by Michele Lang
“It can wait until tomorrow,” Raziel said.
“No, it cannot, my love,” I replied. “Every moment I wait, Asmodel gains the upper hand. He knows I need him. He knows I am not strong enough to prevail without him. He knows I want my lost Book, that he is the only other thing that comes close to it. And he knows that without The Book of Raziel, I am doomed, you are doomed, Gisele…”
My voice trailed off, and I sat and watched the water dancing over the stones.
“My poor girl,” Raziel said. He sat down next to me and took my right hand into his lap; my left hand, my stronger, uninjured arm, kept custody of Asmodel wrapped inside the ball of my fist.
Raziel’s simple kindness disarmed me, but I would not surrender to it. “No, this is the path I chose, and this is where it led. You warned me, the Witch of Ein Dor warned me.”
Raziel stroked my bruised and bloodied knuckles with his patient fingertips. “What choice did you really have, Magduska?”
I clenched the locket tighter in my other hand and waited for my pulse to stop racing. I bade good-bye to my grief for Viktor, for Chana, for Yankel, and let them float away along the surface of the stream.
I did not know what to do with Asmodel. If letting the demon possess me would end the war in our favor, I was willing to do it. If I had to die for good, I was willing—death itself held few terrors for me, though I had learned to love my life.
But I now saw how Asmodel’s actions turned in the hand, a sword cursed with a malign spell. Yankel had tried to teach me before it was too late, but better late than never, as they say.
Every time Asmodel had gotten loose, our situation had gotten markedly worse—I thought of Antonio’s horrible death, the demon’s sadistic attack on the Nazis themselves, too late to save Yankel. And now Gisele, along with me and Raziel, had been gently, but firmly, banished from the salt mines and the Poles hiding inside.
Asmodel was our only hope. But it was a false hope.
One-handed, I clumsily worked the clasp of the locket free and forced it open. Yankel’s blood flaked into the palm of my hand. Underneath, the pictures had warped and darkened: on one side, Gisele as a girl of twelve, formally posed in a photographer’s studio, hair curled and tied back with ribbon.
On the other, a picture of my beloved father, his eyes already full of grief and weighted with the worries that would kill him less than a year later. His stiff collar pinched his neck, his mustache drooped, and his sad smile spoke of monstrosities and screaming injustices still to come.
I brushed my father’s picture with my thumb, and startled violently when the image began to move and speak. “My darling, why have you locked me away from you?”
My heart all but stopped beating, and I almost dropped the locket altogether. I blinked back tears, swallowed away the huge lump in my throat, and pressed my lips together hard to keep from saying anything.
I knew it was the demon speaking and moving, not my beloved, dead father, forever beyond my reach. But I so wanted it to be my father speaking I was tempted to pretend.
But no. The demon was using the illusion of my father’s image to reach to me, any way that he could. I was intent on using Asmodel’s powers to serve my purposes, and Asmodel was just as determined to use me to serve his own ambitions. I could not give an inch, I could not waver; under no circumstances could I let my guard down for so much as an instant.
“I know it’s you, Asmodel. We need to have a bit of a chat.”
My father’s smile widened, and a glimmer of hope shone in his eyes, though the father I knew had seen his hopes crushed before he died. “A … chat.” The smile grew a little hard. “It is so difficult for me to speak, stuffed inside this tiny locket, crushed. Let me stretch my arms, mortal girl.”
“I am afraid not.”
My father’s smile disappeared, and a fine sheen of sweat began to shine on his high, smooth forehead. “Then, really, what is there to talk about, Magdalena Lazarus?”
The sweat began to stand out on my own skin; when Asmodel spoke my name, a clear, sharp pain pierced me in the stomach like an enormous needle.
“Fine, then.” And I made to close the locket; I wasn’t bluffing, either.
“Wait! Stop.”
I slowly opened the locket again, looked down at my beloved father’s face. He leered at me, a huge, horrid smile, and when his lips parted, I saw his teeth were broken, stained, and sharp. It was Asmodel, not Papa, I knew, I kept telling myself, but I looked away anyway.
I stared into the shadows playing in the near darkness, and I held on to my determination like an amulet, like a magic stone. “Poland is lost. Stalin has invaded from the east.”
Silence from the locket, then a long, slow chuckle that turned my blood to water. “He kept his promise. Excellent. Do you see, dear heart? You cannot stop a thing. The Almighty has chosen to scrub you from the face of the Earth, like a stain of rust on an otherwise clean steel blade.”
“You are correct, Asmodel. I cannot defy the One who made the entire world.”
The locket fell silent, and I dared to look at it, balanced with the chain between my fingers. I remembered reaching up, up when I was young, admiring the locket in my stubby baby fingers, turning it to catch the light. To my little eyes, that locket was the most beautiful treasure in all the world. For in those days it had a picture of my grandmama inside. My mother had kept her own memories trapped inside in those days, before everything had fallen to pieces.
I waited for Asmodel to speak again. His cunning was legendary; he had tricked King Solomon into letting him free in the days before the Great Temple was built, and the wise king had paid the price by going mad and losing his throne for long years. I had no hope of outwitting such a one; my only chance was to see where our interests perhaps coincided.
Asmodel finally broke our silent deadlock with a sneeze—my magic often has that effect on those I work it upon. “You want Hitler dead though, of course, little Jewess.”
I hated the term but ignored the feather ruffle of my irritation. “That would slow down the Wehrmacht, wouldn’t it, my jolly demonic friend.”
Asmodel growled; like all creatures of darkness, he hated the light that jokes shed on even the grimmest circumstances. Even my limp, silly, unfunny jokes. Perhaps especially those. “Hitler wants your sister dead.”
“He does,” I readily agreed.
“No one can snuff out his life except for me, Asmodel, the ancient one, the lord of all discord.”
“No,” I said with a little laugh. “You cannot kill him yourself, you creature of air. Not without Divine sanction. And for some mysterious reason I will never comprehend, the Almighty wants this horrible man to walk the Earth.”
“The Lord is a vengeful God,” Asmodel crooned, a note of sympathy vibrating in his surprisingly mellifluent voice. “He chastises your people, punishes you for your many sins.”
Not long ago I would have fallen for that line, but now I just sighed and laughed again, a quiet, sad little laugh. “No, Gisele is without sin. Yankel was without sin. I cannot presume to understand what the Almighty is up to with all this misfortune.”
My lack of rage made him sneeze again, or maybe he struggled a little too hard against his magical bonds. “Who cares?” he finally said, snuffling the words through another sneeze. “Why bother talking to me at all if you intend to become a saint at this late date?”
“Hitler is your creature,” I said.
The sudden silence was heavy, filled with tension so electric I thought the nearest tree might ignite.
“Hitler is his own creature,” Asmodel said, his words careful, his voice now smooth and courteous. “He made his own choices, his wizard called upon me most respectfully. Hitler invited me into his soul, to strengthen his powers. He chooses all.”
“So if I chose to let you in, I could choose to evict you again at any time?”
Again, silence. Asmodel was used to doing the tempting. I waited for his reply. The only thing I had left was
time, a whole night’s worth, stretching into forever, a universe of darkness. If nothing else, my clash of wits with Asmodel gave me something to do in the teeth of my despair. A way to crochet a little hope out of nothing.
“If—if you did invite me,” Asmodel said, his voice now filled with admiration and regard, “your power would completely obliterate both Hitler and Stalin. Neither man possesses any magic of his own—but you…”
My eyes strayed to the locket. My father’s portrait beamed up at me, his face full of desperate longing, tears standing in his enormous, sad eyes.
I held the locket a little tighter in my fingers and I waited. The silence was more eloquent than anything I could think of to say.
I coughed a little and realized I had been holding my breath, and then I shook myself free of my desires—despair was a better state of mind when consulting with a demon. Ambition led straight to presumption and from there to hubris.
“Let me in,” he whispered. “We can turn aside Hitler’s army together. And turn aside the Almighty’s harsh decree.”
“But I thought Hitler was the tool of God.”
Again, the silence. Honesty, the bedrock honesty that rejected all false mirages of hope, insulated me against the demon’s many charms, but for how long? How long before Asmodel would awaken my desire to strike?
“Your desire to strike comes from the Almighty Himself,” Asmodel said, reading my thoughts. “He gave you will, the will to act, the will to change the world. Why would the Creator Himself give you such a will, such magnificent powers, and then forbid you to use them?”
I had, of course, asked myself the very question on many a dark night since I had first called upon the Witch of Ein Dor and set off on my ill-fated quest for The Book of Raziel.
I did not believe Asmodel’s prescience came from any black sorcery or special window into my soul. I knew that once, long ago, Asmodel must have asked himself the same question. And his answers led inexorably to the locket, to me, to his imprisonment in the depths of a Polish forest in the war of 1939.
“Come forth,” I said. And faithfully, Asmodel appeared. Beautiful again, naked again, kneeling at my feet. Infinitely dangerous.
“Beautiful deceiver,” I said with a sigh. “It is just no use. I know I am too weak a vessel to keep you contained. I am no Witch of Ein Dor, I am no mighty King Solomon. I am no Yankel Horowitz, watchmaker of Kraków.”
I reached down and stroked the blond glory of the demon’s hair where it fanned over the high, noble forehead and his straight, neat eyebrows. “My soul is like a candle flame, Asmodel. You cannot touch it, you cannot smear it with dirt. That spark comes from the One above, it belongs to Him and to Him it will return, no matter how much sin I commit down here, whether with you or with Raziel, in the name of helping my sister or defeating our enemy.”
Asmodel took a sudden sharp breath, as if something I said had mortally wounded him. “But why did the One above give you these gifts, then? Why?”
“It is not my job to know, Asmodel. You ask questions that will haunt me to the end of my days, questions I have no answers for. I will not stand aside and do nothing, but I will not act knowing that I make things worse.”
I leaned forward and kissed the demon on the lips, a chaste kiss, but one that lasted a moment longer than it should have. “Asmodel, I am not strong enough to use you as a weapon. This kiss seals our kinship, for I question what you question.”
I glanced up and saw that Raziel was patiently waiting for what I had to say—but the heel of his hand still rested, ready, on the hilt of his silver knife from the mines. He was ready to die and face eternal damnation to save me, yet again.
My smile widened as I returned my attention to Asmodel. “Our path together ends here, old demon. I will let you go now. I give up. There is no other way.”
Raziel gasped, and I did not dare to look at him. Instead I kept my level gaze on Asmodel. “You are a beautiful illusion, Asmodel, but no less false for that. The Garden is guarded by angels with fiery swords, and they won’t let me in again, not even for you. In fact, I believe that you are the one barring the way, yourself.”
Quick as a cat, Asmodel sprang to his feet. I held up a hand to stay his flight: not my untouched left hand, but my battered, bruised right one, the vulnerable one, the one that regardless still held the locus of my power.
“I will set you free, Asmodel, but you may not harm a single hair on the head of any true friend of mine, any of my ancestors, blood relations, or descendents, you may not harm Raziel, Leopold, or any other creature of the air who has ever offered me any sort of kindness. You may not touch me, track me, or search for me. My very name is a bane to you.”
He smiled at me and I knew I was right to concede my defeat. I could not use his power; the idea I could was itself a danger and a delusion. I could not stamp out evil, or banish it from this mad, bad world—it was folly to even try. No, all I could do was choose the good myself—and if I couldn’t do that, at least try to reach for the good. That was my job. The rest, I finally accepted, was all beyond my control.
Asmodel rose into the air, hovered above me like a dark, confounding cloud. And though he had prevailed over me, and though he sought my destruction and the death of everything I had ever loved, anything of good in my world, a sick little part of me loved his mad insistence that the world could somehow change and become perfectible.
He leaned down out of the dark cloud and kissed me, a dark, savage kiss that hurt like the sharp bite of a horsefly. “You have bound me, pretty witch. But that is not enough to stop me.”
He shot into the air with no further farewell, glittered like a falling star, and he disappeared.
“He is going straight back to Hitler,” Raziel observed. His voice was calm, but when I turned to look at him, his knife was still unsheathed—though I wondered if silver was any bane to a creature of air like a demon.
“He goes north,” I said. “I don’t know more than that.”
Raziel snorted in surprise. “You do not know of the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s eastern base of operation? The Hashomer told me a little of it before I went to face the wolf, Krueger. And … Krueger saw fit to tell me more. Krueger must have gone north by now himself.”
I thought of the Soviets and sighed. Krueger must have been called north to the Wolf’s Lair once the Soviet attack on Poland became imminent. No wonder he had been so scattered and defeated the day he had released me to Bathory’s tender mercies. Krueger had been forced to leave his seat of power in Kraków to become just another bodyguard of the Führer. I knew my enemy now, and Krueger despised subservience, secretly even to his master, Adolf Hitler.
I could bear to keep silent no longer, not after this encounter with Asmodel had torn me apart. “What did Herr Krueger do to you, my love?”
“Not much. Only made me watch as he worked Viktor over. I knew I would be next.”
I curled up on the ground, completely exhausted now. His voice never wavered. “Wolf’s Lair is to the north, in Prussia, in the forests just north of the town of Gierloz. The seat of the great Eastern Werewolf Pack, and Hitler’s headquarters in the east.”
“So Asmodel too goes north. Where the foul magic resides.”
My nemesis had gained his freedom, and only now did I realize how much energy it had taken to hold him. Now, freed from the need to hold him captive, I could focus upon the object of my affections, my beloved, my soul mate Raziel. At least for a precious few moments.
“Yankel wanted you to take Asmodel to the Wolf’s Lair, not just let him go. You mustn’t give up,” he said.
“What makes you think I gave up?”
He blinked hard, scrubbed at the bristles on his chin before he answered. “Well, you kissed the demon good-bye and all but wished him luck and a fair journey.”
A laugh rumbled low in my belly. “Asmodel hates that he loves me. Wants me for his own.”
“I don’t believe Asmodel is capable of love, not any longer. But you told Asmod
el you gave up.”
I winked slowly at Raziel, forced myself to smile despite our desperate circumstances. “Do you not realize? I was lying.”
With my witch’s sight I watched Asmodel run north to the Wolf’s Lair, and my painfully beating heart pinned me to the earth as if it were an enormous lead weight. I had not seen the last of the ancient demon. In that, Raziel was right.
24
“I lied to Asmodel about giving up, but I don’t know quite what to do now,” I continued.
I lied now, too. I knew exactly what I had to do. I just wasn’t quite sure how to do it.
When I looked into Raziel’s eyes, he stared back steadily. “Why did you come?” I asked him, the same question that Bathory had recently asked me. My own voice sounded calm, conversational. When you’ve lost everything in your world, indeed the entire world itself, when staying alive was more of a liability than a workable plan, remaining calm was not so difficult.
“Come to Poland? Come to Earth? We have spoken of this before, Magduska.” He sounded impatient, annoyed that I asked him to speak of himself rather than to consider how to make the most of the fact that he was still alive.
“I need to hear it, one last time.”
He looked sharply up at me, his eyes narrowing. “I came because I could no longer stand Heaven, my love. I could not stand safety, I could not stand neutrality, I could not stand celestial distance from those I have come to adore. You do not have to be perfect for me, Magduska. God knows I am not perfect for you. I came to act, to choose.”
I could not accept the future with calm finality. I had too much Asmodel in me. The vision of what I would do next superimposed itself over Raziel’s words with a sudden, searing clarity. It was not complicated, what I was going to do now. But it was going to be the most difficult thing I had ever done.
And both Raziel and Gisele would suffer for it.
“Please, you must tell Gisele good-bye for me, my love.”
“Good-bye? Haven’t you said good-bye to that girl too many times already?”
