Hexed_ The Iron Druid Chronicles - Kevin Hearne [99]
“Do you know how many battles there are for me to watch over throughout the world right now?” she’d asked me when I’d tried to enlist with the British. “I cannot be worrying about you every bloody moment and making sure you don’t step on a mine or get bombed by the Luftwaffe. Stay out of the war, Siodhachan, and don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself—specifically, attention from the Fae.”
I didn’t want to imply that I had any sort of relationship with the Morrigan now, though, so I told the witches a half-truth once Berta returned to the couch with bowls of popcorn and indicated that I could proceed. The witches all leaned forward in their seats, and so did Hal. He’d never heard what I’d done during the war either.
“As you know, I was hiding from Aenghus Óg at the time, as I had been for most of the common era, and I could do nothing overtly magical that would draw his attention. But neither could I simply hide in the Amazon and wait for it all to be over: My conscience would not allow it. So I became a maquisard, joining the French Resistance in the southwest, where I shepherded Jewish families through the wilderness to escape the Nazis.
“The people in my network knew me as the Green Man. If someone insisted on a Christian name, I called myself Claude and left it at that. The families under my care arrived in Spain faster and healthier and more reliably than those of any other smuggler. All told, I saved sixty-seven families, taking them in large groups at times. That’s not on the scale of your fifty thousand saved in Bulgaria”—an accomplishment I privately doubted they could reasonably take credit for—“but it was my small contribution to peace. And you must keep in mind I was in the Gascony region, which was fairly overrun with Nazis, away from the bulk of the maquisards. Getting them safely out of the cities was often more trouble than taking them across the mountains.
“Only one family in my care failed to make it out of France. I picked them up outside Pau, and we were to take the Somport Pass over the Pyrenees. The father was a kind man who doted on his children, a scientist of some kind, but I couldn’t tell you their names even if I wished. So much of the work was an anonymous business, for everyone’s safety.” I paused to take a sip of my hot chocolate, which had cooled somewhat, and Berta watched me impatiently.
“They were a fairly young couple with three children: a boy of ten, a girl of eight, and another boy of five. The boys had little suits on—their best—and the girl had a gray wool coat buttoned over a red dress. The mother was dressed in similar fashion, with a heavy coat worn over a dress. The father carried a briefcase of papers and photos, and the family had nothing more than the clothes on their backs. The father—well, there were traces of magic in his aura that I didn’t take the trouble to examine, but now I see that he was a Kabbalist, and his wards were sufficient, as were mine, to deflect this necrotic spell of the hexen—Gewebetod, ja?”
“Ja,” Malina nodded. “That is the word they use.”
“Six witches ambushed us in the night before we were even halfway to the Somport Pass—one witch for each member of our party, which led me to believe we’d been betrayed somehow. The mother and three children fell immediately, clutching their chests as they landed in the leaves of autumn. I fell down too, because I had felt the strike upon my wards, and I expected a grenade or a spray of machine gun fire next. I cast camouflage on myself once I hit the ground, then crawled as quietly as I could away from where I had fallen.
“Whatever noise I made was masked well. The father was the only one left standing, but he was screaming the names of his wife and children, then crouching over them and trying to revive them as I headed for cover.”
“His Kabbalistic wards shielded him.” Berta narrowed her eyes and nodded knowingly.
“Correct. But I did not know this at the time. I never heard him utter a spell, I’d never bothered to check his aura closely, and so while I suspected he must