The Book of Blood and Shadow

by Robin Wasserman

  “Yes,” Eli said. “That’s what we say.”

  “Here, we say kdo je moc zvědavý, bude brzo starý. You understand this, yes?” She aimed a spindly finger at Eli. “You are Czech, I see that.”

  “I’m American.”

  “Do you understand it or not?” I asked.

  “ ‘If you’re too curious, you’ll get old sooner,’ ” he said. “Too soon. Is that it?”

  She gestured to herself with a rueful smile. “I was once moc zvědava, you see?”

  I smiled back, unsure whether or not this qualified as a joke.

  “It is possible to know too much,” she said. “Lumen Dei, the machine that sees through the eye of God. This is too much.”

  “We’re not planning to use it,” I said.

  “You seek it.”

  “Not because we’re curious.”

  “You seek it, and so they will find you.”

  “The Hledači? Yeah, we’ve figured that one out.”

  She squinted. “Hledači? This is what?”

  Now I was confused. “They’re the ones who … Wait, what did you mean? Who will find us?”

  “Fidei Defensor,” she said in a hushed voice.

  “ ‘Defender of the Faith,’ ” I translated. “Some kind of church group?”

  “They were born of the Church,” she said. “But they are not of the Church. They are alone, and they are everywhere.”

  “So they defend Catholicism or something? Like the Crusades?”

  “They defend faith,” she corrected me. “Man is not meant to know God. We believe, we do not know. Eve knew this, before the serpent. The Lumen Dei is a serpent. An apple. The Fidei Defensor protect man from himself.”

  “Like I said, we’re not planning to use the thing,” I said. “Though even if we were, and even if it worked”—and even if there were a God, I added silently, suspecting this wasn’t the best audience for that particular train of thought—“why would they care? They love ignorance, so I’m stuck with it, too?”

  “Some things are not ours to know,” she said harshly. “For the Fidei Defensor, it is kdo je moc zvědavý, bude brzo mrtvý.”

  “ ‘Too much curiosity will make you sooner dead,’ ” Eli said. “Excuse my language, but that’s hovadina!”

  From the way he spit out the word—and the way she flinched—I had a couple good guesses as to its meaning.

  “I’ve heard of the Fidei Defensor,” he said. “They were a fringe group back in the Renaissance, and they all got slaughtered in the Thirty Years’ War. I doubt we’ll piss them off enough for them to rise from the grave.”

  “Now you’re an expert on defunct religious sects?” I said.

  “Obsessed family, remember?” he said. “So trust me when I say this is one group of nutcases we don’t have to worry about.”

  “Hovadina? Hovadina!” Janika was muttering. “Americani si myslí, že sežrali všecku moudrost světa.”

  “I think you offended her,” I whispered.

  She opened the attic door. “You leave now, yes?”

  “Why did you help us, if you think this is so dangerous?” I asked.

  “Moc zvědava,” she said, shaking her head. “My father tells me this again and again. I am no good at listening. Also …” She stretched out a hand, palm up, fingers stretched wide, but didn’t continue.

  “Also what?” Eli asked finally.

  “One hundred American dollars, the rude one said.”

  I turned to Eli, who looked through his wallet and sighed. “Thirty?” he suggested. “I can’t afford any more now, but if you give us your address—”

  “Thirty,” she said firmly, but stopped short of taking the bills. Up close, her eyes were the murky gray-blue of a storm cloud, and I finally saw what I’d been looking for, the evidence that she’d once had a future, rather than a past. “Remember,” she said. Her hand reached out, and for a moment I feared she was going to stroke my cheek or cup my chin, but it dropped away without making contact. “There is darkness in this city. And for our people, it will always be worse. When the darkness comes again, they will want your blood.”

  “Nora has nothing to be afraid of,” Eli said, and pressed the money into her hand.

  Janika pocketed the bills without taking her eyes off me. “You know he lies.”

  26

  “I’m sorry about today.” Max sat on one side of the bed; I sat on the other. There was, in this claustrophobic room, nowhere else to sit. All day, I had waited for this moment, the two of us alone. I had waited for his soft touch and the apology I knew would accompany it; he would be sorry and I would be sorry and, canceling each other out, we would be right again.

  I reached across him and switched off the light.

  “I’m just scared for you,” he said. “We need to finish this. It’s the only way we’ll ever be safe.”

  Safe. At least until the next knife flashing in the shadows, or the next car crash, the next botched burglary, the next Ebola outbreak, the next heart attack. There was no safe. Finding this machine, bargaining with the Hledači, going home, nothing would change that.

  “Please don’t be mad,” he said.

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re a terrible liar.” He kissed my neck. “I love that about you.”

  “I’m not lying. I’m …”

  “You can tell me. Anything.”

  “I don’t know.” How was I supposed to tell him that I wasn’t mad about what he’d done, but what he hadn’t? Hadn’t saved Chris. Hadn’t stayed to save me. Hadn’t made everything all right again just by putting his arms around me and promising it would be.

  “The postcard, on Andy’s grave,” I said, without intending to. “How did it get there?”

  “I told you, we don’t have to talk about any of that.” He leaned against me, whispering, “ ‘What’s past is prologue; what to come, in yours and my discharge.’ ”

  I could feel him smiling. This was our game; it was my turn.

  I didn’t play. “I want to know.”

  “Shakespeare,” he said. Still trying. “The Tempest.”

  And then he gave up. “I set up a dummy account and emailed a guy in the dorm who’ll do anything for cash. Sent him the money and the postcard, and I guess he came through.”

  “You emailed him.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Risky.”

  “I was careful.”

  “Then you mailed him something.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Also risky.”

  “Worth it, right?”

  I wanted to slap him. “You couldn’t have just emailed me? Sent me a letter? Told me something?”

  “I had to do it this way,” he said. “I had to be safe. The cops, the Hledači—what happened on that night, it could have been worse. A lot worse. I couldn’t risk leading them to you.”

  I knew I should tell him that someone had been watching me, back in Chapman, a figure in the woods who’d left me a message in dirty snow. “Chris told you about Andy?” I said instead. “How come you didn’t say anything?”

  “How come you never told me yourself?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Well, that’s why,” he said. “I figured you didn’t want me to know.”

  “It wasn’t just you,” I said. “It was everyone.”

  “Everyone but Chris.”

  “I didn’t have to tell Chris. That was the point.”

  “But you would have,” Max said. “It’s okay. I get it.”

  “I would have told you, too. Eventually.”

  Now that he knew, I waited for him to ask—not about why I hadn’t told him, but about Andy, about what it was like having a dead brother or what it had been like having a live one, and I found I was waiting impatiently, more than ready to finally let him into the locked room where I kept all the stories, the gross-out jokes, the cheesy hip-hop, the smells of sweat socks and hair gel, all the things that reminded me of my brother.

  “We shoul
d sleep,” he said. “Tomorrow we’ll have to solve Elizabeth’s clue for real or figure out what to do next. Either way …”

  “Right. Sleep.”

  I let him fold himself around me and tuck me under his arm. “You know I’d do anything to keep you safe,” he murmured after several quiet minutes had passed.

  I pretended I was already asleep.

  27

  I dreamed about dead people. Not Andy, not Chris, but Elizabeth, and Rabbi Loew, and the rabbi’s dutiful daughter who used a stick to clean out the bright, springy moss which sprouted from his nose and ears at an alarming rate and, in the dream, was named Janika. When I woke up, three hours before dawn, I suddenly understood where to find what we were looking for.

  When I woke up, Max was gone.

  There was a note on his pillow. Adriane’s upset, can’t sleep. Didn’t want to wake you—we went for a walk. Back soon. M

  If Adriane had banged on our door in the middle of the night searching for solace, then “upset” had to be a significant understatement, and I couldn’t believe Max had let me sleep through it. Nor could I believe he’d been dumb enough to take her rambling through the city in the middle of the night, leaving nothing more than a vague note, leaving me no way to get in touch with them and no idea where they were, leaving me to another sleepless night, with nothing to do but lie awake and wait for them to come back—or wait for them not to.

  I don’t believe I was trying to punish him when I pulled on my jeans and padded down to the opposite end of the corridor, hesitating only a moment before I knocked. It wasn’t supposed to be a lesson: You disappear, you leave me alone, again, don’t expect me to be waiting when you come back. But when Eli appeared, cheeks flushed and hair poking up in spiky cowlicks like an overgrown Dennis the Menace, opening the door wide for me as soon as I spoke the magic words, “I figured it out,” I knew whatever happened next would only end up with Max pissed off, again, and found I didn’t particularly care.

  “The rabbi’s ‘greatest creation,’ ” I told Eli, trying not to stare at his surprisingly muscled bare chest and the spiky black cross tattooed over his heart that should have looked trashy but—and maybe this was just the dim light or the lack of sleep or some temporary crisis-induced insanity—added just enough of a punk twist to his sculpted abs to evoke thoughts I most definitely should not have been thinking. I cleared my throat and aimed my gaze at the peeling paint beyond his shoulder. “What if it wasn’t the golem?” I asked. The rabbi wasn’t so different from Elizabeth’s father, I had realized, in that foggy moment between dream and waking. A man who’d spent his life in service to and pursuit of his God. Of course the world thought of the golem as his pièce de résistance, as the Lumen Dei would have been Edward Kelley’s. But for Elizabeth, the fundamental fact about Kelley wasn’t his work. It was his fatherhood. “What if it was the rabbi’s daughter?”

  “What are you doing here?” Eli asked, still blinking away sleep. His boxers—which I also shouldn’t have been noticing—were pale blue and studded with Tweety Birds. Oddly, they suited him. “Where’s Max?”

  “First I thought maybe it was buried with her, which would suck, because most of those graves didn’t have names, and even if they did, it’s not like we can go dig up the cemetery.”

  “You know it’s the middle of the night, right?”

  “But then I remembered the attic—the mezuzah, remember? Janika said it belonged to his daughter, and mezuzahs are hollow. Anything could be inside. It’s a long shot, but don’t you think it’s worth a try?”

  “Is something wrong?” Eli asked. “Did Max do something?”

  “Are you even listening to me?”

  “I’m just not the most likely or logical person for you to come to with your middle-of-the-night brainstorms.”

  “Look. Adriane was upset, so Max went off with her somewhere. So he’s not around to hear my idea, which I think is a good one, and I think the middle of the night is as good a time as any to check it out, since it’s not like we can look up Janika No-Last-Name in the phone book. And even if we did, I doubt she’d help us again. So I’m going back to the synagogue. You coming, or not?”

  Eli grinned. “I’ll get my pants.”

  28

  “This is your plan?” Eli said, staring dubiously at the iron rungs climbing up the side of the old temple. They began several feet over our heads, but I was fairly sure he could hoist me up.

  “You have a better one?” I asked. “Want to wait until morning and track down another bizarrely willing old lady to let us through the front door—then hope that this one lets us actually touch things?”

  “It’s not the worst idea I ever heard.” But he laced his fingers together and opened his palms, ready to cup my foot. “You realize we’re about ninety-nine percent guaranteed to get caught, right?”

  The street was abandoned. A few streetlights disguised as old-fashioned gas lamps gave the foggy night a warm orange glow. The souvenir stalls were boarded up, and nothing moved but tattered flyers flapping in the frigid breeze. “How do you figure?”

  “This is the city’s oldest synagogue, a global tourist attraction and holy shrine, in a city where there used to be a hundred thousand Jews and now there are barely any,” he said, the you idiot implied. “You think they forgot security cameras?”

  “Then I guess we should hurry.” I stepped into his hands, grabbed his shoulders, and shifted my weight forward, lunging toward the lowest iron rung. My fingers grazed metal, then Eli stumbled under my weight and I almost toppled over. “Watch it!” We tried a second time, and I made contact, grabbing the rung, holding tight, kicking away from Eli, and dangling free. My feet scrabbled against the wall and my arm muscles screamed as I tried to haul myself up, pull-ups never having been my forte. Adriane would have done this in a single, elegant move, I thought, Cirque du Soleil–style, probably cartwheeling or back-handspringing toward the ladder and then scrambling up the side with the ease of a yoga-practicing monkey. She definitely wouldn’t have grunted so loudly as she gained one vertical inch after the other, feet finally gaining purchase, the attic window distant but hypothetically in reach.

  With my feet finally steady on a rung, I reached down to give Eli a hand up, but he was rolling a trash bin toward the base of the building. He flipped it over, climbed on top, and leapt for the ladder, swinging himself with the grace of a cat burglar, the only hint of effort the straining cords of muscle in his neck.

  The climb itself was easy. I should have been terrified, but I wasn’t. Maybe it was the moonless night that made the whole thing—clinging to the side of an ancient temple, pushing the window open, climbing silently into the dark attic with Eli’s phone screen our only source of light—deeply surreal. Maybe I hadn’t fully thrown off my dream.

  “Here.” I led Eli to where I’d found the mezuzah, inside a large wooden cabinet of curiosities in the back corner of the attic. Spiderwebs brushed my face, and in the dark, it was all too easy to imagine the creatures that had woven them skittering up my leg or dropping down from the ceiling.

  “Great. Take it, and let’s get out of here.”

  “I’m not taking it. That’s stealing.”

  “Right—when they drag us off to prison, I’ll be sure our lawyer notes that’s where we draw the line.”

  “Shut up.” Holding the slim stone box delicately between two fingers, I slid off the back panel. There should have been a prayer scroll tucked into the hollow. But when I unspooled the tight roll of parchment, there was Elizabeth’s familiar handwriting staring back at me—and something else. A tiny leather pouch, pinched by a drawstring. I shook it, we both heard the soft whisper of loose earth.

  “No way,” Eli breathed.

  Here, in my hand, like a sack of marbles, all that remained of a physical impossibility: the golem.

  I had been right.

  An alarm sounded. Footsteps pounded up the stairs.

  “We have to get out of here!” Eli yanked me to my feet. He ho
isted me out the window, then followed close behind, his left foot nearly whacking my nose.

  Below us, someone shouted. Flashlight beams danced across the sidewalk.

  “Wait!” I hissed. We froze, pressing our bodies to the building, hoping to be camouflaged by stone and night.

  The attic lit up. Figures wandered back and forth across the window. Down at the street level, security guards paced the perimeter of the building. I clung to the iron rungs, trying to breathe, willing them not to look up. Frigid gusts of wind walloped me in the face. I tried to tuck my head under my straining arm, and tried doubly hard not to look down.

  This had been an insane idea, on the order of swallowing knives or juggling fire. With the wind biting into my bare fingers, already numbed by the cold metal rungs, it looked like it would be a photo finish between jail and death, the latter being the inevitable result if we had to hang on much longer and my body stopped obeying the don’t you dare let go instructions issued by my increasingly deranged neural command center.

  “It’ll be okay,” Eli said softly from above me.

  “Considering our track record, that seems totally likely.”

  “If you think about it, this is actually very appropriate, given the surroundings.”

  “ ‘This’ being …?”

  “Our partial defenestration.”

  “Our what?”

  “Defenestration of Prague? Thirty Years’ War? Catholics getting thrown out the window only to survive by landing in a pile of manure? Any of this ringing a bell?”

  I appreciated the attempt to distract me; it wasn’t working. I craned my neck toward the ground, watching the patrolling guards. Their walkie-talkies crackled, and a moment later, they disappeared inside the building.

  “Now!” I hissed, already climbing toward the ground. Swiftly, carefully, and then, three rungs down—my right foot slipped its grip. I shrieked as my left skidded off the rung and, jolted forward, my head hit metal with a tooth-rattling clang. Dazed by the impact, I almost let go of the bar.

  “Nora! Hold on!”

  Eli’s voice was nearly drowned out by the thunder in my head, but I did as it suggested and held on, numb fingers curling tightly around cold metal, legs kicking, kicking, scrabbling against the stone, searching for purchase, arms screaming. Defenestration, I thought, dimly, and wondered whether being one-quarter Catholic would qualify me for my own miraculous dung heap.