The Midnight Front--A Dark Arts Novel

by David Mack

  “Yup. And this is gonna hurt.”

  They sat in the six-inch-deep mud, reclined, and set their hands on their midriffs. For Cade, just keeping his head raised was torture; he felt himself straining core muscles he hadn’t known he possessed. When he started the labor of pulling himself forward through the mud using only his heels, his head swam. I’m gonna pass out for sure.

  Pistol shots cracked in the biting morning air. Bullets peppered the trenches on either side of Pinch and Cade, kicking up mud that spattered the two soldiers until the sergeant’s .45 semiautomatic clicked empty.

  Clarity restored by terror, Cade scrambled faster. His heart slammed inside his chest; his breathing sped and shallowed. In his haste to reach the end of the trench, he lifted his head a half inch too high and felt the sting of a steel barb slicing his crew-cut scalp.

  Another shot, a fresh geyser of mud in his face. “Keep your goddamn head down, Dunce Cap! And pick up the pace!”

  The motivational salvos continued until Cade and Pinch scrambled over the trench’s far side, got on their feet, and sprinted to the next section of the course. Cade heard the sergeant’s running steps behind them, catching up.

  Every nerve in Cade’s body wanted to collapse, to let fatigue claim him. He forced himself to keep moving. Then his limbs betrayed him. His legs felt like rubber, his feet like lead. He began to stumble.

  Pinch grabbed Cade’s shirt and propelled him onward. “Don’t you die on me, pal! Sarge says if you die, I’m on KP ’til the war ends.”

  Cade gasped in reply, “Wouldn’t that be a shame?”

  The skinny Ranger let go of Cade’s shirt. “Buck up, bud. All we gotta do is make it over the wall, and then we hit the mess for chow!”

  “That’s my reward? Fuck. The army needs better incentives.”

  Pinchefsky belted out a laugh, then stifled it before the sergeant heard. “Shit. You’re all right, Dunce Cap.” He weaved in closer to add in a confidential register, “You’re doin’ better than you think. Find me after chow, I’ll show you the trick to putting your M1 together. But no kidding, bud—you gotta score more sack time, or you’re not gonna make it.”

  All Cade could do was nod and keep running. He couldn’t explain to his section mates what he was doing every night. Defusing a magickal bomb? One that would explode with demons instead of fire and shrapnel? He abandoned any notion of coming clean.

  One whiff of that, and they’ll Section Eight my ass in a heartbeat.

  He and Pinch drifted apart to arm’s length as Sergeant Dale caught up to them. “Don’t let me interrupt your grab-ass, ladies! You two enjoying this morning’s run?”

  In unison, Cade and Pinch answered at the tops of their lungs, “Yes, Sergeant!”

  “Prove it! Hit that wall! Up and over! Like you mean it!”

  They sprinted and charged the twelve-foot-tall wooden barricade, from whose top dangled several ropes. Cade matched Pinch’s stride and kept the Ranger in the corner of his eye as they leaped up the wall and each took hold of a rope.

  White heat raged through Cade’s shredded palms. He blocked it out, just as he would bury the torments of a yoked demon, and reached higher, one hand over the other, as his mud-slicked boots scrambled against the wooden planks. His vision reddened with pain, he grasped the wall’s apex. Then he vaulted over and enjoyed half a second of falling.

  He landed on his feet beside Pinch, who slapped his back. “Well, fuck a duck! You made it, Dunce Cap!”

  Stunned and silent, Cade looked at the wall. More than two dozen times before he had charged that wall and failed. This was the first time he had made it over.

  Sergeant Dale stepped around the barrier, looking as stern as ever. “I’ll be damned, Dunce Cap. There might be hope for you yet. Hit the showers, then fall in for chow. Move!”

  “Yes, Sergeant!” Cade ran for the barracks, desperate to enjoy a shower and a meal before Dale changed his mind.

  The Rangers had overwhelmed him, mentally as well as physically, since the start of his training. After two weeks, he still spent most days feeling as if he were drowning. When the sergeants weren’t running him ragged or making him memorize military regulations, he was quizzed on the army’s jargon and its alphabet soup of acronyms. The more he learned, the more he discovered how much further he had to go to catch up to these men. There were dozens of weapons on which he had to qualify, and he was expected to learn to scale cliffs, perform combat first aid, and do so much more—all while keeping his boots polished and his bunk tautly made.

  Compared to this, wrangling demons was nothing.

  He and Pinchefsky cleared the woods. Down a short slope, the barracks were in sight. Warm water and hot if barely edible food were in sight.

  Pinch grinned. “Sorry you volunteered?”

  A derisive snort. “Volunteered?” He thought of Adair. “Fuck, man. I was drafted.”

  45

  FEBRUARY

  There was no hero’s welcome for Anja Kernova.

  One heavy step after another, she defied the Russian winter. Half-healed wounds plagued her from within as she trudged through knee-deep snow that numbed her feet. After weeks of icy weather and empty roads, she had returned for the first time in over a decade to the place of her birth: the isolated village of Toporok.

  Tucked against the south bank of the River Msta, the village had never been much to see. More than five hundred kilometers inland from the eastern front, Toporok was a lumber town that tolerated just enough farming to feed its handful of permanent residents.

  Anja glimpsed its ramshackle houses and its patches of clear-cut woods, and she felt comforted to see little had changed in the decade she had been away. The sharp tang of smoke from dozens of chimneys perfumed the wintry, twilight air.

  Ghosts born of her memories fleeted through dusk’s lengthening shadows. She had been thirteen years old the last time she had seen this place.

  Will anyone recognize me now?

  Many times in recent years, she had felt confounded by her own reflection. The rigors of learning the Art had taken their toll on her youth, and whatever shreds of her innocence magick hadn’t stolen had now been ripped away by the Great Patriotic War.

  Unfamiliar faces squinted at her through grimy windows. Her former neighbors looked at her as if she were a stranger.

  I’ve been away so long. Maybe I am.

  She adjusted her ruck and tugged the strap of her tool roll, which bit into her shoulder. After she had passed a dozen houses, she noticed that nearly every face she saw was female. She had spied only two exceptions: one a young boy, no more than three or four years of age; the other an old man, his hair white, his face a deep-creased map of life’s heartbreaks.

  In all of the places Anja expected to see boys committing a day’s final mischief before dinner, her searching gaze found only empty silences. Toporok, as small as it was, had given the Red Army its every man and boy who could hold a rifle or die to stop a German bullet.

  Mournful winds whipped up snow devils between dilapidated houses. Anja pushed herself toward a destination that filled her with hope and fear.

  She stopped a few paces shy of the closed door. The house looked as she had remembered it. Its paint had faded, but it was still the blue-gray of a late-winter sky. Behind its shuttered windows dwelled a glow of firelight. But there was no music now, no tunes plucked by young fingers from her family’s old balalaika.

  Intimidated by the house’s silence, Anja stood frozen in front of its door. Once she would have pushed it open and charged inside without a thought. Now, dancing shadows hinted at a blaze inside the hearth where once she had soothed her cold hands, but her guilty conscience warned her she would find no comfort within these walls.

  But I don’t know where else to go.

  Dread paralyzed her. If she left without knocking, no one would ever know she had been here. She would be free to vanish into obscurity and anonymity. There would be no questions to answer, no lies to tell. All she had to d
o was turn away and keep walking. The night would swallow her as it always had. As it always would.

  An insatiable emptiness inside her made her step forward, lift her hand, and rap her knuckles against the weathered wood and blistered paint. Then she waited.

  From the other side came the slow, muffled scrape of a body in motion. Tired steps on a wooden floor. The knob creaked as it turned, and the hinges shrilled in protest as the door was cracked open. Anxious eyes peered out at Anja. Impatience added an edge to her mother’s rasp.

  “What do you want?”

  “Mama? It’s me.… Anja.”

  Galina Kernova opened the door wide enough for Anja to see her face. It felt to Anja as if she were peering at a mirror from the future. She and her mother shared the same pale cast, raven hair, gray eyes, and elegantly arched eyebrows. They might have been twins but for their difference in age and the irregular, Y-shaped scar that dominated the left side of Anja’s face.

  Her mother scowled. “What do you want?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “No.” She started to shut the door.

  Anja struggled to keep it open. “Please.”

  “You let Piotr die.” Galina pushed her away and spat at her. “You’re dead to me.”

  She slammed the door. Heavy clacks of turning locks resounded through the thick wood. In all the years since her mother had cast her out to fend for herself, Anja had never felt so alone.

  There was little point in seeking shelter from anyone else in the village. No doubt her mother’s bile had long since poisoned them all against her. Why did I come here? Why did I think she would forgive me? That any of them would?

  Mired in loneliness, she could think of only one place to go, and of only one soul in Toporok who would receive her without judgment.

  Bereft of hope or purpose, Anja left home for the second and last time.

  * * *

  Piotr’s headstone stood entombed in ice. Anja kneeled in the snow and chipped with the pommel of her knife at the marker’s frozen shell until her younger brother’s name was visible. She sheathed the blade and pulled off one of her gloves. Her fingers traced the roughhewn letters of his name. You didn’t deserve this, little brother.

  She couldn’t silence her memory’s litany of regrets.

  If only we hadn’t blundered into the middle of a wizards’ duel.

  If only Adair, dying at Kein’s hand, hadn’t pleaded with his eyes.

  If only you hadn’t tried to interfere.

  She remembered watching Kein’s magick cut Piotr in half—just as she recalled taking up the rifle her brother had dropped, and putting three rounds through Kein’s back. It should have been enough to kill the bastard, but thanks to magick he’d escaped with his life.

  Thus it had fallen to Anja, with Adair’s somber aid, to take home the two halves of her brother’s corpse. It was a failure for which her mother had never forgiven her, and never would.

  She felt ashamed, not for the unwitting role she had played in Piotr’s death, but for indulging in the sentimental folly of thinking he could hear her lament. He is dead and gone. It is too late to ask his forgiveness. All the regret in the world cannot change that.

  Her memory of that night remained vivid and terrible. It hadn’t mattered to Galina that Anja hadn’t done the deed, or that Adair had vouched for the truth of her account, or that she herself had been wounded. All that Anja’s mother had cared about, then or now, was that her only son was dead, and Anja was the one she had chosen to blame.

  Anja rested her head against the stone and let the night settle over her. After all she had done and suffered, she had hoped for a warmer homecoming than this. She had nearly died of her wounds in Kharkov. As soon as she had been strong enough to walk again, some inchoate need inside her had turned her path homeward.

  Where else can I go?

  The war had engulfed the globe, leaving few civilized places untouched. In the neutral countries, a Russian woman alone would attract suspicion as a possible spy; she’d find no peace there. She could only hope the Red Army considered her missing in action rather than AWOL. And even if she knew where to find Adair, she couldn’t go back to him now, not after the cruel way she had abandoned him and Cade.

  She wanted to believe she could make things right with Adair, but her heart was too raw to face him. How can I atone for leaving when he needed me most? She decided the notion of redemption was folly. Is there anything left in the world worth fighting for?

  Anja had seen too much, suffered too much, to believe in illusions like love and hope—yet she couldn’t bring herself to exorcise their fading light from her soul.

  The road ahead was long and dark. Anja set her eyes on the future and kept walking. The night received her with open arms, as it always had.

  As it always would.

  46

  MARCH

  Everything the Rangers demanded of Cade was hard as hell. That was the point. Every single thing they asked of every man under their banner was damned near impossible. They wanted to know now, while they were still in Britain, which men would break under pressure, who would fold when the pain cut too deeply, who would run when the bullets flew. Better to break the weak links here than lose the entire chain on the battlefield in Europe.

  Eleven weeks. That was how long they had held Cade in their grip. For close to three months they had carved every ounce of fat off his body, chiseled away every bit of him that didn’t fit their vision of a soldier. Eleven weeks, and he was still here.

  He had made what felt like amazing progress. He could keep up with the Rangers on their daily runs and their turns through the confidence course, and he was no longer always the last to finish reassembling his rifle. He had even qualified on all of the unit’s weapons except the mortar, bazooka, and flamethrower.

  The rest of the unit still called him “Dunce Cap,” of course. That nickname had stuck since his first day, when his section leader had found out Cade needed a full remedial training regimen. It often felt to Cade as if the only smart decision he had made since his arrival was not protesting his unit moniker. The only thing the Rangers hated more than a green recruit was a complainer—and that was a sin he refused to commit.

  At least, not within earshot of Sergeant Dale.

  He and the rest of Dog Company’s First Platoon were jolted awake by the lurching halt of the locomotive that had carried them north into the Scottish Highlands. No one had seen fit to tell them where they were going or why. All that had mattered was that they had their rucks packed, their socks and ammo dry, and their asses in formation at 0430 to board their transport.

  Late-afternoon sunlight slanted through the windows, making it hard for Cade to see where they were. Before his eyes adjusted, the sergeants of First Platoon marched down the aisle thundering overlapping orders: “On your feet!” “Grab your gear!” “Muster in formation!” “Get your asses off this train!”

  Chaos ensued, a scramble to comply and escape the wrath of the sergeants. Cade and the Rangers leapt from their seats and fell over one another on their way to the exits. Each man hit the ground with both feet after a leap from the train’s elevated ladder-steps, then scurried to his place in the ranks. In less than two minutes, the entire Fifth Ranger Battalion—more than 450 men—was off the train and assembled by company, platoon, and section.

  Platoon sergeants and officers stood in the front ranks, and the company commanders and first sergeants stood with their respective HQ formations. Inspecting them while passing in a slow march were several British army officers. On the return leg of the review, the British officer in charge paused to trade words with each of the company commanders, and then with the battalion commander, while the assembled troops stood at attention and kept their mouths shut.

  At last, clear orders came down the line: “Right face! Double-time, move out!”

  Each company turned as if with one mind, like a flock of birds changing direction, then advanced down a tree-lined dirt road, past a s
ign that identified their location as the Spean Bridge railway station. In a steady rhythm, the battalion marched behind the British officer, who led them down a series of tree-lined roads that cut through an otherwise desolate parcel of the Scottish Highlands. In the distance rose rugged snowcapped mountains draped in tattered shawls of mist. Cade pulled a pack of Luckies from inside his coat, tucked a smoke into his mouth, and fired it up with his lighter.

  He offered the pack to the men on either side of him. “Wrench? Professor?”

  Privates Calvin “Professor” Dalto, the section’s know-it-all, and Walter “Wrench” Mikalunas, its top fix-it guy, both waved off Cade’s offer, but the corpsman, Private Alvin “Butterfingers” Kimball, reached over Cade’s shoulder. “Spot me one?” Cade handed him a cigarette, then passed him the lighter. After Kimball lit up and returned the Zippo, he took a drag, then smiled as he exhaled. “Thanks, Dunce Cap.”

  “Any time.”

  Cade finished his Lucky long before the battalion finished its eight-mile hike, which halted on a dirt road. He drank in the landscape of rolling hills beside a loch of dark water, all lorded over by a modern-looking fortified residence.

  Learn magick at one castle; learn war at another. Full circle.

  A British officer sporting a pencil mustache and a beret of hunter green met the Rangers with a tirade almost theatrical in its gruffness.

  “Gentlemen! Welcome to Achnacarry. I am Lieutenant Colonel Charles Vaughn. Over the next month, you men will be subjected to the most arduous training in the history of warfare. Any man who fails to keep pace will be returned to his unit.”

  Cade wondered what that would mean for him, a man with no previous unit who, as far as the United States was concerned, was already dead.

  Vaughn prattled on. “During your time here, you will live like soldiers: outdoors, in tents. We will teach you to storm beaches. Scale cliffs. Climb mountains. Defuse mines. Control occupied towns. You will learn to kill with bayonets, knives, stones, your bare hands.”

  The Brit walked at a leisurely pace in front of the battalion. His keen eyes searched the ranks, as if to ferret out any sign of weakness. “Your training will include exposure to live rounds and full-strength ordnance. You will learn to distinguish the sound of Allied weapons from those of the enemy. You will train by day, and by night. We will afflict you with every hardship and danger at our disposal. Not all of you will pass this training; some of you might not survive it. Those of you who do … will one day thank us for the hell you are soon to endure.”