by Michele Lang
“That priest needs a witch,” Raziel said, startling me. “He may not like it, but without magic, the priest and his people cannot hold out long against a full assault.”
“But this particular priest believes my magic is of the devil.” I smiled. “He’s right, of course! If I were a good girl, I’d be finishing my knitting on Dohány Street and going to sleep now so that I wouldn’t have bags under my eyes in the morning.”
Raziel did not relent, or smile. “It doesn’t matter what the priest thinks. This is the largest pocket of resistance left in this corner of Poland. It falls upon us to fight.”
His brave words warmed me. I looked at Raziel, and the sight of him, still ready to fight despite all that had already happened, gave me strength. “We need to talk to any Hashomer holed up in here. We need to stick together.”
But we never got the chance to find the Hashomer.
A wind rustled around our ankles, and the little hairs at the nape of my neck rose in warning. The earth spirits rushed past us to escape something that had made it through the front doors of the mines.
I leapt to my feet, even before the sound of low howls reached, echoing, to my ears. “We’re too late,” I said, my voice trembling. “They’ve come for us.”
21
If only I had had a day to get to know the place better, I might have been able to fight off the werewolves.
But as it was, the mine was a cold, magnificent labyrinth of ballrooms, fairy bowers, chapels, concert halls, and uncarved, curving tunnels of salt. I had time only to grab for Gisele’s hand on one side, and Raziel’s on the other, before all hell broke loose underground.
Salt had a strange effect on magic. It was poison to certain types of magicals, but it also provided a strong buffer against evil spirits. It did not blunt my magic, but channeled it into the spaces between the veins of salt in the mine. I could penetrate the barrier if I chose, but my magic flowed more easily, almost like water, in the spaces between.
I had lost my hesitation for summoning the dead to my side, and I called to my mother and my children imps with a barely restrained panic. The killers descending upon us were swifter and more terrible than I had yet encountered in Poland, and considering the nasty specimens I had fought so far, that was a terrifying prospect indeed.
The ghosts rushed through the corridors of salt in a mighty rush, my mother at their head, leaving the air supercharged with lightning in their wake. My mother called upon the ghosts in Hebrew, her voice echoing through the translucent carvings and spires.
But they could not stop the wolves. Raziel let go of my hand and I yanked Gisele behind me just as the pack found us.
I expected Krueger himself, but the first wolf was a stranger to me. The leader’s muzzle was wet with blood, and his grayish yellow fangs bristled from out of his hideous snout. He didn’t bother saying anything, simply lunged for my throat, and I swatted him away with my wards, knowing they would keep him off of me.
Except this time my wards were useless—perhaps the foul magic emanating from the north had strengthened since Hitler’s victory over Warsaw and his pact with the Soviets to divide Poland. The wolf tore through my spell of protection like through a spider’s web and smashed into me. I fell backward and crashed to the ground under the wolf’s weight.
The wolf sank his teeth into my right forearm, and I summoned his soul out of him with a yell of pain and rage. But his soul would not come. Stubborn, he worried at my arm and shook it like a rag, and my eyesight faded to a static-filled gray.
A huge, deafening gunshot exploded the world. Finally, the wolf’s grip slackened. The smoky haze slowly dissipated to reveal his glazing-over yellow eyes, his jaws still locked on my arm.
Gisele had shot the wolf. Raziel jumped on its stiffening back and pried the beast’s jaws off my forearm. The creature fell dead onto the floor, the back of its head blasted apart.
I gaped down at its carcass, as amazed by my magical impotence as by the creature’s death. Another huge gunshot almost knocked me off my feet: Gisele’s gun shot bullets that seemed big enough to dispatch an elephant.
Her screams snapped me back into unearthly focus. The smaller wolves circled her, growling, and my mother and a crowd of spirits sought to harry them.
I grabbed the silver carving knife I had used to cut my bread, and with a spell of augmentation I plunged the blade into the base of the nearest wolf’s skull and yanked hard sideways to sever the spinal cord. The wolf fell, twitching, at my feet. With a huge tug I scraped the knife through the vertebrae and free.
Though my own arm was throbbing, I jumped on the back of the next wolf; it turned its long gray head to snap at my weakened arm, missing it by only a few centimeters.
Then Raziel was upon the wolves and with big slashes of the second knife he had grabbed off the table he killed two more. He staggered to the back wall while I grabbed Gisele and blinked at the acrid gunsmoke that burned my eyes.
“Gisi, where are you hurt?”
She kept shaking her head and sobbing, driving me half-frantic. “No, no, no…,” she sobbed.
I frisked her all over, looking for wounds. I found none.
“Not me, Magduska,” she gasped. “Yankel.”
I tucked her under my chin and slammed my eyelids closed. Her heart beat so hard she shook against my chest. I took deep, long breaths to steady my own pulse, and I sent my senses out to Yankel in the subterranean caverns, knowing to the bone that Raziel would protect me while I searched for him.
After only a half-dozen deep breaths, I found him and knew why Gisele had cried out. He had fought valiantly to protect his charges, but he was an old man. And he fought in a place that was fundamentally hostile to what he was, who he had been made to be.
I only realized I had started running when I stumbled and Gisele kept me from falling. Raziel covered us from behind; I could hear his breathing, ragged but still steady. If he was hurt too, it was not badly enough to slow us down.
My mind did not know the way; my feet carried me and I followed the footsteps. I expected the worst, knew my people had lost this battle underground.
My headlong rush checked as I stumbled upon a small mountain of bodies, SS men with their death’s-head insignia standing out starkly on their bloodstained collars, dead miners sprawled across the floor, still clutching pickaxes and makeshift bayonets fixed on the ends of broom handles.
I forced my way to the epicenter and began to find the bodies of people I knew, people who had managed to survive the Nazis by seeking shelter with Yankel in the forest.
At the center of the enormous room, Yankel still sat up, propped by the body of a gigantic miner, an ordinary Pole who had died to defend the watchmaker of Kraków.
He gasped for air, his poor body shredded by shrapnel and the fangs of wolves. A mob of dead Nazis and wolves surrounded him. His prayers had held them at bay, but apparently he could not stop them forever.
“Come away,” I whispered urgently.
“Too late,” he gasped. “Take, Asmodel … to the Wolf’s Lair,” he said. “I could not unleash him in time. You must use him. You will know how. You will do it.”
“But—if you—”
“Mamele,” he said. “Do what you think is right.”
He smiled, his face awash in blood. “Bless you, little girl, I am so thirsty,” he said, speaking clearly for the first time, as if he had recovered himself. “Get me some water. Go.”
I reached for his hands, but Raziel gently interposed himself between us. They spoke together in Hebrew, so softly I could hardly hear them, then Raziel reached out and closed Yankel’s eyes with his fingertips.
“He is gone, Magduska. Come.”
I heard a great roaring in my ears, and the room faded from red to gray and began to tilt. Raziel caught me before I toppled over.
A wave of nausea broke over me, and he shook me by the shoulders. “Come,” he said again, his voice hard, and he pressed something sharp and sticky into my palm.
/> It was the locket with Asmodel still trapped inside, caked with Yankel’s half-dried blood.
22
Raziel dragged me from that terrible place into another, an even deeper and colder region of the mine. “Yankel wants us to save the priest,” he said, again and again until the words’ meaning sunk into my mind.
“Magduska, try,” Gisele said, and it was only then that I realized she had followed us all the way into the place of horrors where Yankel had died. “If Yankel wants you to use Asmodel, then do it. We have nothing else left.”
That shamed me into recalling myself to life. “The priest will not approve of my methods,” I said, and almost succumbed to a bout of crazy laughter. “I think Sir Priest would rather die than have his bacon saved by an ancient demon, wielded by a Jewish sorceress. Nu?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Raziel said, his voice cold and calm, merciless as a steel blade. “We need him. So do it, Magda.”
I gave up arguing, being droll, or succumbing to hysteria. I’d try my best, fail, and die for good finally, and all this madness would soon, mercifully, cease. The knowledge of my impending death steeled me, and I cracked open the locket.
The two photographs inside were drenched in blood. I swallowed back the queasy bile in the back of my throat, and muttered to myself in Hungarian. “Okay, you ancient bastard,” I said. “You will come to do my bidding, but you obey my rules, stay on my leash.”
A rumble rose from the locket. “Asmodel,” I said three times, pinning him with his name, “I command you to go forth and slay the slayers of the righteous one Yankel Horowitz the watchmaker. Go forth and kill with great slaughter all the members of the host that rose up against the Lord’s own. The minute you are done, go back into this locket and wait. Go—now.”
I sang the Bane of Concubines that the witch of Amsterdam had taught me months before, and that was enough to bind the demon while he did what he craved to do anyway. I did not need to follow him with my body; my witch’s sight followed Asmodel as he assailed the Nazis and wolves from behind. They had nothing to match his awful power, nothing, and he ripped them limb from limb, dismembered and disemboweled them, killed them and enjoyed it, showing off to me, for he knew that I watched him wielding his powers of destruction.
The priest rose up in the doorway holding a giant crucifix and Asmodel bellowed with laughter. “The Christ has not come to save you today, old man, but Satan!” he roared.
“Shut up!” I ordered, and his voice cut off mid-taunt, but the damage had been done. The priest and his men barricaded themselves behind the door, and the brave old man threw a bottle of holy water straight at the demon’s face.
It did nothing to hurt me: my sight was a sending only, and I had nothing to fear from holy water in any case. But vampires are burned by holy water, and demons are burned by it too, like an acid.
Asmodel bellowed in pain and clawed at his eyes with his great, bloodied talons. I yanked him back into the locket and stuffed him back in, felt little sympathy for the creature as he screamed and sobbed inside.
He would murder Nazis to taunt the priest and tempt me with the demonstration of his power, but not to save my beloved teacher from a horrible death. I expected nothing less from him, but his perfidy angered me anyway.
I looked up into Raziel’s eyes. “He saved the priest,” I said.
“No, you did it,” he said, his voice tinged with both admiration and a careful gentleness. “You used the demon and did not get ruined. Yankel was right to trust you.”
I shrugged, suddenly weary beyond all caring. “All that murder just strengthened him, Raziel. If I let him out again, I don’t believe I will be able to stuff him back inside like I did. The priest doused him with holy water, and that threw Asmodel off guard, but next time I can’t expect to be so lucky.”
“If you think it will help,” he said, “Asmodel can enter into me, take me. If you can control him better that way, I will submit to him.”
My stomach turned to water at the thought of it, at the thought of loving Raziel with the demon coiled up inside him like a tapeworm. “No … no, my dear angel. That will not do the trick.”
His hopeful expression faded, and he sighed. Suddenly I could feel my body again, and my arm hurt horribly.
“Please look at this arm,” I said. “Did the wolf do a lot of damage?”
He immediately stretched out my stiffening arm to its full length. “It is not terrible,” he said, a little too diplomatically.
I sighed and fought the dizziness that buzzed like mosquitoes in my ears. “The battle is over for now. I guess we won, some kind of victory. Let’s go talk to the blasted priest and his men.”
I clutched the locket inside my left fist as we limped arm in arm down to where the priest remained holed up with his men. Again, the bodies piled up tremendously near the center of the battle, by the barricaded door.
My mother’s ghost waited for us there, her arms crossed. I was too tired to care if she disapproved of me, or if I disappointed her. Strangely enough, my weariness freed me to simply love her, my fearsome and beautiful dead mother.
But Tekla had eyes only for Gisele. “Little fairy!” she exclaimed, and I recalled as she said it that this was her nickname for Gisele. Me, I was “mischief,” or “pain in the ass.” No matter now. I truly no longer cared that Gisele was her favorite. Gisele was my favorite, too.
Gisele drew close, and I was shocked to see her dry-eyed, my sentimental one. “Thank you, Mama mine, for saving Magduska! Bless you, bless you, may you fly straight to heaven for all your good deeds.”
My mother shook her head; it was her lips that trembled, her eyes that sparkled with iridescent tears. “No, no … your father is safe in the seventh Heaven, poor man, but I have meddled too much now. I am more a troubled ghost than a spirit at peace, little one.”
“Now that Yankel…” Gisele fought to keep her composure. “Yankel has passed into the next world—he is a great soul and he will speak for you, I promise, I swear it.”
“Hush, don’t harm yourself with careless words.”
“Good-bye, Mama darling. Bless you, bless you.”
They moved closer, opened their arms to embrace … and my mother’s shade passed through Gisele’s body, as insubstantial as a sunbeam, and she disappeared.
I glanced anxiously over at Gisele, but her eyes remained dry. “The way is clear now, don’t you see?”
When I didn’t answer she turned to me. “It is done. We did our best to stop all this from happening. It was not to be, Magduska darling, but we know we did everything we could. Now we save ourselves and everyone else that we can.”
“But how? Why?”
“It’s just the right thing to do. And you, brilliant one, clever one, will figure out all of the hows.”
Standing ankle deep in dead Nazis I could only marvel at Gisele’s folly and at my own. We were walking dead. Our rewards were not in the victory but in the battle itself.
I willed myself to ignore the carnage the demon had caused, and focused on the doorway in front of me. “I am not afraid to die,” I said as I pressed forward to rap on the priest’s barricaded door. “I am just afraid of losing you, too.”
“We have lost already, Magduska. Nobody can take our defeat away from us. It gives us a strange kind of strength, to lose. Do you see it now?”
I sighed and held my shredded arm to my side. “I suppose that I do. The minute we decided to defy our killers, we won.” That was Gisele’s position, but I did not share it.
The priest let us in the door for Yankel’s sake—he and his men still didn’t like or trust us, but at least he respected us. He understood I had saved them, if his men did not. Upon his orders, they bandaged my wounds, washed us and gave us clean, new clothes, and gave us a small but deeply appreciated meal.
As before, I admired the man’s unflinching position; it was so easy to live in a world of bright lines, of clear demarcation between right and wrong, good and evil. I envied that simp
le, righteous priest. The martyr, the great Jan Czajkowski … may he rest in peace in the Christian Heaven until the trumpet sounds.
“Now, you foreigners must leave,” the priest declared. “Poles must fight here for Poland. May you go in the light of the Lord.”
23
We traveled under cover of darkness until we reached Yankel’s hut in the forest. A fallen angel; two lost Hungarian girls; and a primordial demon powerful enough to destroy all of Poland, trapped inside a cheap, dented locket.
By the time we got there, Gisele was stumbling with weariness. She vociferously insisted we all share the little cot, but she was asleep by the time her body became horizontal.
I took off my too-big miner’s jacket and draped it over her exhausted, slumbering body. “Our work is not yet finished, my love,” I said to Raziel, my voice little more than a weary croak.
“We must deal with Asmodel tonight? Are you certain?”
“I don’t have the strength to hold him anymore, my love. Already his call is defeating me.”
And it was true: his plaintive wails, blandishments, and threats drowned out all the sounds of the night, the thread of my own thoughts, Raziel’s words. Like a ringing in the ears, I could not block out the sound of Asmodel’s beseeching voice. The tremendous pull now, to the north.
“It must end tonight, Raziel.”
We stumbled outside the hut and closed the door. I whispered some basic wards, and Yankel’s calm spirit had left a residue of peace and protection over the place. We let Gisele rest and slowly wandered to our old, moss-covered spot by the little brook.
The late September air was noticeably colder now. I took a grim satisfaction in noting that fact, in grasping the knowledge that Raziel and I still lived, that we still could fight our enemies another day.
I thought of poor Yankel, and Chana too, surely dead by now—I hoped Chana had had enough time to remember her Sh’ma. I sat down at the edge of the stream. The moonlight, cold and clear, danced upon the surface of the water, beautiful and untouchable.
