by Morgan Hawke
“Coming!” Her white canvas pack over her shoulder, Thorn trotted after Max, following him into a tiny front garden and then up two steps to the front door of one of the brick houses.
Max lifted the brass knocker and pounded twice.
The door opened, releasing light, warmth, and the stench of cigars. The man answering the door wore a brown wool dinner jacket with a carelessly knotted tie around his collar, but his iron-straight stance and watchful gaze were pure military. He stank of cheap soap and expensive gun oil. “Good evening, may I help you?” He spoke English with a strong Yankee accent.
Thorn frowned. Definitely American military, but normally they wore their uniforms even in foreign countries. Apparently Colonel Ives didn’t want to announce his presence in town.
Max smiled and did not offer his hand. “I’m Max Rykov, and this is Miss Ferrell. I believe we’re expected.”
Thorn eased past Max to face the man at the door. It was code-phrase time. She pasted on her best “I’m just a kid” smile. “The snow is pretty deep in the Adirondacks right now.”
The man blinked; then his jaw tightened, and he nodded. He stepped to one side to let them pass him.
Thorn followed Max into a plain but spotlessly scrubbed foyer. Before them, a narrow, dark, paneled hall led past a steep staircase on the left side and continued to the back of the house.
The man closed the door behind them. He turned to Max. “This way, sir.” He strode into the narrow hall.
Thorn set her hands in her pockets to wait right where she was.
Max stopped. “Coming, Miss Ferrell?”
Thorn smiled. Not if she could help it. “In a minute.”
Max frowned but followed the man down the hallway and to the left. A door clicked open and then closed.
The man returned and nodded at Thorn. “This way, courier.”
Shit…. She’d hoped he would simply ask for the package so she could leave without seeing anybody. Thorn sighed and followed the man down the hall to a door on the right.
The door opened on a small room lined with empty bookshelves. In the center of the room was a massive desk set with two oil lamps and completely covered in sheets of cheap writing paper. The floor all around the desk was littered with strewn newspapers. Behind the desk, seated in a large leather armchair, was a dapper older man in a wine-red, quilted smoking jacket. He had shoulder-sweeping golden curls and a painstakingly trimmed goatee. A lit cigar burned in a broad glass ashtray close to his right hand. “Thank you, Brentwood, you may leave.”
The hair on the back of Thorn’s neck lifted. It was him, Colonel Ives, the man she’d once called “father”—her betrayer.
The man, Brentwood, nodded once and then turned smartly on his heel and left, closing the door behind him.
Colonel Ives lifted his head and smiled. His midwinter-ice-blue eyes crinkled in the corners. “Hello, Kerry, it’s been quite a while, hasn’t it?”
“My name is Thorn Ferrell.” Thorn crossed her arms. “Colonel Ives.”
The colonel lifted his cigar and winced. “You’re still mad at me.”
A growl rumbled in Thorn’s chest, but the sound was far too low for a human to hear. “Because of you, I’m a slave to the army, old man.” She should never have trusted him with her secrets.
Colonel Ives’s gaze narrowed. “When I found you, you were little more than a wild animal.” He shook his head and shoved aside papers. “I did what I thought was best for you.”
Thorn stepped up to the desk and set her palms on it. “You did what was best for your career. You gave the army something they could use, and use me they did.” Her lengthening nails dug into the desk. “I haven’t stopped running errands for the Secret Service since the day you left me in that office with that…agent.”
His gaze narrowed. “You have a roof over your head, clothes on your back, and you’re paid a decent wage….”
Thorn slammed her fist on his desk. The desk gave a hollow bang and a crunch. She pulled her fist from the splintered dent she’d made in the wood. “I live in a room with bars on the windows and a bedroll on the floor. The only time I’m let out is when the military needs something carried across terrain no one else can cross. As for pay, whatever agent is acting as my handler gets it, not me.”
The colonel raised his icy gaze to hers. “If you hadn’t kept trying to run away, bars and handlers wouldn’t be needed.”
Thorn clenched her jaw. She could feel the teeth lengthening in her mouth. Her humanity was slipping with her temper, baring the beast that shared her soul. “You’re a total bastard, you know that?”
Colonel Ives snorted. “I’m a colonel; it comes with the job.” He sighed and then looked down at his desk and shuffled some papers. “You’ll be free to go wherever you like when your term is done.”
Thorn pulled her pack from her shoulder and dug out the brown-paper-wrapped box. She set the package on his desk. “There, my term is done. You’re the last delivery.” She turned on her heel and headed for the door. She had to get out of there before her temper got the better of her and she ripped him apart. “Good-bye, and good riddance.”
“Halt!”
Thorn froze out of sheer force of habit. Stupid military reflexes…. “What now?”
“I have a return delivery.”
She turned slowly to face him and knew damned well her smile was full of long teeth. “I guess you’re just going to have to use a normal courier.”
Colonel Ives rose from behind his desk. “Until you have been officially served your walking papers, you are a U.S. courier and subject to my orders. Is that clear, soldier?”
Thorn let her wolf rise under her skin, let the crackle of energy dance along her bones, exposing the predator within her. “You want to try to make me follow those orders, colonel?”
Colonel Ives bared his flat and yellowed human teeth. “Not a whole lot of people know it yet, but there’s a particularly nasty plague going around out here, and I don’t want that happening in America. You’re the only one that can get what little I have on this European plague back over those mountains.”
Thorn scowled. “Oh, gee, what a surprise, another life-or-death mission.” She folded her arms over her chest. “Don’t you think I’ve saved enough lives for you?”
“Don’t you have any human compassion?” His jaw tightened. “Or does the beast do all your thinking for you?”
“I did have human compassion once.” Thorn lifted her chin, knowing damned well that the light from the small oil lamp on his desk made her eyes reflect and glow like green-gold coins. “I saved an old man lost on a mountaintop in winter. It got me a job at the end of a military leash.”
Colonel Ives dropped into his chair and wiped a hand down his face. “I was trying to provide for your future.”
Thorn turned her back on him and faced the door. “I’ll carry your package, old man, but after that, I’m done with you. I don’t ever want to see your face again.” She grabbed the brass door handle. “Or anyone else’s.”
“Where are you planning to go?” His voice was soft.
Thorn sighed. “To the kitchen. I just had a hard three-day run. I’m hungry.”
“No, after you quit the military. Where will you go after that? You can’t go back to your family in New York; they kicked you out when they found out what you were.”
Thorn kept her back to him. “And whose fault was that?”
“If you hadn’t lost your temper when I came to get you, they wouldn’t have seen you that way.”
Why is it always my fault? Thorn’s hands fisted on the doorknob, denting the soft brass. “Where will I go, now that I can never go home? Someplace you can’t find me, Colonel. Someplace where no one will ever find me again.” She pushed the door open, stepped through, and closed it quietly behind her.
5
The kitchen at the back of the house was warm, brightly lit with gas lamps, and scrupulously clean. The massive cast-iron Franklin stove that took up the entire
far left wall was manned by the huge gruff cook, Tom. He and his two assistants, Dick and Harry, in white aprons over their dark corduroys with their white shirtsleeves rolled up over their elbows, were well into preparing dinner for the rest of the house’s staff.
Perched on a flour barrel at the end of the rough-sawn plank table, Thorn was given a huge bowl of beef stew and a small loaf of warmed bread. She picked up her spoon and eyed the three men. “Tom, Dick, and Harry. You’re kidding, right?”
Dick over at the sink under the row of shuttered windows grinned and waved a soapy hand. “It was an accident, I swear!”
“Speak for yourself!” Tom laughed and set a mug of milk frothy with cream before her. “So, you’re a courier? My wife carried letters on occasion during the War Between the States.” He smiled with obvious pride.
Thorn nodded. Wives and daughters had often done courier duty when no one else was available. Sometimes family were the only people you could trust with something sensitive.
Scrubbing away at silverware, Dick turned to smile briefly. “You must be good if they’re sending you on overseas missions.”
Tom banged open the oven and poked at the roast within. “She made it here through the mountains in winter. I’d say that’s pretty damned good.”
Thorn shrugged. “I get the job done.” She lifted her spoon. “Any idea why the Russian army is here?”
The men exchanged glances.
Tom turned his back to her. “They’re probably on their way out to burn more towns.”
Thorn froze, her spoon halfway to her mouth. “What?”
Tom shrugged. “There’s a plague. That’s how they’re dealing with it.”
Thorn frowned. “The colonel mentioned the plague, but burning towns?”
Tom slammed something on the stove. “It’s their country. Not a whole lot anybody can do about it.”
Thorn stared at her soup. “Well, yeah I suppose….”
Harry abruptly sat down at the table to mash a pot of buttered potatoes. He nodded at her uneaten loaf. “Something wrong with the bread?”
Thorn wiped her mouth on a cloth napkin. She knew a deliberate change in subject when she heard one. “Not at all. Bread is just one of those things that doesn’t agree with me.”
Tom pulled the pan with the roast from the oven and set it on the sideboard by the sink. “How can bread not agree with you?” With a pair of carving knives, he lifted the meat from the pan onto a wooden cutting board. “Everybody eats bread!” He shot a scowl at her.
Thorn rolled her eyes. Cooks prided themselves on their bread. “Anything with grain in it, corn, wheat, rice…it all puts me in the outhouse in a matter of minutes and keeps me there.”
“What?” Dick grabbed the roasting pan for scrubbing. “How can you live without bread?”
Thorn shrugged. “I can’t drink any kind of beer for the same reason.”
“No beer?” The cook shook his head sadly and sliced. “Now there goes all the joy in life.”
Thorn smiled. “No one seems to mind drinking my supper portion for me.”
Dick stopped in the middle of washing the roasting pan and inched one of the window shutters open. “Whoa, looks like we have a fair blizzard going on out there!”
Tom whirled, carving knives raised. “Get your nose back in, and close that! It’s after dark, you idiot!”
Dick slammed the shutter closed and put down the wrist-thick bar. “Oh, yes, of course, sir.”
Thorn frowned at the row of windows along the back wall over the sink. The entire row was shuttered from the inside. Shutters were perfectly understandable—on the outside of a building, they protected the window glass—but these were closed on the inside and heavily barred. She looked over at the red-cheeked cook. “Are we expecting some kind of an attack?”
Tom frowned. “You mean you don’t know?”
The small hairs rose on the back of her neck. “Know what?”
The cook and his two assistance exchanged looks, and their cheeks paled. The acrid scent of cold sweat suddenly filled the kitchen.
Alarm surged through Thorn. They were hardened war veterans, and they were afraid, all of them. “Guys, what’s going on?”
Tom sighed and set his hand on his hip. “The dead have been walking at night and eating anyone they find.”
“What?” That had to be some kind of a joke. Thorn’s hand tightened on her spoon, bending it just a little. “That’s insane! The dead can’t walk.”
“It’s true.” Harry slammed his masher into his potatoes violently. “We have the house shuttered upstairs and down because the damned things are attracted to light.”
Tom shook his head. “They broke into a bunch of houses and killed everyone in them before anyone knew they were even there.”
Thorn set down her spoon. She wasn’t hungry anymore. “Why doesn’t someone hunt them down?”
“They have been, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.” Dick scowled and applied his scrubber to the roasting pan. “They’re real good at hiding during the day, and at night they’re practically unstoppable.”
Harry bared his teeth at his potatoes. “You can chop them to bits, and all the bits keep moving.”
Tom turned to look at Thorn. “And if they bite you, you’re dead in a day and a walking corpse the following night.”
Harry shook his head. “Nobody can get them all because when people get bit, they hide. They don’t want to get shot by their neighbors.”
Dick sprinkled soap on the roasting pan. “And then they die anyway and end up eating their neighbors.”
Tom stacked slices of roast onto a plate. “The only thing that destroys them is fire. That’s why the Russians are burning towns.”
Thorn couldn’t believe what she was hearing. This was the plague the colonel was talking about, a plague of walking dead? She shook her head. “If this is really happening, why don’t they clear all the people out of this town?”
“Evacuate the whole town?” Tom waved his carving knife. “And send them where?” He pointed his knife at the barred windows. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s winter; there’s no place for them to go. Staying home and locking the door is safer than going out in the open and freezing to death or getting eaten.”
“Don’t you worry.” Dick nodded toward Thorn. “Come spring when the passes open, this town will empty out real fast.”
Harry stood up with his pot of potatoes and walked around the table. “In the meantime, everyone barricades themselves in their houses at night, and in the morning they go out and burn the houses that couldn’t keep them out.” He set the pot on the sideboard by Tom’s carving board.
Thorn blinked. “They’re burning houses? You’re lucky this whole town hasn’t gone up in flames.”
“They’ve been real careful about only burning the houses that get broken into.” Tom left the sliced roast on the sideboard to check on the two pots simmering on the huge Franklin stove.
Thorn shoved her bowl back. “What about tenements—you know, where piles of families all live in one building?”
Dick turned to grab her bowl from the table. “Oh, those all got burned with the first snow last month. Most of the factory workers, and their families, are living in the attics of the factories.”
Thorn shook her head. “So everybody just goes on like normal during the day and hopes they don’t get eaten at night? That’s crazy! How can you live this way?”
Dick waved his soapy washcloth. “Oh, don’t worry, this house is brick. Unless someone lets them in, they won’t get in here.”
“And we’ll be leaving real soon.” Harry’s jaw tightened. “Snow or no snow.”
Tom moved the two pots off the stove. “All right, ladies, let’s get supper upstairs in the dining room!” In a clatter of china and silverware, the food was set on trays, hefted on shoulders, and carried out of the kitchen.
Alone in the warm kitchen, Thorn listened to the winter storm rattling the window glass. The dead were walkin
g? It had to be a hoax, a joke, a scary tale you told the gullible. But the stink of their fear was real enough. Something was definitely going on in this town at night.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs into the kitchen.
Thorn snapped sharply awake from her nap. Curled up under her gray fleece coat in the corner between the firewood and the pantry shelves, she held perfectly still and ready to leap, just in case.
Brentwood stepped into the kitchen and frowned. “Courier?”
Thorn released her breath and eased to her feet in silence. “Yes?”
Brentwood’s right hand dove inside his jacket, and his head whipped around to stare at her, clearly startled. He took a breath to compose his expression and eased his hand out from under his jacket. He cleared his throat and held out a small brown-paper-wrapped parcel with a letter tucked under the string. “This is your return package. You’re to deliver it to your superior officer without opening either the package or the letter.”
Thorn took the parcel and snorted. “I know better than to open anything I deliver.” She smiled tightly. “Being tortured for information is not my idea of fun.”
“You’ll leave at first light.” Brentwood stepped back and held out his hand toward the stairs. “A room has been prepared for you. This way, please.”
Thorn knelt to shove the parcel in her canvas pack. “I’d rather leave now.” She had no interest in remaining under the same roof as Colonel Ives any longer than absolutely necessary.
“Now?” Brentwood’s eyes widened, and he stiffened. “But you can’t go out now!” The scent of cold sweat drifted off him.
Thorn looked up at him and frowned. He was afraid. “Why not?” Was the cooks’ story true, or was it something else?
“Why not?” Brentwood glanced at the barricaded windows and then frowned at her. “You must have seen them, or at least heard about them, on your way here?”
“Them?” Thorn picked up her hat and folded her fleeced coat over her arm. “I didn’t see anything on my way here but trees, snow, and the occasional wild animal.” And a solitary vampire, though she supposed he could be considered a wild animal, too. She very nearly smiled. “I went cross-country.”