These were names out of nightmares, places that would forever be synonymous with the savagery of mankind.
“The Nazis tattooed it on Philippe—over and over again.” The fury built in Ysabeau’s voice, making it ring like a warning bell. “It is how they discovered he was different.”
“What are you saying?” I couldn’t believe it, and yet . . .
“It was Benjamin who tortured Philippe,” Ysabeau said.
Philippe’s image swam before me—the hollow eye socket where Benjamin had blinded him, the horrible scars on his face. I remembered the shaky handwriting on the letter he’d left for me, his body too damaged to control a pen’s movement.
And the same creature who had done that to Philippe now had my husband.
“Get out of my way.” I tried to push past Baldwin as I raced for the door. But Baldwin held me tight.
“You aren’t going to wander into the same trap that he did, Diana,” Baldwin said. “That’s exactly what Benjamin wants.”
“I’m going to Auschwitz. Matthew is not going to die there, where so many died before,” I said, twisting in Baldwin’s grip.
“Matthew isn’t at Auschwitz. Philippe was moved from there to Majdanek on the outskirts of Lublin soon after he was captured. It’s where we found my father. I went over every inch of the camp searching for other survivors. There was no room like that in it.”
“Then Philippe was taken somewhere else before being sent to Majdanek—to another labor camp. One run by Benjamin. It was he who tortured Philippe. I am certain of it,” Ysabeau insisted.
“How could Benjamin be in charge of a camp?” I’d never heard of such a thing. Nazi concentration camps were run by the SS.
“There were tens of thousands of them, all over Germany and Poland—labor camps, brothels, research facilities, farms,” Baldwin explained. “If Ysabeau is right, Matthew could be anywhere.”
Ysabeau turned on Baldwin. “You are free to stay here and wonder where your brother is, but I am going to Poland with Diana. We will find Matthew ourselves.”
“Nobody is going anywhere.” Marcus slammed his hand on the table. “Not without a plan. Where exactly was Majdanek?”
“I’ll pull up a map.” Phoebe reached for the computer.
I stilled her hand. There was something disturbingly familiar about that blanket. . . . It was tweed, a heathery brown with a distinctive weave.
“Is that a button?” I looked more closely. “That’s not a blanket. It’s a jacket.” I stared at it some more. “Peter Knox wore a jacket like that. I remember the fabric from Oxford.”
“Vampires won’t be able to free Matthew if Benjamin has witches like Knox with him, too!” Sarah exclaimed.
“This is like 1944 all over again,” Ysabeau said quietly. “Benjamin is playing with Matthew—and with us.”
“If so, then Matthew’s capture was not his goal.” Baldwin crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes at the screen. “The trap Benjamin set was meant to snare another.”
“He wants Auntie,” Gallowglass said. “Benjamin wants to know why she can bear a vampire’s child.”
Benjamin wants me to bear his child, I thought.
“Well, he’s not going to experiment on Diana to find out,” Marcus said emphatically. “Matthew would rather die where he is than let that happen.”
“There’s no need for experiments. I already know why weavers can have children with blood-rage vampires.” The answer was running up my arms in letters and symbols from languages long dead or never spoken except by witches performing spells. The cords in my body were twisting and turning into brightly hued helices of yellow and white, red and black, green and silver.
“So the answer was in the Book of Life,” Sarah said, “just as the vampires thought it would be.”
“And it all began with a discovery of witches.” I pressed my lips together to avoid revealing any more. “Marcus is right. If we go after Benjamin without a plan and the support of other creatures, he will win. And Matthew will die.”
“I’m sending you a road map of southern and eastern Poland now,” Nathaniel said over the speaker. Another window opened on the screen. “Here is Auschwitz.” A purple flag appeared. “And here is Majdanek.” A red flag marked a location on the outskirts of a city so far to the east it was practically in Ukraine. There were miles and miles of Polish ground in between.
“Where do we start?” I asked. “At Auschwitz and move east?”
“No. Benjamin will not be far from Lublin,” Ysabeau insisted. “The witches we interrogated when Philippe was found said the creature who tortured him had long-standing ties to that region. We assumed they were talking about a local Nazi recruit.”
“What else did the witches say?” I asked.
“Only that Philippe’s captor had tortured the witches of Chelm before turning his attentions to my husband,” Ysabeau said. “They called him ‘the Devil.’”
Chelm. Within seconds I found the city. Chelm was just to the east of Lublin. My witch’s sixth sense told me that Benjamin would be there—or very close.
“That’s where we should start looking,” I said, touching the city on the map as though somehow Matthew could feel my fingers. On the video feed, I saw that he had been left alone with a dead child. His lips were still moving, still singing . . . to a girl who would never hear anything again.
“Why are you so sure?” Hamish asked.
“Because a witch I met in sixteenth-century Prague was born there. The witch was a weaver—like me.” As I spoke, names and family lineages emerged on my hands and arms, the marks as black as any tattoo. They appeared for only a moment before fading into invisibility, but I knew what they signaled: Abraham ben Elijah was probably not the first—nor the last—weaver in the city. Chelm was where Benjamin had made his mad attempts to breed a child.
On the screen, Matthew looked down at his right hand. It was spasming, the index finger tapping irregularly on the arm of the chair.
“It looks as though the nerves in his hand have been damaged,” Marcus said, watching his father’s fingers twitch.
“That’s not involuntary movement.” Gallowglass bent until his chin practically rested on the keyboard. “That’s Morse code.”
“What is he saying?” I was frantic at the thought that we might already have missed part of the message.
“D. Four. D. Five. C. Four.” Gallowglass spelled out each letter in turn. “Christ. Matthew’s making no sense at all. D. X—”