by April White
“I’d ‘ave done the same, I s’pose.” Ringo nodded to himself as if that was that.
My gaze had been caught by Ringo’s words, but then my eyes slid to Archer for his reaction. He was watching me thoughtfully when he spoke.
“When you didn’t return, Marianne became frantic. She woke Ringo with her worry that perhaps Madame Bouchard – the one you call Mother Goose – had raised suspicion about your identity and had you detained. He woke me when he confirmed the signs that you’d gone into the woods, and with every cairn we found, I feared there wouldn’t be another.”
My chest constricted at the thought of Marianne’s worry, but Archer’s calm, quiet voice was somehow at odds with his words. “And here, where it was clear you hadn’t been alone, I was moments away from donning the armor and grabbing the sword to ride into the fray to rescue you.”
I smiled a little at the image. “Find a white horse and you’re good to go.”
A twinkle in his eye was the only thing that knocked some of the dust off his dry tone. “The Prince of Darkness rides a bold, black steed. I hardly fit the Prince Valiant archetype, which is, perhaps, my point. I was set to rescue you, willing to throw regard for safety, secrecy, and good sense straight out the window in my quest to be your savior. And then there you were, perfectly unharmed and entirely capable of minding yourself.”
Something went clunk in my brain – that thing that Millicent had said about the differences between men and women. I spun toward Ringo.
“Is that why you were so mad? Because you were all set to rescue me and I didn’t need it?”
Ringo looked uncharacteristically grumpy. “Ye don’t usually need it, so that wasn’t a surprise. I s’pose I was afraid.”
I waited for the sentence to go on, but it didn’t. “Afraid of what?” I finally asked.
He shrugged. “Just afraid.” He held my gaze. “Most of my time with ye ‘as been spent in the past, with knives and swords and the odd pistol bein’ aimed in yer general direction. We both know stayin’ whole is just a matter of bein’ faster and smarter than yer opponent – and ye always ‘ave been that.”
He sighed and waved his hand around him in a generally inclusive gesture. “But ‘ere – now – in this war, everyone ‘as a gun. And that’s not even the thing ye ‘ave to be most afraid of.”
I stared at him. “I’m not in danger of being run down by a tank, Ringo.”
He made a face at me, which helped diminish little of the worry that was lining his eyes. “It’s the turncoats and traitors and scared people just tryin’ to survive ye ‘ave to fear. Fast and smart can only keep ye so safe from them when they set their sights on ye.”
I sat back and tried to choose the words that mattered. I included both of them in my gaze. “I get it. I get the fear, and I have those same fears for both of you. But you should know that I got really defensive when I saw how angry you both looked, and my first instinct was to run.”
“I’m sorry ‘bout that, Saira.” Ringo said. He looked straight into my eyes when he spoke. “I can’t say it won’t ‘appen again, but ye’ve said it yerself, I’ve chosen my family, and ye two are it.”
I gave Ringo a grateful smile as Archer reached for my hand. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
I shrugged. “It’s not the first time you’ve been angry at me for taking risks, and it won’t be the last.”
He studied me for a moment. “Is my protectiveness of you very stifling in your time?”
Ringo smirked, and I almost answered too fast. But then I saw the tension around Archer’s mouth, and I thought I should be fair.
“Yes, but I think I do the same thing to you, so we’re pretty even. You did have to mellow out a little at the Tower of London, but we worked it out.”
Archer looked startled, and I thought dropping our Tudor-era adventures into the conversation probably wasn’t the best idea. But he surprised me. “Why would you need to protect me? I’m immortal.”
I shot Ringo a glance, and he shrugged as if to say ‘you’re on your own.’
I stood up and held my hand out to Archer. He took it and got to his feet with the kind of grace I’d never been able to manage. “That’s a long story, and as much as I’d love to hang out in the woods with you guys all night, I’m bummed to say we should probably go find Nancy and her gang of cutthroats before the snipers start picking them off.”
Archer gave me a smirk worthy of his modern self. “You can talk while you run, can’t you?”
Ringo barked a laugh that earned him a glare from me, and I smiled with thorny sweetness. “Lead the way.”
Archer laughed and we took off through the woods at a decent pace. As we ran, I told him about the old wounds that had begun blooming on him every time he got hurt, and about Connor and Mr. Shaw’s theory about the mutation of his telomeres. It prompted a whole conversation, led by Ringo, about the science of genetics. I was impressed at Ringo’s ability to break things down into digestible pieces and at the sheer amount of knowledge he had picked up from his listening post in the greenhouse lab.
Archer was clearly fascinated with the genetics of Immortal Descendancy, and I was so engrossed in Ringo’s explanation that I forgot to anticipate what came next.
We had intersected the road far beyond the town and dropped our pace to a stealthy walk so as not to attract unwanted attention. I missed the significance of the look Ringo shot me until Archer asked him, “Your friends are doing such precise work in their laboratory. Is it merely research, or do they work toward an end?”
The outline of a building materialized in the misty night, and the prickling edges of Mongerness reached out from the shadows. I whispered, “We’re here.”
Archer’s voice was pitched low. “You didn’t answer my question.”
I stopped to face him. “They’re working on a cure for you – a virus that neutralizes the mutation. But they think you have to be badly injured for the virus to work, and they don’t know if it would reset your telomere response to normal after healing the wounds, or if you’d die from the wounds themselves.” I thought I had managed to deliver the information without the emotional breakdown that laced its fingers around my heart every time the subject came up.
“The unknowns are somewhat concerning.” Archer’s delivery was so deadpan I almost barked a laugh, but caught the sound just in time.
“You think?” I avoided Ringo’s eyes and kept mine locked on Archer. He touched my face gently and might have kissed me, if it hadn’t been for the Monger who materialized behind us.
Ringo and I both stiffened, but Archer spoke sharply to him in French before taking my hand to continue walking. The Maquisard moved quietly ahead, and I assumed he’d been told to inform Nancy that we were there.
Ringo walked a little apart from us, and his silence had weight to it, as if it was a heavy thing instead of an absent one. Just before we walked into Gaspard’s farmhouse, I hung back and let Archer go in first. I touched Ringo’s sleeve. “What?” I whispered.
He didn’t pretend not to know what I was asking, and his eyes met mine directly. “You’re settin’ ‘im up.”
That earned a double-take. “How?”
“If ‘e agrees with ye that the cure is too dangerous, ye’ll take that back to Archer and use it against ‘im.”
“Use it against him? I don’t even get that.”
“Really? Ye don’t think ‘e’d wonder if ye wouldn’t just come back to this time and choose this version of ‘imself?”
I stared at Ringo in shock. “They’re all Archer.”
He raised an eyebrow. “All?”
I tried to explain, even though I knew I was tap-dancing in a minefield. “The student we first met, this one, and mine.”
“So, only the one from yer time belongs to ye, eh?”
I glared at him in exasperation. “I don’t get it, Ringo. What do you want me to say?”
His eyes held mine for a moment before he looked away. “I don’t know. It’s not my
business, anyway.” He nodded at the door. “Go on in. Ye ‘ave things to tell them.”
I debated staying there and making him work through whatever weirdness was crawling around his brain, but I really didn’t want to know. There are some things it’s just better to leave unsaid, and I was already feeling prickles of guilt about his comment. If the Archer from my time was the only one that belonged to me, then any comfort or connection I made with this Archer was in the realm of cheating … on him … with himself. I closed my eyes with a shudder, then squared my shoulders to step inside the farmhouse. My relationship sinkholes had no place in a room full of Mongers and Nancy Wake.
Archer shot me a quizzical look when we entered the main room, where Nancy and Gaspard were studying a map and several other young men were doing whatever small tasks they could busy themselves with. There were rifles being cleaned, knives sharpened, and satchels emptied and re-packed. It was the kind of work people created so they could stay in a room and listen in.
Archer and Nancy stood next to each other, and the height difference between them was noticeable. He was at least ten inches taller than she was, and I had the thought that she was too short for him.
Not to mention, too married for him.
Not that I had a lot of room to talk though considering how murky my own situation was when it came to Archer. I mentally flipped Ringo off for having planted the seeds of doubt and discomfort in my head. Was this Archer, in 1944, a different man than the one I was with in my present? Then again, the Archer I’d first fallen in love with had been the young student in 1888, and this Archer was closer in time to him than the one waiting for me in London. For that matter, according to the rules of time travel, the reason he was waiting in London for me instead of being here was that he couldn’t be where he already was. That fact alone supported the idea that Archer was just Archer, no matter when I was with him.
My mental voice hmmphed as if to say, so there, and I started to feel a little split-personality-ish for talking to myself. This philosophical morality talk could wait. We had snipers to find.
Archer continued his conversation with Nancy and Gaspard in French, and I could tell they were trying to figure out the most likely spots for a sniper to lay in wait. I instinctively moved to Archer’s side to see the map. Gaspard stiffened and made a move to grab the map off the table, but Nancy snapped at him. “Arrêt!”
She turned to me. “So, love, let’s see what you bring to the table, shall we? The goods on the snipers are yours. Pretend you’re one of those rat bastards and tell me where they went.”
I was surprised that she gave me that respect, and I looked at Archer. “Point to the approximate location of my tree.”
His finger dropped on a spot in the forest just south of Oradour-sur-Glane, and I studied the landscape around it. There was the creek I’d followed, and the spot the soldiers had pulled their vehicle off the road. I traced the direction they’d taken when they left, studying the small hamlets dotting the route to Limoges.
“Where are we now?” I asked Nancy. Gaspard practically growled as he stormed away from the table, muttering unflattering things probably having to do with animals and body parts.
Nancy scoffed at the concern on my face. “Don’t worry about him, love. My first night here he tried to convince some of the Maquis to cut my throat and steal my money.”
“What happened?”
She laughed and said cheerily. “I got them drunk, then told them I was the only one who knew all the drops, all the codes, and where the liquor was stashed. If they listened to that one,” she indicated Gaspard, still glowering in a corner, “they’d get none of it.” She blew him a kiss across the room, and his scowl darkened. “Gaspard never did get over the fact I’m still here drinking with his boys.”
She directed my attention to another spot on the map. “But now we have sniper problems to keep us busy. We’re here now, and these were last night’s targets.” She pointed at two bridges.
I placed mental dots on each of the places on the map, then scanned the roads surrounding them. There were two other bridges nearby, one of which was outside a village and surrounded by farmland, and the other was a train trestle bridge that crossed a river. I pointed to the train bridge.
“There.”
“Why?” she asked with interest.
“You said your mission is to slow down a panzer division that’s trying to get to Normandy. If it was me, I’d take out anything that runs north/south, especially trains. Blowing a bridge seems like a pretty efficient way to do that.”
Nancy studied me. “It is. The charges were set earlier today and we plan to blow tonight’s train.”
I stared at her. “Why the train? Why not just the tracks?”
“Because Gerry has a habit of commandeering our trains.”
“But wouldn’t a train be full of people?”
“Most likely.” She didn’t back down, and I held her gaze.
“That’s a lot of people.” I was pretty sure it wouldn’t just be soldiers on that train. My temper was rising, and there were a whole bunch of words I’d been biting back that were just waiting for the floodgates to lift.
“There will be reprisals,” Archer said.
“I’ll work them to our advantage,” she said with a shrug.
That did it. The shrug. Like she couldn’t be bothered with trivialities. I stared at her, my eyes narrowing. “You’ll work reprisals to your advantage? Correct me if I’m wrong, but reprisals are not just restricted to the eye-for-an-eye routine. You take out a bridge, they’ll take out a school, isn’t that how it works?”
Nancy studied me, her expression hardening. “You find the English infiltrator, and leave the rest of the war to me.”
Archer met my eyes and then tried to redirect the conversation. “Where is the main body of the 2nd SS Panzer Division right now?” he asked Nancy.
She shifted her gaze back to the map, studiously avoiding my glare. “A couple of days south of Limoges, assuming we can keep up the pressure. We’ve been taking out the advance groups as they enter the Limousin region, and so far they haven’t been able to organize themselves into anything bigger than a small battalion.”
Nancy tapped the location of the train bridge. “I’m sending scouts to look for signs of the snipers around my charges.”
“We’ll go with them,” I said sharply. It felt like all the eyes in the room swiveled to me, even though it was probably only Nancy, Archer, and Ringo who stared. “You said to find the English spy, right? Well, he’s Werwolf and so are the snipers. I need them alive so we can find the rest of their group.”
“Snipers can be eight hundred to a thousand meters away from their targets, Saira.” Archer was not thrilled with my suggestion.
Nancy’s eyes narrowed. “Listen to Devereux. Stay here and out of the way, because I promise you, when I find those snipers, I’m taking them out.”
I glared right back at Nancy. “You’re going to have to shoot me first, then. I need to follow the Werwolves back to their base, which I can’t do if they’re dead. All we have to do is scare them away and they’ll run, and then you’ll get to blow up your train full of people as planned.”
The look Nancy directed at me was all sharp edges as she grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the room. She surprised me so much I forgot to resist until we were in a bedroom at the back of the house and she had kicked the door shut in Archer’s face.
“She’ll be fine, Devereux,” she said as it slammed. “Watch the door.”
I wrenched my arm out of her surprisingly strong grip. “Seriously? You didn’t need to grab me.” I’d had time to work up to this level of mad. Pretty much since I’d known Nancy, I’d been working up to it, and I wasn’t letting it go easily, no matter how much she yelled at me.
She laughed at me like I was an annoying, naïve child. “I must’ve left my manners in Marseilles where the Gestapo tortured my husband to death.”
Just like that, my indignation burst l
ike a balloon, and I felt, in the pit of my stomach, what it would be like if it were me talking about Archer. Nancy must have seen the pain in my face because the edges she wore like armor softened a little.
She sat on the bed and I leaned against the dresser. She looked tired, and about ten years older than she was. “It’s hard to be so strong, you know, love?”
I didn’t say anything. Her question didn’t seem to need an answer, and she finally met my eyes. “I was in Marseilles in 1940 when the Germans invaded. I got busy making life hell for them right away, and my husband’s money protected us for a while, but when I joined up with the resistance to get people out of France, they finally figured out who I was. We were mostly just getting English pilots over the mountains into Spain, but they couldn’t catch me, and it made them angry. The White Mouse, the Gestapo called me, because I slipped through their traps every time.” Nancy’s expression was more grimace than smile. “I used to dust a little powder on, have a drink, and walk right past their checkpoints with a pretty smile, daring them to search me. God, what a flirtatious little bastard I was.”
She leaned back against the headboard and studied me. “I left Marseilles in 1943. They were getting too close and I thought if I was gone, they’d leave Henri alone. It took me six tries to cross the Pyrenees into Spain, and I had no idea they’d already brought him in for questioning. They thought he knew where I was, see?” Her gaze drifted to the far wall, but she was staring at nothing in particular. “The Germans tortured him for three months before he died.”
The words trailed off, and finally she took a breath and re-focused on me. “Do you know, I never broke down. Not even when they did capture me, then let me go when a friend lied for me, or when I rode a bicycle five hundred kilometers to replace codes my operator had been forced to destroy, or when I had to kill an SS sentry during a raid so he wouldn’t raise the alarm. I’ve always been the strong one, even when I found out about Henri.”
