The Shadow War

by Lindsay Smith

  He grappled with her, trying ineffectively to dig his nails into her face through his leather gloves. “You fucking harlot, I will destroy you!” He slammed his forehead against hers, sparking stars behind her eyes. “I will—”

  But he never finished—the letter opener ground into his trachea. Enraged thrashing, crunching cartilage, and then—he was still.

  A horrified sob rattled out of Evangeline’s throat as Stefan collapsed beneath her, and she scrambled off him, limbs shaking furiously. Too close, far too close. Was this the game she was always destined to play to do the right thing? Victory by fractions? If they were even lucky enough to defeat evil at all.

  She snapped her left thumb back into place, redoubling the agonizing pain, but it was useless. She must have torn something. She dug around in Stefan’s pockets, recoiling from the sharp metal stink of his blood, until she found his torturer’s tool kit. Unfurled it. Ripped free knives and kept digging, until finally she found what she sought.

  The cyanide vials he’d used to torment Georges-Yves. Individually, only enough to threaten death, not bring it about . . . but here she had access to all of them. And the intimate knowledge of Beaux Arts architecture that only a carpenter’s girlfriend possessed.

  The interrogation cell walls were always meant to be temporary; the prisoners were never actually meant to touch them, for they’d always be cuffed. That made the plaster so easy to punch through when she hacked at it with a dead Nazi’s knife for a minute or so. But she was running behind schedule; Simone was already waiting. If she’d survived. Evangeline choked back a cry—if she was still alive.

  She crawled out of the back of the cell wall she’d torn through, armed with a knife, a broken thumb, and inordinate quantities of cyanide pellets. These she held loose in her good hand, a layer of fabric between her skin and the pellets; too much body heat, and perspiration could cause them to start evaporating, and then she was sure to have some serious regrets. She was within the penthouse ballroom now. To her left, she saw the backs of the cheap plaster cell walls, and to the right, the beautiful crown molding, marble colonnades, and expansive views of the Bois de Boulogne at the end of the boulevard, the park’s leaves bright with violent reds and golds. There had to be something—

  And she spotted it: a box hung from the wall. An air raid kit. Complete with a gas mask.

  Evangeline strapped the gas mask on, then kicked at the thin metal grating that concealed a ventilation shaft. The wide shaft, necessary to ventilate such a stuffy plaster and stone monstrosity as 84 avenue Foch, was perfect for her purposes. She braced herself with her legs, not trusting her hands to the painstaking process. Down one floor. Two. This should be the radio room. She peered through the vents.

  “Carpenter hailing Magpie,” a voice pleaded over the static. “Magpie, come in!”

  “Listen,” one of the operators said, rolling their desk chair toward a new outpost. “It’s from the Wewelsburg outpost.”

  “But who is it?”

  A fist squeezed around Evangeline’s heart. God, she hadn’t been ready to hear her voice, both gruff and unyielding, and small and desperate. But that—that made it all worth it.

  She slid the cyanide pellets from her hand and pushed them through the ventilation grate, then pulled the lever to tug the grate shut.

  By the time she’d recited most of a Rilke poem in her head, Evangeline heard the gasping, flailing sounds of men suffocating to death, their own body heat and respiration hastening the poison’s conversion to gas. She had to wait another minute before she dared open the grate, despite the satisfying thumps the Gestapo radio operators’ bodies made as they struck the tile floors. Bless the Germans for shoving their radio misinformation team into a veritable closet. Bless them doubly for outfitting that closet with an obscene number of locking mechanisms designed to protect its inhabitants from attacks from the outside.

  Gas mask still in place, she kicked a wheezing, bloody-eyed Nazi away from the desk and snatched up the transmitter. “This is Magpie,” she shouted in French through the muffled snout. “MAGPIE IS LISTENING, COPY, PLEASE!”

  A silence far too lengthy, far too heavy with uneven static. One of the dying Gestapo officers reached out for her ankle, but she stomped on his hand as hard as she could. Blood spurted from his mouth; he didn’t move again.

  The radio crackled with a fresh transmission. “Magpie, I read you.” Simone sounded like she was in tears. “Over.”

  Evangeline clutched the transmitter to her chest like it was a precious gem. “I need you to use a new encryption scheme. Use—” Her heart thudded. “Use the street number of the last place we went. Over and out.”

  Le Monocle. A heavy gamble. But it had to work—the Gestapo was still listening, somewhere. She spun the number dial to shift her own encryption frequency to match Le Monocle’s street address.

  “Are you here?” Evangeline asked, tossing all protocol aside.

  “Reading you. It’s a bit muffled. Do I even want to know—”

  “No.” She laughed, manic. “My God, no. You’re . . . you’re alive—”

  “You’re on our side,” Simone countered.

  In the background, a man spoke in English. “This is great and all, but we really need—”

  “Right.” Simone shifted to English as well. “Magpie, we’re inside Wewelsburg. It’s a war zone right now. German forces and—and something I can’t even explain. But we’ve been compromised. We need a way out of Wewelsburg. We need the entire Wehrmacht off our ass—”

  “I’m afraid your network’s been blown,” Evangeline said. “Georges-Yves—he gave them everything, the encryption scheme, all of it.”

  There was no missing Simone’s Arabic swearing.

  “But right now I have something even better available to me,” Evangeline said. “If you can trust me, all right?”

  “Yes,” Simone said in a rush. “Please, yes.”

  “All right. Don’t go anywhere. Keep the line open. I’ll update you as soon as I can. Be safe until then,” Evangeline said.

  “Je t’aime,” Simone muttered. Or something that sounded like it. Evangeline’s heart skipped a beat.

  “W-what did you say?” Evangeline asked.

  “I said you’re stubborn and resourceful and goddamned mad, and I couldn’t be more grateful,” Simone said. “Now hurry the fuck up.”

  Evangeline did.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  DANIEL

  He’d told Liam to stay away, so of course the idiot had come barging in, pulling down half the shadow realm around him. If Daniel weren’t so damned in love, he’d be furious. But in love or not, the monsters were here, and the Nazis had more control than ever.

  It was his own fault. If he hadn’t gotten captured, if he hadn’t been so hell-bent on killing Kreutzer and Himmler and all the rest, he could have declared his vengeance done. He’d slit plenty of throats; the bloodstains under his nails would never scrub out. He’d never forget the hot stink of fascist blood spurting across his face, cooling far quicker than seemed possible. He’d atomized enough skull and brain matter and fussy little blood vessels with a point-blank bullet from their own guns. Was this what it meant to resist? Was this enough? Surely this was as much as any one man could do.

  He could have buried his stolen knife deep in the tainted ground of Germany and fled, seeking better shores in Liam’s arms. Rebeka had been right, just as she always was: at some point it was no longer vengeance, but wasted breath, throwing away his perfectly good life after countless deaths. The best revenge is living well, she’d said, even though he couldn’t imagine there would be any life left for them after this.

  The soldiers filed into the chamber, hollow shells of men in uniform, and lined up for Pitr and Kreutzer’s infusions. They merged with the shadows until they were true otherworldly demons—now demons with claws and guns and coal embers for hear
ts that burned hatred for fuel. The two worlds were merging further still, the shadowscape of forest and mountains and demons’ warrens piling up together like a mudslide inside Wewelsburg. And in the distance, something massive was rumbling awake.

  The behemoth. The one that drank his regret and sorrow and bitterness, and reforged it into something even worse.

  Daniel felt its magnetic pull as it straightened from its resting place, its dozens of faces dancing with images. They played like a film reel moving at half speed:

  Rebeka running to him, telling him—lying to him—about Ari and their parents’ fate as she begged him to run with her.

  The stink of burning bodies as their train passed Chełmno, etched like acid in his mind.

  Ernst’s forceful laugh, sandpaper shredding up Daniel’s hope, his love, his very skin.

  The way it felt to walk down a street in Berlin: not as his own person, but as an avatar, a part of a larger whole, a whole that was hated, feared, judged. To never be seen as Daniel, but as just one of the many faceless enemies.

  His fear of losing Rebeka, too—

  Of losing himself—

  Himself, the self he’d already lost long ago when he became nothing but a number in the Łódź ghetto—

  Daniel closed his eyes and choked back a sob.

  The worst thing you can do is be afraid, Liam had told him the first time he’d seen the shadow world.

  But there were always worse things lurking on the horizon. Things he hadn’t even known to fear. The world’s capacity for cruelty and horror was so much more than he could ever grasp.

  REBEKA

  The behemoth was awakening on the horizon, trudging down the mountainside toward their ritual platform. Its face danced with all her failures, the ones her power had thrust upon her, those impossible choices: save her brother but sacrifice the rest of her family. Embrace this darkness but become a monster for it. Seek revenge on the people who did this to her and allow her brother to pay with his life.

  She was tired of being strong for him while he tore himself to shreds. She was tired of carrying all her lies. She was tired of swallowing down anger—it sat like metal shavings in her gut. Wasn’t she allowed to be angry, to grieve, to hate? She’d treated her calmness as the only way to shield herself from criticism, but all along, she’d carried these monsters inside. She shared their breaths. Heard their whispers and saw the truths they saw. This path, too—it had its uses.

  She moved through the ashy forest like smoke, the thick, tarry smoke of burning tires, burning leaves, burning bodies. Set me on fire, she thought, and I will choke you with my fumes.

  The faceless figure stood in her path.

  Stop this, it whispered. Stop them. Spare us—whatever of us is left.

  Rebeka dropped to her knees, palms upturned at her sides. “I don’t know if I can.”

  If you cannot stop it, then our world will corrupt yours. As surely as yours destroyed us.

  It fed her images of the hungry demons who poured into her world, harnessed to the Nazis’ will. They’d been whipped into a frenzy once before, when Sicarelli had torn into their world and stolen what was not his. He’d chained the hungry demons to his will and used them to tear down the faceless creatures’ once-thriving cities. He’d drained their energy, used it to fuel untold works. Now the Nazis wanted to pillage it even more, tugging away everything that made the shadow world whole—stealing its energy for themselves.

  It is why the Nazis hunger, why they crave. They want someone to pay.

  Rebeka knew that hunger too well; it throbbed in her brother’s heart, sometimes even her own. “And what do you want?”

  The faceless thing shrank back into the trees, into its ruins. We want to be left alone.

  The shadow realm stretched and contracted around her. Time and space worked differently here—she’d already learned that much. Maybe she was too late. Maybe Liam was already dead, her brother already devoured—

  Then she saw him, a boy alone in the center of the forest, the shadows a hungering predator around the tight shield he’d pulled around himself. He was trying to hold it off—trying to keep himself from succumbing to the corruption—but it was a losing battle. Sparks scraped against his shield from their claws and teeth.

  She thrust her hands into the dry earth and focused, all that anger inside of her spilling free at last. Distant howls of rage as the creatures were flung away from him, scrambling and twisting to right themselves.

  “You have to close the rift for good,” Rebeka called to Liam as he raised his head. “It’s the only way to stop this. To save yourself—and the rest of our world.”

  “I—I can’t.” He tightened the darkness around him like shadowy armor. “Someone has to control it—it’s me or the Nazis.” His eyes flashed bright with red. “Don’t you see?”

  “We can still stop them.” She looked up: the behemoth was nearly upon them now, and she felt its pull, as though it were sucking the air from her lungs. “We can still fight the Third Reich—but we don’t have to destroy both our worlds in the process.”

  Liam’s shoulders started to fall, the armor thinning. But then, with a roar, he swelled, darkness surrounding him once more. “I have to control it! It won’t let me break free—”

  “You can never control the things you fear.” God, but she knew that—her terror for her brother squeezed around her throat every single day, and no matter how she tried, she couldn’t dissuade him from throwing his life away. “You can only choose not to be afraid.”

  Liam stared at her for a long moment. The behemoth was upon them now, looming over them, mouths stretched wide as it hungered for more and more. There were too many, so many more than she’d tried to handle before. For all her familiarity with the shadows, she still felt their pull, their demand that she sacrifice everything in the name of escaping from whatever terror gripped her. She couldn’t let Liam look at it. If he looked, he’d surrender for sure.

  “Liam,” she shouted over the gale of wind and whispers and cries. “You can be so much more than this.” She thought of her brother. Of a new day dawning. Of fear, and fighting through it anyway. “You already are.”

  He clenched his hands into fists, and she braced herself for a blow—but none came.

  Instead he lowered the shield, exposed now, vulnerable. Embracing the fear.

  She took his hand.

  “You’ll lose your connection,” he warned. “And so will I.”

  She set her jaw. “Good.”

  EVANGELINE

  By the time she’d called off the reinforcements to Wewelsburg, the guards were pounding at the door to the radio room. “One bloody minute,” she muttered to herself. Her fingers flew over the radio dial as her eyes scanned the map of Europe to her right. A clear path. Simone and her friends needed a clear path north, toward Drieborg in the occupied Netherlands—and they needed an RAF pickup once they got there. And all of this was assuming they survived whatever chaos they were facing right now in Wewelsburg itself. From the wild, frantic reports she’d heard on the radio—everything from explosions and fire to monsters and spies—she was sure she didn’t want to know.

  “STAND DOWN, COMMAND POST DRIEBORG,” she ordered in her best German, across the encrypted Wehrmacht lines. “Reports from Wewelsburg are part of an Allied disinformation plot aimed at sowing chaos. They want you to fire on your own men as they head into port.”

  “Who is this?” the operator at Drieborg answered. “What is your operating code?”

  “Great question,” Evangeline muttered to herself as she prodded one of the dead Gestapo radio operators with her foot. She dug around in his breast pocket and pulled out his codebook. “K-2496, Paris Headquarters.”

  “And you claim the reports of an attack on Wewelsburg are fabricated?”

  Evangeline growled. “We did not spend the last three days torturin
g the details of this plot out of Resistance members here in Paris for you to not believe us, but if you want to fire on our own Gestapo operatives as they pass through Drieborg, then I suppose that is your prerogative.”

  A lengthy pause. “Understood, Paris Headquarters. We will allow them to pass.”

  Another thump on the door. She wrenched a sidearm free from one of the bodies, checked its ammunition, then tucked it into her belt. Just in case. Just two more calls to make before it was back into the ventilation shafts with her.

  She dialed the frequency in and jotted a few quick notes to remind herself of the correct encryption scheme for the next call, then pressed the transmitter button.

  “Alliance House, over,” a pert secretary answered. A benign enough name for the headquarters of the Free French in London.

  She took a deep breath. “This is the operator known as Magpie. And I have a sizable favor to ask.”

  DANIEL

  A gale rolled over the mountain ridge like an avalanche, too far away to hear, but its devastating power was all too apparent. The rush of wind was enough to tear his skin right off. But he was facing it: he surrendered control, surrendered the very notion that he could ever cross a final name from his list, because the list would never stop growing. He had to choose that today—today could be a start.

  And what a glorious new melody the wind was.

  No more rolling meadows and sighing flutes; now was the tremolo torrent of the final act. Deep, carnal notes poured from his fingertips and throat. But he felt Liam beating beside him, the rich, brassy high notes to his darker foundation. He felt Rebeka all around him, the steady bass line that grounded him, kept the beat.