The nighttime was so full of adventure and adrenaline, avoiding the police and looking over the wall into West Berlin, that the daytime dragged in comparison. I couldn’t leave the house because I had no papers, and it was, naturally, harder to sneak around in broad daylight. When she caught on to my boredom, Mitzi brought me a radio. I hadn’t ever seen one that wasn’t in a car, but I didn’t tell her that.
She showed me the dial and tuned it to a pirate radio show called Radio Glasnost. “We make it here on tapes, but you can’t broadcast it here. Too dangerous,” she explained, moving the radio closer to the window for better reception. “So it gets smuggled back into West Berlin and broadcast over.”
I asked her how she found out about it, and she tossed her head a little bit, giving me a wicked smile. “They need someone with good music taste to run the tapes to the West Germans.”
The punk music from the show infiltrated my dreams. When I helped Mitzi cook, she translated lyrics for me. I couldn’t understand all of the German politics, but I started to catch on to certain stories and she filled in the blanks. Kai hated talking politics, but Mitzi didn’t.
When I asked Kai why, he just shrugged. “It’s her life. This is her country. It’s not mine.”
And she gave up everything for it. I asked her once if she had family, and she shrugged. “I do, but they don’t know where I am. It’s better this way. They can’t inform on me, and I can’t put them at risk.”
I’d stared at her and finally blurted out, “I’m sorry.”
It was the first time I’d seen her look a little sad. She had squeezed my arm as she passed me on her way upstairs. “Don’t be. It isn’t your fault.”
Kai, Mitzi, and I were playing cards over lunch (a game of Hearts could keep even a sad mind busy for an hour) and listening to the radio when we heard the front door lock turning. Mitzi snapped off the radio. Kai moved fluidly out of his chair and grabbed my arm. He hauled me upright and shoved me toward the pantry in the kitchen while Mitzi headed for the front hall.
“Ow,” I whispered, rubbing my arm.
“Stay quiet.” His hand gripped my arm a little tighter as if to prove a point. “Don’t come out until you hear me call you. Verstehen Sie mich?”
“Ja,” I said, and he shut the door in my face. Never change, Kai. Never change. Hot and cold. (Literally hot. It was hard not to blush at the thought of his hand on my arm just now. And at the same time, cold. He held his cards close to his chest.)
The pantry closet smelled of stale pretzels and the foul glue they put down to keep out the mice. I’d probably die from inhaling that in a space without ventilation, but maybe whoever was out there would kill me too. I held my breath so as not to die and so I could better eavesdrop. The footsteps in the front hall were heavier than Kai’s or Mitzi’s, and I heard German exchanged in low voices. The longer it went, when I heard Kai’s voice pitch higher but I couldn’t make out the words, the more my muscles began to shake with anxiety.
Stasi, or Volkspolizei. That’s why Kai was panicking. I sank to the floor, pressing my head against my knees.
The other voice, new, was definitely male. Calm and authoritative. I couldn’t make out all of the words—German was still easier for me if I was figuring out context too—but then I heard him say, “Papers.” And I really started to panic. I curled my hands into fists, my nails cutting into the soft flesh on my palm.
They had found me. And since I didn’t have papers, they’d hand me over to the Stasi and I’d never get home. I would break under torture. They’d be waterboarding me for information I didn’t have, and I could never make it stop. I’d die. I’d die. I should eat some of the rat poison. I thought about it for a good long moment, but I was too scared, shaking too hard to stand up and find the box in the back of the pantry. In my mind’s eye, I could see it: red with bold black letters warning that it was poison. If I just held a handful of it, I could take it as needed. I unfurled myself and scooted backward, fumbling as quietly as I could. I found the box and its worn-down edges. I scooped a handful of the teal powder into my hand and curled it back into a ball.
When the door opens, I’ll just take it. It’s like my own cyanide pill.
The heavy, unfamiliar footsteps crossed the foyer and into the kitchen.
I won’t feel a thing.
I wished I had a paper dove then. That a Stasi or a Volkspolizei wouldn’t be the last thing I saw.
More German. A chair knocked over. The clatter of a cup to the floor.
Mitzi and Kai couldn’t keep them from finding me. They were only teenagers like me.
A voice, dark and low, “Wo ist sie?”
“Verstecken,” Mitzi said. Hiding. Not for long.
“I’ll get her. Ellie,” said Kai, his voice faint behind the door. “Come on out.”
I shook my head even though he couldn’t see me, rocking back and forth. Tears streaked my cheeks and left damp spots on the knees of my jeans. The door jerked open and I flinched, burying my head against my legs. Do it, Ellie, do it. But I couldn’t make myself bring my fistful of rat poison to my mouth. I couldn’t.
“Ellie?” Kai’s voice dropped, filling with worry. He sank to the floor next to me, touching my shoulder. “Ellie. It’s Ashasher. Remember? The raven man. He’s here for you.”
My shoulders shook despite how hard I held myself in so I wouldn’t just burst into hysterical laughter or sobs. Ashasher. Not the Volkspolizei.
I hiccupped and Kai sighed, slipping an arm around my shoulders, surprising me. His warm voice next to my ear whispered, “You’re safe. Take a deep breath.”
I inhaled deeply, trying not to transfer all my anxiety into the skin on the back of my neck where Kai’s arm brushed against my bare skin, grazing the soft hairs that had escaped from my ponytail. He took another deep breath and said, “You have to breathe out too, Ellie.”
I breathed out in a burst of laughter. I could feel his smile in the small space between us. I hiccupped again. “Ashasher.”
“Yeah,” Kai said, his thumb running a small circle on my shoulder. I shivered, and he stopped immediately. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but it made the space between us feel small and the closet feel very large.
“Not Volkspolizei,” I added to convince myself.
“Definitely not Volkspolizei,” he reassured me. His hand ran down my arm, and I held my breath. He tugged at my fist. “What’s this?”
“Rat poison?” Hard to explain that two minutes ago I’d been planning my suicide to avoid interrogation and torture.
Kai’s expression was unreadable in the dark, but his breathing changed, turned ragged at the edges, as if he had just run a long distance. His warm fingers slid between mine, and he unbent my fingers from my palm, letting the cyan powder fall to the ground between us. Without saying anything and without letting go of my hand, he pulled me to my feet. I shook as we walked out of the pantry and to the kitchen sink.
Mitzi and Ashasher’s gazes hung on us, heavy and stubborn, as Kai turned on the faucet and ran all four of our hands underneath it, rinsing off the poison. His face remained stoic and thoughtful as he turned over my hands, small and pale, in his larger brown ones.
The water ran teal and the steam rose from the basin, smelling slightly acidic. Kai’s eyes lifted to mine, and his mouth tightened. I almost said I was sorry.
But I wasn’t sorry. Instead, I whispered, “No ghosts, remember?”
He squeezed my hands, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.
“Ellie,” Ashasher said.
I blinked back at Ashasher. Today the feathers swirled slowly, a languid movement, like a finger stirring a small circle in a pond or a pool. “Yes, sir.”
Kai snorted and Ashasher smiled, a strange and disconcerting break from his smooth and otherwise calm face. His dark eyes, intermittently visible through the feathers, narrowed slightly. “You don’t have to call me, sir, Ellie. You thought I was here to take you home.”
Kai dropped my hands and gave me a hand towel. I dried them, thinking of the owl towels in my mother’s kitchen. Home. I hadn’t thought that was a possible reason for Ashasher’s presence, and for a split second, my heart skipped a beat. But he wouldn’t have said it like that if it were true. I said, proud of how my voice barely shook, “I thought you were Volkspolizei, actually.”
Ashasher’s head tipped to the side. His voice sounded gravelly and genuine when he said, “I apologize for any anxiety I may have caused you, dear child.”
Maybe a month ago, in my time, with my school classmates, I was a child. But I no longer felt like a child. I was no more a child than Mitzi or Kai who ran around with magic balloons and helped the Stasi’s most wanted escape East Berlin. I stayed quiet.
Ashasher reached into his coat and withdrew a small folded piece of paper. “In lieu of successfully returning you to your time period, the Council has decided to provide you with papers so you may travel as freely as any East German citizen. That is to say, not very freely at all, but freely enough to be in broad daylight.”
I took the paper with trembling hands. “What?”
“You can go out,” Kai explained, his voice quiet and gentle. “In daylight.”
“You’re not a prisoner,” Mitzi added. “No more than the rest of us, anyway.”
“You could leave,” I said. “On a balloon.”
Mitzi shrugged. “Not really. We all have reasons for staying. But at least you don’t have to stay in the house during the day anymore.”
I looked at Kai, then Ashasher. “Can I go out alone?”
“When your German is good enough,” Ashasher said. I deflated a bit. My German was still rough, even with the radio and newspaper practice. “And we are still working on a way home for you, Ellie. It involves some politics and us learning magic we aren’t supposed to do, but we are working on it.”
“Thank you,” I whispered. I held the paper to my chest. A brand-new passport. This one could carry me over the threshold in daylight. And the threat of the police had been mitigated, at least a little. I was no longer a vampire by circumstance.