Garrett Investigates (12 page)

Mary blinked, although her eyes did not require moistening, and because Ruth seemed to need it, she allowed herself to be drawn in. “What is it?”

“Heraldic device. A kind of brutal medieval wolf-trap.” Ruth wiped a hand across her mouth, hard enough to blanch the flesh for a moment. “Ironic, no?”

Yes, for the women trapped in it.
But Mary couldn’t say that in the face of Ruth’s distress. She caught Ruth’s gaze, forcing a distraction. “Can you take them?”

Ruth drew herself up. Her chin lifted, showing the tendons of her throat, her larynx in stark relief. Then she looked down at herself, her painfully thin hands that still trembled slightly.

She said, “No.”

“Move your hand,” Mary said. “I need to pick the lock.”

***

It wasn’t so much the commandant’s office itself that interested them as the secretary’s antechamber, with its wall of filing cabinets. They selected the ones that were locked: Mary picked them open and allowed Ruth to do the unpleasant work of examining the contents. She’d seen enough death warrants over the course of the war to last her an (eternal) lifetime. The Prussians had made fifteen copies of everything; the Resistance had sometimes obtained the sixteenth one.

Both women worked in silence, one ear tuned to the door.

“Here,” Ruth whispered, over the whisk of the lockpick and the rustle of paper. A further, more irritated rustle followed. “There’s only one left.”

“Of course,” Mary answered. “The rest of them are in the pockets of staff officers. Who are likewise on their way to Calais.”

“I cannot take this,” Ruth said, the edge of the paper crumpling in her fist. “What about you?”

“I never planned to leave Paris,” Mary said. Her assistance to Ruth was becoming less a job than it had been, and more a labor of affection. She felt a pang, she admitted to herself, when she thought of Ruth leaving.

But if the Prussians couldn’t drive her from Paris, the wolf-hook of a mere
pang
certainly wouldn’t pull her out of it.

A sound in the corridor kept her from embarrassing herself by continuing. Ruth had heard it too. It was not the scuff of a foot, so much as the whisper of wood in an ancient joist as a person’s weight came on to it.

Neither one spoke. As one they stood, turned—Ruth stuffing the precious papers into her cardigan—and moved to the window.

…an instant before it burst inward in a storm of shattered glass and shutter splinters. A woman in the gray woolens of the Sturmwulfstaffel landed lightly, crouching, in the litter.

Mary might have recoiled, but the door ripped from its hinges at the same instant. Her head snapped around: two women, that way, light on their feet and moving like predators. Ruth didn’t bother to look back.

She lunged.

Mary had seen a thousand-year-old wampyr move in exigency. That was weightless. Floating, abstracted, inexpressibly light…and too fast for the mind to register, even if the eye could follow.

The Ulfhethinn was something entirely different: a hundred and forty pounds of furious meat launched without a sound, without a snarl, directly at the throat of the woman who blocked her path to the window. She hit the other woman with all the force of her leap. Mary heard the thud as flesh connected to flesh; she heard the thump as flesh connected to the wall.

She didn’t see what happened, because she was not looking. Instead she spun and reached, grasping the corners of the nearest filing cabinet—which was wooden, and four drawers tall, and full of papers—and ripping it from the safety bolts that moored it to the wall.

She couldn’t quite lift it and toss it, though she was sure Alice, being older, could have. But she
heaved
.

The thing tumbled on its side, sending the nearer of the rearguard Ulfhethinn skittering back towards the door. From the next cabinet, Mary simply ripped a drawer and threw that, whipping it about from the handle as if for the hammer-toss.

It shattered on the fists of the Ulfhethinn who had not dodged back, showering papers to every side. Blood ran from her knuckles, the seaweedy tang sharpening Mary’s focus and her teeth. Mary edged back toward the fight behind her, eyes fixed on the Ulfhethinn who crouched and without lowering her gaze from Mary’s groped among the flinders of the drawer for a two-foot-long spike of broken wood.

She wore a revolver at her hip but did not reach for it. Apparently she knew this would be more effective.

From the floor came a grunt of effort—the first Mary had heard—and a kind of windy groan. A crunch, and silence.

The Ulfhethnar from the door advanced, one covering the other’s flank, stalking like wolves. “This isn’t about you, bloodsucker,” said the one with the stake. “Let us have our sister, and you can go.”

“Mary,” Ruth gasped. “The
window
.”

A hand was on her wrist—strong, long-nailed, slick with blood. A jerk, a running step half-backward…and they were falling, the cold air rushing around, and just enough time for Mary to twist in the air, bring her feet under her, and let the force of the landing pull her from Ruth’s grasp and roll her to the ground and over her shoulder and up again. She spent the last of the momentum in two running steps and whirled to see if Ruth had made it.

The Ulfhethinn came up running. Blood streamed down her face, long ribbons of flesh peeled from her cheek where the other woman had scratched her. She limped until she reached her stride, then seemed to measure an even pace by grim force of will.

“Run,” she panted, as Mary fell in beside her. “They won’t stop.”

Ulfhethnar were berserkers, Mary remembered. Wolf-shirts, bred of ancient Norse war-magics.

Mary did not need breath for running. Dead flesh was tireless. “How is it that
you
stopped?”

“I’m not. Like other. Ulfhethnar.”

“The river,” Mary said, hearing the thud of someone striking earth behind them.

“Ew,” Ruth gasped. But she followed. Across the river walk, with two sets of footsteps driving hard behind them. Up onto the parapet wall.

“Go under,” Mary said. “Swim with me.”

“Dead lady, I hope you have a plan.”

The Seine didn’t reek—not by the standards of the East Kill or the Thames. Mary opened up her dead lungs, drew them full of air. She found Ruth’s wrist with her hand and locked it there, a literal manacle.

Their eyes met.

As one, they dove.

There was no more ice floating in the river. That was the only mercy. They struck it hard, hard and too flat. Mary’s grip didn’t break, and neither did Ruth’s arm. But the force of the impact swept their hands back and knocked their bodies together. The stark bones of Ruth’s wrist rattled against the stiff flesh of Mary’s hand.

Ruth must have kept her breath, though—how, exactly, Mary couldn’t imagine—and as Mary tugged her through the turgid water she seemed to orient herself and begin to swim. Mary released her wrist and struck out downriver at an angle, trusting Ruth to follow.

Behind them, two objects struck the river in quick succession—each with a heavy splash—followed a few seconds later by a third.

That didn’t
kill
her?
Mary thought, amused that she felt more outrage than fear.

She stroked faster. Ruth kept up despite the drag of her skirts, thirty feet, fifty—and a tap on Mary’s shoulder. She turned to Ruth; through murky water and the blur of darkness Ruth jerked a thumb up. A slow trickle of bubbles rose from her nostrils. The streamers of her blood faded into the moving water all around.

Mary put a hand on Ruth’s neck, a hand on her belly, and pulled her down.

Ruth’s eyes widened. For a moment, Mary thought she would struggle. But Mary pushed gently against her diaphragm, and Ruth, after a moment’s resistance, breathed out. Mary raised that hand to Ruth’s shoulder and pulled her close.

She fitted her lips to Ruth’s, and filled Ruth’s lungs with the air she had hoarded.

It was enough to get them to the destination—a sewer outflow channel—that Mary had used before. She clung to the brickwork, supporting Ruth, with only their eyes above the channel until the Ulfhethnar—two swimming strongly, and the straggler—swept past on their way downriver. Then she hauled Ruth—dripping and shivering—up into the mouth of the arched masonry tunnel. There was a grate; Mary simply loosened the bolts that had long ago been replaced by cunning hands and lifted it aside.

The Prussians might rule the streets above. The catacombs belonged to the Resistance.

“I hope you’re not afraid of the dark,” she told Ruth.

Ruth snorted through her shivers. “I hope the ink on these letters is waterproof.”

***

They walked in darkness, their footsteps plashing in sorcerously decontaminated filth until they came up the trunk to a walkway. The trickle of water sounded and rebounded all around them; the noise was such that they leaned their heads together to talk in low tones. The echoes might carry, but as far as Mary was concerned, if the Ulfhethnar could track them by sound through this noise, they deserved to eat them.

She might, she allowed, be a bit tired.

By scent and familiarity, Mary led them as far as a cache of electric torches and batteries wrapped in a rubberized sheet and thrust into the back of a niche. The second torch she tried worked, once she inserted the batteries by feel. Even a wampyr’s eyes were no use when the darkness was total.

She shielded the torch with a fold of her shirt, so it cast only a dim and indirect glow, and looked up to find Ruth regarding her.

“Thank you,” the Ulfhethinn said.

“Thank
you
,” Mary responded. She should look down, she knew, but it wasn’t happening. And Ruth wasn’t looking down either.

“You’re wondering,” Ruth said, “why it took me three years to assassinate the bastard.”

“I had assumed you had to work your way close to him.” No answer, not immediately. Mary turned away. “Let’s walk.”

“Lead on, Valjean.”

She could feel Ruth stewing, though, and she wanted to give the girl an opportunity to spit out some of the poison so obviously corroding her soul.

“Killing him doesn’t make you a monster, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“My worst fear,” Ruth said bitterly, striding alongside so her wet skirt slapped, certain of her footing in the halflight, “was that someone else would find a way to turn the tide. To break the Prussian war machine. And then everything I’d endured, everything I’d done would have been in vain. So yes: you ask if I think I am a monster? If nothing else proves it, doesn’t that?”

They passed through an archway of rough stone, into a narrower side-channel. The echoes were less here, or at least more attenuated, and the floor was dry except for a foul, slender trickle. Mary trailed her left hand along the rough cemented stone, feeling for a gap you could not see. Here, they were constrained to walk single-file.

“Sweetheart,” Mary said. “What it proves, if anything, is that you are most exquisitely human.”

Ruth fell silent again. Mary felt her fingertips skip on air. “Ah,” she said. “Follow me.”

She turned into the stone, and she knew from Ruth’s perspective she vanished as if she had walked into the wall. But she felt nothing, not even a tingle, as she passed.

“Careful,” she called back as she found her footing on the raw clay floor of a catacomb. On every side, skulls stacked like fruit between the layers of a torte composed of cords of human arm and leg bones glowed warmly in the filtered radiance of the torch. “There’s a step.”

A moment later, Ruth’s head leaned in the ragged gap that could be seen quite plainly from the inside. “Illusion,” she said, as if one encountered that sort of thing every day. “It won’t hide our scent.”

“I was relying on the sewage for that.”

The Ulfhethinn leapt lightly down. Her nose wrinkled. The scratches on her face had crusted, the edges pink already with healing.

“It will help,” Ruth admitted. “The sewers connect to the catacombs?”

“All under Paris, there’s a labyrinth,” Mary said.

Ruth reached out and gently brushed the back of her nails against a dead man’s bony cheek. “A labyrinth has only one path through.”

“Like life,” Mary answered. “No matter how many twists and turnings it takes, you can’t retrace your steps, and it always leads to the center.”

“Yes,” Ruth said, as they started forward again—through a columned gallery, “I’ve been thinking about that.”

Conversation was paused by a brief squeeze that had them on their bellies. Water dripped down Mary’s neck, and she dreaded to think what the damp was doing to her hair. She rolled her eyes at herself: whatever damage it might have caused, the plunge in the river had already anticipated. And it wasn’t as if Ruth looked any less a fright.

On the other side of the squeeze, rising to a crouch, Mary said, “Please continue.”

“I don’t want to go to South Africa.”

“Ruth,” Mary said. “The Russians—”

“I’m not suicidal,” Ruth said.

“Good,” Mary said. “Because the Prussians are packing. And even if I hadn’t come to be fond of you, for saving my city you deserve to live.”

“Fond of me?” Ruth asked.

Mary snorted.

They came to a set of Brobdingnagian stairs, a dozen or so waist-high slabs which they climbed as much with their hands as their feet.

The silence must have weighed on Ruth far more than it did on Mary. “If what I did was right, I shouldn’t have to flee like a…like a criminal. And if it was wrong…” Ruth’s breath sounded as if she were crying, but Mary smelled no tears. “I should not fear judgment.”

“Really? And here I just spent the last twenty-four hours of my life killing myself to keep you away from the
bloody
Russians. Are you ready to throw
that
away?”

“No,” Ruth said. “What I owe you, I owe you, too. But…the hour and the place of my demise are determined. It’s upon me how I meet it.”

“Hah.” Mary clambered up another stair, this one slumped and angled. Gravel skittered from her feet over the edge to vanish in the blackness below. It plinked like water, which made her realize that the echoes of the water were now only a distant hiss. She transferred the torch to her other hand, extending the right one to Ruth.