“Hold on a sec. Doesn’t this whole scenario strike you as just a little bit Batman?”
Gritting his teeth against yet another of the hitchhiker’s minor tantrums, Gabe said, “That depends. Am I Adam West or Burt Ward in this analogy?”
“You’re clearly the sidekick, so Ward, obviously. But I’m serious. Why bother to keep Frank alive rather than just kill him outright?”
“This whole thing reeks of panic to me. Frank forced Cartwright’s hand. But, lacking an obvious way to fix the problem, our NATO friend just kicked the can down the road, hoping to buy the Flame enough time to devise a real solution.”
Josh’s upper lip bulged as the tip of his tongue probed his incisors, suggesting that what bothered him was irritating as a piece of stringy beef. “I get the panic angle. But this …” He gestured around the warehouse, and the deranged life-size version of Mouse Trap it contained. “A locked basement would have sufficed, no?”
“As a hostage, Frank is guaranteed to draw us out. So if he does die, Plan B is to eliminate as many of us as possible, thereby reducing the ranks of Flame’s adversaries.” Gabe shrugged. “They’re big believers in the whole scorched earth thing.”
“Damn. Are you sure we’re not talking about the KGB?”
“Not entirely. But if we survive the night, I’ll draw a Venn diagram for you.” Gabe squinted at the network of gossamer trip wires, simultaneously looking inward and outward. A faint glow briefly enveloped the forklift before the hitchhiker shook free of his grip. He sighed.
“Anyway,” he said, “it’s even more complicated than it looks.”
Josh cast his gaze across the tangle of trip wires. “Is that even possible?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Frank chimed in, “because you’re both going to leave, right goddamned now, before you kill yourselves. This needs somebody experienced with demolitions and unexploded munitions. You clowns aren’t.”
“The North Vietnamese use Soviet munitions. This appears to be standard-issue Red Army.”
“I don’t care if it’s a firecracker. You …”
Frank’s voice faded beneath the keening howl of the hitchhiker. The source of its agitation wasn’t a mystery. The ley lines’ vibrations were the mystical equivalent of fingernails on a slate blackboard.
Tanya had gone to stop it, running off half-cocked, surely outnumbered. Wasn’t that his role, the American stereotype? Then again, where had Tanya’s steely Russian resolve been when she kiss—
Gabe shook his head. Focus, Pritchard. Focus!
He redoubled his grip on the enraged elemental in his head. Then he climbed the drum Josh had found. From the slightly elevated perspective, he studied the Gordian knot with his inner sight, tracing magical currents.
A convulsion wracked the magical fabric of the city. Frank groaned as the pendant on his chest flared afterimage-bright. The hitchhiker went berserk. Gabe tumbled from his perch to a hard landing on concrete, his shifting weight toppling the empty drum. It hit the floor with a sharp clang, then rolled toward the nest of trip wires.
“Shit!” yelled Josh, as he threw himself on the drum.
• • •
Tanya shivered.
When the rain had gone from drizzle to downpour, the water leaking from the dented downspout overhead had become a waterfall straight into her hiding spot. She reminded herself it could have been much worse: With every free elemental in Prague whipped into a frenzy, it was a miracle she didn’t find herself crouched amid a rain of frogs, or glass, or, for that matter, molten lead.
Ordinarily, keeping the rain off would have been a trivial bit of spellcraft. She’d passed more than one cold, wet night on the streets of Prague feeling warm and dry. But whatever Flame was doing across the street, it had the ley lines quivering like a Lubyanka prisoner. Tonight there was no such thing as trivial spellcraft. No such thing as an inconspicuous conjuration or a silent incantation. Tonight, the secret side of Prague was a war zone, and Flame had fired the first shot.
Ice had failed to hold the line. And now …
Bar Vodnář had become impenetrable to a sorceress of her talents, thanks to wards and shields of astonishing strength, workings only possible with direct access to the energy provided by a ley line confluence. It would have taken something remarkable to breach that barrier.
The golem might have been able to do it. But there wasn’t time to retrieve it, and even then she’d need Gabe’s help to awaken it. Admittedly, they did work well together when circumstances demanded it. And his lips tasted—
Focus!
Flame was taking no chances—in addition to the magical wards, there were sentries posted outside the perimeter. Tanya counted and timed them. One lucky fellow slouched in the doorway, sheltered from the rain and partially hidden by the delivery truck that had arrived an hour previously. Every few minutes his walkie-talkie squawked to life with some terse, unintelligible query, and, after squinting up and down the street yet again, he’d respond in kind. Constant status updates suggested that those inside the bar were waiting for something and getting antsy about it.
Meanwhile, the man in the doorway had at least four friends: one on the bar roof, one at each end of the street, and a clumsy woman hunkered under a tarp on the fire escape overhead, whose shivering coaxed a faint clinking from the metal frame. And that wasn’t counting the figure who’d entered the alley a few moments ago.
The person inching closer was still a good ten meters away, but without a way to camouflage herself, Tanya would become visible in moments. She reached for the blade tucked into her boot, hoping to hell her pruny fingers wouldn’t lose their grip. And that the white noise hiss of rain and clatter of the fire escape would hide the sound of a scuffle. Slowly, quietly, she flexed the muscles in her calves, readied for a lunge.
The approaching figure paused behind a row of trash cans, and … waved. She pointed up, at the sentry on the fire escape.
Tanya released a long, shaky sigh. Jordan. She nodded in acknowledgment. The other woman scooted closer, moving gingerly, like somebody who’d lost a fight.
They leaned their heads together. Jordan whispered, “What’s going on over there?”
“Nobody in or out since I’ve been watching. I think—”
Jordan clutched at her arm and nodded toward the street, a breath hissing between her teeth. Tanya glanced up just in time to see two people in rain cloaks approach the sentry guarding the front door. She recognized Zerena by her height and stride, but from behind in a hard rain the other was unknown to her.
The sentry straightened, clearly surprised. He spoke into his walkie-talkie. The back-and-forth with those inside grew increasingly fraught, voices raised almost to the point where Tanya could make out individual words. Thunder boomed.
Zerena motioned impatiently at the sentry’s walkie-talkie. After a moment’s hesitation, he handed it over. She spoke quietly at some length, then immediately returned the device to the sentry without waiting for a response. When one arrived, he looked alarmed, and quickly cleared the entryway. Zerena touched her shrouded companion on the shoulders. The sentry joined them in retreating a few paces into the street.
“They’re lifting the barrier,” Tanya whispered. “This is our chance. Get ready.”
Jordan shook her head. Rain sluiced from her sodden hair. “Be reasonable, Morozova. We couldn’t stop them even if we did get inside. Not the two of us. Terzian has my entire inventory at his fingertips, and access to enough power to keep everything charged for weeks.”
The stone in the pit of Tanya’s stomach became a boulder. The bar housed a world-class collection of charms: She’d glimpsed just a fraction of it when Jordan let them into the cellar to perform the ritual that downed an airplane and killed a defector Host.
An arcane wind tugged at her, as though a mystical airlock had opened. Zerena clutched her companion’s hand and sprinted, half-dragging her toward the entrance. They leapt into the entryway. The mad scramble had caused the other’s hood
to fall askew, revealing Andula Zlata.
“Bozhe moi,” Tanya whispered. “Not you, too.”
Then the barrier slammed shut again, hard enough to send tremors through the magical foundations of Prague and waft a mélange of ghostly scents into the rainy night: dungwort, lavender, boneset. The door closed behind Zerena and her companions.
Jordan whispered, “What was that?”
A bad night taking a turn for the worse. “Now Flame has the confluence, and your inventory, and a Host.”
“Shit.”
“What now? We can’t just shiver here until they either complete whatever ritual they’re doing or find us and kill us.”
“We can’t stop them, but we can slow them down. Give me your knife.” Jordan pointed her chin toward a utility pole on the corner. “And help me get up there.”
• • •
You stupid, petulant child.
Two ice cubes clinked into a cut-glass tumbler. They cracked and popped when Alestair splashed them with gin, finishing with a pour of rather inferior tonic water.
He stared out the mean little window of his mean little flat to a mean little street in a mean little city caught in the grip of a shabby empire. It was raining stair-rods outside, hard enough to splash raindrops against the pane. A streetlamp spewed dingy light into a wretched night. Dismal weather to match his mood.
He sipped, then winced. Perhaps he ought to go native and stick to slivovice.
I’ve tried to help you, Joshua Toms. I’ve tried to give you a more joyful world. In return I’ve asked so little of you: Discretion. Boundaries. Alestair’s hand ached. Instead you fixate only on the locked doors. Ice in his glass cracked again. I offered you the very best of me, but instead you kept digging, digging, digging in the swamp until your spade started turning up skulls—
The tumbler shattered. A geyser drenched his bleeding hand, his face, his waistcoat. Shards of glass and ice, virtually indistinguishable from each other but for the sound they made ricocheting from the window, scattered across the floor like hailstones.
“Damnation!”
He dropped the broken glass, tugged a pocket square from the suit coat draped over a nearby chair, and wrapped it around his hand. The streetlamp flickered—the city power grid flirting with failure. Another brownout, courtesy of the Great Soviet.
“Bloody Reds.”
Alestair surveyed the glittering wreckage of his drink strewn across the floor, a constellation of shards and spirits. Odd that it should shine so brightly on such a dark night. Odd that his own lamps weren’t flickering, too, come to think of it.
He looked outside again. The light flared and dimmed with a slow but regular pulsation. Like a periodic fluctuation in the mains … or the ethereal but elevated heartbeat of free elementals roaming Prague.
The light wasn’t waxing and waning, he realized. The darkness was.
But it would take a profound effort to rile the spirits so thoroughly, so dangerously. And the energy required to fuel such an effort could be found in only one place in the entire city. One place in hundreds of miles, for that matter.
Alestair clenched his fists, barely aware of the sting as gin and lime juice seeped into his cuts. “Jordan Rhemes, what have you done, you stupid woman?”
Jordan, Joshua, Gabriel: a confederacy of fools. Even levelheaded Tatiana and fierce Nadezhda. Children, all of them. Foolish, churlish children.
It came with a strange and shameful sense of relief, then, learning that his enemies had outmaneuvered him. For if nothing else, it promised a change.
Carpet squished underfoot. The wardrobe door sported a long crack from Joshua’s tantrum. Alestair ripped the false panel open, unconcerned about concealing it again.
When the secret police, the Státní bezpečnost, searched this flat—and they would—they’d find nothing.
He stuffed charms into every pocket of his trousers, his sodden waistcoat, his suit coat, and his overcoat until their combined aura was an electric scrape against his skin.
With that, he departed the flat. He paused in the corridor, deliberating, then turned around and fetched the umbrella from the stand alongside the coat rack. Then he set off, neither closing nor locking the door.
What point in that? He wouldn’t be back.
2.
Rain pelted the broken stained glass windows of a deconsecrated church. A gust of wind rattled the leaden mullions and spritzed them with raindrops. Van spoke over the noise.
“I thought we had an understanding. We’d agreed to keep our distance.”
“There’s—”
“Save your breath. I felt the change building well before you became aware of it.”
“Then you know how dangerous this is.”
“Dangerous to who? It doesn’t affect me. Why should I care if this city, and your naive ideologies, are reduced to smoking ruins?”
Nadia drew a calming breath, made a deliberate—and, she hoped, visible—effort to unclench the fingers that were curling into fists, and swallowed her pride. It was terribly bitter.
“Van. Please. I am begging you to help us. Please.”
“Ice, Flame, West, East, communist, capitalist, you’re all the same to me. I don’t care who’s on top from one day to the next.” The other woman shook her head, squinting at Nadia with a look that could have pinned her to the wall. “I honestly don’t know why I found you interesting. You’re no different from your various enemies.”
Van argued like she boxed. She went right for the spot where Nadia was weakest, most vulnerable. That strategy was a precursor to burning all bridges and never looking back. And that hurt more than any gut punch.
“You hypocrite! You came to Prague to sow discord, to kick us in the teeth, to kick them in the teeth, but now they’re on the verge of something deeply dangerous, and you can’t be bothered to care. You’re leaving when you might otherwise have to—”
Nadia broke off as a massive tremor roiled the mystical foundations of Prague. She caught her balance against the wall. Van stood motionless, anchored to the floor with inhuman solidity.
“—to take a position.”
“My position is clear,” said Van.
She turned to depart. To her back, Nadia said, “Zerena Pulnoc controls a Host, you know. But if you truly don’t care how Flame intends to use the nexus, then you won’t care what happens to her, either.”
Van froze in mid-step. I know your weaknesses, too, lover. There was a long silence, and when her voice came, it was almost a growl. “If I join forces with you tonight, it is not because I have allied with your faction. I care only about saving that Host. If I have to trample you to do that, I will.”
Nadia bowed her head, relieved for the short term, dreading a long-term heartbreak. But loneliness was for the living. One thing at a time.
“Of course.”
“And once the Host is free, I’m leaving. I will not stay. Not now.”
You were never going to stay. Is it kindness or cruelty that moves you to suggest otherwise?
“I know.”
• • •
When Andula Zlata had awoken from the agony of stasis, her first thought—her first coherent thought, after the hoarfrost had receded from her soul and her mind was no longer a silent, endless scream—was that she’d fallen into a fable, and that her fairy godmother had rescued her from a thousand-year curse.
Zerena, after all, was everything a fairy godmother was supposed to be. Beautiful, kind, nurturing, confident, glamorous, powerful, protective, effective. All that Andula wanted to be, and more. She was the embodiment of things Andula hadn’t even known she’d wanted, until Zerena opened her eyes to the vast potential within her own self. Exactly the ally she needed against those who’d taken and tortured her, like that scrawny, lying KGB bitch.
But a fairy godmother didn’t shove a letter opener between somebody’s ribs. A fairy godmother didn’t step lightly over the dead man oozing into the office rug, scrubbing blood from her manicured nails wh
ile telling her young charge that they’d be going into the city at once, as though it were nothing but a shopping trip. Wicked witches and servants of evil cults did things like that.
And now Andula was trapped with the lot of them. Zerena wasn’t even the worst of the bunch. Not by a wide margin. Compared to this horrible old man, Terzian, Zerena was a model of motherly compassion.
Andula tried to still her body as Terzian passed, his cane drawing echoes both audible and inaudible from the cellar. Zerena’s unexpected arrival had put the old man in a rage so hot it practically rose from him in waves. It was only by virtue of her bargaining chip—which was to say, Andula herself—that Zerena succeeded in talking her way inside.
Now she and Terzian bristled at each other.
I should have run away when we were on the street, Andula lamented. I should have broken free and run for my life.
But the energies swirling through Prague scraped against her soul as though she were a musical instrument, putting a thrum in her bones that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. And it had grown stronger, eerily seductive, as they approached the bar. She had crossed that dark threshold, and now she was sealed inside a barrier she didn’t understand, but whose presence she could feel.
The stone cellar beneath Bar Vodnář was lined with shelves, row upon row of them. Before her stasis, before she’d learned about Hosts and elementals and the secret fabric of the world, Andula would have found the collection perplexing, a pointless collection of trinkets. But now she could feel the truth. Her elemental, that mysterious, unknowable angel God had gifted to her personally, fixated on the charms like a tomcat prowling the alley behind a fishmonger’s shop. She didn’t need to know their purposes to know they were rare and valuable. Andula shivered again.
More than anything, Andula yearned to commune with her elemental angel. To converse in full prose, rather than in unpredictable and undecipherable flashes of emotion. But why would Terzian and Zerena let that happen, when it meant Andula would have the power to walk away from them forever?
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 47
