CHAPTER EIGHT

REBEKA

Everything was falling apart around her.

The music hall split open with a horrifying shriek, thinning the air. She was thrown backward, away from the doors where Daniel and Liam faced down a host of guards, and as she fell, she blinked and saw another place: a stone tower wreathed in shadow, breathing as if it drew energy into itself. It was burned into the back of her eyelids so no matter where she looked, it waited for her, shadows swirling around it.

This must be it: the vision she’d been trying to protect Daniel from. The grim conclusion to his quest. She’d failed them both—and the rest of their family, too.

The lightning faded, but the screams continued as Liam hummed a note that rattled her soul.

Daniel—was it Daniel screaming? She staggered to her feet, only to find the music hall flattened around her as if a tornado had landed on them. Shelves twisted and snapped, sheets of paper swirling past her—inventories and ledger papers and grim swastika letterheads. The guards who’d filled the doorway moments before now sprawled across the floor. Some cried out, their limbs bent at unnatural angles. Others were all too still. Scattered rifle stocks were shredded and spiraled like peeled potato skins. And in the epicenter of the torrent stood Liam, arms raised high as he commanded a spinning column of thick black smoke.

No, it was darker even than smoke. It was like burning pitch, and smelled just as foul. Inside the whirlwind, she heard—voices. Howls. Teeth snapping, ravenous.

The shadows whispered to her, achingly familiar: Yes.

“We have to go.” Rebeka charged forward and seized her brother’s hand, then reached for the American, too. “More will be coming.”

“No—I need a moment—longer—” yelled Liam.

Boxes of paperwork were ripped off of the shelves, caught up in the vortex. Rebeka ducked low to avoid a piece of plywood as it whizzed past. “Your book isn’t here! Let’s go!”

“One more minute—”

But the sound of gunfire swallowed up whatever Liam was about to say. A fresh group of guards had arrived. Liam fell backward, struck in the shoulder, and dragged Rebeka and Daniel down with him. The vortex shifted in response as his concentration broke. Lightning crackled across its surface as the darkness stretched and yawned—a hungering void.

And then something taloned, something sinuous, slithered out of the black.

Rebeka staggered to her feet, hand closing protectively around Daniel’s to pull him up with her. The shadows unfurled into a vaguely animal shape—limbs stretching, skin slick and viscous. But there were gaping sockets where there should have been eyes, a red fire smoldering deep within them. It crouched on all fours, but even so, it was eye level with Rebeka. It stared through her, and she felt—felt, like a shard of glass—the thing’s slow smile.

Liiiiiii-ammmmmm, the thing purred, its voice hanging in the air like putrid mist. The thing crept forward on limbs with too many joints, its claws cracking deep into the slate floor. We’ve been looking for youuuuuuu.

Liam’s breath hitched beside her as he stood, but she didn’t dare take her eyes off the creature. She took another step back, pushing her brother and Liam behind her. The monster’s head swiveled from side to side; more beasts gathered behind it. Some had snouts like wolves; others, tails that swished like hungry panthers. But their laughter, their insidious grins, their fiery eyes and dark intent were nothing of this world. The closest one pressed in toward Rebeka, and its snout scraped the length of her body with one long, mournful sniff.

Rebeka stared into its eyes, and the creature cocked its head at her. There was something beautiful, something graceful in its movement. Rebeka found herself leaning forward, desperate to reach out—

Then there were more screams in German as the beasts turned on the guards.

Bullets whizzed through the air, pocking the plaster of the music hall. They couldn’t aim at the monsters through the smoke. The creature in front of Rebeka whirled around with a snarl and sprinted toward the gunfire, laughing as if it were all some game.

Rebeka slung her arms around the boys and steered them away.

The vortex had burst out the windows along the courtyard side of the music hall. They raced through the shelving, glass crunching underfoot, then tumbled over a windowsill. Another bullet zipped past as they fell, embedding itself in the plaster walls. Dry, dead bushes snapped beneath her and raked through her hair and across her face as she fought her way back to her feet, the pain vivid in the bitter twilight cold.

Liam wrenched himself up beside her with haunted eyes. Blood flowed from his shoulder where he’d been shot, but there was no time for babying if they meant to make it out alive.

“This way,” Rebeka hissed, and charged toward a covered walkway that ran the length of the courtyard. If she was remembering the map correctly, they could circle back around to the truck bay. But she couldn’t blink away the glow of the creature’s eyes, seeing through her.

Behind them, screams continued as jaws snapped and unearthly howls rang out.

“Did you mean to summon those—whatever they are?” Rebeka asked.

Liam flinched as they steered down the walkway. “Um,” he said. “No—not exactly.”

“What are they?” Daniel asked. He was shaking—whether from the monsters or something else, she couldn’t tell. It wasn’t like him to fall apart, even if he did have half the German army on his ass.

“Well.” Liam ducked into an alcove that led to an interior door, and Rebeka and Daniel pressed in beside him. “The thing about that other world is, it’s not exactly . . . empty. And I think Sicarelli’s meddling a few hundred years ago kinda . . . pissed them off.”

Rebeka stifled a bitter laugh. This was getting better by the second.

“Whatever he did to mess up their ecosystem, it’s left them a little . . .” Liam peered around the corner. “Let’s just say they’re drawn to the scent of human fear. Anger, suffering, blood.”

“Like the smell of those Nazi bastards that you just shredded apart?”

Liam swallowed. “Yeah, pretty sure that was like ringing a dinner bell.”

“And do you have any way to control them?”

“Sometimes. But—not as many as that.”

As if she could have hoped for anything more. “Why can’t you just close the rift?”

“I did,” Liam cried. “But if I draw too much energy from the other side, it—it weakens the barrier. Takes longer for it to seal back up. That’s when it’s easier for the creatures to slip through. And when you hate humans as much as they do—”

Rebeka held up one finger for silence and pressed her ear to the heavy wooden door. A faint alarm bleated on the other side, tinny and mechanical. There wasn’t much hope their soldiers’ disguises would hold, not with her brother staggering around shell-shocked and Liam’s wounded shoulder. Well, maybe Liam’s monsters could serve as a useful distraction—at least up until they all got eaten. She closed her eyes, offered up a quick prayer, then threw her shoulder into the door.

Aside from the insistent alarm, the hallway was oddly, unsettlingly still. Like the other corridors in the compound, the electric lighting was too weak for the massive Bavarian monstrosity crumbling around them, but she saw none of the clerks or guards or secretaries or maintenance people, all those hateful little cogs in the Reichsmaschine. More importantly, she didn’t hear any of those awful whispers—none of the wailing wind and creeping shadows that had poured from the vortex.

She supposed it was too much to wish the next world over had been full of sunshine. “Let’s go before anything else comes out of the darkness.”

Rebeka led them down the hallway, in what she hoped was the direction of the garage bay. To their left—back in the direction of the archives—some sort of massive gearwork system churned and scraped.

Liam limped onward determinedly, teeth gritted, one hand clamped around his wounded shoulder, but her brother was lagging behind. A tiny, hateful part of Rebeka wanted to leave him. She’d done nothing but save him for the past several months, and he’d repaid her by dragging her into this. Instead, she slipped her hand into his and tried not to mind the sticky, drying Nazi blood on his fingers.

“Come on,” she said softly. “Let’s live to fight another day.”

Daniel nodded, but his jaw was tight. He wouldn’t meet her eyes.

As they passed beneath the corridor lights—specifically, as Liam passed beneath them—each bulb flickered and went dead. She glanced questioningly at Liam, but he kept hurrying them along. Darkness pursued them down the corridor, and Rebeka envisioned grasping claws, coiling vines. Then the first bulb shattered—then the next, and the next after that. She jumped, her nerves scraped raw.

“What the hell?” Daniel muttered. But there was no time to stop and consider it. If they turned left at the next corridor, they should nearly be to the garage—

A fierce wind tore down the corridor then, rushing down the path they’d taken and whipping past them with an inhuman screech. “In here!” Liam shouted, and threw himself into the deep recess of a doorway. Rebeka and Daniel dove in beside him.

The wind shivered, lowed, then howled once more. In the center of the corridor, a lightbulb shattered, and the burst socket crackled with a surge of electricity. Ice flooded her veins as her vision split in two: the image of the corridor before her, and then the sight of herself, running, fleeing.

That was certainly a new development—but not one she had time to consider. She’d never been able to watch herself this way, or watch as if from two eyes—but whatever it meant, it couldn’t matter right now.

“We have to go this way!” she shrieked over the clatter, and yanked them down a side hall. The second vision dissipated as if it had lost its quarry—she didn’t dare look behind her. This building hunched all around them, unknowable, a labyrinth of horrors yet to unfold.

The wind flickered, a sad little whimper like a wounded animal, then stopped.

Silence.

“Well?” Rebeka asked, after a heavy moment. No hum of electricity, no distant shouts or footfalls. The nothingness was overwhelming. Suffocating. It constricted her with fear, wringing her nerves dry.

“Well, what?” Liam asked through gritted teeth. He still clutched at his wounded shoulder, and sweat glistened on his flushed face.

“Is it safe now?” She leaned out and risked a glance down the hallway. The twilight glow of the courtyard just barely penetrated the thick shadows that had engulfed the hall. Her eyes were starting to adjust, but only dull forms gave any hint of the corridor ahead.

“You tell me,” Liam said, eyebrows drawn down. “You’re the one who seemed so sure we’d be safe down here.”

“I . . .” Rebeka couldn’t answer that—not now, not without explaining so much more than she could put into words. “Let’s just go.”

Together, they stepped out, slowly continuing in the direction they’d been headed, but walking backward, facing the way they’d come. They didn’t want to encounter any more awful surpri—

“Halt! Stop right there—”

A guard skidded around the corridor, sliding on some unknown slickness on the stone floors. His trembling hands betrayed him as he lifted his rifle, clutching a wobbly flashlight in his supporting hand. Rebeka raised her arm, gun in hand, while Daniel froze, glowering, and Liam took a threatening step forward.

An electric crackle echoed down the hallway the guard had come from. The guard gasped; the beam of his flashlight sliced back toward the hall as he turned to look behind him.

“Who’s there?” the guard shouted. Rebeka took a step back; whatever he’d heard had snagged his attention. If it would hold him a moment longer—

Two black tendrils of smoke darted across the beam of light and coiled around the guard’s legs.

The guard’s screams were like silk ripping apart, shrill and anguished, as the darkness dragged him off. He fell face-first onto the tiles and scrabbled for purchase, but found none. All they saw was one last horrified expression gleaming in the dropped flashlight’s beam before the guard disappeared the way he’d come.

Rebeka and Daniel both stared at Liam. “Did—did you—”

“I wish.” He shuffled forward, taking a wide path around the corridor’s mouth. “C’mon.”

Before she could shout at him to wait, Liam went staggering, swaying, toward the junction ahead. Rebeka laced her fingers through Daniel’s and chased after him, shielding her face with her free hand as another lightbulb exploded above them.

They reached the end of the corridor and turned left. Total darkness welcomed them, and still that soupy silence. She strained her ears for anything—a slithering noise, a hiss and rattle like something ready to strike. Her heart felt lodged somewhere inside her jaw. For a moment, she felt the rush and beat of powerful wings, like when she used to race across the banks of the Tiergarten pond, sending flocks of geese scattering. Then it was gone, as quickly as it had come, as smoky and intangible as all her other foretellings.

“Take my hand.” It was Liam, somewhere on the other side of the corridor.

She started to protest that she was nowhere near him until she felt Daniel shift beside her to close his hand around the American’s.

Three across, they hurried down the hallway, silence so humid it stifled their own footsteps, their own ragged breaths. Rebeka kept waiting for the grasping tendrils at her ankles and wrists, but it was no vision, only fear, raw and seeping. Narrowed eyes watching from the darkness. A hunger so sharp it shredded her apart. And those horrible arms, those living beasts of shadow and seething spilling out of a tear in the world—

Another screech of metal flooded the hall from the direction of the archives, and then, one by one, the overhead lights popped on, ticking toward them like a military march.

Liammmmmm, the wind whispered.

“Fucking hell,” Daniel muttered.

“Hurry.” Liam tugged them forward. “We’re almost there.” But in his free hand, Rebeka saw the darkness gathering inside his palm.

They all but ran down the rest of the hall until, at long last, they reached the garage bay. Smoke filled their nostrils as they ducked into its confines. The sky beyond the bay doors was red-tinged like a sunset aflame. Strange—it had almost been night a moment ago. Their truck was so close—Daniel’s hand slipped from Rebeka’s as she rushed toward it, ready to fling herself into the cab—

But then a guard rounded the corner, looming over her, his chin squashed down and his eyes bloodshot and cold.

Rebeka opened her mouth to scream. The guard opened his mouth, too—the mouth with the diagonal scar across it.

The mouth of the man Daniel had killed in the back of the truck.

Black smoke poured from the guard’s lips, his nostrils, from the gaping wound of his throat, and a scream built up in that smoke. Rebeka wasn’t waiting to find out what would happen next. She did the only thing she could think to do, and punched him square in the jaw.

A tuft of darkness gushed out of his face, like flour from a holey sack.

“What the hell—” Daniel started behind her, but then a surge of electricity raced up the dead guard-thing’s limbs and crackled as his body was enveloped in static darkness that collapsed in on itself.

Liam stood behind her with an outstretched hand. “They’re eating them from the inside.”

“Excuse me?” Rebeka screeched.

“I told you—they like the taste of human fear.” Liam twisted his hands, exertion flushing his face deep scarlet. “Quick, we’ve gotta bolt before it lets the others know where we are—”

Footsteps scraped and dragged behind him from the far side of the garage: more of them coming.

Liam, they called out, the name edged with laughter. You’re far too late. The book can’t help you now—

Rebeka shuffled back as the shapes came into view. Closer now.

“Go!” Liam screamed.

“But what about the truck—”

“JUST GO!” Liam shouted. “NOW!”

It was Daniel’s turn to take Rebeka by the hand and pull her toward the bay doors. She was too stunned to protest.

They fled the garage for the main road out of the compound. No telltale winks of sniper scopes in the towers that dotted the fence line. In the distance, a scream was cut short and replaced with an electrical crack. Rebeka and Daniel kept running.

Eventually, Rebeka’s feet slowed as they approached the guard post at the entrance. Daniel slowed with her, then tossed an anxious glance over his shoulder. Liam was running toward them with his face wrenched wide.

“Don’t stop!” he shouted. “There’s more of them coming—”

A horrific cacophony shredded his words as, behind him, twisted, blackened versions of the Nazis they’d passed in the compound corridors began to stream from the garage.

Liam . . .

“But the guards—” Rebeka started.

“They’re all dead, or good as. RUN!”

That was all she needed. She charged on, Daniel close behind.

They passed the guard post and found it deserted. A slimy hunk of meat was collapsed on the side of the dirt road, raw, skinned fingers still clutching a rifle. Rebeka slowed just long enough to rip the rifle from what was left of the flayed guard’s hands. Don’t think, don’t think, just run. She hugged the blood-slick rifle to her chest as she raced toward the other side of the fence and the trees beyond it, Daniel and Liam behind her—and behind them—behind them—

Rifle fire pierced the air with a fierce whistle and then a thud. Rebeka screamed for her brother reflexively, terror like acid eating through her chest. “DANIEL!” She spun around, but he was still behind her.

Another bullet sang out, and another of the horrible Nazi-creature hybrids fell—

“Keep running!” Daniel called.

Rebeka did. But too late, she turned to see just what she was running toward. She had just enough time to register the boy’s face—wide-eyed, white teeth, and a mouth rounded in a shout—as she plowed into him head-on.