Sigmund & Audrey

She’d lost sight of him up on the ledge—one moment, he’d been standing with Albie as they tried to lead those French mares they’d rescued; next, he was gone. 

Her heart had stopped. 

The mud sucked at her boots. The bullets darted by her head. Lance and Sandhur’s hampering, grappling jerks and tugs faded with their shouts as she broke free. They had to help Albie. 

She had to find Sig. 

Audrey made the ledge, having swallowed half the mud on her way there. And standing over the next valley, facing the edge of the world, Death stared back. The storm and shells rendered it impossible to distinguish the sky from the fragmented, vaulting earth that soared like rebounding hail. Dotting the hellish landscape was a pastiche of broken bodies and artillery, erect like tombstones in the sinking, swallowing mud. But, God above, where was he? 

Sigmund, please!

There. Sigmund Fletcher sat unmoving at the bottom of the chasm, sinking into the mud and lake-like puddles. 

She didn’t care about twisting an ankle or, more foolishly, not even a bullet. She’d slid down the ledge, shrieking his name, but to no response. 

His stillness frightened her. His eyes terrified her. “Sigmund, please!” 

Not until she’d dragged him to relative safety did he seem to snap out of it. Those dark eyes, usually infused with such warmth and boundless kindness, harboured something cold, hollow, and crushed. 

“There was something so pleasant about that place,” he’d whispered later that evening over a tin of cold beans. She could hear the tin in her hands buckling under the strain of her grip. She’d wanted to throw up. She’d wanted to send him back home to England and make him forget this place. She might have been a killer… but Sig wasn’t. He just wasn’t. He wasn’t made for this kind of cruelty—not a man who cooed to frightened horses and fed the trench rats crumbs of bread and cheese.

Part of The Sharpshooter & The Vet series.