by Michele Lang
My hands slowly dropped from my eyes, and I turned to see Raziel shaking his head. “You see? That spell of your mother’s isn’t going to work.”
I squirmed in the astral soup, resisting the truth of what he said; resisting the truth of my feelings for him, too. Here I was, dead, and the angel’s very words called me back to the challenge of life. “If I pray to the Lord for help as you suggest, I might not like the answer I get.”
A trace of mirth flickered in his eyes, though his expression remained solemn. “What other choices remain?” Raziel drew closer. “Just try.”
So I did. With a sigh, I looked up and said, “I know I sin through willfulness. But You made me this way! If You do exist, Lord, the One who made my beloved little sister, please send me a sign!”
I waited. Nothing.
I turned to the angel, my tone exultant, the reality not so much. “Are you satisfied?”
He snorted. “Did you ever think perhaps that I am the sign He sent?”
When I shrugged, he shook his head as he beheld me, a crackle of static in his peaceful void. “I can no longer remain in my celestial domain, safe. And watch . . . what I have to watch. The only choice I can live with now is to descend.”
Oh, Raziel. “It’s not all bad, life.” I had to force out the words, husky as they sounded. “Chocolate is so good it tickles the nose, angel. The spring breeze off the Danube is rare and fine. Even better than coffee at midnight in Paris . . .”
His smile pierced my heart. “I plan to find out for myself, if I can.”
I hastened to focus on practical details rather than the coffee of Paris. “Your plan was good in Amsterdam, so let us keep to it if we can. I’ll find my way back somehow, and I’ll fight the Staff again. You mustn’t descend to Earth until I defeat him.”
I could see he didn’t like that idea. “Magduska. Time is running out. There is no more time for me to wait.” He unfurled his wings and I gasped. “I will not allow the wizard to have his way with you again. I forbid it.”
The light all but blinded me, even in my spectral state. “Raziel,” I finally managed, “this is what the wizard wants.”
That stopped him cold. The magnificent wingspan trembled, and Raziel folded his wings back away, like a barfighter who returns his knife into his boot. “He thinks he’s won, Magda.”
We now talked of trouble just as I, Eva, and Gisele had schemed for our survival on the dangerous streets of Budapest. “Yes—and the Staff’s overreaching is an advantage to us. It makes him careless. But if you go charging down after him, he’ll grab you for sure, just as you said. Bide your time. We’ll think of something.”
He chewed on the inside of his cheek, mulling over my words. “It’s too dangerous,” he said. “Let me return your specter to your sister Lucretia de Merode in Amsterdam. She may have some ideas. Perhaps she will invite you to inhabit her mortal body and you could wield your magic together.”
It sounded like an excellent plan, all the more impressive given the fact that Raziel was unused to exercising his own will to live by his wits alone. But before I could assent, a sudden chill bit into me with iron fangs.
As if my words had conjured him, the Staff wavered in the ether in astral form, a clot of darkness at the edge of my line of vision. He had pursued my soul into the next world.
Fighting a groundswell of panic, I blasted the wizard with my mother’s spell, really put my magical muscle into it. He shielded his face from the force of my prayer—for prayer my dark spell was, however impious.
I squeezed myself into a needle of light once more, to escape back into life—but this time, I strangled within the eye, unreleased. Instead of shooting into my body, back into the Earth shadowed with darkness, I was trapped inside the light.
Even now, I could see the Staff’s horrible teeth, twisted like a car wreck into a smile. “Going back so quickly? I don’t think so, my dear little Magdalena, fallen one. I promised you I’d drink your soul like blood. And so I will.”
I writhed in his grip, but could not free myself. “No.” No: what I had, all I’d ever had. “I curse you; my soul will stick in your throat and choke you for all eternity. Every spell you ever work will turn in your hand and smite you. I curse you now, Staff, for now and evermore.”
The Staff sneered at me, though his expression did look somewhat uncomfortable. “What matters your little curse, Magda? Your ancient grandmama of Ein Dor cursed me too. The Temple fell anyway. Curse and curse again.”
His face grew serene, almost contemplative. “Every evil thought drags you into a lower emanation, brings you into my dominion. I drink your hatred too, little girl, and it strengthens me in my purpose.”
“No. I refuse to serve you.”
Locked in struggle with him, I sensed his power; ancient, complex, seasoned. Stronger than mine, by far. He pulled tighter and I gave a little cry. “Of course I have the power to make you serve me. You yourself will animate the true Book of Raziel, enliven it for me with your hatred, your negation. You refuse to let go, you insist on subverting God’s will. Don’t give up now, there’s a good little scout.”
He banked my rage and pain and suffering like a fire, a locomotive’s coal-fueled engine. Righteous or no, my fury was trapped inside his magical snare.
He reached out, and his hard, bony fingertips pinched me between them like a flea. “You come with me.”
The Angel Raziel leaped up before us, his sword outstretched. “Release her, wizard.”
I twisted to see his face one last time. “Raziel, you promised! Stay back—it’s you he wants.”
The Staff shook me like a terrier with a rat, but I had reached Raziel in time, the angel understood. Raziel lowered his sword, bent his head.
“Magduska,” Raziel said, his face a study in agony. And then, slowly, he faded away.
The Staff had me in his clutches again. But this time, I was the one who claimed victory.
22
The Staff returned with me back to Earth, painfully compressed as I was, to Knox’s warehouse in Amsterdam. He took the amulet of the fragment of the original Book that I had found—written in Raziel’s hand? Adam’s? I did not know. I craned to see my broken, dead body, but I could not find it.
And he trapped me inside the amulet, the way any demon is trapped, the way Solomon enchained Asmodel, Enepsigos, and the other demons and demonesses he enslaved into building the First Temple of Jerusalem.
How I fought him, how I strained against my prison of Hebrew and ink! But to no avail.
I was trapped inside my own book of spells.
He rolled me up and, whistling, tucked me into the silk breast pocket of his well-tailored suit jacket. The curve of the parchment crushed my soul against the tailored hem. “Very good,” he said in German, his voice sounding pleased.
I strained to make out the dimensions of the prison in the shifting shadows. In my current, compressed form, the inside of the amulet looked like a half-lit, arch-domed mausoleum. A huge improvement over death in the warehouse, even an improvement over the gray and formless void of the second Heaven.
But my amulet was still my prison.
Silence echoed all around me, the living Hebrew setting off sparks of heavenly emanations all around my still-living soul. I looked way up: the words arched like a cathedral far over my astral head, and whispered echoes of the holy words vibrated all around me.
I was imprisoned inside my inheritance, yet this magical prison was still mine. The wizard had bent it against me, but it was still mine by right. How to claim it for my own, to use it against my enemies and bind them in their turn?
Even as I considered my circumstances, doubt nipped at my astral body. Who was I to wield this power? It had done in no less a personage than King Solomon. Who was I to defy the Angel of Death?
But then I thought of Gisele and Eva; of Trudy, and her family; even of Leopold. I thought of Raziel. And I thought: who was I, not to wield this power?
Who was I to sit on my spectral hands and refuse to fi
ght against certain evil? God had abandoned me to my fate, His reply to my prayer was clear enough. But I would happily go to Gehenna in the end, rather than forfeit my God-given chance to stop Gisele’s prophecy from manifesting in the world.
To hell with all of it. No one, not God in Heaven nor Trudy in Salzburg, had the right to tell me that the noble thing to do was to shut up and simply die. I could not accept I had to spare the world the embarrassment of my existence, and forget what God or Something Else had created me to do:
Wield my inborn power, grow in it, glory in it.
I gathered my strength and tested the Aleph hovering immediately before me:
The sharp edges of the letter burned, like a knife left on the surface of a woodstove. I drew back my astral hand, and focused myself into a more coherent physical form. Easier to be careful with my astral form if I kept clear in my mind where my limits existed.
Rabdos had confined, but not bound me. I risked much by my “tinkering,” as Eva would have put it, but I had no real choice—I had to break out or end up a tool of the evil that threatened all that I loved. The matter was as simple as that.
Even as I counted alephs, I fought the melancholy that pulled me down. In my heart of hearts I had believed that I could prevail through youth, luck, and sheer stubbornness alone.
But I had no time to indulge in despair. The Staff surely was on his way to some place of power, in Berlin or elsewhere, a place where he could put me to maximum use. I was no student of military strategy, and had no certain sense where Hitler planned to strike. Under no circumstances could I call upon Raziel again.
What to do? In a burst of dark inspiration, I hissed, “Leopold!” and the letters all around me crackled with static. I stayed well back from their sharp edges, but I didn’t give up either. “Leopold . . .” I summoned my creature with everything I had.
I heard a prickling, thonking sound, like a stick pulled by a running child against a wrought-iron fence. And then I saw his little face, peeking through my letter-shaped prison bars. “Mama. Mama! The wizard caught you after all. The bastard.”
I sighed. “Leo, I need to ask you a favor.”
He tilted his eyes, squinted up his face so he could see me. I drew close to the light to meet him. “I need—well, I need to get out of here.”
Leopold laughed and buzzed around like a fly, too little for the Staff to swat at or even notice at all. “Why, Mama? They say to keep the angels close and the devils closer.”
I crossed my arms, tapped my foot impatiently at Leopold’s baby talk. I was fully prepared to argue with him unto oblivion, but then his words sank into me like a restorative, a magic elixir.
The Staff planned to use me, not destroy me, not yet. I would abide, call my forces when the time came. If I could call Leopold, I could call his brothers too.
“Leopold, you are a genius!” I whispered.
He groomed his fine mustache with his long fingers. “But of course, I am my mama’s son.” He winked at me, beamed with pride.
“I will stay in the amulet, stay and learn. Safer here, at least for the moment, than anywhere else. When I need you, Leo, I will call.” I thought of the Witch of Ein Dor and her fabled army of demons, and for the first time since I had been captured, I smiled.
“The favor is this, then, Leopold: can you find the many brothers you said once that I sparked? And can you gather them together?”
He gave me a look so skeptical and droll that I wanted to laugh and cry together in my consternation. I recognized that expression, had tried it out in the mirror many a time in my Budapest girlhood, in an effort to look sophisticated and debonair.
“I will be your demon general, Mama,” he said. “I await your call to arms.”
Past the horizon of my sight, the vibrations of the wizard’s footsteps rumbled, and with a surge of hope I realized my very bondage could prove a belated answer to my prayers.
23
Why in the name of the Witch of Ein Dor had I defied my mother while she had lived? Why had I resisted the long, slow, boring process of acquiring the ancient, superstition-riddled knowledge of my people?
The answer hid within the question itself. I had believed in the promises of rationality and science over the dingy, backward reaches of my mother’s magic. But now . . .
I guess the times in which we live are dingy and backward indeed. The Hebrew words arrayed against me mocked me with their very incomprehensibility; my power lay hidden inside their unknown meaning. The alephs glowed, familiar and attuned to me . . . at my service. I focused my concentration, welcomed all the alephs to join me—
And they slipped out of their formation, the change sending huge tremors through my prison. The amulet still held—I had not altered the words surrounding me enough to change their meaning. Aleph is a silent letter, and allies though my alephs were, they could not speak the spell into a different intonation, a different effect.
But they did infuse the enclosure with the world’s light. They left holes in the amulet, open windows through which I could project my sight and hearing. I surged up against an aleph-shaped pinprick of light—it was tiny, a sliver of brightness, but in my current disembodied form, I thought I could perhaps squeeze through and escape that way, find a safe astral corridor back to my dead body and return again, pick up the burden of mortality to fight another day.
The words around me creaked like ancient timbers, strained by the defection of all the alephs. I peeked through the pinhole, tried to pass through, then drew back with a huge gasp of shock, one I hoped the Staff could not detect.
We had indeed traveled far. My captor was in the midst of a personal, heated conference with Adolf Hitler, the Führer himself. And as I watched their private conversation, it dawned upon me that the portholes revealing this tableau must also expose me to any magical being that would happen to notice.
(Stop him)
The words echoed through my mind, an imperative echoing through my dark, light-pricked prison: Summon Hitler’s soul into this amulet and seal it up tight, somehow. The thought of spending eternity trapped inside a paper amulet with Adolf Hitler struck me as a peculiar damnation, but I would willingly accept it, if I could only stop him from the course the whole world assumed by now he meant to take—
War. Total, irrevocable war.
I inched up to my aleph-shaped peephole and risked another look, as I tried to stay as invisible as I could be.
The Staff and Hitler stood alone, in a brilliant aleph-shaped tableau. It was an alpine summer’s afternoon, on a stone patio overlooking a cascading hillside and a meadow below it, dotted with edelweiss and linden trees. I trembled, focused on cohering. We were at the Berghof, Hitler’s famed retreat overlooking Salzburg, which I had trudged past on my way to Paris only a few short weeks ago.
The exquisite view would have taken my breath away if I had any left. I strained to see the outlines of the great stone house rising behind the terrace where Hitler and his wizard stood contemplating the world, supplicant at their feet.
Of course they spoke together in German. “My mission is accomplished, my Führer.”
Hitler paced without speaking. His face was stern, like in the newsreels, with a shock of oily hair that fell into his eyes, his puffy-lidded eyes squinting into the far distance. I watched him stamp the flagstones under his well-shined boots, and I considered with wonder that this dough-cheeked, cloudy-eyed man held a knife to the throat of the world.
A low bark echoed along the evergreens, and a German shepherd bounded along the patio, its long thin tail waving like a flag.
Hitler knelt, and the dog licked his neck slavishly, while the dictator returned the beast’s caresses. I gulped and forced myself completely still. This bounding, blindly loving creature was Blondi, famed throughout Europe, and she was Hitler’s paramour, the werebitch Eva Braun.
Her story had filled the nonmagical world with fear when it came out in the magazines; I had read a profile in the Pesti Hirlap myself. Ordinary folk a
t least pretended to live their lives free from magical associations. Braun’s open transformation into a creature of the Reich warned the free people of Europe what Hitler might do should he obtain dominion over them: compel their obedience in order to consolidate his power.
Hitler had offered Braun, a regular woman, up to the great Eastern Werewolf Pack in order to bond with them and establish himself as their pack leader supreme. As his mate, she was the highest offering Hitler could make short of becoming a werewolf himself. Though he called himself “Wolf,” and admired the werewolves’ fierce loyalty, Hitler would not allow himself to be turned and thus potentially come under the dominion of any other wolf.
His Nazi wizards had helped her to survive the Change. Unlike most of the European weres, her primary form was animal, and she only took human form under the full moon.
The dog stilled, and I watched her leathery nose wrinkle. A low growl arose in her throat, and for a terrifying moment I believed she had sniffed me out and knew she was being watched by an enemy. But no, her teeth-baring hostility was reserved for my own nemesis, the Staff. One of the magical ones responsible for turning her.
“Hush,” Hitler said, his face half buried in the ruff of hackles raised along Blondi’s trembling shoulders. I saw he loved her, and it annoyed me—I wanted Hitler to be all monster, one hundred percent a nightmare, without even a glimmer of humanity to redeem him.
It was easier to kill a monster than a human man, no matter how bloodthirsty. But I did not need Gisele’s gift of foresight to comprehend his utter ruthlessness. A single glance revealed the evil in the man who knelt in the soft breeze.
With difficulty Hitler calmed his canine familiar. He looked up at Rabdos’s face, and his puffy eyes narrowed. “You disturb her.” He hurled the words at the Staff’s head, sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel.
The Staff’s heart, wizened as it was, still beat so hard that it shook my paper prison, rocked both him and me. “Forgive my presence.”
