Wolf nudged the coals with one foot, and they scorched the leather toe of his boot, too.
“May your words turn to flaming coals in your throat,” he murmured, as if he were reciting an old curse to himself. And then a sudden grin flashed across his face as he saw what Ruthie had done. “But she coated the coals with ice, didn’t she? Imagine coming up with that! Clever woman!”
Wolf’s smile faded quickly, though, replaced by an anxious scowl that grew more worried with every passing moment.
The flames forked and flickered around Sacha’s mother like snakes’ tongues. Then another sort of magic began to mingle with the flames—a cold, wintry kind of magic, as calm and hushed as a New York side street the morning after a fresh fall of snow had blanketed the city.
The two magics seemed to battle each other—heat against cold, molten steel against ice water. But it was no use. The fire was winning. Sacha could see it in his mother’s flushed cheek and hear it in her agonized breathing.
“Get your grandfather!” Wolf ordered. “Now! Run!”
Sacha and Lily arrived at the shul on Canal Street just as Rabbi Kessler was settling in for a nice argument with a few of his favorite students.
“Wonderful, wonderful!” Grandpa Kessler cried, as he caught sight of Sacha. “We just needed one more to make a minyan, and here you are!”
But then he saw the look on Sacha’s face.
They had made it almost all the way back to the factory when Sacha heard a familiar purring sound—and turned around to see the Astral family limousine behind them. Mo and Rabbi Kessler watched open-mouthed as the long, sleek automobile coasted to a stop beside them. And their mouths opened even wider when the back door swung outward to reveal Maleficia Astral, swathed in snow-white lace and looking as if she had dressed especially for the role of angelic rescuer.
“Oh, thank God!” Lily cried. And somehow, before Sacha could decide what he thought about this new development, Lily was dragging him into the familiar car beside her.
Mo and Rabbi Kessler got in beside them—Mo apologizing profusely for treading on Mrs. Astral’s dress. Mrs. Astral said a quiet word to the impassive chauffeur. And then they were off.
“Well, this is exciting!” Mrs. Astral said. “He told me you would be here, and I dashed right off to find you!”
“Who told you?” Lily asked, suddenly looking a little squeamish. “Inquisitor Wolf? Did he call you on the telephone? Where’d he find one?”
“Hush, dear,” Mrs. Astral said in that absent-minded tone of voice she always seemed to use when she spoke to her only daughter. “Let the men talk.”
And then she turned to Sacha.
“Sacha,” Lily whispered, tugging at his sleeve, “I’m not sure—”
But it was too late. Sacha had been dubious about getting in the car in the first place—he was always dubious about Mrs. Astral when she wasn’t right there in front of him. But now that she was talking to him and gazing into his eyes and smiling sympathetically at him, he could think no evil of her. So he told her everything, the words tumbling out in a great rush.
“Oh, how terrible for you!” she exclaimed.
“Can’t you ask the driver to go faster?” Sacha pleaded. “We have to get to Pentacle!”
“Don’t worry about that, dear. It’s all taken care of. We’ve come up with a much better plan.”
“Who?” Lily asked. “Wolf? Or—” She burst into a violent coughing fit before she could finish her question.
Not that it made any difference. Because by that time, they had all realized that they weren’t going to Pentacle at all. They were heading uptown. And the driver must have been going very fast indeed, because a few minutes later, they squealed around the corner of the Gothic arch of Morgaunt’s Fifth Avenue mansion.
Bella da Serpa met them at the door. She looked surprised to see them. But after the briefest of hesitations, she shrugged and led them into the dark and empty library.
A moment later, Morgaunt arrived. He took one look around the library, grasped the situation, and exploded in fury.
“What are they doing here?” he asked Maleficia Astral, his eyes blazing. “How could you be such a fool?”
“But—you told me—” Lily’s mother protested, suddenly sounding like a chastened child and not the first lady of New York high society.
“No one will ask questions about a bunch of poor Jews, but how are we going to explain the death of John Jacob Astral’s daughter?”
“I can take care of her,” Lily’s mother said, showing a chilling lack of concern that Morgaunt had just suggested murdering her own daughter. “Just a simple memory hex—”
But Morgaunt cut her off with an angry gesture. “No, this has all gone terribly wrong. It’s time to cut our losses and move on.”
Mrs. Astral tried to say something, but Morgaunt just turned to Bella da Serpa and began speaking to her as if they were the only two people in the room.
“Call my private subway car,” he told the librarian. “We’re going on a little ride with Miss Astral.” He turned a cold eye on Sacha. “And as for this one, I have a piece of unfinished business with him that I should have dealt with long ago.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Rabbi’s Bargain
SACHA LOOKED AT Lily, who was taking this all in with eyes the size of dinner plates, but Morgaunt was already turning his attention to Sacha. “I had a more subtle game in mind for you,” Morgaunt told him, “but I’m afraid this has forced my hand.” He glanced at Mo Lehrer and Rabbi Kessler. “Too bad about the old men, though. There’s really no reason for them to be involved.”
“Now, wait just a minute!” Mo Lehrer stepped forward, thrusting out his chest in a pitiful gesture of defiance. “If Sacha’s involved, we’re involved!”
“Oh, really?” Morgaunt drawled. “And what does that mean? That you’ll pray to your pathetic God while I kill the boy right in front of you?”
“You wouldn’t dare!” Mo pointed to Rabbi Kessler. “That’s the greatest Kabbalist in New York!”
But Morgaunt just threw back his head and laughed. Then he turned his steely gaze on Sacha. “Come here, boy. I want you to meet someone.”
Sacha felt his feet moving, carrying him forward toward Morgaunt’s beckoning finger. He tried to stop them, but they seemed to belong to someone else, someone who wanted to go to Morgaunt, who wanted to obey him, to follow him—
“Stop!” cried a voice that he barely recognized. It was Mo Lehrer—but a Mo Lehrer that Sacha had never seen before. He faced Morgaunt across the floor like David taking on a modern-day Goliath. As Sacha watched in amazed disbelief, Mo raised his hand to cast a spell at Morgaunt.
“No,” Rabbi Kessler said in a voice that carried across the great hall despite its quietness. “Not that way. Not his way.”
“But, Rabbi—”
Grandpa Kessler shook his head mournfully. “Listen to your heart, old friend. Use the name of God to fight him, and you become no better than he is.”
Mo began to protest, but then he sighed and shrank into himself and admitted defeat without another word.
Morgaunt smiled coldly. Then he flicked a finger at Sacha and a circle of flame burst up around him, trapping him inside.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Rabbi Kessler said.
“Or what?” Morgaunt taunted.
Rabbi Kessler said nothing.
“I thought as much,” Morgaunt said scornfully. “What’s the point of having power when you don’t have the guts to use it?”
Sacha wanted his grandfather to argue—to do something, at least—but he just bowed his head.
Then Morgaunt began to chant, if you could call it chanting. It was more like a droning muttering, really. As if Morgaunt couldn’t even be bothered to say the spells in a proper voice. As if he was toying with forces that would overpower ordinary mortals, but that he couldn’t even be bothered to be frightened of. Magic was a tool to Morgaunt, Sacha realized. He used it, bu
t he despised it. Just like he despised all the nameless workers who wore themselves out in his factories.
Morgaunt droned on. The ring of flames smoked and crackled and threw off a sickly greenish light. Sacha grew dizzy. He shook his head, trying to clear his brain. He was seeing double. Was there a shadow between him and the flames, or was there another person standing in the circle beside him? He wasn’t seeing double at all, he realized suddenly. The shadows flickering across his eyes weren’t an echo of the library, but the image of a completely different place.
It was a pit, dark except for a faint shaft of light from far above. And there was someone in the pit. It was a child—a boy no older than Sacha himself. He was crumpled up against the wall with his face hidden so that all Sacha could see of him was a mop of dark curls and a pale strip of neck above tattered clothing.
Sacha’s heart wrung with pity. He didn’t have to see the boy’s face. Just one look at the shivering body in its pathetic rags was enough to know that he was looking at a prisoner who had abandoned all hope of rescue.
He bent over the boy. Without thinking, he reached out to touch him, to console and comfort him. And then the boy turned to face him.
Ice flowed through Sacha’s veins, stripping away his warmth, his strength, his very will to live. The face looking up at him was his face. And the eyes—black, bottomless, hopeless—were the eyes of his dybbuk. As he looked into the dybbuk’s eyes, he could sense its thoughts and memories. He saw the preceding months stretching out in his mind’s eye as if he himself had lived them, as if the flashes of memory were his own and not the dybbuk’s. He saw Morgaunt seducing Naftali Asher with the etherograph’s eerie music, giving the musician his heart’s deepest desire even as he plotted to use Asher to bring down the IWW. He saw his mother as Morgaunt cast the spell of forgetting on her. He saw the dybbuk sabotaging Asher’s electric tuxedo and understood at last the double game Morgaunt had played—murdering Asher and hiring Sacha’s own mother in his place so that Wolf could only solve the case by destroying his own apprentice. And finally Sacha caught the haziest glimpse, limited by the dybbuk’s own confusion, of Morgaunt’s larger plan to wrest magical power from Minsky and the city’s other gang lords.
Then the darkness swirled sickeningly, and he was standing once again in Morgaunt’s library, the dybbuk beside him—and both of them trapped in the circle.
“What are you waiting for?” Morgaunt asked the dybbuk. He strode to the mahogany cabinet and wrenched its doors open. Inside, Edison’s etherograph cylinders glimmered white and gold in the firelight. Morgaunt plucked a cylinder from the cabinet and held it out so that the dybbuk could see it. From the way the dybbuk was looking back and forth between the cylinder and Sacha, he could guess exactly whose soul was imprinted on the fragile golden foil.
“Kill him, and it’s yours,” Morgaunt told the dybbuk.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Rabbi Kessler said again, but this time, Morgaunt didn’t even bother to look at him.
Suddenly a wave of angry defiance swept through Sacha’s body. He was dead already—that much was obvious. But he’d be damned if he was going to go down without a fight.
He lunged at Morgaunt, but as he reached the edge of the circle, the line on the floor exploded into a wall of fire. He staggered back, and in that instant, the dybbuk was upon him. He fought it any way he could, grabbing and tearing at its ragged clothes, even though he could barely get hold of the creature itself.
Sacha heard his grandfather outside the circle telling him to stop, but he ignored him. Worse, he felt angry at him for not standing up to Morgaunt. What was the use of quietly talking to a man who was hell-bent on committing murder? What was the use of standing by and doing nothing while Morgaunt did evil?
But the more Sacha fought the dybbuk, the more he felt himself slipping under its power. He grew weaker, and the dybbuk grew stronger. Moment by moment, he became less certain of what he was fighting for. Moment by moment, it became harder to remember that he was Sacha, easier to think of himself as the shadow and the dybbuk as the real boy.
Finally, Grandpa Kessler stepped forward, crossing the line of flames as though they were nothing more than a pattern woven into Morgaunt’s Persian carpet.
As he crossed into the circle, he changed. His bent back straightened, and his shabby clothes shone with an inner fire. He became awesome and terrible. He stepped in between Sacha and the dybbuk like an avenging angel. The dybbuk quailed before him.
And then, as Sacha watched, frozen in horror, his grandfather stepped forward, opened his arms wide, and gave himself over to the creature. Suddenly the avenging angel was gone. There was only an old man, frail and small.
“Come to me,” he told the dybbuk. “Come and be at peace.”
The dybbuk wavered for a moment, then stepped into the circle of the old man’s arms.
Sacha had seen the dybbuk attack before. He had seen it grow strong on Antonio’s hatred and hunger for revenge. He had seen it prey on Lily’s secret loneliness, a loneliness he understood all too well when he heard the way her mother spoke about her to Morgaunt. But what the dybbuk drew from Rabbi Kessler’s soul was completely different. It wasn’t hate and sorrow, but warmth and love and life itself.
For a moment—just for a moment—it seemed that it would be enough to fill the howling emptiness inside the dybbuk. But it wasn’t. Rabbi Kessler might as well have tried to fill an ocean with his little glass of water. The dybbuk’s hunger grew. The old man wavered and faded. And still the swallowing darkness rose around them.
“No!” Sacha screamed.
It was too late.
His grandfather was gone, and he was alone in the circle with the dybbuk.
“Kill him!” Morgaunt bellowed.
The creature bore down on him, stronger than ever now that it had devoured yet another life. Sacha retreated to the edge of the circle. He felt the flames licking at his back. He could see Lily on the other side of the circle, writhing desperately in Bella da Serpa’s arms. And then he saw Lily raise one foot and stomp with all her might on the librarian’s pointy-toed shoe.
Bella shrieked, and Lily wriggled out of her grasp, dashed forward, and trampled on the flames until she had cleared a path out of the circle for him.
Now Sacha was free to leave—but so was the dybbuk.
Sacha dashed to the break in the flames, but the dybbuk got there first. For a moment, it wavered at the opening, unable to decide whether to escape or to attack Sacha.
“Kill him!” Morgaunt shouted.
He brandished the etherograph cylinder over his head, urging the dybbuk on, taunting it with its long-coveted treasure. The dybbuk turned to watch. And then, instead of attacking Sacha, it flung itself on Morgaunt like a cornered
tiger, slashed viciously at his face, and ripped the cylinder from his hand.
The dybbuk fled across the entrance hall, its bare feet pattering like rain on the polished marble. Sacha raced after it. He wanted to stay by his grandfather’s body, but something stronger than grief had taken hold of him. The dybbuk couldn’t be allowed to escape into the teeming city and prey on its defenseless millions.
He could hear Bella da Serpa’s high-heeled shoes skittering across the marble close behind him, and he hoped fervently that Lily and Mo were coming too.
At the far end of the hall, the dybbuk ducked into a dark doorway. Sacha followed—and almost fell straight down a long flight of stairs. Down it curved, far deeper than any basement, deep into the earth below the mansion. What could the dybbuk possibly want down here? Was it going back to the pit Morgaunt had pulled it out of?
A smell wafted up from the darkness below—and just as Sacha recognized it, the stairs dumped him out into a place he had heard rumors of but never seen before: J. P. Morgaunt’s private subway station.
The dybbuk was just in front of him, racing alongside the tracks. The platform narrowed to a slender walkway above the tracks. There was nowhere to go but forward. If he reached out, he mi
ght just be able to grab the dybbuk. What he would do then, he had no idea. But he did know that he couldn’t afford to let the dybbuk escape.
Closer . . . closer . . . he almost had him.
Sacha leaped forward. But the dybbuk leaped too—right off the platform onto the tracks.
The third rail glinted menacingly in the shadows. He heard a popping crackle as the dybbuk crossed over it, but nothing happened. Either the dybbuk had just barely brushed the electrified rail or it was immune to electricity.
Sacha gathered his nerve and jumped. He landed with a wrenching stumble and almost fell face-down across the third rail himself. Somehow he kept his feet and kept on running— but it was no good. The dybbuk was far ahead.
Going, going, gone . . . until it was lost in the inky darkness, a shadow melting into deeper shadow.
Sacha pulled up, limping, and hobbled back toward the station. He could see Lily and Bella da Serpa standing at the edge of the platform, where they had stopped when they saw him give up the chase. They peered anxiously into the shadows while they waited for him to reach them. Or at least Lily looked anxious. He couldn’t tell what Bella da Serpa was feeling, and before he had made it back to the station, she slipped away.
“Are you all right?” Lily asked.
“Yes,” he gasped. But he hardly knew what he was saying; all he could think of was his grandfather’s limp body lying upstairs in the library.
By the time they climbed the stairs, there were police swarming over the whole house. Sacha expected to be arrested any moment, but then he saw Wolf coming out of the library supporting a haggard-looking Mr. Lehrer.
“My grandfather—” Sacha began, knowing what the answer would be but hoping against all logic and reason that he would be wrong.
The Watcher in the Shadows Page 22
