Free The Midnight Guardian by Sarah-Jane Stratford

corridor and the colonel extracted his arm from his wife and barely looked at either unimportant woman as he marched after the general.
    Left alone, there was nothing to say. The colonel’s wife looked Brigit over, concentrating on her legs and breasts. Brigit smiled pleasantly, which made the woman shudder and, with a quick nod, a vestige of politesse, hurried back to the little clique of wives that Swefred and Cleland were attempting to amuse, with what Brigit noticed was only middling success. Thus far.
    Helping herself to a canapé, Brigit stopped to be amused by a spotty boy, perhaps seventeen, who was being far too familiar with a bosomy waitress. The uncomfortable waitress bustled to Brigit’s side and almost begged her for an order. The boy gave Brigit a supplicating look she couldn’t understand—surely he knew she would side with a pestered female?
    As she looked down her nose at him with haughty amusement, she caught a whiff of the stake in his modified crossbow. Nachtspeere. This almost-child following whatever direction his hot loins led was a Reich hunter. Brigit held his gaze longer, allowing him any opportunity for recognition. There was none, and she sensed he was carrying the stake out of nostalgia, because Berlin was clean. Furthermore, he was only in attendance as a courtesy to his fond supervisor. Brigit narrowed her eyes—the hunter’s skin mottled under her pitiless sneer. He looked down and slunk away.

    He does not know me. He has absolutely no sense of what I am.
    The boy tried to save face by joining in conversation with Mors and two other men. After what looked like several unfortunate sentences that were wearing patience thin, Mors turned and caught her eye.
    He knows none of us. They have not studied the legends, not to any use.
    The pleasing knowledge that the British millennials were such total strangers to the Nachtspeere was only a small compensation for the sudden lack of valuable targets. Brigit wandered the dining and drawing rooms, sipping at her drink and giving halfhearted sniffs here and there, as though prowling for food. The corridor down which her colonel had disappeared was dark and tempting. She affected fascination with the unnecessarily graphic hunting prints lining the walls and studied each one with great care, clearly not noticing she was drifting farther and farther away from the allotted festivity space.
    The door was left carelessly ajar, as though certain that no one who was not invited to this far more private party would ever dream of crashing. There were twenty-four men gathered, with cocktails, and they seemed to hew to the old idea that the business of domination was to be discussed at parties.
    â€œIf the Führer says Poland rightfully belongs to Germany, I shan’t argue. The countryside is marvelous. Shame about the people, though. Rotten workers.”
    â€œExactly what the Führer says. So we shall remind them that they are in fact German, and they’ll start working again. They’ll work as if their lives depended on it.”
    â€œWhich they will.”
    Good-natured laughter greeted that smiling comment, and drinks were refilled.
    â€œHow we ever could have lost Poland in the first place is beyond me.”
    â€œHaving so many Jews in Germany made us weak. We won’t make that mistake again. It will be good to have more breathing room.”
    â€œWe’ll need it for all the children the Führer wants us to have.”
    A florid middle-aged officer popped open a champagne bottle and sent the cork sailing across the room. It landed at Brigit’s feet as surely as
if it had been a guided missile. She glared at it, but when she looked up to meet the commingled hostility and curiosity facing her, she was the sweetest, loveliest, most artless young fräulein any of them had ever encountered. Her girlish blush and giggle was charming, musical even, and softened nearly every hard eye.
    â€œYou must