Rebel Angels

by Michele Lang

  Just outside the temple walls, I saw a hulk of battered metal standing guard. It looked like an enormous safe, or an icebox, but consumed by a terrible conflagration, melted to the ground beneath it. I watched it from the rear window as we drove away from the temple of fire. And I could not shake the sudden conviction that the hunk of metal was responsible for the young priestess’s disappearance.

  Ziyad’s assassins rode in the front of the car with him as we left Baku. Their names were Boris and Ilyam, and though Ziyad did not bother translating what they said in our travels, I had begun to get the sense of them as men. I was glad they fought on our side.

  It was not their physique or their demeanor that revealed their prowess. No, they let slip their abilities in odd little ways. The shorter and rounder one, Ilyam, played with his knife when he was bored, balancing it by the tip on his fingers, tossing it in the air and catching it one-handed behind his back. His tall, skinny brother in assassination, Boris, used to balance on anything he could find, sidewalk curbs, car bumpers, chips of rocks extending from outcroppings. They couldn’t help what they were, and they honed their talents without thinking.

  As we pulled away from the village outside the temple of fire, assassins and Ziyad in the passenger area, Raziel and I hidden in the back with the coffin, my thoughts strayed again to Gisele, alone in London.

  I rested my body over the top of the coffin, my fingers trailing along the back of Raziel’s neck. The curtains divided us from the passengers up front, so we had a bit of privacy as Ziyad sped along the roads leading north from Baku. But I could think of only one thing.

  “Will we find it?” I said under my breath.

  Raziel turned his head to look up at me. “We have to,” he replied. “Asmodel himself will be chasing us into the Caucasus before we know it.”

  11

  Before we had left Budapest, no less a personage than Winston Churchill had warned us of Hitler’s aspirations to seize the Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus. Hitler wanted the oil; his resident demon, Asmodel, wanted the gem. In the short term, an attack on the east would quell the rebellion stirring inside the Reich since Hitler’s near-fatal “accident” at Wolf’s Lair. In the long term, acquiring both oil and gem would mean the Reich would win the war—and subjugate all the world.

  I shuddered at the thought of it. Bumping along in the back of the pink hearse, I visualized the gem: azure blue, a star trapped inside of it, small but terribly heavy in my hands. I called to it, but unlike the written Book of Raziel, the gemstone did not answer.

  My magic resided in words, not gems. And I could not summon a soulless gem out of its hiding place.

  “I will never find it,” I whispered, half in a panic. “The gem has been lost for over two thousand years.”

  “It has been waiting for you.” Raziel sat up and leaned against the coffin so he could kiss me.

  Our lips touched, but a terrific rattle shook us apart. The hearse lurched and bumped, and the brakes squealed.

  Raziel peeked through the curtains on his side. “The paved road is gone.”

  I looked through on the other side and gasped. The hearse now ran along a rutted track, looking more like a forest path than a proper road. We rattled over the sliding, broken stones in the track, and skidded dangerously close to the edge. Beyond the tires, wildflowers, then … nothingness. We traveled at the very edge of a mountain pass.

  After four hours of this lurching and jolting, the hearse rolled to a slow stop. The front door opened, then slammed, and I heard footfalls crunching through gravel.

  It was Ziyad. He opened the rear door, and made as if he were adjusting the coffin from its sliding around on the rough road.

  “Hungry? Thirsty?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Raziel replied before I could reply—apparently hunger transcended all language barriers.

  Ziyad nodded, slammed the door closed, and disappeared with his companions. All I could hear was the engine ticking as it cooled.

  I furtively raised the curtains and dared another peek outside. A herd of cows surrounded us like a meaty river. One of the cows lifted her head to stare wide-eyed through the window at me, and I dropped the curtain and retreated back into the semidarkness.

  “We’re in the middle of nowhere,” I said.

  “That’s good,” Raziel said. “One rarely finds untouched treasures in the city.”

  I watched Ziyad wander through the herd, to a ramshackle building at the edge of the roadside. Suddenly I was seized with a terrible foreboding.

  “Ziyad isn’t acting like much of a fugitive, is he? I have been hunted. So have you.”

  A crease folded between Raziel’s eyebrows as he leaned back against the coffin. The cabin smelled of pine and wool. “He is among his own people.”

  I couldn’t hold back a snort at that observation. “In my experience, the greatest danger is hiding among your own people. Bathory is in the most danger from his fellow vampires, is he not?”

  My mouth had gone dry, dry as cotton, dry as a shroud. And yet I could not have forced down a glass of the finest champagne in Paris.

  “If something happens to him, or if he betrays us, we don’t know another living soul here who will help.”

  Raziel shrugged. “It’s better than Poland. Far better.”

  “But it’s not just Ziyad.” I leaned my head against the curved cover of the coffin and sighed. “It’s like we’re trapped inside a story by Scheherazade. A maze inside of a maze.”

  Raziel’s fingers trailed along the back of my neck, and I closed my eyes and relaxed under his touch. “You are not alone, never alone,” he said. “We travel together on this foreign road.”

  “I’m terrible at waiting,” I said by way of apology. “At not knowing what to expect.”

  Raziel laughed. “I know.”

  “Well, I still don’t trust Ziyad, not entirely. He does not have the eyes of a traitor, yes? But something terrible weighs on him, Raziel. You don’t need any magic to see it.” I glanced at the portrait on the coffin and sighed.

  “For now, we have no choice but to travel with him to the mountains.”

  I didn’t like Raziel’s answer, but he was right, of course.

  Ziyad emerged from the shack flanked by his bodyguards, carrying a paper sack. He waded through the placid river of cows to the back of the hearse.

  He hauled the back door open. “Even the dead get hungry in my country.”

  The hairs prickled along the back of my neck. “In my country, the dead refuse to stay dead,” I replied with a smile for armor.

  He blinked hard, but said nothing in reply.

  “Food?” Raziel asked, breaking into the silence.

  “Kofta,” Ziyad said, and he bowed slightly as he presented the sack to us. “The meat here is good.”

  I nodded my thanks and peeked inside. Bread, freshly baked and still warm, stuffed with meat off a skewer, and herbs piled on top.

  Raziel and I devoured our meal and watched the herd of cows drift off the road toward a mountain peak rising in the distance. The cowherd, a furious-looking man with ice blue eyes, glared at us as if we had come to murder him. Tripping at his heels was a young boy dressed in rags, who did the hard work of running after stragglers and scaring them back into the herd.

  Ziyad caught me staring and he nodded. He pointed at the peaks, half-hidden in a hazy mist. “The Five Fingers of God, Miss Lazarus. We must ascend them before we have finished our travels home.”

  The peaks reached into the sky, pure rock barren, lacking any sign of life. They looked as remote and unreachable as stars.

  The wind picked up and drove the dust from the road into our eyes.

  “Eat and rest. We must go,” Ziyad said. And he slammed the rear door of the hearse closed once again.

  * * *

  Despite the hard jolting on the unpaved road, I soon fell asleep and dozed where I lay beside the coffin.

  And like a whisper I rose out of my body and hovered above it, a dragon
fly above the shimmering pool of my dream.

  Raziel dozed, too, his hat tilted over his eyes. I considered calling his soul to travel with mine, then had second thoughts. He did not have a native magic to protect him, on this or any plane. And spirits called to spirits—we were unlikely to remain alone in our naked, vulnerable state.

  I let Raziel sleep, returned my attention to the coffin—

  —and was shocked to find another spirit hovering, too. I had not realized a body rested inside, and had not cast for spirits or anything else before getting in the trunk.

  On this plane, spirits spoke a universal language, the language of angels. What a relief, to simply understand.

  “Hello,” the spirit said. She was beautiful and, I realized with a start, the same woman represented on the face of the coffin and on the glorious carpet hanging on the wall of Ziyad’s warehouse in Istanbul.

  I blinked hard, jolted by a sudden and unwelcome realization. “My God, you are the girl who guards the temple of fire,” I said, floating closer. Unlike my soul, still tethered to my body by a silken strand of silvery light, the woman’s spirit hovered free, unconnected to her dead body inside the coffin.

  “Are you lost?” I asked.

  “Oh no, just waiting until I return to my people. They will bury me, and I will ascend after saying my good-byes.”

  “Are they going to … burn you?”

  She laughed at that, a rueful, sweet sound. “I would have much preferred it! But poor Ziyad could not bear to feed me to the fire. Instead, I go to the mountains now, where my parents’ bones lie.”

  “I am sorry you have passed,” I said.

  “Why? It was my time.”

  I tried hard not to argue. This lovely young woman surely deserved to live, even if she had resigned herself to her fate. “What happened to you?”

  Her face grew sad. “The Institute challenged the authority of the temple itself! The enforcers grow bold. They brought one of their anti-magic machines to the very gate of my sanctuary, and expected to breach the ancient walls.”

  I remembered the burned-out hulk of metal by the temple gates. She sighed and continued. “The fire consumed their hateful machine, but not before I had paid for the defense of the temple with my life. And the defense of you, dear stranger. Yes, you, too.”

  Numbness spread through me like poison. This girl had saved my life, Raziel’s life, and paid the ultimate price. “Thank you,” I whispered, so grateful for her sacrifice, but abashed and saddened by it, too.

  “It doesn’t really matter anyway,” she went on. “I have no children, no husband, nothing to hold on to here. Only my brother grieves for me now.”

  Suddenly I understood. “Ah. Ziyad is your brother.” His furtive, absent manner and lack of caution suddenly made sense. All attributable to his sharp, sudden grief. But why had he not told us?

  “A blessing you have come to me, witch of Budapest. Please, when you awake, tell my brother that I am all right?”

  “We grieve for you, too, priestess. Of course I will seek to comfort your brother,” I hastened to agree. “May I please ask your name?”

  “I am Leyla,” she replied. “And please tell Ziyad I am at peace. It will be a comfort to him.”

  I suspected poor Ziyad would find little comfort anywhere now that she was dead. “We appear, you die. It will be hard for Ziyad to accept that.”

  It was Leyla’s turn to sigh and turn away. “You did not kill me, Ziyad did not kill me. It was the magic killers, the Institute scientists who bear the stain of my murder. Life is different in the mountain country. You will see. The Institute must fight harder in the mountains to contain us, and we are difficult to crush. No army wants to march over unpaved roads for days only to arrive in a poor land with no oil, little timber, and a hostile people. It’s just not worth it. And we fight to the death, not a traitor among us.”

  It occurred to me that she must have overheard my conversation with Raziel. “I didn’t mean to suspect your brother without cause.”

  “I did not hear,” she said a little too quickly, suggesting to me she was being more polite than honest. “But you must know that Ziyad is true. The poor man walks a tangled, dangerous road, where friend and foe wear the same face. But he is a true friend to you. Please believe me.”

  “I will tell him what you told me. That you are at peace. But your brother and I may not travel the same road for long.…” I trailed off, unwilling to spell out the details of what I meant.

  “No apologies are necessary. I understand all.”

  “Will you stay here until after the funeral?”

  “Yes. I cannot bear to leave Ziyad so soon, with so many cares. I wait for at least a proper good-bye.”

  I sighed. Nobody hated good-byes more than I did. So I could sympathize with Leyla.

  “And tell him to look in Xinaliq, where my betrothed comes from,” she said, looking away from me and looking thoroughly demure at the mention of a man. “And tell Ziyad I love him, and that I never suffered. And tell him…”

  I reached to her and squeezed her shoulders, she looked like she was going to faint. “Yes, go ahead.”

  “Tell him to sell the carpets. All of them.”

  Before I could ask her why, the hearse went over an enormous hole in the road, bang—BANG.

  And I was jolted back into my awakening body.

  Such bliss, not to return in mortal agony! Just to awaken. I stretched and smiled, glanced at the coffin, of course saw nothing amiss with my ordinary sight.

  When I looked again, with my witch’s sight, there she was, an indistinct ball of energy, like an overexposure on a photograph. I waved to her and she shimmered in reply.

  Raziel cleared his throat and sat up as we lurched along the rutted track of the road to Quba. “Ach, my back,” he muttered. “Banged my head, too, but what’s the tragedy in that?”

  I tsked him even as the sight of his lopsided smile warmed me. I leaned over the coffin to smack him on the shoulder, and as I did so for the first time I caught the faint, unmistakable scent hidden inside the tang of pine and the strong, dusty smell of the woolen rugs.

  Leyla was with us, discarded body and soul.

  I explained to Raziel my encounter and his smile faded. “Poor girl,” he said, touching the coffin even more gently than usual. “She mustn’t linger too long or she will get lost.”

  “No,” I replied. “Now that I have the trick of traveling in my dreams, I’ll make sure she’s okay.”

  He nodded, his eyes serious. “Magda, compared to your trick of cheating death by return, this flying in your dreams looks simple, I know. But, my darling, remember, you can get lost, too.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I said, an edge of impatience creeping into my voice.

  “Don’t yes me like you did your mother,” Raziel said, his voice uncharacteristically sharp. “That cord you see, it is more fragile than you think. I’ve seen babies asleep in their cots snap that cord without meaning it. And slipping away, back to Heaven…”

  “All right,” I said, striving to ignore his solicitude. “I’ll try to remember. But you mustn’t worry too much, because if that silver cord does come loose, I’ll come back anyway. I’ve done it before, as you know.”

  His face brightened at that, but I still had the nagging sense that I was missing something in Raziel’s well-meant warning.

  By now the sun was near to setting, and the shadows grew long as the sunlight snuck past the gilt curtains. We had been lucky. The weather north of Baku was clear. Even a short rain would have melted the track into impassable rivers of mud.

  In the sunset, a row of trees on either side of the road stretched along our way, where horse-drawn carts pushed ahead of us. Swaddled bundles hung from nooses, every half a dozen trees or so, alternating on either side of the road.

  At first, I feared we saw children, strung up inside of bags, sacrifices to the fire gods. Sickened, I squinted to see better so that I could understand, and was relieved to see t
hey were only lambs, slaughtered and dressed, hanging from the trees like executed convicts.

  Ziyad was across the hearse in the driver’s seat, too far away to hear my questions, but before I could call to him the car rumbled to a stop next to one of the swinging carcasses.

  Ziyad got out, slammed the door behind him, and began talking to the man squatting in the road beside the tree with the hanging lamb. After a few moments of unhurried conversation, money changed hands, and the stranger took out an immense blade, swung it over his head, and hacked down the carcass from the tree.

  He wrapped the dressed lamb in a white sheet and carried it to the car. Ziyad opened the back door, and the stranger deposited the lamb on the backseat, next to Boris.

  “Supper,” Raziel remarked.

  I had never felt so far away from the Café Istanbul.

  12

  We stopped outside Quba proper, after rattling through a ghostly forest of white birches, looming in the darkness, shadowed by the shades of thousands of ghosts. The road, paved once again, snaked through this forest, high above a river running sluggishly below.

  I don’t scare easily, but my teeth all but chattered as we moved silently through the wood. Raziel, bless him, maintained his customary aplomb. Whereas the malevolence inside of my own soul called these dark creatures to me, on the plane of the living and beyond.

  We stopped in front of a low, whitewashed building with a façade of white arches that led to a hidden courtyard behind.

  Ziyad bowed as he opened the back of the hearse to let us out. I jumped, landed on rubbery legs, and wobbled around until I got feeling into them once again.

  “Ziyad, your sister…,” I said without preamble.

  He paled and shook his head. “Say nothing,” he said. “No, do not speak her name. Do not speak of her.”

  “But she…”

  “No!” He walked away from us into the courtyard, his back stiffened, offended. I traded a long look with Raziel and we followed him, the bodyguards carrying the dressed lamb between them, looking crestfallen as they followed Ziyad.