The Midnight Guardian

by Sarah-Jane Stratford

  To kill the doctor would, indeed, achieve nothing. They’d meant to break the spine of a beast, and they’d hardly touched it. Their fight had turned out to be merely fragmentary. It was the human fight that was going to matter now, the only one that had ever mattered.

  Still looking at the looming coast, Brigit slowly drew her talon across the doctor’s throat and pitched him into the water. It was drizzling. She extended her hands, watching the blood drip off them. The wind grew stronger as they approached Ireland.

  Hey, ho, the wind and the rain.

  Alma joined her at the railing.

  “What happens now?”

  “We change for the mail boat to Holyhead and then catch the train for London.” Brigit was calm and matter-of-fact.

  “Will they follow us?”

  “I won’t leave a trail.”

  Eamon crept from his hiding place on the mail boat. He found being a stowaway distasteful, something for which he was too old, but there was no choice. He knew he could do more good assisting them onto the boat from where he was and couldn’t risk the clouds breaking. Still, he was itchy to be on the dock. He could sense the waiting hunters, smell their weapons and their hot blood. Two were after the children, which made no sense, but the others were even more frightening in their way. They didn’t care what they killed on their path toward ending the reign of Brigantia.

  Brigit took her time identifying the luggage and arranging for it to be transferred to the mail boat. She was cool and unruffled, and the talk that was flying around of four missing men didn’t bother her.

  The border patrol, too caught up in the excited rumors, stamped their papers with an absentmindedness Brigit almost found disappointing. She was hot for another charade. She and the children repaired quietly to the waiting room.

  The rain had stopped, but the clouds hung firm. For once, Brigit was not concerned about the sun. She was seeing an echo of last week’s cataclysm. Men climbing the roofs of the dock buildings. They were armed with bows and arrows, and fire. Their three selves were the only passengers set for Wales, so there was no hope of human camouflage. She couldn’t believe they would really strike down the children in this ignominious fashion as well, but then she saw the two men outside the waiting room. Nazis. They were in suits, not uniforms, but she knew them by the scent. Nazis. There to return the children to Germany. She was briefly bewildered, then remembered that the IRA had courted Nazis, offered to spy, tried to help them with plans for the invasion of Britain. The enemy of their enemy appeared to be their friend, and many Irish had little love for Jews anyway, so hardly cared what became of them. Now Brigit saw what Doctor Schultze had meant about what was waiting for them here. Of course all these slaves to ruthless ambition were still working together. It seemed utter madness to Brigit, as though the Irish were inviting foreign roosters to rule the coop, but madness was the order of the times.

  Or perhaps it’s shortsightedness, or maybe even just stupidity. Or they simply don’t care. With devotion’s visage and pious action men do sugar o’er the devil himself.

  The ceaselessness of the violence, the keenness to let ever more blood … that order for guns, for so many guns. Brigit swallowed a sob as she had a flash of hundreds of thousands of dead, mountains of dead, the millions of humans who had died under fire since she’d first walked the dark earth compounded in one outpouring of pure horror, the sort only man could inflict upon itself. The obsession, the need to destroy, the opposite mark on the land. She could only hope that this excess of energy and resources they were wasting in an effort to cut down her and the children would stand as a paradigm, that their obsession with death would eventually bring about their own destruction.

  But not soon enough. Oh, Eamon, we failed so completely.

  The whispered answer in her head made her gasp.

  No, not at all. You’re nearly there. I’ll help.

  She’d known Eamon would be there, but feeling him so close, so truly close after so long, filled her with as much terror as longing. Would they see him, would they turn on him? If she had to fight for both the children and Eamon, how could she ever … ?

  They will all survive. There is no other option.

  With that, she took out her handkerchief and wiped first Lukas’s face, then Alma’s.

  “It’s nearly time to go.”

  Alma’s eyes were too white around the irises.

  “They still want us.”

  “Yes. We’re of high value to them.”

  “Why can’t they just let us go?”

  “Human nature is a funny thing.”

  Alma’s face crumpled. She looked tiny, a toddler frightened by a nightmare.

  “Papa says that millennials can run fast if they have to. A mile in the space of a heartbeat.”

  “Not quite that fast, but that’s the general idea.”

  “That means you could get away. You could get away and leave us here.”

  Brigit felt her hand rise to smack the insult out of Alma’s mouth, but remembered just in time that the girl was exhausted and terrified and still just a child. She gripped Alma’s jaw instead so that she could look directly into her eyes.

  “I am a creature of honor. I swore a solemn oath to your father, and I swear now by all that you hold holy, by the love that binds me to Eamon, by the strength in all my brethren here and gone, you are as surely my charge as if you were of my body, and I will see you to safety.”

  Tears sprang up in Alma’s eyes and Brigit dabbed at them hurriedly, hissing at her to control herself, that they still had to look calm and untroubled, even if they were walking straight into slings and arrows.

  But how? How are we going to do this?

  She was exhausted herself, weak and worn and frightened. She was at a tremendous disadvantage. If there was time to think, to plan, if only she and Eamon could actually talk … but the boat would leave in seven minutes. There was nothing for it. They had to go.

  Once again, she hefted Lukas into her arms, although now he was quiet and still from fear, rather than illness or exhaustion. She would have liked to carry Alma as well, to be more sure she could guard the girl, but they could not look so suspicious until the end. An idea was growing in her, a possibility, the possibility of the speed Alma had mentioned … and something more. A way to send the children to the boat while she remained on the dock to see this thing through to a bloody end. Combine her own strength with that of Eamon and Mors and use it in one quick, benevolent gesture to the human race. She knew it was a defiance of nature, whose laws she respected. That power was for vampires alone. But maybe, just this once, she could bend the laws that bound her.

  Nature was certainly on their side in so far as the cloudy sky was concerned. They strode under it boldly, basking in pretended entitlement, trembling under the façade but too proud to let it be seen.

  The Nazis waited until she was at the brink of the short pier leading to the waiting boat. She could just make out a shadow of Eamon, hovering near the railing. The two men flanked her.

  “Hand over the children now, and perhaps you will be spared much pain.”

  The various hunters and men just along for the fun of seeing a vampire killed, and in daylight no less, quivered with delight. They couldn’t hear the conversation on the ground below, but they knew how it was going. Most of them didn’t mind the idea of killing the children as well, since they were only Jews and it was in such a good cause, but they would rather not.

  Brigit looked from one man to the other. They marked her hesitation, took out pistols from inside their jackets, and cocked them. To her grudging admiration, hovering hunters tossed each man a sword as well.

  Alma’s palm grew sweaty in Brigit’s.

  Eamon. We need music again. Not to calm the savage beast, but to arouse it.

  He met her eyes. They were at exactly the same distance as they had been that night, 750 years ago. He winked, and she winked back.

  And so they began. A low hum, a whisper, a song of juxtapo
sition and contradiction. Wave upon wave of rhythm to intoxicate and yet soothe. An aural heat to cool. To create an invisible fog. It was a song composed of melody so ancient and powerful, the planet had nearly forgotten it. Stirring a memory in dirt deep beneath the ugly buildings of the port, the earth sighed and stretched luxuriously. The rolling earth shook the men and they looked around, nervous.

  Each note vibrating through Brigit and Eamon seamlessly wove together to make a tunnel, through which reached the vaguest essence of a smoky hand.

  The flaxen rope through the labyrinth.

  She nodded to the Nazis and bent to Alma, as though kissing her good-bye, and pressed her hand to the girl’s heart, whispering into her ear.

  “Take Lukas by one hand and grab hold of that large hand. It may look like an illusion, but I promise it’s solid. Keep tight hold of it and you will get to the boat. Eamon will take care of you.”

  “What are you doing?” Alma breathed, trying to hide her panic.

  “Go!”

  And Alma obeyed. To anyone else, they were gone in a blink, but Brigit saw them holding the hand, saw them pulled swiftly to safety on a wave of ancient music, saw Eamon receive them, scratched and coughing and crying from the pain of a path they weren’t meant to cross. She had a brief moment of satisfaction in the reunion before she turned her attention to the men flanking her.

  All right, my demon. Let’s create the sort of chaos that could wake the dead.

  The demon smiled at her. It reached out and took the fire into its mouth, where it would keep it, under control.

  If only Mors could see this.

  The Nazis were stunned to receive broken noses at the hand of the creature between them, and could hardly comprehend how the children had escaped. One of them still held his sword and swung out at Brigit, clipping her thigh. She ignored the pain and crushed his wrist beneath her foot as she seized the sword and plunged it into his heart. The other Nazi screamed to the hunters to do their duty.

  Arrows flew down at Brigit. She whirled desperately, batting them away with the sword while begging Eamon to remain where he was. This was her fight now.

  “Which of you will come and fight me like a man?” she bellowed into the throng. The men hesitated, wanting and needing that fight, but knowing, too, what it might mean.

  From the boat, Eamon, Alma, and Lukas watched in stunned silence. Eamon kept a hand tight around each child’s shoulder and they welcomed the touch as though it were familiar. He hummed steadily, a calming, joyous little tune that made them think perhaps they were not watching their guardian engage in a fight with several dozen hunters, while the sky threatened to brighten.

  With guttural battle cries, the hunters leaped to the dock to take on the vampire eye to eye. This was what they were meant to do, after all, destroy great evil at close range. Filth could be disposed of at a distance, but evil of this magnitude must be looked in the face and smiled on before it was vanquished. None of them had ever even tried to take down a millennial, but they were many, she was one, and they knew how to fight.

  Brigit had never studied the art of battle, but she had Mors inside her now, and a man did not become a general of the Roman Republic without knowing some tricks. Her mind emptied, she concentrated only on the hot music inside her, a tune that whirled her this way and that, dispatching men in a frenetic ballet. She heard their shouts, felt blades cut into her limbs, even her torso, but she was too possessed to allow the pain to slow her. Heat was rising, inside and out. The sun and the fire were coming.

  “Now, Brigit! Come now! The boat is leaving!” Eamon shouted.

  The remnants of the fog Brigit and Eamon had created meant no one on the boat, save the three most concerned, could see what was happening on the dock, and the sailors methodically went about their duty so that the mail could go through.

  Brigit paused. She could escape now. No self-respecting Irish hunter would tread upon the province of the British hunters to stalk a vampire, it was only that she was Brigantia and had dared breach their border that they fought her with such venom. But then she caught the scent of Nachtspeere. Weber and Lange hadn’t been the last; there were some here in training, and some that had been sent ahead in case all else failed and this was necessary. Irish hunters siding with Germany, and Nachtspeere. To finish them now meant the Nazi purge of vampires was confined to the Continent, and thus as good as done. She had gone to Germany to avenge her kind. She had come to care about the fate of humanity itself, but this was the end of the circle. If she had failed to stop them from killing humans, she could make one final strike on behalf of the vampires and see more of their strong young men fall, their dazzling hope for the great Aryan future diminished.

  With a roar that reached far back into history, Brigit whirled and swung the sword, taking no pleasure in the necks it sliced through like sausage links, feeling only that it was an act of completion that was too late.

  A hunter leaped on her from behind, the shock and his weight knocking her to her knees. She spun, and smelled the furious zeal and the sure power of the stake, not the one Leon had used to make his point, but one forged hundreds of years ago and saved for the chance to wield with such certainty and precision.

  On the boat, Eamon turned the children into him, pressing their faces to his chest. They would not bear witness to this, nor to the redness rising in his eyes. His Brigit was in danger of shuffling off her almost-immortal coil, and there was not a thing he could do about it.

  The tip of the stake pierced Brigit’s breast, she could feel flesh pulling away, as though making a path for the weapon that was meant to finish this unnatural body. But Eamon was in the heart that stake intended to touch and thus shatter, and Mors was alive somewhere, pulsing under her bones. She clamped her hands around the stake and squeezed so it splintered and crumbled. Her hand flew through the hunter’s shocked eyes, sending brains soaring across the dock.

  Hazy sun rays poked through the clouds. The boat was unmoored, was beginning its slow chug toward Wales. The remaining two hunters, feeling their advantage, ran toward Brigit as she stumbled to her feet. The blood from her many wounds still oozed down skin that was starting to steam and crack in the coming sun.

  No.

  She staggered down toward the dock, her eyes swimming with furious tears. She could not possibly be about to die.

  One hunter shot a stake at her with a crossbow. It pierced her hip and she yanked it out, disregarding the pain, wishing that the smoky hand would come back for her.

  “No, Eamon, no …” Her voice was a plaintive squeak, an echo of her own self. She took another few steps and slipped in brains, landing hard on her back.

  The hunters yelled their delight, weapons aloft. They made to jump on her. She saw their eyes, saw that they were tasting triumph, that she was nothing more than a finished thing.

  “Nooooooo!” she bellowed, seizing each man as he closed in, finding strength in their malice and certainty. With another ear-piercing cry, she ripped out their hearts and squelched them in her fists. She shook the residue from her fingers and ran for the plank.

  The boat was gone, the sun was brightening, and Eamon was crouching, clutching the children and crying out for her in a silent plea. She had not saved those children, not come this close, only to be stopped now. With a scream of defiance at the sun, she dove into the water. She kicked hard, pushing herself almost to the bottom, exulting in her burst of strength, in her complete independence of the need for oxygen. The salt was torment on her open wounds, but she didn’t care, she swam like a creature possessed.

  It was Alma’s voice she heard when her head broke water, Alma shouting that her aunt had fallen overboard. And though none of the boatmen could remember any of the passengers boarding, two of them rushed to the side and pulled Brigit aboard. One man threw a heavy blanket over her; the other pulled her into the little office where an emergency medical kit was snapped open and her congealing cuts and bruises inexpertly but kindly tended.

  Brig
it didn’t give a damn about any marks upon her body, they would heal in hours. She craned her neck, frantic for a sight of Alma. When she saw the girl, she clenched her almost too hard.

  “Are you all right?” she asked in a squeak.

  “Yes,” Alma panted, still shaken from her trip through the tunnel and the interminable last five minutes. “Yes, we’re all right. All of us.”

  The boatmen had no idea what the child meant, but were pleased to see the beautiful blonde relax.

  “The waters here can be a bit rough,” one of them commented. “It was lucky you were able to make it back on board.”

  On the whole, Brigit agreed.

  Chapter 22

  London-bound train. August 1940.

  The sky was bright in Holyhead, but there was shade on the dock, the station was sheltered, and the train would terminate at Kings Cross that night. Brigit’s clothes were still damp, but she otherwise bore no visible mark of what she had just endured, and the little group garnered no notice. Eamon waited until Brigit and the children had their tickets before joining them on the platform. At last, he and Brigit could look at each other and embrace.

  Lukas stared openly at the vampires with their arms wrapped so tightly around each other, but Alma, after watching a moment, turned and looked at the track instead, anxious for the train to arrive.

  The train was full of soldiers and heavy with cigarette smoke and careless chat. They finally found a quiet compartment and Eamon swung their bags into the hold. He smiled at the children and held out two bars of chocolate. Brigit tsked.

  “They haven’t had a proper breakfast, they’ll be sick, eating that now.”

  “The trolley will be round in a few minutes, it’ll be all right.”

  “Please?” Lukas begged.