The Forest of Vanishing Stars(99)

Yona’s head was spinning. Was that why Jerusza had chosen her? Not just a random desire to steal a baby from a blooming Nazi, but a premonition about the day the truth might be revealed? Had Jerusza realized that if things had unfolded without her interruption, Yona and her mother might have one day been sent away to their own deaths by the man who was supposed to love them most?

“I’ve been Jewish all along,” Yona murmured.

“No,” Jüttner said firmly. “No. You are a Mischling of the second degree, not a Jew. My blood is strong, Inge. I have done enough for Germany to erase the stain of your mother’s lies. It’s why I had to bring you back. It’s why I’ve been wandering the woods for months now, looking for you. I have to save you, Inge, before someone sees what you really are.”

She finally found her voice. “I don’t need saving. Not by you.”

“But you do!” He waved his arms wildly. “It’s obvious now! Don’t you understand? The second you join your life to his, you become once again a full Jew by law.”

Yona took another step backward. Why wasn’t Zus moving away? “Papa.” She tried the word again, to soften the tension, but it was too late. Jüttner seemed to hardly hear her.

“You were stolen from me once!” He was almost screaming now. “I won’t let it happen again!”

Now he raised his gun with purpose, pointing it at Zus, his eyes suddenly focused, his gaze hard and steely. No longer was he an out-of-control madman; he was every inch a determined German officer prepared to carry out an execution he deemed necessary. “Look away, Inge,” Jüttner said, his voice suddenly flat, emotionless. “It will be better that way.”

“Don’t do this.”

“It is for the best. You will understand one day.”

Zus was moving slowly backward, his hands raised defensively, but as time slowed to a crawl, Yona knew it wouldn’t be enough. Jüttner would not miss.

It was her choices—and perhaps the war in her blood, too—that had led all of them here, to this moment, and she couldn’t let this happen. She couldn’t be responsible for the death of the only person on earth who loved her for who she was, not for who she might become. Her parents had barely known her, and if her mother was trying to hide her heritage from her father, perhaps a baby had only been a regret, a complication. Jerusza had always wanted more from her, too, an apprentice in her image rather than a child with her own hopes and fears and dreams. Her father wanted her to be a Nazi like him, and even Aleksander had wanted her to change, to become meeker, more servile. But she could only be herself, and Zus knew that and loved her not despite it, but because of it. She could see it in his eyes every time he looked at her, even through his grief, even now, through his fear.

The world was frozen in time, the seconds drifting down like the soft snowflakes all around them. As Jüttner leveled his gun and took one step, then two, toward Zus, who was still backing away, Yona found herself flying forward, stride after stride, her legs stretching with the strength of a lynx until finally, she leapt, her body arcing between the two men at the exact moment Jüttner fired.

And then, time moved again. The snowflakes fell, the crows overhead cawed in agony, the rabbits near the clearing fled in fear. And in the fading moonlight of early dawn, Yona tumbled to the ground, the driven snow around her suddenly crimson with her blood.

“What have you done, Inge?” Jüttner’s voice was suddenly anguished, and he sounded very far away. “Oh God, what have you done?” Then suddenly he was beside her, kneeling at her left shoulder, his face appearing from the blurriness of the world, his eyes full of grief. He was still clutching his pistol, but he seemed unaware of anything but Yona’s body in the snow, the blood pumping slowly, surely out of the hole in her torso.

“Yona!” It was Zus, and he was beside her, too, on her right side, separated only by Yona’s body from the man who had tried to kill him only seconds before. She wanted to tell him to run, because the second Jüttner stopped to gather his thoughts, he would finish what he started. But she couldn’t make her tongue work, couldn’t get her mouth to say the words. All she could do was breathe in and out, in and out, as the snow around her melted and she drifted nearer to the frozen ground beneath.

“Yona, no, no, you can’t leave me,” Zus said, and he was crying now, his whole body heaving as he begged her to stay.

“Please,” Yona managed to say, and then it was her father’s face hovering above her, just as it had once hovered over her cradle, one of the few memories she had of life before Jerusza had taken her. She listened for Jerusza’s voice now, but it wasn’t there. Nothing was. The world was silent, though she could see the lips of both men moving as they hovered above her, pleading with her to stay alive. She could feel the light leaving her, seeping out with her blood, and already, she weighed less than the air. She was a dove, ready for flight.

But there was one last thing binding her to the earth, for the moment Yona died, Jüttner would kill Zus, and she could not let that happen, could not let her final legacy be the death of a good man, a man who deserved to live. And so she summoned the last of her strength and reached slowly, slowly for the knife at her ankle. As her father leaned over her, his tears falling, grieving the daughter he’d never known at all, she held his gaze, and before she could vanish into the deep well of grief and hatred and fear she saw in his eyes, she brought the weapon up to his left wrist and sliced, cleanly and perfectly, taking the blade swiftly up the length of the radial artery, and splaying it wide open, nearly to his elbow just as Jerusza had taught her long ago, the summer she was eight, the summer Yona said she could never imagine taking a man’s life.