Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (87 page)

Dannyboy, keeping a wary eye out for Lucien, led Jamie back to his corner.

“What the hell do ye suppose ye are doin’ out there?” he asked in an enraged whisper. “Yer givin’ him every opportunity to pummel ye. The man intends to kill ye, are ye goin’ to stand back an’ let him do it?”

“I have,” Jamie said in a slightly slurred drawl, “no such intentions at all.”

“Lord above,” Dannyboy exclaimed having got a whiff of Jamie’s breath, “yer drunk. Ye must be mad,” he huffed in exasperation, “I want no part of this. Do ye want the man to kill ye because it seems that ye must. I’m callin’ this off now,” he turned and began to walk into the scuffed circle but was stopped by a steely voice at his back.

“You’ll do no such thing Dannyboy, this is my fight and it will be over when I deem it over.”

“It’ll be over when yer lyin’ with half yer blood on the ground an’ yerself well-prepared to go six feet under it,” Dannyboy said angrily.

“Then so be it,” Jamie said with a weary finality, “but regardless of what happens you’re to let the fight go on, even if you think he’s going to kill me.”

“Jamie lad,” Dannyboy began pleadingly but Jamie just shook his head and repeated stubbornly,

“It’s my fight and I have to end it here and now regardless of the outcome.” Dannyboy took in Jamie’s bleeding face, a welter of bruises and crusting blood and looked up into the green eyes which seemed much more sharply focused than they had a few minutes previous.

“Aye, it’s yer fight then,” he said and stepped away reluctantly.

Lucien came out solid and refreshed, dancing again, Jamie lurched unsteadily from his own corner and the fight was on again.

After five minutes Dannyboy didn’t think Lucien was trying to kill Jamie, he
knew
he was. Jamie was visibly exhausted, breathing heavily, gleaming with sweat, while Lucien, still high on adrenaline, thrashed him with blow after blow after blow until finally Jamie dropped to his knees and toppled over into the cold embrace of the ground.

Lucien, standing over him radiating a thrumming satisfaction, looked expectantly at Dannyboy.

“I believe, Mr. Kilmorgan,” he said, voice thick with satisfaction, “it’s customary to count at this time.”

Dannyboy reluctantly began to count. The first ten beats passed without so much as a stir from Jamie’s bloody form, another five and still nothing. He reached twenty before there was a small groan and Jamie’s head came up, slowly and stiffly, but up. Five more counts and the boy was on his knees, rising out of the dirt in a superhuman effort that had him on his feet only a half-count before thirty. Looking at him, Dannyboy fervently wished he’d stayed down.

Jamie stumbled back to the center, sinking slightly, knees trembling visibly in an effort to keep him upright. His right eye was swollen shut and crusted tight with drying blood, his ribs densely bruised and a huge welt was rising out of his jaw. He was breathing heavily and Dannyboy, long experienced in such things, heard the sound of air being drawn through blood.

If Lucien had been a fair man with an ounce of compassion he’d have offered a draw, but it seemed that the Reverend was far from finished with Jamie. He smashed a right and left punch into Jamie’s face, re-opening the partially sealed cut above his eye and mashing his knuckles into the other. Jamie stumbled backwards and managed, though just barely, to keep on his feet. He then lurched forward and fell into the Reverend’s arms. Lucien held his swaying body and said in a low voice,

“The girl is alive because it suits me to have her so at present. It won’t always suit me,” he pushed Jamie away with a vicious thrust, causing him to fall backwards and crash into one of the large boulders, “but for now she’s the only pawn of worth in our little game so it amuses me to keep her alive.”

Jamie rolled over onto his knees and Lucien kneeled down beside him, his voice silky and intimate, “But when I do kill her I shall do it slowly and I shall watch her die. What the boys on that train did to her shall be nothing compared to the lessons she’ll learn at my hand and then I shall tell you all about it, detail by painful detail.” He stood, trodding upon one of Jamie’s long, fine-boned fingers and turned his back on the man who knelt in the dust at his feet. It was his second mistake of the night; the first had been to forget what sort of mind he was dealing with. Dannyboy had forgotten as well.

From the dust he rose, fluid grace in firm place of the drunken stumbling of only seconds before. Through the bruises, the blood and the gore Dannyboy glimpsed something that looked very much like a murderous smile. And realized with a sudden shock that the boy had meant for this to happen, he’d meant to take a beating that would almost kill him in order to wear his opponent out and then, then it would be his turn.

“Reverend,” Jamie only uttered the one word, but it came with such chill and sober menace that Lucien whirled about at once.

Jamie stood just slightly away from the center of the improvised ring, flame throwing a hellish light over his bloodied form, a concentration in his eyes that seemed to still the atmosphere itself, as if the ground he stood upon were fixed solid in the universe while all else swirled about him. He lifted his chin slightly, easily, as a cat will scent the wind before moving in for the kill.

But Jamie did not move, he stood still, his gold bloody but undimmed. Like the mythical Peris, he seemed descended from fallen angels and cast forever out of Paradise. And he made, through sheer will, the Reverend come to him. Lucien came across the space quickly and Jamie held up his arms as if inviting him, demanding of him that he hit him.

Dannyboy held his breath wondering what the boy had planned and then saw it clearly. Jamie, a southpaw, had led with his right all night and saved his left for this moment.

He parried Lucien’s blows easily with his right forearm and brought around his left in a crippling hook that hit the side of Lucien Broughton’s head like the sound of a thousand trumpeting angels. Dannyboy grinned, he ought to have known better, the boy always saved something for the end.

Jamie did not just beat Lucien, he dissected him, took him apiece part by part, calmly, surely. He broke him down mentally and physically until the Reverend lay gasping in the dust, his head rising up slowly like a drowning man searching for a desperate breath. Dannyboy counted the seconds with joy, whooping when he came to thirty and the Reverend still lay on the ground, eyes glazed, uttering an occasional small sound, like that of a wounded rodent.

“Reverend,” Jamie said, putting the point of his foot under the man’s chin and forcing him to look up into his face, “I thought perhaps you’d like to know that at this moment eight crates of guns are being removed from a small island and they’ll be dumped in the ocean, in an unknown location.”

Lucien made a strangled noise, blood trickling in a steady line from the corner of his mouth. From far below came the sound of a vehicle stopping and voices speaking. Jamie leaned over, his voice like a razor blade running the length of the Reverend’s spine, “And if you ever touch a hair on her head I’ll see you in hell.” He straightened, body slightly stiff, knuckles cut and running with blood.

“There are men coming for him,” Jamie said to Dannyboy. “They’ll take him away. Can you manage him for a few minutes?”

“Ye just try me boy,” Dannyboy replied with relish and then in a softer tone he added, “don’t drown out there; ye took a fair few hits to the head.”

“How do you know where I’m going?” Jamie asked, a light smile on his lips.

“Because I know ye lad, an’ if ye could go to the woman an’ find yer comfort there ye would but ye can’t, so ye’ll go to yer other mistress an’ let her do what she can to heal ye. Go on,” Dannyboy nodded out towards the cliff where rock fell and bowed before the wrath of water, “let the sea do its work.”

Jamie went, the sound of the waves crashing in his ears, the scent of it in his nose, swirling heavy in his veins. The path he took was an old one and his feet remembered every rock of it, every twist and turn and blade of grass.

He hit the water running, dove in and glided through the icy currents. He let it carry him for a ways after that, held sure in its embrace and felt the blood sluice off his skin as it returned from whence it had come.

Later, much later, he lay near the shore, head pillowed by kelp as the frothing fingers of the sea danced up and down his body, easing the ache, dousing the fires of pain.

Above him, the cauldron of night had tipped back taking its spill of clouds and leaving the heavens open in all their glory. In the east where all things begin, sat a small but steady star, nascent with beginnings, glowing with the gold, green and roses of the nebulae, fresh from the cradle of infant stars.

“Shall I name you?” Jamie asked the star, as saltwater lapped at his skin.

The star sparkled in reply.

Jamie laughed aloud and felt something within him stir and break free.

“I shall call you Hope,” Jamie said to the star and the night and the sea and perhaps even to God.

Myth teaches us that when a star falls a soul dies but when a star comes new to the sky, as if God had opened his fist and rolled it gently into the heavens, it means a soul has been reborn.

Dearest Jamie,

 I’m sitting here in your study and you, for once, it would seem, are asleep. Oblivious and safe upstairs. In two hours, we leave. Gone to Boston and, one hopes, a new life. Somewhere that Casey can manage to avoid a bullet for more than a month at a time.

I had planned to slip away without a word, but find here at the last, I cannot do that. For what you have been to me, I owe you more than that. I owe you the truth.

I came to you deliberately, put myself on your doorstep like an unwanted alien. I imagine you may know this already, but what you don’t perhaps know is that I had help in placing me there.

My father, you knew him once and I can only guess what you may have observed or learned, was part of Clann na Gael, what was left of it in those years at least. It was an accepted part of my life and republicanism was in my blood. I am more similar to Pat and Casey than I can ever tell you. After my father was gone, an old friend of his approached me from the New York chapter. To make a long story short, I did occasional work for them. Young, pretty girls are asked a lot fewer questions at customs. I never asked what I couriered, never really cared. The cause was not necessarily mine but it was something I could do for my father, I know that makes no sense but when do the dealings of blood make any sense? I guessed a month or two into the game that I really had no idea who I was working for and suspect, if I was to find out, that I wouldn’t like the answer very much.

I suppose you may have guessed the next part? I was placed as a spy in your home. They suspected you of dealings with the British government. I was to find a way into your life. You made it rather too simple for me and I, I repaid your generosity with betrayal. Though you never really left much of a trail for me to follow, did you? I wondered about that, did you know not to trust me?(The erotic Arabic poetry in rhyming quatrains was a nice touch; Herr Blumfeld is probably still blushing). You were right from the beginning, I lied, a set of obvious lies to smokescreen the more complicated ones. And it was complicated.

I didn’t set out to harm you. That may be hard to believe but I didn’t. Once I saw you again, I only wanted to save you from whatever demons you couldn’t outrun. And now I’m saving you from myself.

I didn’t always lie Jamie. That day last summer when I told you I’d give you everything, I meant it. It wouldn’t have been hard, you’ve held my soul in your hands from the first moment I saw you. You opened your hands that day though and let me go. Know that some of me remains behind and always will.

Remember Maude for me, will you? I entrust my memories, the joy and the pain of them, to your safekeeping.

And so to business. I think the Duke was up to his eyeballs in bad dealings, I think it’s why he’s dead. I’ve got no proof to back that up but it’s a feeling, female intuition if you will. As for Lucien Broughton, well, recent events have cast a strange light onto him. That night in the fire—well I still can’t say with any certainty what exactly happened but when the constable attacked me there was someone standing over his shoulder in the flames. I was knocked unconscious and when I came to, as you know, was safe and sound on the doorstep of the Church. The face I saw in the flames was his, Jamie, an unlikely hero I know, but there you have it. Of course as we both know, guardian angels come in all sorts of shapes and guises. Don’t they?

To end I leave you my talisman, the one you gave me so long ago, for love and luck you said and so I return it to you, hoping it will always give you these gifts in abundance.

May God go with you wherever the journey may lead.

Pamela.

Morning had come while he sat reading her letter and a chance ray of sun had stolen through the fog, entering the object he held in his hand in one smooth beam and leaving it in a hundred splintered rainbows. A blue crystal angel, given long ago and now returned to the giver.

Jamie stood, placed the tiny angel on top of a sheet of paper that held unfinished lines of verse and walked over to the study doors. He grasped the handles and turning them, pushed the doors slowly outward. A morning breeze, earthy with the scent of rotting leaves and woodsmoke, drifted and sighed about his senses. He bowed his head knowing he only imagined the greening scent that underlay it, the promise of spring, the beginning in the ending. Then raising his head, he opened his eyes to morning and to light.

Praise for Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears

‘Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears’ quickly immerses you into the vicious inner circle of 1969 Irish-American politics of South Boston, leaving you desperate for the shores of a gem across the Atlantic; those of the Emerald Isle. However, Ireland remains much the same as generations past, presenting beloved characters with trials and tribulations of love, life and fierce reality. Cindy Brandner skillfully plays an emotional tug-of-war with your heart strings on Irish and American shores, creating a roller coaster ride that you will not soon forget.

- Shannon Curtis, Shamrocks and Stones