Waging War (48 page)

We weren’t alone anymore.

Archer stopped in front of me; he had just
heard it too. He barely breathed the words into my ear. “Other side
of the track. Hug the wall.” It was good advice. In the U.S.,
people tend to walk on the right side of things, because it’s how
they drive. In the U.K., the opposite is true. We crossed to the
right side of the track, tucked ourselves up against the cold
bricks, and waited.

The footsteps came fast and were as silent
as a runner could be. No Monger-gut, so … what, then?

“Ye alright?” came the whispered voice close
enough to me that I jumped.

“Ringo?!”

“Who else?”

I nearly throat-punched him.

“How’d you find us?” asked Archer.

“Rachel told me ye’d be in the tunnels. She
Saw it, I s’pose. Ye said ‘Olborn, so I picked a lock and ‘ere I
am.”

“Was there anyone else about?” Archer
sounded as relieved as I was.

“Streets were empty. Bloody bombs are still
droppin’ though.”

As if on cue, a heavy
WHUMP!
resonated deep in the ground and shook the tunnel where we stood
like a small earthquake. Brick dust rained around us, and Archer
clicked on the Maglite. We stared at each other for exactly one
second before we took off running.

The light swung in tight arcs as Archer
aimed it roughly ahead of us so we didn’t trip on cables or tracks.
Whatever had made that sound was big, and if Tom’s mission had
anything to do with it, we had to find him.

The tunnels diverged, and we took the
smaller branch to the right. A dim safety light shone up ahead, and
the air was full of grit that hung like a cloud in the glow from
the torch.

The platform of the abandoned British Museum
station came into view, and it was full of people.

No, not people – statues.

They looked Roman or Greek, and they stood
against the dirty white-tiled walls like sentries, or maybe more
like an audience, because they were staring at two men who stood
like actors on a stage.

“Tom!” I couldn’t help whatever reflex drove
me to call out his name. He turned at the sound of my voice, and a
gunshot reverberated in the tiled corridor.

Tom was flung backward just as I surged
forward to leap onto the platform.

The other man leveled a gun and prepared to
shoot Tom again.

“No!”

Archer hadn’t followed me up onto the edge
of the platform. He had run straight down the track and leapt up
behind the man, who turned to follow the motion. The man swung the
pistol around to shoot at Archer, and the shot went wild as Archer
tackled his legs. The gun went clattering across the floor.

I sprinted to where Tom no longer lay on the
platform. He was on his feet. The bullet wound in his arm had
already closed, but not before I caught a glimpse of the wound from
the church and several others briefly blooming on his chest and
abdomen. A part of my brain wondered how many times he’d been hurt
since he left us in France. Enough apparently. The rest of my brain
was trying to process what I saw beyond Tom, beyond Archer and the
man wrestling for control of the gun, above the far end of the
platform.

Something metallic glinted through broken
tile in the ceiling. Debris lay scattered on the platform beyond
it, and I suddenly realized what had made the huge
WHUMP!

The man on the platform kicked Archer in the
face and scrambled after his gun. He reached it and sent another
wild shot in Archer’s direction.

“It’s a BOMB!” I shouted at them. I pointed
up at the piece of shiny skin that showed through the station
ceiling. My words had an electrifying effect, and everyone
froze.

Then Tom burst through the suspended
animation when he lunged at the man on the platform. Archer’s face
was bloody from the kick to the nose, but he had recovered and
grabbed at the man’s feet so Tom could wrestle the gun away.

The man fought them like a feral thing, but
he was no match for the two Vampires. I saw Ringo out of the corner
of my eye lurking on the track under the platform, ready to help as
needed. They didn’t need it. A moment later, Tom had the gun and it
was pointed at the man. A Monger, I realized, when the twisting in
my gut was no longer about Archer’s safety.

The Monger was in his thirties, with the
build of a boxer and the face of a street fighter. His nose had
been broken more than once, and a tooth had been chipped, which was
at complete odds with the fancy Saville Row suit he wore. It was
dusty and one sleeve had torn, but gold cufflinks shone at his
wrists, and his shoes still had the shine of a recent polish. There
were scars on his knuckles though, and even the flash of gold on
one finger wasn’t enough to dispel the image that he was a proper
thug.

The hand in which Tom held the gun was
shaking, and I instinctively stepped forward to take it from him.
But Archer’s look stopped me in my tracks. Though he still held the
Monger’s legs, all his attention was on Tom’s face, and without
saying a word, he let go of the Monger and slowly stood up. He
watched Tom as if watching a wild predator that was wary and ready
to bolt.

I shifted my attention from the Monger to
Tom, and I nearly took a step back away from him. I’d seen him
across the church, but I hadn’t registered his appearance because
of the mayhem. But now I really saw him. Tom looked so much older
than when I’d seen him in medieval France. The bones in his face
had been chiseled and handsome before, but now they looked
razor-sharp, with the skin stretched tight over them. Tom’s eyes
were bleak and hard, and he glared with unfettered rage at the
Monger who still lay on the ground.

“Tom?” I ventured cautiously.

“Back off, Saira.” Ringo’s voice was low and
warning, and I shot him a quick glance. He, too, was staring at
Tom’s face.

Tom had eyes for no one but the Monger in
front of him, and I wondered who he was and why Tom so clearly
despised him.

Regardless of the answer, I couldn’t back
off. I wanted to take Tom out of there and go home with him, but
for that I needed to reach through his single-minded focus.

I slowly stepped over to the wall and pulled
my marker out of my coat pocket. Archer had insisted I carry it
since we escaped from France, and I was glad to have it now. I
began to draw a spiral. Ringo noticed and nodded approvingly.

“Who is he, Tom?” I used a calm tone that I
hoped sounded reasonable, as if I was asking about the weather.

I didn’t think he would answer me because
all his effort seemed to bleed into holding the gun on the Monger.
When he did, the voice that came out cracked as though from
disuse.

“Meet George Walters, traitor, thief, beater
of wives and children …” He took a shuddering breath. “And my
great-grandfather.”

His great-grandfather? He came here to meet
his great-grandfather? Something went
clunk
in my brain and
instantly everything about Tom’s plan became totally clear and
completely, horribly wrong. There was nothing tentative in my voice
anymore. “You can’t kill him.”

My tone of voice surprised Tom, and he
looked at me for the first time. I froze, the spiral half way
drawn, but he didn’t seem to notice. Something softened in his eyes
for the briefest moment, but then they went flinty again and he
returned his glare to Walters.

“If he dies now, his son doesn’t get beaten
almost to death, and then he won’t turn around and beat Seth
Walters bloody. Then maybe Seth won’t rape my mother, and I’ll
never be born.”

“It doesn’t work like that, Tom.” I was
harsh, but I wasn’t feeling particularly generous about this.
“Those things happened. They suck, and you’ve paid a huge price
because of them, but you can’t just make it all go away. If you
kill him, you’ll split time. One timeline will be what already
happened, and the other one may look different, or maybe not. But
you don’t get to play God on this. Last time you tried,” my voice
got softer, “Léon died anyway.”

He flinched at that, so at least he was
listening. I finished the spiral and concentrated on keeping myself
outside of it as I spoke to him.

“Don’t do this, Tom. Going back and killing
Hitler doesn’t change the fact that he killed six million Jews,
because he did and we know it. Killing your own personal Hitler
won’t change the fact that you were born, and it won’t erase the
circumstances of your birth. The only direction any of us can go is
forward, Tom. We take what happened and we make ourselves into
people we can look at in mirrors without flinching.”

No matter what, I couldn’t let Tom kill
George Walters. I caught Ringo’s eye, looked pointedly at Tom, and
then at the spiral. He nodded once, reached into his pocket for
something, and slunk up onto the platform. George watched us all
with glittering eyes from his low position.

Tom’s voice was steely. “Time travel has the
grandfather clause. He is the grandfather, so he will die.”

George lunged forward to grab the gun just
as Ringo hurled his full weight at Tom. The combination was the
only reason either of them succeeded. Ringo’s hit sent Tom flying
into the spiral on the wall, and with a last look of hatred
directed straight at me as he screamed, “NOOOOO!!!” Tom disappeared
through the portal.

There was a moment of stunned silence while
the echo of Tom’s voice still hung in the air, when time itself
seemed to have stopped. The silence was infinite in its
possibility, and it was shattered in a moment. The moment when
George shot Archer.

Archer went down and George kept shooting
wildly in a rage. Tiles shattered, and cement dust exploded on the
platform. I leapt off the platform as bullets struck everything
around me.

It felt like a war zone.

Archer – Present Day

A bullet struck the wall behind me, and a
broken tile chip grazed my neck. The two guards we had disabled at
the entrance to the station were still down, so this was someone
new. I scanned the station to find the shooter, and I saw Connor’s
Wolf change trajectory and aim for the middle of the wall where the
old passenger crossover had been when the platform was still
intact. Another wild shot aimed at the Wolf broke tiles, and then
two more in rapid succession. The last shot had been too close. The
shooter was inside that passage, now a partially bricked-up hole in
the wall, in a defensive position that left us exposed. The only
barrier we had working for us was part of the train car that
blocked the shooter’s view of the left side of the station nearest
the tunnel entrance. It was the side Adam was on with most of the
mixed-bloods who had crawled out of the train cars. “Adam, go!” He
didn’t hesitate. He raised his arm and swung it in a commando
signal for
let’s move
!

Tam and Daisy, the two young people Logan
had asked for help, were still on the right side of the tunnel near
the blocked end. Daisy had been helping an older woman out of the
train car while the green-haired young man waited to lift her
down.

Everyone had frozen with the gunshots. “Wait
there!” I called to them. I hoped they stayed out of sight – I
wanted the only moving target to be me.

I burst forward with as much speed as the
distance allowed, and the shooter unloaded his clip on me. One of
the bullets tore through my coat, but just missed the shoulder.
Good, I’d need it to climb.

The shooting paused for the barest of
moments, and I knew he was reloading. “Go!” I yelled behind me. I
hoped the kids would get the woman to Adam, but my focus was on
that wall.

I climbed the broken bricks in the lower
section that had once been the platform, but the shooting started
again too soon, which meant he was aiming at the mixed-bloods. I
growled and pulled a loose brick from the wall. Another shot, and I
heard a Wolf yelp in pain. Rage filled me, and I flung the brick
over my head into the passage. The shots went wild, and I heard
them hit tile, brick, and metal.

I hauled myself the last few feet and
barreled into the passage. Bullets tore into my chest, and old
wounds bloomed fresh and bloody, but I couldn’t feel them.

And then the buzzing began.

Saira – 1944