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Shadow Soldier (The Gunsmith Book 2)

Page 16

by C. K. Crigger


  I was already in, but I did close the door.

  He hadn’t bothered to turn on a lamp. Though very little light shone through his single window, I saw right off there had been some big changes in him since morning.

  I gasped. “Good God, August! What’s happened to you? Are you sick?” As a matter of fact, he looked as though he ought to be dead. How could anyone be so shriveled, so . . . so diminished, yet have his heart keep on beating?

  No wonder he hadn’t turned on the light. It would have revealed a person whose claim of over a hundred years of life must be indisputable. And I think—I know—he was vain enough not to want this to show.

  “You might say,” he answered shakily. “Sick of living. Sick of going to sleep and waking up again. You see me as I feel, girl.”

  He took a breath between every sentence, and though his words were impassioned, his voice was light and curiously flat.

  “You’ve brought the pistol,” he added. “I can feel the touch. Barely in time, I think.”

  Yes. I could see that. I also saw he’d been looking at the photos because they were scattered all over the bed where he lay.

  “You tried to go by yourself, didn’t you?” I should probably be ashamed of the little rush I felt in seeing he’d failed. Not for want of trying apparently. I confess I was glad to find he couldn’t do it without me.

  The old coot didn’t appear in the least embarrassed I’d caught him attempting to renege on the pact we’d made this morning. I’d explained then why I had to go back in time and I thought he’d understood how important it was that I succeed. In my opinion, his reason for wanting to do the same wasn’t nearly as compelling as mine. Not even close. If there must be a choice and the magic could take only one of us, I was determined to be that one. And I possessed the gun.

  I patted the gun case. “Not very nice of you, Mr. von Fassnacht. I’d say, in fact, that you are downright unethical. See why I didn’t bring the Colt with me before? I sensed you’re not trustworthy.”

  “You’re crazy for wanting to go there,” August said, flat out. With a few grunts of effort and a hand from me, he managed to swing his legs over the side of the bed and sit up. “The Europe of 1918 is not a romantic place with a grand adventure around every corner. It’s full of death, sickness, and fear. Your man is probably already dead. What would a fella from a world as soft as this one know about surviving a war fought by men ready to die?

  “He knows more than you can imagine,” I retorted. “Caleb’s not soft. He survived in 1811, in 2015, and he’ll survive in 1918.” I crossed my fingers behind my back, adding, “And he’d damn well better be ready to live, not die.”

  August looked better, less like a graven image, when he was upright. He sounded better too, stronger and more articulate. “What about you, sis? Are you soft? Do you sprekken der deutsch? Parlez-vous français? How are you going to get along? How are you going to find him? The battle zone was a big arena with miles and miles of front lines. And those shifted all the time.”

  Well, I spoke just about that much German, that much French. I won’t deny the language was a bit of a problem. As for the rest? “The gun will take me to him.”

  August snorted

  “It will!

  “Then why did you come to me?” he asked, hitting upon the one thing I’d rather he hadn’t noticed.

  I had an answer ready. Not completely truthful, but an answer.

  “What’s wrong with taking a shortcut? I know the Great War was spread over a vast area. But you can take me directly to the place you found the Colt, and Caleb, or Ned Smith, should be somewhere close.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “And won’t you be a sight, walking amongst the dead in your pretty, little white tenny shoes and blue jeans?” He threw back his head and laughed hoarsely, as though he hadn’t done such a thing in years and was out of practice.

  “I’ve never had a problem with—with costuming—before,” I said, ignoring both his laughter and the fact that, if all went as planned, this event was going to be completely different than any previous venture. I thought quickly. “I could always take a uniform off a body, I suppose.”

  August eyed me pityingly. “Oh, sis, little do you know.

  I had to concede such a scenario was not exactly on a potential Favorite Things To Do If You’re Bored list. Seating myself on the bed beside him, I put my thumbs on the latches of the gun case and prepared to flip open the lid. “It doesn’t matter, August. Whatever I have to do is what I’ll do. And I’ll do it for as long as it takes to get Caleb back.

  “Here.” I handed him the picture—crumpled now because he’d lain on it as he napped—of his cousin Will. “Zero in on the last time you saw Will. That should put us in the right neighborhood. I’ll take it from there.”

  “Put you in the right neighborhood,” he muttered. “Gott knows vere it vill put me.”

  Part of me was astonished at his sudden reversion to a German accent. I noted that he sounded almost exactly as he had when I’d heard him speak as a boy, visiting his relatives in America.

  But other considerations bound me now. Too busy to worry about an old man’s quaver, or his knobby-jointed fingers locking onto my arm.

  I opened the case’s lid, revealing the Colt in its nest of woolly sheepskin. August’s grip tightened, numbing my arm to the elbow. Strong, so strong for such an old man.

  The 1911 Colt.45 Automatic emitted power like a megawatt turbine at Grand Coulee Dam. In my eyes, the blued metal seemed lighted from within. Sound roared, reverberating in my ears, my head, my whole being.

  Ah, yes. The power recognized me this time. Quickly then. Before too much fear came upon me.

  I grabbed the pistol firmly, taking it in both hands. Power kicked through my joints, as though to break my grip, but I wouldn’t let go. Pain flowed through my veins with every accelerated heartbeat.

  I swore I wouldn’t let go

  Darkness, a whirling red vortex, a cold fit to break glass

  Through it all I was aware of August, grimly clinging, and screaming like a man whose heart is being ripped, still beating, from his chest.

  Then the world steadied. Still dark, but not totally black; still cold, but not freezing. It was quiet. I had expected a battlefield with the sound of guns and the smell of cordite.

  Gradually, I realized I knew this place.

  “Damn you, August von Fassnacht,” I said with fierce pain. “What have you done?”

  THE COLT HAD COME through the time shift with me, safe and sound. I held it in a locked-wrist stance, and thought perhaps I’d use it, right this minute, to shoot the twisty, old man who’d screwed things up.

  Only when I turned the gun on him, he wasn’t an old man. He was young and he was wearing a uniform of German field gray. An expression of utter incredulity suffused his face.

  At least he retained enough self-possession to throw his hands in the air when he saw where the gun was pointing. Unfortunate. Now I couldn’t, in all good conscience, kill him. Or maybe I could. I didn’t know yet.

  “You damn fool! Why did you bring us here?” I demanded in the second before I started to sniffle. I was disappointed, terrified and distraught, and I was in the fricking wrong place. The Colt trembled in my grasp.

  Dear God. Was there ever such a tangle? At this moment, I didn’t know if August had any recollection of the past eighty-five years—or future eighty-five years, depending on how you looked at it. And I wasn’t sure if he’d remember me.

  “We did it,” he whispered, proving he did. “We really did. Son-of- a-bitch!”

  “I’m going to kill you right now. Put you out of your misery.” My finger actually tightened on the trigger, I was so angry. It would have taken very little effort to complete the motion; a tiny extra squeeze is all. Until I recalled that a murder had already taken place in this room. I’d watched it being done with my own eyes. And I couldn’t have shot him anyway, because the Colt wasn’t loaded—only he didn’t know that.

&nbs
p; My finger uncurled from around the trigger and I allowed the barrel to drop.

  “You need clothes,” he said, letting himself breathe again. “And money. A map. I can help you.”

  Clothes. Money. Dear Lord. The thought hit me like a sun going supernova. I’d come here in my own self, not taking the guise of a long-dead character. And I was fully here. All of me. No shell left in my own world to be refilled when my essence returned. I had no back up in the real world—except for my dad and a tin whistle.

  “All I want is to find Caleb Deane,” I said, putting that particular fear out of my mind. “If you’d done as I asked, I might’ve extricated him by now and been on my way home.”

  Eyeing me grimly, he lowered his arms. “Or you could be dead. When the shells fall, they don’t check what is underneath. Land or sea, friend or foe, man or woman. I told you what it’s like where I found my cousin Will.”

  “Argh,” I growled under my breath. “I make my own decisions, August. You know I’m working against the clock.”

  “Then don’t waste time arguing,” he said. “Come with me. We will get a kit together for you, I’ll put you on the train, and that will be that. You can cross to the American side at a place I will show you, and you can ask their officers for help.”

  He’d lapsed once again to the same accent he’d had when I heard him at the swimming hole. Not German exactly. Just stilted English. He must have felt terribly strange within himself. An old man in his wisdom allowed to revert to the young man he’d been. His years as an American sounded as if they were deserting him, and I couldn’t help wondering how long he would hold me in his mind. How long until he joined his unit like it was 1918 and went back to the war. Would he take the same path he’d taken before?

  I have to say he made me nervous, locking his eyes on me with what I considered an eerily penetrating and possessive stare—almost as though he were trying to mesmerize me, or something. Maybe he was watching in case I decided to shoot him after all. But then I realized he refused to let himself see any of his mother’s boudoir. If he looked at me, he didn’t have to think about what happened the last time he was here. Could be I was a lodestar to him right now; the only familiar thing in his firmament.

  I had no such compunction about looking, and I tried to take everything in at once. Someone had put covers over the upholstered furniture. Most of the knick-knacks I remembered from before were gone from tabletops and étagêres, their surfaces empty and forlorn, decorated only by layers of dust. The draperies were drawn over the windows, including the French door August had used both to enter the room and to leave unseen the day he met with his mother. The walls had been denuded of paintings and tapestries, although it was obvious where they had hung.

  Most of all, I felt cold—and half-blind in the darkened room.

  “Did anyone ever⏤” That didn’t sound right! I tried again, “Does anyone live here now?”

  “No.” He took my arm and led me through a door I hadn’t noticed before into another room. A bedroom, still cluttered with the paraphernalia of a glamorous woman obsessed with self and beauty.

  “How long has it been?” I asked. I was pretty sure he didn’t want to talk, especially about his mother, but if anyone had the right to know the rest of the story, it was I.

  He sighed, an old man’s sigh coming from a young man’s mouth. Young, although bitterness pinched lines around his lips and eyes, looking almost like scars on his pale face. His eyes were very blue. “More than a year.”

  “And no one has picked things up?”

  Wryly, he answered. “Oh, I think so. There is a lawyer, you understand, putting things to rights. He’s hired a caretaker. We want to look out for him.”

  In other words, the lawyer had hired a caretaker to make sure no one but he picked anything up. There must have been treasures galore in this old castle, once upon a time.

  “Do they know that you . . . that you . . . um . . .”

  “No,” he said, his face expressionless. “Officially, they’ve blamed deserters for the murder, although according to Herr Schmidt, the authorities suspect her latest lover as the more likely culprit.” His tone indicated this was to his satisfaction.

  August was done talking. About things pertaining to that anyway.

  BEATRIX VON FASSNACHT, or whatever her name had been at the last, had owned tons of duds. They crowded a walk-in closet that must at one time have been a separate room, a nursery perhaps. I put my curiosity aside and refrained from asking August any more questions as he pawed through the collection of gowns, afternoon frocks (I guess that’s what they were called), fluffy robes (peignoirs again) and, more pleasing to my taste, riding gear.

  August, with unerring accuracy, selected jodhpurs, tailored shirts and a hacking jacket.

  “Try these,” he said. “If you’re determined to walk on a battlefield, you will do better dressed in pants. There are boots,” he added, pointing to a whole row of them, all polished and standing upright like sentinels.

  “I hope my feet aren’t too big.” I eyed the boots doubtfully, looking for a pair that might fit. “I’ve heard women are bigger boned with wider, flatter feet now days. Must be all the calcium and good stuff we eat.”

  “You should wear a skirt while traveling on the train, but I don’t suppose you will.” August ignored my comment as he inspected the clothing filling the racks. Some were covered with dustsheets, with discreet logos denoting Worth and Chanel.

  I gave myself over into his care. Actually it wasn’t possible to do anything else at this point. While still angry with him, I had to concede the validity of his argument about my jeans and tennis shoes. They were highly out of place in this time. It would be wiser if I were not to stand too far out of the crowd. Best to blend in, if possible, and avoid any awkward questions—from either friend or foe.

  In fact, my own head was abuzz with questions and incongruities. How had I transferred to this time and not been changed? That had never happened before. I’d always appeared in a history dressed in appropriate costume for the period.

  Of course, I’d never exactly been myself, Boothenay Irons, before either. In every other instance, I had shared a self with whoever belonged in the history of whatever gun carried the magic. While self- aware, I’d intermingled with those ghostly people. Made them come alive. I’d lived their life, felt their loves, their fears, their hate.

  Another weird quirk this time was that I’d brought the gun along with me. I didn’t quite know how, since in August’s past he had not yet taken up the Colt, but here it was. I put it in my bag, brought through time also, since I’d had it slung over my shoulder when I sat down with August back at the home.

  He seemed a little easier with the Colt out of sight.

  “Try this,” he said, snatching a white shirt off a hanger and tossing it at me. “This, and this.”

  His selections weren’t showy, being aimed more toward a higher degree of practicality than of style, although I gathered anything Beatrix possessed must have been the cat’s meow or whatever the phrase should be. Unable to help myself, I sneaked a peak at a Worth gown, a confection of glittering blue beads on a blue silk background, while his back was turned.

  “Take that, too, if you want,” he said indifferently, catching me in the act. I have to say I was tempted, though my better sense prevailed. August left while I was changing into his mother’s clothes. Feeling decidedly strange, I discarded my own things, rolling them into the smallest ball possible to be stowed in my roomy leather shoulder bag and taken away with me

  I didn’t know why I had those strange feelings exactly. Maybe because I was afraid that, by donning the murdered woman’s clothing, I also donned a part of her. God forbid.

  It was bad enough Beatrix and I matched fairly well in size. She’d had bigger breasts. I had broader shoulders. My hips were as slim, my waist as small and I found my feet not so large as I’d feared. All of that inspired me to twist my too-short hair into a knot, a style more in keeping wit
h the era.

  Whatever he’d been doing while I dressed, August was back in the outer room when I came out. He looked drawn and pale, the scar on his face standing out in a livid streak. As an old man, the scar hadn’t been noticeable, hidden perhaps, between his wrinkles. How did he feel, returning to his youth after learning what old was like? Would he decide to meet his fate as a German soldier, undoing the things he had done, or would he reconsider and return with me to end his life in the new millennium? I didn’t envy him his decision, whatever it turned out to be.

  “The train is in the station at this very moment,” he said. “You must go.”

  Panic surged. He sounded like he was saying goodbye. “What do you mean, ‘you must go’? You’re coming with me, aren’t you? As far as the frontier?”

  “I cannot.”

  “Cannot? You cannot? Damn it, August, you know I can’t speak the language. What am I to do if someone asks me a question in German? Jeez, they’d take me for a Mata Hari or something. They shot Mata Hari, didn’t they?”

  “That was the French,” he said, as if I should have known. “As far as the language goes, I’m not so sure I can speak German anymore with any fluency. It has been something like eighty-five years.”

  There he went, springing surprises on me again. And yet I should have guessed. He had left Germany under another man’s name all those years ago. Of course he would have done his best to forget this life had ever existed. Covered up or wiped out every trace of who he’d been, of what he’d done.

  “You’re bound to do better than me,” I retorted.

  “I have no papers.” He grabbed my arm and, with firm pressure, propelled me through the open French doors and across the blue stone terrace. A short distance away, I saw the rose garden where he had met with Eva on that warm spring day four years ago.

  “If I were to be stopped, I would be taken up as a deserter and shot,” he said. “The Kaiser has grown adamant about that lately.”

 

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