Blood for Blood Read online

  “But the danger has not passed. I call now upon the people of the Reich to remember the oath you swore to your Führer. Remember this great world we have built and do not let the pure blood of your fathers be shed in vain.”

  “Scheisse,” Kasper whispered.

  Henryka’s swear was far louder, far worse.

  The THUDs inside the closet faltered, died. Henryka would’ve bet ten thousand Reichsmarks that Adele’s ear was pressed to the door, listening to the Führer’s impossibly alive voice as he raged on.

  “Our retaliation will be swift and without mercy. We must take blood for the blood that was taken. For the bullet that was shot in Tokyo, thousands more will hail down on traitors to the Fatherland. Resistance will be crushed without hesitation.…”

  Henryka’s arms seemed to move of their own accord as they shot out, fingers joining with the Olympia Robust’s keys, shoving past them. The typewriter went crashing off her desk, clattering to the concrete floor in a pile of broken metal and inky ribbon. The document Henryka had been working on was spattered with stray keys. The greatest victory—The Führer Adolf Hitler is dead—and the smallest—Cairo declared a republic—undone with FJKÖÄ ZUIO QWER, the most random of letters.

  Valkyrie the Second’s history in the making stopped here.

  CHAPTER 11

  Yael held her gun fencing style: left hand up and out and straight. Adolf Hitler stood in her sights, alive again (still). His mustache fringed his lips; stodgy veins wreathed his temple. His eyes crackled, manic blue.

  —KILL THE BASTARD—

  Yael obeyed: finger to the trigger. Her bullet whistled through the ballroom’s golden air, into the Führer’s chest. At first, there was only nothingness—a gap of not-flesh where flesh had just been.

  Then came the blood. Pouring out and everywhere.

  Adolf Hitler did not scream or fall. Instead he changed. His hair frothed white, then sleeked black. His eyes flashed dark, darker, darkest, until they were the same shade as Tsuda Katsuo’s. They were Tsuda Katsuo’s. The Japanese victor stood in the Führer’s place, his gaze all the more sharper in death. The red circle on his chest kept blooming.

  I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so, so sorry is what Yael wanted to say. Instead her finger fell, unstoppable, on the trigger. A second hole appeared in Tsuda Katsuo’s chest.

  He changed again, taking the shape of Aaron-Klaus’s face—the way Yael had last seen it. His zealous features were lit with belief that he could change things.

  She shot him, too.

  Again and again. Shot, change, shot, change. The skinshifter wore face after face after face. Miriam’s dark curls. Mama’s evening-shadow eyes. The Babushka’s piano-key smile. Yael fired more bullets than the chamber of her P38 could possibly hold. Holes riddled their chests, more than any living person could stand. The faces kept changing, revolving through an endless litany of ghosts.

  They would not die. They would not stay dead.

  There were buckets of blood now, pouring from the wounds Yael had made. Pooling on the floor, lipping up the edges of her zori sandals.

  “Isn’t this what you wanted?” Aaron-Klaus asked her. “Isn’t this what we trained so hard for?”

  BANG.

  “You left me,” whispered Miriam. “You left me to die.”

  BANG.

  “Monster!” wailed her mother. “It’s a monster!”

  BANG.

  The blood rose to her shins, rose, rose, kept rising, warm around her knees. There was a crowd behind Yael, but they did not seem to notice the red staining their kimonos, soaking their dress uniforms. They held glasses of champagne, the nothingness of their conversation hummed loud, louder, loudest.…

  It was a strange waking. Not like the ones that followed most of Yael’s nightmares. No rapidly pounding heart, no flailing limbs, no sweat-soaked undershirts. There was just darkness, noise, pain, and the stab of Yael’s blood-matted hair against her cheeks as she lifted her head, took in the dim surroundings.

  Walls: metal and… bending? Unforgiving floors. Seats upholstered in scratchy ochre fabric. Luka Löwe was sprawled in the seat across from her; the cigarette burn on his collarbone rose high, dipped low as he snored. The buzz of the nightmare crowd droned on, unbearably loud.

  Airplane engines.

  She remembered now.

  After the SS-Standartenführer’s punches and the silence Yael forced herself to keep, the officer disappeared. Yael and Luka and the guards stayed in the ballroom with the unknown skinshifter’s sheet-covered corpse. The hours passed and kept passing. Dawn light peeked through the windows, stretched through the morning and into noon. Their guards changed. The bloodied shroud and the Führer’s dead body double were removed. The day crawled on. When the SS officer finally returned, it was with Felix Wolfe in tow. From a distance, it looked as if the boy wore a glove of patent oxblood leather. But when SS-Standartenführer Baasch dragged him closer, Yael caught sight of the right hand’s final fingers: crushed.

  He didn’t deserve this.

  Yael knew the moment Felix saw the wolves, saw her. The Wolfe boy flinched. Up, up his blue eyes scathed: through the Babushka, Mama, Miriam, Aaron-Klaus, Vlad… over the blood and bright of her default face, until their gazes finally locked. Both stares were clouded with pain, inside and out. Yael wanted to say something, but the SS-Standartenführer was speaking, telling the trio they were being flown back to Germania for “a more thorough interrogation” and a trial at the People’s Court.

  They were driven to an airstrip with the rest of the SS bodyguards and loaded onto the Führer’s personal plane: Immelmann IV. Yael, Felix, and Luka had been stuffed into the tail section, locked behind a steel-plated door, denied the luxury of cotton ball earplugs and orange juice. SS-Standartenführer Baasch and the rest of the guards left them alone, retreating to the Focke-Wulf Condor’s front end.

  The gesture struck Yael as odd, but then again, what was the point of stationing a guard? Their hands were cuffed, secured to the cabin’s various unmoving elements. (Yael’s wrists were locked around a table leg, Luka’s bolted to the frame of his own seat.) Even if they managed to free themselves, where would they go? They were trapped in a steel tube, thousands of feet over the middle of nowhere.

  None of this stopped Felix Wolfe from trying. The boy sat in the chair next to Yael’s, his hands clasped to the other table leg. There was very little light in the cabin—their plane was flying west, too slowly to keep the night at bay—but Yael could still see the mess of torn skin and garnet clots that was his right hand.

  (No wonder she’d dreamed of blood.)

  Felix’s right thumb and forefinger, at least, seemed functional. He was using them to try to twist the cuffs’ lock apart. His lock-picking tool was crudely clever—he’d managed to loosen a badge from his Hitler Youth uniform, bending its pin into shape against the table’s edge.

  But—as Vlad had told Yael when she first started learning—tricking locks open required delicacy. Precision Felix’s mangled fingers did not allow. The raw wounds kept scraping against metal cuff, until they bled freely again. Every few seconds, he slipped, swore, barely keeping his grip on the pin. His fair, freckled face mirrored agony.

  “Stop!” It was hardly the first (or only) thing Yael wanted to say to him, but she blurted it out anyway. “You’re just hurting yourself!”

  Felix kept twisting the pin. He did everything he could not to look at her. And Yael did everything she could not to watch the blood—seeping down Felix’s skin, along his cuffs, gathering into the sleeve of his Hitler Youth uniform.

  After a few more grimacing, twisting minutes, the lock clicked. His left wrist snapped free. It took him considerably less time to jimmy the right lock open. The cuffs fell to the floor with a resounding CLUNK.

  “Give us a hand, Herr Wolfe?” Luka was awake now, staring at the other boy. “I don’t mind if it’s half of one.”

  Felix turned. There were so many wounds on his face, visible even in the cab
in’s scarce light. His nose was still taped from Luka’s roadside punch, temple bruised from Yael’s last pistol-whipping, lips scabbed red from SS torture. He looked nothing like the black-and-white pictures from Adele’s files. Nothing like the boy who’d given up everything to help Yael on the road.

  Felix knelt down, twisted Luka’s cuffs free. He made no move to undo Yael’s restraints.

  “Where is my sister?” This second gaze between them was not painful so much as… dangerous. There was a wild edge in Felix’s eyes, but Yael was not surprised.

  She’d taken someone he loved. It was enough to make anyone dangerous.

  Four times over (four wolves inked) was enough to turn someone into a monster.

  “Safe.” Yael hoped this was the truth, and not just for Felix’s sake. After knocking out Adele in her Germania flat, an operative named Kasper had smuggled the girl to Henryka’s beer hall basement. That office was the heart and soul of the resistance. If it wasn’t safe now…

  “That’s not what I asked.” Felix’s edge grew sharper. His good knuckles clenched.

  Yael eyed them. Half wishing he’d throw the punch they held. Fully knowing the SS would crush the rest of those unsplintered bones to reap whatever information they could out of the maimed boy. She didn’t blame him for telling the SS about her tattoos, but if there was even a chance that Reiniger’s Operation Valkyrie the Second was still a go, Yael would risk it for nothing.

  “That’s all you need to know,” she said. “Adele is safe.”

  “I wouldn’t fret too much, Herr Wolfe.” Luka slid between them. “Your sister is more than capable of fending for herself.”

  “Adele—” Whatever Felix was about to say, he decided against it. He shook his head. “You don’t know her.”

  Luka snorted and leaned back on his heels. “That makes two of us. Change-o-Face here had us both convinced she was your flesh and blood for over three verdammt weeks.”

  Felix’s mouth dropped open, scabbed lips first. Wanting to speak, but not quite managing it.

  “If she says your sister is safe, she’s safe. End of discussion,” Luka said. “I’d be more worried about our future disfigurement and probable beheading.”

  “There are worse ways to die.” Felix’s voice dropped low.

  “Maybe. I’m more of a heart-croaking-out-in-your-sleep kind of guy myself,” Luka retorted. “Fräulein here is our best chance of obtaining that, but she won’t do us Scheisse if she’s cuffed up. So if you don’t mind handing over that pin?”

  The Immelmann IV’s engines rattled and burned, the whole plane shaking through a patch of turbulence. Adele’s brother dropped the Hitler Youth badge to the floor and walked away. Luka retrieved the pin, rolling his eyes as he turned back to Yael’s bonds. She watched him work in silence, not knowing what to feel.

  There were certainly plenty of choices. Anger—the righteous kind—for the dock incident. (Yael was still cursing it, six languages over, in her head.) Admiration—the earned kind—for the way he’d handled the SS-Standartenführer in the ballroom. And through it all, that nebulous, lost feeling.

  What now? What now? What now?

  Luka glanced up. Their eyes clashed—his stunning and stormy, hers all bright, eerie bright—and Yael realized she’d been staring too long.

  “About the docks,” the boy said. “Well, you’ve been around me these past few weeks. You know trust isn’t exactly my strong suit. I was a dummkopf. A Schweinehund.”

  “Yes. You were.”

  “I should have waited.”

  “Yes,” Yael said. “You should have.”

  He jabbed the pin—hard, too hard—into the lock. (Delicacy, like trust, was not Luka Löwe’s specialty.) Yael started to worry that he would bend the pin too far, beyond repair. She was just about to ask him if he really knew what he was doing when—

  Twist, click, free!

  One lock, two. Yael’s cuffs fell to the floor. She wasted little time setting her broken nose back into place.

  What now? What now? What now?

  They were still trapped inside this plane. Wounded, outnumbered, weaponless. Even if they could get through the reinforced steel door between them and the SS guards and by some sheer miracle overwhelmed their captors, there was the very not-small matter of landing the plane. A skill Yael’s years of training had not equipped her with.

  Again, Felix seemed undeterred by these things. Adele’s brother was rooting around the cabin, looking for anything of use. Pillows, blankets, crystal glasses, old copies of Das Reich (RACERS EQUIPPED WITH RIKUO 98S IN HANOI was the headline). He even pulled Martin’s pocket watch out of his uniform, clipping the timepiece open and shut again before deciding it held no answers.

  Luka picked up one of the glasses, tossed it in the air, and caught it. Heavy crystal smacked against his palm. “We could blitz them when they come to fetch us.”

  Barware against a mob of SS? Yael shook her head.

  The Immelmann IV shuddered again. Yael felt the floor tilt beneath her, gravity shifting toward the nose of the plane. Were they beginning their descent? Already?

  “What’s that?” Felix nodded at an object on the far wall.

  They all leaned in to look.

  It was a red lever.

  And then she remembered.

  (How had she not remembered?)

  The Immelmann IV was Adolf Hitler’s personal plane. The only one he ever traveled in.

  Yael started laughing. The sound left her more easily than it should have. Luka and Felix turned to look at her, variations of Has she snapped? shading both their faces.

  In the early days of mission planning, Yael had spent hours with Reiniger, poring over the schematics of the Führer’s security detail. After forty-nine assassination attempts, Hitler’s defense was airtight, but that hadn’t stopped the resistance from double-, triple-, quadruple-checking for holes. Roster lists, blueprints, transportation plans, anything and everything that might possibly hide a weakness. Reiniger barely glanced over the diagram of the Immelmann IV before tossing it aside. Yael retrieved the waxy paper from the floor, eyeing its swooping, avian lines, delicate tracings that reminded her of the Valkyrie etching she was so fond of.

  “Why can’t we do anything on the plane?” she’d asked.

  “Apart from the lack of Reichssender cameras? The Immelmann IV is impenetrable.” Reiniger had nodded at the plans in Yael’s hand. “You never know when the Führer will depart, so you can’t put a time bomb on it. The windows are made of fifty-millimeter-thick bulletproof glass. The Führer’s cabin is fortified with steel and fitted with its own escape hatch. All the seat backs double as parachute packs. If anything on the flight goes wrong, Hitler just pulls a red lever, and out he goes.”

  Yael—the girl outside the memory, the one still laughing because not everything was death (not today)—slipped her fingers inside the nearest seat back and pulled. Its cushion fell away to reveal a harness and, below that, a cord. She checked the next chair, and the next. Each was the same: detachable back cushions doubling as parachutes.

  Yael slid her shoulders into the straps of the one she was holding and shoved a second parachute cushion into Luka’s chest. “What are you waiting for? Put them on.”

  The victor clutched the tangle of straps, examining it much like he would a spiderweb—disgusted, about to drop it to the floor. “You want us to jump out of an airplane wearing just this?”

  “I want you to die in your sleep. Old and gray,” Yael told him. “Now, put it on. Make sure you’re wearing your jacket. It’s going to be cold.”

  Luka’s expression balanced between sheer terror and the desperation to look unfazed as he salvaged some of the cabin’s blankets, wrapping them around his torso before he buckled his parachute into place.

  Not a bad idea. Yael grabbed more blankets, threading half of them through her own harness before collecting a third parachute-cushion and turning to Felix. The boy’s face was filled with a terror far stronger than Luka�
�s. Fear beyond fear, backed up by medical files. Acrophobia: an intense fear of heights.

  She’d seen this in Felix before, on the road, when he’d had to guide his motorcycle along a cliff ledge. But that drop had only been twenty meters.… This one numbered in the thousands.

  “Nononono.” The whisper left Felix in a single stream. He shook his head, all of him shaking. “This wasn’t… isn’t…”

  “Felix.” Yael’s voice was low, blunt. “Look at me.”

  He did this time. She could see how the terror was eating him alive, swallowing his pupils until there was no blue left. Yael held this dark, dark gaze as she draped the blankets around Felix’s chest, slipped the harness over his arms, and cinched its buckles tight.

  Once she was sure the boy was fastened in, she found his cord, placed it in his good hand. “I want you to count out fifteen seconds, then pull the cord,” she said to both boys. “When you land, stay where you are. I’ll find you both.”

  They stared at her. Luka nodded. Felix’s face was blank with terror.

  Yael pulled the scarlet lever. One moment the floor was a solid, certain thing. The next a piece of it yawned open, jaws wide to chaos. Darkness, cold, and roar poured inside the plane.

  Yael had no idea what lay beyond, no way of guessing their distance from the ground. Who was to say there was ground beneath them at all? How many seas littered the landscape between Tokyo and Germania? Rough math (Focke-Wulf Condor engines averaged 335 knots an hour times about ten hours) told her they were somewhere on the Reich side of the Seventieth Meridian. If the pilot had chosen a more northern flight path, they’d be well away from any large bodies of water.

  The only way to know for sure was to jump.

  Luka edged his way over to the chute. Golden hair whipped back. Lips peeled into an unfeeling snarl. His eyes sliced over to Yael; his fingers twitched off his forehead in a non-heil salute.

  Then he jumped.

  Even expecting it, the sight was shocking. Luka there, then not. Devoured by dark. Yael tugged Felix forward by his harness. They had to move quickly if they were to land close together. But Adele’s brother fought her, every molecule of his body struggling to get away from the nothingness in the floor.