Unnatural Issue (42 page)

One of the wolves went first, then three of the brownies, pulled down and buried beneath piles of walking dead. Then the stag went down with a despairing squeal.

And that was when the shelling began.

He heard the telltale whistling first and instinctively flinched to one side. A moment later, the shell exploded not far off, sending a rain of dirt and body parts down on him. Another shell followed the first, and another, while the Elementals and the dead tore and fought at each other in unnerving silence. Charles too fought on, in a haze of exhaustion and terror.

A third shell—a fourth—bracketed them. The Elementals had descended into the shell crater with him; they were all standing together now, facing the horde of walking dead that stumbled and tripped down the sides of the crater toward them.

Another pair of shells landed even closer, this time, throwing half-corpses down the side of their crater. These things writhed and snapped and grabbed until the brownies cut them to bits, bits that, horribly, still moved. An unattached hand clamped itself around Charles’ boot until he bayoneted it into the ground.

Two more shells fell even closer. The remaining wolves whimpered, and the unicorn pressed into his side.

Where were his men? Hadn’t they figured out he was missing by now?

Despair clawed at his soul. He was going to die, and it would not be a clean death.

Five more shells, one after the other, whistled through the sky and sent gouts of debris up to rain down on them. The walking dead paid no heed at all.

What were the wretched Germans trying to shoot at? Had they actually spotted the white hides of his Elementals? Were they using
those
to sight in on?

It didn’t matter. None of this mattered.

Belatedly, he remembered that he had hand grenades in the rucksack on his back. As more and more of the walking dead poured down to meet the combined weapons of his allies, he slipped out of the straps and fumbled one out, armed it, and tossed it.

The resulting explosion wasn’t as impressive as the shell, but it cleared a path partway up the crater wall.

He urged the Elementals to follow him, and scrambled toward that gap in the enemy lines. If he could get there, he could clear more of a path out with another grenade. If he could do that, they might be able to—

He heard the shell whistling overhead.

Overhead.

No!
he thought, and then the world erupted in light and sound and then plunged into darkness.

T
HE little bistro was very good about giving Peter and Susanne a relatively quiet table, and even better about turning the provisions Peter supplied into quite decent meals. They even managed to turn that wretched plum-and-apple jam into a rather delightful sauce. “You’re being rather foolish, old girl,” Peter said, as he refilled Susanne’s glass with the decent pinot noir that Garrick had managed to find, somewhere. “Think about this: You could do just as much good, if not more, doing your nursing back in Australia. The lads that make it back will need someone who knows what they’ve been through.”

She shook her head, her mouth set in a stubborn line. He sighed. He knew that look. “There aren’t enough nurses
here,”
she countered. “You know that, you’ve seen the wards when a rush comes in.”

“But the magic—” he protested. “Think of what you could do with Earth magic for them!”

“I’m using it all the time here, every day, or half of those fellows wouldn’t live through the first night.” She raised her chin and defiantly challenged him to counter that, and he knew that he couldn’t. She could do what no doctor—other than Maya—could do. She was right, she was keeping men alive who by rights should have died.

Peter sighed anyway, because he also knew that the real reason she was not going to leave had nothing to do with the nursing. He knew what was going on; it was as plain as could be every time she looked at Charles. She was utterly smitten and probably had been from the moment she first set eyes on him. For a moment he was silent, caught up in an internal debate.

Should I tell her about Rose?
That was the question. The poor thing had no idea that she had a rival, because the rival had only materialized after she’d been sent across the Channel.

In the weeks following the invasion of Belgium, when
everyone
knew that it was only a matter of time before Britain declared an official war, lives had suddenly accelerated. Men tidied their affairs, sold horses and yachts and motorcars. Some who had put off engagements proposed and wed within days, while others broke off engagements on the grounds that they didn’t know if they were going to come back alive. Thankfully, there were a lot fewer of those. There were so many applications for civil marriages and special licenses, in fact, that clerks could hardly keep up with them. Churches and registry offices were booked solid with weddings religious and civil. And when that started, Peter had had no doubt that there was going to follow a veritable rain of babies around about April.

He would have bet that cool, calm Charles would not have been affected by that frenzy, that primitive urge to make sure you produced at least one child before you went off to an uncertain conflict. Charles, unlike most Britons, had been sure that it would
not
all be over by Christmas, but he hadn’t rushed into anything. Peter would have wagered any amount of money that Charles would never let his instincts overcome him.

He would have been wrong.

It all happened over a garden party. The magicians of England all knew, by now, that this was going to be a long and hideous war. They knew that many would be called up, and many would not return. Elizabeth Kerridge had known, had been certain, that this gathering of both sexes of magicians was going to be fevered, and she had figured that at least one, if not several, engagements were going to come out of this gathering. She had said as much to Peter, half in jest and perhaps half in warning. Had Charles known that? He might have; he might have simply decided that his mother was going to pitch girls at him until he decided on one. It might have been that, the moment he saw one he had known as a boy and been friends with, he figured he had better just give in and take someone he could get along with. Branwell was going to need another generation. He was the only child, the heir. It was his duty.

Or perhaps they really
were
meant for each other.

Peter had not seen the actual meeting, but he’d had it described to him. The two had looked equally surprised to see the other. There had been a moment when the eyes of Charles Kerridge met the young woman’s, followed immediately by Charles leaving the reception line and going straight to the side of young Rose Mainwright, and not moving away from her for the rest of the night. The next morning, it was official. They were engaged. Charles told Peter later that Rose was an old friend he had long ago lost track of, someone he’d played with as a child until her parents moved to Blackpool. She was an Elemental mage too, a Water mage, like Peter.

Peter liked her; she and Charles were obviously comfortable together.

Susanne didn’t know about Rose. Not that Charles was hiding anything; he just never would think to tell her. So far as Charles was concerned, Susanne was just someone he was helping, certainly a friend, but nothing like as close a friend as, say, Peter. They weren’t of the same social class, as Charles had pointed out before this. Why should she care if he was engaged or not?

He was completely oblivious to the fact that Susanne was infatuated with him; Charles could be desperately thick about emotional matters sometimes.

So should
I
tell her about Rose?
Peter pondered this while Susanne ate hungrily and talked about her work on the wards. He finally shrugged to himself and decided that it wouldn’t matter what he told her, she wouldn’t believe it unless she saw it with her own eyes.

Which, if he finally got his way, was simply not going to happen. She would be in Australia, where there was a shortage of women. She’d have dozens of hearty young fellows vying for her, and in no time at all, she would forget about Charles.

He was about to change the subject to how she thought the Elementals here were faring, when he felt it.

She did too.

Cold, and dark, and death. And they recognized the signature of that black pall of magic.

Richard Whitestone.

They both clutched the sides of the table as if the earth itself had moved, and fought free of the clinging tentacles of that horrible power. Susanne was the first to speak.

“Father—” she said, looking terror-struck and nauseated at the same time. He didn’t blame her.
How
had Richard Whitestone managed to find them across the Channel? And how had he gotten here in the first place? Was an attack imminent? How much time did they have before a horde of walking dead broke down the door to the little bistro?

She looked stunned. Peter had already gotten the inadequate little knife in one hand and the fork in the other and was looking around for liches. Richard was obviously working necromantic magic, and very powerful stuff—

When no walking dead appeared, he shoved away from the table. “I’m here, and you’re here, and there’s no army of dead coming at us—so who is he attacking?” he wondered aloud.

And both of them got the answer at the same moment. “Charles!” they chorused. “He knows Charles helped me,” she said, anguish in her voice. “And your trick worked; he can’t possibly know that I am here, so he’s going after Charles!”

“Revenge,” Peter agreed grimly.

“We have to get to him!” she cried, and flung herself out of her seat and dashed out the door.

“Wait!” Peter called out. “Wait!”

She was already gone, the door slamming shut behind her. He ran to follow, hoping he could catch her before she ran off into the night to do something brave but stupid.

But she had not, as it proved, gone very far.

He had barely gotten out of the door himself when the clatter of horse hooves and the rumble of wheels on cobbles to his right warned of a cart approaching at high speed.

But as it whipped around the corner, he saw it wasn’t a cart, it was an ambulance, driven by his own Uncle, whose grim face told that he too had sensed the dark perversion of Earth magic out there somewhere between the village and the Front. Susanne was already up beside him; Uncle Paul pulled his horses to a stop just long enough for Peter to fling himself in the back, and they were off again.

He clung to the side of the ambulance, being thrown all over the vehicle as Paul directed it regardless of the presence or absence of roads. It was a terrible ride, not only because of the nausea he felt from that foul magic out there, but because as they neared the first line of trenches, it was clear that there was a bombardment going on. Shells pounded into the earth ahead of them—occasionally, one exploded far too close to them for any sort of comfort. Evidently Paul didn’t care; the horses were not allowed to slack or swerve, and when an Earth magician determines that an animal
will
do something, that animal has very little choice in the matter.

He fought sickness, fought despair, fought the crushing demand that he simply lie down and give in. He couldn’t imagine how Susanne and Paul were feeling; he only got the reflection of the necromantic magic because it was not of his Element, but they were getting it right in the teeth.

They were heading directly into the thick of the bombardment. Shells were falling all around them, and still the ambulance plunged through a night made hideous with explosions and the stench and bitter chill that accompanied necromancy. Inside the wagon, Peter could only cling and ready his own magic.

Then, suddenly, the chill vanished, and the stench, though it remained, went back to the normal stink of the trenches, if such a thing could be considered normal.

A moment later, the ambulance slewed sideways as Uncle Paul skidded it to a halt.

Peter plunged out, over the now-vacant driver’s seat and invoked mage-sight so he wouldn’t have to strike a light. Susanne and Paul were ahead of him, descending into a crater with entrenching shovels in their hands. They too must have invoked mage-sight, since they were moving as surely as if it were broad daylight.

Susanne glanced up as he displaced a shower of dirt onto her. “Down here!” she shouted, and at first he wondered why she was shouting at him, but then he saw the faces of three men looking over the rim of the crater on the opposite side. “Charles Kerridge is down here! He’s buried, help us get him out!”

They jumped as if they’d been stung and tumbled down into the crater, that being the fastest way to get to the bottom. They joined Uncle Paul and Susanne in pitching aside rotting body parts and digging. Just as Peter got there, one of the men threw a torso aside and exposed a still-living person. Charles!