“But sir! I have—”
“No place here. Go.” That single word echoed through the warehouse. When she hesitated, the old man laid a finger not very subtly on the handle of his cane.
Edvard didn’t bother to hide his smirk as she slunk past him. Once outside, she turned to see Sasha and Terzian standing side-by-side behind the desk, their faces illuminated a pale aquamarine by the hidden contents of the opened box.
But then the door closed with a quiet click, and she was alone.
• • •
The Agency had put Edith in a third-floor walk-up on the edge of New Town, the Nové Město. It got little natural light owing to the narrow street, the single closet was the size of a coffin, and the neighbors weren’t the types to engage in small talk on the landing. It was pretty much perfect for Edith, who spent the vast majority of her time at work. The only drawback was the shared bathroom at the end of the corridor: Sometimes cracking a difficult problem required a long hot soak. Which is why, halfway through a sleepless night spent trying to fit the square peg of Dominic Alvarez into the round hole of Gabe’s secret world, she trudged down the hall.
Turned out it was much easier to get hot water at four in the morning. But not, unfortunately, uninterrupted thinking time.
The door banged again. She gathered from the stream of irritated Czech that somebody had to pee, and he had to pee right now.
“Yes, yes, one moment,” she mumbled. Conversing with a complete stranger while naked in a bathtub wasn’t as titillating as one might have thought.
She pulled the drain plug and stood. Her soap-slick feet nearly sent her for a header on the mildewed pre-war tiles. As she shrugged into her robe, hoping to hell it didn’t come undone when Captain Tinybladder barged past—”Keep your pants on!” she yelled, realizing belatedly that it was probably a poor choice of expression—the whirlpool of suds caught her eye.
The water swirled faster the closer it got to the drain, the stuff farther back sloshing more languidly until it seemed it barely knew the drain had opened. But it was all of a piece. Like planets going around the sun, or…
What if they’d been unable to make headway identifying Dominic’s associates because they’d been looking for the wrong pattern? They’d looked at phone records, service records, deployments, aircraft registries… but they hadn’t tried to correlate his known contacts with other ley line confluences around the world. Gabe had said Prague was special, but he hadn’t said it was unique. Maybe this mystical geography crap was useful after all.
This was it. The wedge that would split the problem wide open. She could feel it.
Hours later, back in the office, she realized she was still wearing her shower cap.
What she really wanted was to confer with Gabe, the only person with whom she could share her theory regarding the complex interface of intelligence, foreign policy, military policy, and magic. But he wasn’t available.
Josh was around, and judging from the looks he kept shooting in her direction, definitely wanted to talk. Their shared encounter with the impossible had made them confidants, but now she didn’t know how much she could share with him. Had he found success in his own attempts to make sense of the world? Had he pigeonholed Gabe, too? Maybe Pritchard wasn’t in today because he was exhausted from repeatedly initiating people into arcane secrets.
But to whom did Gabe go with his magic questions? Well, she could think of one likely candidate.
• • •
“Are you Jordan?”
The woman behind the bar paused to sip from a teacup before answering. “I am.” Her tone was light, quite at odds with the look in her eyes, which suggested either weariness or wariness. Or both. Those weary/wary eyes narrowed in recognition. “I’ve seen you in here recently. You’re the gimlet drinker.”
Good memory. The kind of memory that would serve a person well in the intelligence world. Gabe had told her, after all, that witches and spies had much in common.
“That’s me. Edith.”
“I’m out of fresh limes, I’m afraid.”
Edith shook her head. “Too early in the day for me. I’m a friend of Gabe Pritchard.”
The look on Jordan’s face crystallized: Wariness. Definitely wariness.
Edith leaned across the bar, speaking quietly. “Recently he and I have been discussing certain, uh, esoteric topics.”
Jordan rolled her eyes. “Oh, boy. Here we go.”
“He’s very open about the fact that his own knowledge of the subject isn’t wide or deep. A crash course, is what he called it.”
“Is that so.” It wasn’t pitched as a question. Edith pushed forward.
“Yes. Which is why I’ve come to you. I have some questions about the entities he calls Ice and Flame.”
Jordan coughed and, still sputtering, fumbled for a bracelet on her left wrist. She spilled tea on her apron.
“What the hell is wrong with you? Keep your voice down,” she hissed.
I thought I was. Edith remembered Gabe’s private performance of the national anthem. He’d had a way to prevent them from being overheard. It would make sense for somebody in Jordan’s position to carry such items on her person.
Edith wanted to lay her head down and rest. Everything she knew, everything at which she excelled, had been thrown out the window. Magic changed everything. The ironclad rules of solid spycraft were rusted through and crumbling.
A man seated near the far end of the bar abruptly set down his drink. He hopped from his stool. After tossing a few bills and coins on the bar, he donned his hat and departed. Jordan paused to gather his glass and, finding it only half empty, frowned.
She dumped the beer into the sink behind the bar. As she rinsed the glass, she said, “I can’t help you. Consider me a dead end.”
“I just want to understand the rules.”
“I just want a paying customer.”
“If I buy a drink, will you answer my questions?”
“Dead. End.”
It had started raining by the time Edith emerged from the bar. She wasn’t the only person caught unawares and without an umbrella. Dozens of people darted from doorway to doorway, awning to awning, trying to stay dry. Still, Edith could have sworn she glimpsed the fellow from the bar darting around the corner every time she reached a moment’s respite from the downpour.
Probably nothing, and she was inclined to shrug if off as paranoia, a cumulative effect of all the new information—deeply disturbing information—she’d learned about the world and its players. But she had training, and knew better than to ignore it. So she took a circuitous route back to her apartment, and used all the usual tricks along the way: pretending to window-shop so as to examine reflections of the scene behind her; looping around; doubling back; hopping on a tram, then off again…
It took her more than an hour to make it home. When she did, she slumped against the door and immediately slammed the locks. Legs shaking, she slid to the floor.
The man from the bar had followed her around the city. He and two of his friends.
The Witch Who Came In From the Cold
Season 2, Episode 10
The Mirror Cracked
Cassandra Rose Clarke
Prague, Czechoslovak Soviet Republic
April 28, 1970
1.
Zerena perched delicately on the threadbare loveseat shoved haphazardly against the hotel wall. Terzian had the curtains on the room’s grimy window pulled back so that the sun fell into the room at harsh angles, leaving blades of fractured white light scattered over the neatly made bed, the thin carpet, the scuffed writing desk.
The water ran in the bathroom. Zerena sighed. Crossed and uncrossed her legs. He was taking his time, making her wait. She dug her nails into the cheap, worn cloth of the couch, trying to rid herself of the buzzing electric energy of her anger before Terzian returned to the main room. If she let her expression reveal her inner emotions, then she would have already lost.
The water shut
off; the bathroom door swung open. Terzian emerged, his own expression unreadable. Zerena activated her most aristocratic smile.
“I was just thinking,” she said, “what a shame it is that you have to stay in a place like this. I certainly could have found you somewhere more suitable—”
“It’s safer,” Terzian interrupted. “It doesn’t draw attention. Now, tell me what it was you wanted to speak to me about.”
He pulled the rickety chair away from the writing desk and sat down, crossing one ankle crisply over the opposite knee, like a paper crane folding itself into existence. Zerena straightened her spine under his gaze and reminded herself that she had to win this afternoon, that if she did not undo Sasha’s recent infuriating successes, all her years of work would be for nothing.
“I didn’t get a chance to tell you before,” she purred, “but I wanted to congratulate you. On our victory at the docks.”
Was that a hint of smile in the warlock’s craggy mask? If it was, the moment passed too quickly for her to catch.
“The Ice were careless,” Terzian said, flicking one hand. “They gave me the opening to steal the truck with the Hosts.”
“That’s not how I heard it.” Zerena let her voice gush a little. And heard it she had, from one of her whisperers on the scene. The flurry of magical napalm, the Ice falling back in fear. “I heard—”
“Yes, I can imagine what you heard,” Terzian said sharply. “And I’m sure it was all nonsense. Tell me, Zerena, was your source the same incompetent who claimed to know so much about Jordan Rhemes?”
Zerena flinched, and she hated herself for it. “My contacts sometimes fail me,” she admitted, forcing herself to meet Terzian’s dark eyes. “I’ve never denied that. That contact was—punished.”
Terzian leaned back in his chair. “I see. It’s no matter. As you know, your comrade Sasha provided the information I needed.”
At the mention of Sasha’s name, a wild fury surged up inside Zerena; she clamped down on it, distilling it into action. This was why she was here, wasn’t it? To slip her way through the bramble, back into Terzian’s favor. To undo the damage wrought by Tanushka’s vicious betrayal. If only Zerena could truly punish the girl as she would some useless Flame acolyte.
And so Zerena swallowed her anger and her humiliation, and smiled graciously, as if playing host at one of her parties. “Yes,” she said. “That was quite fortunate for us, wasn’t it?”
Terzian watched her. Waiting. He knew she wasn’t here just to offer her congratulations.
“I wanted to make it up to you,” Zerena continued, pushing herself forward on the couch, leaning toward him like a schoolgirl gossiping with a friend. “I think our victory against the Ice should be celebrated, don’t you?”
A quick wave of his palm. Go on.
“Well, we have the Ice’s Hosts. We shouldn’t let them go to waste.”
“You think I would waste Hosts?” Terzian fixed her with a harsh glare.
“Of course not!” Zerena laughed—hadn’t he told her once, a long time ago, that he’d found her laughter charming? “I only think we must consider the best use of the Hosts—or rather, the elementals inside them.”
Terzian said nothing, and Zerena took this as permission to go on.
“You and I both know that controlling a Host can be a difficult process. And with these Hosts having gone into stasis—who knows what will happen when they wake up? If we can even wake them up at all? They’re ensconced in Ice magic. We should be prepared for the possibility that we could kill them in our attempts to rouse them. At which point, we will simply have more loose elementals.”
Terzian leaned forward—she had his interest. “You want to try the Host creation ritual again.”
He was always so quick. Almost as quick as she was.
“Yes.”
“That ritual backfired when we attempted it in Cairo, and even the simpler effort to capture the loose elementals failed. What makes you think redoing the Cairo ritual will succeed this time?”
Zerena tipped her head in acknowledgment. “Yes, we have failed before. But we are the Flame! We rise from the ashes of our failures.”
“Is that what you’re doing here?” Terzian smirked. “Rising from the ashes of your failure to gather information about Jordan Rhemes? Your failure to capture the loose elementals?”
Zerena’s cheeks burned. But she knew humility was the key to the lock of Terzian’s approval. “Yes,” she conceded. “My whole life is devoted to the Flame. If I have let the organization down—it is my obligation to make amends.”
“And this is how you wish to do it,” Terzian said. “By creating Hosts.”
“Yes.” Zerena let a hint of fervor creep into her voice—it couldn’t hurt. “I’ve been studying the ritual, Terzian, these past few weeks. Studying the way you taught me, all those years ago in Paris. Trying to find the hidden truths in the incantations, in the ritual components. Looking for the organic matter, like you always said—remember?”
He did. She could tell by the way his eyes glittered.
“And I think I know what went wrong in Cairo,” she said, pitching her voice lower. “The group was skilled and strong. The best magicians the Flame could find. Which could only mean the ritual itself was flawed.”
Terzian’s brow furrowed, preparing his protest—to point out, no doubt, that her own ritual to capture the Hosts had been flawed. But Zerena pushed through, not giving him the chance.
“There is a ritual out of Mesopotamia,” she said in a rush. “Perhaps even older. It revolves around the Babylonian talisman. With some tweaking, I think it will suit our purposes very well.”
Terzian tilted his head, his brow creased in concentration. Zerena knew that look. He was cautious, but he was interested. “And where exactly did you get the idea to pull from the past? That doesn’t sound like you, Zerena.”
Zerena smiled. “A lady never gives away her secrets! But I know my way around a library as well as anyone. And sometimes we have to reshape the past to create our future.”
Terzian chuckled at that, and Zerena felt the tension slip out of her shoulders. Just like old times. She still knew how to charm him.
“I’ll want to get a second opinion, of course,” Terzian said, settling back into seriousness. “Talk to some of the others. Examine the ritual myself. But yes, I can see the appeal here. Force the past to work for us.”
“That’s what makes us Flame.” Zerena smiled incandescently at him. “We can adapt and grow. We aren’t trapped in our traditions.”
Terzian nodded. “We’ll need to find potential Hosts as well,” he said. “People willing to take the risk.”
Zerena’s heart fluttered. She had hoped he would broach the matter of the potential Hosts—she hadn’t wanted to bring it up herself, for fear of looking desperate. But since it was out in the open—
“I’m willing to volunteer myself,” she said carefully. “Since it’s my ritual design.”
Terzian peered up at her. “Playing mad scientist, are we, Wraith?”
Zerena said nothing.
“No, I don’t think you’re the right choice for this. You’re a skilled witch, certainly, but for a Host, we need someone more”—he paused and looked at her and Zerena felt fire rising up through her core—“trustworthy.”
The word hovered between them, poisoning the air in the room. “You think I’m not trustworthy?”
Terzian shrugged. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. If we go forward with the ritual and it proves a success, maybe I’ll consider it.” His eyes burned. “Maybe.”
“I see.” Zerena stood up, afraid that if she remained seated he would see her shake with rage. “I understand.” Her voiced hitched a little; of course Terzian noticed. Zerena cursed herself for it.
Tanya. This was Tanya’s fault. Tanya, who had proven far more loyal to the Ice than Zerena had calculated, and far too willing to make Zerena into a fool. Tanya—mousy, good-girl Tanya—her expression guileless as a child’s a
s she handed over those lies, had actually found a way to ruin Zerena’s life.
“You will, of course, participate in the ritual,” Terzian said, his voice like cold cream against her skin. “You’ll be instrumental, I’m sure.”
Not as instrumental as she should be. Zerena nodded once, thanked him, moved toward the door.
She wanted to scream.
2.
Edith stood on the sidewalk outside the old apartment building, staring up at the window she knew had been situated in the tiny kitchen. The apartment still hadn’t been rented out; she had checked that before leaving the office.
Ash, she thought. Ash sprinkled on the windowsill. Dom had been a smoker; it was in his file, and the one time she’d met him, three years ago at Langley, he’d been chomping away on an unlit cigar like some cowboy in an old Western. It would never have occurred to her that the ash was magic.
It would never have occurred to her that magic was even a factor.
Edith took a deep breath and marched up to the entrance, then swiftly took the stairs to the empty apartment. She hadn’t told anyone she was coming here; she wanted a chance to examine the space on her own, to look for clues that might fit in with her new understanding of the true paradigm at play here. Magic.
She picked the lock with steady hands—a trick she’d learned not at Langley but from a local girl she’d befriended during family summers on Martha’s Vineyard—and slipped in. The place seemed unchanged since she and Gabe had visited. She went immediately to the windowsill, where the line of ash still waited, the pattern disturbed by their examination. Holding her breath, she pressed her fingers into it, bracing herself—but of course nothing happened. It was just ash, powdery and soft like confectioner’s sugar. When she sniffed at it, she smelled tobacco and nothing more.
She sighed, disgusted with herself, and brushed her hands together. Ash fluttered to the floor. She turned, taking in her surroundings. Had Gabe seen anything here that day? Anything magical, something she wouldn’t have noticed?
Would she even recognize magic for what it was?
The Witch Who Came In From The Cold: The Complete Season 2: The Complete Season 2 (The Witch Who Came In From The Cold Season 2) Page 35
