Waging War (31 page)

He shrugged. “Just afraid.” He held my gaze.
“Most of my time with ye ‘as been spent in the past, with knives
and swords and the odd pistol bein’ aimed in yer general direction.
We both know stayin’ whole is just a matter of bein’ faster and
smarter than yer opponent – and ye always ‘ave been that.”

He sighed and waved his hand around him in a
generally inclusive gesture. “But ‘ere – now – in this war,
everyone ‘as a gun. And that’s not even the thing ye ‘ave to be
most afraid of.”

I stared at him. “I’m not in danger of being
run down by a tank, Ringo.”

He made a face at me, which helped diminish
little of the worry that was lining his eyes. “It’s the turncoats
and traitors and scared people just tryin’ to survive ye ‘ave to
fear. Fast and smart can only keep ye so safe from them when they
set their sights on ye.”

I sat back and tried to choose the words
that mattered. I included both of them in my gaze. “I get it. I get
the fear, and I have those same fears for both of you. But you
should know that I got really defensive when I saw how angry you
both looked, and my first instinct was to run.”

“I’m sorry ‘bout that, Saira.” Ringo said.
He looked straight into my eyes when he spoke. “I can’t say it
won’t ‘appen again, but ye’ve said it yerself, I’ve chosen my
family, and ye two are it.”

I gave Ringo a grateful smile as Archer
reached for my hand. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

I shrugged. “It’s not the first time you’ve
been angry at me for taking risks, and it won’t be the last.”

He studied me for a moment. “Is my
protectiveness of you very stifling in your time?”

Ringo smirked, and I almost answered too
fast. But then I saw the tension around Archer’s mouth, and I
thought I should be fair.

“Yes, but I think I do the same thing to
you, so we’re pretty even. You did have to mellow out a little at
the Tower of London, but we worked it out.”

Archer looked startled, and I thought
dropping our Tudor-era adventures into the conversation probably
wasn’t the best idea. But he surprised me. “Why would you need to
protect me? I’m immortal.”

I shot Ringo a glance, and he shrugged as if
to say ‘you’re on your own.’

I stood up and held my hand out to Archer.
He took it and got to his feet with the kind of grace I’d never
been able to manage. “That’s a long story, and as much as I’d love
to hang out in the woods with you guys all night, I’m bummed to say
we should probably go find Nancy and her gang of cutthroats before
the snipers start picking them off.”

Archer gave me a smirk worthy of his modern
self. “You can talk while you run, can’t you?”

Ringo barked a laugh that earned him a glare
from me, and I smiled with thorny sweetness. “Lead the way.”

Archer laughed and we took off through the
woods at a decent pace. As we ran, I told him about the old wounds
that had begun blooming on him every time he got hurt, and about
Connor and Mr. Shaw’s theory about the mutation of his telomeres.
It prompted a whole conversation, led by Ringo, about the science
of genetics. I was impressed at Ringo’s ability to break things
down into digestible pieces and at the sheer amount of knowledge he
had picked up from his listening post in the greenhouse lab.

Archer was clearly fascinated with the
genetics of Immortal Descendancy, and I was so engrossed in Ringo’s
explanation that I forgot to anticipate what came next.

We had intersected the road far beyond the
town and dropped our pace to a stealthy walk so as not to attract
unwanted attention. I missed the significance of the look Ringo
shot me until Archer asked him, “Your friends are doing such
precise work in their laboratory. Is it merely research, or do they
work toward an end?”

The outline of a building materialized in
the misty night, and the prickling edges of Mongerness reached out
from the shadows. I whispered, “We’re here.”

Archer’s voice was pitched low. “You didn’t
answer my question.”

I stopped to face him. “They’re working on a
cure for you – a virus that neutralizes the mutation. But they
think you have to be badly injured for the virus to work, and they
don’t know if it would reset your telomere response to normal
after
healing the wounds, or if you’d die from the wounds
themselves.” I thought I had managed to deliver the information
without the emotional breakdown that laced its fingers around my
heart every time the subject came up.

“The unknowns are somewhat concerning.”
Archer’s delivery was so deadpan I almost barked a laugh, but
caught the sound just in time.

“You think?” I avoided Ringo’s eyes and kept
mine locked on Archer. He touched my face gently and might have
kissed me, if it hadn’t been for the Monger who materialized behind
us.

Ringo and I both stiffened, but Archer spoke
sharply to him in French before taking my hand to continue walking.
The Maquisard moved quietly ahead, and I assumed he’d been told to
inform Nancy that we were there.

Ringo walked a little apart from us, and his
silence had weight to it, as if it was a heavy thing instead of an
absent one. Just before we walked into Gaspard’s farmhouse, I hung
back and let Archer go in first. I touched Ringo’s sleeve. “What?”
I whispered.

He didn’t pretend not to know what I was
asking, and his eyes met mine directly. “You’re settin’ ‘im
up.”

That earned a double-take. “How?”

“If ‘e agrees with ye that the cure is too
dangerous, ye’ll take that back to Archer and use it against
‘im.”

“Use it against him? I don’t even get
that.”

“Really? Ye don’t think ‘e’d wonder if ye
wouldn’t just come back to this time and choose this version of
‘imself?”

I stared at Ringo in shock. “They’re all
Archer.”

He raised an eyebrow. “All?”

I tried to explain, even though I knew I was
tap-dancing in a minefield. “The student we first met, this one,
and mine.”

“So, only the one from yer time belongs to
ye, eh?”

I glared at him in exasperation. “I don’t
get it, Ringo. What do you want me to say?”

His eyes held mine for a moment before he
looked away. “I don’t know. It’s not my business, anyway.” He
nodded at the door. “Go on in. Ye ‘ave things to tell them.”

I debated staying there and making him work
through whatever weirdness was crawling around his brain, but I
really didn’t want to know. There are some things it’s just better
to leave unsaid, and I was already feeling prickles of guilt about
his comment. If the Archer from my time was the only one that
belonged to me, then any comfort or connection I made with this
Archer was in the realm of cheating … on him … with himself. I
closed my eyes with a shudder, then squared my shoulders to step
inside the farmhouse. My relationship sinkholes had no place in a
room full of Mongers and Nancy Wake.

Archer shot me a quizzical look when we
entered the main room, where Nancy and Gaspard were studying a map
and several other young men were doing whatever small tasks they
could busy themselves with. There were rifles being cleaned, knives
sharpened, and satchels emptied and re-packed. It was the kind of
work people created so they could stay in a room and listen in.

Archer and Nancy stood next to each other,
and the height difference between them was noticeable. He was at
least ten inches taller than she was, and I had the thought that
she was too short for him.

Not to mention, too married for him.

Not that I had a lot of room to talk though
considering how murky my own situation was when it came to Archer.
I mentally flipped Ringo off for having planted the seeds of doubt
and discomfort in my head. Was this Archer, in 1944, a different
man than the one I was with in my present? Then again, the Archer
I’d first fallen in love with had been the young student in 1888,
and this Archer was closer in time to him than the one waiting for
me in London. For that matter, according to the rules of time
travel, the reason he was waiting in London for me instead of being
here was that he couldn’t be where he already was. That fact alone
supported the idea that Archer was just Archer, no matter
when
I was with him.

My mental voice
hmmphed
as if to say,
so there,
and I started to feel a little
split-personality-ish for talking to myself. This philosophical
morality talk could wait. We had snipers to find.

Archer continued his conversation with Nancy
and Gaspard in French, and I could tell they were trying to figure
out the most likely spots for a sniper to lay in wait. I
instinctively moved to Archer’s side to see the map. Gaspard
stiffened and made a move to grab the map off the table, but Nancy
snapped at him. “Arrêt!”

She turned to me. “So, love, let’s see what
you bring to the table, shall we? The goods on the snipers are
yours. Pretend you’re one of those rat bastards and tell me where
they went.”

I was surprised that she gave me that
respect, and I looked at Archer. “Point to the approximate location
of my tree.”

His finger dropped on a spot in the forest
just south of Oradour-sur-Glane, and I studied the landscape around
it. There was the creek I’d followed, and the spot the soldiers had
pulled their vehicle off the road. I traced the direction they’d
taken when they left, studying the small hamlets dotting the route
to Limoges.

“Where are we now?” I asked Nancy. Gaspard
practically growled as he stormed away from the table, muttering
unflattering things probably having to do with animals and body
parts.

Nancy scoffed at the concern on my face.
“Don’t worry about him, love. My first night here he tried to
convince some of the Maquis to cut my throat and steal my
money.”

“What happened?”

She laughed and said cheerily. “I got them
drunk, then told them I was the only one who knew all the drops,
all the codes, and where the liquor was stashed. If they listened
to that one,” she indicated Gaspard, still glowering in a corner,
“they’d get none of it.” She blew him a kiss across the room, and
his scowl darkened. “Gaspard never did get over the fact I’m still
here drinking with his boys.”

She directed my attention to another spot on
the map. “But now we have sniper problems to keep us busy. We’re
here now, and these were last night’s targets.” She pointed at two
bridges.

I placed mental dots on each of the places
on the map, then scanned the roads surrounding them. There were two
other bridges nearby, one of which was outside a village and
surrounded by farmland, and the other was a train trestle bridge
that crossed a river. I pointed to the train bridge.

“There.”

“Why?” she asked with interest.

“You said your mission is to slow down a
panzer division that’s trying to get to Normandy. If it was me, I’d
take out anything that runs north/south, especially trains. Blowing
a bridge seems like a pretty efficient way to do that.”

Nancy studied me. “It is. The charges were
set earlier today and we plan to blow tonight’s train.”

I stared at her. “Why the train? Why not
just the tracks?”

“Because Gerry has a habit of commandeering
our trains.”

“But wouldn’t a train be full of
people?”

“Most likely.” She didn’t back down, and I
held her gaze.

“That’s a lot of people.” I was pretty sure
it wouldn’t just be soldiers on that train. My temper was rising,
and there were a whole bunch of words I’d been biting back that
were just waiting for the floodgates to lift.

“There will be reprisals,” Archer said.

“I’ll work them to our advantage,” she said
with a shrug.

That did it. The shrug. Like she couldn’t be
bothered with trivialities. I stared at her, my eyes narrowing.
“You’ll work reprisals to your advantage? Correct me if I’m wrong,
but reprisals are not just restricted to the eye-for-an-eye
routine. You take out a bridge, they’ll take out a school, isn’t
that how it works?”

Nancy studied me, her expression hardening.
“You find the English infiltrator, and leave the rest of the war to
me.”

Archer met my eyes and then tried to
redirect the conversation. “Where is the main body of the
2
^nd
SS Panzer Division right now?” he asked Nancy.

She shifted her gaze back to the map,
studiously avoiding my glare. “A couple of days south of Limoges,
assuming we can keep up the pressure. We’ve been taking out the
advance groups as they enter the Limousin region, and so far they
haven’t been able to organize themselves into anything bigger than
a small battalion.”

Nancy tapped the location of the train
bridge. “I’m sending scouts to look for signs of the snipers around
my charges.”

“We’ll go with them,” I said sharply. It
felt like all the eyes in the room swiveled to me, even though it
was probably only Nancy, Archer, and Ringo who stared. “You said to
find the English spy, right? Well, he’s Werwolf and so are the
snipers. I need them alive so we can find the rest of their
group.”

“Snipers can be eight hundred to a thousand
meters away from their targets, Saira.” Archer was not thrilled
with my suggestion.

Nancy’s eyes narrowed. “Listen to Devereux.
Stay here and out of the way, because I promise you, when I find
those snipers, I’m taking them out.”

I glared right back at Nancy. “You’re going
to have to shoot me first, then. I need to follow the Werwolves
back to their base, which I can’t do if they’re dead. All we have
to do is scare them away and they’ll run, and then you’ll get to
blow up your train full of people as planned.”

The look Nancy directed at me was all sharp
edges as she grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the room. She
surprised me so much I forgot to resist until we were in a bedroom
at the back of the house and she had kicked the door shut in
Archer’s face.