Seven for a Secret (8 page)

Now the war was over, you could get rubber again. If you were Prussian. Ruth vaguely remembered shoes with rubber soles and buggies with rubber tires from before the invasion, when she was small. But these were the first such she’d had as an adult.

She rather thought this expedition would be the ruin of them.

Ruth was nearly last in line, Adele beside her and Jessamyn Johnson, who rarely talked, alone at the back of the group because Katherine was walking first. So Adele was in perfect position to appreciate how surreal the scene had become—the young women in their sodden white physical education uniforms marching with kicked-up knees like soldiers, or like a corps of drum majorettes with enormously oversized, deadly batons.

Herr Professor led them down the garden path between tall yew hedges. Ruth’s whole body shook with cold, water dripping from her eyelashes and flooding down the collar of her shirt. The spear trembled, the point swaying like a wind-tossed tree-tip, and she expected an ambush at any moment. From the taut stares the other students flashed to every side, Ruth thought she was not alone.

She had some warning when they rounded the corner beyond the brick garden house, because the girls before her stumbled and reacted, moving raggedly into a semi-circle rather than falling out crisply to either side as they should. When Ruth came up among them, she saw why and stumbled too.

Between two old stone hitching posts, a drenched and miserable yellow-eyed wolf cringed at the limit of its chains.

„You will kill it.” Herr Professor’s voice rose from the shadows at the base of the hedge as if from a bottomless hole. „And when you have killed it, you will cut out the heart, and share it between you. Miss Small, Miss Mapes, you may begin.”

If there was a thing you could say for Ian MacGregor, it was that he had the gift of timing. He appeared at Abby Irene’s door in the company of a smiling, red-headed wampyr just as Mrs. Moyer was setting the table for a late and lavish tea of poached salmon and green peas with crème brûlée for dessert. Abby Irene invited him to dine, and the wampyr—Alice—to observe.

MacGregor wasn’t any younger than she. Despite his cane and artificial foot, however, he was considerably more spry. And he accepted the invitation with alacrity, and without even glancing over her shoulder for Sebastien as if Sebastien were her keeper.

Which might have lessened the pain of the wampyr’s acid beauty when she smiled so kindly at Abby Irene. But couldn’t, really.

Abby Irene wouldn’t mind dying, she thought. Not now, not after so many years of adventures.

But by God, she minded getting
old.

It was Sebastien’s practice to attend the meal for company, and the presence of Alice and Mr. MacGregor only encouraged that. Abby Irene had never minded discussing business over food, and Phoebe had the strongest stomach of all of them. So as soon as Mrs. Moyer disappeared into the kitchen to bring forth the soup tureen, Abby Irene gestured to their guests. “You wouldn’t have come out in this rain if the news could have waited until morning.”

“Lady Abigail Irene.” He looked up from adjusting his napkin. “You should have been a detective.”

She contemplated tossing her roll at him, but Phoebe disapproved of food fights. So instead she snorted—unladylike, but that was the privilege of age—and said, “Out with it, or I’ll see you get no crème brûlée.”

He grimaced, burled hands interwoven on the lace tablecloth, and glanced at Alice, who gestured him to continue with an elegant white hand. “It turns out our friends already have files on these children.”

He didn’t expect to surprise her with that. But his gaze flickered from her, to Phoebe, to Sebastien, observing reactions. “All the girls are seventh daughters,” said Abby Irene. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

MacGregor clucked. “Lady Abigail Irene, I would wager no man could dare proffer such an opinion.”

The flattery curved the corner of her mouth into an irrepressible smile. “You know me well.”

He swirled the water in his glass. “One of the girls is a Jew. Her family are ours.”

Sebastien flexed his fingers against the tabletop. “And she hasn’t given them up?”

“She hasn’t.”

Mrs. Moyer came to lift away their plates and carry them into the kitchen. As she brought back the crème brûlée, Sebastien said, “That’s a very suggestive fact. Has anyone admitted that the child is a infiltrator?”

MacGregor shook his head.

Alice leaned forward on her forearms and said, “We have to assume that many of these children are beyond immediate rescue, you must understand. Possibly beyond redemption at all, but—” She interrupted herself with a shrug. “They’re young. They’re easily swayed by philosophies that seem to provide uncomplicated answers and a sense of identity. The Prussians selected them when they were eleven or twelve. So we must recall that they’ve been indoctrinated to the Prussian ideals for as long as they have been aware of politics. And the Prussian ideals—”

“Everyone likes to be told they are special, chosen,” MacGregor said. Abigail Irene watched his face go still and impassive as a death mask. “Everybody likes to be invited into the secret society.”

Ruth had to try it herself, if only to put the poor thing out of its suffering. After a few steps, the simple act of
forcing her feet forward proved an impossibility. None of the other girls had managed to totter even a step. They clumped in a semicircle, spear-butts propped on the ground before them, huddled behind the shafts as if they were the trees of a forest that could manage to hide them.

But then Adele stepped forward, and Ruth had to step up with her. Jaw firm, eyes front, and in the rain who could tell if they were too bright? Side by side. For now, they could do anything together.

For now. Until Ruth had to decide who to betray, Adele or herself.

Ruth lifted her spear and thrust, and for the first time killed something other than a sandbag. Adele shouted and thrust also, simultaneous.

It wasn’t easy or clean, not the way they were taught in drill. Oh, the spear blade parted the skin like glass, but the wolf did not simply fall down and die. There was a terrible noise and struggle, the wolf lunging to the end of its chain, its claws harrowing the earth in parallel furrows, clods and mud flung to spatter dresses and faces. Ruth tasted salty earth, mud, rain, the sharp chlorophyll of torn grass.

Then finally it fell, and Adele stood leaning on her spear, hair plastered across her bloody face, shuddering over the chained body of the wolf.

Because she could not put her arm around Adele, not with Herr Professor watching, Ruth knelt down on the soaked grass beside the corpse and reached up without
looking for the knife he would press into her hand.

So I can kill something if I have to,
Ruth thought.
That’s good to know.

A man will surely be easier than a wolf. Especially a man who isn’t blameless.

Once Ruth punched through the hide, the knife was sharp enough to slice flesh without sawing. Ruth was a farm girl; she’d never slaughtered, but she’d cleaned chickens. This was awful, but not so different. Adele and Beatrice and Jane helped her, once she had the belly open, and they pulled free a steaming mass of offal and left it in the mud. Jane turned her head to retch; Adele pulled back hands held from her sides as if they were daubed with flour.

Herr Professor had to free the heart.

Wolves, Ruth thought with some amusement, weren’t kosher. But then, she’d been eating treif for years, in this German household.

God would forgive her. And if he did not, there were worse things he would be holding her accountable for.

The meat was hot, the shreds still smoking and flavored with cold rain, a shock of jellying blood and salty muscle, the heart…the heart tasted…the heart, the strength of it thrilling in her veins like liquor, like love…like nothing
she’d ever before known.

When she raised her face from the palmful of blood
and haggled meat she’s swallowed, Ruth saw Adele grinning at her through a mask of gore rain-streaked across her cheeks. Ruth wanted to shudder, to cringe from the bizarre delight that prickled like nettles along every limb and down each finger, to hide her own face from the wildness that infected Adele’s.

You’re doing it for your mother,
Ruth told herself, but the reflection might have been on bedtime chores or cold toast for all it stirred her. She wiped rain and blood from her nose onto the back of her hand, and thought more firmly,
You are doing it for Adele.

“The second formula is:
sium
, cowbane;
aconum vulgare
, sweet flag;
pentaphyllon
, cinquefoil;
vespertilioris sanguis
, bat’s blood;
solanum somniferum
, deadly nightshade; and
oleum
, oil.”

—Montague Summers,
The Werewolf in Lore and Legend
, 1933

When Sebastien came into Abby Irene’s bedroom, he found her before the mirror, brushing out her short white cap of hair. Her nightgown spread over the embroidered cushion of her vanity bench. She couldn’t have seen his reflection float up behind her, but she still lifted her chin and the brush stilled.

He waited. If he were still flesh and blood, he would have held his breath. He felt, as he felt so often now, as if he were a burned paper, ashes still holding their shape but only so long as he remained untouched.

He placed a hand on the slope of her shoulder.

“Sebastien.”

“My dear,” he said. “You are afraid for me.”

She snorted and set the silver-backed brush down on her vanity. “I am old,” she said, scornfully. “My liver is weak. My heart is feeble. I have no stomach for risk and adventure any longer.”

“You used to be a better liar,” he said, tolerantly.

She pressed a powder-soft cheek against his hand. “Are you so certain I’m lying?”

“You have the heart and stomach of a general,” he said. “And the liver of a king.”

That straightened her neck and made her bark laughter. “I am too old to lose you, Sebastien. You are all I have left.” She kept her eyes on the mirror, as if it were easier to speak to what she could not see. Her lips pressed tight, as if she understood the hypocrisy of proclaiming age and loneliness to a wampyr. She shook her head, a quick little shiver he might have mistaken for a tremor if she had not said, “By God, I’m a selfish old bitch.”