The root cellar door was wide open in the hall, and leading down into it, like teeth ringing a maw, were sharp, jagged streaks of blood.
His afternoon MRE lurched back up his throat, but he forced it down. He had to think logically about this. A problem set—he could puzzle this out. Whoever the assailant was, they hadn’t left bloody tracks exiting the cellar. Maybe there was an exterior cellar hatch they’d left through. They’d have no reason to stick around unless they knew he was coming, but if they were expecting him, why not clean up the mess? Wouldn’t they want everything to look in order?
Maybe—Phillip forced himself to believe in this hope—maybe the farmers had just gotten lucky and shot a massive buck wandering through the woods, and had dragged it downstairs to dress it properly. It might explain the marks on the door—antlers as they dragged it through. His father had shot a six-point buck at their lake house once, but got it halfway into the cabin before realizing there was still fight in it left.
The third possibility—the one Phillip didn’t want to explore—wrapped its thorny vines around him and wouldn’t let go. That thing he’d seen in the woods. The inky, sinewy creature, slithering out of thin air. Surely he’d hallucinated it. But the ripple of those dark muscles, the awful smell and sharp crackle of electricity . . . could he have imagined that, too? How could such a thing be real?
Phillip hefted the poker, letting its weight ground him, then slid his pistol from its holster with his free hand. Just in case. If nothing else, he might have surprise on his side: for Nazis, deer, or anything else.
He descended the root cellar stairs into darkness.
No sounds but the faint groan of wood beneath him—nothing but the same wilted-vegetable stink and a pungent layer of dust and mold. Once he reached the bottom, he stopped and waited for any movement, any noise. Nothing. He risked a tentative step forward, but his foot struck something solid. Dense. He pulled back and waved his hand above him until he caught the pull string for an overhead light.
The bulb clicked on and washed the cellar in dull gold.
Two bodies glistened before him: a man and a small girl. As far as he could tell, anyway. They were mostly gleaming, blood-slick heaps, large swaths of skin missing to expose muscled limbs and torsos and patches of hair, their unbound intestines spooling off to one side.
Phillip was too petrified to scream: he could only stare, clammy sweat soaking him through, words nothing but a jumble of noise in his head.
Who—
Why—
Deep within the cellar, tin cans clanked together as something moved.
Nope. No thank you. Phillip whirled back toward the cellar stairs, feet acting of their own accord. But as soon as he started up them, heavy footsteps sounded overhead.
Trapped.
Mutilated bodies in the basement and God only knew what upstairs. And something else rattling in the darkness. At least upstairs there was a way out. But as he moved up the steps, the air congealed around him, shadows wrapping around his limbs like steel wool, chattering and screaming from inside his skull.
DON’TGOdon’t go do n’t g o . . .
His windpipe sealed up; his muscles burst with agony as he tried to pull free. His legs were ripped out from under him, and the darkness dragged him down the stairs, chin banging against each step. He skidded into the pile of corpses and rolled onto his back as the darkness spread around him, swallowing up all but a faint glimmer of the overhead light. Above him, a figure loomed: the little white girl, her body still mangled, shadows oozing from her many wounds.
Phillip did the only sensible thing and screamed.
She lifted one arm, rotten darkness spilling out of her seams. Stretched her hand toward Phillip, as if to caress his face, sending an array of images crawling like spiders through his thoughts. A world on fire, a circular chamber, a featureless face looming over him, waiting, wanting, demanding answers he couldn’t give.
Somehow he had the thought to raise his pistol, but his limbs were locked in place. Of all the goddamned things Al had trained him for . . . Absurdly, he wanted to laugh. The army’d never guess in a million years how he’d gotten himself killed.
More, the girl hissed—the words like teeth and claws digging in. We need more.
Just then a rifle shot pierced the veil of darkness, whizzing over his shoulder from behind him, and a hole bloomed in the girl’s face. She rasped with a scream, but it was like a deflating balloon, all rushing air as the shadows gushed out. In a gale of whispers and shrieking, the darkness collapsed on itself, leaving only the mangled body behind—just as before.
Phillip crumpled, the back of his head hitting the cellar stairs.
A young woman towered over him, her upside-down face snarling as she clutched her smoking rifle.
“You’re late,” she said.
CHAPTER FIVE
SIMONE
The American shoved off of the cellar stairs and whirled on her with a pistol in one hand and a fire poker in the other. “Who the hell are you?”
Simone slammed the barrel of her rifle against his poker in a riposte. Both rifle and poker clattered to the stairs. His eyes widened as he gripped his sidearm, and his thumb fumbled for the cocking mechanism. But she was already lunging at him, pinning his pistol arm to his side as she backed him against the cellar wall.
“Okay, okay.” He held his free hand up. “You win. Let me go.”
Using her forearm to hold him against the wall, she dug around in her hunting parka’s pockets with her free hand until she found what was left of her pack of Gauloises and jammed one between her teeth.
“What,” Simone growled, “is the code?”
He stared back at her with glassy, deep brown eyes. “Are you fucking kidding me? Did you see that thing—”
“The code,” she said again, fishing out her lighter.
“I—I thought you might prefer orchids!” he shouted. “Now get off of me and help me stop these—”
Simone scowled. She was kind of hoping he’d give her an excuse to use her rifle again. “They’re dead.” She let go of him and glanced toward the skinless bodies on the packed earth floor. “Or something like it. I killed two more on my way here.” The lighter sparked under her fingertips. “Thought they were Nazi swine, but they didn’t die the same.”
“Then what are they?”
Simone shrugged, letting the smoke scrape out the tension from all the corners of her soul. How should she know? She was here to kill monsters. Didn’t make much difference to her what form they took.
Her contact was still breathing shallowly, sweat clinging to his smooth forehead as he stared at the bodies—or whatever they were. Now that Simone allowed herself to look closely, she saw they were fairly horrific. Nothing like the stories of Nazi atrocities smuggled in from the far corners of Poland and Lithuania, but the visible organs were certainly unpleasant. And that shadow that oozed out of it, like coal smoke . . .
“Ph-Phillip.” He offered her a shaking hand. He was trying to smile, the poor kid. He had a sweet face, with a sturdy jaw and thick eyelashes, better suited for the movies than the war zone. He was bound to be a colossal headache for her. “Phillip Jones. United States Army.”
Simone stared down at his hand. “You told Georges-Yves you could help us.”
“I have no idea what the army told your—uh—Georges-Yves.” Phillip lowered his hand, then ducked to pick up his sidearm and fire poker. “I just know I was supposed to meet you.” He glanced at her sideways. “Whoever you are.”
Simone exhaled smoke instead of offering her name. Her fingers squeezed tight around the cigarette until they stopped trembling. “You have the equipment?”
He gestured, inexplicably, toward his boots. This was already taking too long, and night was falling thick. “They’ve got hidden compartments,” he said. “The shoes.”
“Okay.”
She wrinkled her nose; the cigarette was already nearly gone. “Are you ready?”
Phillip stared at her for a long moment before looking back toward the skinned bodies. “Shouldn’t we, uh . . .”
Simone clenched her teeth as she followed his gaze. He wanted to bury them—as if they would care how they were treated now. She could just hear her mother chiding her about respect for the dead, as if the fascists had shown them all a single ounce of respect in two long years. “They knew the dangers when they agreed to help our network.”
“They knew the Nazis were a risk. This . . . This was something else,” Phillip said.
She frowned at him, but she didn’t have time for this. Something sparked inside her—an unwelcome image, one she quickly tried to snuff out. A hand pulling away from hers. Snowy cheeks raked red with tears. A whispered apology that was no apology at all.
None of them had asked to face the Nazis. But the ones who chose to ignore the threat, the ones lucky enough to run—those she could never forgive. Those who cared enough to try, to even survive in this hellscape, for as long as they could—she could respect that grudgingly, she supposed.
“If there’s something you feel you must do, do it quick.” Simone sucked down the last of the cigarette and flicked away the ash. “Night is closing in, and we have a long way to go.”
Phillip plucked the cigarette from her fingers before she could snuff it. He made a vague gesture over the bodies, uttered something under his breath, and then grabbed a canister of gasoline from the basement’s corner.
“Won’t take long at all.”
It had been two years since the tanks rolled into Paris, since the bastards goose-stepped down the Champs-Élysées and Marshal Pétain threw himself at their feet in surrender. For the people of Goutte d’Or, though, the change hadn’t been so momentous at first. They already knew how it felt to live with too many eyes following you on the streets and peering into your business. It was why the Khalefs no longer went to salaat-al-jumu’ah, where half the mosque’s congregants were likely undercover gendarmes; only her mother still prayed the salah. It was how her rat of a brother could be laid off from the factory one day, then bring home cuts of meat and sport a new suit the next, all for the modest price of spying on their neighbors.
“This is only temporary. It will be all right,” her mother chirped, shoveling potatoes and roasted goat into her mouth like she might never eat again. Her eyes were haunted with every cruelty they’d endured on Paris’s unfeeling streets. “We’ve survived far worse.”
But Simone had always wanted more than just to survive.
Several months earlier, April painted Paris with a thick smear of humidity, and nighttime was no better. Simone’s skin was clammy with sweat that wouldn’t dry, and Evangeline fanned herself relentlessly, her gaze somewhere far away. It was Thursday, their night together, when Evangeline could be sure her father would be trapped at work for hours on end, kissing the occupiers’ too-shiny boots.
Yet Evangeline seemed unsettled. They’d dipped into Le Monocle nightclub, but she’d dragged them right back out again minutes later, claiming the smoke was giving her a headache (as she lit up her own Gauloises). The quays along the Seine were nearly empty; it was only them and the muggy air pressing in until they heard the motor rumbling down the cobblestones. Only the occupiers were allowed to drive now, leaving the rest of them to the Métro and bicycles and walkways. When you saw a car coming toward you, you knew it meant nothing good.
Simone yanked them into a dark alley without thinking, backing Evangeline against the wall. Whatever oddness had settled within Evangeline that night started to fade, and she tilted her face up, eyes sparkling in the starlight, eager as ever for a stolen kiss. Simone kissed her rose lips, her soft cheek, the point where Evangeline’s jaw met her ear. Breathed in her scent of lilac and gin as chiffon shifted and crinkled under Simone’s grip, her callused hand curling around a soft, pale thigh. She kissed Evangeline’s neck and sank against her, constant terror weighing her down.
Three years they’d been like this, passion claimed on rooftops and in alleys and smoky corners of Paris’s lesbian nightclubs. In the catacombs and in the many unused rooms of Evangeline’s palatial home. They’d never been barreling toward something, only seizing up each day as it came, clinging to each other when they could, but all too often, they could not. Not with a father like Evangeline’s and an informer like Simone’s brother. Not with the Nazis flooding the streets.
Evangeline tensed in Simone’s arms.
“What’s the matter?” Simone asked, then tsked as Evangeline started to protest. “What’s really the matter?”
Evangeline smiled sadly and fiddled with her cigarette until Simone took it from her fingers and dragged a long inhale for herself. “You know Violette . . . the race car driver.”
Simone wrinkled her forehead. “Violette Morris?” Violette was something of a celebrity in Le Monocle, tits lopped off, always dressed in a tuxedo with a pretty girl on each arm.
“I heard something at work, something I . . .” Evangeline slumped back against the stone wall. “Never mind. It’s paranoid nonsense.”
Simone folded her arms. She didn’t wear tuxedos like some of the nightclub’s guests, nor dresses; she preferred a breezy tunic and wool trousers with suspenders. In her line of work, carpentry and masonry, it didn’t raise suspicion to dress like that. And in Evangeline’s decorous world of diplomats and sycophants, her ethereal chignon of blond hair and floaty chiffon dresses suited her just fine.
“If you heard it at work,” Simone said, “then it’s not paranoid nonsense.”
Evangeline snorted and reclaimed her cigarette. “Someone said she’s a Gestapo informant. She sells out women like . . .” Evangeline didn’t finish the thought, just huffed out a ribbon of smoke. “Said she reports to Göring himself.”
Simone glowered. “Why? Why would she do that?”
“Protection, of course.”
“That coward. And you were afraid for her to see you.”
Evangeline stared at the ground. “Does that make me a coward, too?”
Simone bit back her instinctive response. They both knew what it would be, anyway.
Evangeline cupped Simone’s cheek with her free hand. Her fingers were always as soft as rose petals, nothing like the hard calluses that crusted Simone’s. Simone tried to look mollified, but the truth hung too heavy between them, thick as the April stink off the Seine as winter’s secrets thawed. Simone would never have patience for surrender, appeasement, acceptance. Evangeline’s gilded cage had been built with nothing but.
“They’re getting more aggressive. I think they mean to punish us for de Gaulle.”
“Because he has the good sense to fight back?” Simone asked. So many in Paris had accepted—been relieved, even—when Marshal Pétain delivered the armistice to the Nazi forces. France would allow themselves to be occupied, in return for a farcical modicum of self-governance. Curfews, deportations, all their liberties stripped off one by one in a great tease, like a burlesque show in Montmartre. And Evangeline’s father was one of Pétain’s accomplices. More and more each day, Evangeline was, too.
From the safety of London, Charles de Gaulle had put out the call on the radio: the Free French would not be stopped. In pockets and alleys and basements, informal plans were hatched and sewn together into a larger piecework quilt of resistance. Even in Simone’s neighborhood, the whispers grew: here was a way to fight back. Not only against the Nazis. But against the French traitors who treated them like invaders when France was the one who had claimed Algeria for its own.
It was a call that grew ever harder to ignore, especially when Simone’s carpentry jobs dried up. She was always at her most dangerous with nothing to occupy her hands. She needed work—a purpose. Craved it. Smuggling messages across Paris, learning how to clean a rifle—such tasks occupied her when nothing el
se could.
“Simone . . .” Evangeline bit her lower lip, eyes wide and searching. “I know you want to fight back.” It had been an all-too-frequent argument between them of late. “But I’m telling you, it isn’t safe. Informers are everywhere.”
Simone narrowed her eyes. “You think I can’t be smart about it? It isn’t as though I’m going to strut down the boulevard with the Cross of Lorraine pinned to my chest—”
“You don’t have to declare yourself a de Gaulle supporter to be punished.” Evangeline’s hands squeezed at Simone’s hip. “Every time a resister kills a Nazi, they round up fifty French—a hundred—”
“That is why we have to stop them. Before they kill us all.” She cut her eyes sharply toward Evangeline. “If they kill enough of us, they might even make their way to you.”
Evangeline’s hands fell away from her. “That isn’t fair.”
Simone’s heart thudded. The truth was right there, on her lips—that she’d already joined the fight. She hadn’t yet told Evangeline about Georges-Yves and Ahmed and Sanaz, their secret shooting practice in the woods, the network of messages they’d tapped into. She hadn’t even meant to fall in with them, not really. Only Georges-Yves had found her wasting her days at the corner souk, hands fluttering over lumps of wood with a carving knife. He saw that restless energy and knew it needed a target.
You look like a hammer in want of a nail, he’d said, taking the seat opposite her as he blew steam off his cup of mint tea.
She’d ignored him at first. Men were always talking at her. The reasons they might be worth listening to were few.
Your brother, he’d continued. He’s a dangerous sort. Do you want to be like him?
Simone stopped, the knife’s blade pressed against the pad of her thumb. The extra ration cards. Promises of a new apartment bigger than the closet she and her brother and mother shared. Assertions that now that Germany had liberated Algeria, they could be free back home. Was it worth the screams in the middle of the night, the Gestapo storming up the stairs? The nervous smile that stretched across their mother’s face as she pretended not to hear? It made the meat her brother brought home taste rancid. She’d rather have worked herself raw in a factory than go on that way.
The Shadow War Page 5