by Michele Lang
“Ah, of course, Herr Staff, our paths have crossed again.” My careless courtesy was not all pretense. I had died and returned, and the shock of it, like a first dive into a cold lake in August, had somewhat fortified me against the prospect of dying again.
It would have been an arrogant mistake to underestimate him; I still could only imagine how much agony the ancient sorcerer could inflict. But my family’s gift for returning to life had indeed passed to me, and through my own magical efforts I had earned the right to return. It was a small comfort, but it was real.
“You will now release the Book to me, lovely one.”
I clutched the book I held to my chest. “And what if I say no?”
“I have ways of making you say yes. Scream yes.” The Staff floated off the chair and halfway across the warehouse before touching lightly to the ground, the remnants of his hair greasy and stuck to his skull like the hairstyle of a rotting corpse.
The book grew hotter in my hands, and I clutched it tighter to me, a glowing ember. Even printed, even an ersatz copy of the original, The Book of Raziel retained innate power.
My family was no paragon of religious observance. We celebrated Easter the same as Passover, we ate bacon and put cream in our chicken goulash. But my mother had taught me a single prayer during her time of life, as a talisman against mortal danger. “Sh’ma Yisrael . . .”
The printed Book trembled in my hand like a living creature, and I dimly registered the fact that the demonesses swatted wildly at the air, as if the sounds of the Hebrew words were stinging insects scourging them. Through my half-slitted eyes I watched them cover their ears in agony and flee down the stairs. How they roared!
But the Staff did nothing. After the metal door slammed shut behind the last demoness fleeing the building downstairs, his smile widened and he applauded me, slowly.
“Ah, brava!” he said, the sneer in his voice low and sickly sweet. “You drove the ladies away this time! Vanquished them! All the better.”
“The—better?”
“Why, yes! You have changed, little mousie. You have returned from dead. Or have you?” He smiled, revealed his awful, mossy teeth.
I swallowed hard, refused to reply to his taunts, however much they fueled my own unspoken fears.
“You know that little trick with the prayer would never have worked the first time, in the fields,” the Staff remarked. He removed a toothpick from his breast pocket, poked between his molars with it, and then flicked it out as it grew from a splinter to a sapling to a small tree trunk of a wizard’s staff. “The Psalms were a failure.”
“Ah, but we both know the Sh’ma comes from the Torah itself,” I retorted, playing for time as I backed away toward the staircase behind me. “And the Psalms were composed by mortals. The word of God trumps the word of man, no matter how sublime.”
“It is not the holy speech that makes the difference. It is you. You have bartered your soul for power, ruach gone to the Angel of Death. I myself have done nothing but the same.” The taunt in his voice grew stronger, the mask of his suave amusement slipped. “Your baby lessons, learned well, so quickly, but they are not enough to master me.”
He snapped his fingers and the Book leaped in my hands; I held on and with difficulty kept the Book nestled against my heart. “I am playing with you, little one,” he said, stepping ever nearer.
It sickened me to hear him say it; dreadful as he was, we were the same kind of creature. “Why waste your time playing with me, Herr Staff?” My voice shook like leaves in a storm, but I held steady.
“Why indeed? I told you the first time. I enjoy watching you suffer. Your terror is sweet nectar.”
We stared at each other, at something of an impasse. I wondered: if I gave him the printed, mistranslated copy of the Book, would that partial surrender get me out alive?
The demonesses only sought my blood as a catalyst, while the wizard seemed fascinated with my ability to die and return. If the wizard killed me, I would have a much harder time returning—if indeed, I could return at all. If I could not wield it, the Book would not stop him, and the Staff would easily kill me and devour my soul. I swallowed hard, inched toward the stairs.
He waited, fiddled with his now-massive staff, did nothing.
“What do you want of me?” I finally asked. “The Book you sought is here, and as you say, it is child’s play to take it away from me.”
“What do I want? Everything.” His voice sounded affable again, as if we were discussing lunch instead of the fate of my soul. “I want your book. I want the real Book—of course we both know the book in your hand is only a copy.”
The hairs at the base of my neck prickled with an animal revulsion as he went on. “I want to use your blood, body, and soul to activate the Book, the real Book. Make it mine to serve me. You will be a fitting sacrifice.”
He stopped talking, mercifully, and we stared each other down, time suspended.
“You cannot use me,” I said. “I will escape into death before I let you use me that way.”
“So you think.” He shrugged, shuffled closer still. “You raised a demon, and probably a score more, in your last adventure in the next world. You are more like me than you want to admit. You could learn still more, avoid all these unpleasantries.”
In an instant he had somehow closed the gap between us and I smelled the foul puff of the wizard’s breath as it caressed my cheek.
“I’ll grant your sister safe passage, a safe journey to America. Knox will make sure of it!”
I swallowed hard, tasted bitter satisfaction in recognizing the obviousness of this last lie, and forced myself to look into his face.
The Staff grinned and nodded, evidently thinking he had gained ground. “I’ll swear the most terrible oaths, bind myself with irrevocable spells. In fact, you can bind me yourself.”
I remembered Madame Lucretia’s lessons. In my vulnerability lay my power. “We both know I don’t have the strength to bind you, Herr Staff.”
By now I had retreated to the landing at the top of the stairs, even as the Staff had followed me close, step for step, and made any escape impossible.
He stroked my hand where I clutched the banister. His fingers closed over my wrist. “Give yourself to me willingly, undamaged, and I will make sure Gisele is protected. You will suffer. Your suffering is part of the bargain no matter what you decide. But I can swear to you that Gisele will be safe.”
A hornet’s nest of lies swarmed around the Staff’s pretty words. My sweaty left hand slipped along the leather spine of the book I still clutched, and I saw the name of my only true protector shining in gold leaf against the embossed red leather: Raziel. My lips moved silently, shaping his name, but I refused to utter a sound.
Call him! Call upon the angel! A sudden urging assailed me with an irresistible intensity.
I tore my gaze away from the cover of the book, saw the rapt expression on the Staff’s face, and it occurred to me that he wanted me to call upon Raziel once more: my last, desperate thought had echoed too loudly inside my skull, sounded a bit too German-inflected.
The wizard wanted Raziel to show himself now. Maybe he believed he could vanquish the angel himself, but with a sickening, sinking sensation I realized he wanted the angel for something more sinister than mere destruction. Raziel had spoken true: the wizard meant to enslave him in service to the cause of the Reich.
There was nothing for it, I would have to die once more: the wizard’s cruel lie about protecting Gisele was nothing more than a false dream.
My wrist was still trapped inside the Staff’s knotty fingers, and I twisted my hand in vain to free it, fought a wave of panic that surged over me as I struggled and the book tumbled to the dirty floor.
I shook my head in admonition, forced myself to smile, and had the satisfaction of seeing the grin fade from the Staff’s lips. “No. I don’t know why you want me to summon the angel, but I won’t.”
His eyes narrowed, and any pretense of his civili
ty was gone for good. His fingers darted upward and clawed into my shoulders, and the Staff shook me like a terrier worries a mouse. “He’s your only hope, damn you!” Hot spittle sprayed from his lips onto my face, where it burned.
“No,” I whispered, and I reached with my summoning to the true Book of Raziel with everything I had.
The walls blazed up in a moment, as though some thoughtful hausfrau in Hell had just switched on the ovens. The paint blistered on the hand railings and I yanked my hand away from the hot metal just in time. Sweat poured down my face and I closed my eyes and called to my book without words, with simple unbridled longing, the sigh of a half-asleep lover for her soul mate, gone missing from her bed.
I opened my eyes. The walls glowed with pinpricks of light, orange stars. I abandoned my only physical escape and, with a dreadful effort, wrenched away from the wizard’s claws. As I raced to the middle of the room, I stretched my palms toward the far wall, even as my nearly broken left wrist throbbed with pain.
Some misguided mortal soul, long ago, had used the pages of my book to insulate the warehouse as wallpaper. A Jewish star burned through the heavy coating layers of paint, the incantation double-ringed with Hebrew words I could not read. I ripped into the wall with bare fingers, pulled the outer layers of nineteenth-century newsprint away from the ancient pieces of parchment, and I cupped the drawing in my palm and held it outward against my foe.
It was an amulet; how I understood that at the time, I do not know. But it was mine: I held an amulet to bind and compel evil spirits—I held it in my hand, held it at the ready.
The Staff swooped upon me. I called upon my ancestors, but they could not help me, not from beyond the grave. My family ghosts gathered at the edge of the second Heaven, clustered all around, maiden aunts and bent old great-uncles I didn’t recognize, and they wrung their hands and cried grievous tears until I released them once again.
Next, I sent my power deep into the spongy ground underneath the warehouse, into the old, mossy bones of Amsterdam, and I called to the spirits of the land to hurl out this horrible sorcerer’s vile toxin. Alas, wherever I sent my witch’s summoning, I could only find water, the flow of water rushing away as fast as it could from the pestilence that was the Staff. And the air spirits that still remained inside the warehouse only huddled in horror against the ceiling.
I held the amulet out from my body, a spiritual firearm, but I could not activate it, not without knowing the Hebrew incantation, not without even knowing how to read the letters. I whispered the Sh’ma over and over, but it was not enough.
My eyes met the Staff’s, and time ground to a halt. We stood only a couple of feet apart, and he held his hands open wide, as if he were defenseless. “Go ahead, Lazarus. You have the remnant. Go, animate the Book. That is why you came all this way, nein?”
“Aleph, bet, gimel, daleth . . .” I whispered, and the corresponding Hebrew letters began to glow in my palm. But then, I had to stop, for those were the only Hebrew letters I had ever learned.
The letters flickered and died in my fingers. The Staff licked his lips and smirked at me, and I backed away, knowing he would close the gap between us in another instant. In that final moment, when the wizard lifted his staff, I held the amulet up between us. Lucretia’s magic was not enough to defeat him, and it was a mistake to believe that I could even fight him for long with her magic instead of mine. Only my own, still-hidden magic would do, and I had to find it myself. But it was too late for that now.
He threw his staff aside, and the wizard grabbed my already-broken left wrist, bent it back. I smothered a cry as he plucked the Book’s amulet out of my other hand with a smooth, fluid movement and tucked the slip of paper into his breast pocket.
And then the Staff was upon me, a furious, punishing juggernaut. In desperation, I screamed for the Witch of Ein Dor, and she came. But she could only hover outside the rippling, cracked leaded-glass windows and shout inaudible curses and shake the ancient, rattling panes.
I tried to protect my head with my hands but he slapped them away, beat at my face with physical blows and with malign, poisonous magic. Again and again he pounded on my ears, in my eyes, and he screamed: “Call the angel! Make him appear, you little bitch! Make him fall, you Jew whore!”
The world faded around me and I sank to my knees, the spectral forms of the ghosts and the witch glowing brighter and brighter in the gathering darkness. Raziel’s name twitched on my lips, but I held my breath, would not call him.
“Make him come! Make him die too!”
Sometimes the only victory is in defeat, the only honor is to run away. This time, I ran away to death, not Zanzibar, and I left the wizard beating my pulverized face with his staff and his big, hard, bloody fists.
21
Dead, again.
My flight into death this time was a grim victory. The Staff had certainly done his best to ride that fine line between torture and murder, and I had only managed to slip away because I knew the way to the next world far better than I did the geography or the native spirits of the city of Amsterdam.
Gray ether wrapped me in sepulchral silence, the profound nothingness a blessed relief after the vicious pounding I had taken. I bobbed like a cork in the swirling mists, and I basked in sweet oblivion.
And now I understood the temptation to let all of it drop, forget the miseries and passions of earth and simply fade away into eternity. Already, my mortal travails seemed far away and irretrievable, more a historical oddity than a screaming injustice I had to rectify.
I took a look around. The same endless plain stretched out to infinity, the same soup swam with primordial spirits. I whispered my own name, and it dwindled away into nothingness.
A thread of impatience spooled into a barely contained panic. I had to figure out how to get out of this place, escape from this moribund peace and launch myself back into the struggle of mortal life.
A voice called to me, rising through the soft fuzz wrapping me up like a flannel sheet: “Magdalena . . .”
Raziel. Golden light bled into the cottony gray that surrounded us. A pair of golden wings unfurled in their full glory, and the rest of Raziel filled in after them.
When I saw the look on Raziel’s face, my shadow heart twisted. “My magic wasn’t enough,” I whispered. “Not even close.”
“Your magic is plenty enough, if you can learn how to release it,” Raziel said, his voice soft but rumbling, like thunder building far away.
His eyes blazed, his hands clenched and unclenched. Slowly it dawned upon me that he had watched every turn of the battle from this safe but ineffectual vantage point. I could not imagine the agony of his watching my demise, without being able to take a step forward to intervene as I suffered and died. And I knew that, no matter what, Raziel would never tell me. Never.
“Raziel . . . ,” I began.
His brows knitted together and his nostrils flared. “You do not understand the frustrations of angels.”
I kept my voice gentle. “I have to go back again, as much as I wish I could stay.”
I thought of Paris, and regretted calling him all over again. “If you think I should stay with you . . .”
He shrugged. “I will descend, whether you return to Earth or not.”
His answer left me thunderstruck. “But what about—”
“My sacred duties? The Almighty knows my heart. Surely He will forgive me for what I must do.”
I tilted my head, considered my beautiful, terrifying messenger of doom. Ah, the Almighty. “Is He up above somewhere? Truly? I have met in my travels angels, demons, vampires, witches. Goblins and werewolves. But never once—once—have I seen a drop of evidence that the Lord even exists.”
“How do you think all of us got here?”
I practiced drifting as an astral spirit: being a disembodied ghost has its pleasantries. I rose up over Raziel’s head, floated upside down like a confused balloon. “Perhaps He has better things to do than worry about us and our littl
e tragedies. Perhaps He has moved on from this world to create another, hmm?”
The angel shook his head and laughed. The sound echoed through the astral mists and tinged the gray with sparkling golden light.
“You might be surprised,” he finally managed to say once his rolling laughter had faded away. “Take it from me, Lazarus, take it on faith if you must. The Lord Almighty does exist, though not in a form you could meet and amuse the way you do me. He withdrew from the Earth and its environs so that the children of men could truly be partners with Him if they so choose.”
“But why? What a crazy way to create a world!” I reached down, and our fingers interlaced. My astral feet trailed up behind me, as Raziel tugged gently at my fingers like a kite string.
He shrugged and laughed again, though less uproariously than before. “What does it matter why? You are in terrible trouble. What do you have to lose? Believe in Him, call upon Him for help. I cannot show you the way back to life, and your spell will not work this time. Not given the way you died.”
Raziel looked deeply into my eyes, and on the astral plane our souls grew close and twined together like flowers in a garland. “The Staff has more power than any demon, Magduska. He exercises his free will just as you do. I do not know if you can master your magic in time to defeat him, but you are the only one who has a chance.”
My astral cheeks grew hot. “You called me Magduska,” I said. “Only the people who love me the most call me that.”
“I know.”
We floated together in the silence, without even the pounding of my living heart to break it.
I could not tear my gaze away. “I’m going back, then,” I said. “I best get started.”
I smoothed his cheeks with my fingertips, and put the palms of my hands over my eyes to block the incendiary sight of his beauty. I declaimed the spell my mother had unwillingly once spoken on my behalf—I was proud to remember every syllable, every last inflection. But though the ether trembled all around us, I still remained.
