Angel of the Somme: The Great War, Book 1

by Terri Meeker

  As she pressed further into the remnants of the station, she heard the voices more distinctively.

  “Help! Someone, please!” The cries came from behind a veil of smoke.

  She wove past some shattered benches and tripped, nearly sending herself sprawling headlong into a burning beam. When she looked down to see what she’d nearly fallen over, she saw it was a human torso, in uniform, completely drenched in blood. She fought down a wave of horror and steeled herself.

  Lily headed toward the eastern wall, to where the flames were brightest. She stepped around several bodies. Her stomach twisted when she saw the ruined, bloody skirt of a VAD uniform. Lily resisted looking at the girl’s face. Tomorrow she would have the luxury to mourn. The victims needed her now.

  When she cast a glance to her side, she could no longer see the matron through the smoke. Undaunted, she moved past the rubble and pushed farther east.

  She stepped past another dead soldier and around a partially collapsed wall when she saw him. A figure with dark curly hair, dressed in hospital blues, dragging himself through the burning rubble.

  Sam.

  She shook her head. It had to be a trick of the smoke. She squinted through the acrid air but he was still there, still crawling toward someone. She stumbled forward a few steps before she realized who it was that Sam was struggling to reach.

  Rose.

  Oh god, no. Rose.

  Lily froze.

  Rose was impaled by a cruel staff of metal—spearing directly through her torso and pinning her to the ground. Somehow, impossibly, Rose was still alive. She reached out to Sam, her arm so white as to appear ghostly through the smoke.

  This was too awful to be real. It couldn’t be.

  Lily tried to move, willed her throat to cry out to them. She could only watch in horrified silence. Though it only took seconds for Sam to reach Rose, it felt to Lily as though time had somehow been suspended.

  Sam reached out his hand toward Rose. The moment their fingers touched, a terrific light flooded the remnants of the station. Lily ducked on instinct, her body primed for another bomb blast. The explosion of light faded in an instant, however, and Lily blinked, readjusting to the light—to see only Rose, her body now slumped over, her eyes glassy and lifeless.

  “No!” Lily screamed.

  She began to run to the broken wall, toward the flames and to where Rose lay. A firm hand on her forearm stopped her.

  “No, Miss Curtis.” Matron Marshall.

  “It’s Rose,” Lily screamed.

  “I know it’s Rose.” The matron’s expression was pained. “But she’s gone. Even if she weren’t, you wouldn’t be able to save her.”

  “Please, no.” Lily struggled against the woman’s grasp.

  “You cannot. We need to help those we can still save.” The matron stepped aside and gestured at the stretcher she’d been carrying. An unconscious soldier lay on it and one of the ambulance drivers knelt at the other end. “Accompany Private Collins to the ambulance and return to the hospital. I’ll need you to ready a great deal of picric acid for our burn victims.”

  Lily only stared at her.

  “I’m giving you a direct order, Miss Curtis. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lily said numbly.

  Before Lily could grasp the stretcher, the matron reached over and squeezed Lily’s hand in a painful grip. “The moment the fire brigade makes it safe, we’ll attend to Miss Lewis’s body. You know we will.”

  Lily nodded, then hoisted the stretcher and followed Collins through the rubble.

  Rose was gone. Dead. It couldn’t be, yet she’d seen it with her own eyes. And somehow, Sam had been there too. He couldn’t have arrived before them. He’d been in his hospital bed when they left.

  It was impossible.

  She gripped the stretcher and wove a path through the rubble and the dead until they reached the village square. The little patch of ground that made up triage was already crowded with wounded. The stretcher bearers had been busy, loading ambulances and the first two were ready to leave for New Bedlam. Lily loaded the wounded soldier into the back, then climbed into the passenger’s seat in a kind of numb haze.

  When they pulled up to the front door, Sister Cudahee took charge, directing the unloading of the wounded. Since the stretcher bearers had the situation in hand, Lily ran through the front door and rushed to the officers’ ward.

  Please let Sam be safe in his bed. Losing Rose is enough. Let this whole awful night be a dream.

  She tore open the door and her eyes immediately went to Sam and Gordy’s corner.

  Gordy sat on the edge of his bed, looking worried. Sam’s bed was empty.

  She ran straight down the aisle to Gordy. “What happened? Where is he?” She struggled to keep her voice from screaming.

  “Went to the back, just after you left.” Gordy swallowed. “I went after him. Thought he must have run after you lot. I wasn’t fast enough. I couldn’t find him.”

  Lily’s heart thundered. She ran to the back of the ward, shoved through the door and scrambled down the hall. It didn’t make sense—that he’d try to go to the station by the rear door. It made even less sense that he’d somehow managed to arrive there before her.

  But you know the truth of it, Lily. You know exactly how he managed to get to the station before you.

  She ran down the hall, turning her head as she passed the staff wing—no sign of him there. She skidded to a halt when the hall dead-ended into the small surgery hall.

  Directly in front of her, in Surgery Room #2, a light shone just around the edges of the door. She twisted the knob and opened the door.

  Blue clad legs lay on the floor on the far side of the surgery table. She dashed around the side to see—Sam, still as death. He was on his back, lying on a small pile of linen. An abandoned ocular examination light lay beside him, its beam shining directly into Lily’s eyes. He was deadly pale and covered in a sheen of sweat.

  She dropped to her knees and snatched up his wrist, checking for a pulse.

  Please, oh please, Sam. Don’t do this. Please not now.

  He lived. His pulse was thready, but his heart was still doing its work.

  She leaned her cheek against his forehead. His breathing was shallow but his skin was cool. But he was pale, so very pale. As pale as Rose had been.

  He was alive—and more than that, he’d been telling the truth all along.

  He’d risked his life to save Rose and yet somehow, something had gone terribly wrong. If Rose died, did that mean Sam would die too?

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Sam’s head screamed, filled with agony. He had little strength to fight against it. He couldn’t open his eyes. He inhaled and braced himself against the onslaught.

  A sound slipped into his head, just behind the wailing banshee of pain. It was a voice, gentle at first, but growing louder.

  “Wake up, Sam. Come on, please wake up.”

  He forced his eyes open and his head yowled in protest. He blinked, trying to force the world into focus, but the walls of New Bedlam swung back and forth, as though he was a sailor on unsettled seas, everything a blur. An uneasy humming buzzed around his ears.

  “Sam.” The voice called to him again.

  You know this voice. She called you out of darkness before.

  He squeezed his eyes shut tightly, then opened them slowly, willing them to focus.

  Lily. Seated in her chair by his bed watching him carefully, as though her glance might hurt him if she looked too closely. She clasped his hand tightly.

  “I didn’t think you were coming back to me this time,” she said, as tears overflowed from her pretty green eyes.

  “Sorry, Lily.” He formed the words carefully. Even his tongue moved with great effort. “I had to…” He tried to squeeze her hand, but each movemen
t required energy and his battery was completely dry.

  “I understand, Sam. I do. And I believe you now.”

  “But I broke my word do you.” He coughed.

  “I know,” she said.

  With every bit of effort he could muster, he squeezed her hand. “Forgive me, Lily.”

  “There is nothing to forgive, Sam. I can’t be angry because I can’t be sure I wouldn’t have done the same thing. If I’d seen Rose in such trouble, I’d have wanted to help. I’d have done anything.” She squeezed his hand. “The important thing is that you tried.”

  “But Rose is all right?” His voice cracked on her name.

  Lily’s chin began to quiver, her tears spilled down her cheeks. She looked down at her lap.

  “How is Rose?” he asked, his voice shaking.

  Lily didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She just looked at him with a tear-stained face and shook her head.

  “No!” He tried to sit up in bed and a fist of pain slammed him back against the mattress. “I got to her in time. I healed her!”

  Lily’s tears splashed down her cheeks freely. Her eyes held such sorrow it tore his chest open with the ease of an artillery shell.

  “Rose is fine. She has to be. It was just like it was with the others. The same feeling, the same light. It can’t be. She cannot be dead! She thanked me, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Captain Dwight?” A low voice interrupted them. Sister Cudahee. “I must ask you to restrain yourself, sir.”

  “You don’t understand,” he began, trying and failing once again to pull himself up.

  “Sir, if you don’t calm down, I’ll be forced to sedate you.”

  As he looked up at the stern woman, he noticed that she truly looked exhausted. Sam forced a lungful of air into his chest.

  “I apologize, Sister. I shall do my best to…behave more appropriately.”

  Sister Cudahee nodded, then moved away.

  Sam looked up to Lily and felt his heart shrivel a little, curling up inside his chest like a burnt ember. He’d seen her weary before, exhausted even. It didn’t compare to her now. She looked, for the first time since he’d known her, frail. Broken.

  He shook his head. “Rose is dead?”

  Lily nodded her confirmation.

  “How could that be? It was just like the other times. How could I be so wrong?”

  She tilted her head toward him. “You weren’t wrong, Sam. You were trying to help.”

  “If I didn’t save her—I was wrong.”

  “Wrong about what?” She glanced guiltily across the aisles to Sister Cudahee and scooted closer. “You weren’t wrong about being able to visit the wounded, Sam.”

  He blinked and felt a slash of pain.

  “I saw you, Sam. I saw you there—reaching out to Rose.”

  “What did you see?” he croaked. “Tell me exactly what you saw.”

  “You, crawling through the rubble, reaching out to Rose. She was dying—there was nothing you could have done. Nothing any of us could have done. Her wounds were too great.”

  “And then what?” he prodded.

  “And then? Nothing I suppose. There was a flash of light and you disappeared,” she said. “Rose was gone then. I tried to go to her, but the matron stopped me.” She squeezed his hand tightly.

  “But before I touched Rose, she was alive, wasn’t she? And she was speaking to me.”

  Lily wavered for a moment. “She was mortally wounded, Sam.”

  The truth came to Sam in an instant. It didn’t snap into place, like the final piece of a puzzle, but fell down on his head, like the ceiling of a bombed train station.

  “No. Oh, god no. I’ve been wrong about it all along. Wrong from the start. What a great, bloody, arrogant fool I’ve been.”

  “Sam?” Lily leaned down, her lips against his ear, whispering warm comfort. “Please don’t. You need to calm down.”

  Sam struggled to keep his voice low, but it was impossible. “The devil didn’t come to me with pointed horns and an evil smile. He came as my heart’s desire. Don’t you see?”

  “I don’t. What are you talking about?” Lily pulled back, a look of fear in her eyes.

  “I haven’t been the Angel of Mercy. I’ve been the Angel of Death.”

  “What?” She shook her head.

  “My trips to the trenches? They’ve been real. Everything about it has been real. The one thing I got wrong was the most important thing of all. I haven’t been healing people. I’ve been killing them.”

  “No, Sam. That can’t be.”

  “Then why couldn’t you find any of the men I’d ‘saved’? Buchanan, O’Reilly. You were looking for them on the wounded lists. You should have been checking under killed in action.”

  “You’ve got it wrong.” Her tears had begun anew, flowing down her cheeks to splash on her white apron—leaving dampened accusatory stains.

  “Miss Curtis?” Sister Cudahee interrupted them. Her firm voice came from the head of Sam’s bed.

  “I’m sorry, Sister.” Lily’s hands were on her lap. She twisted them into knots, and would not look up.

  Sister Cudahee stepped around Lily and leaned down to Sam. She held a syringe in one hand. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist on a sedative.”

  Sam was too weary, too sick at heart to protest, to move. He closed his eyes.

  Sister Cudahee slid a needle into his arm and depressed the plunger.

  How could he have been so wrong about a thing? No wonder the Irishman, Daly, had approached him so cautiously. He’d seen Sam in action, had a sense of what he truly was.

  A dark cloud quickly filled his mind and he slipped inside its easy relief like a worm hiding from the sun.

  When Sam opened his eyes again, it was early morning and it seemed like a perfectly normal day. His respite only lasted a few seconds before it all came falling down around him. The previous day’s events—the bombing, Rose’s death and his hand in it.

  He squeezed his lids closed, longing for it to be a dream. When he opened them, he was still on the ward, still in his nightmare. He tried to move his arm, but it wouldn’t budge. Looking down, he saw that someone had reattached the restraints while he’d been sleeping.

  He looked over to see Gordy staring at the ceiling, his head wobbling steadily, like a dog’s tail. Gordy’s expression was so pitiful that Sam could barely endure looking at the lad.

  The whole room seemed to share Gordy’s frame of mind. A somber mood draped the ward like a funeral shroud. When the men spoke it was in hushed tones. Looking out the window, it seemed the earth itself mourned their loss. The sky was gray and drizzled rain.

  One lone, frazzled VAD scurried about, delivering medication and changing bandages. The morning breakfast trays remained scattered about the room, a low priority in this new, post-bomb world.

  Sam realized that he’d been looking for Lily instinctively. He shuddered. He couldn’t imagine what she must think of him. She wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of him now that she knew the truth, knew him for the murderer he truly was.

  His headache throbbed behind his eyes with a pulsing rhythm. With each two-stroke beat, the word repeated inside his mind: killer, killer, killer.

  All those times he’d gone to the trenches, he’d only casually considered, “Why me?” He’d only paused briefly at the wonder of his gift, before rushing off to use it, like a child wielding a howitzer.

  Now that he knew his real role with the wounded, the question of “why him” plagued his mind. Was it simply a fluke? Was it due to some peculiarity specific to his injury, much like the man Gordy had told of, with the bit of metal driven through his head? Was it a punishment of the gods?

  And in the end, what difference did it make? However the dark gift had come to him, he’d been the one to use it. Over and over ag
ain. He’d taken so many lives.

  Killer. Killer. Killer.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Lily trudged down the back hallway, trailing a hand along the wall. She was dead on her feet. Though she’d gone forty-eight hours without sleep in the past, she’d never known true weariness before now. She felt as thin and fragile as an egg shell. She’d crack with the slightest pressure.

  The zeppelin raid on the train station had taken seventeen lives. Most of the dead had been injured soldiers arriving on the hospital train. Five of the lost were from New Bedlam. Rose and Sister Newell were among them.

  The attack was a mortal wound to New Bedlam. Everyone sensed it, staff and patients. They shuffled around in a state of shock. It wasn’t just the loss of so many. The hospital would be useless without a functioning rail station. Though New Bedlam still had a heartbeat, her death was only a matter of time.

  Lily entered the officers’ ward and cast an eye to the corner of the room where Sam and Gordy lay. She could see the outlines of their silhouettes in the early morning light, but neither of them yet stirred. Sam was likely still in the drugged sleep that he’d been in since he’d awoken after the bombing.

  She checked the sterilized cabinet to find it empty, as she expected. She’d need to organize a group for autoclave duty—another task on her endless list. Since the previous day’s events, Lily had shuffled from emergency to emergency in a numb fog along with the rest of the staff.

  Before she would be needed for breakfast duty, she made her way to the matron’s office for the moment she’d been dreading. The matron had suffered a terrible leg burn while tending to the wounded and would be bedridden for a few days. Lily didn’t fear being discovered. She feared confirming Sam’s bizarre fear when she read through the list of the dead.

  She gripped a little slip of paper tightly. On it, she had written the dates of Sam’s seizures along with the names of the men he’d purported to heal—purported to kill, as he now claimed. She shook her head. It was too impossible. Sam was wrong. Distraught from Rose’s death. There was some other, more reasonable explanation. There had to be.