Look Behind You (The Order of the Silver Star) (5 page)

Cuchulain blanched. “You… you
touched
—and you’ve not looked?”

Chris scoffed. “Buddy, what kind of spy do you think I am? My job was to deliver, not to read.”

“Then Lord bless you, friend, you’re a stronger man than most. It’s nothin’ good, I can tell you that, and more than mortal mind should know.”

“O-kay….”

Cuchulain ran his free hand through his hair and sighed. “I can’t tell ye how I know.”

“But?”

“’Tis a grimoire.”

Chris was frozen for a moment before he could manage to nod and squeeze out, “Oh… peachy.” Then he walked back to his hotel in a daze.

Part of him wanted to run as far as he could as fast as he could—clear back to Castell, even. Part of him wanted to buy a bottle of hooch, lock himself in his room, and get very, very drunk. He did neither. But he did take a long shower and scrub his skin until it was nearly raw, then fall to his knees at his bedside and pray for hours until he fell asleep, still kneeling. And the next morning, he bought a notecard and sent it to Nimrod with the five-Mark note (which looked a little scorched from where it had touched the film) and a message:

Onkel Johann,

You were right. Sorry I laughed.

Dein Eric

Back in Paris, Chris threw himself into his work to the point that he nearly forgot about Christmas. The reason wasn’t entirely a desire to put the grimoire incident out of his mind, though he really wished that he could. But there were feasibility studies to complete as part of the initial planning for Operation Barbarossa, British radio broadcasts to monitor and analyze, and reports to write—for both sides. His report to the OSS mainly consisted of a recommendation to go along with whatever plan SIS came up with, especially if it involved the Rangers; when his OSS contact, Cleopatra, wondered aloud what it was all about, his only reply was, “Don’t ask.”

But there are some things a person can’t un-know. So after Chris realized with a start that it was Christmas Eve and hauled himself to Notre Dame for midnight Mass and a prayer for his family in the States, he paused on the way out and picked up a small vial of holy water. He didn’t exactly know why, but he figured he might need it sooner or later.

*****

While Niamh and Fand were overseeing the greening of the throne room of Tír-na-nOg for the upcoming winter solstice celebration, a sentry ran into the room in a panic. “Sire! SIRE! ’Tis Kevin O’Malley—with a great bloody grimoire!”

Now, Kevin O’Malley was a double agent, but not in the usual sense. He was a Killarney lad, loyal to Ireland, who felt his talents were best used in working for British Intelligence against the Germans. He’d taken some guff for it, but considering the way he’d helped in the evacuation of Dunkirk, there seemed no question he was on the side of right. But his grandmother was of the Tuatha Dé, one of Niamh’s handmaidens, and especially since the invasion of France, he’d been passing on such intelligence on the SS as he safely could to O’Donoghue.

That didn’t explain why Kevin had suddenly come back to Killarney in person with a grimoire in tow or why said grimoire had the sentry in such a panic.

O’Donoghue frowned. “What sort of a grimoire?”

“Bad enough we can see it a mile off.”

His frown deepening, O’Donoghue hurried to the ramparts to see for himself. And sure enough, though mortal sight might have no trouble seeing Kevin’s car as it sped toward Lough Lean, the moonlight seemed to the eyes of the
Sidhe
to be repelled from a spot of darkness in the car that marked the presence of the spell-book. The darkness was bounded, as if Kevin had had the sense to put a binding spell on whatever he carried, but it was as visible as if it had been a blazing light.

“Set a guard,” O’Donoghue ordered. “We don’t want Unseelies or demons to get a chance at the thing. I’ll see to Kevin myself.”

The sentries bowed and obeyed. They closed ranks about the lake just as Kevin drove past them to a safe spot and parked. O’Donoghue watched until Kevin’s course was clear, then headed out to intercept him a good way from the shoreline. From a distance, O’Donoghue saw that the darkness about the grimoire moved with Kevin, which meant that he was carrying the thing. But as the mortal drew nearer, O’Donoghue was puzzled by the fact that Kevin wasn’t carrying a book in his hands at all, only a small bundle that fit in his pocket. Not until Kevin walked past him, unseeing but determined, did O’Donoghue realize that the grimoire had been recorded on microfilm somehow.

How the blazes some mortal had managed to microfilm a spell-book that powerful without succumbing to its use himself was beyond O’Donoghue. If this degree of evil clung even to photographs of the thing, the original must be horrid.

All of that realization occurred in the time it took Kevin to get three strides past where O’Donoghue had hidden himself. But the fairy king wasn’t about to let that microfilm get any closer to his domain.

“Hi!” he called, indignant, as he revealed himself. “Kevin O’Malley! What do you mean, bringing the likes of that to a place like this?”

Kevin turned to face O’Donoghue, who in mortal guise towered a good foot over the young man in height, and pulled his cap off. His worry and fear of the thing he carried were as plain as the freckles on his honest face. “Faith, Your Majesty, I didn’t know who else to ask.”

O’Donoghue crossed his arms. “Sure and it’s a grimoire, lad. You didn’t need me to tell you that.”

“No more I did, Your Majesty. But we need to know if the
Gearmánach
plan will work.
4
They’ll be trying it in any case.”

“What plan?”

“To bar the coast of France with spell-work to stop any sort of invasion, human or otherwise, while they go after Russia.”

O’Donoghue frowned. He’d heard tales of Hitler’s paranoia, but that kind of thinking was dangerously odd for a mortal, especially these days. And it didn’t explain why the Germans might think a non-human invasion was possible. Perhaps he could tell more from the microfilm. “Right, let me see it.”

Kevin pulled the microfilm out of his pocket and held it out to O’Donoghue. Sure enough, it was bound with a spell and further contained in three layers of oilskin, each blessed by the Church and covered with
Sidhe
wards. O’Donoghue thought he might sense wards about it that were even older and stronger than that, but he couldn’t be sure. He hummed thoughtfully as he took the bundle and sensed what he could about its contents without opening it.
Bloody
had been the right adjective for it, and not as a profanity. Whether it had been written in blood or whether the spells simply included blood-magic was more than he could tell at the moment, but either way, that blood had been copious and human. And this was one set of spells that could not have come from the Unseelies.

“This is old necromancy,” he finally declared, “very old. From Asgard, I would reckon, and not a few of the spells straight from Hell before that. With enough blood behind them, they could be very powerful indeed.” Then he sighed and handed the bundle back as he remembered a point Oberon had made about the Blitz. “Or at least they would have been, back in the days before motorcars and gunpowder. The world’s changed. If evil mars evil, it may be the last war poisoned men and land enough that even an evil spell can’t have the hold it once did.
And
there’s more might than ours in the world. What a Christian force might do against this magic… well, I don’t know, and that’s the truth.”

Kevin fidgeted a bit. “We’re thinking of calling in the Order of the Silver Star.”

O’Donoghue blinked; that was one of the names Crowley had stolen, but for some reason, O’Donoghue couldn’t think who the right owner might be. “The who, now?”

“The
maior ó Texas
.”

O’Donoghue lit up in delighted surprise at that. That name was one he knew—one everyone had known for a good century—but somehow he hadn’t connected it with Merlin’s prophecy before. Neither had most people, he was sure. He laughed. “Are ye now! Well, that
will
make a fine surprise for the
Gearmánaigh
! We’ve kin in San Patricio—I’ll send word, shall I?”

Kevin grinned. “If you like, Your Majesty, that’d be grand.”

“Right, then, off ye go, lad. Oh, and—” O’Donoghue reached into his own pocket and pulled out a slip of paper, which he handed to Kevin. “That’ll destroy the film, and the quicker, the better. No mortal eyes should see that book if it can be helped.”

Kevin nodded, bowed, and left, though O’Donoghue stayed to watch him while he could. And no sooner had Kevin gotten back to his car than he used the spell to destroy the film. The darkness vanished, and O’Donoghue sighed a bit in relief, knowing that should anyone in London try to steal the film, he or she would open the bundle to find nothing but a chunk of obsidian.

With Kevin squared away, O’Donoghue went back to Tír-na-nOg and retired to his council chamber to sit back and think through what he’d just learned. Whatever had thrown the Germans into a panic during the Blitz, they were still afraid that it was in England and was going to come after them, and they clearly thought it was something better opposed with magic than with mortal weapons. As a result, Himmler was mucking about with forces beyond his ken, and O’Donoghue feared that even if the half-wit SS warlocks didn’t blunder into calling up something they couldn’t control, they were bound to hurt a lot of their own kind and to make somebody in the Darklands, or a greater power still, very angry.

The might of the
Sidhe
would do little in this case. But the Order of the Silver Star was another matter. If everything O’Donoghue had heard of them was true, they’d be just the men for the job, though they might still need some… special support.

O’Donoghue sent word to Oberon, who concurred with his analysis and agreed with his idea. So it was that on the winter solstice, all the Seelie courts of the British Isles forewent their usual revels in favor of meeting in Glastonbury to create such gifts as they had not bestowed on mortals in a thousand years. While the men set about long-disused smithcraft, the ladies joined forces to stitch banners and think of all the things they’d like to say to Himmler and Hitler if given half the chance. Titania went on quite a heated tear that got frequent murmurs of assent and was followed by some good-natured jibing that she’d stolen all the best lines already. Niamh’s tirade was only slightly less impressive.

“What about you, dear?” Fand finally asked the Lady of the Lake, who had been working on a smaller banner for a second force whose inclusion in the Allies’ plan Kevin had just learned of. “You’ve been frightfully quiet over there.”

The Lady of the Lake tied off her last strands of silver thread and maroon silk with a flourish, then looked down her nose at the center of the room, where they had been pretending Hitler was standing. “I knew Arthur Pendragon,” she said archly, “and
you
, sir, are no Arthur Pendragon.” And she cut her threads with an air of finality.

The other ladies laughed and cheered.

By the time the flurry of stitching and gossip and smithy was finished, O’Donoghue’s herald stood ready to take the gifts across the sea to Texas. When he returned, he reported that the contingent of Tuatha Dé who lived outside San Patricio had been very surprised by his arrival, having paid less attention to events in the Old World than to the local ranchers’ worries about ongoing violence in Mexico. But once the herald had explained his mission and passed on O’Donoghue’s instructions, the Texas Tuatha Dé had been just as enthusiastic about the plan as were the rest of their kin. They had even located the gifts’ intended recipients and begun keeping watch over them with varying levels of interest. One Matt Schneider, in particular, had elicited a highly interested remark that made O’Donoghue laugh.

Now all O’Donoghue had to do was to wait for the mortals to make their own plans. As soon as he got word from Kevin that all was ready, he would send his herald back to Texas with the go-ahead. And then… then let the
Gearmanaigh
idiots tremble.

#####

4
German

#####

~~~~~

Chapte
r 3

Unfathomed

December 28, 1940

Chris turned out to need the holy water sooner. Orders came down from Berlin after Christmas for a massive air raid on London on the night of December 29, and an SS inspection of the same bomber group was slated for the day before—which also happened to be the new moon. Chris had a horrible hunch and manufactured an excuse to go to the airfield on the 28
th
himself. The SS goons were still inspecting the bombers when he arrived, so he went straight to the bomb silo. He couldn’t have explained the pieces his subconscious seemed to be putting together for him if anyone had asked him, but he had the nagging sense that the SS warlocks had been doing something to the bombs used during the later weeks of the Blitz and that they were planning to try again now.