Look Behind You (The Order of the Silver Star) (14 page)

“You’d better.” But the way Matt hugged back told Chris his apology was accepted. Then Matt released him and stepped back, looking toward the window, his face grim. “I can’t risk losing this thing any more than I can risk losing you. Not now.”

Chris sobered. “Why? What’s out there?”

Matt shook his head. “I dunno. Something’s been doggin’ Martinez and me since the first night out of Dunkirk. Never outright attacked us; seems to always be something keeping it at bay, makin’ it miss us by five minutes, that kind of thing. But it’s there, and it’s bad.
Unselige
, demon, I don’t know.”

Chris felt his skin start to crawl like it had when he’d found the
Leichenpulver
in that bomb silo. “What makes you think demon?”

“Martinez kept talking about his grandmother’s stories about a
brujo
.”

Chris swore. “What about—” He broke off and nodded toward the flag.

“They’ll deal with the Gestapo, but the rest… well, that’s what wards are for.”

“Wards and prayer.”

Matt smiled at him. “Told you I needed backup.”

Silver reached over and nuzzled Matt’s shoulder.

Men and horse stood where they were for a long while, listening to the sounds of the battle raging outside. It seemed to be going well enough for the fairies but not badly enough for the Gestapo, at least at first. But slowly that creepy sense of foreboding started to grow, and eventually Chris couldn’t tell who was winning anymore.

“God help us,” he finally breathed.

And the tide turned. The creepy feeling vanished, and the humans’ shouts turned to screams of fear that faded into the distance as they turned and fled with the fairies in hot pursuit. Silver tossed her head and neighed for joy.

Then suddenly more screams started up—from the theater. Shouts in German mingled with shouts in something that sounded like Irish. And evidently they’d forgotten to search somebody, because there were gunshots as well.

“What the—” Matt began, and both brothers took off running toward the theater.

But the screams stopped abruptly just as they rounded the corner into the back foyer, and when Chris unlocked the doors and flung them open, the place was empty.

It took several unsuccessful attempts for Chris to manage to splutter, “Bu—what—how—”

“Bronze,” Matt got out. “That’s why bronze and not iron.”

Chris stared at him for a second before it clicked. Fairies couldn’t cross iron, but the bars on the windows were bronze. “So the wards’ll keep out anything but—”

“Anything but friends.”

That realization didn’t lessen the shock much for either of them. They stared at each other for a moment longer, then back at the empty theater for a few moments longer than that.

“Well,” Matt finally said. “Guess we don’t have to worry about how to manage breakfasts now.”

Chris snorted.

“Oh,
here
you are,” interrupted a familiar British baritone from behind them.

Both brothers jumped, turned, and chorused, “How the hell did
you
get in here?”

Nimrod smiled. “I had the password.”

Chris really was starting to wonder whether he’d actually woken up that morning.

Matt still seemed to have his feet under him, though, and pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “Where did—”

“England,” Nimrod replied. “Off to a nice, cozy POW camp in the north of Scotland where they shan’t be troubled by anyone until the war’s over. Unless, of course, Titania decides to visit Shakespearean wrath on Goering.”

Chris burst out laughing at the thought of Goering with a donkey’s head. There might have been a tinge of hysteria in it, but he honestly couldn’t care. That mental image was probably the least absurd thought he’d had all night.

Nimrod smiled. “Right, well, I’d best be off. You can take the flag down now; you shouldn’t need it again, but it’s there if you do. The others should arrive within the week, and you’ll be safe enough here until then. And in the meantime, perhaps you could begin gathering papers to be sent to London.”

Chris nodded. “Understood.”

“And where are you headed?” Matt asked.

“Berlin,” Nimrod answered. “The less accurate news that gets to Himself, the longer it will take him to mount any kind of response. Lord willing, he’ll not be able to react fast enough to stop his worst nightmares from coming true.” And with a nod and a devious smile, he walked off toward the hall opposite the one where the flag hung.

With a shrug and a sigh, the brothers went to take the flag down. Silver had wandered further down the hall and was snacking on an ornamental tree, but Matt called her back to use as a ladder again. She followed them back to the front hall and waited while he put the flag away in his gear, and then she looked rather pointedly toward the doors to the grassy courtyard that stood in the middle of the palace.

“Guess that would make a good enough corral,” Matt mused and walked up to the doors. He carefully put his hand up to the bars, and they withdrew. So he opened the door and let Silver out, and when he closed the door, the bars slid shut again.

Then both brothers turned and looked at the front doors again. And Chris realized that they hadn’t heard Nimrod come and go. As big as the palace was, they might not have, but….

“I wonder,” said Matt.

#####

26
Hands up! Everyone out! Fast!

#####

~~~~~

Cha
pter 7

Undefeated

May 11, 1941

The Schneider brothers really had had enough excitement for one night, Nimrod mused as he left. It would be another three days before the other Rangers converged on Mont-St.-Michel and three more days before they returned to Paris, which could, in other circumstances, prove to be quite a tense and dangerous wait for Matt and Chris. But in truth, they would have plenty of time to gather up all the materials they’d captured—including some evidence that would be quite damning for Goering at the war crimes trials—and rest and possibly even get in a game or two of dominos of a night. They’d be quite safe.

Nimrod had made sure of it.

On the whole, the Rangers were doing a better job of clearing the way for the Allied invasion than anyone had had any right to expect. Some had faced more formidable foes than others thus far—Wright and Hickman had stumbled across a Nix, for example, and the Hamer brothers had battled quite an exotic array of demons along the way—but they were steadily driving the evil back from where the SS had bound it.

And the SS were beginning to pay the price. For all their cold efficiency, Himmler’s warlocks had been hasty, not only under pressure to erect the wall of enchantments as quickly as possible, but also too eager to call upon forces far more powerful than any of them truly understood. Many evil spirits of every kind had been summoned, primarily with the promise of blood and destruction, and a sizeable number were unwilling to leave without that promise being fulfilled. Those that the Rangers did not banish outright began to turn on the men who had summoned them. The daevas were satisfied with simply tearing apart a warlock or two, but the more powerful demons had begun taking hosts and doing their best to wreak Hell’s fury on earth throughout the territory claimed by Germany. Foolishly, a number of the men most devoted to Himmler’s ad hoc paganism had actually welcomed their possession, at the encouragement of the Reichsführer himself. The
Might Is Right
credo had them all convinced that power should be sought and harnessed no matter its source. But Himmler had no idea how close he was to losing control of his own forces. The concentration camp commandants, in particular, would not be waiting for the outcome of the Wannsee Conference—scheduled before the invasion of Russia under pressure from Himmler and then moved forward again for fear of the Rangers—to begin implementing the Final Solution. And not only bloodshed was imminent. The warlocks had completely overlooked the amount of damage that would be done to the crops growing in the region of the wall, which would likely not become apparent until the harvest came in. The speed of the Rangers’ attack would limit the extent of the blight, but both Germany and France might be facing another very lean winter and didn’t know it yet.

Nimrod’s job at this stage was seeing to it that Himmler and Hitler stayed in the dark. The genie, so to speak, was out of the bottle as far as the SS was concerned, and there was nothing Himmler could do about it even if he wanted to. As terrible as it was to contemplate the damage the demons were about to do, God and the Rangers would have to see to that mess. But Hitler must not look away from the Russian Front too soon. Nimrod had to keep him focused on the East until the Allies were far enough inland that the Germans could not stop them from taking Berlin.

Matt had been wrong about one thing. The German people as a whole did not deserve what was to come, and few of the deaths that were about to result between now and the war’s end would be just, from a human perspective. And Nimrod had no way of knowing what might have been, whether more lives would be lost or saved in this way than without the Rangers’ involvement or what effect those spared would have on the course of history. The war with Japan might very well be more terrible for America, and as for Russia… he hadn’t been granted that foresight. Neither had Merlin, though Nimrod was sure the wizard had foreseen this campaign and not revealed it to his scribe. What Nimrod did know for a certainty was that the Rangers’ mission could not be allowed to fail now. The consequences of failure would surely be more terrible for all concerned than if the Texans had never become involved.

The rest was in God’s hands—and who, indeed, was like unto Yahweh, to know His mind or give Him counsel?

*****

The only bedroom in Luxembourg Palace was the Queen’s Apartment, which Goering had granted Speer for his own use. Fortunately, the staff had just changed the sheets, so Matt and Chris didn’t find it
too
awkward to drag themselves up there when they were finally done for the night and crash together in the same bed. And Chris slept like a log the whole night, with two exceptions. At one point he heard what sounded like another skirmish outside but couldn’t wake up enough to care, and at another he thought he heard tiny voices whispering something until Matt rumbled some grump that Chris couldn’t make out.

He woke at his usual time the next morning due to sheer force of habit, and it took a moment for him to wake up enough to remember where he was and why. Then he sighed and started to get up but froze when he looked over at the chair where he’d left his uniform.

Said uniform was gone. In its place sat his duffle, and his off-duty shoes were on the floor where his boots had been. Frowning, Chris got up to investigate and found that the duffle held not only his shaving kit but also all of his civilian clothes.

“How’d this get here?” he wondered aloud quietly.

“Three guesses,” Matt replied, rolling out of bed and onto his feet, “and the first two don’t count.”

Chris blinked. “The Little People? Seriously?”

Matt nodded and grunted an affirmative as he started toward his own bags, which were piled next to the chair.

“Huh.” Chris looked around, unsure what to do. “Hey, uh, th—”

Matt swatted his shoulder. “Don’t say that.”

“What? Why?”

“Most of ’em don’t like it.”

“Well, then how—”

“Cream. Put out some cream, or milk. And maybe some bread and cheese or something.”

Chris sighed. “Sure, all right. How much?”

Matt shrugged. “Just some. Couldn’t tell how many there are.”

“Okay. Thanks, Matt.”

Chris took his things into the dressing room to get dressed and shaved while Matt went in search of a bath, and then he headed down to the kitchen to start breakfast. Since he’d want cream for his coffee anyway, he decided to get the fairies’ breakfast set out while the coffee was percolating. Finding a saucer took a minute or two, but the cream and bread and cheese were easier to find, and then the hard part was figuring out where to set stuff. He finally decided on one of the nearest windows out in the hall, and its bars retracted as he walked up to it. Cautiously, so as to avoid spilling or leaving the brim-full saucer where it could fall and break, he set everything on the windowsill and watched as the bars closed again. Then, satisfied that nothing was going to break or make a mess, he headed back to the kitchen.

The scrambled eggs, bacon, and coffee were ready by the time Matt came down, radio in hand, looking significantly more awake but still in need of caffeine. Chris handed Matt a mug he’d already prepared, and Matt guzzled down several swallows before pausing for breath with a grateful groan.

“Thanks, bud,” he said with a smile and set the radio on the counter.

Chris smiled back and brought filled plates over to the kitchen table. “So that wasn’t you talking in your sleep last night?”

Matt snorted and followed. “Not hardly. They couldn’t make up their minds about you. Had to convince ’em you’re an American agent
and
my brother.”