Seven for a Secret (9 page)

“You’re a selfish old bitch who’s lucky to have chosen a wampyr lover.” Hard words softened by an amused tone, and a kiss on the part of her hair. Her thin skin pressed warm to cold lips. “Abby Irene, I will not leave you.”

“Don’t promise that. You can’t promise—”

“I have,” he reminded, “demonstrated unrivalled reliability so far.”

It made her laugh, which was his intention. But the laughter fell away again. She said, “I would have died for him if I could.”

“For him?”

She shook her head like an old horse irritably shaking off a fly. “Don’t play naive for my benefit, wampyr. Jack. And no, not for him. That’s not what I mean, really. But I would have taken his place for you.”

“Abby Irene—”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“
Don’t.
” His tone, and whatever was in it—command, hurt, anger—at last made her turn and look at him, instead of the reflected emptiness where he was standing. “Don’t pretend you know what I want or need, Abby Irene. Don’t do it. Don’t assume I am lying when I say I value you. I would not trade you for him.”

“Or him for me?” But the bitterness had fallen out of her voice, and now she squinted at him without her glasses, eyebrows trying to rise. “I’m sorry, Sebastien. It’s unbecoming. It’s just the damned arthritis making me miserable. And you could have had so much
more
of him—”

He squeezed her shoulder. “Twenty years or eighty, what does it matter?”

“Sebastien?”

His turn for the edgy bitterness. “Really. Twenty years or eighty? What does it matter to me? You’re all ephemera, woman. Gone before I know it, like your nations and your languages and your kings.”

You didn’t say such things to mortals. But Abby Irene stared at him for a moment, the squint surprised off her face, and then broke into a wide pink-gummed grin. “Bloody old bastard,” she said. “Just when I was about to wade into my self-pity with both feet.”

He grinned back, with enough teeth to make up for her lack of them. “Dance with me.”

“As if I could.”

“Stand on my shoes. I’ll hold you up.”

She blinked. “That’s hardly dignified.”

He slid his hand down her arm to the elbow, cupped it, and pulled her to her blue, horny feet. “And you were never sixteen, Abby Irene?”

She had shrunk. She tilted her head way back to look at him. “Not in living memory,” she quipped, and let him bear her up, one hand at her waist, the other crossing her back as he lifted her to stand on his shoes. She weighed no more than the autumn-dry shell of a burst milkweed pod, blown clean by the wind. He helped her balance, careful to keep her weight off her knees, while she flung one arm around his neck and clung with an old woman’s determination.

Carefully, in rhythm to the music she hummed under her breath, Sebastien stepped to the left. “I’m going to talk to them tonight,” he said against her ear. “I’ll get them out. We’ll go like smoke. It will be all right.”

“All of them?” She leaned back, supporting herself on hands crooked against his nape. “All twenty-one? What makes you think they’ll come, especially the older ones?”

His mouth twisted. “It has to be all or nothing. We cannot allow the Germans to take them. If I can convince the older girls, remove the headmaster and the guards—”

Remove was a euphemism for permanence. But Abby Irene merely looked up at him, shaking her head so the soft skin under her throat wobbled. She had no pity for the Huns. Her concerns were of a far more mundane nature.

“Sebastien—” She leaned in to him, shifting her slight weight so he could support it more easily. “And how exactly do you propose to hide twenty-one children in occupied London when the whole of the Prussian forces will be turning the city upside down for them?”

“Do you propose I slaughter the lot?”

She shook her head. “That would be a last resort, and you know it. And an ineffective one. You know these can’t be the only ones.”

Of course not. It would be basest idiocy to think so. With their addiction to Nordic mysticism and the more bizarre fringes of eugenics—

“The Prussians,” he said, “have a pattern. And they
believe they are reclaiming their own and redressing ancient wrongs. How many blonde seventh daughters do you suppose there are in all the Aryan
Urheimat
?”

“Too many,” Abby Irene said. “They must have such
a school in every country in Europe. It would be very…Prussian…to standardize. Sebastien, we cannot allow the Prussians these soldiers. As long as Russia holds out there’s a chance.” It was bitter for her to speak supportively of England’s old enemy, but a measure of her determination that she did so.

She continued, “If they have come to subscribe to the Prussian ideology—” She shrugged, but he could see it hurt her—her own expedience, and the cruelty of it. “Find me one. One we can make our own. You cannot save them, but perhaps we can
use
them.”

“I think,” Sebastien said, “I can find one or two who have not. I’ll go tonight.”

“Without an invitation?” She glared at him through her glasses. “How do you think to enter?”

“It’s an old house,” he said, noncommittal. “And I am an old fiend. I’ve been in London before. Let us not forget! Your are talking to Amédée Gosselin.”

He hoped to make her laugh with his flourishes, but instead the hard squeeze of her hand on his arm arrested the dance. “Sebastien—”

She wanted to ask who had lived there, and when, and under what circumstances he had been invited in. The impli-
cations followed after, the realization that once intromitted, the devil could not be easily denied. Sebastien watched the tracks of thoughts chase one another across her face, shadowy and sharp, until she reined them back. Instead, she said, “An old house. How old?”

“When it was built, it stood in the countryside, surrounded by gracious lawns and manicured gardens. It’s outlasted fire and plague,” Sebastien said. His lips quirked. “And the Great Beer Flood of 1814.”

“The Sorcerer’s Fire?” Abby Irene asked. “It never got that far. There wasn’t any
city
there at that time.”

The Sorcerer’s Fire was not so named so because sorcerers had begun it, but because the antecedents of Abby Irene’s former colleagues—the Enchancery, at that time still tentatively and formally identified as the New Royal College of Sorcery—had been the only force in London capable of diverting the fire. That any of the hunched old medieval buildings of Central London—the coaching inns, churches, and slump-shouldered mushroom-cap houses huddled ear by ear, leaning heavily across narrow streets—still stood was due entirely to the courage of those grave men of history. Sebastien still remembered the horror and wonder that had swept the continent in its wake, and how quickly the kings of Sweden, Spain, and Portugal—among others—had rallied to follow the Germans and English in institutionalizing court magic and the training of sorcerers.

“And don’t think you’re going to distract me into history lessons,” Abby Irene continued. “Do you think for an instant there won’t be wards?”

He smiled and spun her, careful not to whirl too fast. “I don’t think for an instant there will be wards that you can’t bypass, my heart.”

“It won’t work,” she said. “You will not persuade them.”

“So you propose what? That I go in like a monster, and festoon the gate spikes with their heads?”

“No,” she said. “Remember what I told you about the magic?” She reached into the collar of her gown, between her breasts, and pulled free a tiny chamois bag. She slipped the ribbon over her head and slid it into the breast pocket of Sebastien’s coat, her crabbed old fingers lingering. “The one you choose. Give her this to drink in water. If she accepts the draught, that will serve us as consent.”

“Spells of mesmerism, Abby Irene? That’s quite unethical.”

She closed her eyes, pressed a papery cheek to his shoulder. She whispered, “Time of war.”

Hours dripped by, but even after a hot, necessary bath and a coat of stinking herbal liniment that stuck her flannel nightgown to her body, Ruth still felt the heart searing her belly. Cold-fire waves radiating from under her ribcage as if she had swallowed an ember—or ice—left her curled up and shivering, knees pressed against her mouth. She could not stop shaking. She pressed her thumbs under her chin to hold her teeth together because it was the only way to keep them from chattering. In the hall, she heard soft footsteps, but did not lift her head. Herr Professor had again instructed them to leave their bedroom doors open, and filtered light—from electric lamps turned low in the corridor—gave odd textures to the darkness in Ruth and Adele’s bedroom.

It wasn’t just Ruth’s stomach that felt burned. Her skin prickled from scalp to toes, sunburn needles over every inch of skin. Across the gap between narrow beds, Ruth heard Adele breathing harshly, the pained whine seeping thinly between her teeth. She wasn’t sleeping either.

And Ruth needed sleep so badly. If she could just sleep, just let go of the sickness and ache and burning in all her muscles, she thought she would be better. Desire became obsession, the need like a hag-riding, except awake rather than sleeping. Which was the problem, wasn’t it? She should get up, cross the narrow space to Adele’s bunk, and curl up beside her. She should pull Adele into her arms and comfort her.

But when Ruth pushed her fingers into her mouth she tasted the wolf’s blood, the same blood that had smeared across Adele’s face. She had scrubbed under the nails until the quicks bled too, and her own blood tasted like the wolf’s blood. There was no difference between them.

It had been a game until now, spy against spy, Ruth playing secret agent and Ruth playing wolf-girl. The scents, the quickness. The way sound carried to her ear, as it had never carried before. The little magics that let her and Adele slip through the city on mischief, magics as real and as superficial as their uniforms. What burned through her now wasn’t a game.

It was wildfire.

The dim light in the room dimmed further, in passing, as if somebody had briefly darkened the crack between door and jamb. Ruth waited until the shadow passed and the footsteps retreated down the hall before she lifted her head. She didn’t whisper; whispers carry. Instead, she pitched her voice as low as possible and said, “Adele?”

Adele raised her face from her pillow and turned, her braid falling across her shoulder with a slide and thump so loud Ruth winced.
That
wasn’t right. Or rather, it was right, because it made her realize in context that the heavy footsteps in the hall were someone padding softly by in slippered feet, and that the brittle rattle of rain on the shutters was in truth the fading patter of the passing storm. She could smell Adele across the gulf between their beds, the poison herbs in their bedtime liniment, the well-cured hide of the wolfskin belt sewn about her waist, as broad as the span of three fingers.

“Here,” Adele murmured.

Ruth made herself untangle the tight knots of her body. She smoothed herself under the covers, rolled onto her back, and composed herself, hands across her breast. It was an artificial relaxation, but she could make herself stop shivering if she concentrated all her will on releasing the muscles,
making them slack.

“I didn’t think he could really do it,” Ruth said.

“He?”

„Herr Professor.”

„Make us like wolves.” Adele’s voice was firm, not rising. A confirmation rather than a question. „Do you think this is it? Will we go to Prussia now?”

She sounded half-excited, half-concerned. Ruth’s heart ached. „Do you think they’ll separate us?”

„Would they?”
That
chafing sound was Adele’s calluses against skin as she rubbed her arms, not in chill but in self-comfort. „They wouldn’t. They’ll want us together. We’re sworn to protect the Chancellor. What do you think they’ll do with us?”

Ruth considered. She considered also the caustic river that scalded her limbs, the restlessness it bore with it.
Moving felt better than lying still. Even if Herr Professor was doing bed checks. She rose to bare feet between the beds, spurning her slippers, and paced to and fro just at the length of Adele’s reach. She knew it was the length because Adele extended one arm and let her fingertips brush and rebrush the skirt of Ruth’s nightgown.

„The Prussians are strong,” Adele said. „Maybe they’re right. Why shouldn’t they be right? Isn’t God on their side?”

Might does not make right,
Ruth wanted to say.
No matter how much it might seem like it sometimes.
But that would have been a stupid thing to say, just now. „Somebody’s on their side,” Ruth said grudgingly. „Are you?”

Adele shrugged. „They’re smart and what they say makes sense. There’s enough to eat. A good place to sleep. Everything is so much better than it was at home.” The stretch of Ruth’s own nightgown around each stride was deafening. Her head swum with the reek of herbs and rendered fat. Adele said, „There’s you.”

Ruth stopped mid-stride and turned into Adele’s bed like a ship turning into the wind. „And you.” She bent her fingers together. „Do you think we’ll really be wolves?”

„No.” Another serpentine rustle of Adele’s braid upon the pillow. „We’ll be warriors who are like wolves. Stronger, smarter. We’ll go to Berlin. We’ll go together. We’ll be very brave in our uniforms and have the safest job in the army. We’ll work hard and save pennies and buy a little townhouse, if they let us sleep outside the barracks.”