Look Behind You (The Order of the Silver Star) (9 page)

After a moment, Montgomery stepped closer to Hamer. “I say—” he began.

But Hamer interrupted. “I can guess what you’re about to ask, General, but the answer is no. Aleister Crowley is at best a lunatic and at worst a demon; he evidently took the name from Merlin’s prophecy but either didn’t know or didn't care that it had already been fulfilled. We were here first, and we don’t practice magic. We combat it. We fight for justice, for the rule of law, and for Jehovah.”

“And your definition of spiritual law?”

“Love God with your whole heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Montgomery nodded. “Thank you.”

“Who the hell is Aleister Crowley?” Martinez asked for all the other Rangers.

“The wickedest man in England,” Montgomery replied. “But I daresay that if the name means nothing to you, it doesn’t matter.”

Martinez looked at Matt, who shrugged. “O-kay,” Martinez said with a shrug of his own.

“I vouch for these men, Gen. Montgomery,” Nimrod declared as the other brass arrived. The power and authority in that simple statement were unmistakable; Matt half expected the walls to shake, only Nimrod hadn’t raised his voice.

And Montgomery… subsided with a murmured “Yes, sir.”

Matt was too polite to actually stare at Nimrod, but he was sure tempted to. Who was this guy? He couldn’t be a member of the royal family, but Montgomery wouldn’t have backed down for some average Joe Agent. Was he a duke, maybe? Or was he even human?

Nimrod looked right at Matt and shook his head.
Don’t ask
, Matt understood, though he wasn’t sure how.
It isn’t safe.
But then, as the group funneled into the briefing room, Matt passed close enough for Nimrod to grab his arm and whisper for his ears alone, “Your brother trusts me.”

Matt blinked at him a couple of times, but Nimrod released him and put a hand on his back to push him gently into the dark-paneled briefing room. As he found a chair, Matt tried to fill in the blanks raised by that one sentence. He and Chris didn’t look that much alike—but he supposed there was enough of a family resemblance for someone who knew Chris well to make the connection. If the agents normally used code names, it wouldn’t make sense for Nimrod to be able to place Matt as Chris’ brother based just on his name, even if Hamer had given British Intelligence a list of who all was coming… and besides,
Schneider
was a fairly common name.

So was it the family resemblance? Had Nimrod heard Matt speak and recognized the accent? Or had Nimrod just
known
somehow?

In the short run, Matt supposed it didn’t matter. Nimrod clearly knew Chris, or he wouldn’t have known how much Chris’ trust meant. Chris had always been fairly self-reliant and was too smart to give his trust easily under the circumstances, so assuming that Nimrod was telling the truth—and Matt had no reason not to assume so—that fact spoke highly of him. So did the fact that Nimrod chose that credential over any other as a way to commend himself to Matt. All the evidence so far pointed to Nimrod being some kind of a wheel in British Intelligence, and he clearly had some innate authority of a kind generals would heed. But he hadn’t said anything about his own rank. He hadn’t really given any information about himself at all. Just
Your brother trusts me
—with
and so can you
being implied.

Matt still wished he had more information about Nimrod to justify his gut feeling, but it was a feeling he couldn’t ignore.
If you’re going to trust a fairy with your parents’ wellbeing based on one conversation
, he thought,
you might as well trust this guy, whoever he is, because he’s a friend to Chris
.

Nimrod walked past a moment later, on his way to the front of the room. Matt glanced up at him, and Nimrod gave him a fleeting small but genuine smile… almost like he had heard Matt’s mental conclusion.

Matt managed to smile back, shivered as Nimrod moved on, and pulled himself together to focus on the task at hand.

#####

1
4
Goodbye for now, my heart.

#####

*****

When the Rangers finally left the briefing room ten hours later, Matt was ridiculously grateful that he’d managed to sleep on the plane on the way over, even though he’d never flown before. What had started out as a simple information dump had morphed into an initial investigative stage and strategy meeting, with Hamer taking over as more and more reports rolled in from various agents in northwestern France—plants withering, birds going into hiding, cattle mutilations, cold spots, rotten-egg smells, sudden headaches or lightheadedness or mysterious illnesses. Matt thought they had eaten at some point, but he couldn’t remember what or when; everyone had been too focused on work and hadn’t even slowed down while they ate.

By the time they were finished, though, the Rangers had not only a working sense of the structure of the Atlantic Wall but also a plan of attack. After a few hours to rest, they’d be heading to the coast, where a ship was waiting to take them to Dunkirk. From there, they’d spread out on horseback, riding as straight across country as they could to break the enchantments as fast as they could; the goal was to clear the way for the Allied invasion force as far as Mont-St.-Michel by the end of the month, then turn around and start pushing inland. Some of the Rangers even had specific target cities. Just how Matt had been assigned to Paris, he’d never know, but he was supposed to meet Agent Hercules outside of town as soon as possible—it would probably take five days on a mortal horse, maybe less if he really pushed it, but he had no idea how long it would take on a fairy horse (assuming that’s what they were getting) with the need to break enchantments and maybe fight Nazis along the way.

Part of him hoped the damage that the spells were doing just in the first 24 hours would be enough to make Hitler reconsider and order the warlocks to undo everything. But Matt wasn’t Irish. He’d never get
that
lucky.

“Hey, Schneider,” Hamer called. “Bunch of us are headed to a pub to get something to eat. You comin’?”

Matt shrugged. “Sure. Thanks.”

About half of the group opted to go on to the rooms they’d been given for the moment, mostly old-timers like Halberson who were too tired to go out. Hickman decided he’d attract too much attention. But the rest of the group was too hungry to care what anyone thought, so off they went to the pub, and the mood lightened a bit as stories and jokes began to fly.

Suddenly, an old man in a funny hat came running out of a house up the street. “Magister Hamer? Magister Hamer!” he called.

Hamer stopped and frowned as the wild-eyed man ran up to him. “It’s
Captain
Hamer. Who the hell are you?”

“Aleister Crowley. I wondered if I might—”

Hamer slugged him, knocking him down and breaking his nose, then walked away without any further response. And as the others followed, Matt thought he could hear high-pitched laughter coming from somewhere nearby.

Martinez leaned closer to Matt. “Monty thought we were following
that guy?
”

Matt looked back at Crowley, who was blinking owlishly at the Rangers as they passed and seemed not even to notice that he was bleeding, then at Martinez again. And they both burst out laughing at the absurdity of the idea.

*****

A good meal, a stout beer, and sheer exhaustion meant that Matt barely managed to get his boots off and set his alarm clock when he and Martinez got back to the room they were sharing. Martinez didn’t even get that far, just lay down on top of the covers with his boots hanging off the end of the bed. Matt did make it under the covers but sacked out without even bothering to change, and it felt like he’d been asleep all of ten minutes when the alarm went off.

“Shoot me now,
muchacho
,” Martinez groaned into his pillow.

“Can’t,” Matt replied as he slapped the clock. “Gun’s on the other side of the room.”

Martinez snorted and sat up. “You want first shower?”

“
Nee, leg los
.
15
I’ll see if I can’t rustle up some coffee.”

“
Bueno
.” Martinez pushed himself to his feet and staggered over to grab a clean shirt and such out of his pack. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Stupid o’clock, alias oh-dark-thirty.” Matt sat up and looked at the clock more carefully. “I hope I didn’t forget to set this thing ahead before we left Austin, ’cause either it’s two in the morning, or we’ve missed our train.”

Martinez groaned again and headed for the bathroom.

Matt’s fears about setting the clock to London time were relieved when he heard Hamer down the hall knocking on doors and calling, “Rise and shine!” More than once the wake-up call was answered with a muffled curse, which somehow didn’t surprise Matt.

A quick glance around the room didn’t reveal anything that looked like it could be used for making coffee, so Matt decided to save Hamer one stop. With a bit of a groan, he got up, opened the door, and poked his head out into the hall. “Hey, Cap’n, any chance of some coffee?”

Hamer shook his head. “Nah, not here, sorry. Nimrod says they’ll feed us on the train. Grab a shower; that should wake you up.”

Matt nodded and retreated with a sigh.
Some vacation
, he thought glumly as he shut the door and went to retrieve what he needed from his own pack.
Here we are in
London
, and the most I can see of it’s a pub. And now we’re leaving in the dead of night with no coffee. Wish you were here, Amy. You’d find some way to make this better.

Suddenly a familiar scent tickled his nose. He straightened and turned—and there on the nightstand were two steaming mugs of coffee.

He had exactly one guess as to the source, so as grateful as he was, he didn’t actually voice his thanks. Neither did he dare ask why the fairies would bother to grant what wasn’t exactly a wish. Instead, he set his things on his bed and took a cautious sip. The coffee was made precisely the way he liked it, and it didn’t make him dizzy or trigger any other sensation that would make him think he’d been snared by a kind of magic he didn’t want to tangle with. So with a shrug, he took a longer drink.

He was almost finished when Martinez came out of the bathroom and frowned in confusion. “Hey, I thought I heard Hamer say there wasn’t any coffee. Where’d you—”

“Don’t ask,” Matt interrupted and downed the last swallow. “You finished in there?”

“
Si, terminado
.”
16

“
Fabelhaft
.”
17
Matt grabbed his gear and made his way into the bathroom as Martinez picked up his coffee and sniffed the steam that was still rising from it. Once in the bathroom, Matt started to take his shirt off, only to glance down and discover that his clean underwear had suddenly become a horrible shade of burnt orange.

He’d never owned orange underwear in his
life
.

“Not funny,” he muttered and stomped back into the main room.

“Wow,” Martinez exclaimed as he passed. “This is just like
mi abuela
used to make.”
18

“Glad you like it,” Matt replied absently, grabbed some unaltered underwear out of his pack, and went back into the bathroom, where… the offending underwear was back to its normal state. He huffed and set the spare underwear on the edge of the sink. “Seriously, not funny,” he said quietly for the benefit of whatever fairy prankster was in earshot. “And would you mind letting me shower in peace?”

There was no response, so Matt took the silence as an affirmative and showered, dressed, and shaved as quickly as he could. But when he picked up his spare underwear to take back to his pack, it crinkled slightly, and he unfolded it to find a tiny note that he imagined being whispered with a giggle:

Her Ladyship likes you.

He blinked a couple of times. “Her Ladyship”… did that mean Colleen, or whatever her real name was? He guessed it could be true, even though they’d spoken face to face only the once; she’d always seemed friendly enough, but he supposed there was a chance there was more to it. She’d stepped in to care for his parents in his absence, after all, and she certainly hadn’t had to do that. But why would the fairies here even know what she thought of him, never mind feeling the need to tease him as if this were high school and the guys were trying to harass him into taking the homecoming queen to the junior prom? (He hadn’t even been friends with Janya Meier.)

And why did his stomach feel kind of fluttery over the note all the same?

Martinez knocked on the bathroom door. “Ten minutes, Schneider.”

Matt pulled himself together and stuffed the note in his pocket. “Comin’.” Then he gathered up the rest of his gear and hustled out of the bathroom to join Martinez in preparing to leave.