The Shadow War

by Lindsay Smith

  This time, Liam reached for the silvery threads of the rift that would take them back to their world and tugged. It seared into his mind, the blinding brightness of it, and the harder he pulled, the more the darkness unraveled around him. With a snarl, the taloned claws dropped him, and he scrambled back until he found Daniel pulling free of the mud and took his hand once more. His skin was burning, hot as the film reel fire back in the town, burning the shadow away as Liam tore open a pathway home.

  Trees coalesced around them as the darkness faded. He pulled Daniel to him while the rift sealed up behind them: the darkness, the hatred held at bay.

  For now.

  They were back in their world on the eastern bank of the stream, stoic oak trees shedding orange leaves around them. To the west, they could hear screams amidst the crackling flames in Hallenberg’s town square. Gunfire rang out, a single rifle crack: Simone? Or one of the soldiers?

  “We have to get to Wewelsburg. Kreutzer’s got the book—”

  “What was that . . . thing talking about?” Daniel asked. “Doyle blood—paying for what you’ve done.” Daniel’s breath quivered; he took Liam’s hands. “Liam. What was—who—”

  Liam squeezed his hands back, then dropped them. He turned to keep moving, but Daniel stayed rooted to the spot. He’d seen it in the firm line of Daniel’s mouth: he would have to give him the truth, all of it, if he wanted his help.

  If he wanted . . .

  Liam closed his eyes as he gulped down air. He’d never meant for any of this to happen. It was why he’d come here alone, why he’d been fighting so brutally for control: he was the only one who could set things right, because he was the only one who’d let them go so wrong. So massively, so painfully. This was his trial. His mistake to undo.

  Liam’s shoulders fell, and he opened his eyes once more. Only minutes ago, he’d almost kissed Daniel, but now Daniel was looking at him like one of the shadow world’s monstrosities. Something dangerous, something not to be touched.

  Daniel was more right than he knew.

  “I . . . lost someone in the shadow world. Someone I loved.”

  Daniel lowered his gaze, resigned. “The boy you mentioned. Pitr.”

  Hearing Pitr’s name—from Daniel’s mouth, no less—made it all too real. There’d been a time when all Liam wanted was for it to be real, for the world to know what they were. How easy it had been, back then.

  “I thought I knew what I was doing. All my theories and formulas. I’d even found the right frequency—” Liam leaned back against a tree trunk. A simple tree, shaded and quiet. In the twilit woods, even the fires of Hallenberg felt far enough away. “But the truth is, I wasn’t strong enough to control it.”

  Daniel stepped forward. It was a trusting gesture, far kinder than Liam deserved. Yearning stitched tight in Liam’s chest. He wished he could have met Daniel anywhere, anytime else—an easy, uncomplicated place, where demons and humans alike weren’t circling them like wolves, all too ready to kill them over nothing more than who or what they were.

  He wondered if such a place could ever exist.

  “It was an accident, then?” Daniel lifted his gaze. “You can’t blame yourself for that. That doesn’t make it your fault.” Then, hesitantly: “This is why you want the book, isn’t it? Because you want to bring him back. You want to save him, don’t you?”

  Liam stared at him for a long minute, and his fingers traced the ghost of Pitr’s touch against his cheek. Bring Pitr back. Was that what he wanted? Could it have been, once?

  But then he couldn’t help it: he shook with a laugh.

  “No. No, getting trapped there was the least he deserved.” Liam’s voice ran cold. “The only problem is that I didn’t finish the job.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  SIMONE

  Sniper work was one part blood rush—calculations whirling through her head faster than she could examine them, sights lining up perfectly—and nine parts insufferable dullness. Not the dullness of having nothing to do, but of knowing she had something to do yet being unable to do it until some unknown time at which she would have to move too fast—but not now, not yet, not close enough that she could be ready, not far enough she could look away.

  Simone hated and loved it. She hated the wait that was a constant itch between her shoulder blades and loved the moment that itch went away. She loved the bloom of red from a Nazi’s skull, those flowers she so carefully planted blossoming over and over. She hated being kept from that joy.

  And most of all, she hated sharing the waiting with someone else.

  “We should check on them,” Phillip said, for the thousandth time. “No one’s gone in or out for a while now. If they found anyone, they’d be hauling them off already—”

  “But they aren’t, which means they are still in there.” Simone twisted her neck from side to side, earning a satisfying crack. She was stomach-down on the roof of the furniture shop, rifle propped on the roof’s lip, aimed toward the church. A handful of military trucks and a single officer’s Mercedes were parked on the town square. “Do you want to walk into a Kino full of Nazis? I’m not so sure you could avoid notice as convincingly as Liam.”

  Phillip scowled at her, but they both knew she had a point. Not that she would fare much better. Sometimes she wanted to laugh with how mad this whole journey was, traveling hundreds of kilometers into the heart of Nazi Germany to find a boy who’d dropped out of the sky. And get them both safely back out again—not that Georges-Yves or the US Army had been too forthcoming about how they’d manage that. A frequency, a preassigned code. That was her only hope of ever escaping this nightmare land.

  Part of her didn’t care about escaping. Part of her wanted to cling to the feeling of the rifle firing in her hands, deafening her frantic thoughts and puncturing the pain she kept bottled inside of her. She hated Evangeline, hated her for her cowardice. She hated France and the narrowed stares other Parisians gave her, their muttering about immigrants, as if they weren’t the ones who’d claimed Algeria for their own. But she loved Evangeline, too; her ambition barreled through nearly every no that stood in her way. Loved that it was almost too plausible to believe that maybe, despite everything, she just might really be aiding the Magpie.

  She loved France and its colors and chaos and opportunity, woven loosely and brightly like a Berber rug. She missed her mother holding fast to the deen, reciting a du’a into silence, into nighttime, into the ear of a god who knew what lay before them and behind. She missed the feeling of wood melting under her fingertips, shrinking and shaping itself into whatever she dreamed.

  And yet like a dream, it crumbled in the light of day. She could try to hold on to it, but she could never go back. Also like woodworking: a wrong cut could never be uncarved.

  Simone checked the rifle sights once more. Her gun wasn’t really made for long-distance work—the scope’s magnification was minimal—but it was the best trade-off she had, not knowing from day to day whether she’d find herself perched in a tree or face-to-face with the enemy. A few men stood guard under the Kino’s marquee, waiting with nervous energy. It didn’t look like they were smoking, or on any sort of break, but they weren’t directly acting on orders, either. They looked . . . listless. Wrong.

  Simone tightened her grip and leaned forward.

  “Wait.” Phillip stopped his pacing. “The alley. There’s someone down there.”

  Simone gritted her teeth. “Soldiers?”

  “No. It’s—” Phillip sucked in his breath. “Shit, I think it’s Rebeka.”

  Simone forced her jaw to unclench. “What the devil is she doing down there? They could see her—”

  “I don’t know! I didn’t even see her walk this way. Hey!” He hissed down toward the alley. “Up here!”

  Simone ran her thumb back and forth over the rifle’s stock. She wasn’t about to take her eyes off the soldiers. Behind her
, Rebeka’s shoes thumped, wet, against the metal of the fire escape. Before her, two more soldiers exited the Kino. No—three—no. Simone’s stomach dropped. The third person was being frog-marched between them, red-faced and stoic—

  Helene.

  Promise me, Helene had asked her, away from the others. Promise me that if you must, you’ll do what needs to be done.

  “What happened?” Phillip was asking Rebeka behind her. “You look spooked.”

  Simone pinched the bridge of her nose and tried to shut them out. The Nazis would do terrible, terrible things to Helene: dig for any truth they thought they could bleed and beat and scrape out of her before discarding her husk. She didn’t deserve it. She’d only done the same as Simone—she’d fought. She was better than Simone, in truth. She actually cared for people, tried to save as many as she could, while all Simone wanted was—

  Was what, exactly?

  Simone had been so caught up in running away, in the pressure-valve release of each bullet she fired, that she couldn’t see the cliff edge she was racing toward. She didn’t dare wonder what would remain of her when there was no more pressure to unleash.

  At least Helene had a purpose. She knew why she did what she did, all while knowing it might cost her everything. She deserved so much more.

  She deserved to be spared.

  Simone braced herself against the rifle. Caressed the firm barrel and the wooden stock, her intricate design only halfway carved into it. She settled into the rifle’s sights, that funnel that stripped away all her fear and uncertainty and animal urge to escape.

  Helene’s hair had wormed loose from her tight braid and wisped around her head, halo-like. Her cheeks were flushed, but she held her chin high. Her broad face was solid and sturdy as granite. The Nazi on her left kept having to readjust his grip on her half arm, unable to manage a decent frog-march, and the tiniest smile tugged at the corner of Helene’s mouth every time he did.

  This would be how she’d want it. Not hours or days from now, after they’d stripped her down, beaten her, brutalized her. Not after she’d learned how much it took to wrest the secrets from her soul. She would want to die proud.

  Simone took aim.

  The crack was too loud in the autumn air; the rifle’s butt jolted beneath her, petulant. Without a sniper’s stand to brace against, the sight had slammed into Simone’s eye, and a hot welt was already forming. Dammit. Behind her, Phillip and Rebeka had fallen into a shocked, perilous silence threatening to teeter over into screams. But Simone ignored them and brought the scope back up to her eye once her vision cleared.

  They should already be running, but she had to be sure. For Helene’s sake.

  “What are you doing?” Phillip whispered, quietly but with searing urgency. “What in the hell—”

  Helene’s body had gone limp, sagging between the two guards who’d dragged her from the Kino. The guards were just now turning, bewildered, to stare at the red fountaining from her forehead. The blood framed her cheeks, her chin; between those crimson streams, it almost looked like she was smiling.

  The guards looked up. Looked at each other. Sputtered something Simone was too far away to hear.

  Then they dropped Helene and started to shout.

  Simone curled her arms around the rifle and sat back. Her relief was so warm and all-encompassing, so sharp, that for a moment she felt tears gather in her eyes. They should all be so lucky, if they were caught. To God we belong, and to God we return. To hell with all the rest.

  But there was no more time to waste. “We need to head back to the tunnels.”

  “You killed her,” Rebeka sputtered. “All those Nazis in the street, and you killed the woman who helped us—”

  “Do you have any idea what they would have done to her? To the rest of the Resistance members, once she gave them up?” Simone swallowed down a rush of bile in her throat. “Adab al-qital. The way of war. She asked me to do whatever it took, and so I did.”

  Sacrifices. So many sacrifices lining her path. Too often she felt like one of her idle carvings, shaving off strips of herself in a vain effort to whittle down into something that felt right. Her homeland, her family, her dignity, her love, her respect for human life. She was the artless hunk of wood that remained.

  But she had done the right thing, whether the others could see it or not. Maybe in that, she’d reclaimed something.

  Phillip’s eyes were still wide with disbelief, but Rebeka lowered her head. “You’re right.”

  “Yes, I know.” She slung the rifle over her shoulder and hoisted up her pack. “But if we don’t move soon, we’re going to be next—”

  The rush of fire was immediate. Simone turned back toward the church at the noise, just in time to see the windows burst out of the second floor. The projection room. The shouts already filling the town square ratcheted into shrieks, the frantic pounding of boots.

  “Now,” Simone managed, her tongue too thick in her mouth. “Let’s go now.”

  Phillip and Rebeka were too stunned to protest.

  They dropped down onto the workshop floor of the furniture atelier and made their way through the radio room. Guillerme was hunched over the transmitter, sending out a frantic message, but Karl rushed toward them. “What’s happening out there?”

  “Nothing good. You need to hide everything.” Simone gestured to the stacks of decoded messages, the radio equipment, Phillip’s freshly installed transmitter boxes. “Quickly. Somewhere they’ll never find. Destroy anything you don’t absolutely need to keep.”

  “But we were finally making progress—answering the information requests—”

  Like the Magpie’s. Cold iron gripped Simone’s limbs. “Did—did you answer the request about Wewelsburg—”

  Karl glanced toward his son, but Guillerme was wrapped up in his sea of dits and dahs. “Not yet. You said there was nothing to tell—”

  “Change of plans.”

  She was going to regret this. Jeopardizing their mission on the whim of that idiot American boy and her own desperate hunch. “Tell the Magpie we’re headed to Wewelsburg.” She glanced at Phillip, who gave her an encouraging nod. “We’ll report from there as soon as we get communications established safely.”

  Karl kicked open the hatch to the tunnel systems. “Then we’ll barricade this room from both sides.”

  Simone started down the hatch. Phillip and Rebeka followed, hands and feet slapping along the metal rungs. The tunnels had a fetid, stale smell to them from disuse.

  “When we are safe,” Simone muttered, “you’ll tell me how you made it out of that flaming hell.”

  Rebeka stumbled behind her. “I will.”

  “What about your brother?” Phillip asked suddenly. “Where is he? Oh, God, was he still inside—”

  “No.” Rebeka’s voice was steady enough that even Simone felt comforted by it. “He’s safe. For now.”

  Simone noticed she didn’t say the same for them.

  Simone had learned a great many things about silence in her life. There was the silence of her and her brother huddled underneath their bed while their parents raged in Arabic just outside. The silence after their father left, went back to Algiers with scarcely a goodbye. Her mother’s silence was always pointed, the silence of shame and grief and embarrassment for raising her children alone, letting their faith fade, packed up with all the things that marked them as outsiders in a chest in the corner of their room. The heavy silence of night in occupied Paris, the long wait for the sound of boots, the crash of kicked-in doors.

  Silence could be beautiful too. Simone loved the way the night seemed to hold its breath when she joined Evangeline on the sloped slate roof of Château à Pont Allemagne. The wind stilled and the starlight bent a little closer when she took Evangeline’s hand in hers, when she kissed whatever part of her she could reach: a creamy shoulder, a knobbed spine, a mess
of hair just loosed from its bun. But Château à Pont Allemagne held many, far more wicked silences in its newly restored walls. Simone hated every one.

  She’d grown accustomed to the invisibility cloaked around her when she worked at the château. It was a beautiful architectural monument, Baroque and overflowing with scrollwork, cherubs, marble, and paneled wood. Nymphs and satyrs lurked in the corners of rooms like eavesdroppers, and more than one passageway through the mansion’s interior facilitated the easy, unseen movement of servants and paramours alike. It was a house designed for burying secrets, for speaking the unspeakable so it need never be spoken again.

  That was certainly how Monsieur Gaturin used it. It was how he intended for Evangeline to use it, too. She and Simone buried a great many secrets in its walls, confessions that could never have survived in the open, but the château was a wonderland mirror that made even the impossible seem real. Now Simone wondered what further secrets those walls were hiding. If they saw Evangeline undergo the same transformation Simone had, from prisoner to aggressor. If the real Evangeline was hidden in the silence between the dits and dahs of the Magpie. If that Evangeline could ever be coaxed out.

  But Château à Pont Allemagne held a strange grip on whoever entered those garish, swirling bronze gates. When you looked out its windows, all you saw were bright and careful gardens. You never saw the snakes.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  PHILLIP

  After everything they’d seen, Phillip had about decided he liked the forest the least when it was quiet. The quiet was too heavy, too suspicious. The quiet was just a dam getting ready to break.

  It took them a few hours of hiking before anyone seemed willing to speak. Simone’s head was swiveling around madly, scanning the rapidly darkening trees for signs of anything that might be hunting them. Helene’s death hung heavy as gunpowder around her. Maybe she thought nothing of it, but when Phillip looked at her, it was all he could see.

  Rebeka was harder to read. Whatever ordeal had led her safely out of the church before it became a conflagration, it must have rattled her—hadn’t it? There was a stubbornness to her calm, a determination in the way she trudged on through the densely overgrown forest floor. But there was pain, too. It made his heart ache to see it, the pain etched around this proud girl’s mouth.