Drink this.”

He took it, surprised at the weight of it. It was silver, though dark with tarnish, strange words inscribed on its sides. But because it was Pamela, he simply unstopped the bottle and drank down what it contained. It was thick and stung his mouth like nettles, but it tasted oddly ambrosial as well. Heat flooded his body along the path of the drink.

“Now get undressed and get into the furs.”

Jamie was tempted to look around to see if there was a tiny door with the address ‘W. RABBIT’ engraved upon a brass plate, but squelched the thought under the stern look Pamela was giving him. And though he had no memory of shedding his clothes, he soon found himself under the furs, disturbingly bare.

“Where is Casey?” he asked, thinking it would have been wise to ask the question before getting naked.

“Oh, he’s here too, just a bit behind me is all.” She waved airily and producing another flask—this one copper—she drank its contents.

“Would you mind terribly,” he asked, buried in a sable quilt that reached his chin, “pouring a bit of hot tea on my nose?”

“Jamie,” she sighed, “please quit messing about. This isn’t a tea party and you are most certainly not a dormouse, by any stretch of ludicrous imagining.”

She was speaking in an odd mixture of Gaelic, Russian and her own native English. Jamie wondered if the drink had been absinthe or something akin to it for he seemed to be lost in dreams that made only a dream world sense. There was no flavor of either wormwood or gall on his tongue, however, only that strangely warm and stinging taste that lingered all the way down his throat.

Feeling giddy or drunk or high or poisoned, or possibly all of the above, he found himself declaiming in verse—

“In my youth, said the fool, though I was learned and fair
I was considered both a rogue and a wit,
My reputation was sullied and bruised as a pear
Though ‘tis true that I liked to be bit.”

Pamela sighed as though taxed by a small, badly-behaved boy. “Alright, have it your way, but I refuse to wear a hat or drink from a dirty teacup and I insist on fresh butter for my bread.”

And then, clad still in her furs, she said,

“You are fair, said the maid, as I’ve mentioned before
But I find you uncommonly glib
And if you give tongue to rhyme anymore
I shall give you a dig in the rib.”

The fur slid from her shoulders and dropped to the floor. Underneath she was completely naked. Jamie found himself wordless with surprise. Dear God, but he had forgotten how beautiful she was. She was the poem he had never written, as perfect as unspoken thoughts traced upon an orchid.

“Poets make the most conceited lovers,” she said. “For instance right now you’re comparing my skin to orchids, but are not sure how to tie that in with the ink of blood that runs in traceries of a thousand rivers beneath my skin. Aren’t you?”

“Are you reading my mind?” he asked, thinking she looked rather like a stern and wildly seductive nun at present.

“Maybe, I’m not sure. You’re a bit transparent right now. It could be that
you
are reading
my
mind.”

“Now you’re being contrary,” he said, still trying to see around her, wondering what in hell ‘a bit behind me,’ meant concerning her husband’s presence.

“He’s not terribly happy about me being here, but he came with me, so it’s alright,” she said in a manner Jamie found incredibly blithe for a woman wearing no more than her socks. “Besides, this is a simple thermal exchange from one body to another, the best way to warm you up.”

The heat from the stove was intoxicating. He was drunk with warmth and when she slid into the furs next to him, he gasped aloud at the fire of her skin. She shimmered with heat from head to toe and Jamie moved toward it as life will toward the sun that sustains it.

“Let me warm you,” she said softly, turning under him with the ease of water.

“But—I—”

“Jamie, it’s simple. I’m not really here.”

“I know,” he said softly, “because I’ve dreamed this too many times. Still, I can feel you and smell you. I don’t understand—”

“Neither do I, Jamie, but I don’t think it matters.”

“But—”

“Shh,” she put a finger to his lips to still his protest, and the white scent of water lilies rose up, a pale-tinted cloud to fill his senses. She was all velvet fire against him and his body could not help but respond.

She touched his face and said his name softly, so softly that he thought he might weep for the pain of hearing it so after all these months.

He felt himself shaking and could not stop. She merely held him tighter, her skin melding into his own, its heat thawing the frost at his core.

Now he could see the two of them from above, as though he were hovering over his body from somewhere near the ceiling. Was he dreaming, or was he dead?

And then he was lost in her heat, her scent and the feel of her beneath him, taking him down into a haze where he couldn’t define direction or thought, where nothing mattered but the two of them, stars caught fast in the crimson fire of the night. Her skin against his own, her scent mingling with his, the night silk of her hair in his hands and raining along his body.

Her eyes were a spring river into which he fell, the water of her dividing at his entry and then surrounding him in heat and life. She was the only solid point in an amorphous universe… the finding of his own forgetting, the substance that filled his missing parts.

Thought and time were lost to another world, one that did not exist for them. The warmth of the fire was still there, but he felt as though she were drawing him far, far away from this palace of ice, over seas and into a far country of summer wine and warmth.

“Don’t give up, Jamie, because you are needed and you are loved.” She took his face in her hands and kissed his forehead gently and he looked down, down into her eyes and felt as though he were a boat long lost at sea and now in sight of a harbor, where humanity might be rediscovered. The world was terribly still, and he wished...oh, how he wished to stop it here before she began to dissipate in his hands like smoke and stardust. No sooner did he think the thought then it became reality and he couldn’t feel her anymore. And the warmth, so recently found, began to drain from him like sand from an hourglass. He was so tired, so very, very tired…

Without warning, a big hand grabbed his and a jolt of heat ripped through him like lightning. A pair of dark eyes met his own and a decidedly rough and masculine voice said, “Don’t die. D’ye hear me, you bastard? Do NOT die!”