CHAPTER ELEVEN

LIAM

After Phillip gave him some sleeping pills, Liam lost track of what were dreams and what was reality. The film strips turned into black vines that slithered across the floor and coiled around his limbs. Daniel’s soft lips shushed him as he changed the dressing on Liam’s shoulder with nimble musician’s fingers. Pitr’s mouth wrenched open in a silent scream, hand stretched forward as blackness surrounded him.

Maybe it was neither dream nor waking. Maybe the behemoth in the shadow world had finally caught him, and was mirroring all his fears and failings as it waited for him to break. Maybe the faceless figures in the chamber room had caught him at last, and it was time for him to be judged.

“Daniel,” he whispered once, or thought he did, reaching out to that dour face. “Please don’t go.”

Daniel gave him no answer. Maybe it was just the sleeping pills talking, sleep grasping for him again with bloody arms and too many memories. Maybe Daniel wasn’t there at all.

Liam’s mind tumbled downward, the past tugging him back.

After he and Pitr had embarked on their research, the end of the semester came all too soon, and Pitr went back to Czechoslovakia for the summer while Liam continued their work. They parted on uncertain terms at the end of spring. Pitr promised he’d keep researching while he was in “the old country,” as he put it, with a heavy roll of his eyes. He was going to show Liam’s diagrams to other researchers he’d been corresponding with while Liam tinkered around with frequencies, wavelengths in his lab.

Unspoken but heavy between them was the question of what they were. Liam yearned to belong to Pitr, for Pitr to belong to him. But Pitr still held him at arm’s length, a secret for the library’s darkened corners. He understood why. He just wished Pitr wanted more, too.

Liam’s third year at Princeton was going to be the hardest yet. He was on track to finish his bachelor’s degree by the next spring, just short of his eighteenth birthday, but among his studies, his mother, his many jobs, and his new project with Pitr (and Pitr himself), he barely had a moment to breathe. He brought dinner home for his mother and kept their room tidy so the landlady wouldn’t complain, but it was too much penance for his lapsed Catholic sensibilities to bear. His mother would stare at him from her good eye, her face, her silence, her everything a screaming indictment of his failure. He hadn’t been able to stop his father. He hadn’t been able to protect her. As far as Liam was concerned, he might as well have wielded the tire iron itself.

There had to be a way to keep it from ever happening again.

But the summer semester drew to a close with no significant breakthrough, no answers, no nothing—and he could no longer ignore the world on fire around him. America was not yet in the war, but they’d heard the sirens blaring. They’d seen the ships of refugees hovering at their shore, only to be turned away—America is full, New York’s English and Irish and Dutch families claimed.

It was all so useless, and there was nothing Liam could do to change it. Men like his father, with their red armbands and translated copies of Mein Kampf, were everywhere, angrier than ever about immigrants, Communists, heathens. Liam joined a student protest when Lindbergh and his America First goons came to campus, and shouted against the xenophobic monsters until his voice burned out, but it was as useless as sending a signal from inside a Faraday cage. No one cared. Nothing would change.

There had to be a way.

Liam tried to temper his excitement over his and Pitr’s research, eager to have something to show when Pitr returned, but all through his summer classes, he found himself shoving formulas around like building blocks in want of a cornerstone. What was the key to opening up those neighboring realms? Based on energy observations, he was sure frequencies were involved—he needed to find the right vibration, the gap in waves. Professor Einstein spoke of bending space to cross distances and time, but that said nothing about worlds that existed parallel to their own. If they were two pages of a book pressed together, then there had to be some seam, some sentence that ran across them both.

Then fall came, and when the term started up again, Liam spied Pitr across campus a few times, but always with his friends, his sharp gaze scraping over Liam like he wasn’t there—except for that once, that tantalizing day, when it was apologetic, hungry, wistful. That one time was enough to keep Liam’s hope alive, a flickering ember hidden away.

He kept working nights at the library through the fall. Afternoons. Early mornings, too. He knew where Pitr lived, but if he showed up uninvited, he would never be forgiven. He knew too well the sting of Pitr’s disapproval, a deliberate absence that pierced him through.

Finally, a shadow fell across the circulation desk, and Liam looked up from his lab notes to find Pitr watching him with a curiosity, a sorrow, that lodged Liam’s heart high in his throat.

“We’re having a small gathering tonight.” Pitr gave him a scrap of paper with the address for the house he rented with two other history students. “You should come by.”

“I—I’m working tonight,” Liam stammered, but Pitr was already gone.

Bitter November wind rushed down the street as Liam made his way there straight from his late shift, the sounds of other campus parties fading into the distance. The porch light was out; the curtains pulled shut. Liam knocked, and the door eased open onto a poorly lit foyer. As he stepped inside, sounds wafted over him; somewhere, a radio played The Adventures of the Thin Man, complete with dire organ chords.

Pitr shuffled out into the corridor clutching a mostly empty bottle of potato vodka. “There you are.” He was backlit, his features ghoulish, but they softened as he reached out and trailed his fingers against Liam’s cheek. “Most people have already gone home.”

His accent had gotten thicker during his time back in Europe. Liam wondered what it had been like there, if the specter of war hovered over everything, or if like everything else in Pitr’s life, it was easily brushed aside and ignored.

“Sorry,” Liam murmured, leaning into Pitr’s touch. This was what he’d craved all along—this closeness between them, unafraid and full and bright. “I had to work—”

“Come.”

It was an order, not a request. Liam’s heart flipped over, and he took Pitr’s hand. He’d follow Pitr anywhere.

They passed the living room, where a bow-tied boy snored on the couch, drink in hand. The upstairs was completely dark, but Pitr knew his way around, steering Liam into his bedroom. Heavy shadows loomed around them: a dresser, a bookcase, a four-poster bed that crowded out everything else. Only a distant streetlight offered any hint of the shapes around them.

“I—I think I found something,” Liam started, oddly nervous. He had to say something powerful, something that would hold Pitr’s exacting attention. “A frequency that might relate to the other world.” He was elated to be back in Pitr’s presence, brought to his home, no less. But as Pitr latched the door shut behind them, panic clawed at Liam—what if he was no longer enough?

“Shh.” Pitr set the bottle down on his dresser and brought his massive paws to the buttons at Liam’s collar. “Not now.”

“But I thought you—”

Pitr quieted him with a kiss, stringent with alcohol and weighing heavy against Liam’s mouth. Liam froze for a moment. He shouldn’t give in to him, not yet. Not after the months that had passed with no word from him, not so much as a hint that Pitr remembered he existed. But he didn’t last long. Pitr was here, Pitr wanted him still, had missed him, even, in his own way. It felt so good, so soothing to be wanted that Liam no longer cared that he was a secret to be hidden away.

But there was something new, mechanical in Pitr’s movements, the reflexive way he kissed Liam, the possessive way he pulled him into bed. It was like a thin sheet of ice lay between them that Liam was desperately trying to break through, while Pitr sat impassive on the other side. Maybe it had always been this way, and Liam had just forgotten. Maybe he’d never been anything more to Pitr than he was right now: lean, tormented, precocious, and completely out of his depth.

It was worth it. Liam melted for him all over again, and the world beyond the cramped room crumbled into dust.

Afterward, Liam tried curling around him, kissing his shoulder and the thick cords of his neck, but Pitr didn’t respond. Liam opened his mouth, breath hitching. What could he say? What would keep Pitr here with him, make him want the same something more that Liam craved? All he could think to blurt out were confessions of love, but he feared that would only drive Pitr further away.

When he looked again, Pitr was asleep.

Liam slipped out of bed, heart pounding. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and little details of the cramped room jumped out at him as he fumbled for his clothes. A box of Slovakian candy, empty wrappers piled beside it. Books on medieval hygiene and illuminated manuscripts. A stack of moth-eaten sweaters that stank of must from months in storage. A leather notebook jammed with loose scraps of paper, its cover bent and cracked in half, underneath a jar of pomade.

Liam glanced back to make sure Pitr was still asleep, then he eased the notebook free.

The first page looked like a bibliography scrawled in shorthand. Lots of words Liam didn’t recognize, cloaked in the háčeks and čárkas of Hungarian, Polish, Czech. A few Latin words slipped out, though, amidst those sharp knives: just enough for Liam to follow.

Then came the sketches. Stone monoliths and buildings that matched no style Liam had ever seen before. A poorly drawn figure: Was it supposed to be a man? Its face was too long, its eyes lost inside deep vertical folds of skin. Liam’s fingers skidded over the sharp pen marks that had rendered it, and an uneasy shudder rippled through him.

A folded note was wedged into the next page, warped from moisture and heavy use. Liam unfolded it to find it written in German. The letterhead was for a Dr. Jozef Kreutzer. Liam’s frown deepened: the return address was a military posting in Łódź, inside occupied Poland.

At the time, Liam’s German was perfunctory at best, so he could only skim the surface. Something about a book, Porta ad Tenebras, that had been confiscated by the German army but that Kreutzer was trying to track down. The key to wrenching open the gates. It details Sicarelli’s meeting with the beings on the other side, my research tells me. How he built the first bridge. It might prove valuable later, Kreutzer said—but first their basic theories had to be confirmed. My experiments continue apace, but we need more. Has your colleague found the frequency yet?

Liam kept leafing through the notebook, a new urgency thrumming in his veins. The pages were wrinkled from being gripped with sweaty hands; Pitr’s cursive was nearly indecipherable. Even the few passages in English were a challenge, and the deeper he went, the more the writing unraveled, panicked and swift. Strange creatures appeared in the margins, skeletal dogs with too many joints in their limbs and people with seams in their skin.

But then one page, the last, carried a single equation in English, splotched with ink and heavily underlined:

Two requirements for opening:

RESONANCE

BLOOD

Liam looked up, an unnamed fear gripping him. Just what had Pitr done?

And then he froze: There was a dark figure behind him in the mirror. Standing. Looming. Heavy bruises of exhaustion beneath his eyes. In the mirror, their gazes locked.

“Come back to bed,” Pitr said. His voice was so low Liam felt it more than heard it; it traced a finger down his arm and held his heart in its grasp. Liam sensed something feral and unrestrained beneath the tone.

Resonance. Blood. The resonance part, Liam understood—it fit his own theories neatly enough. The right wavelength could create a gap in space itself, teasing open their universe like dough stretching until it tore in the middle. But blood—

Pitr reached for Liam’s wrist. “Now.”

Liam’s foolish, petulant heart, the one that drove him to fight back against grade school bullies, that urged him to throw himself between his parents when his father was on a rampage—his foolish heart wanted to protest. He’d do anything to prove to Pitr he was old enough, clever enough, brave enough. That he was deserving. That he was worthy—of Pitr and whatever Pitr sought.

But the Liam who’d watched his father win anyway, who’d glimpsed the suffering men like him wrought, who had to handle the aftermath of a world he couldn’t control and a heart he couldn’t keep from breaking—that Liam deserved more.

“Don’t be reckless,” Liam said. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with. I can’t lose you—”

Pitr curled his fingers around Liam’s shoulder, digging in, sending a thrill down Liam’s spine he both hated and loved. If he could see this through with Pitr—if he could keep from losing him—then someday, he could have what he deserved.

“You won’t lose me,” Pitr murmured. He turned Liam to face him, tightened fingers in Liam’s hair. His kiss was metallic. Salty, like an oath sealed in blood. Liam felt something inside him shatter, but he didn’t dare examine it. He wanted, too much, to believe.

Liam slipped from sleep and memory into darkness, a cold alkaline scent thick in his nostrils. He tried to reach out with his right hand for the glass of water he kept on the nightstand in his rented room. But this wasn’t Princeton, and his right arm refused to obey. Pain spiraled out of his shoulder to remind him of everything that had happened yesterday, and Princeton felt further away than ever.

He did a little mental math. He’d had to sell his ma’s golden medallion of Saint Patrick to afford airline tickets, but he’d been able to leave the home nurse with more than enough funds to last three months. Class would have been in session for two weeks now; they’d surely noticed he was missing, but his graduate advisor was probably too swamped to worry about him just yet. Still, this was taking far longer than he’d planned. And now the book had been moved to Wewelsburg—

Footsteps weighed on the stairs outside the projection loft. Liam wrestled himself into a seated position, propping up against a rough stone wall. There were no windows in here, but he felt well rested enough. It had to be midmorning at least. They hadn’t kicked him out just yet.

The door opened, and Daniel turned on the lights. He carried a mug that smelled of weak coffee and a buttered pumpernickel roll. Liam’s stomach growled as Daniel crouched down, and pink brushed over Daniel’s cheeks. Almost a smile. Liam relaxed at that.

“You’re looking better,” Daniel said, offering him the plate and mug. His eyes were brighter today, but stormy as ever. He smelled wonderful—warm and damp, freshly soaped. Liam felt embarrassed by his sweaty state.

Liam took a long swallow of coffee, not caring that it was weak. “This helps. Thanks.”

Daniel’s gaze roved over him, taking him in. Immediately Liam had a flash of memory—something he might have babbled in the throes of pain—and it was his turn to blush.

“Listen . . .” Liam bit his lower lip as he fished around for the right words. “If I, uh—if I said anything that, that—embarrassed you, or—”

“You didn’t. Embarrass me, I mean.” Daniel’s throat bobbed. “You did say a lot of things. Most of them unrepeatable.”

“Oh, well. That’ll happen when you get shot.” Don’t leave us, he seemed to recall telling Daniel, panic clawing at his throat at the thought of him throwing himself into a fight he couldn’t possibly win. He took another gulp, then tipped his head back against the stone, looking at Daniel askance. “I meant them, though.”

Daniel was still crouched before him, empty hands folded between his knees. He lifted one now, slowly, reaching toward Liam’s face. Liam sucked in his breath, too afraid to move, not wanting to break whatever spell was between them. A quick flick of Daniel’s long fingers, and he brushed a sheaf of Liam’s hair to one side.

“That’s good to know.”

Liam wondered what Daniel would do if he reached up and took his hand, laced his fingers through his own. He didn’t want to startle him away, this wolf in the forest who’d sized him up and crept closer, wanting, maybe, to be tamed. But maybe Liam was the one who should be scared. Daniel’s intensity was molten, searing. Liam didn’t fear it, precisely, but he knew it enough to grant it a healthy distance.

He kept his good hand wrapped tightly around the coffee mug.

“Do you think you’ll be well enough to leave for Wewelsburg tonight?” Daniel asked.

Liam let out his breath. “That’s the idea. We’ll need a way in, though. And if—”

He stopped himself short. He wasn’t yet ready to confess what he feared finding there. Not even to Daniel. It was his mess to clean up.

Daniel cocked his head, waiting for him to continue.

Liam swallowed the last of the coffee. Daniel deserved to know at least some of it. “I’m worried about Kreutzer. He knows about the book and the shadow world’s powers, and he’s got my older research. But I don’t know how much else he’s figured out.”

“Ah.” Daniel sat before him, close enough Liam could smell the coffee on his breath. “You think he may be able to use the book before we do.”

Liam leaned forward. He was feeling more like himself now—the hunt, the promise of control a signal fire on the horizon. A chance to take all the badness he’d unleashed and use it for good. “There’s still time. If we can get the book before Kreutzer makes sense of it, we’ll be unstoppable. The entire Third Reich—demolished.”

“I’m ready,” Daniel said.

Liam set down the coffee mug and rested his hand on his knee, fingertips trailing onto Daniel’s as well. “Whatever you thought Siegen was gonna be like, Wewelsburg Castle will be much worse.”

“I know.”

“It’s Schutzstaffel HQ now. Heinrich Himmler himself holds court there—with all the other SS chiefs.”

Daniel’s knee twitched beneath Liam’s fingertips. “That’s why we’re going, isn’t it?”

Liam wanted—desperately—not to do this alone. And he wanted more time with Daniel than the past few days had offered, this tempestuous boy who always seemed to be at war with the music in his heart. But this was no picnic in the woods. And he knew Daniel’s brand of chaos—the kind with no regard for his own life.

“Tonight begins the day of atonement. Erev Yom Kippur,” Daniel said. “I promised Rebeka we’d eat together beforehand. We’ll be ready to leave after that.”

“Sundown, then.” Liam nodded.

“What was your life like before?” Daniel asked suddenly. “What was it like back home for you? Was it really so bad that coming here seemed a better choice?”

Liam slumped backward with a tired smile. “Before? I pretty much lived at Princeton. The library and the physics lab. Always working.”

Daniel arched an eyebrow at him. “You don’t say.”

“I, uh . . . I have a hard time letting go of things. I get something in my head, and I have to burn it out of me. I’m either all fire or cold ash—don’t know how to be any other way.”

“Yes, I can see that.” Daniel smiled, hiding it behind his knee.

Another smile earned. Liam wanted to store them all up, wrap them carefully and tuck them somewhere safe. He wondered what Daniel might be like in a world where he could smile all the time, where he could walk down Fifth Avenue in clean clothes and laugh at something stupid Liam had said, smile because they’d stopped to pet a dog, frown over nothing worse than missing the IRT train headed downtown and so they had to linger on the station platform, nudging each other and sharing secret grins. He wanted Daniel’s mouth to hurt from smiling and his sides to ache from laughter. He wanted his heart so full he had nowhere else to put it all except to funnel it through his viola’s strings.

But it was no use imagining Daniel in New York with him, when Daniel couldn’t see past the tip of his own knife.

“I wish I weren’t this way,” Liam confessed. “But I get these ideas in my head, and I want them so badly. I—I don’t know how to want things less.”

“But if you weren’t so determined, then you wouldn’t be here.”

They held each other’s gaze for a minute. Liam’s mouth was too dry, too unwilling to cooperate; he drank the rest of his coffee to cover it up.

“You’d—you’d love New York,” he finally managed, the words tripping over themselves with sudden urgency. “It’s like its own symphony. There’s always a new melody to pick out.”

Daniel’s smile fell. “Berlin used to feel that way, too.”

Liam allowed himself to imagine a world where he could be powerful enough to save this boy. Tear apart the Third Reich—not just because he had to, but because it was what Daniel, his family, deserved. He could almost believe it—that he could claim the book and the power he’d sought for so long.

He could taste it, the juicy steak after months of broth. The smile he thought would never cross his mother’s face again. The power of two worlds in his veins, thumping, burning, searing—not Kreutzer’s, not the Nazis’, but his alone. He had uncovered this. He had tamed this. And he’d control how it could be used—not by Nazis, but by those who’d fight them off.

Liam regarded Daniel’s face, this fighter’s face, this boy who survived against the odds. They both deserved this.

“Well. We do this right, maybe we can find a way home.”

“Maybe,” Daniel said, but neither of them believed he meant it.

The shower was downright sinful, stripping off the top layer of Liam’s skin, all of the grime and anger and failure that coated him like a film. Phillip and Simone had slunk off on their hush-hush mission elsewhere in town, while Daniel and Rebeka broke bread in the bell tower above and Helene went about her daily chores. Liam had offered to help her, but after a short quiz in German, she deemed him too much of a risk in case her customers got nosy.

So Liam helped himself to the selection in the film vault as he waited for nightfall to head out once more.

He tried The Great Love Helene had mentioned the night before, but his stomach was churning after only a few minutes in. A Nazi officer wooing a cabaret singer, and yet somehow it wasn’t a horror show. He spooled the film back up and tossed it back in the heap.

Next up he found a stack of tins for an old silent film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—two different editions, oddly, the older-looking one buried at the bottom of the stack. Both told the story of a world gone increasingly mad. A man was investigating the murderer Caligari and his sleepwalking, unwitting accomplice, only to find that Caligari is the director of an insane asylum and not one of its residents, like he should’ve been. A perfect parable for their time, Liam thought bitterly; that power was not to be trusted, not to be taken as an absolute.

Yet the newer edition nestled that story inside two bookended scenes. This version, unsurprisingly, bore the approval stamp of Goebbels’s propaganda wing. The two framing scenes were brief, but revealed that in truth, the man investigating the murders was the madman, and Caligari the harmless asylum director trying to cure him of his delusions. Trust in the system. Any evidence the system is broken is only your own mind deceiving you.

Liam barely resisted the urge to rip the film right off its reel.

Wood planks groaned above and around him as people moved along the bell tower stairs. Instinctively, his hand moved toward the false panel where he’d hidden his satchel and P38, but he thought better of it. It was Daniel and Rebeka finishing their meal. He’d get confirmation first that the coast was clear. Then they could be on their way.

No sooner had he taken his hand away from the panel than the door to the projection room swung open. A yelp lodged in Liam’s throat, bitten back just in time. In the doorway stood an SS officer, his cheekbones sharp, his cheeks hollowed out like shallow graves. A sour expression pinched his lips that could equally have been a sneer or a smirk. He nearly had to duck to step inside the projection room.

“Pardon the intrusion, good sir,” he said in silky-smooth German. “We heard a vicious rumor some villagers were harboring unpatriotic fugitives. I’m sure you won’t mind if we have a look around.”