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)

by Lindsay Smith

  As they traveled down Strahovská, the car slowed, left turn signal blinking; he was inching into a parking spot in front of a run-down dive, the sort of place that would make Bar Vodnář seem classy and inviting. Edith drove past, flicking her eyes from the road in front of her to the rearview mirror, and the reflection of her target climbing out of the gray car and striding toward the bar. Edith slid into her own parking place two blocks away and considered her options. Her stakeout clothes were loose-fitting and comfortable, but still a touch too dressy for his chosen establishment.

  If she lost the trail now, though, who knew when she might get another chance? She could only hope that flashy suit of his would soak up all the attention.

  She walked quickly to the bar, her quick footsteps echoing in the balmy night. Branislav’s Place was scrawled in blue paint on the door, and tawdry neon Otevřeno and Studené Nápoje signs stained the sidewalk in lurid shades of green and gold that seemed to Edith like their own kind of magic.

  She eased the bar’s heavy door open, the tar-stained wood sticky under her fingers. Branislav’s Place was about half-full, the air thick with smoke and the scent of stale beer. Most of the patrons were gathered around pool tables, and the click of the cues made Edith’s heart jump like she’d just heard a gunshot. She didn’t see her target, only men in work shirts and fashionably long hair, their expressions serious as they considered the configurations on their pool tables.

  But then—

  There, settled into a table near the back. Alone, although there was another beer sitting across from him. Edith strode up to the bar and climbed onto a stool that gave her line of sight on her friend in his expensive suit.

  “What can I get for you?” The bartender swooped down on her, blocking her view.

  “Gin and tonic,” she said, trying to mask her impatience. The man nodded and slipped out of her view.

  Her target wasn’t alone anymore.

  His companion was his inverse: short and round instead of tall and thin, suit shabby and ill-fitting. Where the hell had he come from? The bathroom, she supposed; he certainly hadn’t walked through the front door.

  “Here you go. One gin and tonic.” Edith shoved the money at the barkeep, willing him to make himself scarce. When he stepped away, Edith could see the new man’s face.

  Recognition struck her with a kind of dull revelation.

  Sasha Komyetski.

  Maybe this wasn’t about magic after all. Maybe it was just a Russian thing, like the boy from the apartments had said. But if this was about Russia, what did that say about Dom? Had he been KGB? Had her initial inquiry been right all along?

  Nothing made any damn sense. This thing with magic was supposed to explain why she’d never been able to find a clear reason for Dom’s betrayal. He had been a model officer for years, with none of the usual signs that might reveal a double agent. And yet here she was, staring across the room at the Prague KGB chief of station, the memory of that mysterious ash still on her fingertips.

  Komyetski and the thin man clinked their glasses together and drank, mirroring each other. The station chief grinned, looking, Edith thought, rather pleased with himself. She pretended to sip her drink. The liquor burned her lips. The smoke in the bar stung her eyes. Men moved through her field of vision, and Komyetski and the thin man flickered, like images on an old film.

  Komyetski pulled something out of his jacket pocket.

  Edith stiffened. A weapon? Had she been seen? But no, it was too small to be a gun, and it was the wrong shape to be a knife. It looked—

  Well, it looked rather like Gabe’s copper bracelet, didn’t it?

  It was larger than Gabe’s had been, more ostentatious—perhaps more of a necklace than a bracelet. The dull metal shone in the yellow bar lights, and Komyetski passed the thing through the flame burning in the red cracked-glass votive at the center of their table. And for a very short moment, the span of a heartbeat, Komyetski and the thin man and their table blurred, their colors bleeding together and then snapping back into place. If Edith had not been watching so intently she would have thought it was just a tear filming over her eye, a reaction to the thick smoke in the bar.

  But she knew better. She remembered that conversation with Gabe. The copper bracelet. Now we can talk.

  When she looked at the two men, she felt an ache behind her eyes, an irrepressible need to look over at the others playing pool, or the shaggy-haired bartender counting his tips, or the front door—to look anywhere in this rough-edged dive but that table in the back. She tried to resist as long as she could, but the ache turned into a throbbing jolt of pain, like a migraine; her eyes watered, and when she turned her head, the pain faded. Just like magic.

  She took a long pull from her gin and tonic. So this was it, then. Not hydrogen bombs. Not AK-47s and bomber jets. Just a copper bracelet passed through a flame.

  Edith felt like the world had just cracked open, but she didn’t know what to make of what she’d found.

  3.

  Zerena stretched out in front of the television. Today she had actually turned the silly thing on, and the station was playing some Russian propaganda film, dubbed in Czech, the lips of the actors out of sync with the voices spilling out of the tinny speakers. Even so, the images gave her comfort. As a girl she had watched these films in the cinema and pretended they’d come from America, from Hollywood. It was nothing but light on a white screen, and yet the cinema was where she’d first come to understand beauty.

  And it was Terzian, later, who had shown her how to capture beauty, how to shape the world in the image she saw fit. Not that it mattered. Terzian had lost his faith in her, and the films of her youth had been turned grainy and cheap on her husband’s television set.

  “Zerena?”

  For a disconcerting half a second, Zerena thought one of the actors was calling out to her from the fantasy on the screen. But no, it was only Andula, leaning up against the doorway, looking pitiable even in the fine linen dress Zerena had lent her.

  Zerena suppressed a surge of annoyance—couldn’t the girl see that she didn’t wish to be bothered? But she couldn’t risk alienating Andula now. Not with Terzian turned against her. Not with Sasha so close to winning.

  “Yes, dear?” Zerena pushed herself up to a sitting position. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

  Andula didn’t move from the doorway. On the television, the actors began to sing, a stirring Soviet hymn that no one had bothered to dub.

  “Do you mind if I turn this off?” Andula stepped toward the set without waiting for a reply; Zerena flicked her hand, allowing it. She found the reversal of their roles amusing. Ordinarily Andula was the one in here, communing with the television.

  “Tell me what the problem is, my dear,” Zerena said, turning up the maternal charm she’d used on her students in the Komsomol Youth League, a charm she had focused like a beam of light on Andula since waking her up. “You know I’ll do anything I can to help you.”

  Andula looked down at her with an expression as harsh as the winters of Zerena’s childhood. “Would you?” she said.

  Another surge of annoyance. Zerena lifted her chin. “Of course. I’m here to help you, darling.”

  Andula’s eyes flashed. This was the last thing Zerena needed, to have to delicately massage Andula’s sore ego, to assure her twitchy Host that everything was quite all right, exactly how she wanted it, when Terzian had yet to reach a decision about the ritual, and had refused her request to become a Host, regardless.

  “Then why haven’t you woken up anyone else?” Andula asked.

  Zerena blinked, stared up at her. “Excuse me?”

  “Why aren’t there others?” Andula paced in front of the television, her back hunched over her crossed arms, hair hanging in strands in front of her face. “I wasn’t the only one on the barge, and you told me you—the Flame, I mean—the Flame has all these Hosts just like me, but I’m the only one around.” Her words spilled out of her, faster and faster
, and Zerena sat very still and listened and seethed, her head already starting to ache. “And every time I think about that night that you woke me up, I keep remembering this person.”

  “What person?” Zerena said, straightening up.

  “I don’t know.” Andula’s eyes were unfocused. She shook her head. “I just—I was asleep, but I could remember her—it was a her, I’m sure of that.”

  Andula could remember the night the barge burned? How long had she been holding on to this memory?

  “I’m sure it was nothing,” Zerena said airily. “A fragment of magic. You needn’t worry. As to your question about the other Hosts—”

  “I remember her,” Andula said, but less surely. “Everything was so fragmented when I first woke up, but—”

  “It was nothing,” Zerena said, more sharply than she intended. Andula looked at her with wide eyes, and Zerena stood and draped an arm around Andula’s shoulders. “Trust me. We’ll be waking up the others soon enough.” She tucked a strand of hair behind Andula’s ear. “Don’t you want be a part of something bigger than this little backwater of a city?”

  Andula looked away. Her frown deepened. “I still don’t understand why you haven’t woken up the others.”

  Zerena sighed. “We will. I promise you. We’re waiting until it’s safe. I knew you from the youth league, and I couldn’t stand see you frozen like that—I was given special dispensation.” As good a lie as any, she supposed.

  Andula seemed to accept it, at least for the moment. She nodded and didn’t say anything more. Zerena hoped that would be the end of it—she had bigger problems, with Sasha and Terzian both squeezing in close to her. But then the girl wriggled away from Zerena’s touch and stalked away, alone.

  Zerena felt a surge of anger. She should be able to control a shy little creature like Andula.

  She hoped she wasn’t losing her touch.

  4.

  Edith stood in front of a crumbling old house lit by moonlight, the garden overgrown with spring weeds, the windows boarded over and blacked out. Still buzzing from her trip to Branislav’s Place, she had sped in a fever to the address the boy from the apartment had given her, clutching at hints and possibilities.

  The place was a safe house. She’d been to enough of them to know.

  She crept over to the neighboring house and slipped into the garden, always keeping one eye on the target house. The fence separating the two plots was a flimsy chain-link thing, and it only came up to Edith’s chest. She shrugged out of her jacket and tossed it over the top, then clambered over with a practiced ease that would have shocked any number of the fellows back at Langley.

  The back of the house was as shabby and run-down as the front, and here the weeds grew even higher, coming up almost to her knees. She waded through them, blades whispering at the fabric of her trousers, all her senses alert. There was an uncanny stillness to the air, and even the birds had stopped singing. She saw no hint of movement inside the house.

  Edith slipped a hairpin from behind her ear and sidled up to the back door. But before she could pick the lock, a stabbing pain shot through her fingers, as if she’d been electrocuted. She yelped and yanked her hand away. The pin disappeared into the overgrown grass. Was the lock electrified somehow? It looked completely ordinary, rusted and old-fashioned. She peered closer, rubbing her still-stinging fingers.

  That was when she saw it—some kind of writing scratched into the brick above the lock. She didn’t recognize the script—it certainly wasn’t a Cyrillic one—but something about it struck her as vaguely runic. Ancient.

  Edith looked down at her tingling fingers. Magic. Magic, not electricity.

  She backed away from the door, moving out into the yard. A breeze kicked up and the grasses swayed, the pale flowers bobbing like the heads of teenagers listening to music. She heard a faint tinkling, too, like a wind chime, and she whirled in place, eyes keen—there. In the tree. A little flash of metal. She approached it, her steps cautious. It wasn’t a wind chime. It looked, in fact, like trash that someone had strung up on fishing wire and then tossed into the tree branches. A mobile made of twists of scrap metal and some old, frayed wires wrapped around a bundle of dead grass. The metal pieces clinked together; the dead grass spun in a slow, lazy circle.

  Something sparked behind Edith’s eyes, an ache like the one she’d felt when she spotted Sasha Komyetski with her mystery man in the bar.

  Edith walked briskly over to the fence and swung herself over. She shrugged on her coat, strolled back out to the street. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself; that was the only reason she didn’t run. She slid into her car and closed the door and locked it, and only then did she finally let out a short, gasping breath. Her hand shook as she slid the key into the ignition, as she turned over the engine. She glanced at the safe house in the rearview mirror. It still looked empty.

  She couldn’t keep doing this, not by herself. Charms and runes and strange little sculptures hanging from the trees—none of this was what she had trained for.

  She would have to go to Pritchard.

  • • •

  Gabe stepped out of the break room, a cup of coffee steaming in his hand. He was still a little bleary-eyed—hadn’t been sleeping well, not since the docks. One of the secretaries waved at him and he waved back, plastering on a grim semblance of a smile.

  When he got to his desk, Edith was waiting for him.

  Gabe slowed, blinking the last of the sleep out of his eyes. Edith sat primly, her knees pressed together, hands folded in her lap. She looked up at him before he could say anything and gave him a quick lightning flash of a smile, tight and unfriendly.

  “Hey, Edith,” he said, cautious, before sliding into his chair. “Can I help you with something?”

  “Yes. I have some questions. Related to my investigation.”

  Gabe sipped his coffee so he wouldn’t have to say anything.

  Edith leaned forward, dropping her voice a little. “You have—expertise,” she said, “that I think would be useful.”

  Gabe didn’t like the sound of this. “Expertise?”

  She nodded.

  “Is it the kind of expertise we should be discussing—” He waved a hand around. “You know.” Here, he didn’t want to say. In front of Frank and everybody.

  Edith sighed. “I’ve arranged for us to use one of the secure meeting rooms. Are you amenable?”

  Gabe looked down at his cup, at the flat brown liquid within. The bitterness clung to his tongue. Too bitter, really—one of the girls had overbrewed it.

  “Fine,” he said.

  Edith stood up and strolled away, clearly expecting Gabe to follow her. He did, a dead weight sitting in his stomach. The docks had been a disaster in every conceivable way. The Ice lost the Hosts, and now Edith knew about magic. He suspected Josh did as well. At least if Josh had found out, the revelation of the magical world would be a bit of a relief—see, Gabe wasn’t a counteragent, just a half-baked sorcerer, that’s not suspicious or anything. But with Edith, there was no way of knowing what she was going to do. Maybe she would turn him in or maybe she would order a psychiatric evaluation or maybe she would just round him up and ship him back to Langley so the CIA could dissect him.

  Edith ushered him inside the meeting room and shut the door. The air felt too thick, too still.

  “Please,” she said, “have a seat.”

  Gabe sank into one of the chairs set up around the table in the center of the room. The walls were reinforced concrete, designed to muffle their voices.

  “Are you recording?” he asked.

  Edith looked at him. Her expression was inscrutable.

  “No,” she said, and then sat down. She folded her hands in front of her. Watched him for a moment. Gabe shrank back in his chair and clutched at his coffee like a talisman, wishing he could worm his way out of her gaze.

  “I have questions about,” she coughed, “magic.”

  “I take it this is about your Dom invest
igation, then.”

  “Well, yes.” She shifted in her seat. “The revelation about—magic—” A pause before the word, like she wasn’t sure she should even be saying it. “—has offered a new route of inquiry.”

  “I figured it would.”

  “I have some questions.”

  The weight in Gabe’s stomach shifted, rolled over. This wasn’t about him, after all. But it still wasn’t good.

  “Look,” he said. “I know you’re excellent at your job. I’m sure you can handle yourself.”

  Edith frowned.

  “But playing with magic isn’t the same as playing with the KGB. You need to be careful.”

  Silence. A silence made heavier by the unmoving air of that muffled room. Edith shifted in her seat, uncrossing her legs, crossing them again. “I am well aware of how to be careful,” she said. “You don’t become a female agent in the CIA without that knowledge.”

  Gabe blinked, surprised at that slight slipping of her facade, that hint at vulnerability.

  “I’m sure you’re careful,” he said, after a moment. “But we’re not talking about a man with a gun here—”

  “I recognize that.” Her expression hardened. “Which is why I came to you, Mr. Pritchard. Which is why I arranged for this room to be available this morning. Which is why we are sitting at this table and why I told you, from the beginning, that I had questions.”

  Gabe felt like he was back in grade school, being reprimanded by his teacher in front of the class.

  “I know how to protect myself from, as you put it, a man with a gun. But I need some guidance protecting myself from—” The pause again. “Magic.”

  Gabe closed his eyes, took a deep breath.

  “I am not stupid, Mr. Pritchard.”

  “Oh,” Gabe said, “I know that.”

  “Well?” She tapped her fingers against the glossy tabletop. “Can you help me or not?”