“Tried to strong-arm me into giving it up. Started with the soft sell, then when that didn’t work, brought out a few sick pieces of ritual work. Ugly stuff.”
“You should have contacted us,” Nadia said. “We could’ve helped you take care of them.”
Jordan shook her head, a loose dark lock falling over one eye. “No need. They got run off by one of their own.”
One of their own. Irritating, the way Jordan always sidestepped the most valuable bits of intel. Nadia was dying to know exactly who, but she’d been around Rhemes too long to expect anything more. Top-shelf bourbon and useful bits of knowledge—you always paid extra at Bar Vodnář.
“That doesn’t sound like Flame,” Nadia said instead.
“The giving up? Or the internal conflict?”
“Both.” Nadia sighed. “Believe me, I’d love nothing more than for the Flame to tear themselves apart from the inside. Less work for me. But this pull of energy . . . it isn’t us.”
Jordan worried a strip of dried reeds between her fingers as she thought. “Could be that the Flame in charge didn’t want to risk revealing that they were conducting something that powerful. If they seized control of the Vodnář, of the confluence, then people would hear. And people would realize that the Flame was working on something big.”
Nadia nodded, ideas gathering speed. “Right. Better to conduct it somewhere safer, where they can control who knows about it, even if it means less energy to fuel the ritual.”
“Fortunately for the Flame, they don’t know about your sensors.”
Nadia froze. Jordan was grinning at her, white teeth gleaming in the dim light. Slowly, Nadia pulled her shoulders back. “I beg your pardon?”
“Oh, you know.” Jordan gestured in the air. “Those charms you’ve hidden all along the main path of the southwest-northeast ley line to see where power’s being drawn.”
A number of choice Russian phrases ran through Nadia’s mind.
“Spies aren’t the only observant people in this city, Miss Ostrokhina.” Jordan smiled.
“Be that as it may . . .” Nadia swallowed. A cold sweat was encasing her like a shroud. Rituals requiring utmost secrecy . . . Flame goons trying to gain access to the confluence. “I really don’t like the way this is adding up.”
“Then I suggest you use those sensors to find what’s drawing the energy and put a stop to it.” Jordan turned toward one of her shelves and dug around in a small cigar box. “And here—this might help.”
Nadia pocketed the thin sheet of mica Jordan handed her, its edges wrapped in a slender thread of silver. “Thanks,” she muttered. She had no doubt that, one way or another, Jordan would find a way to make her pay for it.
• • •
Gabe pulled his wrist away from Alestair and made a nervous scan of the ballroom. “Look, Al . . . Now is really not a good time . . .”
“Nonsense. We’re all friends here.”
There was no mistaking the sudden sharpness in Alestair’s sunny expression, the hard steel glint of his eyes. For perhaps the first time since they’d met, Gabe felt that he was finally seeing the slick operator MI6 was known for producing. That beneath the bespoke suits and Eton rhetoric, a cold-blooded spy was at work.
Maybe he had been all along.
“All right,” Gabe said, lowering his voice. He eased back on his heels and donned the best bored, polite party smile he could. “It’s business. But I thought I could . . . y’know. Practice.”
Alestair snorted with something resembling a laugh. Gabe got the distinct impression the Brit was enjoying this way too much.
“I don’t know which disappoints me more. That you haven’t let me in on the fun of whatever you’re hunting, or that you didn’t ask for my help working those charms.”
“They’re nothing, really. An old gift from Jordan.” Gabe lifted his shoulders. “Thought I should get more comfortable working with them.”
“And the case?” Alestair asked.
Gabe sighed. “You know I can’t talk to you about that.”
Alestair cocked one eyebrow. “Now, now, what’s the harm in a little chat among friends?”
“That.” Gabe shook his finger at Alestair. “That’s exactly the problem. Especially when you count people like her among your friends, too.”
“Everything okay?” Josh asked, sauntering up to them. He kept an easy pace, but his expression was strained. “Gabe? Shouldn’t we . . .”
Josh’s gaze flickered toward Alestair. Only for a second, but it was enough. Gabe suppressed a groan. Al was friendly with Tanya, and he was more than a little friendly with Josh, apparently . . . Alestair’s loose lips might sink all sorts of ships.
Alestair’s smile dimmed as he turned his attention back toward Gabe. “If you need my help,” he said, “you need only ask.”
Gabe shook his head. “I appreciate it, Al. Really, I do. But honest—I have everything under control.”
At that moment, the shouting began.
3.
Tanya was conducting another perimeter sweep of the second floor of the Lichtenštejnský Palace when the screaming started.
An ancient Slavic curse rose to her lips. The West German security team—which had, until this point, been tolerating her obvious surveillance with bored indifference—hunched forward with coiled intent. Tanya paused, lipstick in hand, and stared a moment longer into the mirror she’d been pretending to use to reapply her makeup.
The ballroom. The shouting was coming from the ballroom. Two main entrances, plus the service entrance from the kitchen. Enough of the service staff was in the KGB’s pocket that she had to trust they’d divert any escape attempts via the kitchen. Currently, the West German heavies were crowding the first ballroom entrance, forming a wall of well-carved muscle. That left . . .
She dropped the lipstick and sprinted down the corridor for the remaining ballroom entrance.
The doors around the corner were closed. Tanya slapped her palms against the metal bar—locked from the inside. She ran her fingers through her bangs, knocking some strands loose from her carefully swept chignon. What the hell was happening in there?
She squeezed her eyes shut. Somehow, Gabriel Pritchard had to be involved.
Blyad.
He’d been so slick, working with her to stop the golem. Like they really were members of the same team. She’d been hoping for that, if she was being totally honest with herself. That they might trust one another someday. They’d never be outright allies, she knew, but she’d hoped she and Gabe could find the sort of comfortable stalemate she’d settled into with other Western Ice members like Winthrop. Ice business was Ice business, and to bring up anything regarding their office work was just impolite conversation. It shouldn’t even factor into their rapport.
But of course Pritchard couldn’t ever see it that way. He was a red-white-and-blue-blooded patriot, and magic was only slightly more than a nuisance to him. Why had she ever thought it could be more than that? Why would she ever have wanted it to be?
And yet.
And yet he’d told her the truth about the Ice’s stasis program for all of the Hosts. When Nadia wouldn’t. When her own grandfather wouldn’t—assuming his construct had even been created with such knowledge in mind. Gabe had nothing to gain from telling her short of the momentary satisfaction of rubbing her nose in her own ignorance. It was too temperamental an act, coming from a place of too much emotion, for him to even try to exploit it for something more.
That wasn’t the behavior of a slick spymaster laying a trap. It was the desperate flailing of a wounded animal trying to strike back.
Tanya paced back toward the first entrance, where the guards still formed a protective barricade, and approached. Leave a kopeck-sized gap between your lips. She worked through her mental repertoire. Legs slightly narrower than shoulder-width. Shoulders rolled back. Dewy-eyed. Peer through your lashes rather than tilt your chin up.
“Excuse me,” Tanya whispered, first in Czech, then,
when none of them looked back at her, in German. “Excuse me. Excuse me.”
“Fuck off,” the guard snarled. “No one’s allowed in or out.”
Tanya batted her eyes, but he wouldn’t so much as glance her way.
Fine. We’ll do it my way. She snapped open her clutch and gripped a handful of interwoven herbs and twigs in one hand.
“Pardon me,” Tanya whispered. “I’m afraid it’s very important that you permit me inside.”
The guard turned around to scold her again, but his eyes unfocused, as if looking at her only presented a fun-house reflection back at him. His brows furrowed, but the gap had been made; any effort to look at her as she slipped past him would send his gaze skittering away. It only lasted a few seconds. But that was all she required.
Now she was inside the ballroom, and staring at a full-blown bar fight.
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten,” Dima—one of the scientist team’s minders—growled. His cheap wool tie dangled precariously from his neck like a noose; blood trickled down one side of his mustache. “I remember how you wronged me back in Piter.”
One of the scientists under his care—Maks? Misha?—threw his arms in front of his face to defend against a blow. From the shiner swelling around his right eye, it looked like it wouldn’t be the first of the evening. “I swear to you, I didn’t mean it! If I’d known you liked her—”
“Enough! Dima, you are a pig with drink and women alike.” Kostya staggered in between them.
But he was too slow to avoid the emptied bottle of Sovyetskoye Shampanskoye Dima swung at his temple.
Tanya had mere moments to decide. Did she intervene, and undoubtedly blow her cover in front of the substantial crowd that had gathered around the brawl? Or did she stand back and let these minders—these men the Communist Party had specifically tasked with shielding the scientist delegation from Western agents—have their brawl, and risk leaving the scientists exposed?
And what the hell had gone so wrong that they were turning on the very men it was their job to protect?
She rocked onto her back foot, prepping herself to leap forward and try to talk some sense into the minders.
Then she recalled Sasha’s smug face. The way his jowls pushed up when he was particularly pleased with himself; when he knew he had one of his operatives wedged under his thumb. Tanya was already serving a permanent posting in Sasha’s thrall, thanks to his discovery of her elemental radio and her subsequent failure to recover it. An incident this huge, on her watch, would surely cost her even more. Far more than she could afford around the Prague rezidentura.
Tanya flinched as the cheap glass bottle shattered and sprinkled the onlookers.
“All right, that’s enough.” A contingent of security officers moved in to encircle the brawlers. Tanya gripped her clutch to her chest and shrank back. If the minders were busy duking it out, even dragging some of their charges into the melee, then where had the rest of the scientists gone?
Pritchard.
Tanya found herself in one of the rare situations in which her small stature actually hindered her. Even in heels, she had to bounce upward to search the assembled crowd. She’d spotted the American earlier, at the reception, looking bored, distracted, rubbing elbows with his puppy friend. Now, though, she was searching for him in the gaps between a heaving sea of faces contorted by drink and the dim chandelier lighting. She swore under her breath. Somehow, she knew, knew Pritchard had something to do with this madness.
The what and how, though, remained to be seen.
The crowd swept around Tanya like rapids, slowly but inexorably moving her toward the front. She looked up, and found herself suddenly exposed on the edge of the fray. The fight had spread, that alchemy of drink and violence catching alight and feeding on itself. The security grunts were flecks of water against the roaring flames.
Only KGB training and reflexes allowed her to dive out of the way as one of the minders crashed into the glass-topped round table beside her.
She threw up one hand, sparing most of her face from the spray of splinters and shards. Her scalp wasn’t so lucky. Something warm trickled down her forehead and into the corners of her eyes.
Tanya dropped to her knees beside the shattered table—cover be damned—and seized the minder sprawled over the wreckage.
“Where,” she said, spit spraying and blood dripping down her face, “are your scientists?”
The minder’s eyes flickered an eerie shade of red and gold as he looked back at her. The only answer he gave was a bone-chilling laugh.
• • •
Nadia locked the rooftop access door behind her as quickly as she could and ran to the ledge. Sure enough, the bits of crystal hidden in the seams between the stone emitted a faint red glow. She permitted herself one moment to cringe, then, as the crystals flickered back and forth, fished in her bag for her binoculars and took up Tanya’s usual post along the rooftop.
So it was going to be another one of these nights, then.
Briefly, she considered summoning Tanya to meet her, then remembered her partner was on duty for the rezidentura watching over the scientific conference. Half the city’s spooks were tangled up in that soporific sprawl. Winthrop too, then, most likely. And Metzen, her KGB double agent out of West Germany. Try as she might, Nadia couldn’t think of a single member of the Consortium of Ice she could call on tonight without blowing a cover, crashing a banquet, or enraging a jealous husband.
Nadia dug in her satchel and laid her array of charms on the rooftop ledge. With a sad twinge, she recalled a night not so long ago when she and Tanya had surveilled this corner together, ready to intercept the construct the Flame had sent to hunt the Host Andula Zlata. Life was much simpler back then. Before Tanya learned about the Ice’s stasis program when she wasn’t ready for it. Before that smug American officer began to meddle in their affairs.
Now she didn’t have to worry about disappointing Tanya with her grim calculus. The thought should have brought her some comfort. But she’d seen the real fear in Tanya’s eyes, the kind of fear that quickly burned off and left poisonous rage behind. They’d tried to settle their differences. Reached a sort of agreement. But such truces weren’t meant to last. Ask Molotov and Ribbentrop.
The first of Nadia’s charms chimed once more.
She settled on her stomach and brought the binoculars up. Then, just as she was about to shift to her side to scan the square, she remembered the charm Jordan Rhemes had given her. Gingerly, she pulled it from her pocket and removed it from its casing.
A soft kiss of blue filtered through one corner of the mica as Nadia held it out before her. She swiveled it left, then right, until she settled on the point where the blue glow was strongest. Then she took a deep breath, cursed the nonexistent gods, and whispered an old Amharic prayer.
She really hoped Jordan knew what she was doing.
Nadia sensed something like a thread pulling in and out of her body, stitching a line between her and the mica square. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, not entirely, but a little unnerving, carrying a chill through her as the thread pulled tight. Then, all at once, the threading ended with a feeling like a snap. Nadia leaned backward, dazed, and dropped the square beside her on the roof. She blinked the constellation of stars from her eyes and pulled her binoculars up again.
Within minutes, the chiming sound grew in strength; the other charms joined it with a series of chirps and glows. Nadia squared her shoulders and watched the far end of Staré Město.
Out of the twilit alley, a hunkered, unnaturally squared-off figure emerged.
Nadia dropped the binoculars and brought herself to a crouch. The Flame had made another construct.
Which meant they believed there was another Host in Prague.
• • •
Someone at the Lichtenštejnský Palace had gotten the bright idea to turn off the overhead chandeliers. As Tanya would have happily told them, had they bothered to ask her opinion, the darkness did nothing to damp
en the brawl. If anything, the fighting had grown even more heated—men grunting and shouting, no longer bothering to give reasons why before leaning into a punch.
Not that much of anything could tame that storm, now that Tanya knew that somehow, some way, magic was involved in the chaos playing out before her.
“You are hurt.” A West German officer seized her by the arm—she thought it was a West German officer, as best she could tell in the dim light from the table candles—and yanked her upright. “The Czech police and paramedics are on the way. Please—allow them to tend to you.”
“I’m fine.” Tanya yanked her arm away. “You should be subduing those men. I am afraid they might be . . .” She paused for a moment, concocting a suitable lie. “Under the influence of some sort of drug. Perhaps your men permitted someone to enter the premises with drugs?”
The officer’s tone hardened. “No. That cannot be possible.”
“Are you certain of that?” Tanya asked. “If they take these men to the hospital, and learn these men were given illicit substances at an event you were supposed to secure . . .”
The officer’s scowl deepened.
“Well, I am afraid it could be rather embarrassing for you and your embassy. Do you not agree?”
“Step aside!” someone shouted in Czech. “Paramedics! Coming through!”
A squadron of Veřejná bezpečnost policemen shoved through the crowd, escorting paramedics with canvas stretchers. The policemen formed a tunnel of khaki uniforms while their commander subdued Dima, the sole Russian minder who had yet to crumple into a delirious, drunken, battered puddle on the ballroom floor. They hoisted the minders and a scientist onto the stretchers with brutal efficiency. Police escort to the hospital, then, before being taken into custody.
“Wait.” Tanya pushed her way toward the commander. “You cannot arrest these men. They are representatives of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic—”
But Gabriel Pritchard looped his arm through the police chief’s and turned him away from her. Tanya’s mouth flapped open. This had to be Gabe’s doing. He’d engineered this whole distraction—
The Witch Who Came in From the Cold - Season One Volume Two Page 10
