Grim Tidings

by Caitlin Kittredge

  I looked up at a small creaking sound and saw the wire-caged light over my head swinging gently back and forth, like a stiff breeze had just passed by.

  Nothing would have made me happier than to turn tail and not stop until I was back across the Rhine, but Gary would be furious and if nothing else, this Kubler deserved to have his soul pulled out through his nose. A lot of warlocks thought it was possible to cheat a reaper, and I never got tired of seeing the looks on the faces of the ones who really had it coming when I darkened their door.

  “Herr Kubler?” I called, starting down the hall. Still quiet, just me and the buzzing lights and the soft drip, drip, drip of melting snow off my overcoat. “Hello?”

  “They’ve gone.”

  I spun to face the open door and the soft voice emanating. Inside was a small office that looked like a tornado had touched down. Colonel Kubler didn’t look nearly as impressive as the photo Gary had shown me. Without the black SS uniform and the hat to hide his bald spot, he looked like any other skinny old man who probably touched your arm a few times too often when he talked to you and spent half the time trying to sneak glances down your blouse.

  I let the leather satchel slide out of my hand, keeping my grip on the brushed steel knife I’d used to pin down stray souls ever since I came to as a hellhound, in the mud at Gary’s feet. He’d leaned down and held out his hand and told me I didn’t have to die. And like an idiot, I let him pull me up.

  “Lucky I’m not here for anyone else,” I said. Kubler blinked at me when I switched to English, but then he did as well, his voice coarse and reedy as a broom scratching across a floor.

  “They are still here,” he whispered. “But they have all gone.”

  “Much as I’d love to spend my time chatting, I think we both know why I’m here,” I said. “You are way overdue on the deal you signed. You going to come quietly?”

  Kubler started to laugh—at least I thought he was laughing. When it turned to a rusty cough, and a spray of bright red dusted his white lapels, I took a step closer, squinting in the flickering light.

  “Alas.” Kubler favored me with a bloody grin. “A bullet,” he said. “Meant for another. But you have missed your chance all the same. I am not long for this world, and my soul remains my own.”

  He started to laugh again, until I crouched down and peeled back his lab coat, revealing the starburst of blood and powder burn in his side just above his hip bone. “Gut shot?” I said. Kubler gasped, his neck twisting a little in pain.

  “What would you know about it?”

  “I’m not a doctor like you,” I said, pulling the knife from its leather case. The case was soft and smooth under my fingers, even though the leather was mottled and dark from being in my bag, my back pocket or tucked against my skin for over twenty years. “But I have been around a lot of dying people, and gunshot wounds are usually quick.”

  Kubler tried to back up, but he was trapped between his bookcase and his desk. A few files slithered off the top, raining onionskin paper around us that landed and sopped up his blood. “That is unless you take a slug in the guts,” I said. “Then it can take hours. Worse if you rupture the intestines. Then you can go septic waiting to die. I’ve heard the pain is indescribable. But that’s not the point. The point is, it takes hours.”

  I leaned in, pressing my free hand against Kubler’s wound. He let out an animal cry, but I was stronger than him and his struggling didn’t do much more than smear blood up to my wrist. “Lucky for you, I’ve got all day.”

  He started to laugh at me, and coughed up blood. A droplet landed in my eye, staining half my vision red. “My soul remains my own. Yours, I’m not so sure about.”

  “Me neither,” I said, sitting cross-legged and tapping the knife blade against Kubler’s metal desk. He grimaced at me.

  “Vas?”

  “Oh, I’m waiting,” I said, tapping out the beat from “In the Mood”. “As long as I stick you before you expire, I still collect. But I think we can afford to wait a little longer.”

  For the first time, Kubler’s face slackened. He was yellow, in the whites of his eyes and the pale skin around his lips. The bullet must have nicked his liver. “You cannot . . . you would torture me?”

  I shrugged. A clock was ticking somewhere, and Kubler’s rusty wheezing filled up the space between us. He glared at me, his eyes burning, but he could barely keep his eyes open.

  “You think Hell will be a misery for me?” he gasped finally. “I am in Hell. Stuck in this place, with the trenches full of animal corpses—the living ones and their stink . . . the cow mewlings and screamings . . . after this place, Hell will be a comfort.”

  All at once, our little waiting game got tiresome. “Those people you keep out there in the mud and the shit,” I said quietly, “will have the comfort of knowing that they’ll never have to see your face again, because you died like a coward begging for the pain to stop. And those trenches you throw their bodies into were a hundred times too good for your corpse.”

  I leaned forward and stuck the knife between his ribs. I aimed up and into his heart, shuddering as the wasted, tattered thing that was all that left of most warlock’s souls flowed into the knife. “And by the way, I’ve seen Hell,” I whispered in Kubler’s ear as he groaned. “They still have a few surprises waiting for you.”

  The blade glowed for a few seconds, like I’d heated it over an open flame, and then quieted.

  I shoved the knife back into its case and stood, swiping the last of Kubler’s blood off my face. The whole hospital was still eerily silent, more like a morgue than a medical center. Nothing good happened in this place. Nothing good had set foot on this ground in a long, long time.

  I stepped into the hall, heading back the way I came. I couldn’t wait to be out of this place. It was one of the few times since Gary had found me that I was actually glad I wasn’t a human being anymore. Warlocks could do plenty of depraved shit to each other, but there was something so impassive about the camp and the German personnel in it. They were just people, just going about their job like it was any other slightly inconvenient, grimy assignment. I didn’t think the girl whose uniform I’d stolen would have shown any more emotion if she’d worked collecting garbage. This place must have been a dream job for a necromancer like Kubler—all the bodies he could want and then some. But there should be bustling Teutonic efficiency, not silence and chaos. Nobody had even investigated Kubler’s cries.

  Close enough to the door to feel icy wind around my ankles, I heard a scraping sound behind me. I made myself turn around slow, like I was only curious, and I belonged here. I didn’t need a passel of Nazis on my tail on top of everything else.

  The girl was also wearing a uniform, canvas that had at some point been crisp and white. She even had one of those little nurse’s caps hanging askew from her rumpled curls.

  I paused, waiting for her to speak first. That’s another important trick of blending in where you’re not supposed to be—don’t be the chatterbox.

  “Where . . . is he?” she ground out. I squinted to get a better look at her in the flickering electricity. Red spilled down the front of her uniform like she’d dumped a glass of punch on herself, and her skin was so white it gave her uniform a run for its money. She took a fast step toward me, and I realized what the whispering sound had been. She was wearing only one shoe. The stocking on her bare foot was ripped and bloody, bruised toes leaving little rusty half-moons on the dirty floor.

  There’s a misconception about predators, that we’re all created equal. But that’s not true at all—some stay on top of the food chain being the baddest on the block, but the truly canny ones, the survivors, learn how to tell when they’re outgunned and beat a retreat, staying alive until they wear you down and pounce.

  The nurse wasn’t bloody because she was sick or someone had beaten the shit out of her. She wasn’t limping toward me because she needed help. Her dime-size pupils and the red foam leaking from the corner of her mouth told m
e everything I needed to know, and that thing was Run for your life.

  I shot my gaze sideways, down a corridor lined with swinging doors, little round windows like the kind on submarines glowing from within. Light was a good sign. There might be humans down there I could use as roadblocks.

  The limping nurse hissed at me. We locked eyes in that split second of violent calculus that happens when a lion meets an antelope. Then I turned and ran, and she chased me, a guttural scream ripping out of her throat.

  I smacked at a few door handles as I ran past, but they were all locked. The nurse was snapping at my heels by the time one gave and I shoved inside, slamming the door in her snarling face. The handle rattled and banged. She wasn’t giving up.

  I was inside some kind of exam room, all the instruments neatly laid out on a tray and a tilting white table shining under a bare bulb. The nurse screamed on the other side of the door, beating the flats of her hands on the metal.

  “Simmer down, lady,” I muttered, yanking open drawers and cabinets to try to find something to defend myself with. The little glass vials on the shelf were all in German, and I picked one with a skull and crossbones printed on the label, fingers shaking a bit as I fumbled a syringe. Whatever was wrong with that nurse, I wanted to be far away from this place when it spread.

  I heard a creak behind me, a rusty hinge bending, and before I could turn, my skull exploded into a thousand pieces of glass. I was knocked out so fast I didn’t even feel myself fall.

  I was immobile when I came to, and I really hoped it wasn’t because I’d had my brains bashed hard enough to paralyze me. I moved my arms and legs, feeling hard leather straps holding me down, cold metal under my back and aching head. I thrashed against the restraints and managed to bruise my wrists and ankles for my trouble. Of all the places you want to find yourself tied down, a Nazi hospital isn’t top of anyone’s list.

  “Quiet.” The voice came from beyond my field of vision, which admittedly was about as crisp and clear as a dirty windshield on a rainy night. Everything was blurry, and every time I tried to move my eyes my vision slipped sideways.

  “Ungh,” I said to the invisible voice.

  “Please,” it replied. “I apologize for the pain but you must be quiet.”

  I lay back against the cold table, feeling my heart thudding. “I hate to break it to you, but if your plan is to torture me quietly that’s not going to work out.”

  “Nothing could be further from my mind,” the voice said. It was male, clipped dry syllables that came from somewhere in this neck of the woods, but not the immediate neighborhood. Not a German. Maybe a neighbor.

  “Then why all this?” I said. Raising my head up felt like somebody had taken a hammer to the side of my skull, but I did it all the same. A face swam into view. He was painfully thin, sallow in the dim light, black hair swept back from a high forehead. He looked down at me without blinking.

  “I thought you were a German at first,” he said, indicating my uniform. “Then I thought you might be sick.”

  “Sick like I’m covered in blood and chasing folks looking for more?” I asked. He grimaced.

  “I’m sorry I hit you,” he said. “You are an American?”

  “Born and raised,” I said, relaxing into the dizzy waves bearing me up. Born and raised and died and was born again as a monster was just long-winded.

  He moved away and came back to put a cold cloth across my forehead, then undid all his good work by shining a light into my eyes. It felt like being sliced across the face with a butcher knife. “Jesus!” I snapped. “Do you mind?”

  “You have a concussion,” he said.

  “You really are Sherlock Holmes,” I sighed. “What did you hit me with?”

  “A bedpan.”

  I glared at him. “Better and better.”

  He leaned over me to unbuckle my straps. He was wearing a plain white shirt, not the ragged pajamas most of the prisoners in the camp had to make do with, but it was ancient, yellow at the armpits and collar. His pants weren’t any better, worn at the knees and so filthy they were stiff. “Are you a POW?” he asked. “I have not met any female GIs. The men they keep far away, in a satellite camp with the Russians.”

  “I’m not a prisoner,” I said.

  “Then you are a spy,” he said, nodding to himself. “And you could not have chosen a worse time to slip inside these fences.”

  “And what about you?” I said, sitting up and feeling the back of my head. It was tender and a little bloody, but I was basically whole.

  “I am a doctor,” he said. “They brought me here and made me assist the staff with procedures.” He held up his hands, turning the long fingers this way and that. “There are few skilled surgeons in the camps. Most are at the front lines or sitting on their fat asses in Berlin, ducking bombs and drinking tea.”

  Something crashed out in the hall, and I watched the doctor’s whole body get taut. “Are we safe in here?” I said.

  “For now,” he murmured. “Until they find a way to open that door.”

  “And ‘they’ would be . . . ?” I lifted an eyebrow. He sighed, running water over his hands and forearms to get rid of the speckles of what I assumed was my blood.

  “One of the reasons I was brought here.”

  I saw the plain tattoo just above his wrist bone, spidery letters and numbers inked out in a hurry. My head pounded again. “Where’s your family?”

  “Gone,” he said. “Except for my daughter. We sent her to England ahead of the invasion. I have not seen her in four years.” He turned away, wiping his hands on the same cloth he’d pressed on me.

  “And they force you to operate on people?” I said, looking back at the door. From somewhere beyond the flat metal painted with bubbling white paint I heard a shrill scream, cut short like the voice’s owner had run into a wall.

  “Oh no.” The doctor let out a small laugh, bitter as hemlock. “I only assist, clean up, occasionally perform autopsies. The Wehrmacht would never let a filthy Juden put his hands on them, especially if those held a scalpel.”

  “I’m Ava,” I said impulsively, sticking out my own hand. I usually made a point to stay away from people at all costs, but I had a feeling that without this guy I was pretty much lunch meat anyway.

  “Jacob,” he said. “Dr. Jacob Gottlieb.”

  “Where are you from?” I said. I slid off the table and tried standing. The ground rolled under me, but soft swells, like I was on the deck of an ocean liner. I could handle it. I’d had more trouble walking after a long night of bourbon sours and cheap cigarettes than from Jacob’s little Babe Ruth impression with my head.

  “Krakow,” he said. “I was a chief surgeon. Youngest at my hospital.”

  “Tennessee,” I said. “I was a bootlegger’s apprentice. My grandmother was very proud.”

  Jacob gave that dry laugh again. “Won’t she be worried about you, here among the enemy?”

  “She’s dead,” I said. “And she never worried much when she wasn’t.”

  We both jumped when someone banged on the door, and kept banging. Not the frantic, hungry pounding of the nurse but the desperate hammering of a person whose brain was still working and was running on sheer terror.

  I glanced at Jacob, who’d grabbed up his bedpan again. “We don’t have to open the door.”

  His jaw knotted and I waited. I wasn’t particularly inclined to open up to whoever was out there. If they were running around free, chances were they weren’t in the same boat as Jacob but were wearing this uniform voluntarily.

  “Jacob,” I said as the banging increased, a man’s voice pleading in German to be let in. “Really. I’m happy to leave us locked up tight.”

  He sighed and lowered the bedpan. “I can’t. No matter how much they’ve taken from me here I’m still a doctor.”

  He pulled back the bolt and spun the handle. I waited, looking into the blackness as the door swung open.

  CHAPTER

  4

  THE MIDWE
ST

  NOW

  I came to with the cold water snap of fear, my animal brain driving me into consciousness whether I liked it or not. It was dark, the kind of deep velvety black you only find in a windowless room. I took in a damp, slightly musty scent like an old wool blanket over my face, and the almost claustrophobic warmth, and did the mental math that arrived at basement. Old, too, judging from the thump and grind of a boiler heating things to sweat lodge levels.

  My arms were suspended over my head, wrists wrapped in some kind of chain. The chain forced me to stand on tiptoe, soles of my boots rasping against the concrete as I struggled for purchase.

  “Leo?” I whispered. My throat was hot and close from disuse. My head pounded, and even though it was dark, lazy white pinwheels spun in front of my eyes. I shut them again and fought a hot spurt of vomit trying to climb its way out of my stomach.

  A light snapped on, one of those big caged bulbs that buzz and snap like a hive of bees. It didn’t do my head any favors, but if they were watching me at least I’d get some answers.

  The boiler room door swung open and a man in a suit stepped it. He didn’t wear a suit the way Leo did, all black, understated, thin tie, jacket just a little wrinkled at the edges because he was comfortable in it. This guy wore his blue wool blend with pinstripes and gold cuff links the way some guys wear a gold chain with a bunch of diamonds—to show off.

  I’d known a lot of guys like him, and I’d hated every last one of them.

  “Comfortable?” the man asked, and when he smiled I figured out why my stomach was churning from more than the ketamine hangover. He was a reaper. Same plastic smile, same too-perfect face, same hair that looked like a cheap wig.

  “I’m fantastic,” I said, rattling the chain with my numb arms. “How did you know this was my favorite stress position?”

  “I apologize,” he said. “But until we’ve figured out a few things you understand we have to be careful.”