Page 41

Twenty-Two

They were taken to the Citroen and forced into the back seat, with Pierre and Roger in the front.

Pierre drove, while Roger sat in the passenger seat, one hand pressed to his face, the other holding Rebecca and Henry at gunpoint.

Rebecca felt a surge of dread at every turn and bump in the road, watching Roger’s clumsy finger as it fondled the trigger.

“So”—Roger licked his lips, the gun bouncing in his hand as they drove—“Claire won’t do it herself after all, eh? No stomach for it?”

“Her stomach’s fine.” Pierre gestured toward Rebecca. “She and this one have history is all.”

Roger’s face twisted into a shape Rebecca had seen many times before, an unmistakable marriage of revulsion and arousal that had become all too familiar to her.

“I knew it.” He curled his lip in disgust, even as his eyes wandered over her body.

She understood what came next. She and Henry would be executed, their corpses left with a note identifying them as collaborators, a warning to others.

She should have been terrified, but as the car rattled through the darkness, black trees passing in and out of their headlights, all she could seem to feel was an incredible flush of rage.

She stared at Roger with a look of flat contempt. “He was a moron, you know. Your cousin.”

Roger’s smug smile turned to a frown. “You shut your mouth, whore.”

“The Gestapo told me he didn’t last three hours under questioning. Can you believe that? I bet even you would have lasted longer than that.”

“Rebecca…” Henry said quietly, but she was beyond caring.

“You can call me a traitor all you want, but I know the truth. And the truth is that André was a coward who betrayed everyone he knew just to save his own skin, and still he managed to die like an idiot. Do you think they shot him? Or did he just drop dead of shame?”

Roger pressed the gun against Rebecca’s forehead. She felt the cold metal grinding into her skin, making her guts lurch, but she did not flinch.

“The only reason he didn’t betray you, too, is that deep down he knew you’re not a real maquisard.

Just a boy, hiding in the woods, playing with your guns and wearing that stupid -looking beret, pretending you’re a big man while the rest of us fight and die for France.

Hell, even André managed to die for his country, and he was an imbecile. ”

“Hey,” Pierre said calmly. “ You , shut up. Roger, put that thing away. If you shoot them inside the car, I’m going to make you clean up the brains by yourself.”

Rebecca found herself fighting the urge to laugh—a joyless, reflexive impulse she had seen before in those about to die. Roger leaned in close, his breath hot and sour, and whispered, “I’m going to take my time killing you.”

Pierre grunted. “You’re not killing anybody. I’m killing them, you’re staying with the car.”

Roger’s mouth fell open. “Why?”

“Because Claire doesn’t trust you to do it right, and neither do I.” Roger looked like he was about to argue, but Pierre cut him off. “We’re here.”

And then it finally hit her, choking off that bitter laugh like a weed. Rebecca looked out into that deep, black night, and there it was—in her veins, in her skin, in her teeth. Terror .

They stopped the car along a narrow dirt road, flanked on both sides by thick woods. Above them, the moon drifted from behind the silver clouds, sailing across the sky.

Rebecca looked at Henry and felt all that fear mixing with a terrible regret.

Henry hadn’t asked for any of this. He wasn’t a soldier or a freedom fighter.

Rebecca had always imagined she might die a violent death, but looking at Henry, she felt the urge to give him some kind of comfort, for whatever it might be worth.

She waited for him to look at her, but he was staring out the window, his gaze on something far away.

“I’m sorry I got you into this,” she said.

Henry looked startled, as if he’d only just remembered she was there.

There was something unsettling in his gaze that Rebecca couldn’t quite name—his eyes kept drifting back toward the tree line, fixing themselves on some unseen thing in the dark.

She was about to ask him what it was, when Pierre’s jolly voice announced, “Everybody out!”

The doors opened, and Rebecca and Henry stepped from the car. Roger stood too close as she climbed out, placing his face inches from hers, smiling his rotten smile. He waved the gun mockingly, and Rebecca was just beginning to think about taking it from him when Pierre snatched it from his hand.

“Give me that.”

Roger’s smug smile evaporated, and he slunk away, leaving Rebecca where she stood. She was shaking and couldn’t seem to stop.

Pierre looked at her, not unkindly. “Let’s go.

” She noticed that he never spoke roughly or barked commands.

He was a man who understood that his imposing size spoke for itself, and so he never bothered to raise his voice, a trait that Rebecca viewed with a grudging sort of respect, even under the circumstances.

“Why not do it right here?” Roger asked. “Why drag them all the way into the woods if we don’t have to?”

Rebecca knew why. It was a gift from Claire.

One final kindness. Traitors were always left in public places, left to rot in the open, with a note, and a warning— collaborators beware.

Their bloated corpses would serve as an example to others, clucked over and spat upon.

Reviled. But not Rebecca. Her death would be private, her body returning to the earth, surrounded by trees, and birds, and darkness.

Her name would be clean. She would have found the notion strangely calming if it weren’t for Henry, whose only crime was having had the bad luck of meeting her.

She glanced at him and felt his fear mingling with her own dread and self-loathing, threatening to consume her if she let it.

“Stay with the car,” Pierre said. “If someone comes this way, you leave. I can find my own way back.” He handed Roger the keys, then turned to Rebecca. “Come on.”

Rebecca and Henry walked side by side with Pierre behind them, holding the gun. There was no path through these woods, and the uneven ground was thick with rocks and shrubs. Rebecca stumbled as the moon dipped behind another cloud, and Henry caught her by the arm.

Pierre chatted as if they were all good friends. “I’m sorry about Roger. He’s an idiot, but he’s one of us. Don’t worry about that ‘kill you slowly’ business either. This isn’t my first time. You won’t feel a thing.”

“I appreciate it,” Rebecca said, desperately clinging to the last of her bravado, even as her knees turned to jelly beneath her. “Would it make a difference if I told you we’re not collaborators?”

Pierre chuckled. “I’m sure you’d tell me anything right now. So no, not really.”

“I didn’t think so. Still. I thought you should know.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Rebecca saw Henry stop and then stumble as Pierre shoved him from behind to keep him moving forward.

He fell, and Rebecca knelt to help him to his feet, but he wouldn’t be moved.

He stared wide eyed into the darkness in front of him, as if looking at something only he could see.

“Henry.” She squeezed his arm, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Henry, I know you’re scared. I’m scared too. But you have to get up.”

There was something disturbing about Henry’s face, his glazed expression as he peered into the darkness. He nodded slowly, and Rebecca felt a cold, creeping realization that the nod was not meant for her.

“Well, I guess this is as good a place as any,” Pierre said with a sigh. Rebecca felt her guts go icy. “Do you pray?”

“I do,” Henry said, still staring into the darkness.

“Have at it, then.”

Henry nodded again, his eyes still trained on the woods. Rebecca wondered if it was the book making him act this way, and the thought of it filled her with the kind of terror that caused animals to chew off their own limbs.

There was a moment of quiet, and then Henry spoke.

“I see you.” He stared, unblinking, at a fixed point in the darkness. “What’s your name?”

Pierre took a step forward. “What did he say?”

Rebecca stared between the trees, straining her eyes to see what Henry saw, but there was nothing. “I don’t know.”

Henry smiled, and the sight of it was so unnerving Rebecca found herself backing away from him. “Hannah. It’s nice to meet you. I’m Henry.” A pause. “Can you help us?”

“What the hell is this?” Pierre stepped closer. “Is he having a fit?”

Rebecca reached out and touched Henry’s shoulder. “Henry?”

He nodded once. “That’s fine. Thank you.”

What came next happened very quickly. There was a shifting in the darkness, a flutter of movement in the moonlight.

Rebecca felt something move past her, close enough to make her yelp and shrink from the unseen thing.

And then she heard a sound, one she had heard before, too distinctive to be mistaken for anything other than what it was—a long, hissing expulsion of air, the kind you sometimes hear from the newly dead.

She looked at Pierre. He was on his feet, but his posture looked strange, twisted and unnatural.

His mouth hung open, his face frozen in an empty mask.

He’d gone pale, so pale he seemed to reflect the moonlight, and as Rebecca got to her feet, she saw that his eyes were all wrong—they had gone milky white, like two pearls. The gun lay forgotten at his feet.

Henry was standing now, too, watching Pierre. After a moment, the death rattle fell silent, and Pierre turned his clouded eyes on Henry. Rebecca thought she would scream looking into those blank, unseeing eyes.

“Henry . ” Rebecca’s voice was a strangled whisper. “Henry, we have to go. We have to go now. ”

Henry cocked his head to one side. “It’s okay. She won’t hurt us.”

He approached Pierre slowly, as if approaching an animal in the wild. Pierre’s blind eyes followed him as he moved, making Rebecca’s skin crawl.