Awakening (Birth of Magic #1)

by P. T. Dilloway

  “You said it’s an air raid shelter?”

  “Yes. To protect him from bombers.”

  I nodded at this. “I think it’s time to give the system a little test then.”

  ***

  I went over the plan, such as it was, with Bernice. We set out along the hallways again, until we found a low-ranking Nazi officer. I grabbed his arm, just about throwing him against the wall. “You, minion, we have important news from the Chairwoman. Take us to your supervisor.”

  “Excuse me?”

  I nodded to Bernice. She pushed her chest out, trying to project an air of authority. “You heard her, worm. We have important information from the Chairwoman. She’s asked us to bring it to the commander of the Luftwaffe personally.”

  “I can’t do that,” the young officer stammered.

  “You know who the Chairwoman is, don’t you?” Bernice growled. “If you do not do as we say, we will slice you into pieces and feed you to the Fuhrer’s dogs.”

  The officer gulped at this. “This way,” he said.

  He led us upstairs, to a set of offices for the Luftwaffe’s central command. It looked so ordinary inside that for a moment I thought the officer might be lying to us. Then he ushered us into a more ornate office, where a general sat behind a desk. “What is the meaning of this intrusion?” the general snapped.

  The younger officer saluted and then said, “These women are from the Chairwoman. They say they have important news for your ears only, sir.”

  The general turned his glare on us. “Who are you?”

  “I’m the Chairwoman’s personal assistant. She didn’t want to trust anyone else with this information.”

  “What information?”

  “The French are sending bombers for a surprise attack.”

  “The French? Our intelligence has told us nothing of this.”

  “The Chairwoman’s sources say the bombers will be here soon.”

  “I will have to confirm this—”

  Before he could reach for the telephone, I used a Static Charge to hurl him against the wall. Then I spun around to chop the stunned younger officer in the throat. While he was doubled over, I took the Luger from his holster. This I aimed at the general as he recovered. “The only call you’re going to make is to sound an air raid alert. Understand?”

  “But—”

  “If you don’t, I’m going to start putting bullets in all of your lower extremities.” I shifted my aim to between the general’s legs. “Starting there.”

  For just about any man that was more than enough of a threat. The general was no exception to this. He picked up the phone and began barking into it. “I don’t care! Sound the alarm! Get all senior staff down to the shelter!” After the general put the phone down, he lamented, “I’ll be hanged for this when they find out.”

  I shrugged. “At least you’ll still be a man when they do it,” I said. I motioned to him with the gun. “Let’s go. You’re going to show us how to get into this air raid shelter.”

  ***

  I had been in enough castles in my time that I expected there to be a secret passage opened by triggering a hidden lever. There wasn’t anything that elaborate. The general led us down to the first floor. Military officers mingled with support staff as they all ran to find cover while the alarms whooped. The general went through an office, where someone had unlocked a door. Behind it was a concrete room with a stairway leading down.

  I held on to the general with one arm while I turned to face Bernice. “It’s time for you to go, Bernice.”

  “What? But we haven’t found her yet.”

  “She’s down here. I know it.”

  “Aunt Stephanie, please—”

  “It’s too dangerous for you down there.”

  “I can handle it.”

  I smiled at her. She had proven herself so far, but I couldn’t let her do it. “I’m sorry, Bernice. I can’t risk your life. I couldn’t do that to Alexis.” I patted her shoulder with my free hand. “Go and see your grandmother. She’ll be glad to see you.”

  “How will I find her?”

  “Just go back home and wait.” She stared at me for a moment, but I think she finally understood what I meant.

  “I will, Aunt Stephanie.” She gave me a hug that was awkward with me holding on to the general. “I love you.”

  “I love you too, kid. Thanks for everything.”

  “Good luck with your daughter.”

  “Thanks.” I knew I was going to need all the luck I could get.

  I watched Bernice hurry away from the office. I would have to hope she’d be smart enough to get out of Germany on her own. So long as the Chairwoman didn’t know Bernice had betrayed her, she could make it into France and from there our old estate. I hoped too Mrs. Deveaux wouldn’t be too tough on the girl.

  Once she was gone, I shoved the general towards the entrance. “Let’s go hotshot.”

  We descended the staircase, into an antechamber made of concrete. The air smelled relatively fresh, not the normal dank odor you get from water, human sweat, and mold mingling together. As Bernice said, they must have finished this recently. “What do you plan to do with me?” the general asked.

  “Nothing. You’re just going to take a little nap.” I could have used a spell to put him under, but I felt better hitting him in the head with the butt of the Luger. He went down instantly, his entire body going slack. I dragged him into an adjoining room that for the moment was completely empty.

  Then it was time to find my daughter.

  Chapter 25

  The Fuhrer was not among the officers in the bunker. He wasn’t in the Chancellery when the alarms went off. Too bad or I could have ended the Nazi regime right then. Instead I went room by room, punching out a few odd generals, admirals, and other big wigs as I went. There wasn’t any sign of Celia or Ethan as I made my way through the honeycombing chambers of the bunker, but I knew I’d find her eventually. Not as if she could go anywhere.

  It didn’t really come as a surprise to find the last door I came to locked. This was it. Celia would be on the other side. I could only imagine what condition Ethan would be in at this point. If she’d gotten what she wanted from him, she might have already slit his throat and cut him into pieces. Or he might still be alive but bloodied and bruised as Celia tried to extract the information from him.

  There was only one way to find out for sure. I used a Static Charge spell against the door. The heavy door shook, but it didn’t open. I repeated the spell three times, until it finally caved in. As it did, I threw myself to the side of the door. I was just in time to avoid getting a knife in the throat.

  “You made it after all,” Celia called out. “The Chairwoman should have known those three couldn’t hold you.”

  “It’s over, Celia. Let Ethan go.”

  “It’ll be over when I slit your throat and use your blood to repaint this room,” she said. I wished I had a spell to see through the concrete walls so that I might see what she was doing. Instead, I had to get down on my knees and then roll across to the other side of the doorway.

  This brief glimpse of the room showed that Celia had taken up residence in Hitler’s bedroom. There was a king-sized bed and an ornate writing desk. Ethan sat at the desk, working. I couldn’t tell what condition he was in, but thinking back to the train in Boston, Celia might have used the same potion on him. Or she might have used old-fashioned coercion, either with her knives or with her body. Despite everything that had happened, I knew Ethan would still be vulnerable to Celia’s charms.

  As for Celia, I caught only a glimpse of her head behind a dresser. She probably had a few more of those black crystal knives of hers and maybe some other weapons as well. She would wait for me to come storming in and then she would kill me.

  “I don’t want to fight you, Celia.”

  “Then surrender.”

  “I can’t. You know that.”

  “I can’t surrender either. I guess we’re at an impasse.” Her
voice clearly indicated she knew she was on the better end of the standoff.

  I did have another card to play. “Celia, what do you remember about your mother?”

  “Are you Freud now? You want to psychoanalyze me?”

  “I want to know how you became like this. I want to help.”

  “My parents didn’t do anything to me,” she said. “They died when I was little. Smallpox. I nearly died myself.”

  “But the Chairwoman saved you.”

  “No. I just got better. I’ve always been tough.” She waited a moment and then said, “Are we done reminiscing now?”

  “Not yet. Bernice, Vivien, and Lorain, they’re Alexis’s granddaughters. You know that, don’t you?”

  “So what?”

  She wasn’t going to make this easy; I didn’t expect anything less from my daughter. “Listen, the Chairwoman chose you for the same reason as them. You have a witch’s blood in your veins. That’s how you can make potions.”

  “Are you saying my mother was a witch?”

  “Yes.” I took a deep breath. Now was the time to finally say it. “The woman you knew as your mother wasn’t really. She and her husband adopted you when you were a baby. They promised never to tell anyone, especially you. There was a lawyer in Paris named Souray who set it all up. Your mother—your real mother—agreed to turn you over to them. She wanted you to have a good life—a normal life.”

  “How do you know about that? Did your precious sister give me away? I was one too many for her?”

  “No.” I took another deep breath that was hard because my throat was seizing up. “Celia, you’ve seen how alike we look. Don’t you wonder why that is?”

  “Coincidence. There are a lot of redheads in the world.”

  “Goddamnit, Celia, stop being so pigheaded. I’m your mother. I gave you away to your adopted family.”

  There was silence from inside the bedroom, except for Ethan’s pen. He must be in another of those trances if he kept working through all of this. I braced myself for what Celia might do. I thought she might scream at me, or maybe come charging out of the room.

  The last thing I expected was a grenade to come rolling out of the bedroom, stopping right in front of me. I barely had time to hurl it down the hallway, where it ricocheted off the walls and then exploded. I threw myself to the floor as the concrete roof overhead shook. I felt pieces of the concrete from down the hall pelt me, but the roof over me held up.

  When I sat up, Celia stood over me, a knife in either hand. Her face burned red with heat, but the look in her eyes was far more damning. “Hello, Mother,” she whispered.

  ***

  I rolled to the right before she threw the knife in her left hand. But she’d already figured on that and had the other knife flying towards me. It got me in the shoulder, going clean through me, into the concrete wall. My scream echoed off the walls. “I’m sorry, Celia. You have to understand—”

  “No, you need to understand what I endured thanks to you.” She fetched the other two knives she’d thrown at me and then brandished those so I knew she’d stick me in the other shoulder—or somewhere more vital—if I tried anything. “That’s right, your little plan didn’t work out. Not like you wanted it to. Or maybe it did. Maybe you wanted to put me through Hell; your little mistake.”

  “No, Celia. I didn’t want to hurt you. I loved you.”

  “Loved me so much you sent me away.”

  “I wanted you to have a real life. I didn’t want you to end up like me.”

  “I didn’t, did I, Mother?”

  “No, you became worse than I could ever be. You’re a monster.”

  “I’m not the monster here. You’re the one who gave me away. You’re the one who let him take me in. You could have saved me, but you didn’t. You let him do those things to me. Those awful things.”

  “Celia—”

  “Shut up! I’m going to tell you everything he did to me. That way before you die, you can know what kind of a heartless beast you really are.”

  I could only sit there and listen while she described what her adopted uncle had done to her. Him and his wife had taken Celia in after her original family died. Her uncle owned a farm about a hundred miles north of Paris. They were a well-respected couple in the community, seemingly ideal parents for a little girl.

  The first sexual abuse came when Celia was seven. It was after her birthday party, when her uncle took her upstairs for bed. He reached beneath her nightgown to touch her between the legs. She was too young to understand, but she knew it was something bad when he made her promise not to tell her aunt about it.

  From there the abuse escalated. He fucked her the first time when she was eleven, not long after her first period. He’d been touching her for years, but when Celia’s aunt went out of town to visit a sick relative, he plied Celia with wine and then carried her upstairs, to his bedroom. Young and drunk, she didn’t really understand what was happening to her.

  It continued for another three years, her uncle fucking her whenever he got the chance. Celia never told anyone, too afraid and too ashamed about it. If her aunt knew anything, she never mentioned it.

  The end of it was predictable enough. Just as with my affair with Marco, it was inevitable that with all that sex Celia would get pregnant. She didn’t know for a few months, thinking that she just had a sour stomach that caused her to throw up in the mornings. But after five months she was beginning to show.

  Her uncle was clever about the whole thing. When she told him, he beat her savagely until she made a phony confession in front of her aunt, pinning the whole thing on a servant boy. He beat the servant within an inch of his life until he too confessed. He was sent away with a healthy bribe for his troubles while Celia was locked up in her bedroom like a prisoner.

  I couldn’t help but be proud of my daughter’s escape. She worked for months to secret away sheets that she could fashion into a makeshift rope. When her aunt and uncle went off to Christmas Mass, she put her plan into action. Despite being eight months pregnant, she climbed down the sheet ladder. Not knowing anything about how to hitch up a carriage and unable in her condition to ride on the back of a horse, she set out on foot.

  But it was cold that night. There were already several inches of snow on the ground and more coming down, a blizzard that cut short the Christmas Mass. Celia knew she wasn’t going to get another chance, so she kept going, into the forest. She hoped to find somewhere to shelter for the night, a cave or cluster of rocks where she could get out of the snow.

  She didn’t find anything except more snow and more cold. She had only an ill-fitting jacket and shoes that couldn’t keep out the water. Her feet went numb first, followed by the rest of her extremities. When she couldn’t take it anymore, she dropped into the snow, thinking she was going to die.

  “Then she found me.”

  “The Chairwoman.”

  “That’s right. She found me and she took me to a hospital.”

  “What about the baby?”

  “Your grandchild? What do you think happened? I went into labor while I was still unconscious. When I woke up, she told me that he had died.”

  “She couldn’t save him?”

  “He was too little and weak for a potion, she said.”

  I nodded, though I’d have to check with Alexis about that. “Then she began training you to be an assassin, just like the others.”

  “Not like the others. I was the first. The others came later.”

  I nodded, no longer caring about the pain in my shoulder from the knife. More horrors unleashed thanks to me. If I hadn’t been so selfish to betray my sister, if I hadn’t been so frightened that I gave her away, then none of this would have happened. “I’m so sorry, Celia,” I said, hanging my head. “You can go ahead and kill me. I understand. I deserve it for what I’ve done to you. But first, do something for me.”

  “A blindfold and cigarette? There’s no smoking in the bunker.”

  “No. Let Ethan go. This i
sn’t his fault. It’s my fault. His only crime has been loving you. Let him go.”

  “I can’t do that, Mother. Not until he’s finished.”

  “Don’t do it for me, or even for him. Do it for yourself. I know you still love him.”

  “I don’t love anyone. Not anymore. I’m a monster, like you said. A soulless, heartless monster. Just like you.”

  “No you aren’t.” I reached out for her, but she backed away from my touch. “You’re just a hurt little girl who doesn’t know who she is. You’ve done these things for the Chairwoman because you think she cares about you. But she doesn’t. You’re just a pawn to her. She’s using you to get what she wants.”

  I had hoped I could reach something inside of her, but instead I got a knife in the other shoulder. She smiled as I screamed. “How dare you,” she growled. “You think you can come here and tell me what to do? You think you can turn me against the Chairwoman? She’s the only one who’s ever given a damn about me. She gave me everything: a home, a life. I was a hurt little girl when she found me, but she made me into a woman, a strong woman who doesn’t need you or anyone else.”

  She probably would have killed me then, but Ethan saved my life. He came toddling to the doorway, his eyes unfocused as he moved. He was more of a zombie at the moment than Andre back in New Orleans. “I’m finished,” he said.

  Celia turned from me to put a hand on his shoulder. “Good. Now I can dispose of both of you.”

  ***

  Ethan didn’t put up a fuss as she tied his wrists to a chair in the bedroom. I couldn’t put up much of a fuss either, not with a knife stick out of each shoulder. Fresh waves of pain almost made me black out as she tied me up to another chair. She sat us next to each other and then planted herself in front of us, a Luger in her hand. “Which one wants it first?”

  “Kill me, but leave Ethan alone,” I said.

  I saw Ethan blinking next to me as he had after I vanished him somewhere. The potion Celia had given him was wearing off now that he’d done what she wanted. “Celia?” he whispered.