Garrett Investigates (10 page)

She almost walked into the flank of one of the horses before she heard it moving in the concrete-thick darkness. Fading back into the bushes and dropping her bedraggled carpetbag, she assayed a quick count by sound. There were seven of them on this side of the road; she guessed there would be as many on the far side.

In the darkness between lightnings, she drew her wand out of her glove and lay down in the mud. She sliced thorn canes and bittersweet vines with the soft edge of the knife, wrapping them in the towel so they did not cut her hands.

The “French and Mohawks” weren’t talking, just waiting, although she saw a flask passed from hand to hand during a gleam of lightning.
Roderick’s on the other side of the road, then.

Clutching her fistful of raspberry canes, Garrett belly-crawled forward, wriggling through the fluid earth. She counted the seconds between flash and thunder, judging how far sounds of a struggle would carry over the howl of the wind. Mud stung her scratched face and blinded her as she wormed forward. She stopped alongside the nearest horse and rolled on her back, covered in and indistinguishable from the slime. Carefully, she raised and sighted along her wand. The gelding stamped, a hoof larger than a big man’s fist grazing her temple, showering her in mud. She shut her teeth on a scream and whispered the command word, using the bulk of the gelding to block the wand’s flash. The rider went slack in his saddle.

She rolled under the restive gelding and dropped the bundle of canes between his feet, hoping they might foul his stride later, and that it might matter. His hind hoof caught her in the shin as he thought of dancing away, half-spooked but still responsive to the unshifting weight of his rider. Garrett mastered the pain, slow breaths through her nose, and leveled her wand again.

She didn’t try the rolling-under-the-horse trick twice.

Instead, upon standing, she caught the second animal’s reins and dragged them free of the rider’s numb fingers. She peered over the mare’s withers as the animal sidestepped into her and then stopped, comforted by the pressure of a human body.

God bless well-schooled animals,
Garrett thought. The third rider, perhaps noticing something in a lightning strike, turned. Garrett counted for the thunder: two, three, four, five. Steadying her wand across the pommel, she silenced him and slid under the mare’s neck, throwing the reins into the thornbush.
Please, please, please snag there and hold her.

The third rider was caught off-balance. His mare started to prance backwards, snorting, as he fell forward across her neck. Garrett thrust the wand between her teeth and ran two agonizing steps on her wrenched ankle to catch him by the waist. Over the hiss of the storm, she heard iron-shod hooves rattle on the cobbled road.

No more time.

There was a pistol in the third man’s hand. Garrett grabbed at it as she threw him out of the saddle, wet fingers sliding off the grip. Muffled by the bit of ebony between her teeth, she cursed and bent down, snatching the weapon. Her other hand stayed on the saddle; the mare spooked, dragged Garrett back.

Garrett let her, hopping on her good foot until she managed to let go of the saddle and catch at the rain-slick, soapy-feeling reins. Someone shouted. Lightning flashed.

Garrett threw herself belly-flat across the saddle, almost sliding under ironhard hooves. Somehow, she got one leg over the animal but lost her wand as the mare reared and kicked out, displeased with the unkind tug on her reins. The saddle felt greasy with rain. Garrett threw her weight forward to bring the animal down, kicked her feet into stirrups set too high for her, skirt riding up around her waist. The iron on the right side split her bruised shin open before she shoved her foot in.

Two of the remaining four riders whirled on her. The other two, not yet aware—in the rain and the darkness—of their companions’ fate, broke cover and charged the road, to meet the ambuscade coming from the south. A flash of lightning outlined them among the thorny canes. Garrett leveled her captured revolver and shot them in the backs.

The gunshots rang out clearly through the storm as the first of the riderless horses burst onto the road, fighting tangled reins, and skidded on the wet cobblestones. Garrett’s mare stood firm, although her ears flickered at the gunfire.
God bless this horse.
A moment later, Garrett heard the hoofbeats of the carriage horses accelerating from trot to full-out run.

And then she almost lost her grip on both the pistol and the saddle when the closest remaining rider reined his mount into hers and struck her hard on the shoulder with the butt of his rifle. The arm holding the reins went numb from neck to elbow. Garrett brought the pistol up as he grappled her in the storm-slick darkness and shot him point-blank, under the chin.

The carriage rattled on, seven riders shouting in pursuit.

They have rifles,
Garrett thought, drawing a bead by sound on the final opponent in the thorn break. Lightning revealed him raising his.
All they have to do is shoot the damn carriage-horses. But Richard’s warned, and he’ll have at least one guard.

She fired in darkness, heard the last man drop.
Two bullets left.
She felt about her saddle, found a shotgun slung by her knee.
No time to look for more weapons.
She raised the reins. The mare, deft in the soupy footing, jumped forward.

Garrett heard gunfire ahead, the rattle of metal-rimmed wheels on the stones and shouts of anger.
There’s nowhere to go but the house
, she thought,
and that’s no haven.

They raced through bitter darkness. Garrett clung to her rain-smoothed saddle grimly; leather split her stockings and burned her thighs. The carriage could overturn at any moment, or the Earl’s son’s men could get a lucky shot on a carriage horse in a flash of lightning or the light of the lamps. She saw the glitter of weapons in the blackness, heard a scream and a thud that could only be one of the Earl’s men shot and falling.

She grinned around desperation. Mud washed from her dress by the blinding rain slicked down her, squelched under her, loosening her grip. But her mare was gaining on them, running on the rain-dark road, knowing the path with long familiarity even if Garrett didn’t. She was willing, and her rider let her have her head and just hung on.
Don’t fall,
she thought.
Just don’t go down, and I’ll buy you and put you out to pasture, girl.

Lightning shattered in chains. Garrett, closing, heard the crack of a rifle, saw the near-side carriage horse fall skidding across the cobblestones on his knees, fouling his team-mate. The coach tottered, wobbled, and spilled sideways with a splintering crunch, falling in the path of another of Roderick’s horsemen, lanterns bursting fire. Garrett shouted, kicked her mare, firing wildly at the largest of the horsemen as she charged into their midst. She dropped the reins, waving the much-beleaguered foxfur wrap like a flag.

Two shots. Horses startled, scattered. She hurled the empty pistol in Roderick’s face as he swung around to face her; she kicked out of the too-short irons, grabbed a double fistful of his French officer’s jacket and dragged him, too, down to the hard stones among the iron hooves of panicked horses.

He fell on top of her. She buried her face in his chest, balling up, using his body to protect her from the blows of his own fists and the dancing hooves. His knee came up solidly into her groin and she cried out but didn’t let go. Screaming horses stamped all around them, and she heard shouting voices and gunfire. The fight wasn’t
over yet.

She felt more than heard a thud like a meat hammer and Roderick’s body went limp, grinding her into the rounded stones. Three more gunshots pounded her ears, before the thunder.

A moment later, and someone was rolling the weight off of her, gently helping her to her feet.

“Inspector Garrett.” A familiar, dry voice, the voice of Richard, Duke of New Amsterdam. “I’m afraid the carriage is a loss, and my groom and footman a greater one. I suppose you will be able to explain this banditry once we reach the house?”

“Not the house. The Earl and his son are behind it all,” she said, and would have fallen if he hadn’t caught her.

***

Early the next day, Garrett stood by the tall, diamond-paned window, holding aside the red velvet drapery. They had returned with soldiers, and although she had not yet rested or bathed, the Earl had been arrested. The sky was brightening slightly, although the rain still fell.

The Duke of New Amsterdam came up behind her and lowered a brandy snifter over her shoulder, his sleeve brushing the pearl-embroidered silk of her ruined gown. “Abby Irene,” he said in her ear, “you’ll catch your death standing in the draft.”

She accepted the glass as she turned to him, favoring the ankle. Dank silk still clung to her abused body. She hadn’t kindled the fire, although it was laid. “Richard.” She let her lips twitch toward what might have been a smile and gulped a third of her brandy. “Thank you.”

“Thank
you
,” he said.

She studied his careworn face, reached out to brush away the bark-colored hair dried stuck to his forehead. “Duty and all that.” He wasn’t much older than she, but the distance between them could never be spanned for more than a moment. “Of course.”

“Of course.” An easy smile that broke her heart in the same place every time. “I knew that was your motivation.” He looked around the lavish dining room. “They’re never as clever as they think they are.”

“It’s not inherited money, I take it? What was he doing?”

The Duke shrugged. “State secrets.”

“I understand,” Garrett set her glass aside on a sideboard.

“No,” he said. “I meant state secrets. To the French, and the secessionists. Getting you and me out of the way would weaken the Crown in the colonies as well.”

“Ah.” Somehow, they had drifted together. His eyes, green and golden-brown, wouldn’t quite meet hers.

She stepped forward and pulled his head down, gnawing at his lips as if starved. They clung together for a moment.

Then he stepped back. “The mud,” he said. “My clothes.”

She drew him to her again. “Tell your wife I fainted. Tell her you caught me.”

A long, hungry silence followed, and was broken. She looked away, toward the unlit fire and the failing storm. He held her upper arms tightly, one in each hand. “Abby Irene. I was going to end this, this weekend.”

She chuckled, shook her head, took a step back against his resistance, raising her chin to meet his hazel eyes with hers. “I’m going to end this every weekend. I hope you don’t think I’m proud of myself.”

“Proud? No. Not quite that either.”

“You were born here, Richard, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I love the Americas.”

A pregnant pause, which she did not fill.

He continued. “And what brought you here, loyal servant of the Crown? Whose wife did you offend?”

“No-one’s.” She glanced at her mudstained boots. “I chose to come here. It was…further from the memories.”

Disbelief in his eyes. “Chose to leave London?”

“It’s almost true,” she said, meeting his gaze. “Nothing’s changed.”

“Nothing at all.” He stroked her snarled hair once quickly, before she stepped away.

This is one of the two New Amsterdam universe stories that does not have Abby Irene in it at all—except as a background presence. It is, in many ways, her actions that brought this state of affairs to pass…

“Underground” is set in the waning days of the Great War, which—in this universe—takes place somewhat later and under very different circumstances than in our own world, and incorporates some of the genocidal excesses of our own Second World War.

Mary Ballard was the daughter of an indenture. She had been at various times the housekeeper of a forensic sorcerer, une Parisienne, and a private detective before the War…and a member of the Resistance during it. She had seen magic black and white; she had seen demons and monsters; she had seen women raped and starved and men torn apart by the Prussians and their guns. She had seen torture: all these things and more.

Now, she stood in a dingy cellar room—sparsely furnished with a battered stool, a paint-stained table, a salvaged cot—and opened a battered blue-painted steamer trunk, thinking that this was not even the first time she had seen blonde girls of eighteen or so packed alive into luggage. She’d seen more, in fact, than she had ever expected to.

But none of those had smelled of musk and rank damp beast in addition to the animal sourness of fear and close confinement.

The girl in the trunk wore a motheaten cardigan of gray wool, her knees drawn up beneath a full skirt, her head tucked down between her knees. Her hair escaped its braid in sweat-matted strands; her shoulder blades stood out beneath the sweater like incipient wings.

When the light fell across her, first she scrunched tight, drawing her knees to her face as if the squinch of eyes and mouth exerted a gravitational pull. There was no flesh upon her bones. The veins on her hands and wrists intertwined the tendons like serpents in Eve’s tree. And then she relaxed, joint by joint, breathing so deeply that Mary could see the bony ribcage swell.

Mary stood upright, pulling the lid stays straight. The girl turned her face up, still blinking in the electric light, squinting, so Mary moved to shade her with her body. The face was familiar, yes, but when Mary had seen it last, it had been in a newspaper photograph: not so gaunt, so bruised under the eyes, and balanced atop the stiff gray uniform of the Prussian Sturmwolfstaffel, adorned with black
Wolfsangeln
.

“Hauptsturmführerin,” Mary said. Extending her hand, she continued in English, stiff and awkward on her tongue. “Come out of there.”

Mary had expected a Sturmwolf to flinch from contact with her own brown hand, but the only hesitation in the girl’s movements was that of stiffness, disorientation, and pain. When Mary touched her, she grabbed and squeezed, the desperate human need for contact that seemed even more touching when neither of them were human.

The girl’s fingers were even colder than Mary’s. No wonder, that: it was a bitterly chill, dank April in Europe, as if spring itself were in mourning for the dead. And there would be more dead before long: too many hungry, too many displaced, and too many farms harrowed under the marching boot, the chewing tread.

“Ruth,” the girl rasped, and started coughing.

Mary helped the girl sit up and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, cradling her through the spasms that wracked her gaunt body. Mary had no warmth to share, but perhaps the support would be enough.

Eventually, the paroxysm ended. The girl wiped a hand across her mouth, leaving no blood behind.

She took a rasping breath and said, “Please just call me Ruth. Ruth Grell.”

“Ruth,” Mary said. “I’m Mary Ballard. You’re in Paris. I’m with the Resistance.”

The
Resistance. It was funny how some things became archetypal of their kind. As if they could have other, lesser cousins, but
this
was the one that mattered.

Ruth hugged herself as Mary helped her to stand. She might be starved to the bone, but there was still strength in her body—far more than there should have been.

“You’re a wampyr,” Ruth said.

“Guilty,” Mary admitted, assisting her out of the trunk.

Ruth wobbled as her feet, puffed out by two sets of stockings, settled onto the clean-swept cement floor. She hobbled the two steps to an oval braided-rag rug and stood there as if that had been the end of her strength. Mary winced, imagining the cramps of such long confinement on living flesh.

Mary bent to fetch Ruth’s shoes from the corner of the trunk where they had been crammed.

She continued, “And you’re an Ulfhethinn. But I’m trying not to hold it against you.”

Ruth laughed; it sounded worse than the coughing. When she had her breath back, she said, “And I’m the one climbing out of the coffin.”

“Do you need a toilet?” Mary asked, setting Ruth’s shoes down for her.

“I’ve nothing in me to get out again,” Ruth admitted with a flush. “You said Paris? Is it liberated yet?”

“Not yet. Here, this stool—” Mary draped threadbare shawls and afghans around the girl’s shoulders until she resembled a moss-hung boulder more than a young woman. “I’ll fetch you tea.”

“Not yet,” Ruth echoed hoarsely, while Mary boiled water over the camp stove. “I’m sorry, I’m—” another painful, gasping laugh “—behind on the news.”

“Berlin is under siege,” Mary said. “The Russians and the Iroquois. Pavelgrad is liberated. Prague.”

Ruth lifted her head on a neck made longer by lack of flesh, eyes burning. She had beautiful bones, even recoiling. “I knew about Prague.”

Of course she would have. They’d brought her out of the death camp at Terezin through Prague.

Some griefs were too deep to be eased through conversation. Mary had her own—so many friends, sisters, courtiers lost to the Prussians…

She did not allow her tone to shift. “Kyiv. Stockholm. Warsaw. The Fascists have been overthrown in Spain. The Prussians still hold London and Paris, and the Russians and Americans are mopping up units all over the countryside, but—” she shrugged. “—you have cut the head off the snake.”

Huddled under her wraps, head drooping, Ruth didn’t answer. Mary didn’t know if she was conserving her strength, or if she was not ready to hear praise for an act of murder. In the interests of picking at open wounds as little as possible, she lifted the boiling beaker from the flame and poured in silence.

There was honey for the tea. Ruth cupped the chipped cup in her palms for a long time, breathing in the steam, before she tasted it. As she swallowed, her gaunt face lit in gratitude. “It’s sweet.”

“You need it,” Mary said. “We haven’t a lot of food. But more than you’ve been getting, to look at you.”

Ruth’s voice was improving with use and tea. “Anything would be more than I’ve been getting. So if Paris hasn’t been liberated, why did your people in Prague send me West instead of East?”

There was no easy way out of it. “Because the Russians want you as a war criminal. You and all the Sturmwolfstaffel.”

Ruth didn’t raise her eyes from the steaming tea. Her face betrayed no surprise, no fear. Only the calm acceptance of someone who had been pushed so far past the boundaries of her strength that she no longer even fought to regain them.

“And if they catch me,” Ruth said with dry irony, “I suppose they will send me to a labor camp.”

“It seems likely.”

Ruth nodded. She sipped her tea and said, “Of course.”

***

“Food,” Mary said, when they had sat in silence for a little while. “We have turnips and salt pork—”

“Pork,” Ruth said resignedly.

Mary winced. She knew—they all knew—Ruth had been raised Jewish, before she became an infiltrator. But Mary was no longer accustomed to thinking in terms of the necessities of human diets, except inasmuch as the smells of food now nauseated her.

“I am so sorry—” she began.

Ruth shook her head. “It’s all right. I’ve been eating what the Prussians ate for years now. God will forgive me one more meal of trayf faster than He would forgive me wasting food in a time of famine.”

You are very brave
, Mary thought, but her time in service had left her acutely aware of the moods of others, and she didn’t think—just now—the comment would
be welcome.

***

The girl was too exhausted to stay awake—especially with a lined belly—and too traumatized, still, to sleep as heavily as her body demanded. Mary wondered what scars her skin would have displayed, if she were not a supernatural creature.

Caring for her—just being in the same room with the weight of her despair and exhaustion—was a crushing thing. When Mary, dressed now for skulking, slipped out of the dingy cellar room at sunset, leaving Ruth dozing fitfully in a salvaged infirmary cot, she felt relief. And guilt—but it was guilt at the relief, not at leaving. She’d become accustomed to being her own creature, to bearing no responsibilities except the ones she picked up willingly. To be responsible for the care of another galled a little.

But she had the necessary skills, and the superhuman abilities to keep safe a superhuman refugee.

We are ugly creatures
, she thought, ascending the stairs in near-darkness,
for Paris.
There were other tenants in the flats she passed, but very few would poke their heads out of doors in such times. Some were her brothers and sisters in the Resistance, quietly keeping watch over her while she expedited Ruth on her way.

Others had merely learned under the occupation not to invite notice. Like mice when the hawk swings over, people were going to ground.

She paused in the small lavatory—it had no bath—to attend her makeup and her hair, which she kept in an Eton crop modeled on that made famous by another black American who had made Paris her home and the Resistance her calling. The mirror was of no use to her, but the bathroom had a small kerosene burner in the corner, and she used that to heat her comb. Over the years, she’d gotten adroit at attending her toilette by feel.

At the top of the attic stair, Mary picked the lock—a skill her old employer might be surprised to learn she had acquired. She had always been a slender—a
skinny
—woman, and it was but the work of a moment more to let herself out the window onto the steeply canted roof.

She lifted herself into the cold wind of the rising night, staying low so as not to silhouette herself against the clouds streaked with blood and amber in the west, the twilight sky that glowed a radiant periwinkle elsewhere. L’heure bleu, the French called it: when there was light, but no sun. Slates gritty and chill against her fingertips, Mary tasted the coming night on the air. In the street below, there were few pedestrians: only the eternal Prussian patrols, and even those seemed somehow tentative.

Paris was Mary’s city, as no other had ever truly been. She had lived in Philadelphia and New Amsterdam, but the City of Lights had been her home for nearly forty years—and those other places had belonged to someone else. Mary had only inhabited them. In Paris she had been able to submerge herself in the community she’d always craved—a curious culture of expatriates and wanderers who found in each other what they could not find at home.

Paris was hers, and she would fight for it.

As much as anything in her city, Mary loved its Mansard rooftops. The greatest gift of her nascent immortality was the strength and agility that let her treat those roofs as a highway, that let her go skimming across their slates and shingles alongside the city’s axiomatic clowders of cats.

She watched the light fade out of the sky. When it was safely dark—or a little before—she rose to her feet and ran. The night smelled of frying onions, of wood smoke, of the exhaust of cars, of the wind that swept over everything, that bound it together and pulled it apart.

Mary smiled as she leaped fearlessly among the chimneys.

This was freedom.

This was worth anything.

It was over too soon. She could have run all night, and sometimes she did. But someone was waiting for her, and so she flitted south along the Rue Saint-Denis. The trees were hazed with tiny leaves and blossoms as if in defiance of the cold, though it was too early for the heavy scent of the famous chestnuts.

Here, there was foot traffic. The street below had been famed since medieval times as a haven for the sex trade, and no mere crumbling Prussian occupation could keep the force of nature that was a Parisian whore indoors. Their catcalls and solicitations floated up to Mary, who paused a moment to wish them well. She had nothing but respect for them, the
demimondaines
making their way in the world in defiance of its expectations. Many, like Mary, were women from other places who had come to Paris for a better life; some were Parisiennes born and bred, whether their ancestors had originated in the province of Île-de-France or in the Sahel of Tunis.

Over the decades, Mary had numbered more than two or three among her court.

She had found, over those same decades, that she had little use for men, and Frenchmen less than most. She had no need of them, and she found it distasteful to coddle their egos and debase herself before their expectations. It was also possible, if she were honest, that her work as a private detective before the War had exposed her to a little too much human nature. Especially since she had so often been working for those same women of the demimonde, and the subjects bringing them grief had so often been those same Gallic cockerels.

She supposed it hadn’t been much of a stretch for those who had recruited her to the Resistance to know that she would be a safe choice. Her race, her associates, and her supernatural nature had all argued in her favor. She believed she’d been an asset. She’d even done her share of recruiting—and now, for Paris, for her fallen comrades, she would perform this one last task as a secret soldier before taking her retirement.

When she reached the Seine, she descended. Another night she might have mingled with the sparse foot traffic across the Pont au Change, but this evening brought only drilling Prussians to the bridge. They lined the road before the occupied Préfecture de police on the Île de la Cité beyond; a display of force that demonstrated only how insecure the Prussians knew their position to be.

So Mary crossed the river below the lip of the bridge, in the shadows on the span, on the strength of her fingertips and balance. Beyond, she scaled a wall and took to the rooftops again. It amused her to leap silently the cramped medieval width of the Rue de Lutéce over the heads of the enemy. Even if they saw her, they had no hope
of pursuit.