The Midnight Front--A Dark Arts Novel Read online

  Cade stared in disbelief at the wand. What the hell is he doing?

  Seven massive tentacles erupted from the vortex and flailed at the lifeboat. All that kept them at bay were daggers of fire that spat from the wand as Cade’s father bellowed in hoarse, garbled Latin: “Vindicta! Morietur, et draconi!”

  The oarsmen rowed in frantic strokes, desperate to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the thrashing tentacles. Bolts of lightning leaped from Cade’s father’s wand, cowing the black limbs of the deep one at a time, as Blake shouted, “Transferam vos!”

  Magic? Monsters? Cade’s rational worldview imploded: This can’t be real—

  One giant arm slammed down beside the lifeboat, sending up a wave that launched the wide-bottomed craft like a toy through the air. The lifeboat landed at an angle, and the aft crewman was thrown overboard. Water surged over the passengers and knocked Cade’s mother into his arms. She shook her head and spluttered out a mouthful of brine.

  “Mom! Are you okay?” He waited until his mother nodded. He turned aft. The rest of the passengers were falling over one another to reach the rear of the lifeboat. He grabbed one of the oars and wrested it free of its mount. Hefting it like a quarterstaff, he pivoted forward and moved to stand beside his father.

  His mother sprang to her feet and seized his coat. “What’re you doing?”

  “Helping Dad!” He swung his oar wildly at tentacles undulating overhead.

  She tried to pull him down. “No, Cade! Don’t!”

  “Mom, he needs me!” He swatted at a tentacle that snapped toward his father, only to shatter the blade of his oar against it.

  She clutched fistfuls of Cade’s coat. “You don’t know what you’re—”

  Another tentacle burst from the water, coiled around her torso, and stole her away before Cade could retaliate. “Mom!”

  His cry turned his father’s head. The elder Martin swung around and hurled barbs of fire at the arm that held his wife. “Occidere monstrum!”

  Crushing force snapped shut around Cade’s waist and chest. He lost hold of the broken oar and hollered. His mind went blank from fear as a tentacle hoisted him into the air, high above the lifeboat, beyond his father’s reach. The massive limb coiled tighter as it whipped him back and forth. Another cry escaped his lips as his smallest ribs fractured.

  Unable to breathe, he panicked. He kicked, flailed, pushed against the leathery hide and iron sinew that held him. He saw his mother in the other tentacle, suspended nearly a dozen yards above the water, trying to scream but unable to make a sound, suffocating like he was.

  They swung toward each other. He reached out, tried to take her hand. Their fingers brushed but didn’t connect. The tentacles holding them swayed apart, but his mother’s eyes never left him. His tears mixed with seawater running from his hair.

  Below, a third tentacle bashed his father overboard. He disappeared into a cresting wave, then surfaced a moment later, his wand aimed in Cade’s direction. “Iustitia et libertas!” Arrows of ghostly light from the wand skewered the tentacle, which went slack and let Cade fall. He plunged toward the waves as he struggled to make his chest expand and draw breath.

  Seconds before he met the sea, Cade pinched his nose. He plunged feet-first into the water. Under the surface he was engulfed in funereal wails, as if all the dead men ever claimed by the sea were serenading the ocean with their regrets. Instead of fathomless darkness, the depths were aglow with infernal flames that filled Cade with terror.

  Fighting the knifing pain in his ribs, Cade kicked to propel himself away from the fire. He broke the surface a few yards from the boat, coughing out salt water. His father had made it into the lifeboat; he leaned over the side and reached toward Cade. “Take my hand!”

  Agony and cold had sapped Cade’s strength. A primitive survival urge drove him toward the boat, even as it drifted closer to the whirlpool. As soon as he was close enough, his father pulled him up onto the gunwale. Doubled over the lifeboat’s edge, Cade looked for his mother, hoping she, too, had been blasted free of the creature’s grip.

  She wasn’t in the water. He looked up. She was still trapped in the tentacle that had stolen her from the boat. He called out, his throat burning, his voice a rasp: “Mom!”

  A sickening crack of breaking bones filled the air. Her body went limp.

  “No!” Blind with fury and grief, Cade let go a hoarse, inchoate cry of sorrow. It was too late to help her, but he raged at his father, “Do something!”

  His father cocked his arm to hurl another blow at the creature. One of its tentacles shot from the water, curled around the lifeboat, and crushed it. Wood splintered and water flooded in. Two more limbs snaked from the sea on either side of the wreckage. A third seized his father’s legs and began to drag him off the fractured remains of the prow, into the vortex.

  “Dad!” The beast had already slain his mother; Cade wasn’t going to let it take his father. He caught his father’s hand, then clutched his own hunk of wreckage. “Hang on, Dad!”

  The fear left his father’s eyes, leaving only love tinged with sorrow.

  “Leave a light on for me, son.” He aimed his wand at Cade: “Fuge!”

  A pulse of light struck Cade and sent him soaring far away from the vortex. Tumbling, rolling out of control, he splashed down half stunned. He surfaced and looked for any sign of his parents—only to see the tentacles pull them down into its swirling chaos. His mother’s body drooped backward with a grotesque kink in her spine, but his father resisted his fate with a storm of vulgarity and a wand throwing fire.

  Sprays of color streaked over Cade’s head and struck the beast. He twisted around as he treaded water, then marveled at the sight of three strangers joining the battle. A gray-bearded man hovered in midair, his long coat fluttering as he hurled orbs of fire at the sea creature. A young man in a suit sprinted over the waves while conjuring shimmering arrows. A third man, too far away for Cade to see clearly, stood on the pitched deck of the Athenia; with balletic gestures he levitated unconscious survivors from the water and planted them in a bobbing lifeboat whose passengers were all unconscious.

  A fearsome sizzling and a shriek turned Cade’s head toward the whirlpool. Lightning arced from his father’s wand and stabbed into the gyre that swallowed him, the monster, and Cade’s mother.

  The vortex shrank from sight and the North Sea rushed in to take its place.

  “No!” Cade paddled with weary arms toward the last vestige of the whirlpool, driven by the irrational hope he might still rescue his parents.

  A thunderclap marked its closing, releasing a pulse of icy blackness that slammed into Cade, leaving him dazed. His arms closed around a hunk of flotsam that seemed unequal to the task of keeping him afloat. Wounded and exhausted, he felt his strength ebb. His limbs grew slow and stiff, until he was unable to move at all.

  I failed them. They’re gone. Mom and Dad are gone.

  He shivered. The ocean called, beckoned him to follow his parents into its embrace. His grief was unbearable, a ballast he couldn’t bring himself to abandon. He was ready to accept the sea’s invitation, to let go and vanish into the depths.

  So cold … so tired …

  He let go of the flotsam and surrendered to the ocean. It pulled him downward—until a slender hand seized his wrist and dragged him to the surface.

  All he saw of his savior was the silhouette of a long-haired young woman.

  “Hold on,” she said in a Slavic accent.

  The raven landed on the driftwood beside Cade’s face.

  Its angry caw was the last thing he heard as he lost himself to the darkness.

  * * *

  Sounds carried in the stone halls of Wewelsburg Castle. Footsteps could echo for hours, and even whispers took on lives of their own in the Renaissance-era fortress. So it came as no surprise to Briet Segfrunsdóttir when, from two floors away, she heard the grandfather clock in the east tower’s study strike midnight and fill the castle with its
melody.

  Her steps passed in silence as she climbed the stairs. She delighted in her magickal stealth. This was how she preferred to move through the world: with the grace of a ghost.

  The study’s door was ajar. She tapped twice on its jamb. “Master Kein?”

  He was slow to answer. “Enter.”

  She opened the door and stepped inside. Kein sat in a high-backed armchair upholstered in burgundy leather. His feet were propped on the chair’s matching ottoman and extended toward the black marble fireplace. The room, like the rest of the castle, had recently been remodeled and furnished at great expense. Marring the image of luxury was a profusion of Nazi icons: swastikas carved into the mantel, Himmler’s “Black Sun” mandala adorning a tapestry on the wall behind the desk, and the banner of the Third Reich above the hearth.

  Kein, by contrast, embodied simplicity. Tall and spare of build, he had a handsome, clean-shaven face. His golden hair was cropped short and slicked flat. He wore a dark suit of tailored silk and a bone-white shirt that flattered his whipcord physique. The tack in his four-in-hand burgundy necktie and the links in his French cuffs were steel with onyx pentacles. His bespoke black leather shoes were as immaculate as the rest of him, down to their soles.

  He shut the book he was reading. “What news, Briet?”

  “A telegram from Oberleutnant Lemp on U-30, via the Kriegsmarine. As you requested, he torpedoed and sank the Athenia roughly two and half hours ago.”

  A knowing smirk. “Yes, I’ve already heard the news from Below.” He shifted his book to an end table and stood. “The Martin family is not among the survivors.”

  She stepped forward and passed him the telegram she had carried up from the castle’s radio room. “Lemp swears he expunged the incident from his log.”

  “Good. Now Admiral Dönitz can call it an accident.”

  “If he does, the British and Americans will cry murder.”

  He shrugged off the consequences. “A small price to pay.”

  Briet had been trained not to pry, but she had to ask. “Does this mean we’ve succeeded?”

  “Now that Cade Martin is dead, the last obstacle to our labor is removed.” He crumpled the telegram and threw it into the fireplace. “Tell the Führer he is free to proceed as we have discussed.” Firelight danced in his eyes. “‘Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.’ … When Siegmar returns home, our great work begins.”

  1940

  4

  DECEMBER

  Silence within yielded to silence without. Oblivion was supplanted by the weight of mere being, and the comfort of darkness slipped away. Formless thoughts reclaimed their shapes. Atoms of identity returned, single spies at first, then battalions. Respiration’s familiar tides asserted themselves. Consciousness dawned, languid and foggy.

  Then came a flood of fear and inconsolable grief.

  Cade awoke gasping. His mind was still at sea, caught in the frigid water, his soul gutted and raw from watching his parents sink into the depths. He masked his eyes with his palms and poured out his sorrow in throaty sobs until his body felt as empty as his heart. I can’t remember the last time I told them I loved them; now I never will again. They’re gone. Gone forever.

  His tears were still warm upon his face when a stillness overcame him.

  Am I dead? Cade slowed his breathing and gave his eyes time to adjust. He was in a dark room, one he had never seen before. He wasn’t dead, but he was alone in a strange place, without company or explanation. That boded ill.

  Where am I?

  Dim violet light spilled through a window behind him on his left. A jumble of logs smoldered in the hearth to his right. He lay on a narrow bed in a room with a wood floor and plain walls. The oak door opposite the window was shut. To the right of the fireplace, in the corner farthest from the door, a small archway led to another room with at least one window.

  This is no hospital. Am I a prisoner?

  He pushed off the bedcovers and sat up. His feet were bare, and the flannel nightclothes he wore were baggy and ill-fitting. A quick look around yielded no sign of his own clothes. He cinched the waist tie on the pajama bottoms as tightly as he could tolerate. That should do.

  He got up. It felt odd to stand. The floor was cold, and his legs trembled under his weight. His stomach growled, and he wondered how long it had been since he’d eaten.

  Halting steps brought him to the window. On the other side was a crenellated battlement mantled in snow and ice. Beyond it sprawled a panorama of lakes and hills slumbering under wintery shrouds. It was a landscape Cade had seen before only in photographs: the Scottish Highlands. How the hell did I get here? And why here?

  A caw from outside the window startled him. He turned to see a raven perched on a crenellation. The bird stared at him as if it were looking for a fight. It cocked its head, then thrust it forward and let out a croak, as if to scold him. Cade backed away from the window.

  That can’t be the same bird I saw on the Athenia, can it? What’s going on?

  Curiosity drew him into the alcove. Atop the low dresser he found a wireless—or, as he used to call it before moving to England at the age of fourteen, a radio. He turned it on with the twist of a dial, then fiddled with the tuner knob. Static spilled from the box until he found a live channel, and a distant voice with a dry English accent broke through the noise.

  “—as firefighters struggle to contain what many now call ‘the Second Great Fire of London.’ Reports from the Ministry of Information indicate the overnight raid was the deadliest since the start of the Blitz, killing more than one hundred sixty persons in metropolitan London, and bringing the estimated total of civilian casualties since September to approximately forty-one thousand. Home Secretary Herbert Morrison hastened to confirm, however, that St. Paul’s Cathedral has survived this latest night of the Blitz. On behalf of Prime Minister Churchill, he vowed, ‘It will not fall while free Britons still draw breath.’” A somber pause. “Only a few hours remain in nineteen-forty, dear listeners, and the coming of a New Year brings with it—”

  Cade switched off the radio. He felt hollow and numb.

  New Year’s Eve 1940? I’ve been asleep for sixteen months? He met his reflection in the mirror over the dresser. His hair was mussed, and he’d grown a beard—yet he recalled no dreams, and his muscles hadn’t atrophied. If I’ve been out for a year and a half, I shouldn’t be able to stand, never mind walk. And there’s no medical gear here, so I couldn’t have been in a coma. The longer he pondered his situation, the less sense it made. What the hell’s going on?

  Another thought occurred to him: Someone must have given him the oversized pajamas he was wearing. Maybe they had left other clothes he could take.

  Borrow, he corrected himself.

  He opened the dresser’s drawers and found what he needed—underwear, brown trousers with dark gray suspenders, a wrinkled linen shirt. They were old but felt comfortable to the touch. Good enough.

  As he traded his pajamas for regular clothes, he saw in the mirror a reflection of his back on the window behind him. There was something between his shoulders.

  He turned away from the mirror, then craned his head to peer over his shoulder at the symbol drawn in sepia ink between his scapulae:

  What the…? He had no clue what it was or who had put it there. This gets weirder by the minute. He finished getting dressed, then spotted a pair of broken-in black leather boots in front of the window perch. There we go. He picked them up and held one against the bottom of his left foot. They were his size. He sat on the window bench and put the boots on. As he finished lacing the second one, he saw a pile of old newspapers in the corner beside the dresser. Their folds were sloppy, the stack uneven; they had been read by someone.

  He plucked the top newspaper from the stack.

  It was a London Daily Mail from many weeks earlier. Plastered across its front page was an image of smoldering ruins beneath a headline touting how many Luftwaffe bombers the RAF had
shot down before that night’s bombing. A detail in the photo snared Cade’s attention. He recognized the architecture of a gutted tower: it was all that remained of the chapel at his old boarding school. Studying the footprints of buildings described by rubble, he realized the Yarrow School had been obliterated. A small headline in the right-hand column confirmed his fears: NORTHWEST LONDON SCOURED BY INCENDIARY BOMBS IN OVERNIGHT RAID.

  He flipped through other, older newspapers. Germany had been pummeling Britain with an air war since May of 1940 and showed no sign of relenting any time soon. Earlier papers recounted grimmer tales: the Nazis’ swift conquests of France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands. With Italy’s help, they had seized western Europe and much of northern Africa. Except for the Soviet Union, no one had shown any willingness or ability to resist the Nazis’ advance. This must’ve been what my father wanted to warn me about.

  Cade returned to the room in which he had awakened. The raven stood on the ledge outside the window, its beak half open as it squawked.

  Christ. The whole world’s gone to shit. I have to get out of here. He crept to the door and tried its knob, moving it just enough to see it wasn’t locked. But was it guarded?

  Cade took the poker from the hearth and held it like a broadsword as he returned to the door. With his free hand, he opened the door. He peeked down the narrow hall. There were no guards. It was a start.

  Dark blue-gray plaid carpet. Pairs of electric lights shaped like candles overhead. Along the opposite wall, two long, red-cushioned benches of dark wood flanked a closed door. To Cade’s left stood a stately grandfather clock. The hands of its modern-looking face stood at 8:41.

  Makeshift weapon in hand, Cade ventured out of his room and skulked to his right, toward a windowed door that led outside onto the castle’s battlements. It was locked. Wind rattled the door in its frame.

  Cade stole down the corridor, past the benches and the clock. He passed a few more closed doors; then, at the corner, he paused and clutched the poker with both hands, tensed to strike. He pivoted left around the turn—and found no one there.