Garrett Investigates

Introduction to “Underground”



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.





Underground

For Nisi Shawl



Paris, April 1941



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.

And they never saw her.

She did not need to descend again. The route she followed led to the Pont Saint-Michel, a bridge even more cramped and medieval than the Rue de Lutéce. If the Rue Saint-Denis was one of Paris’ most ancient roads, the Pont Saint-Michel was one of its first bridges, and the broad stone thoroughfare had only been replaced once. Alone of the bridges of Paris, it still held its two rows of medieval houses, blocking the view of the water on either side—unless you were lucky enough to dwell in one.

“Lucky,” perhaps, being a relative term, as some of them were unplumbed even now, and there were said to be no colder houses in Paris. Comfort, however, was not an issue for everyone. These houses leaned together like spinster aunts, their wattle-and-daub walls stained tea-brown between the timbers. The walls bowed and bulged with a weight of years that Mary, still in her first century, found somewhat incomprehensible—and oppressive to contemplate.

On the fifth sharply peaked roof from the Île de la Cité, Mary stopped. There were no trees here, but the dark and chill cloaked her. After glancing both ways to be sure she was unobserved, she lowered herself from the roof-edge to a narrow balcony overhanging the river. Her feet touched lightly; she turned to knock on the frame of the curtained window beyond. The frame, because she was haunted by a vision of the ancient leading between the tiny diamond-shaped panes shredding at the first tap.

She didn’t actually need to rap. The curtains twitched back at the first sound, and the opposite casement swung wide. There were no candles or lamps within to silhouette the woman who held the window open, but Mary’s eyes gathered starlight like a cat’s. She saw a round, pleasant face like an egg in a nest of red curls, and the white shift with its low, ruffled neckline—a nightgown far from warm enough for the season.

Not that this woman could any more feel a chill than Mary could. Which was only one of the reasons that Mary had brought her, too, into the resistance. Another of Paris’s resident expats who would fight for her past that last breath.

“Mary,” Alice Marjorie said, in her gentle Scottish burr. “Come in before you catch your death, my dear.”


A candle did burn, but in the front room, where its light would be seen lighting the curtains with a warm glow from the street. For Mary and for Alice, this was light enough.

Before the war, the house might have burned bright with electric lamps from Dr. Tesla’s broadcast power. But Telsa had mured himself up in his booby-trapped generator tower like a wizard in a storybook and he’d not been seen outside its walls for years. It was anyone’s guess what the old man was eating in there.

On the subject of eating, the lack of such things as cups of tea and plates of biscuits robbed wampyr society of many of the little niceties by which humans persisted. In their place, Alice brought Mary within and led her to the front window in which there was no candle. The façade of the old house leaned out over the bridge’s stone thoroughfare, so when Alice drew the curtain back and Mary leaned her face alongside, she could see all the way into the Île de la Cité.

“Did you come that way?” Alice asked.

Mary nodded.

“And no trouble?”

“No one so much as looked up.”

“You were fortunate the breeze was blowing from the West.” Alice’s words were cold on Mary’s ear. She had no breath, as such: her lungs were just a bellows for her speech. That, more than anything, had taken Mary some getting used to. “Do you see the three young women there, in their grey uniforms, talking with the S.S. officer?”

“Oh.” Indeed, Mary could hardly miss them now that Alice had pointed them out. Mary could not see the barbed and crossbarred hooks of their insignia from here, but she hardly needed to.

“Indeed,” said Alice. “Ruth Grell is not the only wolf in town.”

“They’re hunting her.”

“Of course they are,” said Alice. “They are fanatical warriors, and she killed the man they were oathbound to protect. Also, there was word on the shortwave this evening: the Russians will be in Paris before the week is out.”

Mary did not state the obvious. Ruth must be gone before the Russians arrived. The Prussians were distracted by survival: the Slavs would have nothing on their minds but vengeance. She only nodded once more. “I am open,” she said, “to suggestions.”

“Letters of transit,” Alice said. “You must steal them from the Prussians. They will keep you and Miss Grell safe behind Prussian lines until you can reach Calais. I have heard that the Americans are not yet in Calais. Nor is it blockaded. Prussian officers have taken ship there for South Africa and Argentina. That’s Miss Grell’s best hope for freedom. And even if she is taken on a ship in the Atlantic, it’s likely to be into American or Iroquois custody—”

She might live. Oh, she would stand trial: assassin or not, she had been an officer in the Prussian’s most elite corps of shock troops. But the Americans did not wear the scars this war had left upon Mother Russia, with two-thirds of her young men dead and most of her young women now under arms as well.

Mary Ballard believed most deeply that the woman with the German Chancellor’s blood on her hands deserved to live. To go free, preferably. But most of all, to live.

“I’ll need plans of the Préfecture de police.” She had been there, on one midnight raid or another. But a cautious spy did not trust too much to memory. And so a cautious spy lived to spy another day.

“You’ll have them,” said Alice Marjorie. “And I would suggest that with three Sturmwölfe on the prowl, you find a more discreet route home.”


Mary took the Metro home, too aware of curfew looming to enjoy watching the other passengers. Far less fun than running the rooftops, but it brought her beneath the feet of any hunting Ulfhethnar. They would not be hunting her—at least, she hoped not—but that did not mean it would be wise to draw their attention. And walking at street level did allow her to stop for groceries at a boulangerie, and at a café that would allow her to carry a hot chocolate away in a paper cup—an innovation of the occupation, which the lower-ranking Prussians had encouraged mightily.

The basement flat had a door that led into the area, below street level. When Mary let herself back inside, Ruth was sitting up in bed. She looked less pallid, as if the blood were coming back into her body. She also looked—and smelled—uncomfortable.

“Where did you go?” she asked, as Mary locked the door.

“It’s best if you don’t know that,” Mary answered, setting the food aside, on top of the trunk in which Ruth had arrived.

Ruth nodded. She slid her feet, still in their doubled stockings, over the edge of the cot and tested them against that rug. “You mentioned a toilet.”

“Just up the stairs. We share it with the ground-floor flat, which usually isn’t an inconvenience for me.” Mary shrugged self-deprecatingly. “There’s no tub, but I can give you a washcloth and soap. You can heat water on the burner.”

The relief on the girl’s face was palpable. Mary, looking at her, tried to see the storm trooper, the soldier, the assassin. She could recognize nothing in Ruth except the countenance of a weary child.

She crouched hastily, breaking eye contact. There were rags for washing in the chest beneath the cot. She extracted a couple, and a cracked cake of soap that had once been scented with lemon verbena.

“Sorry,” she said, offering the soap. “It seems to have been there longer than I thought.”

Ruth’s fingers brushed her palms. The nails were long and transparent and faintly smoky, filed to a tidy oval shape. The color put Mary in mind of the mica lantern-panes of her youth.

Ruth swallowed audibly. “Can you—”

“Of course,” Mary said, and with a hand on her elbow, stood her up and steadied her toward the stairs.

Ruth managed the climb better than Mary had expected. Her strength and steadiness were improving with the superhuman rapidity one would expect. More food, Mary judged, would be the cure.

Mary stood guard outside the toilet while Ruth refreshed herself. When she’d finished, Mary escorted her back downstairs, gave her some fresh underthings, and brought her the slightly-stale bread and the lukewarm chocolate. While Ruth ate—with exquisite manners, for a starving wolf—Mary explained the situation as Alice had explained it to her.

“…so,” she finished. “Tonight in the wee hours, I will break into the Préfecture de police and steal letters of transit. We shall forge them for you. One of my friends will make sure that a staff car is waiting for you outside Paris, with sufficient funds in gold to see you safely away. We have faith that, so-armed, you will be able to reach a ship in Calais.

“Surely,” Mary added with a ghost of a smile, “You can manage to impersonate a Prussian officer.”

Ruth raised a hand, chewing her current mouthful hastily. She swallowed with a pained expression. “Have you ever been inside the Préfecture de police?”

“Yes,” Mary said. “They keep a lot of interesting files in there.”

“Fine. Have you ever fought an Ulfhethinn?”

They crossed glances like a fencer’s exchange. Ruth’s expression argued for inclusion; Mary’s was adamant.

Mary ended it—she thought—by saying, “You’re not strong.”

Ruth looked up at her through gleaming eyes, a smudge of chocolate on her nose. “I’ll be strong enough.”


Curfew was long past when they took to the high road again. Ruth was not exactly dressed for rooftop skulking, in her full skirts and cardigan, but it didn’t seem to inconvenience her. She managed the tiles at a lope, her feet nimble in their soft shoes, and seemed to have no trouble following anywhere Mary might lead.

Curfew or no, the streets were not deserted, and there was no sign that the Prussians were enforcing it. They were probably busy packing, Mary thought with grim satisfaction.

Once, as she paused to measure the gap of a leap, Ruth drew up beside her. Mary could not resist: “I didn’t know wolves could climb.”

“Women can.” Ruth’s hands, half-covered by a motheaten pair of mitts Mary had found for her, twisted in her shirts as the wind rose. Ruth turned her face into the wind. “Do you smell that?”

Mary turned, too, and breathed deep. “No.”

“Sturmwolfstaffel Hauptsturmführerin Katherine Ressler,” Ruth said. “Fortunately, she’s upwind. A kilometer or so. Somewhere in the 8th Arrondissement, I’d say.”

Mary gazed at her with an unaccustomed emotion. Wonder, she decided. She had become too accustomed to the supernatural strengths of wampyrs, and the frailties of humans.

“You’re familiar with Paris,” Mary said.

“I was here with the Chancellor’s guard several times. We studied the plan of the city.” Ruth paused. “I’d be more confident if I could scent the other two. Are you sure there were only three?”

“My friend and I only saw three,” Mary said. Ruth’s tone was too casual, and her casual identification of the other Sturmwolf by name was indication of how tight-knit the group had been. Of course Ruth knew whoever had come to kill her. “I do not know the names. I am sorry.”

Ruth nodded. “I hope one’s not Adele,” she said tiredly.

“She’s very skilled?”

Ruth shook her head. “Katherine is better.” As she stepped back from the roof-edge to measure her leap, she said, “Adele was my lover.”


The Préfecture de police was guarded—roof and street and courtyard. To Mary and Ruth, human guards weren’t much more than an inconvenience. They slipped within like shadows, breaching a window with no more sound than the whisper of the hinges, and found themselves in a fifth-storey hall, dim at this small hour. Ruth shut the casement tightly, so no alerting draught could herald them.

“Well?” Mary gestured along the hall. Emergency bulbs glowed faint red at each intersection: more than enough light for the dark-adapted eye. The Prussians had covered the floors with luxurious Oriental runners—looted, of course—that would have hushed the sound of their footsteps if their footsteps made any sound.

“Letters of transit,” Ruth said. “They’ll be in the commandant’s office. This way.”

She led with a confident stalk, her gray skirts whipping about her calves. Mary glided behind, black jersey trousers not even whisking as she walked. Together, they rounded two corners, slipping into doorways when Ruth’s senses—which proved even more acute than Mary’s—warned her of approaching sentries.

Other than the sentries, the hallways were far more deserted than the streets. Whatever restless energy charged the streets, it had not reached the Prussian command.

“Ulfhethnar?” Mary asked, as they were paused inside a men’s washroom.

“If there are,” Ruth said, “walking softly will not hide us.”

But one more corridor brought them to the office. Here, Ruth paused with her hand in its fingerless mitt upon the doorknob. She looked at Mary, brows rising.

Mary nodded. The scent of Ulfhethnar hung around the doorway, but it was cold. Well, the commandant would have wanted to meet with the hunters. Somebody in Prague must have talked. “Three means they’re pretty sure they know where you are, do you think?”

“There were only six of us in my class to wear the Wolfsangel,” Ruth said. “They did not send Adele.” She delivered it as a report, emotionless, which alone was enough to reveal to Mary how much emotion she was hiding.

“Who did they send?”

Ruth cocked a pale eyebrow over one eye that glowed like flame with reflected light. For a moment, Mary thought Ruth would shake her off with a question—“What does it matter to you who they are?”

But the Ulfhethinn said, “Besides Katherine? Beatrice Small. And Jessamyn Johnson.”

Ruth’s hand whitened on the knob. Bitterly, she scoffed: “Wolfsangel. The wolf-hook. You know the Prussians pretended it was an ancient Aryan symbol? It’s not even a real rune. Like everything else they stole, they lied about it.”

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.

Ruth accepted the assistance gratefully. Ulfhethinn or no, she was still a recovering invalid. Mary burned fuel; she would need to feed when this was done with, but she did not become weary. Ruth’s near-white hair hung in grimy strings; her breaths came slowly, but heavily.

“Spoken like a true Ulfhethinn,” Mary said. “At least that’s where I assume you get the Norse fatalism.”

“The Norse don’t have a lock on fatalism,” Ruth answered. She leaned down and put her hands on her knees. “How much further?”

“Less than half as far as we’ve come,” Mary replied.

“Oh thank God.”

“Yes.” Mary seated herself on the edge of the next higher step. “Do you believe in God?”

Ruth shrugged. “Ask me again in a year.”

“Fair enough. So if you’re not suicidal—”

“I’m not suicidal.” She straightened, pushing her hands into the small of her back. “But I killed seven men, Mary. And I’d have killed more if I could have laid hands on them.”

“How much blood did those men have on their hands?”

“That’s irrelevant,” Ruth said levelly. That amber-red flame glossed her pupils again. “I can make excuses, and be no better than they are. Or I can trust in the law to judge me, and live or die as a…it sounds stupid, even inside my head.”

“A righteous woman,” Mary said.

Thin-lipped, Ruth nodded.

Mary pinched the bridge of her nose. Not the Russians. She wouldn’t do it. She couldn’t do it, any more than Ruth could blithely sail away to South Africa or South America.

And then, like moonrise, the answer dawned on her. “We’ll get you to the Iroquois.”

Ruth’s head had been turned away, giving Mary the privacy to think. Now it swiveled back. “Iroquois?”

“Or the Americans. It doesn’t matter. You have a chance of surviving that trial.”

“Americans,” Ruth said, as if it hadn’t crossed her mind. “I could live with that.”

“And where there’s life, there’s hope.”

Mary stood, and prepared herself to face the chair-high steps again. Only one or two more to the next passageway, and from there, the surface was not far. If they didn’t beat the sunrise, well, they’d be spending the day in a cathedral’s crypt. There were worse fates.

“Anyway,” she said, hoisting herself up. “It’ll be easier in the long run. The Prussians will be expecting you to make for Calais.”

Ruth laughed bitterly. It echoed.

The sound gave Mary strength anyway.