The Shadow War

by Lindsay Smith

  He’d seen too far much death in the past day, but it only hardened his resolve. A vivid, gruesome reminder of the world his parents and uncle had known, all the pain and suffering they tried so hard to armor themselves against. He’d never really known how it felt to be right in tragedy’s grip, even if he saw that sorrow, close enough to touch. He wanted to stop it the way that only he could.

  “Wait. Hold here,” Simone hissed back at them.

  Rebeka’s hand caught his sleeve reflexively before she flinched and muttered an apology.

  “What is it?” Phillip asked.

  Simone started into the forest, hands at her waistband. “I need to piss.”

  Rebeka stifled a laugh. Phillip couldn’t look at her, or he’d start laughing too. But then their eyes met, and it felt so good, so pure.

  “Should we be looking for your brother?” he asked, still grinning.

  “We know where he’s headed. I doubt we’ll be able to catch him before they reach Wewelsburg.”

  “And you’re okay with this?” Phillip asked.

  Her mouth flattened. “I have to be.”

  Phillip exhaled. “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have to be worrying about—well, any of this. Maybe you can head back to Paris with Simone, like he said—”

  “No. I want him to . . .” She gazed into the darkness around them. “I want us to get through this. Together.”

  “Then we’ll do our damnedest to make that happen.”

  Simone reemerged from the twilit trees and beckoned them over. “This way. I spotted something.”

  They followed her for a few hundred yards, then crouched down, the escarpment overhead deadening even the sound of the breeze. In the starlight, Phillip just barely saw the shine of Simone’s and Rebeka’s eyes, the latter staring straight ahead without seeing much that he could tell.

  “There’re lights up ahead,” Simone said under her breath. “A cabin or farmhouse, maybe. But if there are lights, it probably isn’t empty.”

  “Should we keep looking for one that is?” Phillip asked. “Or if they have a barn or shed that we could sneak into—”

  “I’m not afraid of them.” Simone and Phillip both turned toward Rebeka. Her English, already choppy, had turned to blunt little jabs. A challenge twisted on her lips.

  “The Nazis or the monsters?” Phillip asked.

  “Either one.”

  “Well, you should be.” Simone’s fingers played with the straps on her bag. She’d gotten a new hunting jacket from Helene, Phillip realized with a pang. It was much too broad for her, the shoulder seams falling somewhere around her biceps. He wondered if she could ever forget where it had come from.

  “Maybe,” Phillip drawled, “we could keep going, and look for another place—”

  “No. We need to rest.” Simone clicked her tongue. “Tomorrow we can regroup at Wewelsburg, catch up with your brother there. But I don’t want to face these shadow things without the American’s help.”

  “I . . . I don’t think the shadows will be a problem now,” Rebeka said, looking down at her hands.

  Phillip’s eyebrows crawled up his forehead. “Because Liam isn’t with us?”

  She shrank into her shoulders. “No. Because I am.”

  “You might need to explain that one,” Phillip said.

  Simone gripped her rifle strap. “If you’re some kind of demon magnet now too—”

  Rebeka shook her head and dropped down onto the ground, tucking her knees under her chin. She looked either very brave or very scared, and Phillip couldn’t decide which. “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “I’ve seen with their eyes.” A laugh wrung out of her; it sounded too much like a sob. “Apparently I’ve been doing that. For quite some time.”

  “Rebeka . . .” Phillip said. “You’re tired. We’ve been through a lot—”

  “Don’t patronize me. I know how mad it sounds. But I shouldn’t have feared it. I should have seen it sooner for what it was, before . . .” Her gaze fell, and she tucked herself together tighter. Disappearing. “They won’t hurt me. We have an . . . affinity, I think. A bond.”

  “You think,” Simone said, sour. “What in the hell do you mean?”

  But Phillip’s mind was fuguing on what she’d said before. I should have seen it sooner for what it was. Those words clanged around in him like a tolling bell, guilt bricking itself up around him. He’d come out here to smash it all down, prove he could help, too, in his own way. But was he really saving anyone, or was he only putting them in more danger?

  Now he dropped to sit beside her, knees falling wide until he was cross-legged. Karl and Guillerme—had they avoided being found? Or had he only sealed their fate?

  “Why are we all sitting down?” Simone asked. “I’m trying to make a plan—”

  “We should take this cabin,” Rebeka said. “If you don’t want to travel at night, it’s our best choice.”

  Simone issued a few short sputters, then looked to Phillip for support. Oh, no, he wasn’t playing that game. He shrugged, head tilting toward the cabin as if to say, Worth a look.

  With a growl, Simone stood back up and unslung her rifle. “Fine. I’ll search it.” She trudged forward two steps before whirling back and adding, “Don’t go anywhere.”

  Once her footsteps retreated, Rebeka sagged forward and squeezed her eyes shut. A tear gleamed in one corner of her eye.

  “Hey,” Phillip whispered. “Are you all right?”

  She gathered her dress’s hem into a fist. “I wish I’d understood sooner.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I see—things. Places other than where I’m standing. I didn’t realize it before, but it’s like I’m watching them from the shadow world. And the shadows themselves, they . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t know how it’s possible.”

  “Well, it’s another universe, right?” Phillip’s mind was whirring on frequencies, circuitry. Liam’s explanation had made so much sense, just the kind of diagram he needed to understand the world. Hell. It made more sense than anything else he’d seen out here. “If it’s that close to our world, then some people might have a—a sensitivity to it. A frequency, maybe. They can probably sense the weakness in the barriers and maybe even glimpse through those barriers without realizing it.”

  “So there is nothing mystical about it. Just science.” She didn’t sound too thrilled.

  Phillip winced. “Doesn’t that make it better?”

  “It’s not better or worse. But . . . I don’t want to have this—this connection to a world like that.”

  “An evil world?” he asked.

  She pressed her lips together. “A place of darkness. I want there to be more than just the darkness.”

  He leaned forward, intending to tuck back a brown lock of hair that had drifted into her face. He wasn’t even thinking as he did it; it felt natural, instinctive. He stopped himself just before touching the lock, and their eyes met.

  “Sorry,” he said, at the same time she told him, “Don’t be sorry.”

  He laughed softly and secured the hair behind her ear. Her skin was so cold, but then, he supposed, so were his hands.

  “There’s more than just the darkness,” he told her. There was more to the world than the paths that had been laid out for them. The opportunities lost. The wounds they’d inflicted. He had to believe it because the alternative would crush him alive. “There has to be.”

  “I want to find it,” she said.

  Phillip opened his mouth to answer, but Simone returned then, towering over them.

  “I don’t know how, but it’s completely empty. No sign anyone has been there for days.”

  Phillip scrambled to his feet, the thought of a safe haven too much to resist. “You’re sure?”

  “Sure
as I can be.” She shrugged. “They still have electricity, but we don’t touch any lights, don’t turn anything on or off. We leave it exactly as it is. And we take turns guarding.” She fixed her stare on Phillip. “You’re first.”

  Despite Simone’s proclamations, they did use the stove just long enough to heat up canned broth and toss in some cubes of vegetable bouillon, which was unfortunately all the flavor they could find. They sat around the cabin’s tiny breakfast table as they slurped down their sad little soups. The cabin looked like someone’s hunting lodge, and a modest layer of dust blanketed the bedsheets and tables. If the owners were around, they hadn’t come here in some time.

  After another sweep of the woods, Simone beckoned them both onto the porch and held her hunting rifle out in both hands. “Now. I think it’s time you both learned how the hell to use these things.”

  Phillip huffed. “I got decent enough marksmanship scores—”

  “Sure.” Rebeka reached for the rifle. “I’m too clumsy with the P38.”

  “Do you know how to check that it’s loaded? Without blowing your face off?” Simone gestured toward the chamber. “How you slot the bullet, prime the firing mechanism . . .”

  Rebeka pantomimed taking the steps. Her breathing seemed to slow as she went through the motions, and some of the tension left her face. Phillip raised one eyebrow at Simone. He’d thought she was just like him—far more at ease with diagrams than people. But even if she didn’t intend to, she knew just the thing to put Rebeka more at ease.

  Probably helped that it involved killing Germans.

  Simone stretched out, long-limbed, on the cabin’s porch steps. “Now bring it to your shoulder. The thing is, you’ll always know the kick of the butt is coming. You have to be ready for it, but not so braced that it makes you rigid. Think of it like . . . the next step in a dance. If you step too soon, it’ll mess up the step that came before.”

  Rebeka smiled faintly at that. “It’s been a long time since I’ve danced.”

  Phillip’s mouth—the goddamned traitor—was already opening to offer before he clamped it shut. She’d told him what sent her and her brother into the woods—the halting, panicked escape from Poland she’d recounted the night before. She certainly didn’t need him fawning all over her while she wrestled with everything else.

  “Line up your shot, but don’t forget the rules of physics, all right? Gravity, wind, the rise and fall of your own breath. Wait for a space. A silence. See the arc of the bullet, how it will move. And then—boom.”

  Boom. Phillip shivered involuntarily. But the woods were a wall of darkness staring back at them, a lazy trickle of birdsong giving comfort that nothing worse lurked in the trees.

  Yet.

  Rebeka moved through the steps of firing a few times more until her focus drifted. She returned the rifle to Simone and slumped back on her palms, looking for all the world like she was relaxing.

  What did he say to someone like her? Phillip’s talents lay in his knowledge, his ability to build and transform. But that wasn’t some universal adapter that could be plugged effortlessly into any conversation. Small talk, the weather, the markets, the symphony—his parents’ idle chatter bored him at best, and out here, it seemed impossibly wrong.

  Yet the silence felt easy. When Rebeka looked over her shoulder at him, he smiled, and she smiled back. Easy. Maybe words were overrated for her, too.

  “So. The demons.” Simone tore at her nail cuticles. “Why aren’t you worried about them?”

  Rebeka nestled into the woolen blanket she’d brought from inside. “I can’t speak for all of them. But I think I have an understanding with some.”

  “What about Liam?” Phillip asked.

  “Some of them want him dead. They made that very clear.” Her gaze hardened in a way that sent a chill through Phillip.

  “And why is that?” Simone asked.

  “He’s the same as all the others who’ve used their world before.” She shrugged. “Just wants their power for himself.”

  Phillip braced himself. “What about your brother?”

  For a long moment, she was silent, gathering up her words. There was a way her lower lip twisted when she was being careful, this pensiveness that had weight to it.

  “He will do what he always intended to do,” she said finally.

  Phillip had one more pressing question. He fiddled one hand into his pocket and rubbed his fingers over a radio crystal nestled there. Just one tiny geode offered enough energy to power an emergency field radio. It seemed more like alchemy than science. And yet, expanding out from the small crystal, from radio waves, he had arrived at something world-changing. Secrets sent around the globe.

  “Liam said frequencies were a part of opening the path between the two worlds, right?” Phillip asked.

  “Something like that.” Simone cut suspicious eyes toward him. “I didn’t understand half of what he said.”

  Rebeka nodded into her arms. “A combination of finding the right frequency, and using . . . pain . . . as bait. To draw the dark energy out.”

  “Right. You need the bait to open it, pull them into our world.” Phillip let go of the crystal. “But maybe not to close it again.”

  Simone scoffed, but Rebeka chewed at her lower lip, lost in thought. Phillip caught himself staring—at the bow of her mouth, the long cast of her eyes as she retreated back inside her head.

  “If it is about frequency . . . then that might explain why it ‘chose’ you, too. By which I mean—it didn’t choose you at all.” Phillip nudged her foot with his own. “Everyone gives off their own little bit of radiation. You just happened to get the lucky number.”

  “What, you think I’m tuned to the same frequency as the shadows? Like a radio set?” Rebeka asked.

  Her gaze had lifted. Despite the dark circles under her eyes, she looked lighter—brighter, somehow. Like there’d been some light inside her switched off for too long, and he was only seeing it glow now for the first time. God, he wanted to do anything it took to keep it burning bright.

  But then it came crashing back down.

  “You’re kind to think that,” she said, too carefully. “But I know better.”

  “Rebeka . . .” He shook his head. “Whatever you’re feeling about this connection you have—I promise you, it’s not your fault.”

  “You have no idea.” She grimaced. “You don’t even know me.”

  The words stung when they landed because he knew she was right. They hovered in an uneasy silence, so unlike the comfortable one they’d shared before. This new silence was too much, a hunger he couldn’t sate. And as much as he wanted to know her, more than that, he wanted to help. No. He needed to.

  And suddenly, he felt that tingle under his skin, like when he saw past the mess of a schematic or circuit diagram to the system it could create. He felt like just the right switch being slotted into place. He might not be able to build bonds like his parents did, or tear through enemy lines like Uncle Al. But he could solve a problem.

  “What if—what if I could close it?” Phillip asked. “Maybe even keep you from sensing it anymore.” The question felt too fragile, like a tissue-paper flower he’d made his mother once at school. She’d frowned at it, clucked her tongue. Don’t ever settle for something so false, she’d told him then. But now he would pin his hopes on something flimsy if he had to. He’d pin his hopes on whatever he possibly could.

  “You really think you can do that?” Rebeka asked.

  “I’d like to try.”

  Rebeka looked at him thoughtfully, then nodded once, careful. “But only after I find my brother.”

  Phillip knew how it felt to bear a gift that looked more like a curse. To be celebrated for something that made you feel sick inside. It was why he’d let himself be thrown from an airplane into a war-ravaged forest, wasn’t it? To desperately prove that maybe h
is talents didn’t have to be used for harm. But everywhere he looked, while others saw the shining light his gift cast, he only saw the gruesome, chilly shadows it left behind.

  Simone stood then, and retreated to another room of the cabin to rest. But Rebeka was still looking at him, with more uncertainty now than before.

  “Why are you really here?” she asked, and when he opened his mouth—“The truth. Not because of the army. Why are you.”

  Phillip tangled his hands together to keep them from fluttering around. “I’m afraid it’s not so heroic as you may think.”

  “Tell me about it” was all she said.

  He liked that. Tell me about it. No empty platitudes, no absolution that wasn’t hers to give. It gave him the confidence he needed.

  “Well, I’ve had it pretty easy all my life. As easy as a Greenwood family can have it, I guess. But I was never going to be a businessman like my parents. I was never that good with people, connections.”

  She smiled softly. “Not everyone can be.”

  “Yeah, but I respect them for it, you know? They were always the first to pitch in when our neighbors needed help, when someone’s business got hurt. I don’t want to take it for granted, everything I have. I want to help out, too. I went to college to earn my own place, to make something of my own from all the little designs I was always fussing with, but it just didn’t feel like enough.”

  “Your radio encryption systems? I wouldn’t call those little.”

  He blushed, strangely proud. Like maybe he wasn’t so pitiful for looking at her like she was the sunlight that trickled through the trees, dappling the world with flecks of gold, that little spot of brightness in all the cold shadows.

  “Well. It didn’t work out so great.”

  Rebeka’s smile faded.

  “Last year, I ended up working an internship at Connolly Surveying—an oil company in Tulsa. A bunch of us from the engineering college did. Kind of came as a shock that this white man wanted us to work for him and that he’d actually pay us fairly.