Waging War (51 page)

“Millicent Mulroy?” I breathed. “She married
her pilot.” I stared at Ringo with wide eyes.

He nodded, his expression more solemn than
I’d ever seen.

“Time has split.”

I Clocked us into Archer’s cellar room at
St. Bridgid’s School with the breath-holding hope of Christmas
morning and the wincing anticipation of a horror film. But I knew
what I would see even before my eyes adjusted to the dark. The air
in the cellar annex was stale and musty from moth-eaten carpets
rolled in a corner. Empty bookcases were stacked against a wall and
tables lay inverted on top of each other with their feet in the air
like giant dead bugs. I didn’t even need to use my Maglite to find
the four-poster bed at the far end of the space. The curtain was
drawn back and the mattress was missing, which made the bedframe
with its wooden slats look like the ribcage of a skeleton.

Ringo clicked on his Maglite and swept the
room slowly as I strode back to where he stood at the spiral. It
was the old one that had been scratched into the original plaster
wall, not the chalk spiral I had drawn in this space at Archer’s
request.

“’E never lived ‘ere after the war, did ‘e?”
Ringo’s voice sounded hollow in the lifeless room.

“No, he never did.”

“I Saw you come,” Miss Simpson said when I
found her in her office. School wasn’t in session yet, as it was
still the tail end of summer, but Miss Simpson was already there
getting ready for the new term.

There was no smile of welcome when Ringo and
I knocked on her door, and only the barest hint of recognition in
her eyes at the sight of us.

“Do you know me?” I asked quietly.

“You’re a Clocker. We don’t get many of you
at St. Brigids.”

“Many?” I had been the only one.

“We have two Mulroys and a MacFarlane this
term, so no, that’s not many.”

Two Mulroys. Millicent’s … grandchildren?
Ms. Simpson studied me as I processed her words. “What did you See
about us?” I asked her.

“You were gathering information here at
school, finding allies. You won’t stay long, but in the end, you’ll
destroy us.” Miss Simpson smiled at that.

“Why does that make you happy?” I asked her
with the little breath I had left.

Miss Simpson’s eyes looked dreamy as she
recited.

“
Because out of the ashes the phoenix
will rise.

The truth will be born, where before there
were lies.

And one line will live when the other one
dies.”

The key was where I’d originally found it on
the lintel above the door to the Clocker Tower, which was deserted
with no sign that I had ever been there or made it my own. Ringo
locked the door behind us as I crossed to the painting and drew
back the drapes.

The London Bridge was just as it had always
been, the Clocker spirals painted in with swirls of paint. I traced
a swirl with one finger absently, as Ringo stood behind me near the
desk.

“You have no history here, neither of you.”
A voice came from the doorway, and I didn’t turn.

“I wondered if you’d come, Doran,” I said,
my eyes still on the painting.

“This time stream you created is not so easy
to navigate. I wasn’t sure I’d find you,” he said with no irony at
all.

“
I
created?” I stared at him,
incredulous.

“Don’t put this on Saira.” Ringo was
indignant enough for both of us. I finally turned to face my
cousin, who had entered the room. Doran looked slightly disheveled,
which was odd enough for him that I looked closer.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked him.

He grinned wryly. “Well, the wreckage you
left behind in London was more than even I could sift through for
something so small as the Monger ring.”

I stared at him. “Did you find it?”

He shook his head with a grimace. “If it
remains intact, it has become a needle in a haystack.”

“
If
it does? You mean it could be
gone? No more Monger ring?”

He looked oddly serious. “The Mongers no
longer have the power to compel, and in fact, their power has been
crushed.”

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it depends who you talk to,
doesn’t it?” His words were flippant, but his tone was utterly
serious.

His mood seemed to match mine, and I
shrugged. “Doesn’t matter without Archer.”

“Ah yes, your Victorian Vamp. Sadly, there
was no sign of him in the rubble either.”

I felt my fists clench by my sides. “He
doesn’t deserve your disrespect. He was a better man than you’ll
ever be, Doran.” I ground the words out through my teeth.

“But why do you speak in past tense?”

Ringo stared at Doran. “Because ‘e died in
1944.”

“Yes, but time split the moment that bomb
went off. There are now two time streams, and on one of them you
have a history with the Vampire.”

I gasped. “How do I get there? Can I just go
back before the split and then Clock forward again?”

He looked pityingly at me. “Saira, you know
better than that. When young Henry split time in France, you had to
go back and repair the split before you had access to the true time
stream.”

“But we were
there
when it split! I
can’t be in the same time as myself.”

“I suppose that’s a conundrum then, isn’t
it?”

“And you’re not going to tell me how to fix
things, are you?” I could feel a very familiar anger rise up – the
same anger Doran inspired every time he dropped into my world and
scattered bits of information like breadcrumbs for the birds to eat
before I could follow them.

“My aunt would be rather disappointed in me
if I did that, but then she has already given you a clue, hasn’t
she?”

My eyes narrowed as I considered his words.
“Your aunt is Miss Simpson? Are you a Seer too?”

“Of course not. My mix is dangerous enough
to my health without adding another Family to the recipe. I’ll
leave you with this though, dear cousin: as with nature, everything
needs a check and a balance, or a yin and a yang, if you will. Just
as your Vampire gives you balance, so, too, does weakness offer
balance to power, or the bad balance the good. There is no
possibility for color in a world where everything is black or
white. Only in shades of gray does an opportunity exist to find the
rainbow.”

With that, Doran stepped forward, past
Ringo, to kiss me on the cheek. “Congratulations on your marriage,
Cousin. I do hope you find your happiness,” he whispered, just
before he stepped through the painting and disappeared.

“Well, that was spectacularly un’elpful.”
Ringo sounded disgusted, which was my usual reaction to Doran’s
visits. But I was still reeling from the hope his words had ignited
in me. Archer had existed on the time stream where we met and he
was still there. I just had to figure out how to get back to
him.

“No. For once, Doran gave me something
useful.” I looked my friend in the eyes and promised, “Archer’s out
there, on the true time stream, and we’re going to find a way back
to him.”

Epilogue – Archer

The bullet wounds in my chest wouldn’t heal
without the blood my body had begun to crave. It had been too long
since I’d last fed, and I knew it would require so much more than
either of my companions could give without killing them.

Connor’s Wolf lay in a coma next to me, his
heat a balm to the chill that had begun to creep through my veins.
Blood had soaked my shirt and was beginning to pool under me. I
looked for Tam, who had taken my Maglite, the habit to carry one
courtesy of my association with my wife, and was exploring the back
of the passage.

“They stored their own food and water here.
There’s probably enough for about a week or two if we ration.”

My voice croaked with dehydration when I
spoke. “Don’t touch my blood, or let Connor touch it. He’ll heal
better if he stays Wolf, but don’t let him get thirsty.”

Tam cocked his head at me like a dog does,
and I wondered what the rest of his mix was in addition to Seer.
“You sound like you’re going somewhere.”

I slipped my hand into my pocket and pulled
out the little silk wrapping I carried there. My fingers fumbled
with the ties as I removed the little syringe Shaw had given
me.

“Tell Connor when he wakes that I tried his
cure. Tell him I’ve lost enough blood that it may work.”

I uncapped the syringe and rolled up my
sleeve with trembling fingers. “Eventually I’d get hungry enough
that I’d go feral and kill you for your blood,” I told him without
meeting his eyes. “I saw it happen to a friend of mine.” The
syringe slipped from my fingers twice until finally it rolled out
of reach. I choked back the sob of frustration in my voice. “Can
you … help me?”

He searched my eyes for a long moment, the
truth of what I said sinking in. “You’re a Sucker.”

I nodded. He considered me another moment,
then apparently made a decision, because he moved to pick up the
syringe. I barked at him, “Not with your skin.” Tam nodded and used
the clean silk bandage to pick up the barrel of the needle. He
knelt beside me.

“Let me do it,” he said.

My breath was coming in ragged gasps and I
nodded helplessly. “A vein,” I remembered to tell him. He carefully
cleaned a spot on my arm, then pushed the needle under my skin.

“If you see my wife, tell her she was the
only thing I saw at the end.”

He looked strangely at me, his finger
already in the process of pressing the plunger on the syringe. “I
thought you said this was the cure.”

Fire began to crawl up my arm. It coursed
through my veins with every pump of my heart, and I closed my eyes
as if the sun burned behind them. I was in agony, and completely at
peace. I whispered with the last of my breath.

“It is.”

A burnt out car in
Oradour-sur-Glane. (photo credit: TwoWings, CC BY-SA Wikimedia
Commons)

It may be an obvious thing to set a book
about the Immortal Descendants of War during the deadliest war in
human history, and I actually did consider other conflicts first
because it was so obvious. But I’ve always been fascinated by World
War II – its causes, its effects, and its extraordinary heroes and
villains. My mother was born during the war in a tiny German
village in what is now part of Poland. She was six months old when
her mother fled the village on foot with her three children, twelve
hours ahead of the Russian army. My mom’s memories of childhood in
the aftermath of war, living in poverty, battling stomach
tuberculosis caused by malnutrition – those were stories that I
grew up with.

The German atrocities are well recorded,
though until I began to research the setting for Waging War, I had
never heard of the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. It is a small
village near Limoges, France, and the remains of it still stand as
a memorial to the events of June 10
^th
, 1944. Accounts of
the events surrounding the massacre from various sources including
court records, German soldiers, and the few French survivors
generally agree that a burned-out ambulance was discovered by a
troop of German soldiers who had been searching for Sturmbahnführer
Kämpfe, who was kidnapped and ultimately killed by the local
Maquis. The Maquis had been effectively harassing the
2
^nd
SS Panzer Division on its way to Normandy, and the
journey, which should have taken four days, took seventeen, thus
allowing the Allies to solidify their presence in northern France
after D-Day. The massacre appears to have occurred as reprisal for
this Maquis activity.

As the Germans conducted a house-to-house
search of the village looking for caches of Maquis weapons, they
rounded up the men into the village square and sent the women and
children to the church for “safekeeping.” There was a small
explosion inside the church (sources disagree as to whether it was
caused by soldiers or by someone from the Maquis), Germans began
shooting, and in the end, nearly every woman and child in the
church was dead, either from gunshots or from the subsequent
fire.