The Shadow War

by Lindsay Smith

  Where was his goddamned jammer? As soon as the monsters were done with the Germans, he had to try—he’d have to hunt for the right counterfrequency to lock them out. But even as he thought through the plan in his mind, he saw all the points of failure, the unlikeliness of success—

  Rebeka closed her eyes and rocked back and forth on her heels. If she was communing with the shadows again, he hoped it was working.

  Crunch. Sigmund’s shouts went abruptly silent with the gnash of bones and teeth, replaced by the screams of his family. Phillip forced himself to look: the first monster stood in the cabin’s doorway now, grinning at them with a blood-slick smile. It sucked down Sigmund’s headless body with a fierce slurp.

  “Anytime now, Rebeka,” Simone shouted, stepping backward from the monster. It turned flaring nostrils toward her, sniffed deeply . . .

  Then swiveled its focus toward the German woman.

  Something bumped up against Phillip’s leg, and he looked down to find Sigmund’s bitten-off head staring back up at him. Bile roiled in the back of his throat. But it was the reminder he needed to get to work—

  “You devils have done this! With your—your wicked magic and your—”

  The German woman had no time to finish before the monster raked her into one massive, multijointed claw and held her aloft. One talon punctured straight through her lungs, dissolving her words into a damp gurgle.

  Finally Phillip found the jammer and tore it free of his pack. He snapped the crystal into place and rattled the box until the dimmest frequency came in. Come on, you know how to do this. He clicked through the frequencies, but his invention was designed for portability, not fine-tuning. Before him, the monster took its time feasting on the woman while its companions munched on the Reichsjugend.

  There—he found one frequency that made a curious shimmer in the air. It was almost as if, for one second, the monsters were a chalk drawing on a blackboard that someone had smudged. But then they righted themselves and turned, snarling.

  Oh, you felt that, didn’t you? Phillip spun back to the frequency, and the same effect happened. But it wasn’t enough. Liam had told him that the frequency opened the rifts, so countering that frequency should push it closed again. Right? If he was going to force them back into their realm, he’d need more power.

  “You found it,” Rebeka said, locking eyes with him.

  Phillip winced. “I don’t have enough juice. I need a bigger generator. I need—”

  “A car?” Simone asked, peering out the cabin window.

  Phillip’s face fell. Yes, a V-6 engine ought to do the trick. But there were at least two monsters between him and that horsepower. “They’re blocking it—”

  “I can buy you time,” Rebeka said.

  “Please—don’t—”

  But she was already facing down the first monster, now finished with its feast. It crouched back on powerful legs, watching her with a cruel smile on its gore-smeared face. Rebeka extended one hand to it, and it took all of Phillip’s willpower not to scream at her.

  “Trust me,” Rebeka said softly. She averted her gaze from the monster just long enough to meet his eyes. “Like I trust you.”

  And then Rebeka collapsed to the floor, her heap of a body shimmering—as if caught between both worlds.

  Phillip froze. “Rebeka!” he shouted, despite the monsters—half a dozen of them now—despite everything. “Rebeka, please—”

  The cabin rumbled like the beating of a thousand wings. The air around them turned dense and scraped at his arms.

  Go, the monster roared, its voice multitonal, a frightful chorus. The word was coming from the other monsters’ mouths now, too. Go, Phillip. Hurry!

  Phillip gathered up his tools and raced for the cabin door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  REBEKA

  Rebeka both was the monsters and wasn’t them. She could move them like marionettes, but they bobbed and writhed on strings in ways she couldn’t control. They were her eyes and nose and ears, but she was never fully in command of them as she straddled the two worlds, two times, two lives, and maybe more.

  The man she’d encountered before in the shadow realm hadn’t found her yet. Maybe he didn’t know she was here. Maybe by staying halfway in her own world, she could evade him—but then again, he might be busy with something else.

  She shuddered, not wanting to imagine what that something else might be.

  In truth, the shadow realm was a lot less frightening this time. It wasn’t a dead place; the plants writhed with their own breath, and the drone of insects and other nameless creatures spoke to a vastness she couldn’t begin to comprehend. These ruins were where entire civilizations had once thrived, in the past the other being had shown her. The shadow energy sustained this dark place and gave it life with the same relentlessness as the sunlight in her own world. Apparently, that dark energy had been pulsing in her all along. And yet feeling it, accepting what it had given her . . . she felt brighter than ever.

  She stumbled past another cluster of eerie ruins and thought of the faceless figure, the time it had shown her from before. Before humans had reached through the barrier and stolen some of the shadow for themselves. She remembered the figure approaching her, reaching inside her head as if passing judgment. Had it trusted her not to betray them like Sicarelli did? It must have known she was unlike that angry man who prowled the shadowlands now, conquering some of the more predatory monsters. The being had shown Rebeka for a reason. It trusted her to be better.

  Just because she had an affinity for that shadow energy, drew it to herself unintentionally, magnetically, didn’t make it hers. She hadn’t asked for it, no more than the shadow energy had asked to be used. They were stuck together, along for the vengeful ride.

  Look, Rebeka. Wasn’t it what their mother was always telling her? (Had always told her, she corrected herself.) Look at what’s in front of your face. Stop trying to get ahead of yourself—you’ll only trip over your own feet.

  It was true. As a little girl back when they’d attend synagogue on the High Holy Days, she was always squirming, waiting for the closing prayer, eager to rush out and feel the cool Berlin air on her face, the possibilities of the empty night ahead like a gulp from a crystal mountain stream. By the time they banned Jews from attending movie theaters and concert halls, she’d already charted a different life for herself. Business school in Switzerland, accounting classes, all the ways she would take over their butcher shop and turn it into a bustling enterprise, maybe somewhere other than the hateful streets of Berlin, their shop becoming a good thing instead of a leash that kept snapping her parents back.

  But her visions weren’t enough to stop the night of smashed windows, of their neighbors being marched through the streets like cattle. Their flight to Luxembourg hadn’t been part of her plans. While their uncle tended his crops and Ari rolled up his sleeves to enjoy their new life, she felt ready to burst out of the too-tight cocoon of her skin. Every day she tried to formulate a new plan, bringing her parents news of a ship bound for America or signs that London was pushing back the Blitz, and wouldn’t it be better if they found something more permanent, somewhere they could truly begin again? She was so tired of being derailed, her plans thrown out of gear, so that sometimes she couldn’t even see what was staring back at her from the darkness, from that humming aura that crowded her sight and tunneled her into another world . . .

  She stopped, and breathed, and looked, and felt.

  Humid air, swampy and fetid with the endless cycle of vegetation flourishing and dying and rotting and feeding life anew. A rumble in the earth, the steady percussive beat of giant feet or hooves or claws in the distance. Look, Rebeka. Look and see what’s watching you.

  She forced her gaze to lift.

  In the distance, flickering. A faceless thing, a behemoth hunched down like a massive mountain, calling her, begging her to
look. But her stomach tightened every time she tried.

  The darkness shifted. Swallowed her. Became infinity.

  It was like a pond, still and heavy all around her, punctuated only by the occasional distant drip of water that rippled outward through her thoughts. Dimly, she was aware of the shadow realm, of her world, and all those layers of possibility between them. What was she looking at? Why had the shadows guided her here?

  Look.

  The faceless figure was beside her again, its countenance solemn and lowered. That pressure in her mind steered her forward, toward a broken circle of stones.

  As she stepped into them, they lit up, like a spotlight piercing a dark stage. The air around them warped. She was seeing this land’s past; she was seeing her world’s present, and they were all entwined.

  Look. If you take too much darkness, this is what you will become.

  The sight shifted again until she was peering back into her world through a darkened scrim. But she was no longer in the cabin. The shadows had ushered her somewhere else. A pathway winding through lonely forests, shuttered houses. A castle’s tower on the hill.

  She moved across rain-slick cobbles toward the shaft of light until she reached a stone archway. Not rough and wild like the shadow realm—human hands had built it. The spotlight, she saw now, was streaming down into the room beyond the arch, filling the chamber within.

  She rested her hand on the archway and stopped. There was something too ritualistic about this room’s design. It was bell-shaped, rising up toward a round opening with an intricate carved design, a lattice, laid over it. Four sectors, four arms, bent and then bent and then—

  Her throat felt swollen then, buzzing. A Hakenkreuz. When simplified, it became a swastika.

  Menacing busts dotted the chamber’s periphery, twelve in all. Faces in white marble that she only knew from grainy photographs in Der Stürmer. Stoic, as if they were Roman gods. No. Aryan ones. Arrayed around the central depression in the room as if awaiting a ceremony.

  And in the center of the depression—a lectern. A book.

  Look, Rebeka, the Faceless whispered. Do not miss what is coming. Another watery vision—a reminder of Sicarelli wrenching the life force away from the Faceless and its people. What has already come for my kind.

  She reached the pool of light. A handwritten manuscript, bound in deteriorating leather, rested on the lectern, the light glinting off its gold-edged pages. The book’s cover had been pressed with a symbol not unlike the Hakenkreuz, but this one had a dozen jagged arms, like rays of a sun, reaching out of a doorway. The Black Sun: some fabrication of Aryan lore teased out of half-remembered historiographies and misinterpreted wood carvings and ledgers that didn’t get burned with witches. (Oh, how those Europeans did love a good witch hunt, a convenient bin for disposing all their woes.)

  Dread bubbling in her stomach, Rebeka opened the manuscript cover.

  Porta ad Tenebras.

  Was this Wewelsburg Castle, then? It felt so different from war rooms and officers’ banquet halls. As if the chamber had been prepared for this purpose. For ritual. For sacrifice.

  The tower in her vision. It was leading her here—

  She lifted her hands from the book, but they were already sticky with some thick substance.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Rebeka nearly jumped out of her skin. She stepped back from the manuscript, and now she could clearly see: it was seeping shadows and blood, not unlike an infected wound. Opposite her in the darkness, a man stepped forward—the angry man who’d confronted her in the shadow realm last time. The one who’d commanded the demons, who wanted the shadow world for his own.

  Dark eyes, loose dark curls—he looked a little like Daniel if she squinted, but there was something whittled and starved about him, like if he bared his teeth, there’d be nothing left of him but fangs. He wore round-lensed glasses perched halfway down his nose that made him look both old and young at the same time.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll be right on time.”

  Movement from the manuscript caught Rebeka’s eye. The blood had cleared from the open page, revealing an illustration. A black rectangle of ink, only now it was shifting—stretching wide. An arm took form, reaching up out of the page—grasping for her—

  Rebeka stumbled backward. The arm connected to a complete figure—a man. But he was far from a normal-looking man. His skin was shrinking, pulling tight around his skull. Shadows wisped out of his nostrils and mouth as he laughed.

  Please. This time it was the voice of the faceless ones. The civilization who’d lived in the shadowlands long ago, before Sicarelli desecrated their world. Please. Our energy will corrupt your world as surely as yours corrupted ours. You cannot let this pass.

  Lightning crashed beyond the chamber, the hot white flash revealing the man was only a black void in the shape of a person. His smile was licked with flames.

  “Don’t be late,” he said. “We need all the blood we can get.”

  But the vision was collapsing around her.

  Rocks shook loose from the chamber walls. A bust of a senior Reich official tipped forward and smashed to the ground. The rubble fell straight through the man as if he were a ghost. In the distance, a pitch rose and fell, rose and fell on a frequency as it adjusted, dialed itself in.

  “Wait—” Rebeka cried.

  But it was too late. Phillip had done what she’d asked.

  She awoke on the blood-strewn floor of the cabin.

  “Rebeka!” Phillip rushed toward her. “Are you all right?”

  She flung a hand out in front of her face, patting around until she could grip his shoulder. “Did you . . . What did . . .”

  “I found it,” Phillip said. “The frequency. I reversed the amplitude, sent the waves in a different direction, and it was just like—”

  Simone clicked the safety on to her rifle, the sound riotously loud in the dead of night. “It was like they evaporated.”

  “It shut the rifts,” Rebeka said.

  That rectangle of blackness on the book’s illustration, the hands grasping out. The gate between worlds.

  The gate that Liam sought to fling open for good, with the aid of the book at Wewelsburg Castle. If these other men didn’t open it first.

  Rebeka looked into Phillip’s eyes, so brimming with hope, with pride. Her fingers crept up to cup his cheek. Like her, he’d only ever meant to do what was best. Like her, he couldn’t see the consequences beyond his periphery—the men who lost their jobs; the family members she couldn’t save for the one she did. It shouldn’t have to be this way, this zero-sum game of fortune and failure. Light and shadow. They shouldn’t have to trade darkness from their world with darkness from another. There had to be a force for good in this world, one that didn’t carry with it an equally bad cost.

  But it would mean staying firmly planted in their world. No more shadow. No more connection to the other world. No more control for Liam—or anyone.

  “I saw the book. At Wewelsburg. The Nazis know what it can do. They are going to use it to open the bridge, and soon.”

  Phillip’s eyes had lidded as he sank into her touch. Now they opened slowly. She felt his regret, too. She wanted nothing more than to savor this moment with him—to look and really see what was right in front of her.

  But she knew what awaited them.

  “My brother wants to get there first.” Her next words sat heavy on her tongue. “But it will get him killed.”

  Simone had been rummaging through the German woman’s discarded purse, but paused at that. “The book will kill your brother?”

  “Yes—no. I’m not sure. The man who wields it. I’ve seen him in the shadow realm before. He’s been hunting us.”

  Simone unearthed a packet of cigarettes. Her nose wrinkled as she read the label, but with a shrug, she fished one
out and fetched her lighter from her bags. “And he will use its power for the Nazis, yes?”

  Rebeka nodded. She didn’t trust her voice any longer. “Liam thought he could use the book to stop them. But he was wrong. No one can. The shadows will corrupt us all if we keep the rifts open. We can’t leave any sort of connection to the other world at all.”

  “So we must stop him instead of help him,” Simone said with a heavy sigh.

  “We can do it,” Phillip said, though the words came out sluggish. “Cancel out the frequency. I’ll need to make some adjustments, but—”

  “Might as well leave now, then,” Simone said. “I don’t think we’re getting any more sleep tonight as it is.”

  They packed up their things and left the bloodbath of the cabin behind. It was hard to see anything at all in the dead of night, but every time Rebeka closed her eyes, the behemoth was waiting: its surface ready to drink up all her fears. Its mountainous spine called to her, a siren singing her into the dark.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  EVANGELINE

  Stefan Neumann was a perfect gentleman, and he worked very hard to make sure everyone knew. Despite the shortages, Evangeline’s desk was never devoid of fresh-cut flowers, though of course he didn’t attach his name to their delivery. He arrived at Château á Pont Allemagne in a Mercedes polished until it gleamed like a wicked stepmother’s enchanted mirror. He held the door for her always, black leather gloves freshly oiled beneath the sharp cuffs of his uniform. And when they arrived at Maxim’s, he never used his rank to secure them the choicest table.

  Not that anyone was going to deny anything to the Torturer of Troyes.

  He waited until their lobster bisque had been brought out before he began that night’s interrogation, a shift Evangeline noticed only because he paused after inhaling before he spoke. His hair gleamed a gentle chestnut under the gas lamps, parted on the side as she’d suggested instead of straight down the middle, and he looked at her with a gaze he must have believed was boyish. Charming. Men were always so pleased when women returned their smiles, not realizing those smiles were like the jabs of knives, forcing a hostage’s response.