Page 114 of Down and Dirty

“Only if they try to kill or rape you first.”

Mother Edwina looked rather green at the prospect.

“I have been trained as a warrior, and lately, whilst I was at… well, just lately, I have learned new fighting skills. In the best of battles no one dies, but I tell you, my father and brothers must meet the raven, or they will ne’er stop. You are not to worry. I will take care of them.”

“You would kill your own blood kin?” Mother Edwina inquired.

“I would… if necessary.”

More gasps.

For the next two sennights, Britta tried her best to teach fighting skills to nuns and novices from age thirteen to sixty, with little success. It was one thing to teach the women at The Sanctuary how to fight; they had incentive. These nuns would rather turn the other cheek, no matter the affront. Also, they had been sedentary for a long time and got winded just throwing spears made out of broom handles… and then only several paces away.

“No pain, no gain,” a motto she had learned from the commander back at WEALS, meant naught to these ladies.

Sister Conception muttered in a most un-nunlike manner, “The only pain here is you… a pain in the arse.”

Nor did they understand the SEAL refrain, “The only easy day was yesterday.”

“I mucked the stables yestermorn, scrubbed the stone floors of the scullery, changed bed linens, and hauled firewood,” Sister Egbert said, not even bothering to lower her voice. “What is so easy about that?”

Finally, she stuck with the age-old “God helps those who help themselves.” There was naught they could say to that.

Then everything changed when a group of ten nuns came riding into the abbey courtyard. That they had passed through her father’s ranks was amazing. They were riding horses, which was a surprise in itself; most nuns had no coin for such an extravagance. But the biggest surprise was the woman leading the pack.

She wore the drab garb of a nun, except no head covering. Her hair was coal black, and her eyes a strange shade of blue. It was the nun warrior of her dreams. And she was beautiful.

Britta put a hand to her heart in shock as well as thanks. How many miracles could one person sustain in a lifetime?

But then the biggest shock of all came.

“My name is Angelique. We have come from Frankland to help you,” the woman said, loud enough for all to hear. Then she rode her horse a little farther so that she was right in front of Britta. “Greetings, Sister.”

Good-bye is the saddest word…

For two months, Zach ranted and raved and made himself and everyone around him miserable.

Not only had Arsallah and his evil cohorts gotten away, they still stirred the diplomatic pot by demanding that Sammy be returned to his native country.

Most of all, Zach was devastated by the loss of Britta. After extensive searches, there was no body, but he figured Arsallah had disposed of that, wanting there to be no connection to his evil deeds in the basement of that abandoned house. At first, he had even hoped that Arsallah had taken her back to Afghanistan to use as leverage, but he would have made mention of that by now. Zach had to accept that she was dead.

He was on leave from the SEALs, with good cause. There was no way he could focus, not even on training WEALS. Besides, the class was down to a manageable twenty now. Actually, twenty was more than had been expected to make it through the rigorous training. There would be no Britta, though, and that saddened Zach even more. She had wanted so badly to succeed in WEALS.

Sammy had been very clingy at first, but then, with the resilience of childhood, he settled into his normal routine and hardly ever mentioned the ordeal he had been through. Still, Zach knew that Sammy was worried about his grandfather Arsallah and whether he would try again.

And now his family was pulling an intervention on him. An intervention! Like he was a friggin’ addict or something. They had him trapped in his town house living room, with Sammy upstairs playing video games with Scary Larry.

His grandmother was serving them tea… tea, for Pete’s sake… using a silver tea service and bone china, both of which he hadn’t even known he had. What is bone china anyway? Crushed bones? Yeech! It was a scene right out of Alice in Wonderland. There were fancy-pancy little cookies the size of quarters she’d brought from a bakery that probably cost a dollar a piece. Danny was flicking them into his mouth like popcorn.

His mother and father, divorced almost twenty years, were glaring at each other. They made The War of the Roses look like kindergarten.

“Shape up, boy,” his grandfather said after putting his teacup down. “Everybody loses someone sometime. Get yourself a new assignment. Lose yourself in work. Uncle Sam needs you.”

Yada, yada, yada. He’d heard this spiel a dozen times.

His grandmother gaped at his grandfather as if he’d sprouted two heads. “Nonsense. He needs time to grieve. He may never get over the girl, but in the meantime he must think about Sammy and move on.”

I wonder if there’s any beer left in the fridge.