by Michele Lang
And Eva … her face flashed before me, too, all the artifice gone, pure terror covering her face like a shroud. My poor Eva. What had happened to her? How could I abandon my fight as long as she was still fighting hers?
I crossed my arms, too, and rested my forehead on them like a pillow. “What can I possibly do to help them? I’m nothing without my magic.”
I could not conceive of myself now, without my magic manifest. But losing Gisele was worse.
“What if I stay here with you?” I continued. “What happens next?”
“You rest. And your sins fall away … eventually.”
“But what about—”
“Raziel? Oh, that man, that king of the rebel angels, he’ll keep fighting no matter what. And Eva will make it through somehow. But I can’t tell you when or how. That, nobody knows.”
I lifted my head and stood up from the table, trying and failing to banish the terrible fear that sank into me like the fangs of a wolf. “Here, the fight is over.”
“For you, yes. If you stay.”
“Could I … watch? Or help from here?”
“Well, it’s pretty much against the rules. You have places to go, you know. But I suppose a glimpse or a prayer would be permitted. After all, they gave me permission to come here and cook your turos teszta for you.”
A mere glimpse was not nearly enough. “But I can’t live without you,” I said.
“Yes, you can,” she said. For the first time I caught the flash of tears in her eyes. “Listen to me. This home is gone, yes. But you’ll have new homes, a new love who is living for you. If you are finished with it all, okay. I understand, you’ve been through enough, for sure.”
She paused then, and I could see this scene was straining even Gisele’s patience. My mother would have pulled my hair by now in her frustration. “All I am telling you is that you have a chance to go back. And I don’t.”
There it was. The confirmation that Gisele was in fact dead. And that no magic in the world, not even the Gem of Raziel itself, could undo her death.
I couldn’t withstand this confirmation with heroic stoicism. Even I’m not that cold. Instead I grabbed her into my arms and hugged her tight, as if I could keep her with me forever if I just hugged her hard enough.
“If you’re gone…,” I whispered, unable to finish the thought with words.
“You know the right thing to do,” she whispered back into my ear. “My job is done, but yours…”
She disentangled herself from my arms and swiped at the stray tears that had escaped from her eyes. “I never found a soul mate, just had my sister. You have yours, you know your soul mate. But Raziel will understand if you go.”
“But how will he love me without…” My voice trailed off, stumbled over the words.
“Without your magic? Pfft, he loves you true. And don’t you love him, wings or not?”
She shrugged and sighed. “You think of me as sweet and kind. But I’m the one who forced you to hunt the Book, to fight Hitler’s demon. To die, again and again and again, to kill. And now I’m sending you back, even again. I’m not the angel you thought I was, Magduska. I never was.”
Her words made me gulp. “Churchill told me the same about you, once. I’m finally starting to understand.”
She shrugged, and laughed even as the tears rolled down her round cheeks. “Time’s up, my dear. Bless you for doing everything you could to save me. Remember—you did. You did save me. Those visions would have haunted me into forever. And now they are gone.”
Her words made me pause to think of the bigger picture. She was made of sterner stuff than I had thought, but she thought too much of me. Gisele reminded me to think beyond my own skin. She always had.
“If your visions are gone, does that mean the war is over?”
She sighed. “You know the answer to that. The particular nightmare I have is over, but that doesn’t mean a new nightmare isn’t brewing.”
I sighed deeply. Gisele no longer had her visions. The prophecy of the Witch of Ein Dor was turned aside. But if I ran away from the fight to come, I could never rest easy in the afterworld.
Never.
“But how can I do anything without my magic?” I persisted.
Gisele made an exasperated little noise, even as an enormous smile broke over her face like sunshine. I basked in that warmth, knowing it was the last time I was going to feel it in this world. “Easy,” she said.
“Not so easy,” I replied with a growl, and she laughed and laughed, the old belly laugh she had lost in the last year of her life.
“I adore you, Magduska Lazarus,” she finally said. “Remember me, and know I am ever so much happier now. The fear is gone. I am happy. And Papa is waiting for me! Don’t worry, Mama and Papa will watch over me, now.”
I couldn’t speak anymore, not after that. I just nodded and smiled and cried.
“You can use your magic now, here, away from that Soviet beast. Go back, and your will alone will be enough to keep you in your life. I won’t lie, it is going to hurt, going to be a hellacious fight. But you’re stubborn enough to do it.”
So stubbornness, not magic, would carry the day. So be it—much of my magic had been in fact simply my stubbornness, augmented with a healthy dose of the impossible.
“Good-bye, little mouse,” I managed to say. “Watch over me if you can.”
She smiled at me then. “You already have Viktor for that.”
Both of us knew she was right—she was no angel, I finally understood it. She had her own destiny to pursue in the afterworld, and no more time to fuss over me. I had already waylaid her for too long.
“So fine, I’ll go back,” I said. “But you’re the one who is leaving me.”
“It’s the way of things,” she said with a shrug. “Better for you, too. You have greater things to live for than babysitting me. I’m no baby anymore.”
I started whispering the family spell of return, the one I had forced our mother to teach me. I knew I invoked the spell of return for the last time in this life.
As I wavered and shimmered, I waved good-bye to Gisele. And she blew me kisses, her smile more carefree than I had ever seen in life.
How I hated good-byes. But for Gisele and me, this was the last one.
23
I shot into my body with a horrible velocity. I groaned, and a great cacophony of Russian rose all around me.
The top of my head felt like it had been blasted off. I vaguely registered the fact that they had shaved off all my hair, and my scalp and all the rest of me was cold, horribly exposed and cold.
But the worst was the fog of my thinking. The learned professor had assured me that he would barely be touching me in physical terms—merely an incision over the pineal gland, the scientifically located origin of the mystical third eye.
But the pain was not minor, no. This was no minor operation I had endured.
“Gisele…,” I whispered through dry, cracked lips. The cacophony rose higher around me, a symphony of concern. A cool, moistened swab passed over my lips, a blanket slid over my shaking limbs, and I began flying through the air, dizzying, slowly at first, then faster and faster, faster than flying carpets.…
I drifted away again.
* * *
This time, no dreams. No visitations of angels, no stubborn little imps to warn me. Just nothing. The Soviet version of paradise.
* * *
I awoke in a hospital bed, surrounded by flowers, in January.
The professor himself sat at the foot of my bed, and when he saw that my eyes had fluttered open he jumped to his feet and pushed a button on the wall.
He spoke to me in Russian, in a voice that I think was intended to soothe and reassure.
I could see dreams of the Lenin Star reflected in his eyes when he looked at me.
Other than the professor and the garish, stinky hothouse flowers, everything in the room looked gray and drab and dead.
The professor pressed the button again, then m
uttered something unsoothing under his breath before rushing out of the room.
Alone. Blessed solitude, a prisoner’s gold when there are no other friendly prisoners, only jailers. Alone, with my thoughts and my wounds, but blessedly free of that horrible little man.
Now that I was alive again, I considered doubting my dream of Gisele. Maybe it was only a terrible, wonderful dream. And my girl somehow was still safe, under Churchill’s protection …
But then I reached for my magic, where it had been hidden safe within me. And for the first time in my life that magic was missing. I called upon it in my mind, summoned to it. But it did not answer.
It was dead. The famous-to-be professor had ripped the magic out of me. And Gisele had made it clear that if I chose to come back, to live, this would be the last chance. I could never return from the dead again. I had, finally and irrevocably, run out of lives.
My magic, all of it, like Gisele, was gone.
* * *
I dozed, too exhausted to do anything more than simply exist. A hand closed over mine, and I felt the gentle pressure of the fingertips.
I sighed, could do no more than that.
“Magduska,” Raziel said.
My eyes flew open.
* * *
I blinked hard once, then blinked again. Raziel stood over my bed, and I swear he looked as celestially glorious as he did the day I first met him in Vienna.
“I must be dead,” I said. “Or this is a dream.”
“No, it’s really me,” Raziel said, with a smile so sweet and sad that tears came to my eyes. Where was my famous control, my renowned sangfroid?
“But are you a prisoner? How did you get here?”
He squeezed my hand a little tighter. “Everything has changed since you were taken into the Institute. Everything.”
“I never thought…” I sighed and closed my eyes again, already exhausted.
“That you would see me again?”
“Yes.”
“I promised you, from the beginning. I will never leave you, not in this world or the next. I left Heaven so I could be closer to you, so you could know it.”
I sighed again, feeling the pain trapped in my heart. Remembering my dream of Gisele. My head pounded with every heartbeat.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?”
Raziel said nothing.
“It wasn’t just a dream I had. Gisele’s gone, and I couldn’t save her no matter what I did.” I took a deep breath, steadied myself. “I’m afraid you’ll say the same about me before too long.”
“Afraid?”
“Yes, that you will regret falling from Heaven like you did. Because I won’t survive anyway.”
“Do you regret doing everything you could to save Gisele?”
“No!” I pulled my hand away, scrunched down in the bed in my misery, like a little creature hiding from hawks overhead. “I regret not doing even more. I regret not giving my own life somehow, figuring out how to die in her place.”
I started shaking all over. “But it’s too late for that now. Isn’t it?”
I felt Raziel’s weight as he sat on the edge of the bed. His hand clasped mine again, and I opened my eyes.
I stared into his eyes, and I disappeared into the depths of them, into the dark sweep of the tale he had to tell.
“I made it to England alive. And with the gem. But all was confusion when I got there…”
“Tell me everything,” I said with a low growl. “And don’t you dare try to spare me by leaving anything out. I want the bad news, all of it.”
“It isn’t all bad news, Magduska. Not at all.”
Perhaps not, but Gisele’s death overshadowed everything else in the world. I felt the pain of her murder in my very bones. Because now I knew my dream of her was true—as Gisele had admitted to me, she had been murdered by the last demoness, Enepsigos. Asmodel had gotten his revenge on me at last.
But I needed to know everything. If I didn’t want to die of grief, I had to make Gisele’s murder mean something in the end. I couldn’t bear the thought of her dying in vain.
24
“I fled from Quba with the cigar box tucked under my arm, and walked on foot due west, as far as I could go before night came. But I didn’t make it very far before they found me.
“My brothers, the fallen seraphs of the Mountain of Fire. They knew I had escaped the clutches of the Institute somehow. And they chose to walk with me. I will be honest, they are afraid of you, even now. Especially now. But they know me. And the sight of me, walking the earth like they chose to do, decided them to join me.
“My brothers found an auto for me, and we drove together down to Baku, down those terrible, rutted roads. By the time we had returned to the capital, I had learned to drive on any kind of surface, and my brothers sent me on my journey west, with their blessings. I will tell you the rest when we have time, and rest, and peace. Let me just say that after Uzziel smuggled me out of the country, Knox did the rest once I got back to Hungary.”
“You saw Bathory? And Eva?” I could not help interjecting.
Raziel looked worried, and it wasn’t until he kissed my shaking fingers that I realized his concern was for me and not for my question. “They are fine,” he said, his words concealing a world of questions and fears he would not let me pursue. “Eva still lives. Bathory still rules. For the moment, at least.
“But never mind,” he said, his voice gaining force. “Budapest is not where my story takes shape. It is in England, at Chartwell, where I must take up the tale.
“By the time I reached Churchill’s home I was alone again. The place was in a state of consternation when I got there. Gisele…”
His voice trailed off. And as I turned away, the stitches in my scalp pulled at my skin, mortified it. “She was dead,” I said, to spare him having to break the news to me. “Murdered. Do they know…”
“The murderer? The English do not. But I do.”
He hesitated then, and I leaned back against the pillow. The room was cold, so cold, cold and gray and devoid of life. Only Raziel’s face, animated and full of pain, confirmed that I had not already died and passed on to some ammonia-smelling gray purgatory.
“How do you know?” I whispered. I could hardly bear to speak the words aloud, though I was desperate to hear his answer.
“The demonesses who killed you first,” Raziel began.
My heart sank. Raziel’s words confirmed my dream of Gisele as true. I now knew what he was going to say, but I nodded for him to go on.
“There were three of them. Obizuth, Onoskelis, and Enepsigos. You killed Onoskelis in Budapest.”
I shuddered, remembering our night cut short in Bathory’s mansion on Rose Hill.
“Obizuth has repented, she seeks your freedom since she fears the Nazi menace more. She knows Asmodel firsthand, you know.”
I knew. Obizuth had told me so herself once, long ago, in an elegant, horrible suite at the Gellert Hotel.
“But there were three of them,” Raziel went on. “Enepsigos was left.”
I said nothing. Enepsigos, the cruelest and the strongest, was the worst of the demonic sisters enslaved by the Staff wizard.
“She chose to become enslaved again to Asmodel. She chose to destroy Gisele, at the demon’s bidding.”
“But why?” I finally managed to force out. “What could Gisele do to them? What harm did she ever do?”
“It wasn’t her, my love. It was you.”
I closed my eyes against the sudden wave of dizziness that overtook me. They had sworn to destroy me, and the only demoness true to her oath had taken aim at the one thing that meant more to me than my life.
My sister.
I forced my eyes open, and I breathed deep until the dizziness retreated. “They can’t stop me that way,” I whispered.
“Don’t look too deeply into the demons’ motives,” Raziel said. His face was still unearthly calm, but his voice contained all the anguish he would not let himself feel. Instead I f
elt it, I felt it infecting my body like a fatal plague.
“How could they get to her? Wasn’t Chartwell properly warded?”
“Against certain kinds of magic, yes. But against possession the English are rather poorly defended. To be fair to the English, it is very hard to defend against an evil spirit determined to worm its way in.”
“How do you know it was Enepsigos?” I hoped that Gisele had managed to visit Raziel, to wish him farewell, too.
But no. “Because the demoness came to me and told me. She told me everything.”
We stared at each other in silence. I had heard Asmodel’s rantings about the terrible slaughter he intended to wreak. I could only imagine the horrible things Enepsigos had done to poor Gisele before she killed her.
“She didn’t have time to torture your sister before she died,” Raziel said, a little too quickly. He knew what I was thinking. “She didn’t have the time, or the magic at her disposal. I knew when she was lying to me, and when she told the truth.”
“I don’t believe you. She is cruel, that demon. She drinks terror like blood.”
“She wanted to, Magda. She tried to convince me that she did. But … I saw Gisele’s body. She did not suffer.”
“Don’t lie to me. Please.”
Raziel sighed. I could see he had wanted to spare me the details, but we both knew I wouldn’t let him off the hook so easily. “I am not lying. Believe me, Enepsigos wanted to do far worse to her. When she killed you, she tortured you worse.”
I remembered how the demonesses had torn me apart, the first time I died. I grudgingly accepted his words and motioned for him to go on.
“She told me she had possessed the body of one of the Chartwell maids and nobody there was the wiser, not even the girl, who liked to do love spells and the like and was not adept in magic, was unwary. Enepsigos was hiding like a parasite in the girl’s mind.”
I thought of Gisele’s letter, of her simple gratitude for the kind girl who had brushed her hair. And I shuddered.
“She’s gone back into the girl,” I warned. “Enepsigos doesn’t like to leave loose ends behind.”
Raziel hesitated. “You’re too curious, do you know that? The poor girl jumped in the river and drowned herself the next day.… She thought she had killed Gisele in some kind of trance.”
