Waging War (43 page)

The fire still smoldered among the bits of
wood around the stone church, and the smell of charred flesh hung
in the air with an oily stench.

Bodies were everywhere.

They were a blanket covering the ground.
Their clothes were a tapestry of blues and browns that threaded
through blackened ash. A little girl’s skirt was yellow. A boy’s
shirt was green. And through it all wove ribbons of red blood that
connected the people of this village to each other after death,
even if there had been no connection in life.

Saira was gone. She’d half-carried her
wounded and bleeding Sucker to the side wing of the church during
the chaos, and when the shooting finally stopped so the soldiers
could flee the burning church, they had disappeared. All that
remained of Saira’s presence was a chalk-drawn spiral in the
corner. I stepped toward it, and then I saw the priest emerging
from behind the altar.

His eyes didn’t go wide in the way a
person’s might when confronted by a man in a German uniform covered
in blood. They narrowed. It intrigued me. He probably wasn’t the
only one hiding in whatever crypt he’d come from, but I had no
interest in seeing more dead.

So I shook my head at him, put my finger to
my lips, and waved him back to his hiding place. He hesitated just
long enough that I thought he might be assessing whether or not he
could take me. He was tall, older than me but not more than a
decade, and he looked fit. To him, I must have seemed scrawny and
weak, despite the uniform and the rifle I had to wear so the
regular SS didn’t start things they couldn’t finish with me.

The priest’s gaze was direct and
unflinching, and I met it with my own. The horror of the other room
was still imprinted on my eyes, and looking at him meant I didn’t
have to watch Karl vomit in a corner, or admit that I noticed the
three SS soldiers who had returned to pick over bodies for
something to steal.

After a long moment – too long for someone
who wanted to stay alive – the priest reached out a hand and made
the sign of the cross at me. The bastard blessed me, right before
he turned and went back down the steps. The back of his priest’s
robe was covered in blood, so much blood I wondered at the wounds
that must be underneath it. Suddenly, I wanted to go after him. I
wanted to demand to know why he thought a blessing could ever
matter to a murderer. I wasn’t just going to hell, I was in hell.
How dare he imagine he had the power to absolve
me
.

I was shaking with rage when I strode to the
spiral on the wall – Saira’s unintended gift to me. Had she
followed me to France? Was she looking for me? Was her presence in
this place and time an accident, or was it fate that she drew a
spiral here for me to use?

Whatever had brought Saira, Archer, and
Ringo to this war, they had given me the means to finish my own.
France and Germany could duke this out without me, because now I
had a way to Clock to London and do what I came to this war to do.
I would find Walters on my own. I would find him, and I would kill
him.

Churches

I took us to the attic of the rectory where
Bishop Cleary lived – or rather, would live in another seventy
years, more or less. It had been Archer’s and my weapons training
ground and was almost as empty now as it would be then. It was a
calculated risk. Whoever the current Guy’s Chapel minister was, he
most likely lived alone, and Archer could probably talk our way out
of anything using his Bletchley Park connections and basic charm.
Except Archer was still out cold and would probably stay that way
until nightfall tomorrow.

When I’d made sure the attic was empty and
safe, I came back to where I’d left Archer, Ringo, and Rachel.
Ringo was checking Archer’s wound, and Rachel looked a little
shocky. I helped her to her feet, then shook her hand.

“I’m Saira. This is Ringo,” I indicated my
friend, “and Archer.”

She looked me straight in the eyes without
any fear, and I admired her for it. “You are the friends of Father
Sebastien. I recognized him,” she gestured toward Ringo, “in the
village square and wanted to help. I am Rachel,” she said in
accented English.

“Thank ye for that, by the way,” Ringo
said.

Rachel nodded once. “You brought meat to the
children,” she said, as if that explained everything. She added,
“We are not in Oradour-sur-Glane anymore.” It wasn’t a
question.

“We’re in England. At the Guy’s Chapel
rectory,” I added for Ringo’s benefit. He looked around once, then
nodded and went back to tending Archer’s back and shoulder. Ringo
had pulled a canteen of water out of his satchel and was wiping the
last of the blood off Archer’s skin.

Rachel’s eyes had widened and she took a
step back from me. “How—?” Then she shook her head. “No, I will
just have faith and leave it alone.”

“I can take you home when we’re done
here—”

She took another step back, but I wasn’t
sure that it was me she was retreating from. “I never want to see
what they’ve done, or the faces of my friends and my father’s
friends. I am finished there.”

I nodded. “Fair enough. Thank you for hiding
us.”

She shrugged, seeming to accept her new
circumstances, and began to wander around the room. “You are here
for a reason, I think.” She rubbed a clean spot in the dusty window
and looked outside.

Ringo shot me a look as I glanced over at
Archer, still so vulnerable. Then I turned back to Rachel and
studied her as she picked up a broomstick and weighed it in her
hand, maybe to find its balance, or to check on its usefulness as a
weapon. We were possibly the same age, but she wasn’t as tall as
me. Her short dark hair and lean, wiry frame were totally
functional and gave her the tools to pass for male. But if someone
looked close enough, her eyes would give her away. They were
wide-set, framed with long black lashes mascara companies would pay
top dollar to use in their ads, and they were currently focused on
me.

“It is dangerous, what we need to do,” I
told her.

Her gaze didn’t waver. “So is staying
alive.”

I took a breath. “When I can, I’ll take you
wherever you want to go.”

She turned to Ringo. “You’ll come with me to
find places to sleep?”

“I don’t think—” I began, about to say I
didn’t think it was a good idea to go wandering around a guy’s
house in the middle of the night, but Rachel cut me off.

“The house is empty.”

“How do you know?” I asked, although a
sneaking suspicion was winding its way up my spine.

“I just feel it,” she shrugged and pointed
to her stomach, “here. I am never wrong.”

I stared at her for a long moment. “When did
you build that false wall in your bedroom?”

She looked back at me without blinking, and
finally said, “Three months ago.”

Right.

Ringo shot me a raised eyebrow and got up to
leave with Rachel, and then I was alone for the first time in days.
Archer’s presence didn’t count because he was unconscious, and I
found an old blanket folded up on a dresser to spread over him.

I went to the window and looked out over the
nighttime street. Southwark seemed deserted, and there were no
streetlights on anywhere. There was a big pile of rubble directly
below my window, and I realized that the little park I’d always
assumed the city planners had left next to Guy’s Chapel was really
the result of a direct hit from a German bomb. Down the street, as
far as I could see under the moonlight, was the same landscape:
Victorian and Georgian buildings standing singly or grouped two or
three together, then an empty spot where a building had once stood.
The haphazardly mixed architecture of modern London suddenly made
perfect sense, and based on the number of ugly fifties and
sixties-style buildings that would be built in Southwark, air
raiders had hit this area really hard. The bombed-out landscape was
eerie, and despite the pre-dawn hour, the neighborhood felt oddly
deserted.

Ringo spoke quietly from the top of the
stairs. “There’s a bedroom for ye one floor down. Do ye want ‘elp
movin’ ‘Is Lordship to it?”

I looked at Archer, still curled under the
blanket, and shook my head. “No. I’ll manage. Get some rest, and
we’ll make a plan when we wake up.” I turned back to the window,
more for what I couldn’t see than what I could.

Ringo hesitated, but I said nothing else,
and finally he went back down the stairs. When the attic was mine
again, I turned my back to the window and slid down the wall to
huddle against it, drew my knees to my chest, and stared out across
the room with unseeing eyes.

I started shaking.

It began with chattering teeth that had
nothing to do with temperature, and then turned into a whole body
tremor. I didn’t even bother to fight it, I was too tired. But the
shaking was making it hard to breathe, and when I tried to get up,
I stumbled back down twice. Tears of frustration rolled down my
cheeks, and my breath came in gasps. My lungs were beginning to
seize up, and I fought panic as I pushed myself to my knees and
tried to stand a third time.

Strong arms lifted me, and I twisted around
to find Archer helping me to my feet. I buried my face in his neck
with a cry and he held me so tightly the tremors had no room to
shake. He stroked my hair, and murmured nonsensical things until I
could breathe again.

I kissed him then, to find the life in being
alive. The last time we’d kissed was in our little walled garden,
back in a time when all those people were still breathing, cuddling
their children, thinking thoughts of what to plant, or clean, or
build.

I kissed him for all those husbands and
wives who would never kiss each other again, for the parents who
couldn’t kiss their children, for the children who would never grow
up to find someone to kiss. I kissed him to erase the horror from
my eyes and my ears, to pull back the fear so it didn’t consume me,
and to find a small bit of the peace that had fled the walled
garden with the first scream.

My clutching grasp on Archer’s skin became
the anchor to keep me sane and whole and alive, and his arms held
me so tightly to his chest that my shirt became the barrier to
where he ended and I began.

I didn’t want any barriers between us, and I
stopped kissing him just long enough to tug off my shirt and
camisole. The heat of his skin was like a balm to my shocked body,
and I pressed myself into his chest.

“I love you,” he whispered into my hair. The
words sent a wave of need through me that brought my Cat up to purr
with desire. I still held control, but she rubbed against the
inside of my skin in a way that made me want Archer to touch and
pet and hold me.

I pulled back from him just enough to see
desire in his eyes, and my Cat preened in it. “I need you,” I said
simply.

The desire flared with heat and fire, and
then he kissed me until there was nothing else in the world.

There were no visions or dreams after we
made love. There was only the peace of being held by the man I knew
to the depths of my soul. The room we had found to sleep in was
furnished simply, but with an old, carved wood four-poster bed that
had long thick curtains we drew around ourselves. We woke at
sunset, in a cocoon of white linen that felt like a sanctuary, and
we whispered to each other to let the peacefulness linger as long
as it could.

“How do you feel?” he asked me.

“Alive.” I traced the last remnants of the
exit wound in his shoulder, and I realized his skin didn’t yet
carry the scars of the many wounds he would one day have. “How are
you?”

“In love with my wife.”

My heart smiled and I laced my fingers
through his.

“Are ye awake yet?” Ringo’s voice intruded
on the cocoon and I scrunched up my face like a kid who doesn’t
want to eat yucky spinach. Archer laughed and kissed me
quickly.

“Yes, now go away and we’ll be out in a
minute,” he said, grinning at me.

“Right-o. Saira, Rachel found a few tins of
things in the kitchen. Come down for food before we eat it
all.”

“Leave me anything you guys don’t like. I’m
so hungry I could eat tinned peas and be happy.”

“You say that as if there’s anythin’ I
wouldn’t eat. Street livin’ beats the picky right out of the
boy.”

I was tempted to throw a pillow at him, but
that would burst the cocoon wide open, so I made another face and
got another laugh from Archer.

“Out!” he called to Ringo. A moment later
the door closed and we could hear Ringo chuckle to himself as he
walked down the hall.

Archer touched my cheek. “That thing you
just did with your face is why you’ll win any fight we ever
have.”

I did the scrunchy face again. “You mean
this?” Archer’s laughter was infectious, and I was tempted to start
a tickle fight just to prolong his playfulness.