The Deepest Night

surely better than the fallow, open land we sprinted through.

We reached the first trees as the third bomb hit, and this time I was able to grab a trunk instead of falling down.

The forest around us trembled. Birds screamed from far away, and suddenly I could hear again, and Armand was yelling, “Come on! Come on!” and dragging me deeper into the shadows.

I don’t know how long we ran. Until I had a stitch in my side and I refused to keep going. I pulled free of him and bent over, puffing. The ground smelled of mulch, and my boots were covered in grass and dust, and I was so ruddy glad I’d had the sense to go to sleep fully clothed in Jesse’s old shirt and trousers.

Ashes began to drift down around us, soft and serene as snowflakes.

“This—” Armand was out of breath as well. “This should do.”

Another bomb, not near. The birds screamed and screamed.

I slithered down to the ground, legs out, and pressed my palms over my eyes to hide from the ash-laced light.

“Where are we?” I asked from around my hands.

I felt him sit beside me, the solid thud of the knapsack plopping down.

“Belgium. Far past the front. I thought the fighting would have moved on by now. This area was secured months ago.”

“Apparently not,” I said, as a new sound reached us: pop! pop! pop!

Gunfire.

I lowered my hands. Armand wasn’t actually sitting; he was coiled back on his heels in his black leather duster, ready to spring up in a second. He looked lean and sharp and feral, even with the hay in his hair.

So pale. His gaze glittering.

And his heart, his heart—

“Steady on,” I warned him. “Stay calm, all right?”

“I am entirely calm,” he said, and beneath the trees’ groaning and the gunshots and the screaming, he sounded it. “You?”

“Of course.”

“Your eyes are glowing.”

“Merde.”

I covered them again, rubbing hard. Everything smelled of ashes now. My mouth tasted of it, mixed in with dust and grit. I realized that the screaming I’d thought was birds had been going on for too long and was too high-pitched. It was people. Children, mostly. Women, too.

“We’ve got to fly out of here,” I said shakily. “Right now.”

“Too late, waif.”

“No, it’s not! We’ll fly fast. We’ll be up and gone before they—”

“Eleanore. We have company.”

I dropped my hands a second time, and the pair of women standing before us screeched and skipped back.

One turned and fled, vanished at once into the depths of the woods.

The other went to her knees, gaping at me. She crossed herself and began to babble in French.

“Your eyes,” explained Armand, in that same calm voice.

“I can’t control it!”

The woman began to creep toward me, her hands up in prayer. She was speaking so rapidly I had no hope of catching any of it. Her clothing was ragged and her eyes were bloodshot and her skin the exact color of the ashes floating between us. As soon as she was near enough she grabbed at my sleeves, my hands, and brought them up and buried her face in them.

I felt it then, what she wanted. I felt it as sure as I felt her tears and her hot breath on my fingers and the deep, dire desperation that had given her the strength to approach a demon girl in the woods and beg for help.

I felt her desperation, and it was the heaviest thing I’d ever known.

“One of the men from the village killed a German soldier last night,” translated Armand, toneless. “He did it to stop the soldier from raping his daughter-in-law. But now the Germans are retaliating.”

“They’ll shell everything,” I whispered. Her breath was so hot, fluttery hot and frantic. It felt like I’d trapped a sparrow in my hands.

“Yes,” he said.

She lifted her face. She was younger than I’d first thought. Probably a mother to one of those screaming children.

“You’ll have to leave.” I tried to find the words in French. “Se cacher. Se masquer. After this. All of you. For as long as the war lasts, you’ll have to hide like animals, because if they do this for one man, they’ll never rest if it’s all of them.” I swiveled about to find Armand. “Will you tell her?”

He looked at me, at her, and then at the trees. Slowly he shook his head.

“Armand,” I pleaded.

“She thinks you’re an angel.”

I laughed, and felt my own tears well up.

“She thinks you have some holy power to end this,” he said. “And you don’t. You don’t, Eleanore.”

“It’s not holy,” I agreed. “But it’s something.”

“It’s your life,” he said through his teeth. “And I won’t let you imperil it for this.”

I disengaged my hands from the woman’s, climbing to my feet. She sagged in place and watched me without blinking.

“Not for this,” I said to him. “But for your cause, it’s fine.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant. This is our path, Mandy. This is where we’re supposed to be. You know I’m right, because you’re the one who charted it for us. Didn’t Jesse insist we leave last night? He knew we’d end up here. We’ve been tapped on the shoulder by the stars themselves. Gifted with powers we don’t yet fully even realize and have done nothing to deserve. Do you truly doubt what has to come next?”

He still wouldn’t look at me. I went to him and wrapped my arms around him, resting my forehead to his chest.

Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom—

The sparrow now was his heart. I covered it with one palm.

“ ‘All beasts must have courage.’ I’m not an angel of any sort. But what am I if I refuse this woman? What am I then?”

“Only all that I love,” he answered finally, low.

“Thank you.” I stepped back. “I’ll see what I can do to earn that.”

He spoke a few words to the woman, who answered in her raspy babble.

“It’s not a large company,” Armand interpreted. “The village is small and starving, so most of the soldiers moved on last month. Only a core group left. Rifles. Bayonets. Cannons. They plan to execute the remaining menfolk within the hour.”

“Find the rest of her people,” I told him. “Tell them they’re going to need to hide.”

He arched a brow at me, a right proper lordling once more. “I rather imagine they already know.”

“Good. I’ll be right back.”

And this time, for the first time, it was I who kissed him on the cheek.

Then I Turned to smoke, and the woman cried out (“Un miracle!”), and I swept over the top of the forest to find the source of all those shells.

She vanished in a spiral of pearly gray, gone from his view so quickly it was as if she’d never been there. It felt, oddly, as if a part of him had ripped away with her. As if he’d lost an arm or a leg or an eye.