The Witch Who Came in From the Cold - Season One Volume Two

by Lindsay Smith

  He had just enough time to watch mirror-familiar confusion play across the creature’s face before it caught him by the throat, lifted, and opened its mouth.

  • • •

  Tanya found the fallen bottle in the reddish shadows of the hotel sub-basement, and followed rough, muddy footprints through a maze of pipes.

  She almost ran past the alcove where the golem stood, back toward her, strangling Pritchard. The American pried at the clay hand’s grip, kicked nonexistent genitals at the clay legs’ fork, and, generally, seemed about to die. His face looked wrong, blurred like smudged film and stretched toward the golem’s mouth.

  She threw the bottle at the golem, and the glass shattered on its head.

  The golem turned.

  Tanya ducked an arc of clay. A fist clanged off a pipe and superheated steam hissed into the narrow hall, darkening and softening the golem’s skin. The thing lurched toward her, flailing, blind. In the dark, its face looked just like Gabe’s.

  The American lay groaning on the floor.

  “Pritchard,” she cried. “The scroll!”

  The golem lunged for her again, and again she dodged; one clay arm tangled in pipes, and she struck its elbow, to no avail. The golem glared at her with Pritchard’s face, and tore its hand free, breaking more steam pipes. Some people would miss their hot showers the next morning. The thought was absurd, but she didn’t laugh.

  She dodged the golem again, and bared her teeth. The top of the broken wine bottle lay on the ground, some water still within. She grabbed the bottle by the neck and crouched low. The next time the golem came for her, she ran into its arms.

  The golem crushed her to its chest. Her ribs creaked. The golem’s body felt warm, and smelled of sunbaked mud and warmer places than Prague.

  She drove the broken bottle into its face.

  Glass bit and cut. Clay features twisted in pain. She flew back into bent metal, fell. Her ears rang. The golem raised its foot to stomp on her chest, onto her skull—and through the reddish bloom of her vision, she saw Pritchard clinging to the golem’s back with one arm, saw him thrust his fist into the golem’s head and draw it out again, fingers clotted with wet clay.

  The golem stilled.

  There was no sound in the International’s boiler room but escaping steam and the creak of broken things, breaking things. Tanya’s heart did not beat, exactly. Waves of pressure and terror rolled through her, rolled out, rolled in again. The basement throbbed.

  Gabe offered her a hand. She accepted it, and pulled herself up.

  Hiding the golem was easier than Tanya had feared. The golem weighed much less than it seemed it should. Perhaps it was hollow on the inside; perhaps animation gave it weight. Either way, they could lift it together, Gabe at the feet and Tanya at the shoulders. There were many storage lockers and closets in this sub-basement, some of which obviously had not been opened in years, but none of which she quite trusted to remain undisturbed when the International sent staff to fix the broken pipes. In the end, they lugged the golem to the furnace, and hid it among piled junk and spare parts.

  They watched each other in the reddish shadows, torn and bruised. Blood from Pritchard’s lip smeared his jaw. He looked like a wild man caught feeding. Tanya did not imagine she looked any better. They needed to clean up. They needed to talk. “Come on.”

  She led him up the back stairs to the fourth floor, slipped a lock on a randomly chosen hotel room—they’d all be empty here, none of the delegates having yet arrived—led him in, and closed and locked the door behind herself.

  “Thank you,” he said, the idiot, but at least he stopped when she glared and pressed a finger to her lips. He stayed by the door, out of sight, as she closed the window blinds and deactivated the bug under the windowsill and the bug under the dresser, as she climbed onto the bathroom sink—saw her reflection, bruised and dirt-caked, her face and blouse smeared with rusty mud—and turned off the bug there too. She washed her hands, wet a towel, wiped her face clean, wet another, and threw it toward him.

  “We can talk,” she said, “for a few minutes.”

  “They won’t notice?”

  “They’re not expecting to hear anything,” she said. “Tell me the truth.”

  He daubed his chin with the towel and frowned at the blood.

  “You missed some,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “All over.”

  He shouldered past her to the mirror and scrubbed the mud-mixed blood away. In that moment, leaning forward, frowning critically at lip and jawline, in spite of the divides of ghosts and golems and gender and the Iron Curtain, he reminded Tanya of Elena Petrovna, her old roommate back in the Moscow International School, cleaning off the wreckage of a successful night. Golem makeup. She caught her laugh in her palm before it could form.

  “What’s that?” Pritchard turned from the mirror. She tapped her own chin, and he swiped away the last of the blood.

  “Tell me the truth,” she said. “Why did you come to me?” Best sort of question to ask in an interrogation, which this was, after a fashion: a question to which you already knew the answer.

  “The golem was hunting me, specifically,” he said. “Hunting this thing in my head.” He tapped his temple. “It wanted to eat me. If you hadn’t come along when you did—I don’t know what would have happened.”

  He did know. He just couldn’t say it. Americans did not like thinking about death, especially their own. “But if it was hunting you, why would it start now? It’s been awake for weeks. Surely it could have tracked you down earlier.”

  “Search me.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know anything about this. You people have your rules, your stories, your magic, and I don’t want anything to do with it. I just want to do my job. Live my life.” He exhaled. “But here I am. I was in trouble.”

  “And you came to me. Why?”

  “It was the right decision, wasn’t it? You saved my life.”

  She had, was the damnedest thing.

  “Winthrop.” It was not a question, but it was all she could manage at the moment.

  “Knows what he’s doing, but he’s an operator.”

  “So am I.”

  “I know,” Pritchard said. “And you don’t even really like me. We don’t see eye to eye on much.” He ran a hand through his hair, which he hadn’t cleaned; mud and sweat made it stand up like a sad clown’s wig. “That’s an understatement, I guess. But I don’t trust Winthrop at my back. And I do trust you.”

  The words bit. She remembered Nadia’s extended hand. Fire couched in her throat. “Get out of here,” she said, and showed him her watch. “We don’t have time.”

  He did not need to be told twice.

  • • •

  Josh, feeling ridiculous in the scratchy, gold-corded bellhop uniform, followed Baračnik from the break room to the lobby. A row of blocky gray vans pulled up outside. He did not gawk or speak, just kept to Baračnik’s heels, eyes on the carpet. Some of the other bellhops were also new: busy night, it seemed.

  Discipline be damned, he couldn’t stop himself from checking the front hall for Gabe. He’d be reading a newspaper, perhaps, or savoring a glass of something amber and not entirely unlike whiskey at the bar.

  But Gabe wasn’t there.

  No arrival ceremony tonight, Baračnik had explained: The delegates were tired from their long voyages, missing homes and families—none, of course, having been allowed to bring wife or children. One more layer of security. Sokolov’s wife had passed away of cancer two years before; his son was an army officer, fiercely loyal—his career would be hurt if the old man’s defection ever became public, but not destroyed. At least, that’s what the initial contact had tried to persuade Sokolov to think.

  Such were the ways of the world.

  Bellhops assembled in a gauntlet by the doors, two lines facing one another. Baračnik took point—if someone else angled for Sokolov, Baračnik w
ould block him, ensure the scientist ended up with Josh instead.

  Scientists emerged from the bus, swaddled in snow-frosted furs. Steam wreathed them. They seemed anonymous and interchangeable in the mist and dark, and though Josh that afternoon could have drawn Sokolov’s picture with a Dutch master’s precision, Josh standing in the International’s front hall at night felt a brief stab of panic. Maybe he’d get it wrong. Maybe Sokolov would miss the sign. Maybe he’d screw it up.

  Josh tried to swallow. His uniform felt too tight. He thought about Alestair Winthrop’s soft skin, and then, because the world was a sad, sick place, he thought about Dom Alvarez’s warning by the embassy front door.

  Where the fuck was Gabe?

  A jowly apparatchik in one of those big round fur hats Josh could never quite believe anyone wore outside a Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon gathered the scientists, shivering, into a line, paired with their luggage.

  He didn’t need Gabe, Josh told himself. He didn’t need anyone. He could do this on his own. In the end, you always had to, anyway.

  Someone tapped Josh on the shoulder and said, with Gabe’s voice, in heavily accented Czech, “Excuse me? Can you tell me how this address?”

  There was nothing dignified or professional about Josh’s relief. With what he later considered the best acting of his life, he kept his face impassive, turned, and, looking at the note in Gabe’s hand rather than at his friend’s face, answered, in clipped English, “It is left out the doors, down the road four blocks, take a left, and then two blocks.”

  The note read: Over bathroom mirror, under dresser, under windowsill. They must have seeded another round of bugs after the security sweep. And he would have walked right into it, maybe spoiled the whole mission. An electric chill climbed his spine and spread through his shoulders, like water working up a tree from taproots to leaves. A surprise, noted for later review: He hadn’t expected near-miss disaster to feel quite so exhilarating.

  “Thanks, buddy,” Gabe said in English, and brushed past him, overcoat collar up, hat in place, limping into the night.

  Bathroom mirror, Josh repeated to himself. Under dresser. Under windowsill. Not much of a prayer, but then, he’d never been a praying man.

  The apparatchik finished his speech, and the scientists filtered in. Josh watched their faces like he’d seen gamblers watch roulette wheels. Not Sokolov—not Sokolov—not Sokolov. Or was it? Had that first one been—maybe if the good doctor put on weight, or lost some—but the pictures should have been recent—

  And then there was no question: The man himself walked in out of the rain, perfect from the tufts of pale hair on his earlobes to the slight inward turn of his left foot, the reddish bulb at the end of that narrow nose, the long thin skull bobbing on the long thin neck, the most beautiful man Josh had ever seen, at least for the next few seconds. He wore reddish-brown shoes, as promised, and he carried his bag in his left hand, and after three steps he stumbled under its weight.

  Josh was there to catch him. Baračnik didn’t even need to move. Josh lifted the suitcase, and walked the good doctor upstairs.

  5.

  Tanya found Nadia working the heavy bag alone in the embassy gym. Gloves pounded white dust from the canvas. Nadia danced as she struck, weight on the balls of her feet, three blink-quick jabs followed by a hook that rocked the bag against the chains binding it to the floor. A sculptor had chiseled those lines into Nadia’s calves, pressed out the planes of muscle on her back. Sweat covered her. She snarled as she struck. She grunted. After one sharp hook that would have broken a jaw, or else Nadia’s own hand, she screamed in rage and triumph.

  Tanya approached. Nadia did not stop. The gym was empty but for the two of them. Dawn wasn’t yet done dawning. At last, Tanya tried: “Hi.”

  Nadia stopped. “What are you doing?”

  Tanya gestured down to her own trunks and her T-shirt and shoes, suddenly aware of how little she resembled Nadezhda Fyodorovna Ostrokhina. “I thought we could spar.”

  Nadia blinked. The bag swayed.

  “Sure,” she said.

  Nadia threaded through the ropes into the ring. Tanya tried to follow, but caught her foot in the process, then, hopping, freed herself. She was bruised from the golem, sore all over. She’d barely slept. She didn’t care.

  They touched gloves.

  Tanya circled, and Nadia circled her in turn. She kept her guard up—remembered school classes, habits of exercise long abandoned. Work combinations: one, two, body blow—

  Nadia slipped away from Tanya’s punch and tagged her lightly on the jaw.

  Tanya’s eyes stung. She circled more, tested the air with jabs, none of which landed. Nadia slid a second punch through her guard, but her next two blows hit Tanya’s raised forearms. Tanya’s heart began to beat faster. Breath came in swimmer’s gasps, down into the deepest core of her. She swung at Nadia again, and again, but the woman was a dancer mixed with a brick wall. Tanya had reach, should have had, but Nadia knew how to use that reach against her.

  At last, exhausted, furious, Tanya spread her arms and dove for Nadia, trying to catch her around the waist.

  Nadia didn’t register the least surprise. She met Tanya’s rush with open arms. The world turned on its axis, and when it stopped, Tanya lay on the ground, staring up into the rafters and Nadia’s eyes, with Nadia’s knee and glove pressing her shoulders to the mat. Nadia felt strong—real. “What is wrong with you?”

  Tanya’s breath was wet, and so were her eyes. She could not speak. She hadn’t realized how hard she’d driven herself, how much she’d needed to wear herself down to manage this. “Can I trust you?”

  “Of course,” Nadia said, confused.

  “That’s not what I mean.” Everything Tanya meant to say gathered in her throat. “I can’t trust the Ice. Not the way I used to. I’m fighting on their side, I’ll stop the Flame, it’s the only choice we have, but that’s not enough. I need someone—not my grandfather, not a superior—I need a real person, or else I’m just as frozen as that girl on the boat. I need a friend.”

  And after all they’d been through together—partnership and secret machinations, Host-tracking; after all the trust they’d traded and all the numberless ways each could have dragged the other before a firing squad—that last admission still made her feel like she lay naked in the ring.

  Nadia let go of Tanya’s shoulder and sat down by her side, and the hard lines of her softened, but she remained herself. She undid her own gloves with her teeth, then pulled off Tanya’s. Their fingers met and meshed.

  She did not speak. Neither of them did.

  That was all the sign Tanya needed.

  • • •

  For some diplomatic reason Josh hadn’t been able to determine, the French embassy hosted the conference kickoff soiree, which meant, on the one hand, an overabundance of speeches, but on the other (far more fortunate) hand, a plentitude of actual champagne. He avoided looking at, or for, Sokolov—during their brief conversation in his hotel room, the man had seemed eminently capable of the limited acting their scheme required, but Josh had no interest in testing either of their covert abilities. His own few recent brushes with fieldwork, no matter how successful, had been more than sufficient.

  But it felt good, after all this madness, to drink a glass of champagne and wander through a party in control of his own destiny. Drinking a goddamn glass of champagne in a goddamn embassy to celebrate. Okay, so maybe nobody would confuse Josh Toms for James Bond, but he had done the work, and when Sokolov was safe across the Iron Curtain two weeks from now, he, Josh Toms, skinny geek from Brooklyn, would be the one responsible.

  They were winning, dammit. As for Dom’s sly not-smile and his sideways accusations, I’m just looking out for you, buddy, the hand on the shoulder—to hell with him, and to hell with all that.

  Across the hall, Alestair Winthrop accepted a third glass of bubbly from a waitress in a cocktail dress and toasted thin air.

  Josh slid toward him through the
press. “Can we talk in private?”

  “This is hardly my estate,” Winthrop said. “But M. Dubrueil owes me a favor or three, I should think. After you.”

  Whatever favors Winthrop was owed, he seemed to enjoy free run of the embassy: Security stepped aside, doors opened, and after two flights of stairs they stood in a small conference room with a topological map of Europe on one wall, and thick curtains drawn. The engaging latch echoed. Winthrop leaned back against the closed door. “If you have business to discuss,” he said, “we really should find a more secure facility—and perhaps a time when the both of us have had somewhat less to drink.”

  “This isn’t about business.” Josh stepped close to him. Too many nevers tangled in his blood. Winthrop radiated through that perfect slender charcoal suit.

  One corner of the man’s mouth crooked up, all arrogance and wealth and at least a thousand years of royalty. “What, then?”

  Josh kissed him. He tasted right.

  “Well,” Alestair said, and kissed Josh back.

  • • •

  The Department of Commerce, Gabe reflected as he stared into his disastrously empty champagne flute, offered the perfect cover in all cases save when you actually had to pretend to care about agriculture tariffs. This was, and had always been, his great weakness as an intelligence officer: He had a hard time faking enthusiasm for a cover. He knew a guy back in Iowa who, if the Company asked him how he felt about paper or women’s hand lotion, say, could, at the drop of a dime, enthuse about the subject with a lifelong devotee’s passion. Not so Gabe. Oh well—to each his own.

  Meeting conference bigwigs in the guise of Gabriel Pritchard, DoC, then, was—to put it mildly—one of the less satisfying parts of his job. The booze was good, the music fine, and the French knew how to cater, but if it hadn’t been an opportunity to meet the defector in person, he’d have long since told this squat Soviet goofball who’d spent the last half hour babbling about the virtues of crossbreeding corn to go jump in the Vltava. Gabe had had enough of corn back in Iowa.

  At least he didn’t have to worry about the golem crashing the party—though the hitchhiker had stayed on a slight wary alert since their fight in the basement. He’d started to wonder if the golem had dislodged it somehow. That would be a pleasant parting gift: a way to finally work the elemental free. Maybe Jordan was wrong about how extracting the hitchhiker would destroy his mind. Stranger things had happened, some this week.