Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (61 page)

He knew the line between this hyper-sensitive state and exhaustion was extremely thin. He needed to find shelter again, somewhere he could light a fire before it was too late. Somewhere he could lie down and likely die, perhaps even before Isay and his hound found him. That was about as much favor as he could expect from the universe at this point. Dying from cold was supposed to be peaceful, though he begged leave to wonder just who had reported on that particular finding.

He smelled the animal before he saw it. Being outdoors for any length of time sharpened a man’s senses, but the scent of blood was so familiar right now that he could not mistake it. It was hot and thick on the air. Something recently killed lay in his path. He slowed to a walk, the scent pulling him the way a woman would, to a place beyond thought that lay in the primordial brain, shivering along the spine in tiny branching pools.

The kill was fresh, a stag, felled, blood still steaming, the snow around stained a rich crimson. He was very hungry, the fever no longer hiding basic bodily requirements, and he needed the nourishment if he was to continue. But this stag had been killed by something very big and very lethal and if it was still nearby Jamie knew he risked being killed himself. Predators were known to share, but one never knew when the meat was an open invitation and when it had merely been left for a few minutes. In the latter case, it was viewed as robbery and punished accordingly should the thief be caught at the kill.

He would have to risk it. He knelt in the snow, and put his hand in the blood that still pulsed slowly out of the throat. The blood was hot on his tongue, and slid down his throat easily, his stomach gurgling in response to the first sign of nourishment in days. He cut away some of the meat with his hatchet, well away from the bite marks that had already taken much of the stag.

He felt the eyes on him suddenly, a ripple up his backbone, a warning as old as man. The warning of an apex predator, a creature that was a perfect killing machine, against which there were few defenses. A creature that did not belong this far west, and therefore a creature for whom there was no rational explanation, yet it was as undeniable as the carrion scent that hit him with the force of a fist. He turned his head slowly.

The tiger stood looking at him, twenty feet away, a distance that was not even a full jump for a such an animal, eyes a blaze of green-white fire in the night. The fur of its ruff stood out, a gleaming frost white, the black stripes moving across its body like shadow over snow. Jamie knelt frozen by the stag carcass, knowing not to move until the tiger moved. If a tiger stepped forward, then a man could take one step back, but until the tiger advanced any move on his part would be seen as aggression or an open invitation to attack him.

He could feel the tiger’s breath, and heard his own respond in the rhythm of hot blood. They stood suspended between worlds, that of man and wild animal, where only the rules of one applied. For a moment their separate worlds overlapped, hanging there in the cold blue splendor of the night. With the taste of the same blood upon their tongues, they were one and understood each other with ease. To be the predator, one must not be seen, nor heard. One must become as a ghost, no more than a passing sigh upon the wind, which could turn into a tornado of killing claw and tooth in a mere second.

“Thank you, Amba,” he said softly, using the Udegai name for the tiger, conceding his right as czar of the taiga. One must thank the tiger and acknowledge the debt. The tiger continued to watch him, the green eyes as hypnotic as those of a forest djinn. Finally, it became clear that the tiger was not going to attack. Jamie stood slowly and backed away, one step at a time, with no clear idea of where the tiger’s territory began or ended.

It stepped forward, and for a heart-stopping second Jamie thought he had made a fatal mistake, though he knew already he would rather die under the tiger’s aegis than under that of a cuckolded husband. But then the tiger turned, its tail as long and thick as a grown man’s arm, glistening silver against the snowy forest trail. Jamie followed, compelled for a reason he could not put into words. Only that within the
umwelt
in which he and the tiger had met, he knew it meant for him to follow.

Time held no dominion that night. Fever brushed it aside as unnecessary to survival. He trotted behind the tiger, keeping pace, keeping a respectful distance as well. He felt, against all common sense and experience, that it had a purpose in taking him this way and that it was not, ultimately, to kill him. For the tiger was wounded too. It was there in the measured marks of his stride, small drops of garnet, glistening jewels on a bed of white velvet.

A strange strength entered his blood, his muscle and bone, allowing him to be fleet, to flow with the tiger, even as they both bled from their respective cuts. Together they had ventured across some boundary between reality and dream, though the substance of the cold and the taste of the stag’s blood seemed beyond question.

The air had lightened infinitesimally when the tiger stopped, turned and looked at him, eyes fired emeralds in the waking dawn. It was clear this was where they would part ways, for even a tiger knew when to hole up and rest, to nurse both wound and rage until strength returned. Jamie stopped and stood watching the animal melt away into the snow, becoming mirage-like in the pale morning.

He had not heard the dog since before spotting the stag the night before, but he knew this did not mean that Isay had lost his trail. Isay would have to stop and so would the dog, and Jamie knew that he needed rest now too, for with the tiger’s disappearance he had become aware of the burning pain in his side and how very cold he was.

He would never understand how he recognized the small hump in the snow for what it was, only that it reminded him of the fairy mounds back home. There was no trail, no pathway leading to a door and yet he had sensed the door there, waiting, covered in white. A sod hut, three-quarters underground. He had to clear the snow away from the door with his hands. Inside, when he stumbled down the short incline, it was little more than a root cellar. There was a potbellied tin stove, shelves with a few canned goods, some kindling and dry birch for the fire, two bottles of vodka and—most blessedly—a low-slung bedstead made from rough lumber and rope, with a straw mattress on top. He wanted nothing more than to collapse on it, but knew he had to light the fire first or he would die from the cold in short order. The smoke could and likely would lead Isay to him if he was close on his trail. Jamie would have to take that risk for he needed to change his dressing and to rest. And he needed to eat, if he could manage to cook the frozen lump of meat before succumbing to his exhaustion and blood loss.

The tin stove didn’t take long to heat to a cherry-glow. The low-slung bedstead was close beside it and Jamie sat there to remove the moss dressing from his side. The slash was swollen and angry looking, a flush of heavy red spreading out from it, heralding the infection that lay under the skin. But the moss had done its job, even if removing it was almost as painful as the original cutting. Moss, processed properly, had antiseptic qualities, but he had not had time to dry or clean it properly.

He cracked open one of the bottles of vodka, lay on his good side and poured the alcohol liberally into the infected wound. It wasn’t as painful as the last time, and he thought perhaps this wasn’t a good sign. He repacked the wound with moss again, this time taking care to remove as much debris from it as he could.

He cooked the meat directly on the tin stove, the sizzling blood scent of it simultaneously nauseating and enticing him. When it was cooked, he ate all of it, for he could not afford the scent drawing the dog to him. And then he lay down, pulling his coat tight around him, leaving his boots on and hoping that he would wake again. He thought about the tiger as he fell toward the fever’s dark abyss, and said a wordless prayer for both their souls.

She came awake in the moments before dawn
, heart thumping unpleasantly in her chest, breath short and limbs aching with cold. The dream still clung dense and thick, and it took several moments to get her bearings, to smell the warm, musky scent of Casey still deeply asleep beside her, to hear the soft hiss of the peat he had banked the fire with before they had gone to bed.

The covers were still heaped over her and heat pulsed from Casey’s recumbent form so she didn’t know why she was so cold. She listened carefully for Conor, but heard no sound from the other side of the wall. She eased her way out of bed, the dream still there in echoes and pulses—the snow, the cold, the dark. She shivered, trying to make sense of the jumbled images.

Pamela wrapped her robe around her body. It had been lying over the chair near the fire and the heat was like a shield between her and the strange dream world that she still felt as if she had one foot in, metaphysically speaking.

She checked on Conor, to find him sleeping heavily, turned on his tummy, mouth open, cheeks warmly pink. She adjusted his blankets, for his internal furnace ran high like his father’s and he tended to kick the covers off during the night. She breathed in his scent of milk and sweet dreams and then left the room.

She was too unsettled to go back to sleep, so headed down to the kitchen to make some tea. It was the wee hours, but she knew her slumber was done for the night.

Pouring a few teaspoons of dried lavender heads into the teapot, she filled it with water from the humming kettle. Around her, the house was quiet, whispering only of night things.

She sat by the fire, adding two bricks of peat and stirring the coals until they flared ruby-bright, throwing out a tremendous heat. Once the tea had steeped, she poured a cup and brought it back to the fireside.

She stared into the flames, sipping her tea, focusing on the pulsing glow of the coals and emptying her mind in order to bring the dream back. There were pieces of it there: a great snowy forest, a man on a dark horse, clad in a black cloak, coming remorselessly on through the snow, cloak hanging on the wind and the movement of the horse beneath him.

In daylight, she knew, she would chide herself for allowing this to worry her so, but here in the depths of night there was no such homely comfort. Rather, she had the distinct feeling that she had entered some strange realm, beyond dreams, and touched… what?

There was only one person she thought might be able to help her understand what was happening. She recalled the last words the woman had said to her before she left her cottage that day. She had taken Pamela’s face in her rough, brown hand, the scent of rosemary like sun-warmed pepper on her skin.

“How far can ye suspend yer disbelief? Ye’ve the eyes of one whose proper dwelling place is between the worlds, but do ye? Can ye believe in something which may make no sense to yer logical mind? That may go against all that ye’ve been taught for much of yer life?”

The woman’s green eyes had held her as though she was pinned to a board, her gaze searching in the dark corners of her soul. There was no point in lying to her, not if she wanted her help.

“Yes, I can,” she replied firmly. “Now, tell me what it is you have in mind?”

Away from the darkly enchanted feel of the cottage
and without Finola’s sharp presence to shore her up, explaining all this to one’s rather pragmatic husband and asking him to take part in it was a task that required gathering all of one’s courage into a tight ball and then just blurting it out—rather less eloquently than one had hoped.

“Have ye the drink taken?” Casey asked calmly when she had finished, the look on his face one of amused bemusement.

“No,” she replied indignantly, “I haven’t taken a drop of anything in months, as you well know.”

His next question was phrased in a deceptively mild manner. “Well, if yer not drunk, then perhaps ye’ve lost yer mind entirely?”

“I have
not
lost my mind,” she said firmly, trying and failing to judge whether this was going better than she had foreseen, or worse.

“Really? D’ye have the faintest notion of how fockin’ mad what ye’ve just suggested sounds? An’ when I say that, I don’t mean yer average garden variety mad neither. No, this is lock-ye-up-an’-throw-away-the-friggin’-key madness.”