Liam’s fingers twitched. “When I reach into the other universe, I can only harness a bucket’s worth by myself. It’s finite. My body can’t hold any more.” Certainly not without letting those dark whispers devour him alive, though he wasn’t about to tell them that part. “But stabilizing the bridge—it would be opening the floodgates.”

Rebeka scoffed, but Daniel had paused, no longer using his Nazi dagger to dig dirt from under his nails. His mouth was soft, open, but his gaze stayed sharp. Liam liked that stare—the way it pinned him in place like a captured moth. He wasn’t sure which carried a greater promise of violence—that stare or those slender fingers curled around the dagger—but both sent a shiver down his spine.

“So you came all this way—in the middle of a war—for a stupid book?” Rebeka’s tone dripped with doubt.

“I can end the war with it. Use it to topple the Third Reich.”

He hadn’t said it out loud before. He shrank back, realizing how naive he sounded, how stupid. Pitr had regularly called him a kid when he felt like being cruel, but it was true, he’d always been the hopeless idealist, the dreamer, the youngest person in the room. He blustered his way through everything with nothing but his wits and an unquenchable lust for more, more.

“This isn’t your war.” Daniel’s voice was twisted tight, like a rag being wrung out. “What does it matter to you?”

Shame prickled like drying sweat on his skin. He remembered too well the panic he’d felt as he tore apart his room, the library, the laboratory in a desperate hunt for his life’s work, ripped away from him. “I have my reasons.”

His mother’s face, her concave skull, her mottled eye socket, her crooked mouth: if he’d had the power then, he could have stopped it.

The men rallying at Madison Square Garden, his father one of them, screaming and screaming, their red and white and black banners spreading like the Spanish influenza through Manhattan, the whole country. He could make them pay.

Jozef Kreutzer, stealing his research, his accomplishments, so he could push Germany toward victory.

With access to the dark energy, Liam could hold them back. Stop every awful thing that lay in wait for him. Maybe erase them, if he chose. He’d never again suffer the helplessness he felt that night in Hell’s Kitchen when he found his mother painted with blood. The frustration, the choking futility as Pitr slipped from his grasp.

Most of all, he tried not to remember his life before the shadows—life without that canter in his pulse, that fire stoking his thoughts. He needed it. He needed it with an urgency words couldn’t explain. But he couldn’t tell them. He should never admit to that.