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

by Lindsay Smith

  Jordan squeezed his shoulder, and smiled. “You stumbled into a new world in Cairo, a world on whose edges I’ve lived all my life. There are two factions: Call them the Ice and the Flame. Their leaders have been fighting a secret war for a very long time, with people like me caught in the middle.” Her smile turned sad. “Sound familiar?”

  He nodded.

  “Good. When you need to vomit, use the bucket beside you.”

  • • •

  Tanya and Nadia chanted, bathing the alleyway in shades of blue and gold, even as the construct lurched out of its bindings. The glow wormed into its articulated stone joints; the “eyes” in the hollows on its head burned a hot white. It leapt once more for the roofline, where Andula, the terrified student, crouched. But they didn’t relent, letting the ancient languages twist and flow.

  Then everything happened at once: Andula’s scream, the sparks showering from the construct’s joints, the flash of light that hit Tanya in the chest like a fist. Her hand ripped out of Nadia’s, and she tumbled backward into the heap of broken wooden pallets. Flecks of wiring and crystals sprayed across her lap—the creature’s elemental components.

  They’d done it. They’d overloaded the construct with energy direct from the ley lines, more than it could possibly contain. It had been reduced to its base parts, all of the power its creators had stored within it unleashed in a single burst.

  As for the matter of just who’d created it . . . well, she and Nadia would have to deal with that soon enough.

  “Blyad,” Nadia swore, heaving a chunk of rock off her arm. She was sprawled across the alley floor, her dark hair pooled beneath her. Tanya had to blink a few times to clear the afterflash in her eyes to make sure it wasn’t blood.

  “What the devil was that thing?” Andula screeched.

  Tanya and Nadia exchanged a look. “I need to gather components,” Nadia said. “So we can track down the creators.”

  Tanya sighed and climbed back up to the roofline with Andula. “As I was saying . . . You are a Host. You were born attuned to a particular elemental, and, through some means, have been activated. Your elemental has come home to roost, you could say.” Tanya smiled darkly. “Witches like me are able to use these elements for good, but there are witches who would use them for more sinister purposes, too. And they would very much like to harvest this elemental from you.”

  “Harvest? Harvest?” Andula crawled back on the roof, away from Tanya. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Tanya chose to ignore her question for the moment. “These witches—the Acolytes of Flame—someone from their organization created that device. An elemental construct. Its sole purpose was track you down for them. Fortunately for you, members of the Flame aren’t the only people capable of wielding elemental magic.”

  The girl’s eyes were wild. “And what would it have done if it caught me?”

  Nadia trilled with laughter. “Oh, milaya devushka. Trust me, you don’t want the answer to that.”

  The crisp night air crackled in the heavy silence for a few moments. “It was tracking me,” Andula finally said. She watched as Nadia wrenched apart two chunks of crystal that had been fused together. “Like—like a radar, or something.”

  “Yes, much like that. The Acolytes of Flame are attempting to collect all of the Hosts like you,” Tanya said. “They want the elementals for themselves.”

  “So there’s something inside of me? Right now?” Andula pointed to herself. “What is an elemental, and what does it want with me?”

  “It wants you. You were born to be together, you were meant to be the Host for the kind of elemental power it represents—like water, or electricity, or earth, so you can use its power to its fullest potential. Think, Andula—have you always had an affinity for water, perhaps, or a particular type of flower? But it wasn’t until you were activated by a strong burst of energy that your elemental could find you.” Tanya’s expression softened. “Don’t worry, it can’t harm you. This is what you were made for.”

  Andula laughed, a dry and bitter rasp. “I’ve never known you KaGeBezniks to be big on matters of fate.”

  Nadia and Tanya flinched as one. They exchanged a glance, a long, wordless debate, then Tanya closed her eyes with a faint nod. “We’re not here as KaGeBezniks,” Nadia said at last.

  “No? Then who are you? What do you really want with me?” Andula folded her arms across her chest. “How can I trust you? How do I know that this ‘Flame’ is the group that means me harm, and not you?”

  “We’re with the Consortium of Ice,” Tanya said, resting one hand on Andula’s knee. She was careful to keep her palm curved down, concealing the tiny charm nestled in her hand there. “And we’re here to help.”

  • • •

  Gabe thought that by the third heave, surely there couldn’t be anything left. He was wrong.

  Jordan rocked back and forth in her chair and kept talking, as if his guts weren’t lying in a bucket between them. “The Ice like the world more or less the way it is. They are . . . prigs, for the most part, but less vicious than the Flame. I have contacts among them. If anyone knows how to deal with your pain, they will.” She passed him a tissue.

  “I don’t need their help” would have sounded much more authoritative if his stomach hadn’t chosen that instant to double him over, dry-heaving.

  “That should be the last.” She passed him a glass of clean water once he finished. “Rinse your mouth well. You don’t want any of the stuff you drank lingering between your teeth.”

  He rinsed, spit, and wiped his mouth, then tossed the tissue in the bucket. “Is there a place I can dump this?”

  She nodded to a door he hadn’t noticed before. “Washroom.”

  By the time he returned she’d wiped the bowl clean, and burnt a handful of herbs within.

  Gabe took his seat. “I can handle myself.”

  She laughed. “Like you handled Drahomir?” Jordan did not let the silence linger long enough to compel his answer. “How long can you keep this from your comrades at the embassy? Or from their bosses back at Langley? The Ice can teach you to deal with your problem.”

  “Can’t you?”

  She shook her head. “I can treat the symptoms. The problem beneath, I cannot touch. And if you let that problem go untended, the symptoms will grow beyond my ability to calm.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “No,” she said. “You must speak with Alestair Winthrop. He is a . . .” she searched the air above his head for the right word, and settled on “. . . cultural attaché at the British Embassy. One of your people.”

  Gabe crossed his legs and leaned back. She hadn’t said operative. She hadn’t said spy. “A cultural attaché?”

  “MI6,” she said. “So, really your kind of people. It’s not like I’m sending you to the KGB.”

  “Was that an option?”

  Jordan’s smile was very white, but in other respects nothing like a shark’s. “Your service and his are friendly. If your comrades, or Langley, discover the relationship, they might even be pleased: Interagency cooperation is so difficult to achieve, especially in the field.”

  “And he’s a . . . whatever.”

  Her face screwed up. “Sorcerer is the term they prefer. But yes. From as old a family as they come. The Ice cares about things like that: bloodlines, titles, families. Prigs, like I said.”

  “And he’s MI6. Of course.”

  “I don’t care for the Ice at all, Gabriel. But Alestair is a good man. He will help you.”

  Yes was the word on the tip of his tongue. It tasted smooth, round, soothing, cough-drop fresh. But with the pain gone, training caught him like a trap. An officer massaged an asset through the stages of the recruitment cycle like a priest led parishioners through the stations of the Cross: Find a potential source, trace the outlines of his needs or hers, build relationship through trust or fear or common cause, and then recruit. Coax the player into the game.

  I’m not trying to
pitch you, Jordan had said. But that was the cycle’s core, the double blind, the story told and sold: This isn’t a process, these steps aren’t mechanical. You’re special. We care.

  The magic was real. Cairo streets twisted through his nightmares. Jackals laughed and metal feet clattered down cobblestones in memory. Knives gleamed in shadows, their edges blood-wet. He saw those dark dream visions waking, sometimes, before the headaches came.

  Jordan wanted to help. Or wanted him to feel that’s what she wanted.

  He swallowed the yes, said “No,” and stood. The room did not tilt or sway as he approached the door.

  “Gabriel—”

  “No,” he repeated, finding it easier the second time.

  She rounded the desk toward him, reached for his arm but did not touch him. “You cannot ignore Cairo forever. Sooner or later you will have to face the wounds you took. Sooner or later you will have to trust me.”

  He couldn’t bear to say no a third time, so he walked through the door and shut it behind himself.

  • • •

  Karel Hašek watched with one perfectly crinkled eyebrow as Vladimir spread the contents of his satchel on his desk, early morning light painting them with a softness that, having failed, they didn’t deserve. Molten tangle of copper wiring. Crystal fragments. A bundle of herbs or flowers, singed beyond recognition. A chunk of quartz. Vladimir snapped the satchel closed, then crossed his hands before him, waiting for his boss to speak.

  “What?” Karel asked. “That’s it?”

  “That’s all we recovered from the alley where we located it, sir.” Vladimir’s thick fingers clenched around the satchel straps. “I suspect that whoever dismantled it most likely took the rest with them.”

  “Whoever. Whoever.” Karel raked a hand through his dark curls. “And who, pray tell, do you think is capable of dismantling such a construct?”

  Vladimir’s throat bobbed; he looked around the study, half-afraid the rest of their coven might pour out of the shadows at any moment. “The—the Ice, sir?”

  “Yes. Yes, the Ice. But what are they doing in Prague?” Karel shoved away from the desk and began to prowl, pacing in long strides. “When was the last time they bothered to track down the Hosts on their own?”

  “All they seem to care about is interrupting our work,” Vladimir said.

  “Always we must stay two steps ahead, Vladimir. Never be the one to pursue. What good is it doing the Soviets to chase after the Americans, after all? Kennedy said he wanted a man on the moon, the Soviets poured all their funds into trying to beat them there. No. Too late. They tried to squash our spirit here, in Prague, but by tamping out one fire, they ignited a dozen others. So it will be for the Ice.”

  Vladimir studied the map pinned up behind Karel’s desk. Hand-drawn, centuries-old, the political boundaries embarrassingly outdated. But the stark diagonal lines formed an uneven grid that never budged. Whatever they accomplished with the ritual, with all of the Hosts bound together as one, that grid would remain, ready to serve them. An endless power source for their endless reign.

  “But they have our Host,” Karel continued.

  Vladimir cleared his throat. “We cannot be certain of that. If we can identify the Host through what remains of the construct, we might be able to locate him or her through more . . . conventional means.”

  “Mm. Perhaps.” Karel plucked up one of the crystals, turning it over in his fingers. A splinter of darkness lingered at the center. Vladimir couldn’t remember if it had been there before their ritual or not. “Or at the very least, we might locate these Ice interlopers. That could be far more valuable, in the long run.”

  Vladimir blinked a few times, then forced himself to nod, even as he was trembling inside. “Naturally, sir. But—but in the meantime. What shall I . . . tell the others?”

  “Tell them we’ll need to conduct a new ritual sooner than we anticipated. I’ll check the charts, the almanac, but I think there are several auspicious times ahead.” Karel grimaced. “It would be better if we could gain access to the confluence beneath Bar Vodnář.”

  “The one the Rhemes woman owns?” Vladimir asked. His shoulders rolled back as he stood up straighter. “I think we might have a solution to that.”

  Karel seized his coat from the rack and swung it on. Heavy tweed, a fine English cut—something from before the tanks rolled in. “Then see to it.” He pulled on his cap. “I have a lecture to give.”

  3.

  CIA Prague Station was born out of an architect’s mistake.

  The embassy building that housed the station was a sharp Georgian beauty curled around a tree-strewn courtyard, and its large third-floor chambers might, in a distant aristocratic past, have been drawing rooms, or libraries, or studies—not that Gabe knew the difference between the three.

  Those rooms, the few times Gabe had been inside them, demonstrated that the architect knew how to produce a decent space. Light filled the chambers from their plush carpeted floors to their high ceilings, and pale blue plaster walls created a flawless illusion of openness. Which, of course, rendered them utterly unsuited for intelligence work.

  But between and behind those chambers—now repurposed as filing rooms or meeting halls or public offices—tangled a warren of coffin-sized rooms where two grown men would have to exhale to pass abreast, improbable cul-de-sacs, doors built for hunchbacks, S-curve crawl spaces with ceilings that belonged on a submarine, opening onto oddly-cornered cubbyholes twice as tall as any room in the rest of the house. All windowless, of course, even the one room large enough to stash four officers’ desks side by side. They’d been servants’ quarters once, or storage, meant for heavy use by people the building’s proper residents preferred to ignore.

  Which, come to think, remained an apt description.

  They’d carved a window for Frank’s office during renovations, a smoked-glass slit broader on the inside, like an arrow loop. That had been their one concession to design or comfort, a status symbol and a generous allowance for the Chief of Station. When Gabe first arrived in Prague, he had imagined they made the window narrow for security reasons, but today he thought there might have been a different sort of foresight involved. Granted, he’d put on weight since his college days, but even in football trim he wouldn’t have been able to throw himself out of that gap.

  Franklin Drummond had killed seven men with a shovel in a foxhole in Korea. Gabe knew this, as did everyone in Prague Station, even though Frank never told the story and no one else did either. Secrets of many kinds moved around and through Prague Station, and some you learned just by breathing in.

  Today, that story Gabe had never heard was impossible to forget.

  “Sit,” Frank said when the door closed. “And take me through it one more time.”

  “I’d rather stand, sir, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “It is not all the same,” Frank said, his voice tightening and tensing as he circled the desk. “It is not all the same because one of us has a leg missing, and that one of us just happens to be your commanding officer, who is confused, and frustrated, and angry at what looks to be a first-degree failure of basic intel work last night. So sit down, Pritchard, and walk me through this mess again.”

  Gabe sat. Frank sat.

  “Well?”

  “I screwed up,” Gabe said.

  Frank lifted his clipboard with a typed report. “Officer Toms praises your work on the hand-off. The potential asset enjoyed the game, won big, for which I’m sure Accounting will thank you, and then the pair of you skipped off to a nice smoky bar for the final pitch.” He turned the page. “At which point, Toms continues, the, let’s just say ‘high-value,’ target, whom we have spent, and you have spent, six months and significant departmental resources developing, emerged from the bar ‘spooked’ and ‘shaking,’ which are not, in my professional opinion, words I would use to describe a successfully recruited asset. Would you agree?”

  “Sir, I—”

  “Would you
agree, Pritchard?”

  “Yes, sir, I would agree. Those are not words I would use to describe a successfully recruited asset. Nor would I describe what I did last night as successfully recruiting Drahomir Milovic.”

  “What would you describe it as?”

  “I screwed up, sir. It’s in the report.”

  Frank turned the page. “The report indicates that you suffered, and I quote, an ‘intense headache’ during the pitch. That you took suddenly ill, and asked the asset to leave rather than placing yourself in a situation where the two of you might appear on hospital records together.”

  “That’s the shape of it, yes, sir.”

  “You’re looking well today, Pritchard.”

  “It was a twenty-four hour bug, sir. I thought I could keep it together for the op.”

  “You went into a delicate recruitment op, which we’ve been planning and prepping for months, sick.”

  “I was feeling off yesterday morning. I didn’t want to cancel at the last minute. It could have made us look bad.”

  Frank threw the clipboard on the desk, folded his hands, and leaned across toward Gabe. “Friends cancel on friends all the time, because they’re sick. We could have changed the schedule. This week, next week, makes no difference. But you got to the pitch, and you blew it. Best case scenario, Milovic’s just worried about you. Worst case, which is likely, he knows you were trying to set him up for something, and he’s worried about us.”

  “With respect, sir, I know this is bad. I’ll make it right.”

  “Over a few months, during which we could have used you on other targets.”

  “I know,” Gabe said. “I’m sorry. I’ve had a lot on my plate recently—”

  “A lot on your plate.” Frank’s eyebrows rose, as if he’d never heard those words in that precise combination before. “A lot on your plate. Boy, you’ve been dropping more balls than a drunk juggler. My girls have a Labrador, you know, those big dogs with the floppy ears?”

  “I’m familiar with the breed, sir.”

  “Now, I’ve known smart dogs in my time, and this is not one of those. When I throw a stick, she’ll run in the opposite damn direction. But my girls love their dumb dog, and because I love them, I love her too. I don’t mind that the dog can’t do what the damn thing’s bred for, because I don’t need it to. But I don’t have room for two pets in my life. Whatever unscrewed your head at Cairo Station, you’d best get it screwed back fast. I took you on because Killarney said you needed a change of venue, that you were a good officer, and I’ve seen some shades of that. But you better show me more than shades soon. There are boys dying for the chance to prove themselves here. We’re on the front lines of the Cold War. We are in the no-man’s-land.” His eyes met Gabe’s. “And the no-man’s-land is no place for someone whose head is not in the game.”