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“It’s the only choice I have left.”

Henry shook his head. “Lydia, Rebecca’s right. If they—”

“There’s nowhere else to go!” She held him with her wild-eyed gaze until he looked away.

Lydia took a rag from the table and used it to pick up the book, then disappeared up the stairs, avoiding Henry’s pleading gaze as she passed. Rebecca heard a door close a moment later. Henry fell back against the wall, defeated.

She sat for a moment, exhausted and afraid, listening to the birds outside. It was a perfect morning. A beautiful morning.

Why do birds sing in the morning, little dove?

“What did you feel?” Henry asked quietly. “When you held it?”

Rebecca looked at him. “What did I feel ?” She felt inexplicably violated by the question.

Henry nodded. “Did it…speak to you?”

Rebecca stood. “No. It didn’t speak to me.” He watched her, waiting, but she would have rather died than say another word about it.

“Are you leaving?”

“Yes.” She walked stiffly toward the door.

“But—”

Rebecca turned on him, blood racing. “But what ?”

Henry looked down and said nothing.

She limped slightly as she walked. She was sure she saw that monstrous figure again at the edge of her vision, but when she turned, it wasn’t there.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” she said.

She opened the door and stopped. Three black cars were coming up the hill toward the chateau. Her heart lurched in her chest. “Someone is here.”

Henry sat up. “What?”

“Look.”

In a second, he was next to her. “Shit.”

Rebecca ran, taking the stairs two at a time until she reached Lydia’s door, and pounded with her fist until it swung open. Lydia was still holding the book in her hands, so tightly that Rebecca could see the bones of her knuckles pressing through the skin.

“The grand mistress is sending a Traveler to bring me home,” Lydia said. “She’ll be here soon, and then I’ll—”

Rebecca cut her off. “Someone is coming.”

“What?”

Rebecca turned and ran back down the stairs without bothering to repeat herself. Lydia followed a moment later.

“I think they’re Gestapo.” Henry was standing at the window now. The door was shut and bolted.

Rebecca felt her blood stutter. She went and stood next to him. “How many?”

“Seven? No, nine.”

“How did they find us?” Lydia asked. “If they followed us from the farmhouse we would have—” She stopped suddenly.

Rebecca turned and looked at her. “What is it?”

Lydia sat at the table, holding the book tight against her chest. “It’s her.”

“ Her? Who is her ?”

“I still don’t know her name.” Lydia’s voice was nearly a whisper. “The witch from the academy. And from the farmhouse.”

“The one who killed your friend?” Rebecca thought of that bone-handled dagger again and felt a sickening dread in her veins.

Lydia nodded.

“Is she tracking the book?” Henry asked. “I thought she could only do that during the full moon.”

Lydia shook her head. Her right hand moved absently over the book, tracing the cracks in the leather. “Once you touch something, you can track it anytime you like. No full moon. No coven.” She looked at Rebecca. “It’s how I found you, when you were captured.”

Slow, creeping realization dawned on Rebecca. “She touched you. ”

Lydia looked down at her hand as if there were a mark there that she could wipe away.

“The night she attacked the academy.” She looked at Henry.

“I should have thought of it. I should have remembered that she touched me. I should have tried to track her, the way she tracked me, but I was only thinking of the book. I—” She stopped and shook her head in shame and disbelief.

“You were right. She never knew the location of the farmhouse.”

“She was tracking you,” Henry said. Lydia hung her head.

“I don’t understand,” Rebecca said. “Why send the Gestapo? Why not come and take it herself?”

“I don’t know.”

“But why didn’t she—”

“I don’t know!”

Outside, voices called to each other in German.

Rebecca went to the window. “They’re surrounding the chateau.

They’ll block all the exits. We’ll have no way out.

” She could feel it now, the amphetamine clarity that sometimes took hold of her in moments of crisis.

She looked at Henry. “Do you have any weapons?”

“Just an old hunting rifle.”

“Bring it to me.”

Henry turned and moved quietly through the house, crouching to stay below the windows. Rebecca turned to Lydia.

“The spell you cast on me, on the road to Dordogne. Can you do it again?”

Lydia’s eyes were wide. “I can only freeze one person at a time.”

“One is better than none.”

Henry returned with the hunting rifle and handed it to Rebecca. She felt better, holding that gun. Stronger. “It’s loaded?”

“Yes. I hope you’re a good shot. I’m lousy.”

“I’m good.”

There was a knock at the door, and the sound of it shot a metallic slug of fear through her chest. She crouched, and Henry and Lydia followed, moving together to the far side of the room.

The knock came again, more insistent this time.

A voice called to them through the door in broken French, telling them to open up.

She had an idea. It would work. But for a price.

“I think we should open the door,” Rebecca said.

“What?” Henry hissed. “Are you crazy?”

“If we open this door, it might draw them away from all the others. You and Lydia can escape out the back while I hold them off.”

“You can’t hold them off, there are too many of them. It’s suicide.”

Yes . Perhaps. But she couldn’t think about that now.

She could see the shadow again, that phantom she somehow understood could only have come from within the book itself.

She saw that squirming, writhing thing, and knew with her whole being that if the Nazis got ahold of the Grimorium Bellum , it wouldn’t make one bit of difference if they survived the day. They would all be dead within a month.

“Get out of here,” Rebecca said as the pounding grew more insistent. She kept her eyes on the door, and away from the thing in the corner. “Don’t be stupid. Take the book and run.”

“Rebecca—”

“My parents are Josef and Miriam Gaiser. My sister is Noémie. She would be sixteen now. Sixteen and a half.” She swallowed to force the tremor from her voice. “They’re probably gone. I know. I know they’re probably gone. But if they’re not…I would want them to know…”

Her voice failed her. She stared at Henry, and he stared back, helpless. Finally, he nodded.

“Thank you,” she whispered. She stood and began to walk slowly toward the door.

“Wait,” Lydia said. Rebecca ignored her. “Rebecca, stop. Stop! ”

Lydia threw open the book, letting her fingers skim frantically over the pages as Rebecca watched.

The characters looked alien, a wall of script so dense the pages were nearly black.

Lydia didn’t seem to be reading the words as much as absorbing them through her fingertips, shuddering as they entered her bloodstream.

“What are you doing?” Henry asked.

But Rebecca understood.

She nearly stopped her. She nearly said, Don’t.

Please. It’s not worth it. Leave me. Run.

But then the will to survive rose up so strong in her, so stubborn and selfish—it refused to be denied.

Even after everything she’d been through, everything she’d seen, she didn’t want to die. Not like this. Not yet.

“Leave her,” she said. She crouched beside Lydia, aimed her rifle at the door, and waited.

Lydia’s eyes wandered in their sockets as her fingers traveled over the pages. Rebecca thought she felt an electric charge in the air, but told herself it was only fear that made the hairs on her arms stand on end. The knocking came again, harder now, a final warning.

Then Lydia spoke.

The voice that came from her throat did not sound like her own.

She chanted in a tongue Rebecca had never heard before and hoped never to hear again.

Sometimes the voice sounded like water in a hot pan, hissing and spitting, other times hard and cold, like striking flint.

Sometimes it sounded like a guttural sob; sometimes the consonants seemed to run on forever, creating cascading rivers of plosives and clicks.

Each syllable made Rebecca want to cover her ears, but she straightened her spine and kept her rifle trained on the door.

From the other side of the door, there came a low moan.

It sounded inhuman, like the lowing of a cow.

The moaning rose in pitch and volume, turning to wails of agony and then shrieks, but Lydia carried on as if she did not hear.

Something about her voice made Rebecca feel ill.

She smelled something horrible—a sticky, deathbed stink that clung to the inside of her nostrils.

The screams crescendoed, reaching a fever pitch, until very suddenly, they stopped.

Rebecca’s hands shook as she held the rifle.

She heard labored breathing on the other side of the door, and then a rattle, and then nothing.

The final word escaped Lydia’s mouth with a withering hiss, and then there was silence.

Rebecca forced herself to stand, gun still raised. She stepped quietly to the door and placed one hand on the knob.

“Rebecca, don’t,” Henry said. Rebecca ignored him and opened the door.

She smelled them before she saw them. A thick, evil smell, like an infected wound.

Three dead bodies lay in a twisted heap in the doorway.

Two were curled so their faces were hidden, but the third lay sprawled on his back, head tilted toward the door, mouth open.

His face was a mass of boils, black and yellow and red, all oozing pus.

Foam poured from his gaping mouth, his bloodshot eyes staring blindly at Rebecca, and for one horrible second, she thought she would be sick.

“Jesus,” Henry murmured. Rebecca took a step back, covering her nose and mouth with her sleeve. In the distance, she could see more men running toward them, shouting to one another in frantic German. She raised the rifle.

“Close the door,” Henry said.