Garrett Investigates (11 page)

And they never saw her.

She did not need to descend again. The route she followed led to the Pont Saint-Michel, a bridge even more cramped and medieval than the Rue de Lutéce. If the Rue Saint-Denis was one of Paris’ most ancient roads, the Pont Saint-Michel was one of its first bridges, and the broad stone thoroughfare had only been replaced once. Alone of the bridges of Paris, it still held its two rows of medieval houses, blocking the view of the water on either side—unless you were lucky enough to dwell in one.

“Lucky,” perhaps, being a relative term, as some of them were unplumbed even now, and there were said to be no colder houses in Paris. Comfort, however, was not an issue for everyone. These houses leaned together like spinster aunts, their wattle-and-daub walls stained tea-brown between the timbers. The walls bowed and bulged with a weight of years that Mary, still in her first century, found somewhat incomprehensible—and oppressive to contemplate.

On the fifth sharply peaked roof from the Île de la Cité, Mary stopped. There were no trees here, but the dark and chill cloaked her. After glancing both ways to be sure she was unobserved, she lowered herself from the roof-edge to a narrow balcony overhanging the river. Her feet touched lightly; she turned to knock on the frame of the curtained window beyond. The frame, because she was haunted by a vision of the ancient leading between the tiny diamond-shaped panes shredding at the first tap.

She didn’t actually need to rap. The curtains twitched back at the first sound, and the opposite casement swung wide. There were no candles or lamps within to silhouette the woman who held the window open, but Mary’s eyes gathered starlight like a cat’s. She saw a round, pleasant face like an egg in a nest of red curls, and the white shift with its low, ruffled neckline—a nightgown far from warm enough for the season.

Not that this woman could any more feel a chill than Mary could. Which was only one of the reasons that Mary had brought her, too, into the resistance. Another of Paris’s resident expats who would fight for her past that last breath.

“Mary,” Alice Marjorie said, in her gentle Scottish burr. “Come in before you catch your death, my dear.”

***

A candle did burn, but in the front room, where its light would be seen lighting the curtains with a warm glow from the street. For Mary and for Alice, this was light enough.

Before the war, the house might have burned bright with electric lamps from Dr. Tesla’s broadcast power. But Telsa had mured himself up in his booby-trapped generator tower like a wizard in a storybook and he’d not been seen outside its walls for years. It was anyone’s guess what the old man was eating in there.

On the subject of eating, the lack of such things as cups of tea and plates of biscuits robbed wampyr society of many of the little niceties by which humans persisted. In their place, Alice brought Mary within and led her to the front window in which there was no candle. The façade of the old house leaned out over the bridge’s stone thoroughfare, so when Alice drew the curtain back and Mary leaned her face alongside, she could see all the way into the Île de la Cité.

“Did you come that way?” Alice asked.

Mary nodded.

“And no trouble?”

“No one so much as looked up.”

“You were fortunate the breeze was blowing from the West.” Alice’s words were cold on Mary’s ear. She had no breath, as such: her lungs were just a bellows for her speech. That, more than anything, had taken Mary some getting used to. “Do you see the three young women there, in their grey uniforms, talking with the S.S. officer?”

“Oh.” Indeed, Mary could hardly miss them now that Alice had pointed them out. Mary could not see the barbed and crossbarred hooks of their insignia from here, but she hardly needed to.

“Indeed,” said Alice. “Ruth Grell is not the only wolf in town.”

“They’re hunting her.”

“Of course they are,” said Alice. “They are fanatical warriors, and she killed the man they were oathbound to protect. Also, there was word on the shortwave this evening: the Russians will be in Paris before the week is out.”

Mary did not state the obvious. Ruth must be gone before the Russians arrived. The Prussians were distracted by survival: the Slavs would have nothing on their minds but vengeance. She only nodded once more. “I am open,” she said, “to suggestions.”

“Letters of transit,” Alice said. “You must steal them from the Prussians. They will keep you and Miss Grell safe behind Prussian lines until you can reach Calais. I have heard that the Americans are not yet in Calais. Nor is it blockaded. Prussian officers have taken ship there for South Africa and Argentina. That’s Miss Grell’s best hope for freedom. And even if she is taken on a ship in the Atlantic, it’s likely to be into American or Iroquois custody—”

She might live.
Oh, she would stand trial: assassin or not, she had been an officer in the Prussian’s most elite corps of shock troops. But the Americans did not wear the scars this war had left upon Mother Russia, with two-thirds of her young men dead and most of her young women now under arms as well.

Mary Ballard believed most deeply that the woman with the German Chancellor’s blood on her hands deserved to live. To go free, preferably. But most of all, to live.

“I’ll need plans of the Préfecture de police.” She had been there, on one midnight raid or another. But a cautious spy did not trust too much to memory. And so a cautious spy lived to spy another day.

“You’ll have them,” said Alice Marjorie. “And I would suggest that with three Sturmwölfe on the prowl, you find a more discreet route home.”

***

Mary took the Metro home, too aware of curfew looming to enjoy watching the other passengers. Far less fun than running the rooftops, but it brought her beneath the feet of any hunting Ulfhethnar. They would not be hunting
her
—at least, she hoped not—but that did not mean it would be wise to draw their attention. And walking at street level did allow her to stop for groceries at a boulangerie, and at a café that would allow her to carry a hot chocolate away in a paper cup—an innovation of the occupation, which the lower-ranking Prussians had encouraged mightily.

The basement flat had a door that led into the area, below street level. When Mary let herself back inside, Ruth was sitting up in bed. She looked less pallid, as if the blood were coming back into her body. She also looked—and smelled—uncomfortable.

“Where did you go?” she asked, as Mary locked the door.

“It’s best if you don’t know that,” Mary answered, setting the food aside, on top of the trunk in which Ruth had arrived.

Ruth nodded. She slid her feet, still in their doubled stockings, over the edge of the cot and tested them against that rug. “You mentioned a toilet.”

“Just up the stairs. We share it with the ground-floor flat, which usually isn’t an inconvenience for me.” Mary shrugged self-deprecatingly. “There’s no tub, but I can give you a washcloth and soap. You can heat water on the burner.”

The relief on the girl’s face was palpable. Mary, looking at her, tried to see the storm trooper, the soldier, the assassin. She could recognize nothing in Ruth except the countenance of a weary child.

She crouched hastily, breaking eye contact. There were rags for washing in the chest beneath the cot. She extracted a couple, and a cracked cake of soap that had once been scented with lemon verbena.

“Sorry,” she said, offering the soap. “It seems to have been there longer than I thought.”

Ruth’s fingers brushed her palms. The nails were long and transparent and faintly smoky, filed to a tidy oval shape. The color put Mary in mind of the mica lantern-panes of her youth.

Ruth swallowed audibly. “Can you—”

“Of course,” Mary said, and with a hand on her elbow, stood her up and steadied her toward the stairs.

Ruth managed the climb better than Mary had expected. Her strength and steadiness were improving with the superhuman rapidity one would expect. More food, Mary judged, would be the cure.

Mary stood guard outside the toilet while Ruth refreshed herself. When she’d finished, Mary escorted her back downstairs, gave her some fresh underthings, and brought her the slightly-stale bread and the lukewarm chocolate. While Ruth ate—with exquisite manners, for a starving wolf—Mary explained the situation as Alice had explained it to her.

“…so,” she finished. “Tonight in the wee hours, I will break into the Préfecture de police and steal letters of transit. We shall forge them for you. One of my friends will make sure that a staff car is waiting for you outside Paris, with sufficient funds in gold to see you safely away. We have faith that, so-armed, you will be able to reach a ship in Calais.

“Surely,” Mary added with a ghost of a smile, “You can manage to impersonate a Prussian officer.”

Ruth raised a hand, chewing her current mouthful hastily. She swallowed with a pained expression. “Have you ever been inside the Préfecture de police?”

“Yes,” Mary said. “They keep a lot of interesting files in there.”

“Fine. Have you ever fought an Ulfhethinn?”

They crossed glances like a fencer’s exchange. Ruth’s expression argued for inclusion; Mary’s was adamant.

Mary ended it—she thought—by saying, “You’re not strong.”

Ruth looked up at her through gleaming eyes, a smudge of chocolate on her nose. “I’ll be strong enough.”

***

Curfew was long past when they took to the high road again. Ruth was not exactly dressed for rooftop skulking, in her full skirts and cardigan, but it didn’t seem to inconvenience her. She managed the tiles at a lope, her feet nimble in their soft shoes, and seemed to have no trouble following anywhere Mary might lead.

Curfew or no, the streets were not deserted, and there was no sign that the Prussians were enforcing it. They were probably busy packing, Mary thought with grim satisfaction.

Once, as she paused to measure the gap of a leap, Ruth drew up beside her. Mary could not resist: “I didn’t know wolves could climb.”

“Women can.” Ruth’s hands, half-covered by a motheaten pair of mitts Mary had found for her, twisted in her shirts as the wind rose. Ruth turned her face into the wind. “Do you smell that?”

Mary turned, too, and breathed deep. “No.”

“Sturmwolfstaffel Hauptsturmführerin Katherine Ressler,” Ruth said. “Fortunately, she’s upwind. A kilometer or so. Somewhere in the 8
^th
Arrondissement, I’d say.”

Mary gazed at her with an unaccustomed emotion. Wonder, she decided. She had become too accustomed to the supernatural strengths of wampyrs, and the frailties of humans.

“You’re familiar with Paris,” Mary said.

“I was here with the Chancellor’s guard several times. We studied the plan of the city.” Ruth paused. “I’d be more confident if I could scent the other two. Are you sure there were only three?”

“My friend and I only saw three,” Mary said. Ruth’s tone was too casual, and her casual identification of the other Sturmwolf by name was indication of how tight-knit the group had been. Of course Ruth knew whoever had come to kill her. “I do not know the names. I am sorry.”

Ruth nodded. “I hope one’s not Adele,” she said tiredly.

“She’s very skilled?”

Ruth shook her head. “Katherine is better.” As she stepped back from the roof-edge to measure her leap, she said, “Adele was my lover.”

***

The Préfecture de police was guarded—roof and street and courtyard. To Mary and Ruth, human guards weren’t much more than an inconvenience. They slipped within like shadows, breaching a window with no more sound than the whisper of the hinges, and found themselves in a fifth-storey hall, dim at this small hour. Ruth shut the casement tightly, so no alerting draught could herald them.

“Well?” Mary gestured along the hall. Emergency bulbs glowed faint red at each intersection: more than enough light for the dark-adapted eye. The Prussians had covered the floors with luxurious Oriental runners—looted, of course—that would have hushed the sound of their footsteps if their footsteps made any sound.

“Letters of transit,” Ruth said. “They’ll be in the commandant’s office. This way.”

She led with a confident stalk, her gray skirts whipping about her calves. Mary glided behind, black jersey trousers not even whisking as she walked. Together, they rounded two corners, slipping into doorways when Ruth’s senses—which proved even more acute than Mary’s—warned her of approaching sentries.

Other than the sentries, the hallways were far more deserted than the streets. Whatever restless energy charged the streets, it had not reached the Prussian command.

“Ulfhethnar?” Mary asked, as they were paused inside a men’s washroom.

“If there are,” Ruth said, “walking softly will not hide us.”

But one more corridor brought them to the office. Here, Ruth paused with her hand in its fingerless mitt upon the doorknob. She looked at Mary, brows rising.

Mary nodded. The scent of Ulfhethnar hung around the doorway, but it was cold. Well, the commandant would have wanted to meet with the hunters.
Somebody in Prague must have talked.
“Three means they’re pretty sure they know where you are, do you think?”

“There were only six of us in my class to wear the
Wolfsangel
,” Ruth said. “They did not send Adele.” She delivered it as a report, emotionless, which alone was enough to reveal to Mary how much emotion she was hiding.

“Who did they send?”

Ruth cocked a pale eyebrow over one eye that glowed like flame with reflected light. For a moment, Mary thought Ruth would shake her off with a question—“What does it matter to you who they are?”

But the Ulfhethinn said, “Besides Katherine? Beatrice Small. And Jessamyn Johnson.”

Ruth’s hand whitened on the knob. Bitterly, she scoffed: “
Wolfsangel.
The wolf-hook. You know the Prussians pretended it was an ancient Aryan symbol? It’s not even a real rune. Like everything else they stole, they lied about it.”