Liam flinched as they steered down the walkway. “Um,” he said. “No—not exactly.”

“What are they?” Daniel asked. He was shaking—whether from the monsters or something else, she couldn’t tell. It wasn’t like him to fall apart, even if he did have half the German army on his ass.

“Well.” Liam ducked into an alcove that led to an interior door, and Rebeka and Daniel pressed in beside him. “The thing about that other world is, it’s not exactly . . . empty. And I think Sicarelli’s meddling a few hundred years ago kinda . . . pissed them off.”

Rebeka stifled a bitter laugh. This was getting better by the second.

“Whatever he did to mess up their ecosystem, it’s left them a little . . .” Liam peered around the corner. “Let’s just say they’re drawn to the scent of human fear. Anger, suffering, blood.”

“Like the smell of those Nazi bastards that you just shredded apart?”

Liam swallowed. “Yeah, pretty sure that was like ringing a dinner bell.”

“And do you have any way to control them?”

“Sometimes. But—not as many as that.”

As if she could have hoped for anything more. “Why can’t you just close the rift?”

“I did,” Liam cried. “But if I draw too much energy from the other side, it—it weakens the barrier. Takes longer for it to seal back up. That’s when it’s easier for the creatures to slip through. And when you hate humans as much as they do—”

Rebeka held up one finger for silence and pressed her ear to the heavy wooden door. A faint alarm bleated on the other side, tinny and mechanical. There wasn’t much hope their soldiers’ disguises would hold, not with her brother staggering around shell-shocked and Liam’s wounded shoulder. Well, maybe Liam’s monsters could serve as a useful distraction—at least up until they all got eaten. She closed her eyes, offered up a quick prayer, then threw her shoulder into the door.

Aside from the insistent alarm, the hallway was oddly, unsettlingly still. Like the other corridors in the compound, the electric lighting was too weak for the massive Bavarian monstrosity crumbling around them, but she saw none of the clerks or guards or secretaries or maintenance people, all those hateful little cogs in the Reichsmaschine. More importantly, she didn’t hear any of those awful whispers—none of the wailing wind and creeping shadows that had poured from the vortex.

She supposed it was too much to wish the next world over had been full of sunshine. “Let’s go before anything else comes out of the darkness.”

Rebeka led them down the hallway, in what she hoped was the direction of the garage bay. To their left—back in the direction of the archives—some sort of massive gearwork system churned and scraped.