Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (60 page)

They came for him in the night
—faceless men in the dim of the infirmary, manhandling him with no small viciousness. He understood where they were taking him and knew it was inevitable. What was less certain was what path inevitability was about to take him down.

Isay was seated in the kitchen of the modest hut, a hunting rifle propped between his knees. Jamie was lightheaded with fatigue and the drugs Shura had given him for pain and fever. There was a lantern on the table but to his hazed vision it seemed only a smeary slide of dancing light, Isay’s thick features swimming in and out of focus. He could smell Svetlana’s blood, could almost see it splashed all over the bed and up the walls. He wondered what the man had done with her body, if she would be buried with respect or tears.

“You sit there,” Isay pointed a meaty finger toward one of the kitchen chairs. Jamie sat, hoping it would help him restore some sort of equilibrium. Isay had been drinking, and Jamie knew his capacity, like most alcoholics, was near to limitless.

“Where I come from in Siber we have a game we play sometimes. It is called ‘Tiger’. You know this game?” Isay was shining the length of the rifle barrel and Jamie felt certain that he knew this particular game, only the name changed sometimes. But he replied the only way he could.

“No, I’m not familiar with this game.”

“This is fine, for I am going to tell you how this game is played. I am going to tell you the rules.”

Jamie fought to clear his head, knowing he was going to need every wit he possessed very shortly, despite the man’s seemingly friendly tone.

“Not all men have seen the tiger, even those who live in the taiga all their lives. But I have seen him many times. I have taken him down. You know what they say about the tiger—for every time you have seen him, he has seen you one hundred times and remained invisible to your weak human eye. They also say that the tiger, he never forgets a slight, never forgets what each of his enemies smells like, he never forgets the taste of a man’s blood once it crosses his tongue, no matter how briefly.”

Isay stopped polishing the rifle but his hand remained on the stock, caressing it as though it were a woman.

“Where I grew up, you have to know how to kill from the time you are small in order to survive. There the tribesmen say that every man has an animal inside that he will recognize as his own soul. I had dream about you and in that dream you and I were both tigers. Two male tigers cannot be in the same territory. One must die. It is how nature deems it to be.”

“What is it that you want, Isay?” Jamie asked, tired of the man’s story, and wanting only to end it.

“Tigers hunt, that is their nature. So you and I will hunt. I will be fair.” He tossed a pile of clothes at Jamie. “That will keep you warm enough to survive,” he chuckled, “as long as you don’t quit moving.”

There were felt-soled boots lined with wool, woolen pants, mittens and a coat. A hat too, lined with fur.

“Put them on. There is no room for false modesty here, not between us, no? We have fucked the same woman after all.”

Jamie put the clothes on, not daring to turn his back on the man. Adrenaline was coating his every nerve ending but it had the advantage of clearing his head. At least he was steady on his feet now.

“You are ready to play our little game?” Isay’s grin was a leer, anticipating several hours of blood sport.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Jamie said tersely.

“Then go,” Isay said. Jamie stepped toward the door, knowing his time was finite. Something in the air flicked at his primal brain and he stepped away from Isay, almost out of reach, but not quite.

“Oh, one more thing.”

Jamie turned just as the knife took him in the hip, a sharp blade of pain like ice slicing through his blood, destroying Shura and Violet’s handiwork and buckling his knees with the agony of it. It might have been worse had he not checked at that last second.

Isay smiled down at him, a feral, dark thing. “Now run, tiger, tiger,” he said. “I will give you a half hour head start, but then be ready because I am coming for you. I left the gate behind the woodshed open, so choose your path carefully.”

Because there was no choice, Jamie ran. Where the knife had cut him, he could feel the blood welling hot, the scent of it would draw every wild animal within the trees and the droplets of it in the snow were going to provide Isay with all the trail he needed to chase him. It wasn’t a fair fight, but then he had never expected one from this man.

The night was bitter, clear like the finest vodka, hung with fire and stars. It hurt to breathe in, both because of the cold and because every breath caught at the stab wound, dragging jagged over bone and open flesh. The gate was indeed open, the snow beyond virgin and silver. He went through the gate, drawing in the fiery air despite the pain for the clarity it brought.

Inside the perimeter of the trees he stopped, reaching under a fallen birch to retrieve a canvas bag, a bag filled by his own premonitions, a bag that Svetlana had helped him hide though neither of them could have foreseen just how this situation would play out.

He stopped a few minutes later in a spot he remembered where sphagnum moss grew in a boggy patch. He stuffed as much as he could into the pack, pulling up more to staunch the blood at his side. It would have to do, and he hoped the reek of his own blood would not prove to be the calling card that drew his death to him. He needed to keep to the forest tracks. There was less snow there and he would be less easily followed where the trees grew especially dense. He might not survive this, but he wasn’t going to make it easy for that son-of-a-bitch either.

He set a pace he thought he could maintain without weakening too badly. Behind him he heard the spine-shivering noise of a hound baying. Isay was bringing his dog.

The birches rose like ghostly maidens from the snow, the firs dark wayposts by which to guide oneself—if one had any clue where one was. He pulled in his focus. If he was going to be treated like an animal, hunted like an animal, he was going to have to think and move like an animal. Observe, decipher, catalogue. It wasn’t impossible, he had done it before, but never bleeding and weak as he was now. When you were prey you kept moving, or you went to ground, as well camouflaged as you could manage. When you were the predator, you kept moving too, for to stop in this land of the long winter was to die, whether you were tiger, bear, wolf or man.

So he moved, putting the pain to one side. The soft-soled boots allowed him to run lightly and as long as he moved swiftly he didn’t sink into the snow, for a hard crust overlay the softer snow underneath. This current cold followed a few days of unseasonably spring-like weather. Isay would likely wear snowshoes. Isay would take every advantage he could. Isay did not know that Jamie had a few advantages of his own.

Long ago, he had been trained in the ways of tracking both animals and men, how to shift one’s vision so that one saw the invisible. It was about abandoning your normal parameters and seeing through the eyes of primitive instinct, about realigning the borders of your normal human perspective to something far older and less civilized. You couldn’t rely on visual prints in the forest. You had to understand other things, other signs that said either man or animal had come this way. He had also been trained well in the art of evasion, and how to turn the tables.

He understood from the start that Isay would drag this out to savor the game before the kill. He wouldn’t want to finish it tonight, with only a couple of hours before the dawn. But that did not mean he wouldn’t taunt him, harry him, and try to drain what strength he had, out in the cold and merciless forest.

It was a strange night, both beautiful and terrible in its lineaments. He had found this a few times before in his life. Stripped to the essentials of survival, one saw the naked heart of human existence, the dreadful fragility of bone and flesh against the elements, against every force that conspired against survival in the first place.

Thoughts ran fleet through his mind, of friends and loved ones left behind, by now realizing his absence was longer than it ought to have been. These thoughts tangled with other things, the great starry dome above, fretted with a darkness that was different from the darkness at home. Here it was both steeper and longer and filled with echoes of that which had come this way but would not pass again. He thought of his sons, each in their turn, and of the towering firs that surrounded him, deaf to human need and grief. And he thought of an afternoon in a meadow and of the woman who had been there with him, and stumbled a little—which saved him from death.

The bullet whined through the air beside him, close enough so that he felt the heat of the forged metal. He had let exhaustion and sentimentality get the better of him in a moment when he could least afford it. He sprinted off the trail, which he realized he had been mindlessly following for the ease of it. He was so tired, the loss of blood muddling his head and instincts. The near miss had the effect of waking him up, sending adrenaline in a slick pour through his blood.

He stopped some ways into the trees. In the distance he could hear water moving under ice and the soft croak of a crow wakened from its sleep. His senses were dulling and he knew he could not go on much longer.

It was time to head for shelter. Dawn was near, and Isay had to be getting tired himself, not to mention that his absence from the camp would be noted. He was far off the trail now and no longer sensed the man or dog behind him. He took the precaution of backtracking through some of his own footprints, before heading for a windfall of trees he had seen earlier in the night. A covering of snow at least two feet deep lay over it, which made it the perfect shelter when he could not risk lighting a fire. He came to it from the far side, out from a large grouping of fir so that his footprints were indiscernible.

The stiffness in his side became pronounced as he knelt to dig out a small opening between the trunks of two fallen trees. Crawling in under the windfall proved difficult and opened the wound in his hip again. He could feel the heat of the blood spill out and into his clothing. Removing the bloody moss, he opened a small bottle of distilled alcohol from his rucksack and poured some directly onto the wound. He passed out for a few seconds from the pain, then came up gasping like a landed fish. He repacked the wound and bound it with a clean strip of cotton. He refastened his clothes. There was nothing he could do about the smell of blood. There was nothing to be done about the scent of his humanity, come to that.

The small hole he had entered through he re-packed with snow, except for a very narrow tunnel for air. He positioned the rucksack a few inches from the opening, dug a hole in the bed of needles and grasping the hatchet from the bag, rolled himself up in a sheet of canvas left over from some Red Army prisoner. Wedged carefully with his back to the lip of stone against which the trees had come to rest, he fell asleep.

The fever came on while he slept. He awoke stiff and shuddering, and knew immediately that his temperature had increased, for the ache in his body was due to more than just having slept rough and cold. He was parched as well, but not hungry. The knife he had been stabbed with had likely been filthy and the wound too deep for the moss to be entirely effective.

Outside his shelter it was twilight and time for him to move again, to get his blood flowing and some warmth into his extremities. He ate a few handfuls of snow to alleviate the fire in his throat. It tasted strongly of the cold amber of fir needles.

The stars were out, Saturn dimmed in the glow of a three-quarter moon. He took a breath of frigid air, shouldered his rucksack carefully and set out, light as a cat across the moon-limned landscape of the northern forest. Casting his senses out, he could feel Isay near. The hunt was on again.

The crisscrossing tracks he had so painstakingly laid out had given him the result for which he had hoped, for the prey was now stalking the predator. The edges of the dog’s prints were soft, crumbling to the touch, telling him that he was not far behind and must be careful not to stumble upon them.

The best trackers always had a sixth sense, that natural radar that swept the area surrounding them and told them when to stop and take notice of something that wasn’t quite right. With Jamie, it had always come like a whisper threading his senses that told him where to look, how to see, when to hesitate. And so he knew when something had changed on the trail ahead and when they stopped.

He reversed his path, stepping carefully in his own prints, and angled off through the trees, the hatchet an outgrowth of his own hand now after holding it all night, ready to strike if need be. He found a thick patch of rhododendron and hid behind it, careful not to rustle the dry leaves that still clung to the branches. He had traced an arc through the trees so that now he was almost directly behind them.

He crouched in the shrubs, breathing into his cupped hand so that the vapors weren’t out on the wind. He was downwind of the hound, though the dog’s ears pricked and its nose drank in the air as though it was identifying each molecule and storing it for future reference. Something of greater interest was on the airy pathways tonight, and Jamie thanked God he had befriended the dog and that his scent was likely on Isay’s own clothes, which would further confuse the issue.

Man and dog were lit with cold fire, standing upon the edge of a narrow river, thick with ice, each as clearly outlined as if they stood in bright sunlight. The fever had given his vision a surreal focus, making things painfully sharp. All his senses were preternaturally fluid and heightened, though he knew this was dangerous, that fever held its own delusions and they could kill a man. He was too far away to be certain of hitting Isay if he threw the hatchet. It would have to be in the head and it would have to land with enough force to split his skull.

He crept backwards out of the shrubs, easing his hold on the hatchet only slightly and headed in a northwest direction, checking the sky as he went. The moon had set and shadows cloaked the tops of the trees. Down here in the snow, the light was silver-blue and his eyes flowed along the landscape almost by feel—rock—stream—snag—his skin attuned to the wind and movement of branch and creatures that moved as he did, to the rhythms of the dark.