Read Online Seven for a Secret by Elizabeth Bear - Free Book Online

gloved hands, he grasped the tarp and flipped it back, somehow arranging the fold so it fell with military crispness though the gesture seemed casual.
    Ruth bit back a gasp. Six long poles lay on the table—spears, each tipped with a glittering steel blade like a beech leaf, four-edged and as long as her hand. The spears also each had a crossbar lashed a third of the way up the shaft and a wrapped leather grip at the butt.
    Six. One for each student.
    „Choose your weapons,” Herr Professor said. „And then we will go and meet your enemy.”

    The spear was heavier than Ruth expected, the butt as thick as her wrist. She propped the shaft against her shoulder, as Herr Professor demonstrated, and steadied it with her left hand crossed over her chest. The rain had not abated. It soaked Ruth’s hair, plastered her blouse to her girdle, and when they left the paved path, trooping like ducklings after Herr Professor, it wet the lawn so mud oozed through the grommets and the canvas walls of her tennis shoes and her feet slid against the rubber soles.
    Now the war was over, you could get rubber again. If you were Prussian. Ruth vaguely remembered shoes with rubber soles and buggies with rubber tires from before the invasion, when she was small. But these were the first such she’d had as an adult.
    She rather thought this expedition would be the ruin of them.
    Ruth was nearly last in line, Adele beside her and Jessamyn Johnson, who rarely talked, alone at the back of the group because Katherine was walking first. So Adele was in perfect position to appreciate how surreal the scene had become—the young women in their sodden white physical education uniforms marching with kicked-up knees like soldiers, or like a corps of drum majorettes with enormously oversized, deadly batons.
    Herr Professor led them down the garden path between tall yew hedges. Ruth’s whole body shook with cold, water dripping from her eyelashes and flooding down the collar of her shirt. The spear trembled, the point swaying like a wind-tossed tree-tip, and she expected an ambush at any moment. From the taut stares the other students flashed to every side, Ruth thought she was not alone.
    She had some warning when they rounded the corner beyond the brick garden house, because the girls before her stumbled and reacted, moving raggedly into a semi-circle rather than falling out crisply to either side as they should. When Ruth came up among them, she saw why and stumbled too.
    Between two old stone hitching posts, a drenched and miserable yellow-eyed wolf cringed at the limit of its chains.
    „You will kill it.” Herr Professor’s voice rose from the shadows at the base of the hedge as if from a bottomless hole. „And when you have killed it, you will cut out the heart, and share it between you. Miss Small, Miss Mapes, you may begin.”

    If there was a thing you could say for Ian MacGregor, it was that he had the gift of timing. He appeared at Abby Irene’s door in the company of a smiling, red-headed wampyr just as Mrs. Moyer was setting the table for a late and lavish tea of poached salmon and green peas with crème brûlée for dessert. Abby Irene invited him to dine, and the wampyr—Alice—to observe.
    MacGregor wasn’t any younger than she. Despite his cane and artificial foot, however, he was considerably more spry. And he accepted the invitation with alacrity, and without even glancing over her shoulder for Sebastien as if Sebastien were her keeper.
    Which might have lessened the pain of the wampyr’s acid beauty when she smiled so kindly at Abby Irene. But couldn’t, really.
    Abby Irene wouldn’t mind dying, she thought. Not now, not after so many years of adventures.
    But by God, she minded getting old.
    It was Sebastien’s practice to attend the meal for company, and the presence of Alice and Mr. MacGregor only encouraged that. Abby Irene had never minded discussing business over food, and Phoebe had the strongest stomach of all of them.