A YOUNG SUCCUBUS NAMED DELICIA by Michel Poulin - HTML preview

CHAPTER 7 – INDIRECT ACTION

 

08:43 (Paris Time)

Sunday, April 13, 1941

Service entrance of the cabaret ‘Mille et Une Nuits’ 34 Rue Saint-André-des-Arts, Quartier Latin

Paris, Occupied France

‘’Alright, alright, I’m coming!’’

Answering the repeated and urgent knocks on the service entrance door of the cabaret, Sylvie Renaudin looked first through the window of the door and saw a tall man dressed in a civilian suit. A cautious woman, the cook spoke to the man through the door while keeping it locked.

‘’What do you want, mister?’’

‘’I need to speak urgently to the daughter of the cabaret owner. My name is Pierre. Can you tell her to come here, quickly? It is a matter of life or death.’’ Smelling at once that this had to do about their clandestine work against the Germans, Sylvie nodded her head after a second of reflection and unlocked the door, letting in the man and relocking the door behind him.

‘’I will go get her, mister. Please wait here.’’

‘’Thank you, madam!’’

The cook then disappeared in the nearby kitchen for a moment, to return a few seconds later with Mélanie, who was still wearing a night gown. Mélanie gave Pierre Brossolette a severe look before telling Sylvie to leave her alone with the man. She then pulled him by one arm into the storage room next to the service entrance, where she closed the door behind her before staring hard at Pierre.

‘’I told you not to come back here: you could attract undue attention on me and the cabaret. Now, what is this business of life or death about?’’

‘’It is about the resistance cell I told you months earlier, the ‘Groupe du Musée de l’Homme’: the Gestapo has rounded up and arrested all its main members, probably due to a denunciation. Its last founding member was arrested this week.’’ That piece of news didn’t seem to surprise Mélanie much, who simply frowned at it.

96

‘’That doesn’t surprise me one bit, Pierre, in view of their amateurish methods and poor operational security. One could pretty easily have identified their group just by analyzing their clandestine newspaper ‘Résistance’. So, where are those group members now?’’

‘’Either in prison or being interrogated by the Gestapo. The only one I know for sure about her whereabouts is still being interrogated by the Gestapo at its Paris offices, at 84 Avenue Foch.’’

‘’And why did you come here to see me, at the risk of attracting attention on me and the cabaret? Do you realize how many of our neighbors on this street are watching us and spreading nasty rumors about us being traitors and collaborators? We already had to fight once a false anonymous denunciation of black marketeering, probably coming from one of our fine neighbors. Thankfully, our very cordial relations with the German military authorities in Paris shielded us from French police action.’’ Pierre lowered his head in embarrassment, understanding only now the risks of his visit.

‘’I came because I didn’t know what to do next, Mélanie. I barely had time to complete the printing and distribution of the last number of ‘Résistance’ before Agnès Humbert was arrested, forcing me to flee their clandestine printing shop. I figured out that, since you had weapons, we maybe could try together to free Agnès or other members of the group before it is too late.’’

‘’Are you mad, Pierre? Grief is evidently stopping you from thinking properly. The only thing we would achieve by attacking the Gestapo offices would be to unmask my own group and have my mother and all the girls here arrested as a result. No! I am sorry, but those Résistance members will have to deal with the consequences of their lack of proper caution.’’

Pierre gave an angry look at Mélanie at those words.

‘’So, that’s it? You will let them be tortured and then executed?’’ The reaction of Mélanie was both fierce and immediate: taking a step forward, she grabbed Pierre by his tie and brutally pushed him against the nearest wall while giving him a fiery stare.

‘’What I will do is use my head and act sensibly, with a view to the majority’s safety, Pierre. Try to do that yourself. I will act against the Germans one fine day, but only when it will be the proper time and circumstances and without endangering others for nothing. Now, go and don’t come back here, ever!’’

97

She then pushed him out of the storage room, showing incredible strength for a teenage girl, and made him go out by the service entrance, locking the door behind a clearly disappointed and frustrated Pierre Brossolette. The latter however understood at least partly her reasons for acting like she just did and did not insist, walking away without looking back.

Returning to the kitchen, Mélanie sat back at the dining table and continued to drink her coffee while thinking hard about what Pierre had said. In the Abyss, someone who got into trouble by making a mistake typically got little to no sympathy or support and could in fact only expect to have others profit from the situation. Mélanie, or more properly Delicia, was however not as mean and selfish as a normal Succubus would be, thanks to her mixed blood from her father, a fallen archangel who had died covering Delicia’s mother’s escape from the Abyss. Other Demons who considered her an abomination because of her part-Celestial blood and neutral alignment had tried to kill Delicia, forcing Lilith to bring her five-year-old daughter to the Material Plane and to abandon her there. Since that traumatic event for Delicia, Marie Laurent had raised and educated her, teaching her the values she believed in, which included kindness, generosity and compassion. While still rather mean of character compared to a normal Human teenage girl, Delicia was now a far cry from what a Demon was supposed to be. However, one aspect of her that was still fully demonic was her magical powers and abilities. Maybe it was time for her to use those powers and abilities to the fullest while staying in the shadows.

12:07 (Paris Time)

Empty apartment facing the SD and Gestapo offices Avenue Foch, 16th Arrondissement Paris

Mélanie had been hiding inside the third-floor apartment for a good hour, watching discretely through one window the Gestapo offices on the other side of the street. The apartment she was in had belonged to a Jewish family that had been evicted by the SS and then led away weeks ago, probably to some unpleasant fate. Its location made it an ideal surveillance position for Mélanie, who had used it before a couple of times to gather intelligence about the Gestapo offices and its activities. Now, she was

98

well positioned to attack indirectly the SD and Gestapo building, from which hideous screams of pain had been coming out of its sixth floor, where the Germans had their interrogation rooms.

The Gestapo agent who had led the search raid on the cabaret last September suddenly stepped out of the building’s main entrance to go to the staff car which had just pulled up in front. Mélanie had a mean smile as she watched the Gestapo man, wearing his customary trench coat and wide-brimmed hat, walk to the waiting staff car while being saluted by the two SS soldiers on guard duty at the entrance.

‘’Time for a few selected spells. Welcome to Hell, Mister Steiner!’’

Hauptsturmführer17 Heinrich Steiner was thinking with anticipated pleasure as he walked to his waiting staff car about the lunch date he was going to have at the ‘Maxim’s’, where he was due to meet with a famous German actress currently visiting Paris. A loud, ferocious growl suddenly made him jerk and snap his head to his right, in time to see a huge, monstrous beast charging him. It had a large, fat body covered with a thick brown fur, four short legs with impressive claws and a relatively small head with two ferocious eyes which glowed red, plus a set of nasty-looking canines. It measured a good eighteen feet from its nose to the end of its flat, furry tail and had to weigh at least a ton, judging from the way the pavement shook as it charged Steiner. His driver, like the two SS soldiers guarding the entrance to the Gestapo offices, froze for a moment with horror and disbelief at that impossible sight, allowing the huge beast to reach the staff car and Steiner before they could react. One of the two forward paws of the animal then went down on top of the Gestapo man, crushing him and sending him on his back against the cobblestones of the street. At the same time, the other forward paw of the beast savagely slashed the unfortunate driver, the four claws ripping his upper torso and abdomen wide open. Steiner, screaming with pain as the claws of the paw crushing him penetrated his belly, then saw the open mouth of the beast come down on him. The head, neck, left shoulder and left arm of the Gestapo man were then ripped off in a single furious bite. The two SS guards, nearly paralyzed with fear, were finally able to fire the first shots from their bolt-action Mauser 98K rifles as the beast was chewing on Steiner’s head. The 7.92mm bullets seemingly did little to the beast except to enrage it.

17 Hauptsturmführer: SS rank equivalent to a captain, or Hauptmann in the German Army.

99

As the two SS soldiers were frantically working their rifles’ bolts to chamber fresh rounds, the monster turned on them, biting the head of the first soldier and ripping it off, then slashing open the second soldier with one furious swipe of one paw. One unlucky group of four SD men who worked in the wireless radio listening center on the second floor and who were also going out for lunch then caught the beast’s attention as it looked for more preys to kill. Frozen with terror at first at the sight of the massacre of Steiner and of the two guards, the four radio operators tried to flee

back inside the building. They however only

succeeded in giving access to the beast by

opening the big double doors. Running just

behind them, the Fiendish Dire Wolverine crashed through the entrance and fell on the

screaming radio operators, crushing down two of

them against the floor while pushing a terrifying growl. It had time to rip to pieces the two men before the panicked survivors saw the beast suddenly vanish into thin air, leaving behind pools of blood and ripped human body parts around the lobby. A young SD officer who had watched the horrible scene from the main staircase of the lobby slowly walked down the steps, his knees weak and his pistol held in his shaking right hand. Cold sweat covered his forehead as he contemplated the carnage in the lobby and outside, on the sidewalk.

‘’M…Mein Gott! What the hell was that?’’ he asked himself while visually surveying the mangled, dismembered bodies. The SS female auxiliary manning the reception desk, who had the reflex of diving for cover under her desk, then started screaming loudly, completely hysterical.

The commander of the SD and Gestapo headquarters unit in Paris,

Sturmbannführer18 Josef Kieffer, came down the stairs from his fourth-floor office a minute later, his own pistol in hand and with four armed SS soldiers at his back. He was shaken at once on seeing what was left of the two radio operators killed in the lobby. Looking through the opened front door at the bodies outside, he then looked at the still shaking young SD officer.

 

18 Sturmbannführer: SS rank equivalent to major.

100

‘’What happened here, Obersturmführer19 Funkel?’’

‘’I…I don’t know really, Herr Sturmbannführer. Some kind of huge, impossible beast, attacked Hauptsturmführer Steiner as he was about to get in his car, then killed the two guards before pursuing four more men inside the lobby and killing two of them.’’

‘’A beast? What kind of beast?’’

‘’I am not sure, Herr Sturmbannführer. It was huge, the size of a car, with a thick brown fur and clawed paws. It was unbelievably ferocious and its eyes glowed red, as if it came straight from Hell.’’

One of the surviving radio operators, who was still shaking while sitting on the first steps of the staircase, then spoke up with difficulty.

‘’A…a wolverine. It was a giant wolverine, sir!’’

‘’A wolverine? But there are no wolverines in France!’’ said a disbelieving Kieffer. ‘’And they certainly are much smaller than a car.’’

The shaken radio operator could only sweep one hand in front of him, showing to him the ghastly human remains and splattered blood covering the lobby’s floor.

‘’It was a giant wolverine, sir. It did all this in mere seconds.’’

Kieffer was still trying to make sense of all this when Standartenführer20 Helmut Knochen, the head of security for the whole Paris area, came down the stairs to see what had happened. His eyes widened and his face paled on seeing the gory scene in the lobby and outside.

‘’Himmel! What did all this?’’

‘’Some kind of impossible, huge beast, Herr Standartenführer.’’ answered Kieffer, who then told him what the survivors had just told him. Thoroughly shaken but being unable to deny the reality of the mangled bodies in the lobby and outside the entrance, Knochen started giving orders around, posting new guards at the entrance and making other men clean up the gory remains as best as possible. He then returned upstairs to his office, all ideas of having lunch forgotten.

Feeling a bit sick to his stomach after seeing the gory remains in the lobby, Knochen went to serve himself a glass of cognac, then sat behind his big work desk, wondering what he was going to tell Berlin about this attack by…whatever. He didn’t see, nor could he see, Mélanie, standing in one far corner of his office after infiltrating

19 Obersturmführer: SS rank equivalent to 1st lieutenant. 20 Standartenführer: SS rank equivalent to colonel.

101

the building thanks to her power of invisibility. What he suddenly saw appear right in front of his work desk was the most terrifying thing he could have imagined. His eyes bulging out and his face deformed with abject terror, Knochen could do nothing but watch the apparition rush at him. The nervous shock was too much for his heart, which stopped beating after a last, explosive pulse. Stricken down by a sudden, massive heart attack, the senior SS officer fell backward in his chair,

dying as he hit the ground. He finally died after a few

more seconds, his face frozen in a grimace of utter

terror, as the apparition was coming down on him.

Mélanie contemplated with a satisfied smile the dead

man, victim of her ‘Phantasmal Killer’ spell, for a few seconds, then continued on her internal

exploration of the headquarters building. She found

the office and private quarters of Sturmbannführer

Kieffer on the fourth floor, then a guardroom, an administrative office and a number of tiny cells on the fifth floor. Two nervous-looking SS soldiers were in the guardroom, looking down via a window at the mangled bodies on the sidewalk as half a dozen SS men were doing their best to clean up the mess, while most of the French civilians passing by threw up after a single look at the dead Germans. Still invisible, Mélanie decided to not kill the German soldiers then, wanting her attack to appear as some kind of curse and not as an attack by a Human. She however was faced with a dilemma when she went up to the interrogation rooms on the sixth floor, at the level of the attic: there, she found a German, his torso bare and drinking some water, standing a few feet from a naked woman tied to a chair. Approaching the woman, who appeared to be unconscious, Mélanie felt growing disgust and anger on seeing that she had been tortured hard. Her face was puffy and bloody, with one eye completely closed by blows and with both lips split open. Half of her finger nails had been pulled out, leaving her hands covered with blood, while multiple cigarette burn marks were visible on her bare breasts. Staring with hatred at the German interrogator, who was probably waiting for his prisoner to wake up before continuing to torture her, Mélanie used a third spell on him, having expended already her ‘Summon Monster’ and ‘Phantasmal Killer’ spells for today.

‘’Disintegrate!’’

102

A narrow green beam shot out of her pointed index, hitting the German in the chest. The man didn’t have the time to scream before being enveloped in a green halo and then turning into ashes.

‘’Have a nice time in the Abyss, you bastard!’’ proffered Mélanie before approaching the unconscious woman to better examine her wounds. She already had a good idea of who she could be, thanks to the morning visit by Pierre, but she now faced a severe dilemma. If she left this woman here, the Germans would then certainly torture her more and then either send her to a prison or execute her. On the other hand, saving this woman by transporting her out of this building could expose the secret of her résistance group’s existence, and this to save someone who had already proven to be either ignorant or negligent, or both, about basic rules of operational security. An alternate solution then came to her mind. Seeing that the woman would be unconscious for at least a few more minutes, Mélanie untied her, then took her in her arms as if she was a mere baby. With her invisibility field now surrounding both her and the woman, the teenager teleported to a location that she had visited a number of times in the past, namely Pierre’s Russian literature bookstore’s basement. As she had expected, the store was closed and empty on this Sunday and she was able to gently lay down the unconscious woman on an old couch normally used by customers to sit down and sift through books which interested them. Finding a blanket to cover her nudity took a bit more time but she was able to find one in a closet. With that done, she went up to the ground floor and picked up the receiver of the telephone set on the sales counter, near the cash register. Before using it, though, she morphed temporarily into a male shape, changing drastically her voice at the same time. Composing Pierre Brossolette’s home phone number, which she found written down on a small note glued to the counter, she waited patiently as the phone at the other end rang. Someone then picked up and answered in a distinctly female voice.

‘’Hello?!’’

‘’May I speak to Pierre, miss? It’s urgent.’’

‘’Uh, one moment, please! PIERRE, IT’S FOR YOU!’’

There were shuffling noises before Pierre’s voice came on line.

‘’Pierre Brossolette speaking!’’

‘’Pierre, Me and my friends found at the Musée de l’Homme that rare book you were looking for. We left it for you in the basement of the bookstore. You will however

103

need to bring some supplies to repair it: it was very roughly handled by the previous user. You better hurry.’’

‘’Wait! Who…’’

Before Pierre Brossolette could say more, Mélanie hung up on him, then returned to her female teenage shape. Hoping that Pierre would not prove so obtuse that he wouldn’t understand the secret meaning of her words, she teleported out of the bookstore, heading back to the Gestapo office: she wanted to explore the place a bit more under an invisibility cloak before the SS men regained some of their wits.

15:20 (Paris Time)

SD and Gestapo offices, 84 Avenue Foch

16th Arrondissement, Paris

A nervous looking SS soldier challenged Michel Koenig the moment he stepped out of his staff car with Dietrich Mannerheim.

‘’Halt! Identify yourselves!’’

Taken aback by such a suspicious attitude towards German officers in uniform, Michel nonetheless took out his military identity card, knowing how independent-minded and jealous of its prerogatives the SS Corps was. Mannerheim also showed his identity card, finally convincing the SS soldier to step aside and let them pass. Both men then went to a SS sturmbannführer who was standing in front of the main entrance to the SD and Gestapo building, talking in an agitated tone to an Army colonel. The colonel and the SS man cut their exchange and looked at the two newcomers as they saluted militarily and presented themselves.

‘’Hauptmann Michel Koenig, of the Feldgendarmerie, here to assist the investigation in the attack on these offices.’’

‘’Hauptmann Dietrich Mannerheim, from the Abwehr. I am with Hauptmann Koenig. Who is presently in charge of investigating this incident, sirs?’’

‘’The SD is!’’ replied at once the SS senior officer, beating the army colonel to the punch. ‘’Who asked for the assistance of the feldgendarmerie and of the Abwehr in this?’’

‘’I did!’’ Cut in the army colonel, giving a cold look at the SS officer. ‘’Whether you like it or not, Sturmbannführer Kieffer, this so-called incident happened inside the territory controlled by the Kommandant of Gross Paris. General von Stülpnagel is

104

especially disturbed by the wild, if not demented reports he heard coming from your services.’’

‘’Demented? DEMENTED? I HAD FIVE MEN RIPPED TO PIECES BY A HUGE BEAST ONLY THREE HOURS AGO, WHILE MY SUPERIOR, STANDARTENFÜHRER KNOCHEN, WAS FOUND DEAD FROM A MASSIVE CARDIAC ATTACK. I ALSO HAD ONE MAN VANISH ENTIRELY, WHILE HALF OF MY STAFF SUFFERED SERIOUS NERVOUS SHOCKS, HERR OBERST!’’

Michel Koenig exchanged a knowing look with Dietrich Mannerheim as Kieffer and the army colonel went on a shouting match, each trying to assert primacy of authority in the investigation. With German Army soldiers now greatly outnumbering the remaining SS personnel on the scene, Kieffer finally conceded grudgingly control of the investigation to the colonel, who promptly gave a series of orders to Michel.

‘’Hauptmann Koenig, I am now putting you in official charge of this investigation. You will in turn report your findings to the Kommandant of Gross Paris. I am Oberst von Metternich, Aide of General von Stülpnagel, and you will find my offices at the Hotel Meurice. If you need anything or encounter a problem, contact me at once!’’

‘’We will do our best, Herr Oberst!’’ replied Michel, coming to attention and saluting, imitated by Dietrich Mannerheim. The colonel then walked away, leaving the two young officers standing in front of the main entrance. Michel gave a wry smile to his Abwehr colleague.

‘’Well, from what this SS officer said, I think that we have a quite interesting and unusual case on our hands, Dietrich.’’

‘’Yeah! That will beat chasing after ghostly train robbers for a change.’’

The first thing that Koenig and Mannerheim did was to go look at the remains of the Germans killed in the noon attack. One look inside each of the body bags was enough to give them the urge to throw up.

‘’Mein Gott! No small arm or grenade could dismember a body this way. These men were torn apart.’’ said Michel, making Dietrich nod his head.

‘’Only high explosives could possibly do this, but then we would have seen some structural damages to the building, which is not the case here. A medical examiner will have to look at those bodies to have a better idea of the precise cause of death. I suggest that we go interview the survivors who directly witnessed the attack.’’

‘’Agreed!’’

105

 

The three direct witnesses available to them, two SD radio operators and one SS female auxiliary receptionist, all showed signs of deep psychological trauma, with the SS female auxiliary in particular being nearly inarticulate. However, what she was able to say corresponded with everything that the two other survivors told the investigators. After a good hour of gentle questioning, Michel and Dietrich took a break, time to compare notes and discuss possible conclusions. In that, their job was made nearly intractable by the fantastic nature of the depositions they had taken. Dietrich scratched his head as he reread his notes.

‘’A giant wolverine… Himmel! How are we to make sense of this story?’’

‘’Maybe they were victims of a collective hallucination?’’ proposed Michel, not believing that himself but having no other explanation. Dietrich gave him a dubious look.

‘’A collective hallucination that can shred to pieces six men? I think that we should look for further evidence and witnesses before jumping to conclusions.’’

‘’Uh, you’re right, but this case is looking like a real head-scratcher. Well, let’s look further around.’’

Visiting in turn each floor of the building while accompanied by a SS soldier, the two men finally ended in the interrogation room where Mélanie had disintegrated an interrogator. Seeing the empty torture chair in the middle of the room, Dietrich Mannerheim looked at the SS soldier guiding them through the building.

‘’You said that your senior interrogator, an Ernest Vogt, was last seen in this room, interrogating a prisoner. Where is that prisoner now?’’

‘’Uh, I don’t know, Herr Hauptmann. Maybe she was brought back to one of the cells on the floor below us. Let me check quickly.’’

‘’Go ahead, soldier!’’

The SS soldier then ran out of the room, only to return in a near state of panic a few minutes later, a shocked expression on his face.

‘’WE CAN’T FIND THAT PRISONER ANYWHERE, HERR HAUPTMANN. SHE ESCAPED!’’

Michel and Dietrich exchanged a glance at those words, with Michel commenting first about them.

‘’With the seeming madness and confusion going through this place during the noon attack, I can see how a prisoner could escape this place, possibly by using the roof

106

and crossing to neighboring buildings. The remaining question however is where is that Herr Vogt now?’’

Looking around the interrogation room for clues, Michel quickly noticed a thick patch of black ashes near a table supporting a few papers and a jug of water. That patch had been seemingly kicked through, spreading it further on the floor. He pointed the patch of dust to the SS soldier.

‘’Was this patch of dust here when your comrades searched for your Herr Vogt, soldier?’’

‘’Uh, I couldn’t say, Herr Hauptmann, as I was not part of that group. I know that four of our men went through this room after the attack, looking for our interrogator.’’ Michel rolled his eyes on hearing that.

‘’A crime scene contaminated by a group of stampeding men. Great! Could someone tell us who the prisoner being interrogated was?’’

‘’Yes, Herr Hauptmann! I will go get that information from our clerk. I won’t be long.’’

Leaving again at a run, the SS soldier came back after six minutes, a thin file in his hands. Michel took the file from him and sifted through it quickly, with Dietrich reading over his shoulder.

‘’Hum, Agnès Humbert, 46 years old, French Résistance member. Part of an anti-German propaganda cell based in the Musée de l’Homme. Arrested on April 10 at her home. A diary full of names was found at the time of the arrest. Well, let’s look at that diary, then we will go visit the home of that French woman. Where could we find that diary, soldier?’’

‘’At our analysis office, on the next floor below, Herr Hauptmann.’’

‘’Then, lead the way!’’

‘’Yes, Herr Hauptmann!’’

With the SS soldier in the lead, the trio moved down to the fifth floor and entered a large room filled with numerous filing cabinets, work tables and maps, where Michel cornered a SD NCO and asked him about Agnès Humbert’s diary. The SD man nodded his head at once on being asked about it.

‘’We have been studying it since we arrested that woman, Herr Hauptmann. It actually allowed us to arrest a few more members of the Résistance group she belonged to.’’

107

‘’Was there any other person named in it that has not been arrested yet?’’

‘’Only one, Herr Hauptmann: a ‘Pierre’, mentioned as helping that woman finish composing a clandestine newspaper. Unfortunately, the diary did not give us more than the first name of that man, so we haven’t been able to identify him yet. We were counting on that woman talking under interrogation to tell us more about that man.’’

‘’Hum, with your prisoner gone, I’m afraid that this ‘Pierre’ will stay a mystery to us. Very well! Here is your file back. Tell your commander that we will keep him informed of any progress we will make in this investigation. Dietrich, let’s go to that woman’s apartment!’’

The SD NCO watched with some mistrust the two army officers as they left his office: the SS Corps disliked very much when people from other German armed services came to dig their noses into its affairs.

07:48 (Paris Time)

Monday, April 14, 1941

SD and Gestapo local headquarters

84 Avenue Foch, 16th Arrondissement Paris

The three Gestapo agents were understandably nervous as they arrived for work in the morning at their Paris headquarters. Thanking their SS driver, they stepped out of their staff car and passed by the reinforced guard force at the entrance, now composed of no less than ten vigilant and also very nervous SS soldiers backed up by an armored troop transport half-track parked on the street. The three agents barely had time to step inside the reception lobby of the building when an eight-foot-high pillar of flames with arm-like appendages appeared between them and the main staircase, two searing blue dots near the top of the pillar looking like eyes. Before the petrified agents could react or run, the arm-like appendages slammed the Germans like giant fists, both crushing and burning them. With lightning speed, the Fire Elemental then swept its arms around the lobby, striking and putting on fire both other Germans and parts of the lobby. Next, the apparition walked down the main ground level hallway of the building, touching off fires

108

all along and blocking the rear exit while killing more Germans on the way. The few Germans who managed to fire at it found to their horror that their bullets seemed to have little to no effect on it and were either incinerated by the creature or fled outside in utter terror, alerting the soldiers guarding the entrance. When those soldiers tried to enter the lobby, their weapons pointed, they were confronted by a fire spreading wildly through the building and soon had to withdraw back outside. One SS soldier screamed with terror when a screaming human torch ran out of a corner of the lobby, trying to get outside, and collided with him. He barely had time to recognize the torch as being the female SS auxiliary who had been manning the reception desk before his own uniform caught fire, making him run out and roll on the sidewalk to attempt to put out the fire. Two of his comrades did help him do so, saving him from a hideous death, but at the cost of first and second degree burns to their hands and forearms. The SS guards could then do little but to watch the whole building progressively catch fire, with the Germans in the upper floors finding themselves trapped by the flames. A few of them who were on the first and second floors, seeing no other way to escape, jumped out of windows with varying success, many injuring themselves in the process. The Germans on the third, fourth, fifth and sixth floors were less lucky, as few of them had the courage to jump down from so high. Except for two men who jumped out of the third or fourth floors and who broke both legs on landing, the rest of the trapped Germans died of smoke inhalation before being incinerated in the fire. Sturmbannführer Kieffer was one of the Germans who perished in the flames before Paris firefighters could arrive and start dousing the flames.

While the helpless SS guards outside the

building watched the headquarters go up in flames,

Mélanie worked as quickly as possible to empty the

Gestapo’s weapons and ammunition vault in the

basement, where she had used Magic Missiles to kill the two SS soldiers on guard there. Making a

series of teleportation jumps in quick succession,

she had time to carry away to her secret cave nearly

all the pistols, submachine guns, rifles and medium machine guns held in the Gestapo vault, along with sizeable quantities of small arms ammunitions and grenades. She finally had to stop and jump back to the cabaret when she saw that the burning ceiling

109

was about to cave in on top of the remaining crates of ammunition. What was left then quickly caught fire and cooked off, exploding and projecting bullets and fragments all around and forcing the Paris firefighters to back away from the fire, as did the SS guards. With ammunition continuing to explode for long minutes, the firefighter then concentrated on preventing the fire from spreading to the adjacent buildings on both sides of 84 Avenue Foch. By the time that the fire was finally extinguished a bit before noon, there was only charred structures and human remains left of the SD and Gestapo Paris headquarters. On Mélanie’s part, this meant a huge success in many ways. First, she had just killed most of the Gestapo and SD agents in Paris. Second, she had also burned down and destroyed the Gestapo files and archives, eliminating a lot of incriminating information which could have cost more lives among the French resisting the occupation. Third, her second magical attack in two days was bound to make any new SD or Gestapo agents posted to Paris after this extremely nervous and circumspect, something that could only help the cause of the Résistance while not risking to cause the execution of French hostages in retaliation. Finally, she had just added to her hidden arsenal a sizeable number of modern weapons, along with plenty of ammunition for them. All in all, it was proving to be a good day by her book.

For Michel Koenig and Dietrich Mannerheim, on the other hand, that day and the ones which followed proved completely fruitless, as they could not find any plausible, realistic explanation for what happened at the Gestapo offices. The autopsy of the bodies from the two attacks on 84 Avenue Foch only reinforced the evidence that something completely out of this reality had happened. However, Michel could not say so on paper, something that would probably have cost him his position in Paris. He was thus forced to officially close his investigation for lack of evidence. Then, to his utter frustration, another German military train was robbed three days later by persons unknown and unseen.