Whitnail asked, “Did you summon Jack?”
We were in what was left of La Horgne, the French village where my sister had lived—and possibly died. Maybe a few hundred people had been residents here once, but under the gray sky that day, we saw fewer than forty. The others, we determined, had been evacuated, captured, or killed. A drizzle dampened the ashen remnants of homes that had been torched, and near the lone church that had survived the invasion, a trio of women clustered around a metal barrel that contained a low, smoky fire. It felt as if color had been removed from the world. I could see distant farms to the north and the west, but I did not think I would find Agnes in them. We’d passed a few as we crossed occupied France, and the absence of smoke from chimneys or barnyard animals behind wooden and wire fences told me the war had emptied the countryside.
I looked up at Whitnail when he asked me the question. I had carried Arthur most of the way since Bram, but Whitnail had carried the snipe the last few kilometers to La Horgne. Now Arthur huddled under Whitnail’s winter coat, occasionally meeping sadly. He’d been in such a state ever since we’d lost our second snipe, Hugh, and little Arthur’s gloom had only foreshadowed my own feelings.
I had done a truly terrible thing soon after we’d crossed the demarcation line through the divided city of Moulins three weeks earlier. I had not yet come to grips with it.
On the surface, France seemed as I imagined it had always been: the quiet farms, the thickets of trees and denser wooded areas in between homesteads, fields of wheat and barley, cattle and sheep dotting the uncultivated pastures. But it was more façade than fact—an undercurrent of fear and danger moved all around us. German military patrols were commonplace; we went to great lengths to avoid them, though we had paperwork that, theoretically, would grant us safe passage. Just the same, I wasn’t prepared to take any chances, not once Whitnail suggested how such an encounter might unfold.
“They would not find me very agreeable,” he said, and I was convinced of his sincerity.
On the road north of Moulins, I spotted a group of ten gray-uniformed soldiers on bicycles coming our way, so we moved off the road and into a dense grove of oak trees. I didn’t think we’d need to hide more than ten or fifteen minutes; they seemed focused on reaching the city, not searching the countryside for resistance members. Assuming we didn’t call attention to ourselves or otherwise antagonize them, we would be fine. We lay on our bellies in the tall wet grass in the shadows of the oak trees to watch them pass by.
Next to me, Arthur made a sound that I could only equate with terror. When I glanced over, both he and Whitnail were staring into the grove behind us. Something moved in my blind spot. Something sizable.
“I assume,” Whitnail said in a low voice, “you will want to map it?”
I rolled over onto my back, fumbling for my spellbook, and faced off against the massive cryptid barreling toward us.
It was as tall as a man and twice as long, and that didn’t include the long, thick tail that thrashed behind it as it moved. Its back was like a red tortoise shell, dotted with large barbs above six legs, three to a side, that gave it noteworthy speed. Its face was like a lion’s, ringed by a mane no less. Even as I rolled to one side and thrust a card into Whitnail’s waiting hand, the beast silently closed the distance between us in a rush. Its huge claws dug up great chunks of earth that sprayed out behind it as it ran, sending them flying everywhere as it skidded to a halt.
Whitnail and I were on opposite sides of the creature. Its head dipped in my direction, twisting unnaturally, and it gnashed its fangs. Using its tail for leverage, it whipped about to face me head-on again, and now Whitnail was behind it. I could see him holding up the card I’d given him.
“Some casters have said the tarasque is territorial,” he called. “I believe they’re correct.”
I had my spellbook open to the place where I hoped to add the cryptid, but its demeanor suggested this was neither the time nor the place to expand my menagerie. I backpedaled from it, slipping and sliding on the wet weeds, my focus entirely on the silent monster bearing down on me a second time.
Oh, good, a tarasque, I thought. At least it won’t say “killed by giant lion-faced turtle-shelled monster” on my tombstone.
And suddenly I was beneath bright winter sunlight. The grove sprawled before me, Whitnail still in the shadows of the trees, and I was backing down the gentle slope toward the road. The tarasque lumbered out of the tree line as well, its shell shiny with dew. The creature lifted its head and squinted at the sun for a moment as if affronted, which was my opportunity to map it—it was directly between my book and the card that Whitnail held up like an Olympic score. I mentally pulled open the gate, and I could visualize the rectangular box as it passed over the tarasque and closed in on me.
Shots rang out.
I had emerged from the grove into the direct line of sight and fire of the German bicycle patrol.
At first, I thought they were aiming at me, but the bullets whizzed past me and ricocheted off the shell of the tarasque. It didn’t seem hurt, but its reaction indicated it recognized the intent.
I shouted at Whitnail, “Run! It’s coming back your way!”
No, it was not.
The tarasque’s curiosity about me had been replaced with outrage about the soldiers. Still as silent as midnight death, it charged past me on a collision course with the Germans. They held their ground, pistols in hand, as they fired furious volley after furious volley.
I stumbled toward Whitnail, my hand out. “The card.”
He tossed it at me, and I snagged it from the air with one hand while I held my spellbook open with the other. I brought the card down hard on the page, and then I immediately placed my fingertips on it to call upon the tarasque I’d just mapped.
My initial thought was that the tarasque itself was no match for ten armed soldiers, though I could feel a whisper of spite in what I did next. I was not careful; I was not thoughtful. As my mapped cryptid appeared before me, I directed it to follow the original tarasque as it reached the squad of Germans, and my command was foolishly vague.
Get them.
In the course of a lifetime, we will all say, think, feel, and do regrettable things. In hindsight, we like to believe we were too young or too uninformed or simply too distracted for those moments, and we do this so we can forgive ourselves for what we’ve done. But I was none of these things when I set a second tarasque on ten men who had families or sweethearts and ambitions or dreams. I left it up to my mapped cryptid to interpret my instruction, and given that it possessed a piece of my essence, I believe it could read what was in my unspoken objective.
The cryptid and the copy were impervious to bullets. They were invulnerable to batons and fists. And they were indifferent to begging and screaming.
In less time than it takes to tell it, ten young German men had been bitten, clawed, and stomped to death. As if scoring their endings, some of their bicycle bells chimed over and over as the tarasques crushed the soldiers’ bodies beneath them. When it was over, only the occasional dented helmet or a hand jutting toward the sky could confirm that the mass of flesh, blood, and bone spread on the French country road had been humans.
I called my tarasque back to its card, and when it vanished, the cryptid left behind didn’t even seem to notice its absence. The monster ignored us now as it returned to the grove of trees where we had first stumbled upon it. Beneath Whitnail’s coat, Arthur made a sad snipe sound that perfectly captured the state of my heart. I trembled as if I were freezing.
“Whitnail,” I whispered so he would come closer. When he did and dipped his head down to hear me, I said, “What have I done?”
He rose to his full height and looked down the slope at the horrifying mess the tarasques had left behind. Arthur sighed.
“War,” Whitnail answered. “You have done war.”
***
It was weeks later that we reached the village of La Horgne, where my sister Agnes had once lived, a journey that filled me with weeks of self-recrimination and self-doubt. I wondered if casters mapping cryptids was not unlike enthusiasts collecting guns. Is it coincidental that what one collects is a weapon, or is it because they are weapons that one wants to collect them in the first place? Would a gun collector pursue a collection of spoons just as easily, were they as valuable and diverse? And if butterflies were comparable to cryptids in their rarity and obscurity, would casters find them as engaging?
I understood that I was a caster because it had been convenient to become one. I did not know how to make a career of it—Blake had found a means to money by displaying the ones he mapped in a carnivalesque atmosphere, and the little girl in Carcassonne seemed to already be on the path to using her mapped cryptids for criminal activities.
I had learned to use them to commit murder.
Surely, more was possible. I just didn’t know anyone to ask.
This thought put me on the path to wondering: Did Agnes know our mother could map cryptids? If so, could Agnes teach me anything she had learned by proximity, through an educational osmosis, or via deliberate study of what Mam could do? I had always heard when I was growing up that Agnes had an imaginary friend when she was little, but Mam dismissed it as if it had nothing to do with cryptids or casters. But what if she were wrong? What if Agnes could actually see cryptids, and her imaginary friend had been one, but she chose to keep it as much of a secret as possible so no one would find out what she could actually do?
As we avoided checkpoints and additional patrols that might question us and our paperwork, I became convinced that Agnes would know something about cryptids and casters. I became convinced that Agnes might be a caster herself.
A sickening nausea took over my senses when we finally reached La Horgne. The village had fallen to the Germans seven months earlier, and what we found was the desiccated remains of what had died back in May. The village crossroads remained burned out; there were no markers left behind to indicate where the village had once stood. The church was fairly intact, though its walls were pockmarked with bullet holes, and some panes were missing from its stained-glass window. It had not snowed yet, so the land was brown and untended, more dirt than grass. We were on foot, Whitnail carrying Arthur under his coat, and we stopped to take it all in.
“If I had two eyes,” I said to Whitnail, “would it look twice as bad?”
He said, “I assume you mean that poetically. Otherwise, a spider, which has as many as eight eyes, would see—”
“Yes, poetically, Whitnail.” I looked over at the three women gathered around a barrel fire; they had glanced at us when we reached the crossroads, but now they were going to some noticeable lengths to avoid meeting our stares. “I’m going to ask them about Agnes.”
“Before you do, I would like to tell you something.”
I braced myself. “All right. Tell me.”
“Happy Christmas.”
Caught unawares, I laughed. “Well, yes, so it is. Happy Christmas to you as well.”
Then I looked around once more, and my laughter faded quickly. My eyes suddenly felt hot, and my chest tightened. As far as my eye could see, there was no reason to celebrate the holiday.
Whitnail scanned the village ruins as well. “Did you summon Jack?”
I could recall the last time I’d called for Spring Heeled Jack, and it was like the memory of a papercut. “No, we have a snipe. One annoyance at a time is enough.”
“Then someone else has,” Whitnail said. He pointed to the church. “There.”
And indeed, I recognized the cryptid’s attire, the cloak, the wild hair, and, more readily, the spring in his step. Even seeing him from a distance, I felt a shudder between my shoulders—while I knew it had to be a mapped version of him, as Jack only haunted London’s alleyways, I still felt phantom pain where I’d once had an eyeball, now lost to his foolish machinations. Even a mapped Jack triggered it, including my own.
The new Jack disappeared into the church as I pulled my spellbook out and flipped a page.
“Let’s fight fire with fire,” I said to Whitnail—and, honestly, to myself—as I touched Spring Heeled Jack’s card. That dazzling dizziness of summoning came and went in two heartbeats, and when it was gone, Jack stood before me expectantly, his hands on his hips.
“Oh. The women are looking,” Whitnail said. “In their esteem, I’m certain you’ve just conjured the devil.”
“Well, it’s time to do the devil’s work, then, Jack,” I said.
“Why, I live for the opportunity,” Jack said, bowing slightly. “Better to tarnish my reputation than your own, eh, squire?”
“Listen. You and I both know you’re not the real deal.” When Jack feigned a heart attack, I waved him away and pressed on. “But you’re still the next best thing. And another version of you just snuck into that church over there. I want you to find out who he’s with.”
“His paramour? I can assure you, bachelorhood is preferable to—”
“His caster. You know what I mean.”
“You, lad, have a dearth of mirth.” He smiled wickedly. “Just the same, your command is my wish. I shall don my grand inquisitor’s cap—”
“Stop talking. Just go.”
Jack sniffed daintily at me, glanced at Whitnail and Arthur, and then leapt backward so far that he cleared half the distance to the church. It was like a magic trick.
Whitnail said, “Now the women are fleeing. If you still intend to ask them about your sister, you will need to approach them in the company of a priest.”
I sighed as I watched Jack skip in one long surge to the church’s door. “I’m surrounded by sarcasm.”
The women had disappeared—presumably into one of the few remaining structures in La Horgne—by the time Jack came bounding back to us, grinning like a madman.
“Now that was a true gentleman,” he said, squatting in front of me as if he might spring skyward and launch himself to the moon. “You could do well with his tutoring.”
“What did he have to say?”
“Well, I mentioned my gout to him, and he strongly recommended meadow saffron, which, of course, I was already aware of, as we both come from the same source of knowledge.”
“Jack,” I said, “please.”
He weighed this for a moment before pulling a handkerchief from a breast pocket and dabbing at his eyes. “Your begging touches me. So, I take pity on you. He’s on the prowl for a woman called Agnes MacCamran.”
I was taken aback. “What? Why? Who’s his caster?”
“We did not discuss our respective indentured servitudes. Suffice to say that he has not yet located her, and they are preparing to move on from this ‘forsaken toadstool.’ His words, not mine. Well, ‘mine” in that he is also me, but I wasn’t the one who actually said those words, so—”
I had tuned him out. I turned to Whitnail. “We need to find this other caster. I’ll wager it’s Blake. And if it is, he’s up to no good. So, we’ll need to track down my sister before he does.”
“I agree that we should find the caster, but I do not think it will be Blake,” he said. “I do not believe he could survive the carnage he created.”
To Jack, I said, “Do you know where the other Jack’s caster is?”
“‘Other Jack.’ You make me feel so diminished. But alas, no. We have a shared history, not a shared present.”
Whitnail unbuttoned his coat to free Arthur the snipe, whom he handed to me. Arthur shuddered in the wet cold and crawled down the front of my own coat.
“I will find him,” Whitnail said. “His cryptid will leave a trail I can follow.”
“I beg your pardon.” Jack bristled. “Are you implying I have a stench?”
That was enough. I retrieved Jack, sending him back to his card, and he disappeared from our sight. I had no doubt he would complain about my lack of courtesy the next time I cast him, but I hoped I’d be an old man before I had any need of him again.
“What do you want me to do to help?” I asked Whitnail. Arthur was trying to flip himself upright again under my coat, and all three of his little feet were scratching me. I grimaced, and Whitnail clearly took that as an indication of my secret desire not to participate in the hunt.
“Prepare your questions,” he said. “I do not know your objectives beyond finding your sister. But this caster will not yet know where to find her. So, I can only guess what you wish to say to this person.”
The air was getting colder as the afternoon was waning. I let out a fog of breath. “I’ll figure it out. We’ll wait for you in the church.”
Whitnail nodded, patted Arthur through my coat, and turned toward the road that passed through what was left of La Horgne. By the time I had reached the church and was letting myself in, he had vanished from sight.
I remembered that the last time we had parted in this way, Whitnail had killed a Vichy officer before returning. And since then, I had sicced a cryptid on soldiers who did not see their deaths coming. Our days were moving into darker, uncharted territories, so I said a soft prayer as I entered the church that whatever came next would not completely obliterate the light we had left.
***
Whitnail found the caster holed up in a small farmhouse beyond the outskirts of La Horgne, and by the time he returned to the church for me and led me back to that house, it was full dark. A single light burned in the front room of the house, and Whitnail said it had not been the case when he’d first approached the house.
“The caster is still there,” he said.
“Is he alone?” I asked.
“I did not see. So, I cannot confirm this is a ‘he.’ But at the very least, ‘he’ will have his cryptids with him.”
A very logical point, I thought, so I summoned the barghest from my own spellbook. It was a good-sized canine, though one with dark flesh instead of fur, a misshapen body, and a snout full of mismatched fangs. It drooled almost rabidly, and from the moment it appeared, it growled in the back of its throat. I commanded it to silence before turning to Whitnail.
“Watch the back in case he tries to leg it,” I said.
“You must think this will be Blake,” Whitnail said, “so you keep saying ‘he.’”
“Fine. In case she tries to leg it.”
“How did you determine this caster is a woman?”
I scowled and gestured for him to go behind the house. When he rounded the corner, I counted out the seconds—one elephant, two elephant, three elephant—until I thought he’d had enough time to get in position. Then, with my barghest barely restrained at my side, I slammed open the front door and burst into the farmhouse’s front room, ordering my cryptid to attack anyone who reacted with hostility—but not to kill them.
I saw the soldier first, before I got a good look at the caster.
The German soldier who had accompanied the caster ended up being on the receiving end of my barghest’s aggression. He had his boots up on a small wooden table, his helmet next to his heels, as he smoked a cigarette that left a cloud of bitter-smelling smoke around his head. His bolt-action rifle was propped up against the wall to his left, but had he reached for it, my barghest might have ripped his arm off. Instead, he cried out in surprise and froze before the angry black shape that leaped atop the table and put its dripping snout in his face. He was maybe a year or two older than me, but in that moment, he looked like a terrified child.
Beside him at the table, a young dark-haired man with a neatly groomed black mustache sat playing some sort of game of solitaire with a deck of cards using acorns and leaves and bells instead of the suits I was familiar with. He flipped cards with one hand, but the other remained under the table, out of sight. He paused his game when I stormed into the room, but he seemed neither startled nor afraid.
“Guten abend,” he said, “Herr Loughty.”
“My name is MacCamran,” I said. “Who are you?”
“But you are kin to the Loughtys, of course.”
“I asked who you are.”
“My name is Erik Ackler. But I’m afraid you are none the wiser for knowing this.”
“Show me your hands.”
“To do that, we would need to see the contents of the Loch Ness monster’s stomach.” He held up his arm, and at the end of it was a cuff held shut with a gold cufflink. “I did not find her to be a friendly cryptid.”
Now I recognized the face behind the mustache. “I know who you are.”
“We have met before,” he agreed. “It has been a few years, but I remember you well enough. You interrupted my mapping of the monster in Scotland.”
“You called me your nemesis.”
“Erzfeind, ja. It was foolishly melodramatic.” Ackler shrugged. “I was a child.”
I studied him as I moved around the table until I could reach the soldier’s rifle. My barghest held the other man at bay as I cycled the bolt and ensured the safety was off. Ackler displayed no emotion as I stepped back to keep the table between us. Though I didn’t point the rifle at him, I thought the implication was there just the same.
“I want to know why you’re looking for my sister.”
He sloppily swept his cards together into a pile and set them aside to give me his full attention. He propped his chin on the wrist of his missing hand. “High Command believes she could be an asset, so I have been tasked with bringing her to Wewelsburg Castle.”
I could not fully understand what he was saying. This was not a political figure we were discussing; this was my blood. “Why? Tell me what that means, ‘asset.’”
Ackler pursed his lips and shook his head as if disappointed. The room was so silent that the only sound was the heavy, fearful breathing of the German soldier. Finally, Ackler said, “No doubt you consider this an interrogation, but I think we are simply having a conversation to get to know one another. Caster to caster. But you are being unnecessarily rude. Agnes is a far more polite caster.”
“She’s not a caster.”
“You must not be a very close family.”
In that moment, as I tried not to visibly reel from his announcement that my mother might have been wrong all those years—or that she might have been lying to me—I found myself becoming afraid of him. His demeanor was so calm that, though I had the rifle and the barghest, he clearly believed he was in control of this situation. Such confidence might have been warranted if he had a small army hidden in the darkness around the farmhouse, which was what I suddenly realized he might very well have at his disposal. I lifted the rifle threateningly.
“Give me your spellbook.”
His arrogance stumbled for a moment, but Ackler quickly found his center again. “You do not strike me as the kind who would murder a fellow caster in cold blood.”
“No, but I am the kind who would put a bullet through your only hand to see if you can still function as a caster with even fewer fingers.”
I heard the back door open then, followed by a cold wind from outside, and all three of us turned to face Whitnail as he lowered his head and came through the doorway to the front room. He filled the space with both his body and an aura of menace that I’d never felt in his presence before. Arthur was at his feet and behind him, lost in the shadows of the farmhouse’s next room.
The soldier said something in German, to which Whitnail responded with a single word. The soldier fell silent again. Ackler swallowed, turning in his chair to face Whitnail. I failed to notice that his hand had disappeared below the table’s edge.
“You are a long way from home, friend,” Ackler said to the albino.
Whitnail said, “I am not your friend.”
Ackler smirked. “No, I guess you’re not, Schneemann.”
Both Whitnail and I felt the gate opening—it was large, larger than the ones I had ever opened, and I realized my mistake in letting Ackler get his hand out of view. He must have had his spellbook in his lap. As the gate opened beyond the house, he dropped to his knees beneath the table, driving his weight into the legs of the chair occupied by his German soldier. As the soldier cried out and tried to regain his balance, my barghest growled a warning and lunged at the young German’s arm. Both cryptid and soldier fell backward, upending the table. Playing cards flew like confetti. I fired a warning shot into the ceiling, but as I did, the soldier came to his feet, holding the barghest by the throat and pulling a knife from his belt.
Whitnail raised one fist and clubbed the soldier on the very top of his head. He didn’t make a sound as he crumbled to the floor, the barghest leaping onto his unconscious form and locking its jaws on the back of his neck to subdue him, should he come around.
Ackler bolted through the doorway into the dark room beyond the front room. He stumbled as little Arthur tried to trip him, but the German caster righted himself, aimed a kick at the snipe, and continued out the back door into the farmhouse’s yard. I came after him, but he had too much of a head start—whatever he had called forth from his spellbook was waiting out there for him. When I reached the door, I caught a glimpse in the wet night skies of sizable wings and clawed feet dangling down, but Ackler was mounted on the shape, and both were rapidly disappearing into the blackness. For the second time, Erik Ackler had run from me. I went back inside, kneeling to check that the German soldier was still alive, and I said as much to Whitnail.
“He has run from you only once,” Whitnail said. “He was running from me tonight.”
The soldier was alive, so we bound his hands and feet and gagged him, and I asked Whitnail to write instructions in French on one of the playing cards, indicating where to find him. I then called forth Jack and, after weathering a series of insulting witticisms about my maltreatment of him and my overall immature approach to the caster/cryptid relationship, I sent him into La Horgne to nail the card to the church’s door.
“If they don’t come for him,” I said, “at least his fate won’t be on our consciences.”
Whitnail said, “Do you want to take the rifle?”
I shook my head. “I don’t want a gun. It would just draw attention to us anyway.”
He accepted this and slowly descended to his hands and knees to press his face up to Arthur. The snipe cooed reassuringly, apparently no worse for wear after being kicked by Ackler, and rubbed himself against Whitnail’s nose affectionately. I rolled my eyes and went to turn out the farmhouse’s lights.
A short time later, we were out in the cold and the drizzle again, headed into the blackness in search of a different farmhouse to call our own for the night. I didn’t want to stay where we’d found Ackler in case he was still nearby and brought back reinforcements to deal with us. As we walked, I thought aloud.
“We’re going to need to find Agnes before Ackler does,” I said. “We still don’t know what the Germans want her for, but it can’t be for anything good. He said she’s a caster, so they must need her skills.”
Whitnail seemed to consider, then hesitate, and ultimately find his resolve. “It is possible that they are seeking her as an ally. Cooperation, not coercion.”
I didn’t like this implication in the least, but Whitnail was trustworthy, reliable, and competent, and so I had to consider the thought. “He said she was a caster. She had an imaginary playmate when she was a lass, but my mam told me it wasn’t real. I’ve been of a mind lately that she had a cryptid—maybe she didn’t map it herself, maybe our mother gave it to her, but if Ackler thinks she’s a caster, there’s some evidence of that. So, it could be that they want her as an ally. But why? What can she do that other casters can’t? Ackler didn’t even try to recruit me.”
“You seemed disagreeable. I imagine that deterred him.”
I snorted. “He’s in for a surprise if he finds Agnes first, then. When they were kids, she could take out both of my older brothers without spilling her milk cup. If she turns out to be the black sheep of the MacCamran clan, it will be better for everyone if I reach her before anyone else does. She always liked me best of us three boys.”
“I have heard it said that blood is thicker than water,” Whitnail said.
“Anyone who says that,” I said, thinking of Blake and now Agnes, “doesn’t understand that proverb at all.”