Bitter Seeds (Milkweed)
Ian Tregillis
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 0765361205
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
It's 1939. The Nazis have supermen, the British have demons, and one perfectly normal man gets caught in between.
Raybould Marsh is a British secret agent in the early days of the Second World War, haunted by something strange he saw on a mission during the Spanish Civil War: a German woman with wires going into her head who looked at him as if she knew him.
When the Nazis start running missions with people who have unnatural abilities―a woman who can turn invisible, a man who can walk through walls, and the woman Marsh saw in Spain who can use her knowledge of the future to twist the present―Marsh is the man who has to face them. He rallies the secret warlocks of Britain to hold the impending invasion at bay. But magic always exacts a price. Eventually, the sacrifice necessary to defeat the enemy will be as terrible as outright loss would be.
Alan Furst meets Alan Moore in the opening of an epic of supernatural alternate history, Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis is a tale of a twentieth century like ours and also profoundly different.
Blood War (Blood Destiny, Book 8)
The Mortal Heart (Beautiful Creatures: The Untold Stories, Book 1)
Necessary Evil (The Milkweed Triptych, Book 3)
Devil Said Bang (Sandman Slim, Book 4)
clipboard and folded the catalog page in his pocket. It took another fifteen minutes of searching the cellar before he found the cabinets marked with the same catalog numbers. They were empty, meaning the records in question had already been loaded on one of the trucks. He rushed back outside, but was relieved to find the trucks still queued up. Marsh again scanned the supervising officers’ cargo manifest—their replacements had arrived, while Marsh was inside—and traced his quarry to the fourth
His Majesty’s Navy, a handful of fighting men from other services, and one accountant who’d had the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Stephenson also took the opportunity to enlist a handful of scientists and engineers to assist Lorimer in his analysis of the battery. But it wasn’t enough. Milkweed needed a strategy for quashing the rumors. One that would kill the issue. The King declared Sunday, May 26—which also happened to be the first day of the Dunkirk evacuation—a
the safest thing to say. Better than the truth: No, son, we’re the ones doing this. “Just got a call over the blower,” said the officer. Waves of tension radiated from the poor fellow. Will couldn’t help but feel an awed respect for the policeman’s resolve. Doing his job day after day, trying to protect people while enduring constant exposure to that wrongness off the coast … He was a good man. Will wished he could have offered him some perspective, some sense of hope. The bobby continued,
hip to his neck. He put his hands under the pillow to prop up his head. The stretched canvas felt rough against the backs of his hands. A bead of water trickled down one corner of the storeroom. It was raining outside. Marsh crossed his arms across his chest to ward off the damp. Rainwater distilled the odor of mildew as it percolated through the stones. The prisoner, Gretel, had slept here during her brief incarceration. Marsh had found reminders of her presence when he’d first started
parents proud.” “It’s too late. We’re full.” “I’m a good German.” He took another glance across the plaza. The others were busy, casting no attention in his direction. Klaus beckoned the girl into the shadow behind the massive marble column. There he opened his coat, kneeled beside her, and tilted his head down. “Look at me,” he said. “This is what they’ll do to you.” If you survive. He watched the brass buckles on her red leather shoes, waiting for her eyes to trace the wires from his waist
