believed it was in this war, and that victory could be had. These days, the state of the outside world was somewhat academic. The topic on everybody's mind, the subject of true interest, was the weather.
But Will didn't need the wireless to tell him about the weather in the Channel. He'd helped shape it. The fog had lifted, and a stillness had come upon the sea. The Eidolons had returned to their demesne, receded into the crawlspaces around time and space.
But the Met Office knew nothing of Eidolons and blood prices. It simply reported that the Channel was calm and clear. The unspoken corollary was that nothing stood between the south coast of England and the German invasion fleet in France. Will drained his glass and swallowed loudly, drowning out the gasps, the sobs of dismay.
To night, of all nights, the Jerries would come in droves. And not just bombers, but paratroopers, too, if Milkweed's gamble worked. The first tendrils of invasion.
The warlocks had concluded their marathon negotiation with the Eidolons; now they sought to begin anew from scratch. But the intervention would be costly. By unspoken agreement, none of the Milkweed warlocks worked near his home neighborhood to night. It was easier that way.
Will had chosen the Hart and Hearth for two reasons. First, he knew he'd need the services of a public house before the night was through. Second, it had a shelter on the premises. This he knew through firsthand experience, having been stuck here during more than one raid.
He called for another pint. The world had gone fuzzy at the edges. He wanted to keep it like that until the work was done and his share of the blood price paid.
The barman left the wireless on after the BBC update ended. Jack Warner and Garrison Theatre filled the void in conversation. It was unnatural for a pub to be so quiet. As unnatural as a stove without a teakettle.
A number of patrons filed out in ones and twos. Probably those with families. Will begrudged them the excuse to leave.
It was a long wait spent keeping himself on the edge of numbness. But when the banshee wail of air raid sirens finally broke the monotony, he found they'd come too soon. He wasn't ready yet. He could still feel his fingers, his toes, the quickened beating of his heart.
The barman flung open the door behind the bar. A narrow staircase led down to the cellar. “Right!” he called. “Everybody down here!”
The patrons queued up behind the proprietor. Will tried to look natural as he lugged the attache case, but it was quite heavy and threatened to overbalance him. Another door at the bottom of the stairwell opened on the cellar proper. An overpowering latrine stink wafted out of the shelter when the barman cranked this door open. Men and women covered their noses as they filed inside. Somebody, probably the barman's son, had forgotten to empty the pails and coal scuttles from the previous raid.
The air was cool and damp down here, but not enough to suppress the smell. Several cords' worth of firewood were stacked along one wall. Pillows, blankets, and thin mattresses had been laid out between rows of metal shelves. The shelves themselves were bare but for dwindling supplies of tinned meat and withered, eye- studded potatoes.
Will took a seat by the door. He counted nineteen souls in the shelter. Part of him was clinical, and obsessed over the mathematics. A simple calculation, he told himself. Dozens of lives for the sake of thousands. But most of him yearned to run away and drown in the surf.
Several faces he recognized, regulars like himself. He imagined they recognized him, too, as he'd been coming here for tea and atmosphere since long before the war. Before everything changed. Will remembered the evening he'd introduced Marsh and Liv, right upstairs. He wondered how many married couples over the years had met right here at the Hart and Hearth.
The ground shook. Tins rattled on the shelves.
He propped the attache case on his lap. He waited for the others to hunker down for a long night. When it appeared they were settled and unlikely to surprise him, he cracked the case open, using the lid to shield the contents from casual onlookers. He'd already smeared his blood on the explosive charges, so that through him the Eidolons would gather new blood maps for nineteen souls: Will's share of the blood price. Will set the timer for ten minutes. Then he double-checked it, closed and locked the case, and slid it behind a pile of firewood.
Will waited as long as he dared—less than two minutes, to be sure, though it felt like eternity—until a moment when it seemed he'd been forgotten. He slipped out through the cellar door as quietly as he could.
He hoped that if anybody saw him, they'd presume he'd gone barmy and leave him to his fate. It happened on occasion; people went mad in the shelters. Above all, he prayed that nobody followed him outside. That would make for an awkward confrontation when the Hart and Hearth demolished itself. The blast would level the building. Tomorrow, the overworked rescue men combing through the debris for bodies wouldn't be bothered to notice that the damage pattern didn't match that of Jerry's bombs.
Whether or not his departure went unnoticed, nobody came after him. Running about outdoors during a raid was a fine way to get oneself killed.
Upstairs, he paused again to take in the pub one last time. He'd been sitting right over there, at the table under the stag head, when he first met Liv. The three of them, she and he and Marsh, had chatted there, one table over. Will shook his head, said his farewells, and pinched a bottle of gin from behind the bar. He'd earned it. He dropped the slender bottle into the deepest pocket of his coat. Then he stepped outside.
Chaos. Sirens echoed across the city while the thunder of ack-ack guns rattled windowpanes up and down the street.
He took the first cross street, eager to put at least one street between himself and the pub. He tried to pick a direction that took him away from the heaviest concentration of bombing, but it was all around him.
The blackout had become a jumble of flickering shadows. Searchlights crisscrossed the sky, blazing through the smoke and occasionally flashing across a barrage balloon. When that happened, the reflected glare shone on the streets below like a few seconds of full moon. Meanwhile, a flurry of tracer rounds from a nearby battery cast shadows that slithered underfoot. The sky glowed orange with fire.
Will ran. The gin bottle knocked against his hip. The earth shook again, rattling the bones of London. When the bomb he'd planted became just another element of the pandemonium, he was several streets away and bounding down the stairs of the Tottenham Court Tube station. Several of the people taking shelter there looked up in surprise when they saw him. Clearly, said the looks on their faces, this latecomer was a madman.
How right they were.
Early the next morning, while the Hart and Hearth still burned, and while an invasion fleet sailed within sight of British soil, the Eidolons returned to the Channel.
If you can spare a moment, Herr Doctor,” said Klaus, “there's an issue with the new incubators.”
Von Westarp paced the length of the debriefing room. The breeze from his passage elicited a papery rustle from the dried wildflowers arranged in milk bottles on the sill.
He paused at the window long enough to glance outside again. “She did this to humiliate me,” he said before launching into another circuit of the room. “Where are they?” he asked nobody in particular.
The doctor had put his dressing gown aside long enough to squeeze back into his SS-Oberfuhrer uniform. It didn't fit as it once had; the past year had been good to him. Klaus made a point not to look at the paunch straining at the doctor's belt and buttons.
“There is confusion regarding the equipment,” continued Klaus. “I gave specific instructions to the machinists. Still, they've wasted time and resources requisitioning unnecessary supplies.”
Von Westarp reversed his circuit of the room. His boots pulverized a handful of wild rose petals that had fluttered to the floor. The air became sweeter and oilier as his continued pacing crushed blossoms knocked loose from Gretel's improvised drying racks.
Nobody had objected when she'd decided to use a corner of the debriefing room for her craft project. Her advice had led the Luftwaffe to dominate the skies over Britain; tolerating her eccentricities was the price for access to her precognition. For much of the summer, the ground floor of the farmhouse had smelled like a perfumery.
Reinhardt insisted it smelled like a Spanish whore house. He would know.
