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.