Ad Eternum by Elizabeth Bear Read Free Book Online Page A

door.
    “We’re not immortal. We are just unputrefying—at least, until it all gets too much for us.” The wampyr snapped his fingers by way of illustration. “Then, fzzt!”
    “It’s not possible he’s really St. Germain?”
    The wampyr smiled sadly. “Do you know how many St. Germains I have met? Every one of them wants to be someone he is not.”
    “And he did not know you?”
    “I lied,” the wampyr said. “There was a Monsieur Gosselin in Paris contemporaneous with Giacomo Casanova and the alleged St. Germain, who claimed to be a son of the famous wampyr hero of Louis Quatorze’s court. But it was not me. It was…” he waved a hand in the direction that Ragoczy had taken “…an impersonator, if you will.”
    “Huh,” said Damian. “I never before fully appreciated the drawbacks of being a culture hero.” He ate a few more bites of pasta. “I don’t care what Ragoczy thinks. Am I being too forward for you ?”
    The wampyr steepled his fingers. “Anyone you shock in the Hotel Aphatos came here to be shocked.”

5.
     
    While Damian finished his dinner, the wampyr reached across the table to retrieve Ragoczy’s abandoned copy of the Manhattanite . It was a full-sized paper, not the tabloid he had anticipated. When he flipped it open, though, his fingers stuck against the surface as if it were printed on fly paper.
    He had anticipated a grainy, flare-daubed, underexposed print from his flight from the cameras on the previous morning. Instead, his fingertips brushed the stark, exquisite jaw of a young woman whose pallor and stern bearing made her seem a heroic, martial statue hewn of ice. She did not look a day over seventeen.
    She wore a plain traveling suit in some fabric that read grey on film, but it might as well have been a uniform. In the photograph, her hair seemed white where it bounced against broad shoulders. The wampyr knew it was ice-blonde, though. As his fingertips traced those pale waves, he felt the stillness of the hunt steal over him. Expression dropped from his face; he felt the effort it took to maintain the semblance of humanity slip away.
    Gently, he turned the paper, and read the caption that lay above the fold.
     
    Former Sturmwolfstaffel Hauptsturm-führerin Ruth Grell arrives at the New Amsterdam Port Authority on Tuesday evening.
     
    Above her face, the headline screamed across three columns:
     
    Prussian Wolf In America
     
    He flipped to below the fold and read of the controversial—nay, notorious —Captain Grell, an English Jew who some said had gone into the service of the enemy, and who some said had infiltrated their innermost ranks until she became a member of the Prussian Chancellor’s personal guard—whereupon she had led a successful assassination plot against him and several of his top advisors.
    She had stood trial in Prussia, and been condemned to an extermination camp as a traitor, a Jew, and a Lesbian—but the sentence had not come to its inevitable fruition before the end of the war. Whereupon she had stood trial in Nuremburg, and been acquitted, in large part because of testimony recorded against her in her Prussian trial by a woman the wampyr knew had been her lover, Sturmwolfstaffel Obersturmführerin Adele Kneeland. Grell had never said as much to anyone, even as Lieutenant Kneeland condemned her—and Kneeland had refused to testify at the second trial. She’d been sentenced to a prison term for her service to the Prussians, but had only served a half-year of it before she was deemed a conscript under new rules and pardoned for her not particularly serious crimes. She’d spent her war in Berlin, and had taken no part in the storied atrocities of the Prussian horde.
    As far as the wampyr had heard, Kneeland was living out a quiet retirement in Tsarist Germany, which was Prussia no longer. He had lost track of Captain Grell, as she must have intended, despite an offer he had once left with her to come and find him when the war was done.
    The