Vampire hunter d the ros.., p.1
The Lost Book of Bonn, page 1
Dedication
To the Pirates, the women of Rose Street, and anyone who has protested injustice in this world
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1: Emmy
Chapter 2: Annelise
Chapter 3: Christina
Chapter 4: Emmy
Chapter 5: Annelise
Chapter 6: Christina
Chapter 7: Emmy
Chapter 8: Christina
Chapter 9: Emmy
Chapter 10: Annelise
Chapter 11: Christina
Chapter 12: Emmy
Chapter 13: Annelise
Chapter 14: Christina
Chapter 15: Emmy
Chapter 16: Annelise
Chapter 17: Christina
Chapter 18: Annelise
Chapter 19: Emmy
Chapter 20: Christina
Chapter 21: Emmy
Chapter 22: Annelise
Chapter 23: Christina
Chapter 24: Annelise
Chapter 25: Emmy
Chapter 26: Christina
Chapter 27: Annelise
Chapter 28: Christina
Chapter 29: Emmy
Chapter 30: Christina
Chapter 31: Annelise
Chapter 32: Emmy
Chapter 33: Annelise
Chapter 34: Emmy
Chapter 35: Christina
Chapter 36: Emmy
Chapter 37: Christina
Chapter 38: Christina
Chapter 39: Annelise
Chapter 40: Christina
Chapter 41: Annelise
Chapter 42: Christina
Chapter 43: Annelise
Chapter 44: Emmy
Chapter 45: Christina
Chapter 46: Annelise
Chapter 47: Christina
Chapter 48: Emmy
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise for Brianna Labuskes
Also by Brianna Labuskes
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
Emmy
April 1946
Frankfurt, Germany
Emmy Clarke was a librarian not a soldier.
She met her eyes in the cracked mirror hanging in the Frankfurt train station WC and told herself that again. She was a librarian.
The United States Army uniform Emmy wore mocked that assertion.
It was a costume, though. A powerful one that offered Emmy protection as she traveled through postwar Germany, but a costume nonetheless.
Mr. Luther Harris Evans, the director of the Library of Congress, had told her that all the trappings—including an army title she certainly hadn’t earned—were a precaution. She wouldn’t be in a single moment of danger if she accepted the two-month assignment abroad.
Had Director Evans known her well, he would have realized she didn’t care about the potential danger.
She just didn’t want to see herself in the uniform that her husband had died in.
Emmy touched the tie at her neck, and remembered how she’d tightened Joseph’s four-in-hand knot the morning he’d shipped out, like she had a thousand times since they’d been married.
The pain of the loss had dulled, as everyone had said it would, but being in Germany was bringing it all back. And this was only the first day of her new assignment.
“A faint heart never filled a spade flush,” Emmy whispered to herself, a saying her mother had picked up in the Montana logging towns they traveled through, poker a religion more than a pastime out there. The phrase was a bit of card sharp nonsense, but it always reminded her of what she had already been through in her life and survived.
She could do this, too.
Emmy gave her reflection a firm nod, and then bent to retrieve her bag.
Stragglers were still disembarking from the train when she stepped back out onto the platform, but the crowd was thinning. She was thankful for that. There were too many people in U.S. Army uniforms and she needed to find a specific one.
Major Wesley Arnold.
The major was a member of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives unit, the group that had been irreverently dubbed Monuments Men. Emmy had always loved the idea of them—scuttling about Europe, protecting artistic and architectural masterpieces from bombs, Allies and Axis alike. Safeguarding humanity’s cultural inheritance.
No one on the platform looked like an academic who also punched Nazis in the name of defending art, so she kept walking, hoping he would find her first.
When she got to the lobby, Emmy was immediately surrounded by a group of young children, their thin little bodies pressing into her legs, their hands reaching up, palms and fingernails crusted with dirt. She wasn’t fluent in German but knew enough to realize they were begging for food.
After several days of traveling by train through the country, she had been prepared for this onslaught. Starving children gathered at spots along the railroad all the way from the port to Frankfurt, calling out to passengers for cigarettes and candy and sandwiches. Never for money, that wouldn’t do them any good.
“Bitte, bitte, bitte,” they cried in unison.
Please. Please. Please.
Emmy resented them. She hated them, even.
Because they made her care, and Emmy didn’t want to feel any kind of complex emotion for Germans—children or not. Her chest went tight as she pictured that moment of fixing Joseph’s tie once more. His smile, the dark curl that fell over his forehead.
Don’t you forget me, he’d said. A tease, a joke. But there had been a serious thread that ran through those words. They both knew his likely fate.
“Bitte, bitte, bitte.”
A sharp whistle cut through the pleas, and Emmy looked up into the eyes of a man holding a placard with her name scrawled across it.
The begging children didn’t scatter, just shifted their attention, and the man held out a package to the youngest one in the bunch with a single command: “Share.”
They seemed to collectively decide they had gotten all that they would and scampered off after the rest of the passengers. The man watched them go and Emmy watched the man.
He was of medium height and medium build with a medium-brown hair color that matched medium-brown eyes. Silver threaded through the strands at his temples, suggesting he was at least in his midthirties. A constellation of freckles sat at the corner of his mouth, which was the only objectively interesting thing about his face.
But there was a magnetism about him that was hard to look away from.
Maybe it was her travel-induced delirium, but she had to admit that he did, in fact, look exactly like an academic who also punched Nazis in the name of defending art. That impression might have to do with the spiderweb of freshly scarred skin that peeked out from his collar. Or the way he leaned much of his weight on his cane. He had seen action.
When Emmy met his eyes, they were hard, but there was a slant to his lips as if he found her scrutiny amusing.
She flushed and looked down, caught out. What assumptions was he now making about her? Emmy had never given much thought to her looks. She was unremarkable but not unattractive, with a face that most people forgot a few minutes after meeting her. Throughout her life, she’d received the advice to skip dessert plenty of times. The one feature that garnered any attention—her thick, glossy black hair—was currently dull from travel, tucked back in a low chignon.
For a silly moment, she wished she’d applied lipstick in the WC.
“I’m Mrs. Clarke,” she said after realizing they had been standing in a strange, weighted silence for too long.
His half smile became a full one that still didn’t meet his eyes. Her own flicked down to his scars again, and she wondered if the flint in his personality was innate or forged through war.
“Major Wesley Arnold,” he said, his voice a lovely rumble, his accent American but hard to place beyond that. “At your service.”
He reached out a hand for her bag and she fought the urge to refuse his help because of his cane. If he’d offered, he could handle it.
“I hope your trip was uneventful,” he said, stilted in that way of people who weren’t natural conversationalists. She followed him into the street where an open-air jeep was waiting under guard by a young private.
“Quite.” Emmy eyed the step up into the vehicle. There was no way she was going to climb in there in a graceful manner with this impractical skirt tight around her knees. How the army thought this was a suitable uniform, she would never know. Women working for the war efforts should have been supplied with trousers.
Before she could even make an attempt, Major Wesley Arnold’s hands cupped her waist. He boosted her into the passenger seat with an ease that suggested a hidden strength not obvious to the casual eye.
Emmy blinked, thrown once again. He’d handled the whole affair with an efficiency she found intensely refreshing. She had needed to get into the jeep, and so he had made it happen.
Major Arnold slid behind the wheel and stowed his cane, all with well-practiced movements. Maybe the injury wasn’t quite as new as she’d thought.
“Thank you,” she murmured. He paused with the key in the ignition as if her response surprised him. Perhaps he’d been expecting a reprimand for how his thumbs had pressed into the soft flesh of her hips.
They drove for a while in silence, and maybe in some other circumstance it would have
Emmy wasn’t sure she could have made idle chitchat, anyway. They were driving through destruction that was so complete and devastating she couldn’t look away from it—the buildings that were no longer buildings; the skinny dogs that, judging from the state of the few people she saw out, would likely become food themselves; the air that was thick with dust and the stench of human suffering. Sour rot, copper blood, disease.
Why was she here again?
She hated that she was here.
Joseph hadn’t died in this country, but he had died because of this country.
Emmy had been more than happy toiling away in the acquisitions department of the Library of Congress. It was a prestigious position for someone as young as she, and it let her get lost in books. Grief, she’d found, had a way of receding when she was reading. Her work in acquisitions often had more to do with examining the book itself than consuming the story, but she’d never been good at ignoring the words that beckoned her into another world, into another time period, into a place where her husband hadn’t died along with millions of other young men.
Then Director Evans had called her into his office. The Library of Congress needed a volunteer to head to Offenbach am Main where the government had set up an archival depot that held the millions of books the Nazis had plundered from occupied nations. They were to sort through all that loot for anything that could be deemed “enemy literature” in an effort to learn more about why and how all this had happened.
One of the original members of the mission had become ill and had to bow out, and Emmy would serve as a placeholder until they could get someone in longer term.
Everything in her had balked at the request. How could she go to Germany and be anything but the cruelest version of herself?
But she’d never been able to say no to books.
So instead of walking to work on a crisp spring morning back in Washington, she was being driven through a bombed-out Frankfurt by a man with scars and darkness in his expression in the very country she’d sworn never to step foot in for her entire life.
More children ran behind their jeep, their bones pressing too tight against their skin, their lips dry and cracked, their feet bare. Emmy wanted Major Arnold to drive faster, but even when they left the children behind there was little relief to be found. On the sidewalk, a pair of shoes stuck out from a dirty blanket, the lump underneath too still to be anything but a corpse.
“Should we stop?” Emmy dared ask, even though she wanted nothing more than to pretend she hadn’t seen it.
But Major Arnold shook his head. “I’ll send someone out. It’s . . . not uncommon.”
Three weeks ago, before Director Evans had given her this assignment, Emmy would have said she would be perfectly happy to consign each and every single German to hell. Yet here they were in hell, and Emmy couldn’t find any satisfaction in the suffering that she saw.
As they crossed the bridge toward Offenbach am Main, a town that sat over the river from Frankfurt, she felt Major Arnold’s eyes on her. When she looked, though, he was back to watching the road. The potholes that came not only from bombs but from neglect and budgetary prioritization required careful navigation.
“Your first time in Germany?” he asked, his voice neutral.
“First time out of America,” she admitted. And then, her defenses lowered, “I don’t know what I expected.”
“Some people think the Germans deserve all this,” Major Arnold said.
She thought about all she’d seen since arriving in Germany. Her train had passed through whole towns that had been leveled to the ground. That rubble represented more than stone and mortar.
She thought about Joseph’s last letter, which she carried around in the breast pocket of her army-issued jacket. The paper was yellow at the edges, tearstained now. He’d written the message the night before the Normandy invasion, the night before he’d died alone on a beach, if he’d even made it that far.
“I’m not an expert,” Emmy said slowly. “But I don’t think this is what justice looks like.”
That earned her an approving glance from the major. They fell silent once more and Emmy was glad for it. She had no desire to bare her soul to this stranger. Instead, she twisted the wedding ring she still wore and tried not to think about anything at all.
Major Arnold finally pulled to a stop in front of an ugly, giant warehouse. During the war it had been used to make chemicals and pharmaceuticals for purposes she had been afraid to ask about.
Now it was the army’s Offenbach Archival Depot. Emmy had been half hoping that the major would drop her off at her cottage for today, but now that they were at the collection point she couldn’t ignore the thrill of excitement that coursed through her.
She trailed behind Major Arnold, studiously not looking at the fit of his uniform. When he opened the door to the depot, the intoxicating, earthy scent of books crashed into her, not a ripple but a tidal wave. Glue and paper, bindings and ink. Time.
Inside, there were millions of books that had been stolen by the Nazis. They came from all over Europe—from research libraries and private collections and universities and government agencies. There would be ones that were encrusted with jewels whose pages were adorned with gold; there would be slim, cheap throwaway paperbacks that came from someone’s bedside table; there would be priceless documents that held information on civilizations that would be forgotten had the volumes not been salvaged.
They had been found by men like Major Arnold in castles and wine cellars, in homes and apartment buildings, in schools and hidden behind wallpaper. They had been found in that horrific institute across the river that had been set up by the high-ranking Nazi Alfred Rosenberg, with the sole purpose of studying the Jewish culture.
Since she had been tasked with this assignment, Emmy had been focused on how hard it would be to go to Germany. How much it would be a constant reminder of everything she’d lost.
She should have known better, though.
What better way to soothe the broken parts of her than to be part of the effort that was helping all of these books find their way home?
Chapter 2
Annelise
Summer 1937
Bonn, Germany
Annelise Fischer pulled her modest dress over her head the minute she passed the tree line. She dropped it on the ground and spread her arms to the sky above, clad only in her underthings.
Despite the woods’ thick canopy, the sun cut patterns through the leaves, kissing her cheeks, her chest, her arms. She lived for this moment, for this freedom.
The air was cooler in here, the sounds of nature waking back up as they always did once the creatures of the forest became accustomed to her presence. She wanted to take her leather sandals off as well and press the souls of her feet into the soil, to feel the earth beneath her.
A low whistle brought her back to herself.
“Better be careful,” Marta Schmidt said, tapping Annelise on the rump in greeting. “There be wolves in these woods.”
Annelise flashed a smile that she knew bent toward predatory. “Wolves should be scared of me.”
“You are positively terrifying,” Marta teased, as Annelise rummaged through her rucksack. She shimmied into a pleated skirt that hit just below her knees, and then pulled on the bright turquoise blouse she’d bought at the market the past weekend.
Annelise tied a daffodil-colored scarf around her neck and then yanked her socks up to her knees. Marta watched it all with the patient eye of someone who’d just finished her own adjustments.
Some of the Edelweiss Pirates wore their flashier outfits out around town. But, so far, Annelise’s parents hadn’t made a fuss about where she was spending her time after school and on weekends. She wanted to keep it that way, so she played the part of a good German girl when there was a chance her neighbors would see and report back on her outfits.
As her final touch, Annelise secured the edelweiss pin to the corner of her scarf. The flower was the symbol that bound them all together. Once upon a time, it had represented groups of young people who had devoted themselves to outdoor pursuits—to hiking, to camping, to skiing, to frolicking in the woods. Those had been simpler days.
