“No—this doesn’t make sense,” Liam was saying, a few aisles away. “The book should be here. Why would they transfer it to Wewelsburg?”

“Wewelsburg,” Rebeka echoed, a frown in her voice. “But that’s the headquarters of the SS.”

Daniel clutched at the cheap wooden shelving to pull himself up. The SS headquarters—Himmler at the least would be there, and possibly the others, too. Plenty of guilty SS officers, in any case. He didn’t give a shit about Liam’s book, or Liam, or Rebeka, or anything else. All that mattered was killing his way through these men—

“Who’s there?” a voice called in German. “Where are the guards?”

Someone had entered the music hall.

Daniel tore his knife free and stalked toward the door on unsteady legs, staying hidden behind the shelving. Nothing mattered but feeling another rush of blood over his hands, turning cold. Tremolo strings built under him, the churn of a Rachmaninoff or Mahler symphony threatening to boil over into chaos. Liam could continue his magical hunt, Rebeka could pretend the war would end and they’d go home someday, but for Daniel, there was nothing left but this: his rage and the Germans’ soft flesh, the fear in the whites of their eyes as they saw their deaths reflected in his blade.

It was sweeter than the cascading opening of Scheherazade, darker and more devastating than the torrential sawing of Mussorgsky’s Bald Mountain. He’d honed his fingers on études, but they had only been training for his true purpose: this.

He lunged from the stacks, knife raised.

The clerk ducked out of the way of his initial thrust, screaming as he stumbled. He was still screaming when Daniel fell on top of him, while the knife plunged crudely into his chest. Again and again. It took so much effort to stab a man to death, and Daniel had spent all his energy in the stacks. Nothing was left but wounded-animal instinct and fury. He’d lost his lunch, lost everything but this, his final act of contrition, his only way to atone for the fact that he and Rebeka survived where so many had not—

A hand fell on his shoulder, wrenching him back. “Daniel,” Liam was saying. “Daniel. He’s dead. Daniel—”

He stumbled off of the clerk’s body and sprawled onto his back, hot tears mingling with the blood that peppered his face. It was everywhere. It dripped into his eyes and burned; it salted his lips and tongue. He wondered, with bleak, hopeless humor, whether maybe his body would appreciate it more than the powdered milk.

“They’re coming.” Liam gripped his forearm, bracing him. He stood strong above Daniel, gorgeous even in his fear, that little wrinkle between his eyebrows, his hair like dusty gold. It was almost a shame that there could be no after for Daniel—not even for this strange, magical boy.

“They’re coming,” Liam said again.