“Tanya. I understand your misgivings, but you need faith for now. We’re doing good.” The last word seemed very hard for her to say. “Focus on the job. This is fun. If you don’t let yourself smile a little, you’ll crack.”
“Fine,” Tanya said, and slapped the transmitter back against the wood. This time it stuck.
For now.
• • •
“Not much of a safe house,” Dominic Alvarez said through his lit cigar.
Gabe Pritchard, hands in pockets, reviewed the alley. They hadn’t been followed, as far as he could tell, and even with all the secret magic crap he’d dealt with in the last few weeks, he remained confident in his ability to spot a tail—but there was always the chance he’d missed something, especially with Dom along. The man was distracting, and not exactly subtle.
“Christ, keep your voice down,” Gabe said. But the alley stayed still and cold and dark. No snow for once—a nice change—but enough left over from the last night’s fall that Gabe should have been able to hear footsteps, or a silent observer changing position. Nothing.
Not that a prospective tail had anywhere to hide: no obstacles or shelter here, unless you counted those few trash cans. Dom tipped cigar ash into the snow by the basement door, and kicked more snow to cover it up.
Gabe frowned. “They’ll see your footprints.”
“You CIA guys.” Dom didn’t quite laugh. “Always jumping at shadows. We would have seen a tail, and, Christ, do you really think some Soviet stooge will give a shit about one more ash pile in this city?”
Maybe, Gabe thought—if there were magic involved. The KGB had Ice moles—so why not Flame as well? Both mystical factions seemed to have a pretty damn wide sense of their own territory. Well, might as well get on with it. If he started second-guessing himself about magic, he’d be here all night. “The space looks good to me. Clear lines of sight, off-street door, drop a sniper in the window up there and a guy on the roof and nobody’s getting in or out without our say-so. What am I missing?”
Dom shrugged.
Gabe resisted the urge to hit him. “ANCHISES starts in forty-eight hours. Our”—he stopped himself from saying defector—“guest arrives the day after tomorrow, and if we have to find a new safe house to stash him in, I’ll need more than a hunch to justify it to Frank.”
Dom went very still. The ember at the tip of his cigar flared. Then he moved. One arm darted out across Gabe’s back, and the blunt, strong fingers of his hand bit into Gabe’s shoulder. Gabe tensed, body calculating options and outs: dart inside, elbow to the throat, drop weight, don’t go to the ground where you’ll lose the use of your height and Dom’s dense strength will work to his advantage—
Then he realized Dom was laughing.
“Mother—” Gabe said, but didn’t finish.
“Gabe, you’re all right. High-strung, but I like you.” Dom grinned around the cigar. “This place looks great. I was just fucking around. Come on. Let’s check her out from the inside.”
The padlock looked rusted, but opened without protest, admitting them to the bowels of the safe house.
This, too, looked defensible: a wide-open basement chamber, lines of sight interrupted only by a few pylons, wooden pallets piled to one side. One door led into a narrow hall, stairwell door to the left, easily securable, storeroom to the right. Dom checked exits and airflow. “Seems good.”
Upstairs, a warren of rooms tangled around the central stair, all unoccupied and in various stages of decay. This place had been elegant once, before some revolution or another had gotten to it. “Why’s no one here?”
Gabe shook his head. “Whole place is marked for demolition come spring.”
“Structural problems?” Dom asked, peeling away a long strip of plaster.
“Nothing like that,” Gabe said. “Just building something else in its place.”
“Make-work shit. Shame, beautiful old piece of junk like this.”
The hitchhiker in Gabe’s head twitched.
“You okay?”
Months ago, Gabe wouldn’t have been. Months ago, even that little twitch would have doubled him over in pain. Much as he hated to admit it, he seemed to be learning how to deal with the bastard. Either that or the hitchhiker, this dumb elemental stuck half-in and half-out of his head, was finally on board with the whole “don’t get Gabe reassigned for mental health reasons” plan.
Still, no sense ignoring the thing. “I’ll go check the roof, in case the advance team missed something.”
Dom stuck his head back out through a cracked doorframe. “You want me to come with?”
God, yes—he could use some cigar-chomping, well-armed backup. But if there was something magical up there, Dom would demand an explanation, which would mean explaining to the brass, and if he did that . . . well. So much for Gabe Pritchard, CIA officer.
“Nah,” he said. “I can handle it.”
Stairs creaked underfoot. Dust filtered through the faint gray light. The twitch in Gabe’s skull intensified as he climbed, but reciting Alestair’s formulae kept it contained. As to what Gabe would find on the roof, he had no idea. Another Host, maybe? Could the captives on the boat have worked their way free? Someone hostile, or hunting him?
He opened the door onto the roof and exhaled, caught in a fist of cold air. After the tight stairwell, the Prague rooftops seemed to unfold forever on all sides, slate tile and spires of disused churches.
The golem stood at the edge of the roof.
It didn’t move, at first.
The golem had chased Gabe through the nights of Prague, clattering after him down alleys; he’d felt its clay hand close around his leg, but always he had seen it out of the corner of his eye, or racing from shadow to shadow. In movement and nighttime shadows the—creature was the wrong word—thing seemed unfinished, made in haste by a rushed sculptor, but in the chill, sourceless light of this late afternoon, it did not look unfinished at all.
Human fingers had left loving tracks upon the roughness of its face. The curve and edge of a palm had shaped the swell of muscles; nails had carved the whorls of the golem’s fingerprints. The golem had not been built to pass for a human being, Gabe thought, in that frozen rooftop moment. The golem had not been built to pass for anything save itself.
In the rough beauty of those features Gabe recognized himself, and Tanya Morozova, and Josh Toms and Alestair Winthrop and Nadia and even Dom, down below.
He was surprised how still it looked; he hadn’t realized until he saw the monster waiting just how much real people moved, legs shaking, shoulders rising and falling, eyes darting as focus shifted.
He was even more surprised when the golem lunged.
It did not need to shift its weight—no muscles tensed before that hunk of clay sprang. It caught his arm in one massive three-fingered hand and slammed him against the wall. Its mouth opened, revealing crystal teeth and a long, dark gullet. A wind colder than the wind of rooftop Prague hit him from behind somehow, and he was drawn down and down into the pit between those teeth. His hitchhiker screamed.
He tried to pull free of the golem, but could not shake its grip. His free hand clutched inside his trench coat for the flask of Vltava River water he kept there—Alestair had used it against the golem last time, he’d collected some himself by moonlight—he felt stretched, pulled, in and down the golem’s throat—
He fumbled the flask open, and splashed the golem in the face.
The golem did not roar. It had no lungs. But it fell back, flailing, and Gabe fell too, skidded on the tile roof, almost tumbled over the edge but caught himself. He lunged for the fallen flask. There were a few drops left, maybe enough to save him.
The golem staggered to the roof’s edge and leapt away. As it arced over the alley, its head spun a half-turn on its neck and glared back at Gabe—glared with Gabe’s own eyes.
Prone on the safe house roof, Gabe told himself he was imagining the resemblance. The golem had been vague at first, its features an artful meld.
But that had been his own face staring at him as the golem scuttled over rooftops out of sight, his own face in clay. The thing had tried to draw him down, to swallow him into itself.
He’d hoped the golem would keep to the shadows for another couple weeks, a string of unsolved crimes pestering the Prague police, but it was coming for him now, on the eve of ANCHISES, when the Company needed all hands on deck, when the slightest mistake could tip their hand to the Russians. When he could least afford goddamn distractions and goddamn magic.
“Hey!” Dom’s voice issued from the stairwell. “You okay up there? “
“I slipped,” Gabe said, forcing himself to his feet. “There’s ice, but the roof looks . . .” He searched for the right word. “Clear. We’re good to go.”
He climbed back down, carrying the empty flask, but the rooftops and the cold lingered in his mind.
2.
“That’s the shape of it,” Dom said in the meeting with Frank the next morning, and tapped his cigar into the ashtray. “Safe house secured, retreat lines scouted. We’re good to go once the eggheads get here.”
Frank sipped his coffee and reviewed the troops: Dom, relaxed as ever, smoking; Josh, controlled, pale, with an eager edge Gabe remembered from his own first big op; and Gabe himself.
“Like he said.” Gabe had picked up a limp during his near-tumble off the roof, and he hoped he was hiding it well. “We’ll have the safe house locked up nice and tight.”
“Glad to hear it, gentlemen.” Frank flipped two pages on his clipboard, and did not frown with his face so much as with his entire body. “The conference starts next week, but the first delegates arrive tomorrow night—Doctor Sokolov among them. There’s an arrival ceremony the day after, but most everyone’s bound for bed as soon as they touch down. That makes tonight our best opportunity to rendezvous with Sokolov.”
Gabe tried not to tense. He’d be the logical choice for the rendezvous, given his field experience, and under any other circumstances he’d have happily made the play, but not with the golem gunning for him. Frank watched him for a pause that lasted far too long, and Gabe scraped for some legitimate reason to beg off.
“Josh,” Frank said without turning, “you’ll make the contact.”
Relief tasted sweet as honey. Yes, Josh getting the tap probably meant bad things for Gabe’s own career—it likely meant Frank hadn’t forgiven Gabe’s earlier magic-induced fuckups with Drahomir and the Russians—but at least the op would roll off smooth. He covered, though: “Toms doesn’t have the field experience.”
“He has to get it somehow.” Frank held a piece of paper from the clipboard out to Josh, who didn’t move. “Son, you handled the Milovic approach just fine. Gabe’s overexposed for this sort of job—we can get you in with the bellhops, give you a solid approach vector for Sokolov, and a script. It’s an easy run.” So long as you don’t fuck it up, Frank very pointedly did not say. “How’s that sound?”
Josh’s hand didn’t shake when he took the paper—or at least, didn’t shake much.
Gabe caught up with Josh in the closet that passed for the office kitchen. Josh didn’t notice Gabe’s approach at first—he was drinking coffee from a mug he held with both hands and staring at a blank yellow patch of wall. Gabe reached for Josh’s shoulder, but stopped himself. The slightest touch might send the kid to the rafters. Instead, he leaned against the counter and waited with his head down and his arms crossed.
“I’m that obvious?” Josh asked after a while.
“You’ll be fine.”
Josh uncurled one hand from the coffee mug, drew the folded paper from his inside pocket, and passed it to Gabe.
“You shouldn’t let me read this.”
“None of this should be happening in the first place.”
Gabe skimmed the paper, folded it again, and offered it back. “Easy liaison. Winthrop’s in with the bellhops is solid, no risks there. It’s not the easiest job I’ve seen, but you could do a lot worse. No running, no gunning, hardly any risk. Get a full night’s sleep and you’ll be good to go.”
“I’ve never done anything like this before.”
“Back when we were stalking Morozova, you took a flying leap out of a car to chase a lead.”
“That was a mistake.”
“Whatever you want to call it, that’s what we need right now.”
Josh took the paper back.
“I’ll see if I can get any more intel on the Russian counter-ops, in case they’re playing a new game. You’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure?”
They stared at opposite walls, painted the same horrible yellow. “Hey,” Gabe said. “You can count on me.”
• • •
“I,” Gabe confessed to Jordan Rhemes over beer that night at Bar Vodnář, after she’d chased the other customers out, “have no goddamn idea what I’m supposed to do. I thought learning about the Ice and the Flame was supposed to make my life easier—get this madhouse under control, figure out what’s going on inside my head, and push myself back to work. Now I have a golem hunting me through Prague, and—” He cut himself off. Jordan wasn’t Ice or Flame, exactly, but she wasn’t CIA either. “It’s getting in the way of my day job.”
She tossed back the last of the two fingers of bourbon she’d poured for herself and glanced a question at him, which he answered with a tired nod. More bourbon for him, a splash for her, and she returned the bottle to its shelf. He started drinking. She pondered him, and the glasses, and the bourbon, and did not. “You say the Vltava River water did nothing.”
“It worked. The golem ran for the hills after I splashed it.”
“But it didn’t stop the thing—our monster didn’t calm.”
“More like the opposite.”
“And after you experienced what you called a ‘sucking’ feeling, it began to look like you?”
The golem’s face had changed, when it tried to draw him into its mouth. It had looked more like him. Or was that only a well-placed shadow, mixed with fear? “I must have made that up.”
“If you want to survive while working magic, Gabriel, you need to resist self-doubt. Trust your own eyes, your own ears, more than your judgment.”
Gabe shifted in his chair and stared into his glass. “Eyes lie all the time. Ears too.”
“No,” she said. “Eyes never lie. The judgment lies—it leaps to false conclusions, it embraces easy answers.”
“But if I trust my senses more than I trust my judgment, how can I tell if I’m going mad?”
“There’s a thin line between magic and madness,” she said, and took a drink after all.
“You’re not making me feel better.”
“You don’t come to me to make yourself feel better. You come for help. And you need more of that than usual.”
“So you think the golem’s going to continue to be a problem.”
“Don’t you?”
He tilted the shot glass and stared through its amber lens down at the bar. “My luck’s not been that good recently.”
“I believe,” she said, “the golem wants to stay alive. All living things do, and it was made to simulate a living thing. When you drew near in the graveyard, your ‘hitchhiker’—the elemental—gave it power. Perhaps now it seeks to draw the elemental into itself. Unfortunately for you, the elemental is too deeply fused with your body, your soul, to slide from you so easily.”
Because anything else would be too damn easy. “I die if it goes.”
“Or you may be ripped from your own body, and bound into the golem’s.”
“Do you see much difference there?”
“Death or eternal imprisonment.” She shrugged. “They seem different to me.”
“So what do we do?”
“Alestair says—”
“God, I don’t want to go to the Brit about this. I’m in deep enough with him already.”
“Even with your soul on the line?” Jordan leaned the bar’s ladder against the topmost shelf, and climbed up.
“At any rate,” she said as she groped among the bottles and casks and wrapped packages there, “I’m just mentioning him. You don’t need to be so defensive.”
“Long day, I guess.”
“Alestair says every time someone’s woken the golem in the past, it wandered until it ran out of power.”
“So where’s the power coming from?”
“Maybe it’s feeding off your elemental—like a moving magnet starts a current in a wire.”
“It’s not my elemental.”
“It is your elemental—it’s just not completely inside you. Maybe the golem can draw off the part you’re not using. That explains why the Vltava water didn’t work—the water tries to force the golem to sleep, but your presence wakes it up.”
“What if we drown it in the Vltava? Or dump it in?”
“You’d end up with a very wet, very angry golem. Catch.” A red flash floated down from the top shelf, spinning and sparking in the taproom lamplight. He caught it: a long quill, blood-red from tip to furthest barb. Jordan descended, bearing a bottle that contained only a yellowed scroll.
“What’s this?”
“Golems run on scripture in their heads, written on vellum or leather—that’s the tale, anyway. I’ve never had a chance to play with one myself. But if tales are all we have to go on . . .” She uncorked the bottle and tipped the scroll into her palm. It was smaller than he’d thought. She unrolled the scroll an inch, drew a knife from her belt, and sliced off a piece. The way the knife parted the scroll seemed familiar. His stomach turned.
“Is that skin?”
“Yes,” she said, and took a silver bowl from beneath the bar. “I’ll write STOP on here, in Hebrew and a few other languages just in case. When you see the thing next, get this into its head. It might not work, but if it doesn’t, I don’t know what will.”
“It almost crushed me.”
“So find someone to help. Maybe your friend in the Ice.”
The Witch Who Came in From the Cold - Season One Volume Two Page 5
