Daniel turned toward him. Liam smiled so easily, as if his earlier black rage had never happened. He’d said the rules were different here, without explaining, yet, where here was—the forest should have been the one outside the tavern, but with so much wrongness, it couldn’t be the same.

Liam appeared to be in total control. He was confident—calm, even—despite the strangeness surrounding them. He was just an ordinary college student, a little disheveled, though nothing that couldn’t be fixed by a hot bath. His tweed jacket, his satchel, his tidy leather loafers—nothing about him hinted he could unleash hell from his palm.

But Daniel was used to monsters that wore the plainest faces.

“If it means keeping Nazis alive,” Daniel said, “then I want nothing to do with it.”

“Far from it. I promise you that much.”

In the distance, something howled, slavering and cruel.

“What is this place?” Daniel asked again, though he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know the answer.

“This,” Liam said, “is how we’re going to win the war.”

CHAPTER THREE

REBEKA

Rebeka kept company with darkness, even as she dreamed of starlight.

Instinct, insight, a short circuit in her brain—she couldn’t explain the things she saw, or the foreboding they lodged in her throat, rusty like cheap Shabbat wine. It struck whenever it liked, and never when she asked it to: as she walked down the street, she found herself peering inside a building on the other side of town, an argument raging there, smelling of anger and pain. She could be laughing and joking with Ari when suddenly she saw the fires far away.

Sometimes it felt like a dream. Always it was like peering through a burial shroud, everything blurred and washed with darkness. One night, trying to fall asleep on her lumpy pallet, she found herself standing in a graveyard, watching the brownshirts smash headstones, vandalize them—Only Jewish deaths will save Germany—and they were all wrapped in a hateful black fog. She wanted it to be a nightmare, but the next morning, she visited the cemetery and saw it was all too true.

Sometimes she could use her sixth sense to her advantage. When the streetcar rolled toward her stop, she could sense the darkness clinging to the other riders, warning that the ride might end with her being spat on or scratched or worse. And worst of all, that night when the officers whispered. Reviewed ledgers. Drew up charts. Prepared to round them up.