Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) (38 page)

Shit, shit, shit. Where is she?

Marsh crouched, spun. He searched the ground for signs of movement, signs of footsteps. But the flickering firelight cast irregular shadows across the ground. Heike landed a kick to his temple. He sprawled in the pool of Kammler’s blood. Rolled. Jumped back to his feet.

Blood spatter. She couldn’t possibly have sliced Kammler as she had without being subjected to blood spray. Had that, too, turned invisible when it came into contact with her? Her knife hadn’t become visible when Kammler bled on it.

To his left, a scuffle, like the sound of a boot heel sliding on gravel. Marsh dove aside. A phantom blade nicked his shoulder. He spun, aimed another kick at empty air. The toe of his boot encountered faint resistance, as though he’d brushed Heike, but only just. If he’d hurt her, she didn’t make a sound. He doubted it.

He jumped aside again, and did so every few seconds. An exhausting way to stay alive. Gretel was doing likewise. They moved like marionettes with tangled strings. A chaotic dance intended to confound their assailant.

It didn’t prevent Heike from landing gashes on Marsh’s arms, chest, face. Some shallow, some deep, all painful.

Marsh swung the sack containing von Westarp’s journals in a wild arc. It didn’t connect, but the scuffling of footsteps told him Heike had dodged. He ducked to one side and felt the breeze of a blade passing close to his face. Ducked again and collided with an invisible barrier.

“Ooof,” he said. Heike said nothing.

Gretel came up from behind and kicked at his invisible assailant. Marsh couldn’t tell if the blow connected or not. Gretel dove aside.

He reached for Heike, tried to grapple with her, to pin her arms, but she had already danced away. She’d been trained too well. Her steaming breath should have given her away, but she held it, and only seemed to breathe when Marsh wasn’t looking in her direction. He got a good slash across the forearms for his trouble.

The skin along his gashes pulled apart when he swung the sack again. Rivulets of blood ran down his arms, joining into tributaries that coated his hands. The neck of the cloth sack slid through his fingers, widening the arc of the journals and pulling him off balance. Heike rammed the toe of her boot into the small of Marsh’s bad knee. The explosion of agony blew out his ability to stand. He hit the ground, and tried to roll away from the inevitable kicks. He failed. His ribs, already sore from Kammler, flared with new pain. Breathing became difficult.

But as long as Heike kicked him, he knew where she was. He slowed, gritting his teeth against the pain but hoping to present an irresistible target. Heike knew better than to attack from the same spot for more than a few seconds. But he was defenseless, bleeding from half a dozen wounds, on the ground …
Thud. Thud. Thud.

But Marsh grabbed the phantom boot with one hand and flung the sack at Heike with the other. A knife appeared in midair, where it tumbled into the brush. Marsh yanked on her foot with as much strength as he could muster. The strength that hadn’t trickled away through his open flesh.

“Oof.” Heike’s breath sparkled in the moonlight.

He half scrabbled, half leapt on the spot where she’d fallen. His blood disappeared when it touched her. Heike jammed stiffened fingers into his throat, his gashes, his eye. He saw stars; the pain loosened his grip. She wriggled out from beneath him.

Concentrating on the ground, eyes searching for any signs of movement, he said, “Gretel, we ha—”

Something snapped tight against his throat, cutting off his windpipe. Heike was taller than Marsh. His feet left the ground when she heaved. Her muscular forearms pressed against his shoulders, her breasts against his back. Her belt dug into the soft flesh around his throat. He kicked at nothing, tried to slam his head against Heike’s face, but the belt was too tight. Cartilage creaked in his trachea.

“I’m homeless because of you,” said Heike.

Her hot breath steamed against the back of his neck. It smelled of the sauerbraten she had eaten for dinner. The burning farm receded down a long, dark tunnel.

Heike shrieked. The belt slackened. Marsh fell to the ground, wheezing.

The invisible woman had released her Willenskräfte. No—her wires had been severed. And a dark stain spread across the back of her shirt, just above her waist, near the kidney. Gretel had recovered the knife.

Agony twisted Heike’s face into a parody of itself. Falling to her knees, she managed to land a fist square on Gretel’s face. The blow snapped Gretel’s head back and bloodied her nose.

Gretel touched a fingertip to the blood streaming from her nose, then licked it.

“No,” she said. “That won’t be sufficient.”

She stepped behind Heike. The other woman tried to pivot on her knees, but with one hand pressed against her stab wound, she lost her balance. Gretel unplugged her own wires and flipped them around Heike’s neck. She pulled. Heike arched her back.

Gretel whispered in the other woman’s ear.

Heike jammed an elbow into Gretel. The
crack
carried to Marsh’s ears and made him wince. But the smaller woman didn’t lose her grip.

Heike’s eyes, wider and bluer than a summer sky, followed Marsh as he staggered to his feet. He pulled von Westarp’s Luger from his belt. But no fear shone through the look on her face, only hatred, as he pressed the gun to her temple. Whether it was for him, or Gretel, or both, he couldn’t say.

Bullet to the brain. The commander had been very specific about that. Something about autopsies, and not leaving their brain matter intact.

Gretel released Heike’s body. It slumped to the ground. Marsh put a second round into the dead woman’s forehead for good measure. Then he crossed over to Kammler, and emptied von Westarp’s gun with two more shots.

Every breath became a white-hot marlinespike prizing his ribs apart. Heike had broken at least one. Maybe more. His cuts opened and closed like little mouths when he moved.

They headed into the forest, toward the car he’d stashed that morning. He had to lean on Gretel. She was limping, too.

She said, “I’ll drive.” Marsh slumped into the passenger seat, already succumbing to pain and exhaustion.

“That could have gone better,” he mumbled.

*

The cacophony of destruction followed us far into the country. We ran out of petrol an hour before sunrise.

I coasted the Mulliner to the side of a country lane, then fetched the spare canister and dumped its contents into the tank. Spilled petrol all over myself. My hands hadn’t stopped shaking after the close call in Stoke Aldermoor.

Liv stepped out of the car. She stretched, yawned. The harrowing night had left her shaken, too. We hadn’t spoken for the entire drive. Neither of us could come to terms with the situation. I couldn’t believe my girls were truly safe. Hadn’t Gretel foreseen this, too? Had she stationed a sniper up the road? What surprises awaited us back in London? And as for Liv …

“Thank you,” she said. “I know I’ll never fully understand what happened tonight, but thank you.” She wiped her eyes. “I feel like you were sent here to protect us.”

I was. And I started to tell her so, but she laid a hand on my lips. I tasted salt.

“Thank you. For everything.”

She put her arms around me. I held her. She whispered, “I feel safe with you, Jonathan. I want my daughter to grow up feeling that way.”

And there it was: the lifeline I’d prayed for. The second chance I’d strived for. All it took was traveling decades into the past, sending her husband on a suicidal errand, and facing down the Luftwaffe. I’d have done it all over without hesitation, just to hear again the offer implicit in Liv’s simple words. My heart felt too big for my chest.

Liv looked up at me. Her lips parted. My knees sagged under the weight of my swollen heart.

How could it be infidelity to kiss my wife?

Her husband didn’t deserve her. I knew her better. I’d learned from my mistakes. He never would. I leaned into her.

But what if our places were reversed, and I learned of this moment between Liv and another man? Learned that she had held up her heart, offered it to another? It would shatter me.

Her husband might still be alive. It wasn’t fair to saddle him with mistakes he’d never made. Maybe he didn’t deserve Liv, but he did deserve the chance to be a better man than I. Liv deserved a good man. A great man. It was too late for me to become that person. The fact I stood there, trembling with desire and crumbling resolve, proved it. But it wasn’t too late for him.

I turned away. She kissed my cheek.

It was the one and only thing I’d ever done right in my life. And it left me wanting to die.

You’d better get it right this time,
I told my younger self.

thirteen

1 December 1940

Admiralty Citadel, London, England

Will’s footsteps echoed through a long concrete passageway. The odor of drying paint cascaded down the stairwells, where it lay like a fog at the lowest level of the bunker. Every breath stung the back of his throat with fumes. The ventilation system hadn’t been activated yet; Will had overheard a couple of men from the Royal Engineers discussing some problem with the charcoal filters. A metal conduit ran along the walls and ceiling. The conduit contained telephone and telegraph lines. Every fifteen feet, an olive-drab stencil mark read C
O
G. This stood for “Continuity of Government.” Will supposed a similar conduit ran through the PM’s war rooms, which were situated nearby, at the southeast corner of St. James’.

Webber handed his identification papers to a Royal Marine sentry. Will did likewise. The sentry checked their names against an access list. The photographs of both men received careful scrutiny before the sentry permitted them to pass the checkpoint. Will followed the other warlock through a sequence of interlocked doors, like the airlock on a submersible or the sally port in a medieval fortress. Behind him, an iron-banded door clanged shut with enough force to rattle the conduits. The air here had been touched by the Eidolons, whose most recent visit had imbued it with a greasy texture akin to rancid butter. The rubber bladder taped to Will’s arm, under his shirt, sloshed against the crook of his elbow. Pretending to scratch an itch, he double-checked the stopcock hidden just above his wrist.

As far as the public knew, the Admiralty Citadel—with its loopholed firing positions and reinforced, twenty-foot-thick walls—was intended as an impregnable bastion in case of Jerry invasion. It could, supposedly, withstand a direct hit from the Luftwaffe. This had yet to be tested.

The elaborate security meant Marsh had no chance of sabotaging another negotiation. It also meant Will had no chance of escape if the other warlocks detected his subterfuge. Pig’s blood did not wash out easily; Will had thus far ruined two shirts in the course of practicing his sleight of hand. Marsh was a demanding taskmaster.

The machine-gun chatter of a Teletype machine led Will and his escort into a chamber thirty feet belowground. There they joined Grafton and Hargreaves. The Teletype received real-time updates from RAF sector command stations and the Chain Home RDF observation posts. Grafton read the terse situation report spooling from the Teletype and adjusted the position of pins dotting an immense map of southeastern England, the Channel, and northern France.

The pins represented the RAF’s best guess as to the location and disposition of incoming bomber groups. Innocent Britons would die tonight. Fewer, if Milkweed succeeded in giving the defenders a supernatural advantage. More, if Will managed to scuttle the negotiation.

“Hurry,” said Hargreaves. He took a mercury thermometer from the table beside the Teletype. If they were to contribute to the night’s defense, they had to achieve an agreement with the Eidolons
and
see it paid.

The summoning fell to Grafton and Webber. Will reflected upon the situation while they drew their knives.

Two weeks ago, after Marsh safely retrieved Liv and Agnes, Will had delivered the first piece of encouraging news since the inception of Milkweed. According to Stephenson, who was hooked into the Ystation listening post network, the forty-eight hours beginning with the Coventry Blitz saw a massive increase in enemy radio traffic pertaining to the REGP. Something big had happened.

Marsh the Younger had carried out his mission. Or, at the very least, he’d made a game attempt.

But, in the short term, the new development allowed Marsh the Elder to pursue more freely the second part of his mission from 1963. Until they knew more about the situation in Germany he still wouldn’t attack the warlocks in full. The man wanted to have it both ways. But now he was willing to move more aggressively against the warlocks. He had already eliminated Pendennis, Milkweed’s oldest warlock, so for his second target he chose Shapley.

The entire situation was steeped in a nauseating moral ambiguity. The elder Marsh had come back with tales of atrocities and murders and yet, to prevent them, he made himself a murderer. And Will his accomplice. The mathematics of salvation said it was a necessary evil for the greater good. But how did the scales weigh cold-blooded murder against sins that existed only in some phantom version of the future?

Something went wrong the night Marsh slipped into Shapley’s room at the Savoy. He moved gingerly for days after the botched assault. The young warlock didn’t die quietly in his sleep.

After Shapley was found dead in his hotel room, surrounded by signs of a struggle, Stephenson had demanded the warlocks move out of the Savoy and into the citadel. Will barely avoided the spartan accommodations through vociferous arguments that his brother’s position in the Lords might draw undue attention to the citadel if it became known his younger brother had taken up residence there. Stephenson had relented, but only just.

As always, the warlocks drew the attention of something
other
through the use of Enochian, filtered through frail human biology and spilled blood, which carried the promise of eradication. Soon, the small chamber reverberated with a malignance vast as the cosmos. A century passed between each click of the Teletype. The sound burbled to Will’s ears, distorted by its passage through thick, greasy air.