Free Seven for a Secret by Elizabeth Bear

intention. But the laughter fell away again. She said, “I would have died for him if I could.”
    “For him?”
    She shook her head like an old horse irritably shaking off a fly. “Don’t play naive for my benefit, wampyr. Jack. And no, not for him. That’s not what I mean, really. But I would have taken his place for you.”
    “Abby Irene—”
    “Don’t lie to me.”
    “ Don’t. ” His tone, and whatever was in it—command, hurt, anger—at last made her turn and look at him, instead of the reflected emptiness where he was standing. “Don’t pretend you know what I want or need, Abby Irene. Don’t do it. Don’t assume I am lying when I say I value you. I would not trade you for him.”
    “Or him for me?” But the bitterness had fallen out of her voice, and now she squinted at him without her glasses, eyebrows trying to rise. “I’m sorry, Sebastien. It’s unbecoming. It’s just the damned arthritis making me miserable. And you could have had so much more of him—”
    He squeezed her shoulder. “Twenty years or eighty, what does it matter?”
    “Sebastien?”
    His turn for the edgy bitterness. “Really. Twenty years or eighty? What does it matter to me? You’re all ephemera, woman. Gone before I know it, like your nations and your languages and your kings.”
    You didn’t say such things to mortals. But Abby Irene stared at him for a moment, the squint surprised off her face, and then broke into a wide pink-gummed grin. “Bloody old bastard,” she said. “Just when I was about to wade into my self-pity with both feet.”
    He grinned back, with enough teeth to make up for her lack of them. “Dance with me.”
    “As if I could.”
    “Stand on my shoes. I’ll hold you up.”
    She blinked. “That’s hardly dignified.”
    He slid his hand down her arm to the elbow, cupped it, and pulled her to her blue, horny feet. “And you were never sixteen, Abby Irene?”
    She had shrunk. She tilted her head way back to look at him. “Not in living memory,” she quipped, and let him bear her up, one hand at her waist, the other crossing her back as he lifted her to stand on his shoes. She weighed no more than the autumn-dry shell of a burst milkweed pod, blown clean by the wind. He helped her balance, careful to keep her weight off her knees, while she flung one arm around his neck and clung with an old woman’s determination.
    Carefully, in rhythm to the music she hummed under her breath, Sebastien stepped to the left. “I’m going to talk to them tonight,” he said against her ear. “I’ll get them out. We’ll go like smoke. It will be all right.”
    “All of them?” She leaned back, supporting herself on hands crooked against his nape. “All twenty-one? What makes you think they’ll come, especially the older ones?”
    His mouth twisted. “It has to be all or nothing. We cannot allow the Germans to take them. If I can convince the older girls, remove the headmaster and the guards—”
    Remove was a euphemism for permanence. But Abby Irene merely looked up at him, shaking her head so the soft skin under her throat wobbled. She had no pity for the Huns. Her concerns were of a far more mundane nature.
    “Sebastien—” She leaned in to him, shifting her slight weight so he could support it more easily. “And how exactly do you propose to hide twenty-one children in occupied London when the whole of the Prussian forces will be turning the city upside down for them?”
    “Do you propose I slaughter the lot?”
    She shook her head. “That would be a last resort, and you know it. And an ineffective one. You know these can’t be the only ones.”
    Of course not. It would be basest idiocy to think so. With their addiction to Nordic mysticism and the more bizarre fringes of eugenics—
    “The Prussians,” he said, “have a pattern. And they
believe they are reclaiming their own and redressing ancient wrongs. How many blonde seventh daughters do you suppose there are in all the Aryan