The Shadow War

by Lindsay Smith

  The doors swung open.

  The chamber had once been a music hall. The floor gently sloped and was studded with bolts where rows of chairs had been ripped up; a stage was shrouded at the far end. Now the hall was crammed with hastily constructed shelving and stacks and stacks of reinforced file boxes. Weak sunlight wafted in from the courtyard windows that lined one wall, but otherwise everything was dingy gray, redolent with decades of must.

  “Well.” Daniel swallowed. “Where do we start?”

  “I’m after the confiscated property and inventory records. If you’re looking for officer names and postings . . .” Liam met his gaze, some kind of judgment behind that stare. Not disapproving of his quest, exactly, but sad for it—sad that it had to happen, sad for where he feared it might lead. With a scowl, Daniel looked away. He’d had enough of that from Rebeka. Forgiveness was not a virtue. Vengeance was the least he deserved. What happened after—that was not Liam’s concern.

  “Inventory records are here,” Rebeka called from the far-left row. She gave Daniel a similar look to match Liam’s.

  “Then I’ll take the right.” Daniel turned away from them.

  “I’m looking for Porta ad Tenebras. Tomasi Sicarelli. The cover is pressed leather, looks like swirling lines feeding into an archway,” Liam told Rebeka, but Daniel shut them out. He found a row of Wehrmacht and SS reports, and with a taste like gravel in his mouth, he forced himself to dig through them.

  Boxes and boxes of invoices and receipts. Accounting records, troop authorization orders, payments, rations records, requisitions forms.

  Carefully tabulated accounting and procedure for confiscating the property of deceased Jews.

  He tried to move on. This wasn’t what he was searching for. But then he came across the Einsatzgruppen reports—the SS’s death squads—and he couldn’t bring himself to look away. Men crowing over the results of their pogroms—blood and bone and brain flying in a hail of bullets, of shouts, of fire and shattered glass and hate—boiled down to nothing but numbers, sometimes in the thousands on a single ledger line.

  Three thousand dead at a fort in Kaunas.

  Thirty-seven hundred in Vilnius.

  Eighteen hundred as reprisal for a German officer’s death inside a Jewish ghetto.

  A slow calculation of death and devastation, all the meat stripped from it, personalities flattened like tin, names erased, bones bleached to nothing but tally marks. He couldn’t take in the volume of it, the enormity of its blandness, how completely and utterly banal—how exhausting—it all was. How drearily they’d had to codify murder and genocide as if it were just another thing to requisition, like filing folders and typewriter ink. So repetitious it required blank templates, boxes to be checked, forms to be filed in triplicate. So pervasive it filled this entire music hall—so blatant it cared nothing about leaving behind such a massive, meticulous record of its crimes.

  Die Endlösung der Judenfrage, one document read. A report on the final solution to the Jewish problem. Slowly, methodically, he read through them all, unable to do anything but bear witness. Someone had to see these horrors for what they were—

  And then he reached a contract—an agreement for the Chełmno camp to sell human hair to a candy cloth factory, at fifty Pfennigs a pound.

  Cement was hardening in Daniel’s blood. That’s what did it—the weight of human hair. That’s what turned him into stone.

  Ari’s loose curls, his mother’s long, wavy locks, their father’s thick hair—shaved from their corpses and sold by the bag so Germans could use it to decorate their hats. All while SS soldiers bickered about who got the gold fillings and shoes and wedding bands.

  It wasn’t a record of crimes. It was merely law now, from the repeal of Jewish citizenship to the Nuremberg Laws to the ghettos to the death camps. It was enough to crush Daniel where he stood. How quickly the Nazis had smothered down their humanity, how willingly a whole nation had turned human beings into things. A problem to be solved. An entire culture to be erased. How straightforward they had made it, how many checklists they had designed, so easy anyone could replicate their system, anyone willing to forget that they were people, that they were alive—

  “I think I have something,” Rebeka called to Liam, from the other side of the stacks.

  But Daniel moved on to the next box.

  A report on the testing of Prussian cyanic gas on Russian prisoners of war, dated August 1941. Stapled to it—approval to advance to trials in the detention camps. Far more efficient than the exhaust-fed vans method employed at Chełmno, the approval concurred. Permission granted to begin construction on such facilities in Auschwitz and Bełżec for administration of Zyklon-B gas.

  Human beings, gassed to death. For daring to be alive. And so many of them to be killed that the Nazis had to worry about processing the sheer volume of them, about efficiency.

  With eyes burning, Daniel ran through the names on his list again. If the Nazis could have checklists for their brutality, then so could he. Every SS officer responsible—every one that he would kill. Gerstein, the camp capo who sat back, boots on the desk, congratulating himself on a well-run system as the people sent to Chełmno were slaughtered en masse. Kreutzer, the man who stole people from Łódź for his experiments. And should Daniel survive long enough, then he could work his way toward the names at the top of every transcript: the very leaders of the Reich.

  Daniel barely felt his knees hit the floor before the bile was burning at the back of his throat, his tongue, his teeth. He only knew what he and Rebeka had heard in snatches of rumors and the smell of Chełmno, but that had already been too much. Had his parents died screaming, clutching each other as gas filled their lungs? Had Ari been amongst the ones who hauled the dead to mass graves before he too was killed? Maybe at least he’d gotten to squeeze their mother’s cold hand one last time as he lowered her into a yawning, hungry ditch—

  Pale yellow spilled onto the wood, chunks of powdered milk in it. It only took one good heave to empty his stomach, but his body kept working, trying to wring the agony out of him. It didn’t know any better—didn’t know that what needed to be purged from his system was the entire world, that there was nowhere he could be safe from the poisonous potential of every human being alive. The Nazis in particular, to be sure; yet who were they but people who had been given too many assurances? Who’d never been challenged or had their voices silenced when they themselves were discussed?

  He dragged himself back to his feet, clinging to the cheap plywood. Gerstein, Kreutzer, Himmler—where were they now? His hands raked over boxes, but he was uncoordinated, drunk with rage. Where were they now?

  Approvals, so many approvals. For transfers, for requisitions. For experiments—so many experiments, some of them marked with Kreutzer’s name.

  Gerstein. Kreutzer. Himmler. He’d etched their names into his heart with acid. Their poison would not spread.

  “No—this doesn’t make sense,” Liam was saying, a few aisles away. “The book should be here. Why would they transfer it to Wewelsburg?”

  “Wewelsburg,” Rebeka echoed, a frown in her voice. “But that’s the headquarters of the SS.”

  Daniel clutched at the cheap wooden shelving to pull himself up. The SS headquarters—Himmler at the least would be there, and possibly the others, too. Plenty of guilty SS officers, in any case. He didn’t give a shit about Liam’s book, or Liam, or Rebeka, or anything else. All that mattered was killing his way through these men—

  “Who’s there?” a voice called in German. “Where are the guards?”

  Someone had entered the music hall.

  Daniel tore his knife free and stalked toward the door on unsteady legs, staying hidden behind the shelving. Nothing mattered but feeling another rush of blood over his hands, turning cold. Tremolo strings built under him, the churn of a Rachmaninoff or Mahler symphony threatening to boil over into c
haos. Liam could continue his magical hunt, Rebeka could pretend the war would end and they’d go home someday, but for Daniel, there was nothing left but this: his rage and the Germans’ soft flesh, the fear in the whites of their eyes as they saw their deaths reflected in his blade.

  It was sweeter than the cascading opening of Scheherazade, darker and more devastating than the torrential sawing of Mussorgsky’s Bald Mountain. He’d honed his fingers on études, but they had only been training for his true purpose: this.

  He lunged from the stacks, knife raised.

  The clerk ducked out of the way of his initial thrust, screaming as he stumbled. He was still screaming when Daniel fell on top of him, while the knife plunged crudely into his chest. Again and again. It took so much effort to stab a man to death, and Daniel had spent all his energy in the stacks. Nothing was left but wounded-animal instinct and fury. He’d lost his lunch, lost everything but this, his final act of contrition, his only way to atone for the fact that he and Rebeka survived where so many had not—

  A hand fell on his shoulder, wrenching him back. “Daniel,” Liam was saying. “Daniel. He’s dead. Daniel—”

  He stumbled off of the clerk’s body and sprawled onto his back, hot tears mingling with the blood that peppered his face. It was everywhere. It dripped into his eyes and burned; it salted his lips and tongue. He wondered, with bleak, hopeless humor, whether maybe his body would appreciate it more than the powdered milk.

  “They’re coming.” Liam gripped his forearm, bracing him. He stood strong above Daniel, gorgeous even in his fear, that little wrinkle between his eyebrows, his hair like dusty gold. It was almost a shame that there could be no after for Daniel—not even for this strange, magical boy.

  “They’re coming,” Liam said again.

  Daniel scrubbed the blood from his eyes and tried to find his feet as he shifted his weight toward Liam, letting himself be pulled up.

  “How many?” Daniel asked. He didn’t know why. It would be far too many for the three of them—even with Liam’s abilities.

  But Liam had no chance to answer. The door burst open, revealing a wall of rifle barrels aimed at them.

  Then the world tore itself in two with a scream.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  REBEKA

  Everything was falling apart around her.

  The music hall split open with a horrifying shriek, thinning the air. She was thrown backward, away from the doors where Daniel and Liam faced down a host of guards, and as she fell, she blinked and saw another place: a stone tower wreathed in shadow, breathing as if it drew energy into itself. It was burned into the back of her eyelids so no matter where she looked, it waited for her, shadows swirling around it.

  This must be it: the vision she’d been trying to protect Daniel from. The grim conclusion to his quest. She’d failed them both—and the rest of their family, too.

  The lightning faded, but the screams continued as Liam hummed a note that rattled her soul.

  Daniel—was it Daniel screaming? She staggered to her feet, only to find the music hall flattened around her as if a tornado had landed on them. Shelves twisted and snapped, sheets of paper swirling past her—inventories and ledger papers and grim swastika letterheads. The guards who’d filled the doorway moments before now sprawled across the floor. Some cried out, their limbs bent at unnatural angles. Others were all too still. Scattered rifle stocks were shredded and spiraled like peeled potato skins. And in the epicenter of the torrent stood Liam, arms raised high as he commanded a spinning column of thick black smoke.

  No, it was darker even than smoke. It was like burning pitch, and smelled just as foul. Inside the whirlwind, she heard—voices. Howls. Teeth snapping, ravenous.

  The shadows whispered to her, achingly familiar: Yes.

  “We have to go.” Rebeka charged forward and seized her brother’s hand, then reached for the American, too. “More will be coming.”

  “No—I need a moment—longer—” yelled Liam.

  Boxes of paperwork were ripped off of the shelves, caught up in the vortex. Rebeka ducked low to avoid a piece of plywood as it whizzed past. “Your book isn’t here! Let’s go!”

  “One more minute—”

  But the sound of gunfire swallowed up whatever Liam was about to say. A fresh group of guards had arrived. Liam fell backward, struck in the shoulder, and dragged Rebeka and Daniel down with him. The vortex shifted in response as his concentration broke. Lightning crackled across its surface as the darkness stretched and yawned—a hungering void.

  And then something taloned, something sinuous, slithered out of the black.

  Rebeka staggered to her feet, hand closing protectively around Daniel’s to pull him up with her. The shadows unfurled into a vaguely animal shape—limbs stretching, skin slick and viscous. But there were gaping sockets where there should have been eyes, a red fire smoldering deep within them. It crouched on all fours, but even so, it was eye level with Rebeka. It stared through her, and she felt—felt, like a shard of glass—the thing’s slow smile.

  Liiiiiii-ammmmmm, the thing purred, its voice hanging in the air like putrid mist. The thing crept forward on limbs with too many joints, its claws cracking deep into the slate floor. We’ve been looking for youuuuuuu.

  Liam’s breath hitched beside her as he stood, but she didn’t dare take her eyes off the creature. She took another step back, pushing her brother and Liam behind her. The monster’s head swiveled from side to side; more beasts gathered behind it. Some had snouts like wolves; others, tails that swished like hungry panthers. But their laughter, their insidious grins, their fiery eyes and dark intent were nothing of this world. The closest one pressed in toward Rebeka, and its snout scraped the length of her body with one long, mournful sniff.

  Rebeka stared into its eyes, and the creature cocked its head at her. There was something beautiful, something graceful in its movement. Rebeka found herself leaning forward, desperate to reach out—

  Then there were more screams in German as the beasts turned on the guards.

  Bullets whizzed through the air, pocking the plaster of the music hall. They couldn’t aim at the monsters through the smoke. The creature in front of Rebeka whirled around with a snarl and sprinted toward the gunfire, laughing as if it were all some game.

  Rebeka slung her arms around the boys and steered them away.

  The vortex had burst out the windows along the courtyard side of the music hall. They raced through the shelving, glass crunching underfoot, then tumbled over a windowsill. Another bullet zipped past as they fell, embedding itself in the plaster walls. Dry, dead bushes snapped beneath her and raked through her hair and across her face as she fought her way back to her feet, the pain vivid in the bitter twilight cold.

  Liam wrenched himself up beside her with haunted eyes. Blood flowed from his shoulder where he’d been shot, but there was no time for babying if they meant to make it out alive.

  “This way,” Rebeka hissed, and charged toward a covered walkway that ran the length of the courtyard. If she was remembering the map correctly, they could circle back around to the truck bay. But she couldn’t blink away the glow of the creature’s eyes, seeing through her.

  Behind them, screams continued as jaws snapped and unearthly howls rang out.

  “Did you mean to summon those—whatever they are?” Rebeka asked.

  Liam flinched as they steered down the walkway. “Um,” he said. “No—not exactly.”

  “What are they?” Daniel asked. He was shaking—whether from the monsters or something else, she couldn’t tell. It wasn’t like him to fall apart, even if he did have half the German army on his ass.

  “Well.” Liam ducked into an alcove that led to an interior door, and Rebeka and Daniel pressed in beside him. “The thing about that other world is, it’s not exactly . . . empty. And I think Sicarelli’s meddling a few hundred years ago kin
da . . . pissed them off.”

  Rebeka stifled a bitter laugh. This was getting better by the second.

  “Whatever he did to mess up their ecosystem, it’s left them a little . . .” Liam peered around the corner. “Let’s just say they’re drawn to the scent of human fear. Anger, suffering, blood.”

  “Like the smell of those Nazi bastards that you just shredded apart?”

  Liam swallowed. “Yeah, pretty sure that was like ringing a dinner bell.”

  “And do you have any way to control them?”

  “Sometimes. But—not as many as that.”

  As if she could have hoped for anything more. “Why can’t you just close the rift?”

  “I did,” Liam cried. “But if I draw too much energy from the other side, it—it weakens the barrier. Takes longer for it to seal back up. That’s when it’s easier for the creatures to slip through. And when you hate humans as much as they do—”

  Rebeka held up one finger for silence and pressed her ear to the heavy wooden door. A faint alarm bleated on the other side, tinny and mechanical. There wasn’t much hope their soldiers’ disguises would hold, not with her brother staggering around shell-shocked and Liam’s wounded shoulder. Well, maybe Liam’s monsters could serve as a useful distraction—at least up until they all got eaten. She closed her eyes, offered up a quick prayer, then threw her shoulder into the door.

  Aside from the insistent alarm, the hallway was oddly, unsettlingly still. Like the other corridors in the compound, the electric lighting was too weak for the massive Bavarian monstrosity crumbling around them, but she saw none of the clerks or guards or secretaries or maintenance people, all those hateful little cogs in the Reichsmaschine. More importantly, she didn’t hear any of those awful whispers—none of the wailing wind and creeping shadows that had poured from the vortex.

  She supposed it was too much to wish the next world over had been full of sunshine. “Let’s go before anything else comes out of the darkness.”