The Midnight Front--A Dark Arts Novel

by David Mack

  Cade studied the map, which showed only pockets of German tanks and infantry on the Normandy coastline. “But if Kein knows the Allies’ plans, why aren’t the Germans moving more forces into position? Why are they still building their bunkers with that shitty weak concrete?”

  A shrug. “Because Kein doesn’t want the Nazis to know.”

  The more Cade learned, the less he understood. “If he isn’t telling the Germans what’s coming … and he’s making them build weak bunkers … it’s because he wants the Allies to bomb or shell that bunker and break the seal.” He looked up at Adair. “And he wants both sides to get hit by the demons.” When his master didn’t correct him, he asked, “Is this part of that war on Science he was babbling about in Wewelsburg?”

  “We’ll have to ask him—right before we cut off his head.” Adair’s sadness darkened, tinged by simmering rage. “But first we need to unmake this seal and banish its spirits, before some damn fool sets them loose.”

  “Unmake it? We can do that?”

  Uncertainty colored Adair’s reaction. “Maybe. It would be like the seals you changed in that demonic cathouse in Caen, just a lot more complicated. I’ve been studying this for weeks. It’s a work of evil fucking genius—but I think it might be possible to negate it.”

  “Like cutting the fuse off a bomb.”

  “If only it were that simple.” Adair limped on his prosthesis and Cade walked beside him, out on top of the great seal, which was twelve feet in diameter. “If you add exactly the right lines, glyphs, and letters—in the right languages—at exactly the right places and in the correct order, you can turn the seal from a prison to a banishing ward. You can use it to command every spirit trapped inside back to Hell.” A grim sigh. “But there’s a catch.”

  “Of course there is.”

  “For a few seconds after you make the last change, a guardian spirit Kein placed on the seal will be loose—and you won’t have any defense.”

  “I’ve fought demons before.”

  “Not without magick of your own, you haven’t.” He pointed out more minutiae in the seal. “These symbols, inside the third and sixth wedges, are designed to negate Briet’s anti-magick wards when the seal breaks. That’s so the demons aren’t forced out of the combat zone. But you’d be neutralizing the seal intact, which means no magick within half a mile of shore.”

  Cade almost wished he hadn’t asked. “Anything else?”

  “Aye. There’s another wrinkle.”

  “I figured there would be.”

  Spreading his arms in an expansive gesture meant to encompass the entire seal, Adair said, “When you reach the room with the seal … you won’t be able to see it.”

  “Excuse me—what?”

  “Something Niko said when he gave me the map and the camera. Kein’s hidden the seal under wax from a new hive, and a layer of cement. To keep the Germans from setting it off too soon, I suppose. At any rate, your challenge is to find the room’s center, use a compass to gauge magnetic north, then add your symbols on the cement above the seal without being able to see it. You’ll have no margin for error—and every change has to be placed perfectly.”

  “On top of something I won’t be able to see.”

  “Aye.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Damn near. But the hardest part might be getting you inside the bunker.” The master noted Cade’s bewildered stare. “The Allies won’t alert the Nazis to their planned invasion of Normandy by sending an advance team to Pointe du Hoc.”

  Cade mustered his bravado. “Then I’ll go alone.”

  “Without magick? Against a division of Wehrmacht and a panzer group? You’d be dead before you got within a quarter mile of the bunker door.”

  “What other choice do I have?”

  A growl rattled deep in the master’s throat. “General Eisenhower wants you to land with the troops, as part of the assault. They’ll get you to the bunker. After that, the rest is up to you.” He shook his head. “It’s a shite plan. Totally fucked. I said as much, but do they listen?” He began to pace, visibly desperate for a way to vent his agitation. “It’s just what Kein wanted. We’re playing right into his hands!”

  “How? What do you mean?”

  “You! Charging into the jaws of death!” Adair shook with indignation. “You’re the only one I can send—” He lifted his pants leg to show the crude wooden prosthetic that had taken the place of his lower right leg. “—thanks to this. A fucking gimp, Ike called me. Unfit for war, he said. So I have to send you—my last apprentice, my fucking ace in the hole, my one hope of stopping Kein—and I have to risk your life on a fucking suicide mission!”

  Cade regarded the seal with apprehension. “I get why you’re upset. But this has to be done, and I’m the only one to do it.” That garnered a wide-eyed stare of shock from the old man. Cade pushed past his fear and found his courage. “More to the point, I want to do it.”

  “But going into a war zone, onto the front line—?”

  “When my best friend asked me to join the army with him, I told him, This isn’t my war. Because that’s what my dad always told me. But the truth is, I knew I should’ve signed up with Miles. I was too scared to say it, but I should’ve listened to him that day. Or hell, even to you. If I had, maybe my parents would still be alive. But now I know for a fact what I always felt to be true: This is my war. And it always has been.”

  Adair looked sad but resigned. “Then you’ve just one more choice to make: Would you rather hit the beach in a boat? Or jump out of a perfectly good aircraft?”

  Painful memories—of the cold bite of seawater, his parents’ anguished cries, the stink of LEVIATHAN—pushed Cade toward a decision. “I think I’ll go with a plane.”

  “Are you sure? Remember—no magick anywhere near that drop zone. And all it takes is a few bullets to turn you and your parachute into confetti.”

  Cade remembered falling through the dark with the flight crew of the Silver Sadie. He wondered how that night might have ended if he had been without magick when all else failed.

  After careful consideration, he nodded at Adair.

  “Right.… Boat it is.”

  43

  DECEMBER

  Freighted with more yoked demons than he could reasonably bear, Adair endured a headache so brutal he feared it would outlive him.

  His and Cade’s mirror-jaunt to England had gone without incident. The army had tracked down Adair’s old friend Denton Crichlow, an occultist who lived outside Bristol, and compelled him to exhume one of Adair’s first enchanted mirrors from storage and see it delivered to an SOE safe house in the south of England, near Weymouth. The coded message confirming the mirror’s delivery had arrived just before midnight, and Adair had wasted no time hustling himself and Cade through the portal, to a land they both had come to think of as home.

  A cold fog haunted England’s southern shores. Though it was only half full, Cade’s ruck slowed the young man enough that Adair was able to keep pace beside him, despite the gait imposed by his prosthetic leg. Adair had donned a long trench coat and a scarf in anticipation of facing a typical English winter; Cade wore his bomber jacket.

  The young karcist shifted his ruck from his right shoulder to the left. “What’s the point of coming back in the middle of the night, after all the pubs are closed?”

  “It’s how the army does things,” Adair said. “‘Hurry up and wait.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’ll see.”

  No light escaped from the buildings on either side of the road, thanks to the blackout curfew in effect throughout Britain, as a defense against German bombing raids. Muffled laughter spilled from the houses, however, hinting at the camaraderie of the troops inside them.

  Cade looked anxious. “Wish I could’ve brought my tools. I feel lost without them.”

  “You won’t need them.” Adair handed him a fat grease pencil. “Just this.” He almost laughed as Cade scowled at it. �
��Don’t fret. I’ll keep your tools safe.”

  He tucked the grease pencil into his pocket. “The thought of weeks without magick—”

  “Months, more like.”

  Horror and dismay: “Months?”

  They stopped and faced each other. “Lad, you’re about to start the hardest days of your life. Come tomorrow, you’ll be grateful not to have a demon in your head when the army kicks you in the bollocks. You hear what I’m saying?”

  A resigned nod. “I hear you.”

  “Good. Because now I want you to hear this.” He shed his anger. “I’m sorry. For all of this.” He read Cade’s confusion in the wrinkling of his brow. “For dragging you into my war.”

  “It’s not your fault. I’d have joined anyway.”

  Adair shook his head. “Not this war—the one against Kein. I saw it coming decades ago.” He mustered courage to speak the rest of his truth. “It wasn’t just your father who made you a nikraim. He never could have done it alone. I pushed him to it. Helped him with the magick.” He hung his head in shame. “I cursed you with this destiny the day I bonded an angel to your soul. I had no right to ask it of your parents, no right to force it on you. But I knew the world would need a karcist strong enough to stop Kein.” He favored his last apprentice with a kindly smile. “And I knew Blake and Valerie Martin would raise a smart, decent child. One who could be trusted with power.”

  Cade seemed thunderstruck by Adair’s revelations. “You went to all this trouble to bond me with an angel. Are you saying I’m some kind of chosen one?”

  “No, there were six others.… Kein killed them all.” He turned an apologetic look at Cade. “You were not our only hope—but you are the only one we have left.” He clamped his callused hand on the back of the young man’s neck. “That’s why I’m sorry, lad. I put all this on your shoulders. The world doesn’t know it, but it’s counting on us.… It’s counting on you.”

  Cade exorcised the fear from his eyes. “I won’t fail them, Master. Or you.”

  Adair gathered his apprentice in a hug, the kind he wished he’d given to Stefan and Niko before sending them to their deaths. His eyes misted and his voice trembled. “I know you won’t, lad. I know you won’t.”

  They parted as Cade said in a low voice, “Someone’s coming.”

  “Our welcoming committee, no doubt.” Adair composed himself, then shuffled forward. “Dry your eyes, lad. Time to meet your new master.”

  Farther down the road they were intercepted by a man in a U.S. Army officer’s uniform. He greeted Cade and Adair with polite nods and firm handshakes. “Gentlemen. I’m Major Paul Abell, battalion command.” To the master he added, “You must be Mr. Macrae, SOE.” Then he eyed Cade’s bomber jacket. “And you are—?”

  “Uh … Cade Martin, karcist.”

  “Not anymore. As of now, you’re Private Cade Martin—U.S. Army.”

  1944

  44

  JANUARY

  “Again.” The master clicked the fob on his stopwatch. Seconds were burning.

  Cade could barely keep his eyes open. “I can’t.”

  Adair snapped his fingers. “If you’re this slow in Normandy, we all die.”

  “Fuck. Off.” The grease pencil fell from Cade’s weary, cramped hand. The dull glow of kerosene lamps filled the sixteen-foot-square training shed. “Don’t you understand I’ve been up since five in the fucking morning? Some sergeant came into the barracks banging a trash can with its own lid. Made me put on a forty-pound pack and run ten fucking miles before breakfast. Have you ever run ten miles in your entire fucking life?”

  “Not without something chasing me.” He tapped the stopwatch. “Time’s wasting.”

  Cade splayed himself, spread-eagled, across the floor inside the simulated bunker, atop the replicated demonic seal. “You don’t get it. They put me with the Fifth Rangers. They’re insane. They’ve been training forever. And they want me to catch up. You know how long they spent in basic? Four months. Guess how long they’re giving me. Two fucking weeks.”

  “You learn fast. Already you cuss like they do.”

  Hysteria overtook him. “Christ, give me a break, will you? After breakfast I do more push-ups than I can count, then I run again, usually ’til I puke. I spend lunch reading manuals, and regulations, and learning how to take apart weapons I can’t reassemble yet. Then everybody yells at me, and I do more push-ups, and they make me run some more. After dinner I get an hour to polish my shoes and press the wrinkles out of my clothes. Then you drag me out here to this shotgun shack to practice drawing a thousand squiggles from memory on a blank floor.” An imploring look at Adair. “Fuck me—what time is it?”

  The master checked his watch. “Half one.”

  “Goddammit! I have to get up in less than four hours, and do all this shit again. Let me go. I need to fucking sleep!”

  “You need to learn how to unmake this trap, or billions of people die.”

  “And I will—but not all in one night! Fuck!”

  There was no hiding Adair’s disappointment. “We’ve been working on this for weeks, and you’ve barely mastered one of eight wedges. We don’t have much more time.”

  “I thought you said the assault wasn’t until summer.”

  “It’s not, as far as I know. But your unit’s heading north soon, for special training. And in case you haven’t noticed, this thing isn’t exactly fucking portable.”

  That was no exaggeration. To train Cade in modifying the glyphs, Adair and a team of military engineers had crafted a full-scale replica of it, then put it under a sheet of high-tech safety glass, on which Cade drew his practice markings with a grease pencil.

  For the first two weeks, Adair had let Cade rehearse with an unobstructed view of the seal beneath the glass. Now he had inserted a retractable mask of black cardboard between the glass and the duplicated seal, to let Cade experience the disorientation of trying to revise sigils he could no longer see.

  Cade sat up and rubbed his eyes. His face felt numb from exhaustion. “I’ve got the first wedge figured out.”

  “Not quite. Remember, one mistake—”

  “And we all die. I know.” A plaintive look up at his master. “The first few weeks were the hardest, learning the whole seal. I’ll have wedge one perfect by tomorrow night. If I keep at it, I can have the whole thing worked out by April.”

  “You might not have that long.”

  “Then work your magick to get me more time.” He raised a hand to cut off Adair’s protest. “I can rehearse without the shed. Just copy the template and give me some onion paper, or something else semitransparent, and I’ll keep practicing after my unit goes north.”

  Adair nodded. “Aye. That could work.”

  “Great. So can I go back to my bunk now?”

  “Aye.” Adair reset the stopwatch and poised his thumb over the fob. “Just as soon as you prove to me you’ve got wedge one down cold.” Click. “Go.”

  Cade picked up the grease pencil, then glared at Adair. “I hope you know the Devil has a cock waiting with your name on it.”

  “Chop-chop.”

  * * *

  After learning to yoke demons, Cade had thought nothing on earth could break him. The U.S. Army was determined to prove him wrong.

  The rope was three inches thick and hurt like a fistful of razors, but Cade didn’t dare let go. It chewed into his hands, which were bloody from climbing it and the wooden obstacles the Rangers had set up in the woods outside Leominster.

  His legs snaked around the rope. He clenched it between his booted feet and pushed upward toward a tape mark still far out of reach.

  His training buddy, Private First Class Carl Pinchefsky, a wiry young Jewish man from New York City, had already reached the tape marker on his rope and was working his way back down. Below them, their section leader, Staff Sergeant Tom Dale, an athletic Texan, barked orders. “What’s your problem, Martin? Got lead in your ass? Faster!”

  Cade wanted to let go, fall to
earth, and maybe break his own neck if he was lucky. Instead, he reached higher, clutched the rough strands, and pulled.

  He was one hand shy of the tape when Pinchefsky reached the ground. Dale snapped at the rifleman, “What’s his beef, Pinch? A possum could run circles around this guy.”

  “Beats me, Sarge.”

  “Does it? Way I hear it, Dunce Cap doesn’t spend much time in his sack at night.” He raised his voice at Cade, who at last reached the tape marker. “That it, Dunce Cap? Got a bimbo wearin’ you down? Maybe you ought to get more sleep!”

  “Sounds good to me, Sergeant!” Wincing at the pain biting into his hands, Cade descended the rope. He’d learned on day one not to slide down—and spent the rest of that day picking sisal fibers out of his palms.

  The moment Cade’s feet touched dirt, Dale was shouting again. “Double time! Pick up your feet!” Dale kept pace beside Cade and Pinch, who as training buddies were ordered to remain within arm’s reach of each other at all times, whether they were running, crawling, or climbing. As they jogged to the next section of the confidence course, Cade was dismayed to notice he was the only one of the three who had broken a sweat.

  After a couple of minutes, they arrived at the next obstacle, which consisted of parallel shallow trenches filled with cold water, then capped with perpendicular strings of barbed wire every couple of feet. There was barely enough room under the wire for a man to crawl and not be completely submerged in the mud.

  “In you go!” Dale blew a whistle, his signal for Pinch and Cade to start their crawl. As soon as they dropped to their knees, Dale bellowed, “On your backs! Feet first! Hands on your chests! Keep your heads up, and pull yourselves forward with your heels! Move!”

  Cade did as ordered, but he shot a stunned look at Pinch. “Is he serious?”