Look Behind You (The Order of the Silver Star) Read Free Page A

the newly-formed OSS. And Matt’s own dark days were just beginning, for in mid-February, while he was still deciding on what job offer to accept, Amy’s car was run off the road by a tequilero . She died on the way to the hospital.
    When Matt and his new colleagues at the Presidio County Sheriff’s Office finally caught the tequilero responsible, he was glad he didn’t know Mr. Tan’s truth spell. He would have used it in a heartbeat. As it was, all he really needed were his size, his glare, and the Spanish translation of “You killed my wife” to break the Mexican down. But he would despise tequila for the rest of his life.
     
    *****
     
    The Tuatha Dé Danann didn’t normally pay much attention to mortal politics. The Hundred Years’ War had convinced the Sidhe that human wars were best left to—well—humans, and it wasn’t as if the various courts of Faërie didn’t have affairs of their own to tend to. To be sure, those affairs did sometimes concern mortal lands, but that was mostly in peacetime; when it came to war, especially as mortal warfare became more mechanized and destructive, the Fair Folk left well enough alone and thanked humankind to return the favor. Only in rare emergencies would the Sidhe intervene to save a favored human or a son of a line that bore fairy blood, and then usually only when the human asked.
    Nonetheless, news from Germany began to filter in even to Tír-na-nOg. They were scant whispers at first, mostly passed along with laughter at mortal folly. Some group calling itself the Schutzstaffel had started trying to revive or reinvent old Teutonic pagan practices, but at first the fools simply pranced around on the solstice attempting rituals with no meaning or power. O’Donoghue, king of the Tuatha Dé, found it hard to believe that, in this modern Christian world, anyone could seriously try to revive the old faith of the Sasanaigh . 2 The prospect was as ridiculous as that nutter Aleister Crowley cribbing bits and bobs out of old books and tying them together with drug-fueled illogic. He’d even tried to claim titles for his so-called religion that were none of his by right, and he hadn’t worked out the connection between his presumption and the calamities the fairies visited on him for months thereafter.
    But over the next few years, the SS became less of a joke in Faërie and more of a concern. Its leader, Heinrich Himmler, began digging up grimoires and relics, finding ritual sites with real power, and locating actual warlocks. The Seelie courts on the Continent sent increasingly worried dispatches to O’Donoghue, and not a few of the Unseelie bands even in Ireland started migrating toward Saxony, out of either curiosity or a desire to help such like-minded mortals. Yet O’Donoghue couldn’t be sure what action to take, if any. His peers had no real sense as yet of what sort of power Himmler might have or what his purpose might be; he seemed mainly to be building rituals, following, and inventory.
    International concerns notwithstanding, however, life went on in the Land of Youth. O’Donoghue had revels to oversee, fields to bless, and unjust magistrates to torment. He was willing to act if the Tuatha Dé were needed, but until then, he had to assume that mortal affairs needed to be left to mortals, as usual.
    One morning in mid-March of 1939, the leprechauns delivered a new batch of shoes to Tír-na-nOg for the upcoming equinox revels, and Niamh decided to break in a pair of hers by pulling a couple of the leprechauns into a ring dance. O’Donoghue laughed as they gamboled about, Niamh’s golden hair flying with as much grace as the bow-legged leprechauns lacked, and debated whether to rescue the poor wee shoemakers by breaking in to dance with his daughter. Before he could decide one way or another, however, they were interrupted by the arrival of a sentry.
    “Sire,” the sentry said, bowing low, “there’s a group of dědeki approaching under a flag of