CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

LIAM

The shadow world was no longer just around the corner. At Wewelsburg Castle, the two worlds had collided and twisted together like crumpled metal in an auto accident, and it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. They bled into each other in a nightmare of whispers and shrieks and shadow and stone.

Pitr crawled to his feet, skin slipping over the knot of shadows beneath. He was more shadow than man now. Liam supposed a year lost in this horrible place would do that to anyone, especially someone who already nursed so much darkness in his heart. No wonder he and Kreutzer had found each other; if Pitr hadn’t chosen Princeton, he probably would’ve gladly worked his way up the SS ranks alongside his research pal. Pitr’s sunken chest puffed up with a gulp of air, and then he laughed. It sounded like the wails of the dying.

“Thank you for the added pain.” Pitr’s smile glinted like a knife’s edge. “It’s just what I needed to begin the stabilization ritual.”

“Let Daniel go. You don’t need him for this.”

“Oh, but I do.” Pitr snatched Daniel up by the bindings around his wrists. Strange winds swirled around them, echoes of sorrow stitched into the gusts. “He means something to you. So he is worth everything.”

Daniel locked eyes with Liam then, those dark pools pulling at Liam’s gut. Dammit, Daniel. Liam swallowed, throat bobbing. Why did Daniel care so little for his life, even now? Why hadn’t Liam been able to convince him to stay alive?

“You shouldn’t have come for me.” Drying blood coated Daniel’s upper lip, cracking as he spoke. “You deserve to live.”

Liam bit his lip to stave off a rush of tears. “So do you.”

Daniel’s eyelids fluttered as he fought against blood loss. “You don’t need this other world. You’re strong enough without it.”

How Liam wished that were true. He’d never been strong enough, and now he’d let his weakness ruin them all. He had to command the shadow one last time before it consumed him. If he could just be strong enough, he could keep it from the Nazis and whoever else sought to claim it. If he sacrificed—

The castle chamber shivered and quaked, straining to hold both worlds as they melded into one, sending him off balance. The shadow world and his world were aligning, folding together, and the ground where they stood was the hinge. The chamber’s stone walls crumbled away in a torrent of wind, exposing only the shadow realm around them and a crude altar of ceremony and sacrifice.

Liam saw, then, what Pitr meant to do: bleed Daniel to draw out more of the monsters—monsters Pitr meant to command.

Liam’s body felt ragged with the immense energy he’d gathered into himself. He’d unleashed plenty when he tore into the castle, but now, in this twilight plane between two worlds, he didn’t need to draw the energy into himself any longer. It was already here, spilling around them, infecting his world more and more by the second as the universes bled together. He could command it all. He could do anything.

But so, potentially, could Pitr.

Liam closed his eyes and reached out. A hundred thousand heartbeats hammered in the distance as dark creatures circled the confluence, weighing their options. He heard their hungry whispers, their purposeless yearning to punish the world that stole from theirs, to feast on the taste they loved most. Pressing even further into the shadow, he caressed their thoughts each in turn, teasing them with the promise of countless Nazis to devour if they’d just fall under his control. He needed them on his side—not Pitr’s.

They raised their heads and drew nearer. They were hungry—and they would obey whoever let them feed. Whoever gave them a whole new world to conquer.

Liam opened his thoughts to them, their energy, their wants, their ravenous cravings echoed through him. He saw glimpses of the worlds as they saw them: trickling anger and fear, sweet and cloying as perfume; the world was measured around them not in light and shadow and form, but in its raw potential for violence and decay.

He could give them that.

Here, this is yours. Feast. He saw what they saw; he steered them through the maze of the crumbling castle walls as it bled into the shadow world. A cluster of SS officers on that floor, foot soldiers gathering in the common rooms—let the monsters sate themselves.

Screams rang through the corridors of what was left of Wewelsburg Castle.

Liam saw them popping behind his eyes like mortar shells bursting: the monsters, his monsters, feeding. The Nazis’ agony and pain sustained them. The fierce, relentless gnash of teeth and claws and a hunger that had no bottom, just like his power, his boundless power.

Someone wheezed with laughter behind him. Frowning, Liam turned, letting his focus slide away from his monsters and their glorious feast. Kreutzer was dislodging himself from beneath the rubble. Bright red blood glistened over the fine coating of stone that powdered his face and hair; it smeared across his chin the color of a ripe pomegranate. He swayed as he pulled himself up to one foot, then the other, and dusted his hands across his knees.

“You have some skill, Mr. Doyle, I will grant you that.” He cracked his neck from side to side; his tongue darted out to flick against the blood beneath his lip. He stooped down and grabbed the battered Porta ad Tenebras manuscript. “But you lack that crucial ingredient that will see our Aryan warriors to glory. You lack conviction.”

Liam took a step back as the doctor moved toward him. With a roll of his hand, he wrapped a strand of shadow energy around his wrist. It shivered in his touch, desperate to be used. Desperate to use Liam. “I wouldn’t say that.”

“You think I underestimate you, little runt? No.” Darkness slithered across Kreutzer’s eyes, purple and silver galaxies spinning in its wake. “I’ve seen it. I’ve seen through you. Through all of this . . .”

Kreutzer took a deep gulp of the fetid air around him. The castle smelled like the shadow world now, that spoiled-meat stink full of rot and dampness. Liam had always fought against its influence; for all he felt it corrupting him, he hadn’t realized, before, quite how much he’d managed to stave off. It had eaten Pitr from the inside out. Latched on to that cruelness in him and let it metastasize. Pitr had already been a creature of the shadow world, its ruthless laws and rabid pursuit of selfishness and cruelty; he just hadn’t yet found his home. And now that he had, it was no wonder the world had bent toward him far more confidently than it had ever yielded to Liam.

But the darkness was pulsing through him, and he couldn’t keep control of it forever.

Pitr and Kreutzer struck as one.

It was a wave of force, black and sparking with electricity. Slamming Liam to the ground. Crackling across his skin. He only panicked for a moment, but it was enough to loosen his grip. One by one, the leashes of the monsters he was controlling slipped free.

Shit.

Above him, Daniel dangled, blood dripping down his forearms. He stared at Liam with an unfocused gaze. Too unfocused—he was losing too much blood.

The monsters’ howls were at the chamber doors now.

“Enough, Dr. Kreutzer,” a woman’s voice said.

Liam blinked from his position on the floor, his vision still rattled, just in time to catch sight of the pretty blond secretary steadying herself on her heels. She’d produced a snub-nosed pistol and pointed it now, shakily, at Kreutzer and Pitr, back and forth.

“You’ve done enough. To Germany, to her people, to all of us. I can’t stand for it. I won’t stand for it any longer.”

Kreutzer struggled to keep himself from breaking into a laugh.

“I—I will be strong against the tide of hate,” she stammered. “We must—resist—”

The chamber door shattered in an explosion of wood splinters. The beasts were here.

They poured forth like a poisonous gas, filling the chamber. Joints creaking back the wrong way, skinless muscles bunching, wounds seeping and oozing. The pack leader crouched and sprang—and before she could summon a scream, they descended on her.

In seconds, she was nothing but shreds of flesh.

“Sweet, stupid Ilse.” Kreutzer clucked his tongue. “Far too little, my dear. You’re far too late.”

The beasts circled Kreutzer, teeth snapping, but Pitr held them back with an upturned hand. An eyeless rust-colored snout snuffled at Liam’s torso, his neck and throat.

Liam slowed his breathing and savored his own fear. He welcomed it. It would fuel him. Biting down on his tongue to add to his pain, he reached out to unleash the rest of his stored energy—

But there was nothing left.

“I told you you didn’t want it enough,” Pitr said. “You strive and strive. But you’ll never be willing to do what it takes to seize true control.”

A thousand eyeless faces pressed in, their razor teeth dripping with fresh blood.

Liam flinched as their hot, decaying breaths raked across his skin. Maybe Pitr was right. Maybe he couldn’t seize complete control over the entire shadow realm.

But maybe he could do whatever it took to close the rift for good.