Grim Tidings (3 page)

BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP

DECEMBER 1944

Even the snow was gray. Not turned gray by the churned mud beneath it, crisscrossed by boots and jeeps until it was a vast plain of frozen sludge. It was like the flakes fell from the sky already muted and stained. In this place, even the snow had given up.

I'd begged Gary not to send me. Give me a dirty trench in a French farmer's field, a clear night in London with rockets falling—even the ghettos packed wall to wall with humanity, crushed together by sandbags and barbed wire, spotlights and dogs, were preferable to this. Gary had just smirked at me, brushing a piece of lint off his vest. “We all have our duties, Ava. There's a war on.”

Wilson chuckled at me, downing his fifth or seventh pint. Gary favored a rickety little pub in Knightsbridge for handing out assignments, which were fast and furious these days—every third-rate warlock who could draw a halfway decent summoning spell was itching to sell his soul to rake in more power before it all came crashing down.

“Not for much longer,” I muttered. Unlike most of the hounds, I occasionally glanced at a newspaper. The Third Army was pushing across the Rhine and deep into Nazi territory, like a knife blade sliding closer to your heart inch by inch. Soon enough, all those German warlocks and Italian
brujeria
begging Gary to trade with them were going to turn off like a faucet. I kind of hoped I was around when it happened, just to watch that tight little smirk fall off his face.

“All the more reason to collect while we can. Herr Colonel Kubler has had a nice run with the bargain he made.” He flipped his ledger shut and stood up, fixing his tie in the mirror behind the pub's bar. “Need I remind you that if he meets his end by bullet or rope before I can collect, then I get nothing?”

I looked down at my shoes. They were covered in dust from the last time we'd all had to dash for the nearest bomb shelter. We were resilient compared to the people who huddled all around us, but nobody, including Gary, wanted to end up on the wrong end of a V-2. “No,” I murmured.

Gary smacked me on the rear with a ledger as he gestured to Wilson, who slammed down his glass and grabbed Gary's coat, scurrying after him like a pedigreed terrier. “Good girl,” he said. “Enjoy your time with the master race.”

I fought the urge not to itch all over as I slogged through the
gray, slushy snow, keeping my head down. I'd snagged the uniform from one of the bicycle couriers who spent all day pedaling between the vast acres of the camp complex, their leather satchels full of communiqués and cables for the officers. The bicycle courier herself was in her underwear somewhere south of the complex. If she were lucky, maybe somebody from the town out of sight behind the curtain of snow would pick her up. If she wasn't lucky, well. Not my problem. Her uniform, crisp and spotless though it was, was made of wool that itched like fire ants and smelled like a wet dog.

Colonel Kubler was a science officer. That much I'd found out from going through the duty rosters in his camp section. The low block of buildings was set off from the others, behind its own fence. The guard shivering outside the gate barely looked at me before waving me through. I tried not to look around either. If I let myself see the filth, smell the overwhelming stench that rolled out from the deep trenches gashed in the earth even though everything around me was frozen, see the hunched, skeletal forms in pale uniforms that had been striped at some point in the distant past, I knew I wouldn't be able to move. I'd stand there paralyzed while the hound took over, like a moth transfixed by an open furnace. Then nobody would be safe, and the people who didn't deserve it would be food the same as the uniformed Germans in the building I stepped into, stamping the snow off my feet.

No brow-shirted guard jumped up to greet me, which was a little odd. The closer the Americans and the Red Army got, the jumpier these assholes became. This Colonel Kubler would never have promised his soul to a reaper even a year ago, but now the
writing was on the wall. The war wasn't going to last, and when it was over the warlock who made the best deal would be the only one left standing.

“Hello?” I called out cautiously. My German was for shit but it wasn't like I was here to take notes. Hello, good-bye, the reaper you gave your soul to says it's time to pay up—that about did the trick for the Nazi's mother tongue.

The whole place was quiet, which in and of itself made me shiver a little. These places were scream factories, and even when they didn't have a fresh crop of prisoners inside they bustled with normal everyday sounds of a field hospital.

I looked up at a small creaking sound and saw the wire-caged light over my head swinging gently back and forth, like a stiff breeze had just passed by.

Nothing would have made me happier than to turn tail and not stop until I was back across the Rhine, but Gary would be furious and if nothing else, this Kubler deserved to have his soul pulled out through his nose. A lot of warlocks thought it was possible to cheat a reaper, and I never got tired of seeing the looks on the faces of the ones who really had it coming when I darkened their door.

“Herr Kubler?” I called, starting down the hall. Still quiet, just me and the buzzing lights and the soft drip, drip, drip of melting snow off my overcoat. “Hello?”

“They've gone.”

I spun to face the open door and the soft voice emanating. Inside was a small office that looked like a tornado had touched down. Colonel Kubler didn't look nearly as impressive as the photo Gary had shown me. Without the black SS uniform and the hat to
hide his bald spot, he looked like any other skinny old man who probably touched your arm a few times too often when he talked to you and spent half the time trying to sneak glances down your blouse.

I let the leather satchel slide out of my hand, keeping my grip on the brushed steel knife I'd used to pin down stray souls ever since I came to as a hellhound, in the mud at Gary's feet. He'd leaned down and held out his hand and told me I didn't have to die. And like an idiot, I let him pull me up.

“Lucky I'm not here for anyone else,” I said. Kubler blinked at me when I switched to English, but then he did as well, his voice coarse and reedy as a broom scratching across a floor.

“They are still here,” he whispered. “But they have all gone.”

“Much as I'd love to spend my time chatting, I think we both know why I'm here,” I said. “You are way overdue on the deal you signed. You going to come quietly?”

Kubler started to laugh—at least I thought he was laughing. When it turned to a rusty cough, and a spray of bright red dusted his white lapels, I took a step closer, squinting in the flickering light.

“Alas.” Kubler favored me with a bloody grin. “A bullet,” he said. “Meant for another. But you have missed your chance all the same. I am not long for this world, and my soul remains my own.”

He started to laugh again, until I crouched down and peeled back his lab coat, revealing the starburst of blood and powder burn in his side just above his hip bone. “Gut shot?” I said. Kubler gasped, his neck twisting a little in pain.

“What would you know about it?”

“I'm not a doctor like you,” I said, pulling the knife from its leather case. The case was soft and smooth under my fingers, even though the leather was mottled and dark from being in my bag, my back pocket or tucked against my skin for over twenty years. “But I have been around a lot of dying people, and gunshot wounds are usually quick.”

Kubler tried to back up, but he was trapped between his bookcase and his desk. A few files slithered off the top, raining onionskin paper around us that landed and sopped up his blood. “That is unless you take a slug in the guts,” I said. “Then it can take hours. Worse if you rupture the intestines. Then you can go septic waiting to die. I've heard the pain is indescribable. But that's not the point. The point is, it takes hours.”

I leaned in, pressing my free hand against Kubler's wound. He let out an animal cry, but I was stronger than him and his struggling didn't do much more than smear blood up to my wrist. “Lucky for you, I've got all day.”

He started to laugh at me, and coughed up blood. A droplet landed in my eye, staining half my vision red. “My soul remains my own. Yours, I'm not so sure about.”

“Me neither,” I said, sitting cross-legged and tapping the knife blade against Kubler's metal desk. He grimaced at me.

“Vas?”

“Oh, I'm waiting,” I said, tapping out the beat from “In the Mood”. “As long as I stick you before you expire, I still collect. But I think we can afford to wait a little longer.”

For the first time, Kubler's face slackened. He was yellow, in the whites of his eyes and the pale skin around his lips. The bullet must have nicked his liver. “You cannot . . . you would torture me?”

I shrugged. A clock was ticking somewhere, and Kubler's rusty wheezing filled up the space between us. He glared at me, his eyes burning, but he could barely keep his eyes open.

“You think Hell will be a misery for me?” he gasped finally. “I am
in
Hell. Stuck in this place, with the trenches full of animal corpses—the living ones and their stink . . . the cow mewlings and screamings . . . after this place, Hell will be a comfort.”

All at once, our little waiting game got tiresome. “Those
people
you keep out there in the mud and the shit,” I said quietly, “will have the comfort of knowing that they'll never have to see your face again, because you died like a coward begging for the pain to stop. And those trenches you throw their bodies into were a hundred times too good for your corpse.”

I leaned forward and stuck the knife between his ribs. I aimed up and into his heart, shuddering as the wasted, tattered thing that was all that left of most warlock's souls flowed into the knife. “And by the way, I've seen Hell,” I whispered in Kubler's ear as he groaned. “They still have a few surprises waiting for you.”

The blade glowed for a few seconds, like I'd heated it over an open flame, and then quieted.

I shoved the knife back into its case and stood, swiping the last of Kubler's blood off my face. The whole hospital was still eerily silent, more like a morgue than a medical center. Nothing good happened in this place. Nothing good had set foot on this ground in a long, long time.

I stepped into the hall, heading back the way I came. I couldn't wait to be out of this place. It was one of the few times since Gary had found me that I was actually glad I wasn't a human being
anymore. Warlocks could do plenty of depraved shit to each other, but there was something so impassive about the camp and the German personnel in it. They were just people, just going about their job like it was any other slightly inconvenient, grimy assignment. I didn't think the girl whose uniform I'd stolen would have shown any more emotion if she'd worked collecting garbage. This place must have been a dream job for a necromancer like Kubler—all the bodies he could want and then some. But there should be bustling Teutonic efficiency, not silence and chaos. Nobody had even investigated Kubler's cries.

Close enough to the door to feel icy wind around my ankles, I heard a scraping sound behind me. I made myself turn around slow, like I was only curious, and I belonged here. I didn't need a passel of Nazis on my tail on top of everything else.

The girl was also wearing a uniform, canvas that had at some point been crisp and white. She even had one of those little nurse's caps hanging askew from her rumpled curls.

I paused, waiting for her to speak first. That's another important trick of blending in where you're not supposed to be—don't be the chatterbox.

“Where . . . is he?” she ground out. I squinted to get a better look at her in the flickering electricity. Red spilled down the front of her uniform like she'd dumped a glass of punch on herself, and her skin was so white it gave her uniform a run for its money. She took a fast step toward me, and I realized what the whispering sound had been. She was wearing only one shoe. The stocking on her bare foot was ripped and bloody, bruised toes leaving little rusty half-moons on the dirty floor.

There's a misconception about predators, that we're all created
equal. But that's not true at all—some stay on top of the food chain being the baddest on the block, but the truly canny ones, the survivors, learn how to tell when they're outgunned and beat a retreat, staying alive until they wear you down and pounce.

The nurse wasn't bloody because she was sick or someone had beaten the shit out of her. She wasn't limping toward me because she needed help. Her dime-size pupils and the red foam leaking from the corner of her mouth told me everything I needed to know, and that thing was
Run for your life.

I shot my gaze sideways, down a corridor lined with swinging doors, little round windows like the kind on submarines glowing from within. Light was a good sign. There might be humans down there I could use as roadblocks.

The limping nurse hissed at me. We locked eyes in that split second of violent calculus that happens when a lion meets an antelope. Then I turned and ran, and she chased me, a guttural scream ripping out of her throat.

I smacked at a few door handles as I ran past, but they were all locked. The nurse was snapping at my heels by the time one gave and I shoved inside, slamming the door in her snarling face. The handle rattled and banged. She wasn't giving up.

I was inside some kind of exam room, all the instruments neatly laid out on a tray and a tilting white table shining under a bare bulb. The nurse screamed on the other side of the door, beating the flats of her hands on the metal.

“Simmer down, lady,” I muttered, yanking open drawers and cabinets to try to find something to defend myself with. The little glass vials on the shelf were all in German, and I picked one with a skull and crossbones printed on the label, fingers shaking a bit as I
fumbled a syringe. Whatever was wrong with that nurse, I wanted to be far away from this place when it spread.