Look Behind You (The Order of the Silver Star) (13 page)

“Chris.” Matt looked up, cutting Chris off. “I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“
Can’t
. It’s not you. I can’t talk about it—what it is, where I got it, from whom, anything. It’s
taboo
, don’t you understand?!”

Chris opened his mouth to say that no, he didn’t understand… but he kind of did, somehow, so he shut his mouth again with a click he hoped wasn’t audible.

Matt took a deep breath and pushed off the table to start moving slowly toward the stairs. “C’mon. Gotta call in, and then I need some grub and a good night’s sleep.”

“Matt.”

Matt paused and looked at him.

Chris walked up to Matt and pulled him into a hug. “Who the hell do you think you are, Superman?”

Matt chuckled and hugged him back. “Not a trick I plan to repeat, little brother, promise.”

“Good to see you again, bud.”

“Best surprise I’ve had all week.”

They thumped each other’s backs and broke the embrace, but Matt slid one arm around Chris’ shoulders as he turned to head toward the stairs once more. Maybe this whole thing had rattled him as badly as it had Chris.

“So what about the rest of it?” Chris asked, falling into step with Matt and trying to keep his tone light. “Those bags and everything. That classified, too?”

Matt actually smiled a little. “Nah, not in the same sense. Silver is. But the rest of it’s just old lore we’ve had locked away for who knows how long. You remember Lone Wolf?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s in charge of it all—or was; dunno if he still is now that he’s not at the lab anymore, but they gave him access if he isn’t.”

And then Matt started explaining what everything was and how it worked to break spells. Chris knew he couldn’t remember it all, but somehow, just knowing that Matt
had
an explanation that sounded even semi-rational put his mind at ease. So did glancing at the bars across the windows in the gallery they passed through downstairs and seeing some kind of etching in them that he had to assume were wards, though he didn’t quite understand why they were bronze and not steel or iron. But he didn’t dwell on it. It felt too good to have Matt here and alive and unhurt and talking his ear off.

They got back to the front hall to find the Nazi banners torn down and Silver placidly eating the portrait of Hitler that had been hanging on the wall.

“You sure that won’t give you indigestion?” Matt asked her.

She snorted and gently stamped one front foot, and both men laughed.

While Chris unsaddled her, Matt dug in one of his saddlebags and came out with a standard-looking handheld radio. Chris couldn’t help feeling mildly surprised to see him using something so mundane after the events of the last half hour, but there it was. Finding a good spot near a window, Matt pressed the button and spoke into the microphone. “Castell to Austin, come in.”

A moment later, the crackly reply came: “Austin to Castell, go ahead.” Chris recognized the voice as Frank Hamer’s.

“Objective complete. Repeat, objective complete. Resuming radio silence. Over and out.”

“Good work,” Hamer responded. “See you soon. Austin out.”

Matt blew the air out of his cheeks and brought the radio back to put it away. “Hope the Gestapo didn’t get that.”

“Oh, they probably heard,” Chris stated matter-of-factly. “But that was short enough, they won’t be able to get a fix on our location—that is, unless I missed a bug somewhere, or the guards outside go running to ’em because they can’t get in.”

“Well, we can deal with that when the time comes. We’re safe for now. This place has a kitchen, right?” The urgency of the question was illustrated by Matt’s stomach growling loudly.

Chris smiled. “Follow me.”

“What is the point of these long empty halls?” Matt groused as they headed back the way they’d just come. “Takes forever to get anywhere.”

“All depends on what you’re used to, I guess.”

“Yeah, I know. Just seems like a waste of space. Impractical.”

Chris huffed. “You want impractical, you ought to see Chambord. Nobody could live there, seriously. It’s gorgeous, but the kitchens are so far from the living quarters, the food always got cold before it could be delivered.”

Matt shook his head. “And they call this luxury.”

“I’m not arguin’. But hell, we’re just a couple of rancher’s kids from Nowhere, Texas. What do we know?”

Matt laughed.

“Speakin’ of, catch me up. How’s Dad?”

“He’s all right. Good days and bad. But he’d still find a way to thrash you if you call him that.”

Chris snorted. “Let’s end the war first. I can worry about that later.”

As they got to the kitchen and rummaged through the stores for coffee and something that wouldn’t take an hour to cook, Matt got Chris caught up on six years of Castell gossip, from the color of Sadie Perkins’ hair to whose cow got into whose barn and wrecked what bigwig’s stash of deer corn last November, and other news that wouldn’t have made it out of the Hill Country and into the wider world. It all seemed so incongruous, sitting in a French palace guarding a couple dozen German prisoners after all these years of basically trying to stop the world from ending, and talking with his brother like they were sitting at the Castell Store with no more at stake than a game of dominos. Yet this, he realized, was what he’d been yearning for every time he’d squashed his homesickness so he wouldn’t blow his cover.

It felt like freedom.

“So you and Cleo,” Matt finally said. “How ’bout it?”

Chris blinked several times rapidly, startled. “Cle—Cleopatra?”

“Sure. I mean, I know right now it’s got to be just business, but when the war’s over—she’s a beautiful woman, that’s all. Seems nice enough.” Matt shrugged.

Chris rubbed the back of his neck. “Hadn’t thought about it, honestly. I could do a lot worse, that’s for sure. What about you? You found anyone else yet?”

Matt looked down at his plate as if to hide the fact that he was blushing.

But Chris connected a couple of dots and decided to make a guess. “The woman who gave you that pendant?”

The muscle in Matt’s jaw twitched as the blush deepened, and he neither looked up nor answered. Bingo. Chris couldn’t figure out what might be worth blushing about, since Matt absolutely wasn’t the kind of man to behave shamefully toward women, but given the urgency with which he’d stressed that the subject was some kind of fairy-tale-level taboo, maybe there was something about the woman that made him bashful. Odd as it might seem to some, Matt’s landing a pipperoo of a wife in Amy had been something of a fluke; he’d often been shy around girls in high school. Come to think of it, Chris hadn’t seen Matt blush like this since he and Amy were first going together and the poor guy hadn’t been able to figure out why she liked him so much.

“You gonna marry her?”

Startled, Matt looked up, looked away and blinked a few times, then looked at Chris again with a strange little smile. “You know something? I might.”

Chris was still trying to figure out where to go from that little bombshell without backing Matt into any further verbal corners when they both heard Silver cantering down the hall toward them.

Matt’s blush vanished as he stood. “Something’s wrong.”

She whinnied, calling for him.

Matt ran to the door, and Chris followed. Silver whinnied again, and Matt whistled. She met the brothers in the hall, ears back and eyes worried.

“What is it, girl?” Matt asked.

She stamped a front foot once and looked toward the windows, ears forward.

Chris jogged to a window and looked out. The fog was still such that he couldn’t see a lot, but he could make out a number of lights moving around outside. “Something tells me those aren’t friends.”

Silver whickered her agreement.

“Gestapo?” Matt asked.

Chris nodded. “Probably. Can’t see worth a damn, but that’s my guess.”

Silver stamped a back foot.

Matt sighed. “All right, where’s a flagpole we can get to from inside?”

Chris wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “A what?”

“A flagpole. C’mon, bud, trust me.”

Chris ran a hand through his hair and sighed as he thought. “I don’t think there’s one we can get to without exposing ourselves. But they hang flags out the windows for holidays, so maybe—”

“Ladder. Where’s a ladder?”

“Uh....”

Before Chris could think of an answer, Silver nudged Matt.

Matt swallowed hard and swung himself up on her back. “Okay, girl. Pick a window.”

She trotted back down the hallway, stopping about halfway, and Chris ran after them. He arrived just as Matt stood up on her back, shoved open the blackout curtains, and pulled something out of his back pocket.

“Now what—” Chris began but stopped himself.

“Classified,” Matt replied anyway as he unfolded whatever it was into a long strip and held it stretched out between the topmost bar he could reach and the window.

Chris sighed and prayed silently.

And there they waited for several long minutes, listening to the muted commotion outside as the Germans surrounded the palace. Chris wasn’t sure if they were setting up heavy artillery or heavy magic or what, but his heart was pounding and his hair standing on end. Matt and Silver looked much calmer than he felt. Silver wasn’t moving anything but her ears, and Matt wasn’t moving at all.

Finally, the silence broke when a loudspeaker switched on with a whine of feedback. “This is the Gestapo,” a voice finally announced in German. “This building is surrounded. You have no chance to escape. We will give you five minutes to give yourselves up.”

“Jolly sporting of them, I must say,” Chris muttered, wondering why he sounded like Nimrod all of a sudden.

Matt didn’t react at all, but Silver shot him a sidelong look.

The five minutes crawled by, and the suspense was almost unbearable. Quite apart from worry about how the two of them were going to hold the entire palace on their own, Chris was dying to find out what Matt was holding.

“Your time is up!” the man with the loudspeaker finally announced.

A hail of gunfire pelted the windows like so much… well, hail.

With a flick of his wrists, Matt shook out the thing he was holding, a piece of green fabric that cascaded down behind the window bars. From where Chris was standing, it looked like a flag, although he couldn’t quite make out the design on it.

No sooner had it fully unfurled than they heard a hunting horn sound, once in the distance, once near at hand. There was a roar like a battle cry, and then the gunfire mingled with the clash of metal against metal.

“Chris,” Matt barked, making Chris jump. “Get me something to attach this with so I don’t have to stand here and hold it.”

“Right, got it.” All Chris could think of was the ball of twine he’d seen in the kitchen earlier, so he ran to get that and a pair of scissors and grabbed a stepladder while he was there. He brought them all back and cut a couple of pieces of twine, then set up the stepladder so he could hold the flag more or less in place while Matt secured it.

And then, as Chris was climbing down again, he remembered what Rommel had said about the Aggies and their banner… and the remaining puzzle pieces snapped into place so fast that he nearly fell off the ladder.

Matt jumped off Silver’s back and steadied him. “Hey, whoa. You all right?”

“Fairies,” Chris gasped. “I j—y—whu—
fairies?!
”

Matt clenched his jaw shut.

Chris grabbed hold of Matt’s arms as his head swam. “That’s why it’s all classified. That’s—Silver and—and you can sense—are you
fae-touched?
”

“Chris,” Matt pleaded. “Stop asking questions. Just stop talking. You’re about to hyperventilate.”

“And you’re not?!”

“I don’t have the luxury! And neither do you, dammit! Pull yourself together—you’re the only other backup I’ve got!”

With an effort, Chris hauled in a deep breath and held it for as long as he dared before letting it out slowly. Matt held him steady as he did the same thing several more times until the world mostly stopped spinning.

“All right?” Matt prompted.

“You’re going to marry a fairy,” Chris said, still sounding a little squeaky and woozy. “Do Mom and Dad know?”

“No. And they’re not going to. I can’t say a word. That clear?”

“Crystal.” So crystal, Chris could cut himself on it if he weren’t careful.

“Okay. I’m gonna ask you again. You all right?”

Chris nodded.

“You gonna quit bruisin’ my gun arm?”

Chris huffed a laugh and let go. “Sorry.” He still felt a little unsteady, but his head was clearing.

But Matt didn’t let go of him or stop looking him in the eye. “Chris, you’re my brother and I love you, but if you don’t stop askin’ questions, I’m gonna punch your lights out.”

Chris laughed helplessly and hugged him. “I’m sorry. I understand now.”