Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (68 page)

“What would you have had me do, Jamie?” she asked in a level tone, “Wait for you to quit anguishing over your sons and lost wife until you felt capable of loving someone again? What if that never happens? Is a life of waiting in vain better than making the best of the situation you are in? Have you found it to be so yourself?”

“Did you marry him to spite me?” Jamie asked his tone a little less malevolent.

“No more than I would marry any man to spite you, but I love him a great deal, more than I think you give credit for. Jamie.” She sighed, “What is the point of this? I’ve lived with him for months now, you had to see this was inevitable, this is where I’ve been headed with him from the start.”

“The point,” Jamie said leaning towards her so that she could smell the whiskey on his breath, “the point is I’ve gotten a divorce and I’m not finding it as liberating as I’d hoped.”

“Divorce? I thought your marriage had been annulled,” she said in confusion.

“It was. The annulment was enough for a long time, there was never, shall we say, any impetus to make it more formal, to sever the ties in a way that I felt was irrevocable.”

“I don’t understand, Jamie.”

“Don’t you? Or do you just not want to understand?” His eyes had turned an unnerving shade of deep, hard green, the hand that gripped the glass strained to the point of shattering the crystal it held.

“You told me to go away Jamie. You said you could not love me and that I was not to love you. I thought you meant it.”

“And I thought your feelings were genuine.”

“You’re drunk,” she said angrily.

“Yes,” he smiled, a poisonous show of teeth and parted lip. “Yes, I am. I’m drunk and I’m being honest. It’s a change for me, I’ve gotten so used to lying I can hardly recognize the appearance of truth much less the actuality of it.”

“What is it you are trying to say, Jamie?” She made an effort to gentle her voice, perhaps to undermine some of his hostility.

“Don’t try to handle me Pamela, I’m better at that particular game than anyone you’ve ever known.”

“I’m going,” she said rising quickly from the chair and knocking his drink flying from his hand in her haste.

“I’m sorry. I’ll get something, a cloth.”

“Don’t.” Jamie’s voice was ragged, exhaustion breaking through the sharp edges.

“It’ll ruin the rug; it’ll only take a minute.”

“I said don’t, I don’t give a good goddamn about the carpet at present.”

“Alright,” she replied quietly, standing still in the pooling, sinking whiskey.

“Do you know what it is I’m trying to tell you?” Jamie asked, willing her to look up and meet his eyes.

“I know what you think you want to say, but it’s maybe just the whiskey talking.”

“Will you please look at me, Pamela?” his voice had softened, drifting down around the edges beyond anger and spite.

She looked up as he’d requested and he almost wished she hadn’t such was the misery in her face.

“Do you think I don’t know my own feelings?” he asked, standing, crossing to her and taking her arms in the grip of his hands.

“No I don’t,” she said firmly, two white spots blazing along her cheekbones. “I think you’re panicking because I’ve distracted you these last few months and now I’m leaving and you’ll have to face yourself again. It scares you.”

“I love you,” he said, standing very, very still as if constrained by the air itself. “Don’t you understand?”

“What I understand, Jamie, is that you couldn’t feel that, nor certainly say it until you knew there was no possibility of my being able to accept and return those feelings equally. And that’s not love, that’s fear.”

“I divorced my wife Pamela before I knew you were married, before any of this seemed impossible.”

“Your wife, listen to yourself Jamie, you still call her your wife, not ex nor quite former. You are still a married man in your heart and no amount of legal papers is going to change that.”

“Now who’s afraid?” Jamie asked bitingly.

“I asked you once,” she said softly, tears gathering in the corner of her eyes, “not to hold me in your hands if you couldn’t hold me in your heart. Now I’m asking you not to hold me in your heart because you can’t hold me in your hands any longer.”

“And if I find I can’t let go?”

“You can,” she said and gently disengaged her arms from his fingers.

“Do you love him?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?”

“No, I don’t suppose I do.”

Through the canted windows of the study came a sighing breeze, fluttering the pages of an open book, turning it on to the next chapter without the allowance of finishing the present one. A breath of lilacs, white and heady, accompanied it.

“You came with the spring, perhaps it is fitting that you leave with it as well.” His hands dropped to his sides, the long, graceful fingers unfolding and releasing. He drew a ragged breath and then continued in a voice so tired and low she had to strain to hear. “I apologize for my behavior; the whiskey can hardly take the blame for such a display. From knight errant to court fool in one move, how swiftly the fates canter across our little stage.”

The telephone rang and he cursed softly.

“Answer it, it may be important,” she said, welcoming the momentary respite.

The conversation heard only from her end was terse, accomplished mostly in one word sentences.

“Excuse the interruption,” he said only a minute later. “It seems my bid to cast myself into the political ring has been accepted.”

She gasped and looked at him in shock.

“The look on your face isn’t terribly flattering. Though perhaps you have to be forgiven for supposing I would let the fair Reverend have his way with my father’s old district. I had, however, planned to get off the fence in all manner of ways today. I suppose though, considering recent developments, this will have to suffice.”

“Congratulations,” she said, through a throat that felt suddenly tight.

“Congratulations to you as well,” he said, “and I mean that. I hope, if this is what you want it will make you happy.”

She nodded, “Are we saying goodbye then, Jamie?”

A long moment stretched between them, sundered by sunlight and dancing dust motes, before Jamie replied quietly and in a tone of voice she was accustomed to, “I rather think we must, don’t you?”

She reached up quickly, touched the side of his face and said, “God go with you wherever the journey may lead.”

She fled the room and was gone before she could hear him say, in perfect and unfettered Arabic, “And also with you, my love.”

From under his desk, where he’d lain in atypical good behavior throughout the whole miserable interview, Montmorency emerged. He padded over to Jamie and laid his head against his leg, wagging his tail in commiseration. Jamie reached down and patted his piebald head.

“Well Monty, we have the consolation of trying. And trying, as they say, at least requires action.”

In answer, Montmorency walked slowly over to the study door, lay down, put his muzzle upon his brindled paws and sighed a thoroughly heartfelt, heartbroken canine sigh.

“My thoughts exactly,” Jamie said.

For a man who’d no great fondness for water Casey Riordan seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time in it. Submerged up to his neck, the hour somewhere on the wrong side of midnight and not a damn boat in sight.

“Where in Christ is he?” he asked through clenched teeth and blue lips.

“Do I,” Seamus spit a duck feather out of his mouth, “look as if I have any fockin’ idea?”

“Rhetorical question,” Casey muttered and hugged himself tighter against the frigid water.

“Five more minutes?” Seamus asked hopefully.

“Ten,” Casey amended, “we can’t afford to miss this shipment.”

“Christ I’m like to freeze my balls off in eight,” Seamus sniffed for emphasis.

“Think warm thoughts,” Casey said unsympathetically.

Silence reigned for the next two minutes, during which time Casey thought many dark things about the absent boat and its absent skipper and Seamus stifled an overwhelming desire to sneeze.

“How’s the wife?” he asked
sotto voce.

“The wife,” Casey said, “is fine.”

“Are ye happy then?”

Casey turned and threw a black look in Seamus’ general direction, “What the hell is this, highschool confession time?”

“Just tryin’ to make conversation,” Seamus said with an injured sniff, “yer mighty touchy these days.”

“Mighty touchy? I’m up to my damn neck in freezin’ cold water, a boatload of guns is late an’ if it doesn’t show up in the next five minutes it’s likely the both of us will be spendin’ the next twenty years in prison.”

“Shh—” Seamus grabbed his arm suddenly, “someone’s watchin’ us.”

“What, where?” Casey instinctively dropped lower, until there was only a hair between his nose and the water.

“I don’t know, it’s only a feelin’, the back of my neck is creepin’ like a caveman’s with a sabertooth tiger behind him.”

Casey, ignoring his own discomfort, focused on the back of his own neck and felt the small hairs rising. Seamus was right, someone and not too distant, was watching them.

“Yer right, I can feel it too.”

“We’re trapped,” Seamus said with a grim finality.

“No we’re not, I’d rather die than go back to jail,” Casey replied just as grimly.

“What do ye suggest we do?”

“We turn around slowly,
very
slowly an’ then we assess the situation before we do anything.”

“Right,” Seamus sounded less than convinced of the genius of this particular plan but took a deep breath and began to turn with Casey. The feeling of being watched intensified with each second that passed. Were there guns trained on them? Would they open fire first and ask questions later? Casey closed his eyes as he made the last step that turned him a full one hundred and eighty degrees. He then opened them and had to fight the desire to laugh. In front of him, floating serenely, heads cocked in curiosity was a three-man flotilla of ducks.

“Ducks,” Casey said just as Seamus sneezed.

“I’m allergic, just the thought of them damn feathers is enough to set me off,” Seamus said and sneezed again, a strange gurgling noise as he’d lowered his head into the water.

“Stop that would ye? We’ll get caught for certain.”

“I can’t help it,” Seamus said, “I’ve always been allergic, my Auntie Kate,”
sneeze,
“who lived in Canada,”
sneeze
, “sent us a down quilt,”
sneeze
, “when I was a boy,”
sneeze
, “an’ we all shared the same bed,”
sneeze,
“the four of us, head to toe,”
sneeze,
“It was the height of luxury,”
sneeze,
“an’ the thought of sleepin’ under it,”
sneeze
, “was like heaven itself had floated,”
sneeze
, “down onto our bed,”
sneeze.
“I almost died under the,”
sneeze
, “damned thing. Nearly squeezed my lungs shut.”

“Bless ye,” Casey said darkly, fluttering the water near the ducks in an effort to shoo them off. They merely cocked their heads in the other direction and happily rode the waves he caused with his hands.

“Move.”

Both he and Seamus sidled away from the ducks, trying not to leave the cover of the overhanging willows whose branches trailed along the water’s surface. The ducks followed. By now, Seamus had dissolved into a flurry of sneezes, one following so close upon the last that he sounded as if he were alternatively choking and drowning.

“Hold yer breath,” Casey said.

“For what?” Seamus managed to gasp out between paroxysms.

“For this,” Casey replied and placing a large hand on Seamus’ head shoved him under water. After a last gasping wheeze, Seamus subsided under Casey’s hand.

He listened carefully to the night around him, the ducks were silent behind him but he’d heard something under Seamus’ sneezes or perhaps he’d felt it. It came again just as Seamus emerged from the water, took a breath and plunged under once more.

Casey stilled himself, forcing his heartbeat to slow and his breath to become even. There was a definite throb in the water, a gentle susurration that was too rhythmic to be made by nature. It was the feel of an engine slicing through water. He filled his lungs with air and bent his knees down until only his eyes were above water, with measured and agonizingly slow movement he walked forward through the screen of branches.

He could see at once that something was strange because the boat moved all wrong. Erratically and too fast, pushing with great speed toward them. He stepped back through the water, reached down and grabbed Seamus by the hair and moving as fast as the water would allow, ran for shore.

They hit ground on their knees. Seamus, understanding only that something had gone awry, bolted to his feet and ran with Casey.

Behind them the boat struck the shore and halted with a grinding crunch, then there was only time for a heartbeat and thunder split the air forcefully with a great cracking boom followed by a flash of light that temporarily blinded the two of them.

Casey turned back to see long flames cleaving into the darkness, burning deep in violet and blue tongues.

“Oh Jesus,” he whispered, “Jesus—the guns.”

“The guns?” Seamus said incredulously, “Someone just tried to kill us. An’ what about the pilot of the boat.”

“Already dead,” Casey said harshly, “saw him tied on deck, couldn’t see clearly but it looked as if his throat were slit.”

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Seamus was still low to the ground, his head bobbing around in an effort to scan the area.

“We don’t move just yet,” Casey whispered, “they may think we’re dead in the water right now but if we start movin’ they’ll know for certain we’re not.”

Seamus nodded his agreement. They’d hung onto some small luck and landed in a hollow of land, bumped and ridged around them, unpredictable enough to make them seem no more than another knobbly bit of grass and rock. Or so they hoped. Behind them a large hill rose, close enough to provide them some cover and not allow anyone to sneak up on their backs.