The Shadow War

by Lindsay Smith

  Liam had just plugged in the oscillators and had begun to power them up for another futile attempt when he became aware of someone watching him from the door.

  “Is that it?” Pitr asked, and Liam nearly jumped out of his skin.

  “Christ. What’re you doing here?” Liam’s grease pencil slipped out from behind his ear. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

  Pitr stepped into the lab. As frightful as he’d looked that night in his room last winter, he looked even worse now. His hair hung in filthy clumps; sleeplessness was smeared under his eyes like oil stains. Liam could smell the musk of exhaustion and coffee on him from across the room. He looked like a balloon a week after the party ended, sagging and deflated.

  “I’ve brought you something. A . . . a peace offering.”

  Liam took a step back, wishing he’d locked the door.

  Pitr wheeled in a dolly, wheezing with the effort. A wooden crate rested on it, hastily hammered shut. It still smelled of fresh-cut pine, the cheap resiny kind used at questionable warehouses.

  The ones by the Brooklyn docks.

  “No.” Liam stepped backward until he pressed up against one of the oscillators, their dual posts nearly as tall as he was. Cold sweat trickled down his spine. “Pitr, no—”

  But Pitr had produced a snub-nosed pistol from within his coat. “The machine, Liam. Turn it on.” He bared grimy teeth in a desecration of a smile. “You know the frequency.”

  Had Pitr been keeping tabs on Liam all spring long?

  Liam clenched his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering. This was a nightmare, brought on by stress and exhaustion. Any minute now he’d wake up in his rented room, alarm screeching, ready to start another early morning at the bakery before rushing to his first exam—

  Pitr aimed the pistol at Liam’s feet. “Now.”

  Heart thudding in his ears, Liam fired up the oscillator.

  For a few seconds, nothing but a dull hum filled the dank basement air. Then the space between the two oscillator posts stretched apart, like taffy being pulled. Moments became separated by the rotating thud of the ultradense sound waves. Liam felt his body stretching and contracting with each oscillation, atoms realigning, his thoughts syncing with that grim metronome. Between the two oscillator posts, the air shimmered and warped. This was as close as he’d gotten without attempting the blood offering Pitr had mentioned before, this fogged-glass glimpse at the other world: no real hint of what lay on the other side.

  Pitr’s face contorted with a hideous grin that made Liam’s stomach flip over. How had he ever had feelings for this monster? He was seeing Pitr for the first time now, all his scholarly airs and sly confidence flensed away. All that was left were the cruel sinews of his ambition, an ego that couldn’t be satisfied.

  “Yes.” Pitr’s smile was oil-slick. “I knew you’d figure out how to reach it eventually.”

  Liam took a step back, hand fumbling behind him for his tools, but Pitr wasn’t as distracted as he looked. The gun’s barrel followed his every move.

  “Don’t get clever. It doesn’t suit you.”

  Liam held his empty hands in front of him. There had to be some way he could get the gun out of Pitr’s hands—but every time he latched on to the beginnings of an idea, the oscillators rolled over again with an agonizing thump, chasing all the thoughts from his head.

  Pitr yanked the dolly closer to the line of air between the oscillators and kicked at the flimsy pine boards. “Now for our sacrifice.”

  Even knowing what was coming, Liam’s head swam, revulsion and terror and hatred hitting his bloodstream all at once like poison. And just a little, despite himself, the sweet hint of anticipation.

  Pitr ripped the torn boards away to reveal the crate’s contents. Kieran Doyle was curled up inside, densely bound with rope, attempting to shout through a tight gag. The stench of alcohol and sweat hung around him in a thick miasma; Liam could barely see his face between the filthy chunks of strawberry-blond hair. But it was him. The monster in Liam’s nightmares. The tyrant who almost turned their room in Hell’s Kitchen into a slaughterhouse. The hateful coward who’d robbed the light from his mother’s eyes.

  And here he was—just a sad, pitiful lump, dirty and destitute, bound and gagged in a basement. Suddenly, all Liam wanted to do was laugh—at this sad, miserable fuck and at himself, for letting the man rule his thoughts and life for so long.

  He wasn’t worth the shit stains their landlady’s dog left on the carpet.

  “A worthy sacrifice, don’t you think?” Pitr asked, snapping Liam’s attention back. “No one to miss him. A perfect vessel of sickness and uselessness and rage. We’ll transmute him into pure misery and pain to open the gates.”

  Could Liam do it? Kill him. His own father. Exact vengeance for his mother, for the twenty years of terror this man had wrought on her. The question wasn’t whether he deserved it—because Liam knew he did. What Liam didn’t know was whether it was worth whatever gruesome taint the act would leave on his soul. Whatever further darkness it might invite in.

  But Pitr knew him too well.

  “Come on, Liam Doyle. Take back your name.” Pitr smiled. “Take control.”

  He’d always known just what strings to pull.

  Liam shuffled forward until only the thin pane of throbbing air separated him from his father. Kieran’s eyes were rolling wildly, but when they settled on Liam, his whole demeanor shifted. Hatred burned deep in those glassy eyes. From behind the gag Pitr had tied around his mouth, he tried to spit out a few epithets, and Liam was glad not to have to hear them.

  “Kill him. Free yourself.” Pitr extended a knife toward Liam through the thick haze of shimmering air. Its handle was ornate; its blade curved. “Take control.”

  Liam’s breath caught in his throat. Control.

  His fingers spread wide, ready to grasp that knife. Was it wrong to kill monsters? No. Far from it. Nazis, tyrants, abusers—every last one deserved nothing but pain. His father among them. He deserved a muddy ditch and his own vomit clogging his throat, or a bullet in the base of his skull from any number of the cut-rate mobsters he owed.

  But for Liam to do it? Now, like this? This wasn’t control. Not like Pitr claimed.

  Forever binding himself to Pitr and his father with this act was no freedom at all.

  “No.”

  Liam dropped his hand. His father snorted, twitched.

  With a snarl, Pitr raised his pistol toward Liam’s chest, his grip shaking. Liam felt his muscles tense, as if that would do him any good. But then Pitr shrugged and lowered the gun.

  “Suit yourself.”

  The first shot shattered Kieran’s kneecap. His scream filled the air, rolling with the rise and fall of the machine’s oscillations. The second shot tore open one of his palms. Blood gushed onto the laboratory floor until it ran and met that wall of warped air, and then it flowed up along the surface of the air—weightless—swirling in the space between the oscillators.

  “Look.” Pitr had to shout to be heard over Kieran’s grunting and the machines. “It’s working.”

  As the blood tinted the ribbon of air red, it began to shift. That stretched space—that was the only way Liam could describe it—began to hint at something beyond the strange shimmer. It looked like a membrane pulling thin, hinting at something on the other side. A landscape—shapes like trees, like leaves, too dark and muddled—

  “I told you. All we needed was some pain.”

  Pitr reached down with his knife then and began sawing at Kieran’s ear, each creak of splitting cartilage loud as gunfire. Something chattered within the darkness between the oscillators, and Liam imagined a thousand hungry, gnashing teeth.

  And then the gnashing was inside him—it was thrumming in his veins. His heart beat faster and his breath quickened as he absorbed his father’s screams, his pain. Liam felt hea
vier, like his bones had turned to lead. An energy raced inside him, cracking and pulsing with a heartbeat all its own.

  The dark energy he knew existed, on paper and pencil scratch, was here. He felt it. He welcomed it. And the more Liam focused on it, the more he felt, with certainty, that he was pulling it into himself.

  It sighed and shivered inside him—as though with relief. Like coming home.

  Pitr must have sensed it, too, because he stopped the torture to look up at Liam with a glare. “What are you doing—No!”

  Pitr lunged forward, crossing directly in front of the space between two worlds. He reached for Liam, but the gap pulled at him, its force magnetic. It sucked away Kieran’s blood from Pitr’s hand—feasted on his screams—

  Then Pitr’s eyes turned black and the shadows deepened across his face. He was harnessing the power too.

  “Yes. It’s mine.” A chorus of voices undercut Pitr’s as he spoke, skittering like spiders. “Mine. I gave it the sacrifice—I deserve the power—”

  The darkness throbbed in Liam’s mind, whispering all the ways he could use it to make Pitr pay. Liam drew his hands apart and imagined the energy stretching out between his palms, tugging it back from Pitr’s grasp.

  “No! It’s mine!” Pitr shouted.

  He whirled to his captive and slammed the dagger into Kieran’s chest. Liam’s father groaned. It shredded at Liam’s eardrums. But it fueled him, too. All the torment this pitiful man had wrought on him and his mother. All of Pitr’s manipulations, all of the lies and heartbreak and subterfuge and denial. Liam drank it all up, even as he sensed Pitr doing the same. Binding that energy. Drawing it into himself.

  But he couldn’t hold on to it forever. He needed to unleash it.

  Pitr’s eyes widened. He sensed what Liam was about to do. They were playing tug-of-war with the very fabric of time-space, the dark energy trickling through the hole between two worlds. He staggered forward, even as his legs stretched, swirling deeper into the hole. “It’s mine!”

  But Liam found it was easy to command the energy that it was now inside him. As natural as walking, breathing. He’d been born for this. He knew how to take control. And the darkness promised him power far greater than Pitr could handle—the things it promised—

  He thrust his hands together, compressing a mass of shadows into a ball. Relativity. Fusion. Explosion.

  The shadows tore out of Liam as though he were casting a net. They spun around Pitr, coiling up his limbs. Pitr was screaming—even over the hungering oscillators, Liam could hear it—but as the shadows engulfed him, they stuffed the sound right back down his throat and slithered inside.

  Pitr staggered into the undulating wall, the tear between the worlds. His hand still gripped Kieran by his bonds, though Kieran was slurping his last breaths through a punctured lung. Liam should feel something, he should feel relief or anger or regret—but all he felt was a dark smile bubbling out of him. Power coursing through him. Limitless.

  The tear stretched wider. Inviting. After all, this was what the shadow world had been waiting for. A suitable offering. The perfect sacrifice.

  But Liam had acted too fast. He’d expended all the energy at once. He dropped to his knees, the sudden weightlessness leaving him dizzy, nauseated. The other world had gotten what it came for—and now it was retreating, leaving Liam empty and cold.

  “You’ll pay,” Pitr wheezed—

  And then the portal closed up around him.

  Too much, it had been too much all at once. The air where the portal had opened condensed, thickening. The oscillators screeched and snapped and pulled inward from their moorings, the gravity of the collapsing rift between worlds sucking them in. They crashed against each other, their whirring noise rolling frantically, then they fused together as the noise wound down, like a top losing its rotational momentum.

  Liam sat back on his heels with a strangled cry. Pitr, his father, the blood, the gun, the dagger—it was all gone. And with it, the energy he’d harnessed from the other world.

  But it had worked. Liam laughed, tears burning his eyes. Pitr had been right after all.

  Oh, God. It was real. The shadow universe he’d only glimpsed in the space of his calculations, in the decimal-point error of his numbers. It was terrifyingly, undeniably real—just on the other side of reality, waiting for the right frequency.

  And just like Pitr said, it was hungry for their pain.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  PHILLIP

  The cabin’s door creaked open on dry hinges. The whole room was a vacuum, Phillip’s and Rebeka’s and Simone’s breaths collectively held, their muscles taut as stretched springs as they waited for whoever was on the other side. From the corner of his eyes Phillip spotted Simone, her arms perfectly still as she kept her rifle ready.

  A man reached into the room and flicked on the light switch.

  “Don’t move,” Simone growled in German. “Or I feed bits of your fascist brain to the wolves.”

  The complete bewilderment on the man’s face morphed as he took in the scene before him. The Algerian woman training a rifle on him. The Black boy clutching a tool kit. The Jewish girl huddled under wool blankets. His lip curled up, and his eyes bulged into something like parody.

  “What in the hell are you mongrels doing in my home?” he bellowed in German.

  Simone pulled back the cocking mechanism with a resounding click—

  A woman with her wheat-colored hair in perfect plaits beneath a knit cap. “Sigi, what’s the matter?” she purred as she ushered two tiny, flawlessly adorned children into the cabin’s doorway. The youngest of them, the boy, stumbled forward, heedless of his father’s outstretched arm until he caught sight of Phillip and stared.

  “Mama,” the little girl said. “Monsters.”

  Simone’s grip on the rifle slipped. Dammit, Simone. Now wasn’t the time for her to discover some shred of sympathy for fellow humans. The kids weren’t a threat, not yet, but if the woman ran to summon the Gestapo, or—or—

  “Yes, they are monsters, Fritzi.” The mother snatched her little boy by the straps of his lederhosen. Yes, Phillip realized with a groan, he was wearing honest-to-Kraut lederhosen over a ribbed sweater. “Go back to the car. Fetch Mama her—”

  “No one’s going anywhere,” Simone said, and turned the rifle toward the little boy.

  “Go, Fritz,” the man Sigi—Sigmund, maybe—urged. “Don’t listen to these people.”

  “Papa—”

  “Don’t you do it,” Simone said.

  “Go!”

  Fritzi took off running. Simone lined up her shot. Her finger pressed down on the trigger—

  Then with a snarl of frustration, she stopped herself. “Khara,” she swore under her breath.

  Sigmund laughed, the sound harsh as gravel. “You’re all the same. Vicious like animals, but weak-willed.” He took a step into the room, even as his wife shot out her arm to stop him.

  “I don’t kill children. Unlike you,” Simone replied.

  “But you’ve lost your bluff now. Do you even have bullets? Let’s see.”

  He reached for the barrel of the rifle to snatch it away, but Simone yanked it back. Swung it around to crack the side of his head. As he reeled from the blow, she brought it up to aim again, the woman screaming, until—

  “Stop,” little Fritz shouted. He’d reappeared in the doorway wielding a pistol, the weapon comically large in his shaking hands. With a smirk, his father took it from him and clapped him on the shoulder.

  Phillip’s left hand was still under the woolen blanket. He had half an idea forming. Carefully, he stretched his fingertips for the sole of his boot and started to slide open the panel.

  “Well done,” Sigmund cooed to his son. “Now. Help me tie them up.”

  The family moved into the room. Again the man snatched Simone’s rifle by th
e barrel and this time managed to yank it out of her grip.

  “Stand up,” the woman barked.

  Reluctantly, Simone and Rebeka got to their feet. Rebeka’s shoulders were squared, but her hands trembled as she moved them behind her back. Shit. Phillip was almost done. He’d eased the components out of their hiding place—he just needed to fit them into the receiver—

  “You too, Blackie. Stand up!”

  Phillip palmed the components into his jacket sleeve and stood, clutching his pack. It was just inside the main pouch, it would take him five seconds—

  “Mama,” the little girl said again, stepping into the cabin to tug at her mother’s wool trousers. “Monsters.”

  “Yes, darling, I know. But we’ll take care of them, the Gestapo will take them away—”

  Though it was the last thing he wanted to do, Phillip turned his attention back to the open door with a heavy sickness in his gut.

  Monsters. The little girl had no idea.

  Red eyes blinked from the darkness beyond the cabin steps. Prowling, circling. He might not have noticed them if he didn’t know what he was looking for. Phillip risked a hasty glance at Rebeka, whose hands were shaking.

  Well. He swallowed. Maybe the monsters would offer a quicker death than the Gestapo.

  The woman spun Rebeka around to fasten her hands behind her back, and Rebeka faced Phillip. She mouthed three syllables at him, twice, to be sure he caught it. Jaw tight, he dipped his chin slightly to confirm.

  Frequency.

  At Sigmund’s feet, tendrils of shadow slithered into the cabin. Phillip forced himself not to look at them. The woman finished binding Rebeka’s hands and turned toward Phillip.

  “They’ll have fun with you,” she sneered, pulling out a fresh braid of rope.

  “Not as much as we will,” Phillip replied.

  Her arrogant expression wrinkled for the briefest moment.

  Then the screaming started.

  Whump. Sigmund hit the floor face-first as the tendril of darkness yanked him backward. His daughter shrieked, banshee-like, but didn’t take his hand as he grabbed at her. The woman turned away, eyes widening, and Phillip plunged his hand into his satchel.