Look Behind You (The Order of the Silver Star) by Elisabeth Wolfe Read Free Book Online

only slightly less impressive.
    “What about you, dear?” Fand finally asked the Lady of the Lake, who had been working on a smaller banner for a second force whose inclusion in the Allies’ plan Kevin had just learned of. “You’ve been frightfully quiet over there.”
    The Lady of the Lake tied off her last strands of silver thread and maroon silk with a flourish, then looked down her nose at the center of the room, where they had been pretending Hitler was standing. “I knew Arthur Pendragon,” she said archly, “and you , sir, are no Arthur Pendragon.” And she cut her threads with an air of finality.
    The other ladies laughed and cheered.
    By the time the flurry of stitching and gossip and smithy was finished, O’Donoghue’s herald stood ready to take the gifts across the sea to Texas. When he returned, he reported that the contingent of Tuatha Dé who lived outside San Patricio had been very surprised by his arrival, having paid less attention to events in the Old World than to the local ranchers’ worries about ongoing violence in Mexico. But once the herald had explained his mission and passed on O’Donoghue’s instructions, the Texas Tuatha Dé had been just as enthusiastic about the plan as were the rest of their kin. They had even located the gifts’ intended recipients and begun keeping watch over them with varying levels of interest. One Matt Schneider, in particular, had elicited a highly interested remark that made O’Donoghue laugh.
    Now all O’Donoghue had to do was to wait for the mortals to make their own plans. As soon as he got word from Kevin that all was ready, he would send his herald back to Texas with the go-ahead. And then… then let the Gearmanaigh idiots tremble.
     
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    4 German
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    ~~~~~
     
    Chapte r 3
    Unfathomed
     
    December 28, 1940
     
    Chris turned out to need the holy water sooner. Orders came down from Berlin after Christmas for a massive air raid on London on the night of December 29, and an SS inspection of the same bomber group was slated for the day before—which also happened to be the new moon. Chris had a horrible hunch and manufactured an excuse to go to the airfield on the 28 th himself. The SS goons were still inspecting the bombers when he arrived, so he went straight to the bomb silo. He couldn’t have explained the pieces his subconscious seemed to be putting together for him if anyone had asked him, but he had the nagging sense that the SS warlocks had been doing something to the bombs used during the later weeks of the Blitz and that they were planning to try again now.
    Sure enough, in front of the bomb racks stood what looked like a lab bench with all kinds of jars and implements arranged on it. The set-up didn’t look too suspicious from a distance, although the placement was curious. But as Chris got closer, he could see that the implements included knives, a big copper bowl, and a thick black candle that didn’t look like it was made of beeswax or paraffin. He’d helped Mom make enough candles as a boy to know the difference, and he suspected that he didn’t want to know what this candle was made of. Then he got close enough to read the label on one of the closer jars that held something that looked like flour:
    Leichenpulver . Corpse-powder.
    Cold dread and nausea settled into Chris’ gut. He found himself flashing back to a conversation he’d had with a friend at Tech, a white missionary’s kid who’d grown up on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico. How they’d gotten onto the subject, Chris couldn’t recall, but he still remembered the grim face and hushed tones with which his friend had explained the Navajo fear of skinwalkers, powerful necromancers who practiced something called the Witchery Way. Even to talk about them much was taboo because there was no telling whether a skinwalker would be spying on the conversation through supernatural means, take offense, and place a fatal curse on the speaker. Skinwalkers were so