Awakening (Birth of Magic #1) Page 13

“Try telling them that.” I left him stammering there while I grabbed Leroy by the collar. “Listen, tough guy, now’s the time to prove it. We got some Nazis coming on board and they aren’t going to let any of us out of here alive. Got it?”

  He stared at me with wide eyes, seeing the silly girl from Baltimore had evaporated. “I got it,” he said.

  “You got any heaters on board?”

  “A couple.”

  “Better get them. These guys aren’t going to be playing nice.”

  Now that the steamer was adrift, the U-Boat started to pull up alongside, making it easier for them to board. I hunkered down behind a crate and surveyed the scene with my nightcrystal glasses. A soldier in a black uniform manned a machine gun on the bow, keeping it pointed towards me. I doubted he actually saw me or he would have already fired.

  I reached into my coat for the crossbow. I unfolded it and then fit one of the silver bolts to it. The Colt was a fine weapon, but it wasn’t as good at this range than the crossbow. I sighted the crossbow carefully; if I missed he’d fire that big gun and try to take my head off.

  Then I let the bolt fly. Even with the nightcrystal lenses I couldn’t see it as it streaked through the air. I only saw it when it embedded itself in the soldier’s right thigh. He went down in a heap just in time for me to launch another bolt, this one into his neck. He flopped around like a fish for a minute and then stopped.

  By then a hatch opened and the rest of his friends came out. There were a dozen of them, all dressed in black uniforms and carrying machine guns. These guys were definitely playing for keeps. But so was I.

  One shoved the body of his fallen comrade into the ocean while barking orders at the rest. He was obviously their leader, at least until a bolt went through his heart. He dropped to the deck to be similarly pushed into the ocean for the sharks to feed on.

  The rest of them got wise after that. Or maybe it was just panic that prompted them to start firing wildly. Either way, I had to flatten myself on the deck while bullets whizzed overhead. As I lay there I folded the crossbow up, knowing it was time for the close-in fighting.

  They were smart enough or had regained their wits enough that half kept firing while the other half tossed some grappling lines over. I stayed down while the Nazis came across the lines to board the steamer. The first one landed about twenty feet to my right.

  Without getting up I swung the Colt around and put a bullet through his left knee. He screamed and then collapsed to the deck, rolling around in pain. The other five came on board behind him, trying to see where the shot had come from.

  I took a deep breath and then rolled out from behind the remains of the crate. I kept on rolling until I wound up behind one of the stacks. A few shots went past me, but none hit the mark. I sat up and then lifted the Colt. I counted to three before I leaned around the stack.

  I fired all four shots left in the gun. I hadn’t bothered with aiming, which meant I only got three of them. I dropped the Colt back into my holster, figuring there wouldn’t be time to reload it. We were about to get to the really close-in fighting.

  I needn’t have worried. The other two Nazis dropped five feet in front of me. I looked over my shoulder to see Leroy and two of the other sailors carrying pistols that were probably twice as big as mine. “You shoot pretty well for a woman,” Leroy said.

  “Skip it,” I snapped. “There’s five more of them coming on board.”

  I had just finished getting five fresh bullets into my Colt when this prediction came true. Learning from the first group’s mistakes, these ones fanned out to get behind cover. They were even smarter in bringing grenades with them. One of these landed behind Leroy and I; we had just enough time to get down before it exploded. None of the debris hit the two of us, but the other two sailors weren’t so lucky. They got it pretty bad in the legs. On land they could probably have been fixed up, but with the nearest hospital hundreds of miles behind us, they didn’t have much of a chance.

  “Bastards!” Leroy roared. Before I could stop him, he came around the stack and began firing. He got through three shots before they cut him down with the machine guns. I could only shake my head at this. Leroy hadn’t been the nicest or brightest guy, but he’d had guts.

  I was alone again. There were more of them and they were better armed, so long as I didn’t use magic. I wasn’t to that point just yet. Not while there was one last trick I could play.

  I put the Colt back into its holster. Then I stripped off the jacket and nightcrystal lenses. I mussed up my hair and tore my dress in a few strategic locations. The final touch was to summon some phony tears. With that I was ready to put my acting ability to the test.

  I stumbled out from behind the stack with my hands up. “Don’t shoot!” I shouted. “Please don’t shoot! They’re dead. They’re all dead. My husband—!”

  Even Nazi men were still men and men couldn’t resist a damsel in distress. Especially not a damsel with one breast winking at them. I faked a few sobs as I stumbled towards them. “Please don’t hurt me. I don’t want to die.”

  One of the soldiers barked at two others in German to take me into custody. They were probably planning to get me aboard the U-Boat so they could take turns raping me in their quarters later. I didn’t try to stop them as they came up to me. “You come with us,” one said in heavily-accented English.

  I could have taken them on my own, but the Gardenia’s captain provided me with a helpful distraction. He came onto the deck waving around a sword and screaming, “Blaggards! This is my ship!”

  While they focused on him, I had the opening I needed. I spun away from the Nazis, kicking one in the back of the left leg and the other in the midsection. I stripped the machine gun from one and then dove to my left before they cut loose with their heaters. The machine gun kicked a lot harder than my Colt, but I managed to keep it steady long enough to finish off the boarders.

  I might have kept the other two Nazis alive to interrogate, though they probably didn’t know anything, but the captain didn’t give me a chance. He slashed both of their throats with his sword, which was obviously not just a prop. I tried to snatch the weapon away, but he held it out of my reach.

  “Now we board their ship and take it for ours!” he shouted. The smell of sour whiskey on his breath was enough to make me gag.

  “You’re not a pirate,” I said. “It’s a submarine anyway, not a ship.”

  “That doesn’t matter. No one boards my ship and kills my crew!” He pushed me out of the way. Before I could stop him, he was already crossing the lines the Nazis had used to board the Gardenia.

  Except the U-Boat wasn’t going to be there much longer. It was already backing away, the grappling lines starting to tear the railing from the steamer. The captain made it over just before the lines snapped. The crazy bastard sheathed his sword to get behind the machine gun. He spun it around about ninety degrees, firing it at the U-Boat.

  “Get out of there, you fool!” I screamed at him, but he couldn’t hear me over the noise of the gun. Or maybe my words couldn’t penetrate his alcohol-fueled haze. No matter what it was, he was still firing the gun as the U-Boat pulled away from the Gardenia. The submarine’s crew wasn’t stupid; they began diving almost right away. The last I saw of the steamer’s captain, he’d given up on the machine gun and was banging away on the U-Boat’s hatch with his sword.

  “You crazy son of a bitch,” I muttered.

  There wasn’t any more time to worry about him. I knew what the U-Boat crew’s next move would be. If they couldn’t get Ethan, they were going to make damned sure no one else did either. Just as soon as they turned around and got a firing solution, they would put a couple more torpedoes into the Gardenia.

  Ethan was still in the stateroom, wisely lying beneath the bunks. “Stephanie!” he shouted with obvious relief. “Thank God!”

  “Come on, we got about two minutes to get on a lifeboat.”

  There was one on the port side that hadn’t been damaged. I instr
ucted Ethan to work the rope on one side while I worked the other side. Motivated by impending death, we got the lifeboat down into the water in less than a minute.

  Getting ourselves into the boat proved slightly more difficult. I tore a sleeve from Ethan’s shirt before he could say anything. This I tore into two pieces. “Put those around your hands and then start climbing down.”

  “You should go first—”

  “Nuts to that. My job is to protect you. I aim to do it.” I gave him a shove towards the side to indicate I was serious. He wrapped the cloths around his hands and then began shimmying down the ropes. I had gloves in one of my pockets for my hands. I also had more experience in rope climbing, so that I reached the boat the same time he did.

  I took a knife from my pocket to slash the ropes. Our lifeboat was free. Now we just had to get out of here before the Nazis sunk the steamer. I handed an oar to Ethan. “Row like the devil’s chasing you,” I said. “If we aren’t out of here in about a minute that’s going to be true.”

  Ethan had never rowed a boat before, but imminent death provides good motivation for learning new skills. He was an exceptionally quick learner; he could have rowed for Harvard that night and beaten Oxford single-handedly. I kept up with him so that we moved away steadily from the boat, though still not fast enough for my liking.

  We didn’t watch the Gardenia get hit, but we definitely heard it. Two explosions wracked the ship, cutting it into thirds. Ethan and I continued our frantic rowing so that we could escape the pull as the steamer went down. It was dicey for a moment as the water tried to pull us down with the doomed ship, but we kept rowing until we were finally free.

  I signaled that we could stop and then turned around. There was nothing left of the steamer except scattered bits of wreckage. No sign of the U-Boat either. If we were lucky they would assume we were dead and head back for Germany. That would buy us some time to get somewhere safe.

  But first we would have to find a ride.

  Chapter 13

  There wasn’t much to see once the Gardenia finished going down. There was only an endless dark sea stretching against the starry sky. In the middle of that dark expanse was our tiny boat, on which the mood wasn’t any brighter.

  Once I signaled we could stop rowing, Ethan stared at where the ship had been. His face was about as pale as the moon above us. He shook his head, but for a minute nothing came from his mouth. Finally he came to his senses enough to say, “How many people were on that boat?”

  “About a dozen.”

  “And they killed them all.”

  I put my hand on Ethan’s shoulder. “There was nothing we could have done for them. We didn’t have time.”

  “I know.” He went silent again, chewing on his lip as he thought about it. “All those people are dead because of me.”

  “Ethan—”

  “Not just them. Celia too.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “It is my fault. It’s my idea they want, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then the blood is on my hands.” He laughed far more bitterly than I thought possible. “It’s a stupid idea. Probably won’t even work. Wouldn’t that be funny after all this?”

  “Ethan, stop it. This isn’t going to help.”

  He looked down at the bottom of the lifeboat. “I just wanted to help people. I wanted to make the world a better place. I never wanted any of this.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t.”

  “Magic. How could I be so stupid? There’s no such thing as magic. It’s all violence and blood.”

  “Ethan, what are you talking about?”

  “My invention. The one they want to kill us for. It was supposed to be a ‘magic wand.’” When I stared at him blankly, he began to explain it to me, his voice becoming calmer, as if we were back on campus. “I don’t mean magic like Houdini or any of those magicians you see at the carnival. I’m talking about real magic, the kind used in fairy tales and mythology.

  “We already know there are different spectrums of light. There’s what we see and then different wavelengths not perceptible to our eyes. Imagine that magic is like that. We can’t see it or even feel it, but it’s there in the background.

  “Now imagine a machine that could tap into that background radiation. A machine that could harness that energy and put it to use.”

  “A magic wand,” I said.

  “Exactly. And with some fine-tuning, we could use that energy to do all sorts of things. We could cure diseases, end hunger, and prevent natural disasters.”

  “But there’s no proof magic like that exists, is there?”

  “Nothing that we can measure yet.” He leaned forward and despite that we were hundreds of miles from anyone, he lowered his voice. “I’ve seen it. When I was a kid I saw someone who could use magic. A witch.”

  I hoped nothing on my face gave away my shock. I faked a laugh and said, “Witches? What kind of a sap you think I am?”

  “I know it sounds crazy, but I saw her. She came into my bedroom one night.”

  “Was she there to collect a loose tooth?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me. It’s crazy.”

  When he clammed up, I sighed and said, “You might as well tell me the rest. We don’t have anything else to do right now.”

  “It happened when I was six years old. I had just gone to bed when I saw something in my closet. It was a monster. A real one. It looked a lot like a big cricket, only it had red eyes and really sharp teeth.

  “I knew my parents weren’t going to believe me, so I hid under the bed. I hoped he wouldn’t be able to get to me under there. He didn’t seem that interested in me anyway. Mostly he seemed concerned with hunkering down in my closet.

  “I was still under the bed when someone came in through my window. She was an old woman, really tough looking. She had on these dark glasses. At first I wondered why, because it was too dark to need sunglasses, but then I realized she was using them to see in the dark.

  “She went to the closet almost as if she knew the monster was there. She actually talked to it, trying to get it to surrender. When it didn’t, she took a crossbow out of her jacket. She shot it in the leg and then dragged the monster out. She used a crossbow bolt to stab the monster in the back.

  “Then she turned the monster into ashes. Not with a flamethrower or a torch or anything like that. One moment the monster was lying dead on my floor and the next it was a pile of ashes she was sweeping up into a jar.

  “I came out of hiding then. I thought maybe she was an angel. But she wasn’t. I know that now. She was a witch. A good witch, though. Not like Hansel and Gretel. She tucked me into bed and then she put a hand on my forehead. She said a few words in this strange language.

  “I fell asleep. When I woke up she was gone. For a while I forgot about it. But then I began remembering it, just a piece at a time. By the time I was twelve I’d reassembled that whole night.

  “It occurred to me that if this woman could tap into that energy to turn a monster into ashes and to make me forget about it, imagine what else it could do? If we could tap into it, that is. That’s what I was working on. That’s what they want.”

  I tried to keep my face neutral throughout Ethan’s story, but inside my guts had turned to cold lead. I remembered that night when Alexis had begged me to go to an apartment building to destroy a bogeyman. I had been so careless that I forgot to look under the bed for the little boy, a little boy who had turned out to be Ethan.

  This was my fault. If I hadn’t let him see me or if I had done a better job wiping his memory, none of this would be happening right now. Ethan wouldn’t have his theories about magic and wouldn’t be trying to create a way to tap into it. And the Nazis wouldn’t be trying to get him so they could possess the design.

  “That’s some story,” I croaked. “Who else have you told it to?”

  “Just Dr. Kendall—and Celia.” He looked down at his f
eet. “I never should have involved her in any of this.”

  I nodded silently. Celia would have become involved anyway. Whoever this Chairwoman was, she wanted to get her hands on Ethan’s “magic wand” too. She might have even gone to the Nazis to enlist their muscle. It didn’t take much imagination to know what the Nazis would do with magic; they would use it to enslave the world. That made it more important than ever to get Ethan to safety.

  Or I could kill him right now. With him dead there would be no magic wand for anyone to seize. The threat would be over and Alexis and I could go back to our quiet lives in Rampart City. One murder and everything would be solved.

  I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Ethan didn’t deserve to die for my carelessness. I had got him into this and I was going to get him out of it. I put a hand on his shoulder. “You didn’t kill Celia. The Nazis killed her.”

  “Because of me.”

  “No.” I looked him in the eye. “That was my fault. I knew they wanted you, but I was too slow. I was supposed to keep you—both of you—safe and I didn’t.”

  “Stephanie—”

  “I’m going to get you out of here. I promise.”

  He probably didn’t believe me, not with us being stuck in the middle of the ocean. He was enough of a gentleman, though, to say, “I’m sure you will. You got us this far, right?”

  I smiled at that. So far I’d gotten us to exactly the middle of nowhere. “Right.” I yawned theatrically. “I suppose we’d better get some rest before the sun comes up. We have a lot of rowing to do tomorrow.”

  ***

  The Atlantic wasn’t the ocean you wanted to be stranded in. Between North America and Europe wasn’t much of anything. No tiny desert isles like in the Pacific or Indian Oceans. At least it wasn’t as cold as the Arctic Ocean.

  Since we weren’t likely to wash up anywhere like Robinson Crusoe, we would have to find a ship to rescue us. We could row for days or weeks without finding another ship if we had strayed too far from the major shipping lanes. If we played this the mortal way, we would end up dying of starvation or dehydration within a couple of days.