Dark Victory

by Michele Lang

  “But she cannot go the places I must, now.” And neither can you, dear Raziel. “Asmodel is the only advantage we have left,” I continued aloud, listening to the wind listlessly rustling the leaves over our heads.

  Raziel’s laugh was short and hard, a loving caress. He reached for my hand in the silvery darkness. “Asmodel? He is racing to the Wolf’s Lair. Perhaps we are better off without such advantages.”

  The demon of the future still hovered over us. I would not let it possess me, as Hitler would surely allow Asmodel to enter him once more.

  “I need your help, Raziel,” I said, my voice still calm and quiet, the serene dispassion of the angels, of the demons.

  “I have come to help you. That is why I am here, in the end,” he said, his voice now choked with his love, a love too heavy and rough to stay afloat in the second Heaven.

  “Yankel was right. I need to hunt Asmodel, follow him to Hitler as a policeman uses a bloodhound. The way we followed him to Gisele the day we came to this place, this Poland, in the name of love. And then I must call my mother and the vengeful spirits to my side. I cannot compel them without The Book of Raziel, it is true. But these spirits will come willingly. They came to me in Wieliczka.”

  “Without the Book, my love, the spirits cannot do much damage, however willingly they come, and however desperately they want to help you too. This is why I fell. They, mortal souls, do not have that choice.”

  He spoke the truth. But that still did not change what I had to do. “My mother can work fearful magic against other air spirits, from beyond this world. I do not understand it, and I don’t know what price she has paid for the gift. But it doesn’t matter anymore. All that matters is that we stop Hitler from winning this war. Because once Asmodel finds the gemstone Book, the Sapphire Heaven, there is nothing more I can do to stop the Nazis, and with the power of both Asmodel and the Book behind them, they could conquer all the world.”

  “Asmodel seeks destruction, not conquest,” Raziel said, but his voice wavered. He wasn’t sure.

  “Either way, millions would die. I have to stop them both. It’s over for Gisi and me, hopefully not for you, my darling. The time has come for me to sell my soul for as much as I can get.”

  He stared at me, eyes wild, and I wondered if he yet understood what I had resolved to do. I interlaced my fingers tighter with Raziel’s, pulled him closer to me. “You know what must happen now, my love. And every minute we hesitate, Asmodel gets farther away, has more of a chance to find Hitler and protect himself against me.”

  His eyes widened in shock. He knew. “No, Magda. Don’t do this.”

  “No, it is you who must do it, my love.”

  We looked into each other’s eyes, so deeply I all but felt my soul slip from its moorings inside my body and join Raziel inside of his own. “I can’t chase him in this form,” I whispered.

  He kissed me, to stop my words. The sensation of his lips against mine was so vivid, so precious; but I had to leave his kisses behind. “I need you to do it,” I murmured, my lips still pressed against his. “It needs to be clean. So if I can come back, I’ll have a body to return to. A bullet wound takes too long to repair. But a knife, of silver, would be perfect.”

  Tears slid down Raziel’s cheeks. He grabbed me by my shoulders, kissed me harder. Our tongues touched, so gently, and his fingers trailed up the sides of my neck and plunged into my hair. He kissed me again and again, kissed me breathless, as if he could kiss my soul on its way, without violence.

  But we both knew I could not follow Asmodel in the path of love, the path Raziel and I walked together. Love was not enough to save me, or to stop Asmodel from completing what he had started, aligning himself with the monstrous genius of Hitler’s struggle.

  I drew the knife out of the sheath belted at Raziel’s waist, reached for his hand and gently led it away from the back of my neck. I closed his fingers over the stubby handle, held both my hands over his tight, tense knuckles.

  We kept kissing. I asked a terrible thing of my beloved, but I knew the mettle of my man, knew he could do what had to be done.

  I kissed him back as hard as I could, a final kiss of farewell. And when the knife slammed beneath my ribs, I was so focused on loving Raziel I hardly even felt the pain of my death.

  25

  As before, I hunted the demon over the bleeding countryside of Poland. But unlike before, the darkness, not the light, drew Asmodel, and I hunted the demon in the guise of an air spirit, not a mortal woman.

  I shot away from my corpse like a hound after a fox, even as I resisted the impulse to stay hovering over my dead body the way that ordinary spirits do, to make it easier for their angels to find them and to lead them to the second Heaven. I had to resist the spirits that would lead me away to the next world, where by all rights I belonged as a murdered human being. I had to stay hungry, a ghost; a demoness; a vengeful dybbuk—not a spirit searching for Heaven. Heaven would have to wait to exercise its judgment upon my wayward soul.

  I had killing to do.

  Only one backward glance did I allow myself before I disappeared into the night: to see Raziel guarding my body, covered in my blood, holding the dagger he had used to kill me. I trusted him body, heart, and soul, and on the slight chance that I could succeed in my goal without suffering some cosmic annihilation, I would attempt to rejoin Raziel in the world of the living.

  I doubted I could work such wizardry again.

  Asmodel surely could sense I hunted him. He could hear my spirit whisper like the wind over the half-harvested, rolling hills of wheat, a van Gogh painting of Hades. But he had sworn not to touch me, and I had bound him to his vow. Besides, Asmodel had more important adversaries to vanquish, and we both knew that I would hunt him to his destination.

  I could not outrun the demon as he ran. But I could cast ahead, see to where Asmodel sought sanctuary.

  The Wolf’s Lair. Far to the north, east of Danzig, near the border with the Soviet Union, the ancestral home of the great Eastern Werewolf Pack had been given over to their newly elected pack leader supreme—the German Führer, Adolf Hitler. Hitler had entered Poland behind his huge army, and now hid within the impregnable stronghold of his allies, the werewolves. Every pack leader in the Reich and Eastern Europe had sworn fealty to him; now Krueger himself and his own enormous pack guarded their Führer tooth and claw, would gladly give their lives for the glory of protecting Hitler.

  I followed Asmodel to this place, alone. And long we traveled. I did not have the luxury of time, the gift of my witchery stretched over the span of many days. And I did not have the power of my ancestral Book, The Book of Raziel, to augment my inherited powers enough to make a difference.

  I would have to find another way, despite the odds. I could not let Asmodel reclaim his hold within Hitler’s soul, or my sister’s horrible visions would no longer be forestalled. But I had not lied. I did not possess enough strength to bend Asmodel to my will. My immediate future was hidden from me; I only knew that my ultimate fate was death, my own domain.

  My mother’s soul flickered next to mine. Out of the second Heaven, Tekla was vulnerable to the demonic spirits attracted to her power, to her solitary state. Neither she nor I were where we were supposed to be.

  “Mother,” I shrieked into the wind, “are you sure? I go to my doom, like the fool I am. You don’t have to share my fate.”

  “Don’t talk back to me,” she replied, out of the wind that surrounded us. “This is my fight as well as yours. You won’t go after the demon alone.”

  And with a cry, Tekla raised the dead. In our wake now followed a huge train of hungry ghosts, vengeful spirits, and imps—the ghosts of our ancestors, the people the Nazis had already murdered, all animated by the prospect of avenging their deaths and protecting their living relatives from the menace, the Nazi war machine that was chewing up Poland.

  The legion of spirits was not yet fully manifested; it was no more than an angry blur hiding behind the veil separating th
e worlds. But they followed.

  I said nothing. But I reached out and grabbed my mother’s hand, and I squeezed her fingers, hard, and held on. Together we swooped north to the Wolf’s Lair like an enormous swarm of bats.

  * * *

  I had expected a dark fortress, something grand and forbidding, ornate and feral, something like the soul of the wolf, Krueger. The Wolf’s Lair was so much more than what I had imagined. It was a hundred times more awful.

  Horrible as the SS werewolves seemed to me, I could still find their weaknesses and exploit them. But here in their place of power, a malign magic overlaid the blind fanatical loyalty of the werewolf people; the fortress I had envisioned indeed rose up like a granite peak within the pine forest where the Wolf’s Lair was hidden. But the stronghold of the wolves thrust deep into the ground, like twisted, horrible roots, and tunneled into the very rock beneath the dirt, where the true power of the Wolf’s Lair could be found.

  To say the place was warded was to ignore the physical manifestation of that evil magic. The very wood, crowded with bizarre, terrible predators, had been twisted by the pull of the Wolf’s Lair into something unnatural and horrible.

  This was the source of the malign magic of the Budapest Vampirrat, the hideous wards of Krueger’s headquarters in Kraków. It was Teutonic black magic—but it was augmented a thousand times by another power. I had felt that power for weeks now; it had eluded my detection even while taunting me with its presence.

  And the source of that power, I was appalled to finally discover, was none other but the re-spelled Book of Raziel.

  The shock of it all but burned my spirit away.

  It was my fault. I had done this.

  I was the one who had uncovered the handwritten, ancient copy hidden away in a warehouse in Amsterdam.

  I was the one who had enabled the Nazi wizard Staff to reconstitute the Book. I hadn’t killed him fast enough.

  And now, my Book had been cannibalized by an alien, terrible magic, and it animated and strengthened my enemies. I sent my sight into the fortress, and a wave of nausea sent me reeling.

  My mother’s spirit drew closer. For once, her voice was gentle. “What is wrong?”

  I could barely force out the words. “Can you not tell, Mamika? It is the Book. Re-spelled.”

  Tekla raised her sharp gaze and she stared keenly into the darkness. “The Russians,” she said. “I don’t know how they did it.…”

  I could no longer form words past the tears. I dashed them angrily away with my fingers.

  She didn’t look at me. “It wasn’t you,” she muttered. “The wizard would have hunted down that scrap of Book sooner or later.”

  She kept squinting, searching the night. “This is Nazi magic,” she finally said. “It feeds on the Book’s power like a vampire. And it was the Soviets that created the machine to make it possible. It is not a sorcery—the Soviets hate our kind. It is more like an engine, one that sucks out the magic of the Book and diverts it to their own devices. And it is the Soviets who have built it. They must have given it to the Nazis, as part of their pact.”

  Finally, she turned to face me. “I don’t know if any magic at all could break that Soviet technology.”

  “We still have to try. We’ve broken so many tenets of our creed already, haven’t we?”

  Tekla tilted her head and squinted at me. “The old path is fallen away,” she said. “Sometimes to honor the spirit of the law, you must break it.”

  The trees groaned in the night, but the ghosts following me and my mother had encountered far worse than the predators and the sorcery of this place. They had been murdered, their loved ones murdered, and my army no longer had anything to lose, not even Heaven. The next world did not prove to be an easy place for my people to settle; like me, restless, they returned to the scene of the crimes committed against them. My people, like me, could not help but seek to alter the events of this world, the world of the living.

  They did not care how powerful was the evil magic of the north. Whatever our fate, we met it together. Better than a demonic army could ever be. And I was but one of this host.

  We infiltrated the wood and perched among the trees, an undead flock of crows. “We can’t get through this thicket, Mamika,” I said.

  “With magic,” my mother said. “By spell you may do it, and we will follow.”

  “How is this possible? I am as dead as you. ‘The dead can work no magic,’ you used to say.”

  “The Lazarus creed tells you what you should not do, not what you are unable to do.”

  I stared at my mother, dumbstruck. She sounded just like Yankel Horowitz, speaking of kielbasa and golems.

  She laughed, delighted by my bewilderment. “It is the same as when you killed the wizard Staff. You are a spirit of air, a daughter of women, not men. You can work your magic, child. It is a sin, but it is still possible. And in these circumstances, I don’t even think it is a sin.”

  I let go of my mother’s hand at last, drew away from her so I could take in the sight of her. Her hair flowed all around her like crimson smoke, and her eyes blazed in that hideous darkness. She had refrained from working magic in her lifetime. Well, she was making up for it now, for better or for worse.

  I started by calling Leopold, my faithful imp, denizen of the realm of air. He appeared whiskers first, then haunches, then finally his lively face.

  “Finally!” he said, with no formal salutations. “Waiting is such agony! Why have you not whipped those Nazi dogs already?”

  I sighed at his enthusiasm, wished his ebullience was mine. “It’s not so easy, Leopold darling. Want to try your hand at it?”

  His face glowed, and not for the first time I wondered at his ultimate fate. He was my brainchild, after all, and I couldn’t help fussing over him like a broody mother hen.

  But I said nothing; what was the point? We were all there to breach the defenses of this half-submerged fortress and destroy Hitler and as many of his soldiers as we could, in hopes of breaking the German offensive before it was complete.

  I had no more hope that such a victory would keep my sister’s visions at bay. I only fought to give more innocent people the chance to get away from the war, go to Timbuktu or Zanzibar or any other safe place they could contrive. I was going to lose, but I still fought on the side of the angels.

  “Now Leopold, gather up your brother imps,” I said. “Get them organized in companies. If you can recruit spirits of the Earth to the cause, all the better.”

  Leopold rolled his eyes, in a wonderful imitation of an obnoxious child. “Mama! What spirit of Earth would bother noticing me? I will gather the spirits of the air. Of course.” And with a parting snort, Leopold shot off into the sky, an imp charged with a great and noble mission.

  That was the easy part. I knew Leopold’s imps and lower devils were loyal—they loved to make mischief and tweak their betters, and here they had the added advantage of fighting for once on the side of the angels.

  But what if I somehow succeeded in getting into the Wolf’s Lair? How could I possibly prevail against Asmodel’s power magnified by the wolves’ and the corrupted magic of the forest itself?

  I only resolved to try. “Double or nothing,” I muttered under my breath, and then I began to intone the Lazarus family spell, the one my mother Tekla had taught me only unwillingly and after both of us were dead.

  I wasn’t strong enough to call them all to Earth—there were so many. “Call them with me, Mama! You always were a better witch than me, with more magic. Mama, please.”

  She looked up, her eyes sparkling with ghostly tears, even as her smile widened. “Finally, finally, you pain-in-the-ass child, you show me some proper respect.”

  I bit my lip and shrugged. Anything I tried to say would only come out wrong, anyhow. She sighed, and we both let the secrets of our complicated love affair go unspoken.

  But then my mother’s eyes widened, and some fresh horror now made her gasp. “Little fairy,” she whispered
, and the astral hairs along my arms all rose in formation, like a miniature army.

  “Oh no,” I said, “Gisele…”

  It was true. The vampire’s kiss had bound Gisele more closely to Bathory than I had realized. She had called to him, and unbelievably, Gisele had gotten Janos to drive the car from Kraków far to the north, to the very edge of the forest where we had gathered. She had brought Raziel, and even my body, wrapped in Yankel’s good tablecloth. I could see my body stretched out on the backseat, and Gisele and Raziel standing by the car’s rear bumper. Janos, poor creature, stayed inside, engine still running.

  It gave me a strange, yearning, almost unbearable feeling, seeing my dead body. I again felt the pull to wait, to be led to the next world.

  “How did you find me, mouse?” I yelled across the veil between the living and dead. “You came so far. Hundreds of kilometers!”

  Her face was as still as a painting. And the awful tension inside of Gisele was finally gone. “It is not so far as you have traveled. Raziel told me, he asked me to help. And I’ve learned that just having visions isn’t enough, Magduska. I’ve got to act on what I know, or my visions will destroy me. Besides, we don’t want you storming the lair all alone.”

  She paused, and took in the sight of the vanguard of thousands of ghosts gathered with us at the forest’s edge.

  “Alone is not my current trouble, Gisi,” I said. “Stay back, this battle is not for you, my love.”

  “But it is for me,” Raziel said. He had Gisele’s gun wedged into his belt, and the knife that had killed me, cleaned and sheathed once again. His coat pocket bulged with other weapons I could not see. “You will not go in there without me.”

  He knew it meant his death; we both knew it. But I had no time, and no right, to protest. “Quickly, Mamika. I need your magic now.”

  “Magic, ridiculous,” she murmured, even as she raised her arms high for the opening benediction. “You work more magic than I ever did. The witch of Amsterdam taught you well.”

  I never loved my mother more than I did in this moment. “But you were wise enough to forbear.”