The Shadow War

by Lindsay Smith

  Eight months now they’d been crawling, starving, clawing their way across Germany, but Daniel was further from her than ever. All he wanted was to dwell on what had happened and drown himself in the blood of anyone responsible. There was already more than enough blood on her hands.

  Sometimes, it was the only thing she could see.

  She wanted to dream of what lived on the other side of their grief. She wanted to believe they might someday leave this purgatory of stolen clothes and cold barns and blood forever staining their hands. But grief turned the world into a stranger—nothing worked quite right in it, none of the old rules applied. Grief lied and lied and lied; it swore things could be fixed, with the right sacrifice, the right exchange. Grief held you in an in-between, kept you from moving forward or back. She feared what would happen to Daniel when there was no more revenge to serve.

  The sheep bleated restlessly below her. Did they sense a wolf in the woods? Soldiers and their dogs? She burrowed deeper into the hay. If Daniel was caught, they might just shoot him on sight. But if they took him alive; if they had any sense of what he’d been responsible for—she’d be next.

  Rebeka looked up sharply. The sheep had gone silent. The shadows in the barn thickened, starlight lost behind a sheet of clouds. She stared into the darkened corners of the loft, and the stone tower stared back at her from her thoughts.

  And then the shadows moved.

  They spilled toward her like ink spreading across the hay. Rebeka stifled a yelp as she scrambled back. They twisted upward, gathering into shapes. Rebeka dug one hand into the hay to fish out her Walther P38—

  But then the shadows melted, as quickly as they’d come, leaving behind two men.

  Rebeka opened her mouth to scream.

  “Shh.” One of them clamped a hand over her mouth until she relaxed. He smelled fetid, cold. “It’s all right. It’s me.”

  Rebeka blinked as her mind tried to make sense of what she was seeing, as her eyes focused on her brother and another boy. But they’d appeared out of nothingness, just the thick darkness and silence—

  “You’re safe,” she breathed. “Did—did you kill him?” Her heart was fluttering frantically, but she willed herself to calm. Her gaze slid toward the other boy, lean and smug and blond. “Who the hell—”

  “Liam Doyle. Pleasure to meet you, miss.” He crouched down and held his hand out to her.

  She stared at the hand, then him. “Are you with the Americans?” she asked in English.

  His eyebrows furrowed. “I, uh— You could say I represent myself.”

  Even smugger than he looked. She whirled back toward Daniel. “What idiotic thing have you done now?”

  “Junker’s dead. The rest of his cadre, too.” Daniel looked toward Liam, who nodded confirmation. She didn’t miss how pleased they seemed with themselves. “We’re safe for now.”

  Rebeka pinched the bridge of her nose. A headache was roaring to life behind her eyes. “You can’t kill an entire cadre of SS officers and not expect them to come looking for us.”

  “Well,” Liam countered, “in fairness, no one knows they’re dead just yet.”

  Rebeka glared at him so hard she could swear he started to smoke.

  “What? What’d I do?” Liam turned to her brother. “Come on. I thought you both wanted to kill Nazis.”

  Rebeka shrank back into the hay. That was Daniel’s quest. Hers was only to try to keep him alive.

  “I want them gone,” Rebeka said quietly. “Don’t much care how.”

  Liam’s smile had faded. What replaced it was far more chilling: the solemn, predatory stare her brother got when he planned his next kill. Just what Daniel needed—a coconspirator. “Then I think we can help each other.”

  Rebeka glanced toward Daniel, but he was busy staring at the toes of his stolen boots, refusing to meet her gaze. He’d already decided for both of them, then. Whoever this boy was, her brother had sided with him and, whether he meant to or not, against her.

  “I assume you have a price,” she said.

  “The town of Siegen isn’t far from here.” Liam situated himself on a bag of sheared wool. He was all lean sinew, exuding the confidence of a wild cat waiting for its prey to tire. “Heinrich Himmler’s snapping up historical texts from all over Europe. There’s something I need from his collection—and I need to get it soon, before he realizes what he has.” His mouth scrunched with displeasure. “Unfortunately, the compound’s heavily guarded, so I can’t get into it alone. I need someone to help me slip past the guards and keep watch while I try to find this book.”

  An SS outpost. Rebeka’s stomach turned. No wonder her brother had been so willing to hear this boy out. Hundreds, if not thousands, of highly trained death squad soldiers would be stationed there.

  “This is nonsense. Daniel, we don’t have time for this. We should continue on—”

  “Kreutzer,” Daniel said softly. “Tell her about Kreutzer.”

  A chill raced up Rebeka’s neck. A phantom touch, like the kiss of a scalpel’s blade.

  Liam clasped his hands in front of him. “Dr. Kreutzer’s written several papers about this book I’m after. Some of them using my research.” His knuckles whitened as he tightened his grip. “Daniel said he was on your list. Of Nazis to kill.”

  Daniel’s list, she corrected silently. “He used to torment our neighbors in Łódź. Make them disappear. People said it was experiments, something unnatural.”

  There was more to Kreutzer, more she didn’t dare voice. The fiery hate that clung to him, smelling like burning meat. The glimpses she saw of a darkness he craved—whispers in the dead of night. He’d stared at her once in the streets, assessing, weighing. Her heart had pounded with a certainty of what he planned for her. She’d made sure to hide herself away that night, curled up in a friend’s cupboard. But she couldn’t explain it. Not without explaining so much worse.

  “Well, if you want him dead, then Siegen’s the place to find him.”

  “But that isn’t why you want us to go with you.” Her voice shook as she tried to push back those memories. “You think three of us stand a better chance storming it than one.”

  “Even I can only do so much.”

  She studied him carefully. He wasn’t dressed richly, but neither did he look like he’d been ravaged by the war and everything that came before it: tweed jacket, navy sweater, comfortable slacks over leather shoes. He’d probably even washed his hair recently.

  She and Daniel both looked frightful, and she knew it. She’d plucked the dress she’d been wearing for the past week from a clothesline; what had started as a cheerful teal wool was now a dingy corpse-gray. Daniel had stolen hiking boots for her from God only knew where when the straps broke on her flats, and she wore them over torn wool stockings. She’d lopped off most of her dark waves and tucked what remained under a driving cap.

  Eight months of scavenged meals and terror and grief had whittled her curves into hard, stubborn planes. Before, she’d routinely lugged cow carcasses around their parents’ shop, then sacks of grain at their uncle’s farm. Now she woke up tired and weak and went to sleep feeling like a shadow of a person, the silk stocking a stronger girl had peeled off and cast aside.

  “I’m not interested in getting my brother and me killed. We’ve survived too much for that. One or three—it doesn’t matter. We can’t stand against a hundred SS.”

  Daniel laid his hand on her shoulder. “Please. Just hear him out.”

  She recoiled from the uniform he wore; the scent of blood covering him was both repulsive and yet—in spite of herself—intoxicating. She couldn’t regret the confirmation of vengeance served. “Your—your clothes are in the corner,” she managed, throat tight, before turning away.

  Daniel sighed, then went to change.

  Liam had been studying her, his gaze hollowed out. It was the gaze of loss, t
he gaze of envy, and it didn’t sit well with Rebeka. He had no idea what it had cost her to keep her brother safe.

  “You don’t know us,” she said, arms wrapping tight.

  He winced, an acknowledgment. At least he understood that much. “I grew up in Hell’s Kitchen in New York.” He perched on a bale of hay. “Saw plenty of unfair fights. Was on the wrong end of more than a few. I know what it’s like to feel powerless.”

  “And you’re here to keep up the streak?”

  “Rebeka,” Daniel scolded from the other side of the loft.

  She made a face at him. “You’re asking an awful lot of people you’ve just met, is all.”

  “You don’t have to do this. I’ve told you that.” Daniel stepped out of the shadows, buttoning his shirt up to his throat. “We’ll find a train depot, somewhere headed west, get you to safety. This doesn’t have to be your fight.”

  How did he not understand? Someone had to be with him to care whether he lived or died. She swallowed back the same tears she’d been swallowing for months. “Luxembourg won’t save us. We’ve tried that already.”

  “You’re from Luxembourg?” Liam asked. “What the hell brought you here?”

  Rebeka tucked her knees under her chin. Autumn was young still, but the night was growing colder by the minute. “No. We’re from Berlin. Originally.” She closed her eyes. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

  That was true. She’d been six when the National Socialist Party took control, but it wasn’t some dramatic change. The rest of Berlin already hated them. They already talked openly about the diseases Jews supposedly carried, the babies whose blood they surely drank. She could see the hate oozing from them, a tangible thing. Vast lacework conspiracies alleging they controlled every nation, every bank, every newspaper—Rebeka always thought, If that were true, then maybe the papers might not run so many articles blaming everything on the Jews.

  But things did change, so seamlessly she couldn’t be sure it was the world changing around her or her becoming more aware of the world her parents had always known. Signs in the shop windows. Stars on their clothes, bright as bull’s-eyes. A slow peeling away of every basic right, like peeling away strips of flesh.

  Rebeka was ashamed to admit it, but she didn’t blame their parents for what they did: the ways they tried to conceal what they were, renounce it. She and Daniel and Ari had continued to attend German schools until the government barred them, and they stopped observing Shabbat, even though their previous observance had been more an excuse to socialize with their friends. But it was far too late to pretend. They’re going to send you away soon, their neighbors leered, under breaths, on streetcars, in the stores. Germany will be great once more.

  “I’m sorry,” Liam said. “I can’t even begin to understand what you’ve been through.”

  “You don’t even know what you’re sorry for,” Rebeka said.

  Daniel clenched his jaw, shooting her a look. “We—we left Berlin after they smashed our parents’ shop. Burned our synagogue. Dragged our friends through the streets and took them away.”

  Rebeka shrank deeper into her coat. She hadn’t needed her strange sense to see that night coming. It was written in the sneer on every German’s face, every headline in Der Stürmer, every band of brown-shirted boys trouncing through the streets. All the night of glass did was smash that fragile belief they all held that this could ever go away.

  The Jews are our misfortune. They were the Judenfrage—the Jewish question. Not fellow Germans, not people, but a question to answer, a problem to solve.

  “Our parents tried to get us into a youth program so we could emigrate to Palestine. But they were so crowded already, and we weren’t Zionists, anyway. We mostly went to synagogue on the High Holy Days. But things kept getting worse . . . They thought maybe we could move to Luxembourg—the farm where our uncle lived. Thought we could start a new life there. But even that wasn’t far enough.” Daniel shrugged into his overcoat. “Germany came back for us and sent us to the Łódź ghetto in Poland. Detention, they called it. Without telling us what we were waiting for.”

  Rebeka couldn’t let him tell the next part. She leaned forward, gripping her hands together. “Our older brother, Ari—he worked in the ghetto’s administration office, and he overheard the officers discussing plans to ship us all off again. He begged us to run. As far as we could.” She picked at a ragged nail. “And so we did.”

  “Ship you off? What, did they send your family to the work camps?” Liam asked.

  A noise escaped her, a wild, frantic laugh. “Is that what they tell you?”

  His brow furrowed, like he was grappling with a foreign tongue. “The Times says they’re concentrating Jews and other political prisoners in labor camps. Like—” Liam ducked his head, cheeks darkening. “Well, like President Roosevelt’s doing with Japanese Americans.”

  “Are they lying to you? Or are you just willfully ignorant?” Rebeka snarled. “They’re killing us. As many as they can.”

  A muscle twitched along Liam’s jawline. “I didn’t—I mean, the papers say it’s just—”

  “It’s a purge. Extermination. They’ve made monsters of us and won’t stop until we’re all dead.” Daniel’s fists curled at his sides. “So I won’t stop either. Not until I’ve killed every last Nazi I can.”

  “You’re sure?” Liam sank deeper into the hay. He didn’t sound disbelieving, only—tired. Rebeka felt it, too. The endless capacity for human cruelty, weighing and weighing on her until she couldn’t move.

  “We saw it. When we stowed away on a passenger train out of Poland. We passed their camp at Chełmno, and you could smell it, the bodies burning. You could see the smoke.” Her voice shattered. “And the other passengers—they were laughing about the smell. They all knew what it was, and it was just some big joke to them.”

  She watched the American, her mouth set in a firm line. Waiting for some kind of reaction, though she wasn’t sure what she hoped he would do. She didn’t know what she wanted—to rage and scream and tear the world apart? Most days it seemed like a good enough plan. Good enough to keep them alive for one more meal, good enough for her to believe what Daniel was doing was right.

  Sometimes she just wanted to sleep. Burrow into the cold, damp earth and pretend it was her grave, the death she’d cheated. Sometimes she imagined the train came for her and she could sleep, sleep at long last.

  But there had to be something on the other side of this nightmare—she had to believe it. It was the only way she could go on.

  “We’ll kill them,” Liam said. “We’ll kill every damn Nazi that gets in our way.”

  Daniel was leaning toward him, something unfamiliar in his features. It took Rebeka a few moments to recognize it as hope.

  “You cannot promise that,” Rebeka said.

  Liam unfolded as he turned to Daniel. His seriousness was far quieter and cooler than her brother’s, but the same fire burned under his skin. She didn’t miss the way Daniel looked back at him then, either—and for a moment, she dared to hope Daniel might believe in after, too.

  “If you’ll help me get into Siegen, there isn’t a German alive who can stop me.” Liam’s voice was threaded with steel. “Not the entire German army combined.”

  Daniel leaned closer toward him. “The shadow place,” he said.

  Rebeka cocked her head, confused. For the briefest moment, she blinked and saw the crumbling tower again. Kreutzer and his burning, hateful face. The darkness always waiting in the back of her mind.

  “Did you ever feel like there was something more out there?” Liam asked. “Another world, just around the corner from our own?”

  His words knocked the breath out of her, but she shook her head. “I can’t say that I have.”

  “Well, it’s real. I found it. A universe that exists just beside ours, and all it takes is the right frequency to b
ridge the gap.” His eyes were wild now—the eyes of a true believer. “And it’s full of this energy—a powerful energy. If we pull it into our world, we can do wondrous things with it. It’s—it’s easier if I show you.” Liam glanced toward Rebeka, as if asking her permission.

  What else could she do? Daniel had already made up his mind. She nodded for him to go on.

  Liam stood, clenching fists, and drew a deep breath. For a long minute, nothing happened, and Rebeka fidgeted, wondering what stupid game this boy and her brother had cooked up.

  But then the air shifted—tingling, needling at the headache that lurked behind her eyes. The starlight flared around her, gilding the hay and rumpled sacks of grain. The sheep bleated again, wary. The night seemed to gather around Liam, wreathing him, until only the whites of his eyes gleamed out of the inky black.

  “I can reach into that world, draw on its power, and store it up, and then I can command it—give it form.”

  Liam opened his palm, and darkness unraveled like a ball of yarn from his hand, like he was a magician serving up a dangerous trick. Whispers surrounded her with gale force; a sickly violet light splashed over them all.

  Rebeka’s heart thumped, painfully sharp. It made no sense, what she was seeing—but neither did her visions. Why should this boy who twisted shadows to his will be any less real?

  The hunger in her shifted. Sharpened.

  “I saw him use it,” Daniel said, his words rounded with wonder. “It shredded an entire cadre of SS officers like they were nothing. Rebeka, just imagine.”

  Just imagine.

  Her brother wanted a way to kill with ever more cruelty and power, and this pretty idiot had appeared out of nowhere, offering him a terrible gift. And as the whispers slithered around her, she knew—the way she’d known in Berlin, the way she’d known in Łódź—it would be the death of them both.

  But she’d have been lying if she said she didn’t want it, too. As the whispers grew, she leaned into them and let her armor slide away. Why fight it? She didn’t just want to kill Nazis—Kreutzer, Gerstein, Himmler, and more—she wanted to make them suffer. She wanted revenge, even if not with the same blind fervor that Daniel did. Yes, the whispers reminded her—she wanted to see this through.