by Jane Toombs
In the shadowy evening light Nick spurred his rangy sorrel, concentrating on the galloping figure four lengths ahead of the regiment, hearing Custer's defiant battle cry mingle with Rebel yells. Artillery roared in the distance, accompanied by the pop-pop-pop of rifle fire but, like the Michigan 1st, the oncoming Rebs held to their sabers.
With a ringing clash, the two lines met. Nick swept through the Rebels shouting, saber slashing. Steel clanged against steel, men swore, horses reared, squealing. In the near darkness it grew difficult to tell enemy from fellow soldier and impossible to keep in rank.
To his horror, he caught sight of the general's distinctive figure surrounded by Rebs. With a howl of rage, Nick forced his sorrel between two Reb horses, swinging his saber furiously from left to right as he bored through the encirclement.
Using the diversion, Custer cut his way free. Nick was pounding after him when suddenly the rising moon, just beyond full, slid from behind a cloud, piercing him with a shaft of silver light. His horse reared, pawing the air. Feeling his insides twist, Nick screamed, "No!"
Between struggling against the urge to shift and trying to manage his spooked sorrel, he didn't see the Reb to his left in time to parry the saber thrust. The blade caught him above the hip, slicing through until it grated on bone. Shocked by the pain, Nick lost control of the sorrel and the horse threw him. He thudded to the ground, rolling desperately to avoid churning hoofs as the battle raged around him.
He smacked hard against rock. Head swimming, his uniform blood-soaked, he dragged himself around the huge rock into a narrow passageway between giant boulders where he collapsed. Even in his confusion he knew the saber wound must be already closing but he was also aware he'd lost so much blood that his body needed time to recover from the loss.
Too weak to move, Nick lay on the ground between the boulders listening to the cries of men and horses and the clink of sabers. It seemed to him the sounds came from another world, one he'd left behind. He glanced at the dark sky. The moon had disappeared behind clouds but, in any case, the urge to change had left him.
As full darkness shrouded the field, the sounds of battle gradually diminished. When the cicadas began their shrill courting he knew the soldiers--Union and Reb--had abandoned the field for the night, leaving nothing behind but the dead and the wounded. He had no idea who'd won the skirmish or the battle. At the moment he didn't care.
Since he had no choice but to stay where he was until he grew stronger, Nick eased himself into a more comfortable position and closed his eyes. To his distress, instead of a reassuring darkness, he saw Wenda, her green eyes gleaming with triumph, her white arms reaching for him. He cursed under his breath and opened his eyes.
From the moment he'd marched into Pennsylvania her unwelcome presence had slipped into his head every time he let down his guard. He wondered if she knew he'd entered her territory and deliberately plagued him or if his images of her were only a residue of the spell she'd cast over him in Monroe.
To shut her from his mind he began silently counting, first in Russian, then in Finnish, French, Spanish, English and, finally, Havasupai.
Flickers of light startled him until he realized they had nothing to do with him but were fireflies searching for one another to mate.
As the hours passed he regained enough strength to rise to his feet, the healing saber wound giving him only a twinge of pain. When he eased from his lair between the boulders, he noticed flickering lights over the field--not fireflies this time but men with lanterns searching for the wounded. Because of his almost infallible sense of direction and his excellent night vision, Nick was certain he could reach camp on his own. He left the safety of the boulders, walking slowly through the darkness toward where he was sure the Union line lay.
After a time he began to feel the walk was interminable and the way far too long. Where was the low stone wall, the apple orchard? Where was the woods? Why couldn't he hear the night sounds of a camp? Where were the intermingled odors of men and horses? Most unsettling of all, why couldn't he sense the presence of other men? Or even animals?
Alarmed, Nick halted, peering into the darkness, all his senses searching, searching--and finding nothing but a faint scent of musk. He tensed. A low, husky laugh echoed in his head.
"Come to me," she whispered in his mind, over and over again. His attempts to resist her allure were futile. Slowly, inexorably, his feet began moving against his will, carrying him where he dreaded to go. Blue energy crackled around him, hurrying him along.
Eventually he was allowed to stop and he knew he'd arrived. Somewhere. In the darkness he heard no natural sounds, smelled no normal night odors, sensed nothing but her. Where in God's name was he?
A woman's long, pointed nails raked gently along his cheek. Her fingers. The hex witch was here with him, the musk of her perfume arousing him even as he fought his own desire. Laughing low in her throat, she touched him more intimately and he was powerless to resist. She fondled him, making him forget everything else so that he reached for her, no longer able to remember why he must not.
She was naked under his hands, soft and inviting. He couldn't see her but he remembered those lush curves very well. The nipples of her full breasts hardened under his caress and when he touched the warm dampness between her legs his need grew frenzied.
"I kept my part of our bargain, I brought you here to keep yours," she whispered as he flung off his clothes and bore her to the ground.
Her words registered without him understanding their meaning. Nothing had meaning except her eager body under his. He plunged inside her, excited into madness by her scent, her feel, the spicy, forbidden taste of her mouth. Their joining sent him racing along a dark tunnel into a noxious cavern where flames danced and leaped, reaching for him, entwining him in their deadly, unforgettable hell-heat. He moaned with the exquisite agony, wanting it never to end even as he struggled toward release.
The fire embraced him, consumed him, burned him to ashes that swirled away into nothingness.
Nick roused soon after the rain began. It wasn't quite dawn, he was naked, he lay in the trampled grass of a meadow. My God, the beast ran loose! he thought in horror. He sprang to his feet and glanced quickly around. The first thing he saw were clothes strewn haphazardly onto the grass near him. His clothes, the uniform pants stiff with blood from the now-healed saber wound. Hurriedly, he pulled them on.
Never before had the beast come back to where the change had occurred. Why was there no taste of blood in his mouth? He raised his hands closer to his eyes to check for blood stains in the dim light. No stains, but he caught a faint whiff of musk.
Musk. Wenda. He'd dreamed of her, dreamed he'd taken her, dreamed of hell. Or had it been a dream? Casting about, he sensed more than one normal glow of energy in the distance but no witch crackle. Looking with his eyes as well as his special sense, he saw two dead bodies all but hidden in the tall grass some twenty paces away, one dressed in blue, one in gray.
He tried to imagine Wenda luring him to this meadow of death in the darkness. Would she come onto a battlefield?
He shook his head in confusion. The only thing he felt sure of was that he hadn't shifted shape last night. He'd remained a man.
Either he'd gotten lost and wandered to this meadow or Wenda had spelled him to her here. But if so, had she been here in body or in spirit? The dream, if that's what it was, had been very real--he could almost feel the soft warmth of her now. He recalled the searing flames all too clearly.
He couldn't hold to the illusion she'd been a dream. Either in person or in spirit, she'd gotten what she wanted from him. Never mind that he hadn't acceded to the
bargain, the hex witch had taken her payment for Liisi's cure.
He couldn't bear to think Wenda had actually lain with him for, if that was true, he might have fathered another like himself. Nick groaned. Even if he wasn't in the middle of a war, he doubted if he'd ever be able to track her down and discover the truth.
The s
cent of smoke drifted to him on the damp dawn breeze, reminding Nick his present position was precarious. Union or Reb campfire? He'd best reconnoiter before it grew any lighter.
Setting all thought of Wenda aside, he slipped cautiously through the grass of the meadow searching for a familiar landmark, getting wetter by the minute. After a time a weak, flickering aura to his right made him hesitate. He knew what he sensed must be a wounded soldier. Friend or enemy?
What the hell difference did it make when a man needed healing? Nick swerved to the right. Moments later he saw
a slumped figure in the grass, one leg twisted at an impossible angle. Blue uniform. Sergeant's stripes.
He knelt beside the man, looking for injuries other than the obviously broken right leg. He grimaced at the sight of the soldier's maimed face. The right eye was gone and the scalp and cheek were slashed open to the bone. The rain streaked the blood oozing from the wound.
After removing the red kerchief from his own neck, Nick grasped a still attached flap of skin and hair, laid it back across the gaping wound as gently as possible and bound the injury with his kerchief. The man groaned but didn't regain consciousness.
Nick cut reins from a dead horse and retrieved empty saber sheaths from three dead Rebs. He twisted the injured man's leg into alignment, gritting his teeth against the sound of the grating bones and, using the saber sheaths as splints, bound them to the broken leg with the reins. As Nick finished, the sergeant opened his remaining eye.
"Damn, m' head hurts like hell," he mumbled.
Nick stared down at him. "Ulrich!" he exclaimed. He hadn't recognized the man until he spoke.
"Captain?" Sergeant Ulrich sounded as surprised as Nick. He raised a hand toward his bandaged head.
"Don't touch that," Nick said sharply. "You've got a broken leg as well as a head injury. I'll find transport to take you back to camp. Lie still and keep your hands away from your head until I return. That's an order, sergeant." As Ulrich mumbled what may have been an assent, his eye drooped shut.
In an adjoining orchard Nick found an empty supply cart under a tree loaded with tiny green apples. He cut the harness and yanked the cart free of the dead horse. Grasping a shaft in either hand, he pulled the cart back to Sergeant Ulrich and lifted the stocky man into its soggy bed, taking care to keep the right leg straight.
As he trudged through the rain pulling the cart, Nick finally saw the low stone wall he'd ridden past when the 1st charged the enemy. Sure now of his bearings, he quickened his pace, swerving to avoid dead men and horses, at last sensing the presence of the living. If the Union had won the skirmish, he was near Union lines. If not...
Nick shrugged and plodded on. He was weaving from exhaustion when a sentry challenged him. By then he was past caring whether the man wore blue or gray.
When he saw the blue of the sentry's uniform Nick knew the Union had been victorious. The knowledge failed to thrill him as much as it would have a day earlier.
The blood lust of battle had tempted the beast inside him. It had almost broken loose last night, would have if the Reb's saber slash hadn't reversed the beginning change. He couldn't afford to take another chance. Though he still believed in the rightness of the Union cause, now he understood that, because of what he was, his part in the war must be a healer's, not a fighting man's. As Liisi had warned, war could destroy him.
As soon as he'd rested, Nick made his way to the field hospital where he located Sergeant Ulrich and treated him first. After sending a message to General Custer by way of a wounded cavalryman who, after treatment, was able to rejoin his regiment, Nick continued to care for the men injured at Gettysburg.
Two days later Custer found Nick riding beside the long line of ambulances carrying the wounded back to Washington. "Sergeant Ulrich says you saved his life," Custer said as his horse fell into step alongside Nick's.
"And I've been told your charge turned the tide in our favor at Gettysburg," Nick said.
"The Michigan 1st, not me," Custer corrected. "I challenge the annals of warfare to produce a more brilliant or successful charge of cavalry." He glanced at Nick. "You were part of that charge. Yet here you are doctoring again." "Some men. like you, General, were born to lead. Some were born to fight. My talent lies in healing, I was foolish to try to turn away from what I do best."
Custer frowned, finally nodding. "I'll arrange for your transfer," he said, touching his hat in a final salute as he spurred his horse.
As the months passed the war became for Nick a nightmare of severed limbs, disembowelments and dying men. In April of '64 he and Hank Ulrich, now attached to the medical unit as an orderly, were assigned to Nashville, to be a part of the Western armies.
"Hear tell we're gonna push south this month," Ulrich confided to Nick as they left the barracks hospital. "Gonna be a big battle." He shook his head. "When I rode with the 1st, I never figured what happened to them Rebs I shot.
Never cared. Since Gettysburg I sure as hell've seen the other side of war."
Nick glanced at Ulrich's disfigured face, his missing eye covered by a black patch. "You're as needed now as--"
He broke off, his attention caught by the red-bearded man striding towards them.
"Cump!" Nick exclaimed before noticing the general's stars on the uniformed shoulders. He saluted hastily. Sherman stopped and stared at Nick. "Damn it, I know you," he said after a moment. "California. You're my namesake. Sherman Oso."
Nick shifted his shoulders. "I'm Nick Deplacer now, sir," he said.
Sherman's eyebrows rose, his gaze sharpening. "A doctor, are you?"
"Yes, sir."
"Assigned to my army. Good. I won't ask why the name change. We'll talk sometime." He strode on.
"Jesus," Ulrich breathed. "Damned if that wasn't Uncle Billy Sherman himself. A friend of his, are you?"
"Not exactly. He helped me a long time ago. In California."
"Good kinda friend to have, a general. Specially Sherman. He runs the whole western shebang. Military Division of the Mississippi, they call it."
In May the western army marched toward Atlanta. In the night camps, Nick, restless, often came upon General Sherman who seemed attracted to darkness. In time Nick came to look forward to these brief encounters though he found only traces of the young lieutenant he'd known in California.
"This country swarms with thousands who'd shoot me on sight," Sherman said to him one night in June, on the outskirts of Atlanta. "They'd shoot me and thank their God they'd killed a monster."
In the darkness Nick's smile was grim. What would Sherman say if he knew the truth about Oso/Deplacer?
Wouldn't he also shoot on sight?
"I don't hate southerners," Sherman went on. "I lived among them, I know them. All in all I'm more kindly disposed to the southern people than any general army officer. But war is war."
"I treat the bloody results every day," Nick reminded him.
Sherman sighed. "You can't qualify war in harsher terms than I do. War is cruelty and you can't refine it. War is hell. But I'm committed to this fight and I'll push forward until we have a permanent peace. No matter what I'm called by the people of the south." He glanced at Nick. "They'd hate you as much as they do me if they knew you saved my life in California." He put a hand on Nick's shoulder. "There've been times I wondered why my life was spared but, on the whole, I'm glad you were at that night camp."
On the evening of November 15, Nick, standing on a hill overlooking Atlanta, watched as flames flared, spreading through the center of the city, rising like red and yellow beacons announcing Sherman's victory.
Nick remembered Liisi casting the stones and Mima's foreseeing of blood and flames. God knows he'd seen enough of both. As smoke billowed over the stricken city, he wondered, as he had so many times since his enlistment, if Liisi had written him.
Difficult as it sometimes was to get mail delivered to the troops, other men received letters from home. But not Nick. Though he'd sent letters to Liisi, none had been answ
ered. Was she all right?
He wasn't quite all right himself. Being in the midst of so many men kept him continually uneasy--his special sense was useless in such crowds. If he couldn't get away alone like this at night he thought he might go crazy. He knew that Sergeant Ulrich worried over his solitary night excursions and he suspected the energy glow on the nearby hill to his left was Ulrich, keeping an eye on him. He sensed no other men near.
The sudden click of a rifle bolt directly behind him startled Nick. As he started to turn, a shot rang out. He whirled in time to see the man behind him slump to the ground, a rifle slipping from his grasp.
But he'd sensed no one behind him! Was he losing his ability? As Nick knelt beside the motionless figure, he heard Ulrich shout his name.
"Are you okay, Doc?" Ulrich demanded, pounding up the hill. "Did I get the bastard in time?"
Nick looked up at Ulrich. "He's dead. A Union private. One of our men."
"It don't matter what color uniform he wears," Ulrich said. "He had the damned rifle aimed at your head. Christ, he wasn't no more'n six feet from you, would've killed you for certain. I saw him clear as anything, outlined against the fire so I got off a good clean shot afore he could pull the trigger. He meant to kill you, Doc, sure as God made little green apples."
Nick stared down at the young soldier. Why in God's name would one of their own men want to kill him? Kill Nick DePlacer? It wasn't as though he was General Sherman.
A Californio? Nick touched the dead man's blonde hair and shook his head. He couldn't understand why he hadn't known the soldier was behind him, hadn't sensed any energy glow.
"Poor bastard must've gone berserk, like," Ulrich said. "Sometimes they do, go to killing everything in sight."
Nick rose to his feet and put a hand on the sergeant's shoulder. "You saved my life."
"I owed you, Doc, damned if I didn't. Now maybe you'll listen to me and stay in camp nights."
Nick squeezed his shoulder and dropped his hand. "You know, Hank, before I enlisted two years ago, I thought the war would be over in six months--a year at the most. Now I wondered if it will ever end."