Shadow Soldier (The Gunsmith Book 2)

by C. K. Crigger

  Ned Smith was arguably the best horse trainer and doctor in the 91st Artillery Corps, and his commanding officer did not consider him expendable.

  A well-brushed bay gelding—a riding horse, not a harness horse— stood at the end of the picket line, a wisp of grass hay hanging out of his mouth. His front legs were wrapped from the knee down, his tail freshly bobbed and his feet newly shod.

  Page turned to Caleb with a grin, his harangue forgotten in the moment. “You found him, by damn. He all right?”

  By some fortuitous accident, Page discovered a limp carrot residing in his jacket pocket and held it for the horse nibble off his palm.

  Caleb watched, a flicker of approval in his grin. “He wandered into camp on his own yesterday. He’s a little lame but looks to me like he’ll be fine in a few days.”

  “I’d hate to lose him,” the major said softly. “I brought him over with me from Texas, you know. I’m used to him. I don’t know why he spooked and ran off. Never has before.”

  The reason might have had to do with the blood that had covered much of the saddle and the horse’s flank when it showed up at the remuda. Since the blood hadn’t been the horse’s, Caleb figured it must have belonged to the fellow who’d been holding the reins and who, given the quantity splashed about, must be among the dead.

  The rough-coated dog at heel on Caleb’s left thrust his nose up toward the horse. Major Page, being a little jumpy, flinched at the action, starting to draw his sidearm until Caleb put up a detaining hand.

  “What the hell is this creature?” Page grumbled. “If it’s a dog, you’d best keep it away from the horses. Don’t want to start a stampede.”

  “She won’t bother the horses, Major Page. She likes them—and they like her. I’ve been thinking I’d train her for a wrangler.”

  “If she don’t savage them first.” Refuting Page’s words, the horse paused in chomping the carrot long enough to touch noses with the dog.

  “Haven’t you seen this kind of dog around, sir? The French and Belgians train them to do about anything that needs doing. Usually they guard flocks of sheep, so I doubt you need worry about your horse being savaged. Anyway, most of the flocks are gone now. Killed or chased away by the war. So the dogs have been put to work hauling ammo carts or ambulances, carrying messages, or whatever. Herding horses should come natural to them.”

  Caleb touched the dog’s head with a gentle hand and the creature peered up at him from under a fall of hair. This was the dog who’d been knocked unconscious when he first discovered them; the other, with his splinted leg, had been left in the tent where the tack was stored, as Caleb didn’t want him walking too much as yet. He feared the one at his side might be permanently deafened by the concussion that had nearly killed her, though she was already responding well to hand signals.

  Page eyed the dog with new respect. “Is that right? More like her where this one came from, I guess. I wonder if it would be worthwhile to take a few of these mutts home with us?”

  “Dunno,” said Caleb. Having done his homework with a local from the village, he knew these particular animals had lost their master a few months ago when he’d stubbornly refused to leave his farm to the mercy of the Huns. There also, Caleb had finally discovered exactly where in the war he was and the when. He didn’t even want to think about being so close by the Argonne Forest. Not in September of 1918.

  “Where’d you get her?” Page eyed him. “You didn’t get up on your high horse about something or other and steal her, did you, Ned? You know we’ve had trouble enough getting fodder for the animals, without causing any other trouble amongst the nationals.”

  “No, I didn’t steal her.” Caleb wondered what kind of reputation his alter ego, Ned Smith, possessed. He regretted the turn this conversation had taken. About the time he thought the subject safely behind him, here he was bringing it up again himself. “I . . . er . . . sort of found her. Found a pair of them to be precise.”

  Page jumped on his hesitation. “Found them, eh? Whereabouts?”

  “Oh, out there.” Caleb gestured toward the front. “You might say they’re booty. Spoils of war, major. Or you could say I liberated them from the Huns.”

  Major Page frowned his question and Caleb sighed. “When I captured the machine gun, sir, the Germans had them in harness, pulling the cart with ammunition and water for the gun. The other dog saved my life. I figure I owed them.”

  Thus reminded, Page picked up the old diatribe where he’d left off, intentionally repeating himself, as though to make sure nothing was forgotten. “What were you thinking, creeping through the middle of a gas attack and single-handedly capturing a machine gun? Damn it all! I hope you know, Smith, that personally I’d like to court martial you for disobeying my orders to stay in the rear.

  “But, hell. Everyone knows what you’ve done, from the freshest buck private to the brass sitting in the command tent. They all seem to think you’re some kind of a hero. I suppose I’ll have to put you in for a goddamn medal.”

  Deadpan, Caleb said, “Thank you, sir.” He couldn’t help the little spurt of satisfaction Major Page’s declaration brought, though he knew of a better reward. All he really wanted was to go home, to his own life and time, and get the stench of death, ever present this close to the fighting, out of his nostrils.

  What could be keeping Boothenay?

  CHAPTER 9

  While I figured I could expect something fairly outrageous out of Will Mueller—or maybe I should call him Herr Mueller—he did succeed in startling me this time. He said he wanted taken back in time, to the beginning of his troubles. Seriously, he wanted to go back to the war? Why had he changed his mind? Was he crazy?

  The idea struck me as being incredulous and I said so. “I can’t do that. I won’t do it.”

  “Which is it, sis?” Mueller’s bleak eyes stared out from under severe brows. “You can’t take me back? Or won’t?”

  I sprang from the red leather chair and circled around behind it, leaning over the top with my fingers clenched on the wings. “Both,” I said with bald honesty, keeping the chair between us.

  He crossed one leg over the other, noting the way I recoiled from him. His upper lip quirked over yellowed teeth. “Are you afraid of me, Ms. Irons? What the hell for? Have you forgotten I’m more than a hundred years old?”

  This, I thought, is a case where age really doesn’t matter. Granted, my experience with other persons of power was small. So small I didn’t actually know of another one living, unless perhaps Caleb, and now Will Mueller—maybe Will Mueller—who belonged in such a select group. But in all my reading and in my studies of the grimoire I’d inherited from my mother, I’d never heard that powers diminished with age. Quite the contrary. In a word, yes, I was afraid of him, though put so bluntly, my fear seemed ridiculous.

  “You say you’re a hundred,” I retorted. Honesty made me add, “I don’t know if I can trust a single word you say.”

  “Well, it’s true. Anyway, what could an old codger like me do you a strong, young woman like you? More importantly, why would I want to? Didn’t you hear me say I wanted something from you?”

  “To which I said ‘no.’”

  “You want something from me as well.” His reminder sounded strangely gentle as he ignored my refusal. “You came knocking on my door, Ms. Irons. I didn’t knock on yours. Tit for tat, sis. Your own words. Maybe we can do each other a favor.”

  Mueller put both hands on the sides of his chair, and with the first sign of age I’d seen in him, used his considerable upper body strength to boost himself to his feet. Walking over to the tablescape of memorabilia, he selected a leather portfolio of photographs tied up with a faded purple ribbon.

  “Here,” he said, selecting one of the yellowed photographs and handing it to me. The picture was about as large as a letter-size envelope, which, when I turned it over, I found to be mounted on heavy paper and made into a postcard. “Take a look and see if you recognize him.”

  “W
ho is it?”

  A young man stared blindly toward the camera. He was dressed in a doughboy uniform and stood at parade rest, his shoulders straight. His face looked innocent, though strong and determined. A scrawled signature flowed across the bottom. “Will,” it said.

  I frowned. Please understand, I know people change over the years, sometimes drastically. If I look at old pictures of my own parents, I find a reconciliation of how they look in the photo and how they looked when I knew them almost impossible. Only when you search out similarities in the shape of their eyes, a tilt of their chin, a hook, perchance, in a nose, do you begin to see the person you remember.

  Well, guess what? I didn’t see one single thing in that young soldier to remind me of the man who sat across from me now, except for the name. They were of a general body type. Maybe they’d both had blue eyes and sandy hair. Maybe.

  “This isn’t you,” I said. Regardless of the signature, I was very sure of my judgment, no matter what he wanted me to think.

  I could have sworn his lower lip trembled.

  “This is a picture of Will Mueller,” he insisted, while I continued to shake my head. A very faint tinge of power clung to photograph. Not anything like I found encapsulated within guns; more as if the paper had soaked up a residue simply from being close to the true magical core. The Colt had lain on top the album at some time in the past, I knew, for when I looked closely, I saw the leather still bore a faint imprint of its shape. From so insubstantial a source, a part of the old man’s story lay ready to be revealed if I chose to take the path.

  “My cousin,” he continued. “The man I shot and whose identity I stole—the man I eventually became.”

  At first his words didn’t sink in. Then, “Oh, my God.”

  If he’d so much as blinked too fast in that moment, I’d have run screaming, but he didn’t, so neither did I—run screaming, I mean. After a moment, reason caught up with me. The crime he spoke of was nearly ninety years in the past. A bit beyond worrying about now. More immediate concerns threw out red flags.

  Like Caleb. What had this confession to do with him? I could only pray that where he was, his name was not Will Mueller. “Why?” I asked at last. “Did you use the gun, the.45 Colt to . . . to . . .”

  “Kill him?” He finished the sentence for me. I imagine he’d had a lot of time to go over and over the deed in his own mind, until he’d come to accept it. “Yes.”

  “Was the Colt his?” Perhaps this would explain the unresolved threat I sensed buried within the gun.

  “I don’t know.” He sounded vaguely annoyed. “What difference does it make who the gun belonged to? It was a means to an end. One I found close at hand when, by the purest luck, I discovered Will on the battlefield at St. Mihiel. The gun could have belonged to any one of those other fellows, I suppose. There were four of them, all dead when I got there, except for Willie.”

  My urge to scream grew stronger. What difference? Only that Caleb had totally disappeared under the impetus of that gun. Only that he was bound under the power of magic to be part of its history.

  My heart thudded with a sickening, heavy fear, the photograph trembling in my grasp. I tried, with a desperate will, to subdue any inkling that one of those men might be Caleb, or Caleb’s alter ego. All dead? It couldn’t be true.

  I found my voice. “From the uniform I understand your cousin was American. And you weren’t. So who are you?”

  “I was, still am, I suppose, August von Fassnacht.” The name was drawn from him like a bird pulling a worm out of the ground, slow and stretched. I guessed that the syllables hadn’t passed his tongue, or maybe even through his mind, for many a long year. Hearing the name out loud must have been as strange to him as to me.

  As though he hadn’t said a word out of the ordinary, he pulled a second photo from the stack, and I looked, but I didn’t touch.

  “Me,” he said unnecessarily. His was one of those rare cases where an old person does retain the bones, the contours of his youth. Uncompromising, stern eyes stared from under bold, dark eyebrows.

  His mouth was straight, unsmiling. Although he was only seventeen or so in the picture, he looked driven and frighteningly intense.

  He wore an old country uniform, trimmed with braid and full of verve. It didn’t give me a clue as to what force he might have belonged to. What I noticed was a resemblance between the cousins, apparent mainly in an inner strength and determination. August had also been an innocent on picture-taking day, a quality I felt him trying to hide.

  A third picture he glanced at only briefly and never offered to me. I had to crane my neck to catch a quick glimpse. I saw it was a snapshot, though rather obviously posed, of a high-nosed lady lounging on a chaise. Swathed in filmy fabric trimmed with feathers and smoking a cigarette with the aid of a foot-long holder, she should have looked ridiculous. She didn’t. She looked dangerous.

  I suppose she was beautiful in a Teutonic kind of way, but there was something in her aspect that told me I wouldn’t want to meet her except under bright lights.

  This must be von Fassnacht’s mother, for there seemed a strong resemblance between the two. August did not see fit to introduce her. I felt sure my dad, who was always talking about “bad vibes,” would have been jibbering by now.

  We came to the last photograph.

  “This is Eva,” he said, his face expressionless as he stared down at a girl’s sepia image.

  Personally, I thought her chin weak and her mouth pouty. Her hair was fair, her eyes were light, her bone structure was slight. I imagined her mind the same.

  “Poor child.” August shook his head. “We were sure we were in love. This was taken in the spring of 1914, before the Kaiser actually declared war, and any thought of dying was still in the future. She promised she’d wait for me. Wait for her conquering hero.” He laughed shortly. “She was very young.”

  He, too, had been very young, a remark left unspoken. Young enough in that far away day that I wondered how he could still be alive. And not only alive, but with an apparent thirty or more years taken off his chronological age. Something was wrong here, and I intended to get to the bottom of it. But first he wanted to tell me about the girl.

  She hadn’t kept her promise to wait. Affirmation of that was unnecessary. I knew, sensing her betrayal through his noncommittal words. Though I was perplexed and frightened by him, I couldn’t stop a quick surge of sympathy for a youth’s lost first love. Ever so lightly I touched his hand.

  Big mistake.

  With the next blink of an eye, the scene changed. Gone was von Fassnacht’s stodgy, little room in the Bethany Home for Assisted Living. His few comforts: good leather armchairs, shelves full of books, all faded into the distance. I’d brought August along on this journey, as I’d no doubt been meant to do, and although physically our bodies remained in his room, our psychic selves traveled a long way. Our reality became a garden filled with the heavy scent of old damask roses and the drone of worker bees. Distantly, I heard a sound of falling water, the splashing of a large fountain.

  Of course, I wasn’t me any longer. Or, yes, I was, but with an eerily familiar sensation; that of helping carry the burdens of someone else’s character. Eva’s shallow emotions were mine to share, as close as if we each stood on opposite sides of a line, separated only by a wall of air.

  Von Fassnacht’s visage was closed to me. I had a pretty good sense of what he was thinking and feeling, but there was no meld between us. And why should there be, for he was totally unaware of my presence and no longer the old man I knew. He had become the boy in the photograph.

  Eva’s sniveling competed with the pleasant sound of the fountain.

  I’d been with her no more than thirty seconds before I knew the hard-faced, old man August von Fassnacht had become could not have borne living with her for more than two or three months, six months tops. As soon as he’d had his fill of her sexually, they’d have had nothing more in common. And you can take my word for it, that time f
rame dealt with the sex, too. She had no generosity in her soul.

  “Gussie,” she said, and it was as if I felt the inhalation as she drew breath. She had a weak, little girl voice. “Oh, Gussie, I didn’t know. Your mother showed me a letter⏤”

  Her eyes fell from his, unable to withstand his steady gaze. I saw that he looked tired, worn gaunt and thin already, though the date was only June 27, 1915. He had an angry, red scar slicing back from his temple that his hair did not completely hide. Half, maybe only a quarter of an inch to the right and he would have been dead.

  Eva never noticed the scar. Her attention was arrested instead by the way the wedding ring on her third finger sparkled in the mid-afternoon sun. Several large clear diamonds surrounded a magnificent blue one. To match her eyes, Paul had told her, pressing his lips to her fingers.

  Her friends, Marguerite and Wilhemenia, had nearly swooned when she showed them her ring and repeated what he’d said. In a rush to make her his, they’d been wed in a thrillingly romantic marriage ceremony completed no more than two minutes before he was to catch the train heading off to the front. They’d drunk a toast with the very best champagne, provided, oddly enough, by Gussie’s own mother. Then dear Paulie had kissed her and gone. That had been the day before yesterday.

  His breath had smelled, she remembered. Rather badly of sausage and beer.

  “What letter?” August asked. “What didn’t you know?”

  Eva hugged herself as if she were cold, although the sun beat down on the flagstone terrace above the rose garden. She deliberately made her voice softer, more childlike, interjecting a trace of a quaver with true artistry.

  “Oh, Gussie,” she said again. “The letter⏤it said you were wounded. Grievously wounded. I thought you must be dead and that I’d never see you again. I thought you’d left me all alone, Gussie.” With some effort, she manufactured tears and when she felt them ready to spill, raised beautiful, shimmering eyes to his. Her childlike hands plucked at the embroidered edges of her short-sleeved, white lawn dress. “Your mother told me I should . . .” She stopped, then whispered, “. . . should try to forget you.”