Liam kept leafing through the notebook, a new urgency thrumming in his veins. The pages were wrinkled from being gripped with sweaty hands; Pitr’s cursive was nearly indecipherable. Even the few passages in English were a challenge, and the deeper he went, the more the writing unraveled, panicked and swift. Strange creatures appeared in the margins, skeletal dogs with too many joints in their limbs and people with seams in their skin.
But then one page, the last, carried a single equation in English, splotched with ink and heavily underlined:
Two requirements for opening:
RESONANCE
BLOOD
Liam looked up, an unnamed fear gripping him. Just what had Pitr done?
And then he froze: There was a dark figure behind him in the mirror. Standing. Looming. Heavy bruises of exhaustion beneath his eyes. In the mirror, their gazes locked.
“Come back to bed,” Pitr said. His voice was so low Liam felt it more than heard it; it traced a finger down his arm and held his heart in its grasp. Liam sensed something feral and unrestrained beneath the tone.
Resonance. Blood. The resonance part, Liam understood—it fit his own theories neatly enough. The right wavelength could create a gap in space itself, teasing open their universe like dough stretching until it tore in the middle. But blood—
Pitr reached for Liam’s wrist. “Now.”
Liam’s foolish, petulant heart, the one that drove him to fight back against grade school bullies, that urged him to throw himself between his parents when his father was on a rampage—his foolish heart wanted to protest. He’d do anything to prove to Pitr he was old enough, clever enough, brave enough. That he was deserving. That he was worthy—of Pitr and whatever Pitr sought.
But the Liam who’d watched his father win anyway, who’d glimpsed the suffering men like him wrought, who had to handle the aftermath of a world he couldn’t control and a heart he couldn’t keep from breaking—that Liam deserved more.
“Don’t be reckless,” Liam said. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with. I can’t lose you—”
Pitr curled his fingers around Liam’s shoulder, digging in, sending a thrill down Liam’s spine he both hated and loved. If he could see this through with Pitr—if he could keep from losing him—then someday, he could have what he deserved.
“You won’t lose me,” Pitr murmured. He turned Liam to face him, tightened fingers in Liam’s hair. His kiss was metallic. Salty, like an oath sealed in blood. Liam felt something inside him shatter, but he didn’t dare examine it. He wanted, too much, to believe.
Liam slipped from sleep and memory into darkness, a cold alkaline scent thick in his nostrils. He tried to reach out with his right hand for the glass of water he kept on the nightstand in his rented room. But this wasn’t Princeton, and his right arm refused to obey. Pain spiraled out of his shoulder to remind him of everything that had happened yesterday, and Princeton felt further away than ever.
He did a little mental math. He’d had to sell his ma’s golden medallion of Saint Patrick to afford airline tickets, but he’d been able to leave the home nurse with more than enough funds to last three months. Class would have been in session for two weeks now; they’d surely noticed he was missing, but his graduate advisor was probably too swamped to worry about him just yet. Still, this was taking far longer than he’d planned. And now the book had been moved to Wewelsburg—
Footsteps weighed on the stairs outside the projection loft. Liam wrestled himself into a seated position, propping up against a rough stone wall. There were no windows in here, but he felt well rested enough. It had to be midmorning at least. They hadn’t kicked him out just yet.
The door opened, and Daniel turned on the lights. He carried a mug that smelled of weak coffee and a buttered pumpernickel roll. Liam’s stomach growled as Daniel crouched down, and pink brushed over Daniel’s cheeks. Almost a smile. Liam relaxed at that.
“You’re looking better,” Daniel said, offering him the plate and mug. His eyes were brighter today, but stormy as ever. He smelled wonderful—warm and damp, freshly soaped. Liam felt embarrassed by his sweaty state.
Liam took a long swallow of coffee, not caring that it was weak. “This helps. Thanks.”
Daniel’s gaze roved over him, taking him in. Immediately Liam had a flash of memory—something he might have babbled in the throes of pain—and it was his turn to blush.
“Listen . . .” Liam bit his lower lip as he fished around for the right words. “If I, uh—if I said anything that, that—embarrassed you, or—”
“You didn’t. Embarrass me, I mean.” Daniel’s throat bobbed. “You did say a lot of things. Most of them unrepeatable.”
“Oh, well. That’ll happen when you get shot.” Don’t leave us, he seemed to recall telling Daniel, panic clawing at his throat at the thought of him throwing himself into a fight he couldn’t possibly win. He took another gulp, then tipped his head back against the stone, looking at Daniel askance. “I meant them, though.”
Daniel was still crouched before him, empty hands folded between his knees. He lifted one now, slowly, reaching toward Liam’s face. Liam sucked in his breath, too afraid to move, not wanting to break whatever spell was between them. A quick flick of Daniel’s long fingers, and he brushed a sheaf of Liam’s hair to one side.
“That’s good to know.”
Liam wondered what Daniel would do if he reached up and took his hand, laced his fingers through his own. He didn’t want to startle him away, this wolf in the forest who’d sized him up and crept closer, wanting, maybe, to be tamed. But maybe Liam was the one who should be scared. Daniel’s intensity was molten, searing. Liam didn’t fear it, precisely, but he knew it enough to grant it a healthy distance.
He kept his good hand wrapped tightly around the coffee mug.
“Do you think you’ll be well enough to leave for Wewelsburg tonight?” Daniel asked.
Liam let out his breath. “That’s the idea. We’ll need a way in, though. And if—”
He stopped himself short. He wasn’t yet ready to confess what he feared finding there. Not even to Daniel. It was his mess to clean up.
Daniel cocked his head, waiting for him to continue.
Liam swallowed the last of the coffee. Daniel deserved to know at least some of it. “I’m worried about Kreutzer. He knows about the book and the shadow world’s powers, and he’s got my older research. But I don’t know how much else he’s figured out.”
“Ah.” Daniel sat before him, close enough Liam could smell the coffee on his breath. “You think he may be able to use the book before we do.”
Liam leaned forward. He was feeling more like himself now—the hunt, the promise of control a signal fire on the horizon. A chance to take all the badness he’d unleashed and use it for good. “There’s still time. If we can get the book before Kreutzer makes sense of it, we’ll be unstoppable. The entire Third Reich—demolished.”
“I’m ready,” Daniel said.
Liam set down the coffee mug and rested his hand on his knee, fingertips trailing onto Daniel’s as well. “Whatever you thought Siegen was gonna be like, Wewelsburg Castle will be much worse.”
“I know.”
“It’s Schutzstaffel HQ now. Heinrich Himmler himself holds court there—with all the other SS chiefs.”
Daniel’s knee twitched beneath Liam’s fingertips. “That’s why we’re going, isn’t it?”
Liam wanted—desperately—not to do this alone. And he wanted more time with Daniel than the past few days had offered, this tempestuous boy who always seemed to be at war with the music in his heart. But this was no picnic in the woods. And he knew Daniel’s brand of chaos—the kind with no regard for his own life.
“Tonight begins the day of atonement. Erev Yom Kippur,” Daniel said. “I promised Rebeka we’d eat together beforehand. We’ll be ready to leave after that.”
“Sundown, then.” Liam nodded.
“What was your life like before?” Daniel asked suddenly. “What was it like back home for you? Was it really so bad that coming here seemed a better choice?”
Liam slumped backward with a tired smile. “Before? I pretty much lived at Princeton. The library and the physics lab. Always working.”
Daniel arched an eyebrow at him. “You don’t say.”
“I, uh . . . I have a hard time letting go of things. I get something in my head, and I have to burn it out of me. I’m either all fire or cold ash—don’t know how to be any other way.”
“Yes, I can see that.” Daniel smiled, hiding it behind his knee.
Another smile earned. Liam wanted to store them all up, wrap them carefully and tuck them somewhere safe. He wondered what Daniel might be like in a world where he could smile all the time, where he could walk down Fifth Avenue in clean clothes and laugh at something stupid Liam had said, smile because they’d stopped to pet a dog, frown over nothing worse than missing the IRT train headed downtown and so they had to linger on the station platform, nudging each other and sharing secret grins. He wanted Daniel’s mouth to hurt from smiling and his sides to ache from laughter. He wanted his heart so full he had nowhere else to put it all except to funnel it through his viola’s strings.
But it was no use imagining Daniel in New York with him, when Daniel couldn’t see past the tip of his own knife.
“I wish I weren’t this way,” Liam confessed. “But I get these ideas in my head, and I want them so badly. I—I don’t know how to want things less.”
“But if you weren’t so determined, then you wouldn’t be here.”
They held each other’s gaze for a minute. Liam’s mouth was too dry, too unwilling to cooperate; he drank the rest of his coffee to cover it up.
“You’d—you’d love New York,” he finally managed, the words tripping over themselves with sudden urgency. “It’s like its own symphony. There’s always a new melody to pick out.”
Daniel’s smile fell. “Berlin used to feel that way, too.”
Liam allowed himself to imagine a world where he could be powerful enough to save this boy. Tear apart the Third Reich—not just because he had to, but because it was what Daniel, his family, deserved. He could almost believe it—that he could claim the book and the power he’d sought for so long.
He could taste it, the juicy steak after months of broth. The smile he thought would never cross his mother’s face again. The power of two worlds in his veins, thumping, burning, searing—not Kreutzer’s, not the Nazis’, but his alone. He had uncovered this. He had tamed this. And he’d control how it could be used—not by Nazis, but by those who’d fight them off.
Liam regarded Daniel’s face, this fighter’s face, this boy who survived against the odds. They both deserved this.
“Well. We do this right, maybe we can find a way home.”
“Maybe,” Daniel said, but neither of them believed he meant it.
The shower was downright sinful, stripping off the top layer of Liam’s skin, all of the grime and anger and failure that coated him like a film. Phillip and Simone had slunk off on their hush-hush mission elsewhere in town, while Daniel and Rebeka broke bread in the bell tower above and Helene went about her daily chores. Liam had offered to help her, but after a short quiz in German, she deemed him too much of a risk in case her customers got nosy.
So Liam helped himself to the selection in the film vault as he waited for nightfall to head out once more.
He tried The Great Love Helene had mentioned the night before, but his stomach was churning after only a few minutes in. A Nazi officer wooing a cabaret singer, and yet somehow it wasn’t a horror show. He spooled the film back up and tossed it back in the heap.
Next up he found a stack of tins for an old silent film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—two different editions, oddly, the older-looking one buried at the bottom of the stack. Both told the story of a world gone increasingly mad. A man was investigating the murderer Caligari and his sleepwalking, unwitting accomplice, only to find that Caligari is the director of an insane asylum and not one of its residents, like he should’ve been. A perfect parable for their time, Liam thought bitterly; that power was not to be trusted, not to be taken as an absolute.
Yet the newer edition nestled that story inside two bookended scenes. This version, unsurprisingly, bore the approval stamp of Goebbels’s propaganda wing. The two framing scenes were brief, but revealed that in truth, the man investigating the murders was the madman, and Caligari the harmless asylum director trying to cure him of his delusions. Trust in the system. Any evidence the system is broken is only your own mind deceiving you.
Liam barely resisted the urge to rip the film right off its reel.
Wood planks groaned above and around him as people moved along the bell tower stairs. Instinctively, his hand moved toward the false panel where he’d hidden his satchel and P38, but he thought better of it. It was Daniel and Rebeka finishing their meal. He’d get confirmation first that the coast was clear. Then they could be on their way.
No sooner had he taken his hand away from the panel than the door to the projection room swung open. A yelp lodged in Liam’s throat, bitten back just in time. In the doorway stood an SS officer, his cheekbones sharp, his cheeks hollowed out like shallow graves. A sour expression pinched his lips that could equally have been a sneer or a smirk. He nearly had to duck to step inside the projection room.
“Pardon the intrusion, good sir,” he said in silky-smooth German. “We heard a vicious rumor some villagers were harboring unpatriotic fugitives. I’m sure you won’t mind if we have a look around.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
SIMONE
That morning, Simone woke in the church’s sanctuary to their hostess, Helene, towering over her with her one hand propped on a generous hip. “Unless you want to watch Die Große Liebe with a few dozen SS officers at the matinee,” Helene said, “I suggest you make yourself scarce.”
Simone pushed off of the velvet-cushioned pew. Her pocketknife and a hunk of spare wood lay further down the bench, where she’d been whittling a bird figurine the previous night to lull herself into restless sleep. She worked her feet back into her boots. “Depends. What’s it about?”
“The importance of waging war and marrying good Aryan girls. I assume. I try not to listen too closely.” Helene stepped back to let her out of the pew. “There’s pumpernickel and ham in the kitchens. Plumbing seems to be working for now if you’d like a shower. You should visit Karl and Guillerme soon to help them with your business—I’ll show you the safe way there.”
Simone moved past her, in the direction of the kitchens. “Thank you.” She would never understand Europeans and their obsession with pork. “Have there been any updates out of Siegen?”
“Nothing yet.” Helene planted herself beside the kitchen counter. She looked sturdy and unbreakable; Simone was glad to have someone like her on their side. “The only forces we get beyond our local Gestapo are those passing through on their way to Siegen, or the Occupied Zone. If it was as bad as you say, though . . .”
Simone winced as she tore off a chunk of dark bread. “We’ll try to be gone quickly.”
Helene made a huffing sound. “You are French?”
Simone swallowed the stale bread she’d been chewing. “Algerian. Though my brother and I have been in France for longer than we were in Algiers.” She shrugged. “It doesn’t feel like home, but then, maybe neither would Algiers.” She thought, with a curious nostalgic itch, of the way their family, their faith had felt like a metronome keeping the tempo of their lives. As it fell away, as the invaders swarmed in, time itself seemed to have fallen apart.
“My parents were Belgian, but I grew up here,” Helene said. “Married a German boy.”
Simone tried to arrange her face into something li
ke sympathy. “Did he . . .”
“Die? No. That would be too good for him.” Helene spat into the sink. “He drives a tank for the Wehrmacht. Poland or somewhere. I get special benefits as a soldier’s wife—Kinder, Küche, Kirche, children, hearth, church, all that rot. That’s how I’m able to do all this.”
“But why do you do it?” Simone asked.
Helene wrenched up the shoulder of her handless arm to rub her nose. “I voted against the Nazi party. Screamed and yelled and fought and marched against every law they passed. Until it became illegal to fight back. And legal to do all the horrible things they’ve done.” She let out a shaky breath. “So I decided that if whatever I did was illegal anyway, then I might as well do it in the biggest, most illegal way I could.”
Simone couldn’t help but smile at that. “France and Belgium thank you.”
“And you?” Helene asked, eyeing her. Simone didn’t miss the way her gaze sliced her open.
Simone swallowed the last bite of pumpernickel. “I show my thanks in other ways.”
After a long shower and a short stint checking the converted church’s tower for vantage points, Simone went to fetch Phillip, who was watching while Liam poked around the film vaults.
“Well?” Liam asked. “Will you go with us to Wewelsburg?”
Simone glanced at Phillip, who was giving her a dubious look. “We can contact the Resistance cell there, and I’m not opposed to doing anything that sabotages the Third Reich.” She narrowed her eyes. “But after that, we part ways.”
“After that, we won’t need to.”
The Shadow War Page 14