Far enough that they could speak without straining to be heard over the combat noises.
Running in the cold had created a wheeze in his chest by the time he found her. He leaned over with hands on his knees to clear his throat and spit out the blood before he tried to speak. “Gretel?” he panted, “I thought you were hurt.” He caught his breath, then asked, “Why are you out here? I told you to go inside, where it's safe.”
“I'm waiting.”
Reinhardt ran from another direction before Klaus could ask the obvious question. He stopped short when he saw the two of them.
“What the hell is this?” Reinhardt pointed at Gretel. “I thought you needed help.”
“I'm waiting,” said Gretel.
“You crazy bitch. I thought this was an emergency. I
She put a finger to her lips. “Shhh.” When she had his attention, she said, “Reinhardt. I've given you the one thing you wanted more than anything in the world. Isn't that enough to make you trust me?”
She looked to Klaus, repeating, “Trust me.”
“What are you waiting for, Gretel?” he rasped.
“That,” she said, pointing at the farmhouse.
The roof flew off. Bricks and timbers disintegrated along one side of the building, and then the rest collapsed like a gingerbread house beneath a hammer.
Will fought a rising tide of panic. He hadn't packed a lexicon, in order to prevent it falling into German hands. But he wasn't supposed to need one. Going home was supposed to be easy. It wasn't.
The return journey had been included in the original negotiation. It was a round-trip ticket purchased up front with a pair of derailed trains.
But now the Eidolons were changing the deal.
They spoke through the stone, the earth, the bare trees and the ice in the streambed. And Will couldn't follow what they were saying. Frazzled, terrified, shivering in the cold and half-deaf from the noise of the battle, he could pick out only bits and pieces from the stream of animus.
...
It made no sense. Soul? This was an impossible price. He couldn't hand over a soul, even if he wanted to. Future? Worse yet, they wanted to take their pound of flesh after all was said and done. They wanted free rein to extract their own price.
Will stammered. In Enochian, that felt like swallowing a shattered wineglass.
The Eidolons repeated their incoherent demand. Their intent included something else, too, but it was washed out by a tremendous crash. Will chanced a peek at the battleground.
Something had extinguished the glow from the farmhouse windows, so Will had only starlight and a sliver of moon to see by. A cloud of dust and smoke billowed from the far end of the field, near the farmhouse, where Marsh had been.
For the second time that night, his eyes flared in pain as the darkness gave way to brilliance. Will squeezed his eyes shut and turned away. Purple spots danced in his field of view. He looked back at the scene slowly, in stages, to let his eyes adjust.
He thought it was another string of spotlights until he saw the source: a human figure, wreathed in fire, blazing like the midday sun. His nimbus illuminated the scene with sharp edges and deep shadows, like an endless camera flash.
The farmhouse had been reduced to a pile of rubble. Marsh stood a few yards off to one side. He raised his revolver, then Kammler sprawled backwards. Will heard the gunshot a second later.
The burning man and the insubstantial man advanced on Marsh from behind the ruins of the farmhouse. Their rage was evident, even at this distance.
“God in heaven.”
The Eidolons repeated themselves.
In the instant before the world fell away, Will finally heard the entirety of the Eidolons' demand. He heard
The soul of an unborn child.
“Wait!” He screamed, trying to refute this atrocity, but he was—
The air around Marsh shimmered with heat, growing warmer by the second. Reinhardt charged at him over the rubble pile of the demolished farmhouse. The air grew hotter still, like a blast furnace. It burned his sinuses. He couldn't breathe.
But then space peeled apart, and breathing didn't matter, because he had no body. He was an abstract concept sliding through the cracks in the universe.
Eidolons infused him; twined themselves through him. They sifted through his essence: past, present, and future.
—too late.
The cleft stone yanked Will back to its twin like a rubber band snapping back together. He was solid again. Substantial. The Eidolons had squeezed him back into what human beings called reality.
Where generations of children yet unborn would live and die. Except the one he'd given to the Eidolons.
“Beauclerk? What happened?” asked a voice he hadn't heard in eons.
Will studied his surroundings. The Nissen hut had blinked into existence around him. Stephenson, Webber, and Hargreaves stared at him.
Will dropped the stone. It sounded strangely insubstantial when it banged against the wooden floor of the hut. He walked to the door on unsteady legs.
“Where are they? Where's the rest?”
Somewhere, in the distance, a car horn blared.
Will paused at the door. He glanced over his shoulder. “I brought them home,” he said. “I brought them all home.”
Somewhere nearby, within the park, a sentry shouted.
Will wandered without purpose between the tents and huts. The first body he found had been charred beyond recognition. He kept walking. The second body he found had been crushed into a pulp. More shouts of alarm went up throughout the staging area as more bodies were discovered.
Down by the lake, Will found a body mostly intact. He flipped the dead man over and rummaged through his pack, searching for a medkit.
Will stuffed a morphine syrette in his pocket before heading off into the darkness.
interlude
Frozen earth meant shallow graves. Shallow graves meant easy picking. r And so the ravens of Albion gathered along parapets and treetops while the men from the island quietly buried their dead.
Twenty-six holes, dug in neat little rows for bodies that weren't so tidy.
Some were sooty black things, curled tightly upon themselves; preternatural fire had charred these men to the core. This flesh, the ravens knew, wasn't worth the effort. Heat had seared away its nutrients; it was little better than eating charcoal.
Others had been crushed, their every bone pulped. These retained their man-shapes solely by virtue of their skin. Better than the scorched dead, but still too much effort. Meat mixed with bone dust and bile. Bitter, and
