by Michele Lang
I threw my magical muscle into the fray. “No!” I screamed, and the vampire’s body flew backward into the trunk of an aspen tree, hard. The trunk snapped like a matchstick and the tree toppled, the crown slowly falling away.
The impact had broken Antonio’s back. The demon tried to make him walk, but the effort was pointless; he looked like a marionette tangled in his own strings. With a roar of frustration, Asmodel exited through Antonio’s lolling, open mouth, stretching it too wide and breaking Antonio’s jaw as he left.
I caught him inside the energy I held between my hands, a fly caught in honey, and held him fast, my arms aching with the effort. “Asmodel, be still,” I ordered, tears of exertion streaming from my eyes. “Stop.”
He squirmed furiously between my hands, and broke free. With a despairing cry I once again ordered him back, but he was too fast. Asmodel tore through the tree branches, across the field, and was gone.
With a stifled sob, I ran to Antonio. He was dead, his skin still smoking in the afternoon sunlight. The life of a bloodlust vampire is precarious in the best of circumstances, and Antonio had lived for longer than anyone could have expected.
But the fact remained. I had killed him. I sank to my knees and covered my face in my hands. Raziel’s voice called to me from a great distance.
His fingers caressed my arms, and Raziel held me close. “You are shaking like a leaf,” he said.
He let me fall to pieces and for two precious minutes, three, I cried. Then he stroked my hair and kissed me on the top of my head.
I looked up at him, my eyes puffy with tears, and he kissed me full on the lips, hard. The touch of his lips on mine shook me harder than if he had slapped me.
His voice was full of steel. “We must go now. Asmodel is very fast, and he may well have already invaded another host. We have to stop him.”
He stated the obvious, but his steadiness brought me back to my senses. “I can cast and see where he has gone. We will hunt him, right, Raziel?”
“Yes, and you have power enough to bind him again.”
I turned to contemplate the awful sight of Antonio, crumpled and mangled on the grass. I sent out my witch’s sight, a scout in hostile territory. Great waves of rage and death and fire knocked me off balance, but I closed my eyes and reached.
War raged not thirty kilometers behind us. Battalions of souls marched off to Heaven in formation, soldiers unwilling even in death to abandon their comrades. I dug my fingers into the dirt and watched them go. The forest spirits and earth spirits of this place had fled their ancient domains and now hid deep in a great forest about ten kilometers ahead of us.
And aside from the battle lines, the land itself cried out to me, an old lament, a song of pain it had cried many, many times before. “Not again, no, not again.…”
I turned my focus deeper in, straining to hear where Asmodel had gone. North, toward Warsaw …
I opened my eyes to see more clearly. Souls, some doomed, others saved, flew through the thick clouds above the battlefield, an immense plain of destruction that bled over the western boundary of Poland. The Germans’ drive was for Warsaw.
A darting spark caught my attention in the midst of this slaughter. Asmodel triumphant. He was not far, less than five kilometers away, a straight arrow shot to the north.
“He’s almost to Kraków,” I said under my breath, not knowing the words until I spoke them aloud. It was the sight that spoke, not me. “He grows weary. He wants…”
I shuddered, took a deep breath to steady myself. “He wants to kill. Take his revenge. Punish. He seeks a host.”
I pulled my sight back, looked up to where Raziel stood. I was nearly in despair. “How can we stop him?”
“Let us track him. You search for magical signs; I will look for physical evidence.”
I nodded and unsteadily rose to my feet. We started walking, Raziel easily keeping pace with me. At the edge of the field I hesitated, looked back over my shoulder at Antonio’s body.
“We don’t have time to bury him, Magduska,” Raziel said. “The farmers will find him. And his bones will rest in his mother’s country. He could have met a worse fate, poor soul.”
And so we left Antonio’s broken and abused body tangled up in the long grass at the edge of the field. The airplane was a torched, blackened shell, and the fire still burned.
9
We walked for two hours through the softly undulating hills, hiding from the few farmers we saw and finding telltale signs of Asmodel’s progress: a hideously flayed cow; a dead flock of crows; a blackened, reeking patch of corn.
Our pace was slow but steady; Asmodel’s was speedy but erratic. After his initial burst of speed, Asmodel meandered, first west toward the continuing, bloody battle, then back south, as if to go on the attack against us.
As the light began to fade into a golden, molten sunset over the fields, Asmodel’s path became straight again. And it led due east.
“He’s heading into a forest for the night,” I guessed. “It doesn’t make sense. Shouldn’t his power grow stronger by night?”
“Travel may not be his intent. Destruction tempts him always, Magduska. Destruction and pain fuel his power. So he may be drawn to something innocent in the forest to destroy. Wood sprites, perhaps, or a remote farm with children.”
Guilt over my failure to hold him drove me forward; the thought of those defenseless souls seared me. “We’d better hurry, then.”
Though Antonio had barely begun to feed before Asmodel’s escape, Raziel showed clear signs of exhaustion. Even his prodigious strength was now only human, and we had not eaten a bite or had even a sip of water since we had bid Budapest farewell. But he nodded in agreement. “We’ll catch him, Magda, even if we have to track him through the night.”
My fear and consternation goaded me onward with more than enough energy, but I considered Raziel by fading light. “He must be hunting Gisele.” My fear tasted like ashes.
Raziel sighed. I could all but feel his weariness weighing down my own bones. “We must catch him first then, Magduska.”
“What if I can’t find him?”
Raziel looked into my eyes, willing me to stay strong. “Forward now. It is not time yet to entertain such questions.”
I wiped at my sweaty forehead and cast yet again for a sign of the escaped demon. My feet were a welter of bloody blisters, and my stomach yowled for food. Rage kept me moving, one foot in front of the other, trudging over the endless fields of Poland.
And a crazy hope kept me going, too. Asmodel was my satanic bloodhound, leading me unerringly to the goodness in Gisele. Even as Asmodel pursued his purpose, he also, unwittingly, served mine.
So, the glimmer of pure light I discovered in the forest meant all the more to me when I found it. I would not have traded that sight for a crown encrusted with diamonds.
“Asmodel seeks a haven,” I said. I spoke unwillingly, as if the beautiful emanation I had found would be harmed by my discovery of it.
“There is a soul that shines like a sapphire in that forest,” I continued. “And the demon is zeroing in on it.”
Raziel turned in the direction where I pointed, and started walking again, faster. His shirt was soaked with sweat and stuck to his broad, muscular back.
I hurried to catch up with him. “But what if we don’t get there in time?”
I hoped that Asmodel had found Gisi, but shuddered at the thought of him reaching her before I did. The thought of that innocent light becoming prey to Asmodel acted as a spur and I broke into a half run. Our first day in the war in Poland was almost done.
* * *
We walked another hour, into a forest that grew thick and dark all around us. I tried to cast as I walked, though I could not draw power from the earth that way; it tired me terribly, but I did not want to pause for even a moment. The beautiful golden light shone steady and kindly like a candle in the darkness lighting the way to a lost and wretched soul. And I could sense Asmodel’s hunger to consume
that bright flame and snuff it out.
My thoughts and worries became darker and more jumbled with every step that carried me deeper into the woods. The night rustled with life all around us: creatures still oblivious to the human destruction bearing down upon them; night spirits that came to hide from the moonlight in the shade of the sweeping branches over our heads.
A great owl hooted as it flew across the face of the moon. “We are almost there,” Raziel said, his eyes narrowed nearly to slits.
We stumbled upon the source of the light almost without realizing we had arrived. Only the specter of Asmodel, a blot against the sky, gave me confirmation that we had found him. But where…?
I looked around. We stood in a clearing, by a small river. At the edge of the clearing, all but indistinguishable from the night, stood a small, decrepit cabin, a hut, really, with a sloping roof thatched with grass and a heavy wooden door that stood ajar.
The light emanated from inside that doorway: it was invisible to my ordinary sight, but when I trained my witch’s sight upon it I was dazzled by its brilliance.
I glanced again and gasped. Gisele stood before me, basking in that light like a bird at sunrise. But the brightness in the dark did not emanate from her.
With great presence of mind, I made myself useful by stepping forward and, quite gently, capturing Asmodel in my hands like a firefly in a glass jar.
The light had so mesmerized the demon that he hardly struggled in my grasp. He sighed and fell into a deep sleep, condensed into a ball of dark energy between my palms.
I could not believe my success. Before I could call to him, Raziel was by my side, and though he looked exhausted, his face seemed to shine again with a celestial light. “A great holy man is here,” he said.
10
I don’t know what I expected to see after a statement like that. A tall magus in striped robes and an exotic jeweled headdress, perhaps? A swami in a cotton loincloth?
After a moment, the holy man appeared. He looked exactly like what he was: an elderly watchmaker from the city of Kraków, short and potbellied and utterly ordinary. A small man, in every material respect.
He was a mortal man, only a mortal man, with no magical gifts I could discern. But when I looked on him with my second sight, I was again dazzled, all but blinded by the radiance of this man’s soul.
He looked at me and smiled, then spread his hands open in greeting. “Good evening, my dears, you have arrived in time for supper,” he said in thick Galician Yiddish. “I am Yankel Horowitz, at your service.”
I scanned around the place for signs of deception or spiritual rot and found nothing. And I stared at Gisele, half disbelieving that I had actually found her at last.
Mr. Horowitz caught me at my surreptitious scanning of the place, and he straightened his spectacles on his nose. “Oh, you’ll find no funny business here, miss. Just a place where strangers are welcome.”
I wanted to believe him, but the fact that he did not look twice at the demon I held trapped between my palms gave me pause. Without a word about Asmodel, he bowed and smiled, and returned to the hut, presumably to see about supper. As soon as he had gone I turned, careful not to disturb my hold on the demon, and faced Gisele, who still stood by the hut’s doorway.
“Little mouse,” I whispered, my relief choking the words in my throat. “Thank the Maker I found you in time.”
Her smile was so sweet and sad that it nearly broke my heart. “Did you really find me, or did … he?” She tilted her chin to indicate Asmodel, who was trying to wriggle out of my bonds.
I whispered a spell of binding, and the demon stilled again in my hands. “It doesn’t matter. We’re together again.” But before I could say any more, Raziel impatiently interrupted me.
“This is one of the righteous ones of the world, Magduska, what the sages call a zaddiq. I expected him to speak in the holy tongue, like the angels.”
“Well, he doesn’t speak Hungarian either,” I said, my voice gentle. “He may be a righteous one, but he speaks only Polish and Yiddish, and Biblical Hebrew, I’m sure.”
Raziel shook his head and sighed. “It is difficult, this Babel of languages. I am used to speaking the angelic tongue, which all creatures understand.”
That was all he said; but his sadness hung in the air like the smoke from the smashed-up plane.
“Try the Hebrew, Raziel. It will work, I am sure.”
“How do you know Yiddish so well?”
He surprised me. “Do you not know? My father was a wine merchant in Tokaj, and did a lot of trade with partners of ours in Galicia. They spoke no Hungarian, we spoke no Polish. I learned Yiddish at my father’s knee, as they negotiated things like inventory and dates of delivery.”
The man returned, carrying steaming pierogies on a silver tray; I found out later he had a small camp stove. I had not realized how ravenous I was until the scent of those salty potato dumplings rose to meet me.
Mr. Horowitz put the tray down on the tablecloth laid out on the grass. He then tilted his head to peer at me from over the tops of his spectacles to where I sat awkwardly, the demon now squirming again in my hands.
“He’s a lively one, isn’t he,” Mr. Horowitz said, nodding at Asmodel while stroking his long cascading beard, the color of bridal linen.
“You are the wonderworker of Kraków,” Gisele said, her voice dreamy. “You will help us, I know. We have come all the way from Budapest to find you.”
That wasn’t exactly true, but I did not disabuse either of them of the notion. Gisele spoke in Hungarian, too—her Yiddish was not as good as mine, her head not suited to business or to acquiring languages—but to my amazement, the man seemed to understand. Gisele and the wonderworker of Kraków were children of the same tribe, and spoke the same language of another world.
It was his lack of fear that awed me the most, and it made me love him. Mortal or magical, all of us had lived in fear for years. Raziel had not known fear before now, but the burden of it, I could see, was beginning to settle on his shoulders. Yet this little old man lived free of fear and its constraints.
“First things first,” he said. “This restless fellow you’re sitting on needs a home, nu?”
“He’s tricky, all right,” Gisele said. Raziel sat beside me, watchful and silent, listening to the cadences of Mr. Horowitz’s mild Yiddish, as if he understood the essential goodness of the man and didn’t need to know anything else.
It was full night now, and Asmodel’s power waxed stronger … and in my exhaustion my own power ebbed. “I will help you,” Mr. Horowitz said. “Let him go, my girl.”
I gaped at him in amazement. “But you—don’t you know what he is?”
He nodded sadly and sighed. “Poor soul. We must hold this wild creature fast.”
Asmodel decided the question for me; with a savage slash at my arm he wrenched free of my grip. He whirled on me, all claw and fang.
I raised a cone of protection around us, and Mr. Horowitz clambered awkwardly to his feet, shaking his head. “All right already,” he admonished me.
In surprise, I let my defenses drop. And we all waited for something, the demon and mortals arrayed against each other in the darkened clearing.
Asmodel broke the tableau first; he swept along the semicircle we mortals made, and his low laughter crawled up into the small of my back. “Your strength fails you, Magda Lazarus.”
I could not speak. The specter of seeing Asmodel loose again struck me mute. Only the pure light of Mr. Horowitz’s soul had lured the demon to a place where I could recapture him. But now I was too exhausted to hold him.
The hateful sound of Asmodel’s laughter echoed through the trees and night. “Evil is stronger than good. If you were worth possessing I would do it, witchling. But you are not powerful enough to suit me. Now, as for Raziel…”
The demon circled around to face Raziel directly. Raziel refused to lower his eyes in deference to the demon’s contempt, and the two faced off as Asmodel snarled. “Yo
u would be worth living in. You have seen enough of this world to imagine the taste of power. But you would die rather than have me, wouldn’t you, my brother?”
Raziel said not a word. But the intensity of his gaze would have discomfited any mortal man.
Asmodel snapped with his fangs at Raziel’s face. I could not help crying out, but Raziel leaped backward in time to escape getting ripped by Asmodel’s terrible jaws.
The demon manifest was a hideous thing. The sound of laughter again rang out in the darkened forest clearing. But this time it was not the demon who laughed.
To my astonishment, it was Yankel Horowitz who laughed. And he did not laugh in terror, or in bitter derision; the old man sincerely enjoyed the spectacle of Asmodel made manifest in the flesh.
“Oy, wonderful. Wonderful! Great is Hashem’s creation!” He started clapping, and then Yankel began dancing from one foot to the other, hands upraised in the air.
“Glory, glory, glory!” he sang. “All of the Lord’s hosts, holy!”
Asmodel roared and clapped his huge clawed hands over his large, veined ears. “Stop it, curse you!”
“No. Bless you, Asmodel, holy one of God!” Yankel exclaimed, his face shining like the sun. “Bless you, ancient one come to stand upon the earth like a son of Adam! Bless you! Come, eat, eat!”
Yankel spoke in a mix of Yiddish and Hebrew; his words assailed Asmodel like a swarm of hornets. “Stop it!” The demon’s screams shook the very trees.
“Hush, Asmodel.” Yankel clapped his hands, and Asmodel collapsed. He spoke no more, but held his head in his hands and groaned, curled up on the grass like a naked madman.
I dared to look away from the spectacle to make sure Raziel was unharmed. Tears sparkled in his eyes like stars. “Now this is a righteous man, Magda, as heroes were in the days of old.”
Yankel’s performance had left me stupefied. After stumbling about to find my Yiddish again, I finally sputtered, “So, righteous one, are you going to dump him in the river?”
