London 1940

The Tube station was packed, thousands of people lying head to toe on the platforms – on the tracks themselves.

Ludovic de Vauban pressed himself against the stone wall, and closed his eyes. Twenty-two years had passed since he'd left the horrors of the trenches, and over those decades, he'd thought he was getting over his shell-shock. But being down here, with all these people . . . it was bringing back things that he didn't want to think about.

The stench was unbelievable. There were no facilities in which to wash, and only four buckets behind screens to act as toilets – for thousands and thousands of people. Every time the thump of a falling bomb sounded, someone screamed.

Suddenly, Ludovic couldn't take it anymore. He pushed through the crowd, fighting back the familiar, old panic, until he was out of the station and standing on the streets of London.

But things weren't any better out here.

The ground shuddered beneath his feet as the planes soaring overhead dropped their terrible cargo, followed by the sound of blasted brick and shattering glass and roaring fire.

Shrapnel peppered the street, and Ludovic covered his head with both arms, pressing his back to the nearest wall. He couldn't even tell which direction it was coming from. The destruction was everywhere.

When he'd first heard the news that war was returning, he'd thought that Edmond had been right, after all. He'd said that even when the Great War ended, another one would come along, because it always did. No one had expected it to be so soon, though. And this war was proving to be very different to the one that Ludovic had fought. This time, the war had come home.

Ludovic hadn't signed up to fight this time – he couldn't – but maybe it wouldn't have made a difference even if he had. London had become a blazing hellhole.

Pushing off the wall, Ludovic walked away from the Underground, hoping to find another shelter, one with fewer people.

As he turned a corner, firemen and auxiliary nurses rushed past him. Here, the fires raged out of control, solid sheets of flame so hot they seemed to boil the air. Further down the street, a building had come down, and above the roaring flames, Ludovic heard the awful cries of trapped, crushed people.

He froze.

The last thing he'd ever wanted was to be in another war, but it had come anyway, ripping through the country he'd come to call home. All those years ago, in the trenches, he and Edmond had helped to save so many lives, using their vampire strength to free trapped soldiers, and carry the injured to safety.

Was Edmond fighting in this war, too?

Ludovic had no idea. But as he watched the firemen trying desperately to tackle the blaze, he realised that he couldn't just stand here and watch. He'd seen them fighting these fires before, and so often it seemed like a losing battle – as soon as they got a fire under control, another bomb would hit the same place and start the fire all over again. Or else it would strike the building next door and start a new fire. It was relentless.

The old fear roared through him, and he swayed, steadying himself with a hand on the wall.

Blood and mud . . . pieces of bodies . . . falling shells . . .

He forced the trenches from his mind.

Maybe this would undo all the progress he'd made regarding his trauma, but people were dying.

Ludovic ran to the firemen.

The ground shuddered with explosions beneath his feet as the merciless bombing continued. He'd almost reached the firemen when he heard the familiar whistle of a falling bomb, followed by the awful silence as it drew nearer to the ground. The explosion seemed to shake the world. The ground heaved, fire blazed in a bright flash, and a vast column of street and earth surged into the air, raining debris all around. Ludovic was thrown off his feet. He slammed into the wall behind him, and fell to the ground.

For a moment he couldn't move. His ears rang with the force of the bomb, and the he was back in the trenches, while shells exploded all around him, and shrapnel reduced men to screaming meat.

Ahead of him, the firemen were picking themselves up, now confronted with a fire that was bigger than ever, but they faced it without flinching. Every night they were on these streets, battling to save their city from the German bombers.

Ludovic hauled himself to his feet.

He hadn't trained to fight fires – he didn't have a clue what he was doing – but there had to be some way he could help. Otherwise, what was the point of all this physical strength?

He jogged towards the firemen, and he'd almost reached them when something made him look up. Fire had consumed the building looming over them, and it was crumbling, the foundations giving way. Ludovic shouted a warning, breaking into a run, but even a vampire wasn't fast enough.

The firemen looked up as the building came down, but there wasn't even time for them to scream before the burning rubble collapsed on top of them. Ludovic wasn't as close as they had been, but rubble crashed into him too, knocking him to the road and burying him beneath a pile of brick and stone. Blast-dust filled his eyes, scratching like tiny needles, and Ludovic shoved a hand through the pile of rubble, trying to clear it from his face.

The sky appeared above him – or rather, the wall of smoke that blocked the sky from view.

Ludovic pushed more rubble from his chest, feeling for any injuries. Flying bits of stone and glass had peppered him with tiny cuts, and his left shoulder ached, but none of that was life-threatening. He'd been lucky.

The firemen hadn't.

Even as Ludovic was staggering to his feet, he knew there was no saving them.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, even though there was nothing he could have done.

Even if he'd run faster, it would never have been enough to get those men away from the building before it came down. He'd probably just have been crushed along with them.

Another bomb came down in a nearby street, shaking the world. Ludovic had thought the shells in the trenches were bad, but these? They were something else. Some of these bombs were so powerful they could demolish an entire street in one go, so powerful that they could kill people even from a distance, by sucking the very air from their lungs.

What would happen if a third war followed this one? What new horrors would people dream up? What new ways would they find to slaughter each other?

Ludovic bent double, trying to stop his mind from sliding away.

Running footsteps sounded, then a hand touched his shoulder.

"Are you alright?" said a voice – female, with a trace of a French accent.

Ludovic just nodded.

"You should get to a shelter," the woman said. "It's going to be a bad night."

Weren't they all?

Ludovic looked up as the woman moved away, running down the streets. She wasn't wearing a nurse's uniform, and her long curls were blackened with soot.

He started to follow her, to see if she needed help, and then . . .

At first, he couldn't quite make sense of what he was seeing.

The red smear on the road . . . the pieces . . . he'd seen it before, in the trenches, but never like this, never this . . . small.

In the middle of the street, amid the rubble and the chaos, was the remains of a baby. The force of a bomb had hurled it through a window, and it had . . . burst when it hit the road outside, like overripe fruit.

Everything faded out around Ludovic, and in his mind he saw another baby, a tiny, fragile thing with a sunshine smile, cradled in the crook of his arm.

Marie . . .

There was nothing he could do to save this baby, but he couldn't bear to leave it lying here like this. He found a torn piece of soot-smeared fabric – a sheet? A curtain? A blanket that had once been in the baby's cot? – and wrapped it around the ruined body.

Tears burned his eyes.

Everything around him was fire and chaos and death. Houses were blown to smithereens, or burned to the ground, all too often with families trapped inside. The dead and the dying lay on the pavement, in the road, and there weren't enough people to help them, and sometimes there weren't even full bodies left, just pieces – unidentifiable, glistening chunks of what had once been human beings.

People were crying, screaming their children's names, and that more than anything made Ludovic lift his head.

That building that had collapsed further down the street – people were still alive under there. Nurses and other volunteers swarmed over the ruins, digging for survivors, and Ludovic forced himself to straighten up, forced himself to tamp down the memories that were threatening to overwhelm him.

People needed help.

He'd come this far without breaking down, and maybe he still would later, but for now he had to hold himself together.

Ludovic ran towards the collapsed building.

A/N: These is the last of the WW2 stories. I know some of you may have expected to see stories about Ysanne, Edmond, and Gideon during this time, but none of them were involved with this war, so there isn't much to tell. Next week, we're moving forward a couple of decades and catching up with Gideon :)