“He was outside during the performance,” Fee said, her eyes widening. “You know how he hates watching the shows.”
Almost before Fee had finished, Phil was dashing past her family and up the stairs. Fee was right: though Stan enjoyed quiet training, he could never stand to watch the magic onstage before an audience. No one knew quite why, but when the show started, he would either wait outside the theater, letting his crystal ball run like a pet over his body, or more likely, take a walk down to the nearby Thames.
Phil opened the stage door and entered the disappearing world.
The Luftwaffe didn’t bother using flashing strobes where a blazing holocaust of incendiary bombs would do. They created terror not with chill breezes and subtle sound effects but with craters and corpses, screaming and explosions. And they removed the world Phil knew not with trickery and illusion but with the brute force of physics, leveling building after building, reducing the world inexorably to atoms.
She could hear bombs falling somewhere far away, but for the moment there were no planes overhead. The theater had been spared, but the dress store three buildings away had suffered a direct hit and was utterly gone. The café beside it was rubble, and the bookstore next door was still standing but with one wall blown off and the roof crumbling. Down the road was a deep pit with a charred bus dangling on its lip, and the entire row of buildings across the street was on fire. Farther away she could see masonry skeletons of buildings that had been gutted by the concussive force.
“Stan!” she screamed, but everyone was screaming for someone.
Geoff came up behind her. “Phil, don’t be a fool. There might be more bombers on the way.”
“Stan was out here. He always walked by the candy store.” It too was engulfed, exuding a sickening burnt-sugar smell. “It’s gone. He’s gone!”
She staggered into the chaos, to tear through rubble looking for Stan, to weep helpless tears and curse the Germans when a second wave of bombers came in after nightfall, following the trail of fire across London they’d blazed earlier.
All around London, millions of citizens were rallying. Their fear fled quickly, replaced by anger and then at last by something far more useful: grim, stubborn determination, a rocklike resolution to endure.
Soon Phil’s family joined her on their devastated street, and the Albions began to account for the fallen and treat the survivors. Fee found Phil a few hours later with rills of tear tracks running down her sooty face, sitting on a curb, exhausted with work and weeping.
“I can’t find Stan anywhere,” she said as Fee collapsed beside her. She sniffed, then sneezed from the mortar dust hanging in the air. “He’s gone, Fee. Our little brother is gone.”
Buy the Book
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About the Author
LAURA L. SULLIVAN is a former newspaper editor, biologist, social worker, and deputy sheriff who writes because storytelling is the easiest way to do everything in the world. She lives on the Florida coast, but her heart is in England.
Ladies in Waiting Page 28
