by Michele Lang
The angel’s voice boomed over the platform, as if it had issued from an independent source. “Judgment is mine. You have committed no wrong upon this child, wizard—not yet. Leave now.”
To my astonishment, the wizard made a long, formal bow, and smiled again. “How satisfying to witness you completing the task that I had begun, Raziel. Thank you for upholding the Divine Plan, and have a pleasant evening. I will see you soon—with many challenging questions concerning your book. Good night.” And with a flourish, he whirled and vanished into the steam of a train departing across the platform.
My body went numb with the realization that I had survived my first encounter with the Staff. For I sensed to the marrow that the wizard would hunt me until he got what he wanted out of me. But now, the angel loomed over the furry, smoking bodies of the dead werewolves, and the stink of their singed hairs rose to my nostrils.
Before Raziel could swing his sword and chop me in half like a melon, I backed up quickly, to the very edge of the platform. I was ready to jump, if it came to that. “Divine Plan! So how could you let that monster just disappear?”
He hesitated, and the fierce expression on his face softened. “You do not understand, Magda. Free will matters far more to the evil-inclined than to the good.”
I rubbed at my arms, trying to banish the chill in my bones. “Free will? A Nazi murderer like him walks away after a few pleasantries and a girl like me—his intended victim, you know full well—now gets hacked to pieces by your sword?”
I was too furious to remember my fear. I confronted him the way I berated my own cowardice in the night, the part of me that longed to flee to the ends of the earth. “What about my sister and Eva—who are both depending on me to survive? How could you enforce judgment on me and not that wizard, when Gisele needs me? She’s completely innocent. I am riddled with flaws, but reveal to me one of hers. One!”
Raziel’s face broke into a smile. It was like the sun coming out from behind a thunderhead. “She snores.”
His answer dumbfounded me. I sputtered, “But snoring isn’t a sin!”
He started to laugh, and I remembered to breathe, forced myself to smile back. “How do you know that about my Gisele? Was that a vision or a guess?”
He shook his head, laughed harder, lowered his sword, and I began to think that perhaps I could survive this encounter with an angel, one who had a good case against me.
He wiped at his eyes with a marble-smooth hand before replying. “The witch did not tell you? I am your family’s guardian angel. I have watched over the Lazarii since ancient times.”
“I know. But I had no idea you hung around enough to know Gisele’s snoring could wake the very dead at night.”
I half heard the train’s warning whistle, heard the faint calls of the conductor from far, far away. I took a deep breath and tried to clear my mind and senses. “So you understand why I must go to Amsterdam. And you know what is coming.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I do not have your sister’s gift of foreknowledge. I know a horrible conflagration is coming, the entire world can sense that. But the particulars, no. Gisele is a far better judge of that than I.”
“But you know our hearts, yes?”
He hesitated, then sheathed his sword. The great gilded scabbard shimmered and disappeared, and the angel somehow transformed into a preternaturally tall man in a chalk-striped suit, no wings, only surrounded by an ineffable cloud of the glory of the Almighty. “No one can know the truth of the human heart. I know you seek an ancient book, my book. I know you seek my intercession.” Again his face grew stern. “And I know you have twisted Divine law in order to achieve that which you seek. Compelling a celestial being to perform your will is forbidden.”
I kept my many objections to myself. “I don’t care. As long as I save Gisele and Eva too, I don’t care what happens to me.”
“The world does. God does.”
I gathered my satchel, which I had left sitting on the cold cement, and, on shaky legs, began to walk along the platform. Other people, mortal and magical, began straggling out from the waiting area onto the platform and onto the westbound train. The porters began to pass the heavy luggage through open windows rather than drag the trunks up the steep stairs to the sleeping cars that loomed high over the platform.
Raziel drew closer to me, and the people around us drew back so he could join me on the platform. A few of the passengers sweeping onto the coach gave Raziel a long, assessing glance before hurrying a little faster up the stairs and past the conductor. Otherwise, no surprise or reaction. The good people of Vienna had witnessed much more mortifying sights in recent days, in broad daylight, on their bustling, modern thoroughfares.
I dropped my bag, grabbed it again, dragged myself along. Raziel followed. “I am going to Amsterdam.”
“I forbid you.”
“I thought I retained free will, angel. I cannot stay in Vienna, that’s for certain. That wizard will snuff out my soul, all of my lives, the moment you disappear, and you know it.”
I hesitated at the foot of the stairs, the last passenger still standing on the platform, and I turned to face my disapproving angel, standing a small distance away. Despite my obnoxiousness, Raziel still sought to complete his own mission—to guard me and Gisele in this dangerous, pitiless world. A thankless task, no doubt.
I climbed the stairs, looked back one last time at Raziel. “Come on, then,” I said, as the train whistle all but drowned out my voice. “Please. If you could let that dreadful wizard go unscathed, you must come with me, try to mend my impious ways.”
Raziel stiffened and shook his head. “So you compel me, even now, against the will of the Almighty. Beware, Magda Lazarus.”
I tried to look meek. “I’m not compelling, Mr. Raziel. Only asking.”
His eyebrows bunched together and he frowned. But the angel followed me up the stairs and into my private compartment. A moment later the train I’d been sure I would not live to ride began rolling out of the station.
7
I insisted on the berth by the window, and like a child I strained to watch the lights of the station from behind the blinds as we fled Vienna in the night. The lights grew smaller, disappeared, and my angel and I traveled through the darkness on my fool’s mission.
I, the fool, looked through chipped and smoky glass and caught my own reflection, superimposed on the sleeping city slipping away. What was I doing? I stole a glance at my companion, who sat upright and silent next to me in the darkened compartment.
His even, beatific features were dappled in shadows as we rocked along the tracks with the other sleeping passengers, tucked away in their own private places. This otherworldly being had saved me from the wizard and his minions, but now the train rushed into the depths of my living hell. Hitler’s Germany.
The warmth of Raziel’s love radiated through his eyes as our gazes met; his tiny smile, half exasperated as it was, told me that he knew me, in all of my weakness and fear, and somehow loved me still. This creature from another level of reality loved me more than anyone in the entire province of Ostmark, in what was once the free republic of Austria, and now a part of the Third Reich. In the middle of danger, he waited for me now to come to my senses.
How could I explain that I agreed with him? “Thank you for saving my life,” I began.
“I don’t want your thanks. I want you to get off this train and get out of the Reich immediately. It is almost too late. Don’t you understand the dangers?”
I did, and he knew I did. I folded my hands in my lap, did my best to impersonate a tired, ordinary girl. A girl who had the right to exist. “It is a two-hour-and-fifty-five-minute ride to Linz. Enough time to get a bit of rest.”
But I could not rest, not with such an extraordinary companion, not in such surroundings. And not in the midst of such danger.
We rocked along in the gold and blue sleeping cars of the grand Orient Express, which originated in Istanbul a
nd ran all the way to Brussels. Bathory, with his usual grand excess, had insisted I travel first class, in a red-velvet-papered and wood-paneled compartment, the finest accommodations offered by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. Two beds in my lonely compartment, no other passengers, and no unanswerable or dangerous questions asked.
How Eva would have appreciated the journey, even as dangerous as it was. As for me, my nerves were worn to nothing. I consoled myself with the thought that such opulence should not be wasted in sleep, though the bed was turned down and the bedding soft and luxurious.
I washed my face with rose-scented soap at the washbasin in the corner, dried my hands and cheeks with the deep-plush wash towel that hung alongside. Unlike my fellow travelers hidden away in their berths, asleep, I had to keep watch to pretend I belonged here. I somehow had to pass muster.
Raziel leaned closer, whispered into my ear. “Get off the train. Now. Sneak off, jump. By the time we get to Linz, the Staff will have the SS after you.”
My heart turned into a hard little stone. I searched the angel’s face for mercy, found none. Yet even in the midst of my worry, his beauty arrested me. It also disturbed me.
I held on to my mission like a talisman against his beauty and my fear. “You are an archangel, aren’t you? With you here, who can touch me?” I thought of the wizard on the train platform in Vienna, his cold hatred, and I settled into my downy white berth, reveled in the knowledge I still lived to travel in such luxury.
“Angels have their limits.”
Raziel’s breath brushed warm against my ear, and I leaned toward him, suddenly exhausted from my brush with evil.
It was easier to listen to him without looking at him. I closed my eyes and focused on his words. “I am an angel of the Lord, but He allows human will full rein in this world. There is only so much I am permitted to do.”
I kept my eyes closed, swallowed hard. “Does the Almighty permit you to come along with me on my errand?”
He would not answer me. I pulled away, sat up straighter, and looked into his eyes. “I have to get to Amsterdam. And you will help me to get there alive.”
A half smile played along his lips. Perhaps he thought I was joking. “No. Go home. And we will find some way to save you and the girls. I can promise you I will try.”
I wanted to obey him more than I have ever wanted anything in this life. I wanted to trust his words and pretend he was right. He had so much authority, my angel. I wanted so much to relinquish Gisele’s vision, to let him think for me, lead me to safety.
But in my heart of hearts, I knew nobody could save me but myself. “I can’t. You can’t protect me against what’s coming. I believe you want to, that you’d do your best. But destiny is something only mortals have the power to challenge, yes? If I go home now, nothing will alter Gisele’s prophecy, and all of us are dead. I can’t have that.”
“There are worse things than death.”
I tasted tears in the back of my throat, swallowed them away. “I need to get that book. And I will do anything to get it.”
“Poor girl. It’s not your job to save the world, you know. Don’t you think you should go home, love the people you love, and do what you can in a place where you are wanted?”
I steeled myself against his sympathy, resisted the urge to rest my head on his shoulder. The Staff was right about one thing—how could a celestial creature like Raziel live condemned to merely execute the Almighty’s will? Raziel’s soothing words distracted me from the truth even as they warmed me.
I considered his admonitions, admired them like gemstones sparkling in the sunlight. But I could not surrender to his commands, no matter how much I wished I could.
He mistook my silence for a weakening resolve. “My imperative is only to save you from evil. Go home while you can, before they catch you.”
The train was picking up speed as we left the city limits, and its rhythm and hum pulled at me, lured me in the direction of acquiescence. Somehow I had to resist.
I shook my head impatiently, like a horse on a too-tight rein. “I can’t go home. I have to get that Book.”
I kept my voice quiet and calm, but the muscles all along my back tightened into a knot. His slow dismay washed through me, a coldness that set into my aching muscles like a chill.
His whispered voice vibrated with urgency. “Forget the Book. Please. Go home.”
I took a deep breath, and prepared to argue Raziel into submission. But a rap on the door of the compartment interrupted us mid-battle. I slid the door ajar, and two railway men stood swaying in the dim, carpeted hallway. The first one, the important-looking one, looked down his nose at the male passenger in the single lady’s private compartment, crossed his arms against his chest and somehow kept his balance as the train banked deeply into a curve.
“Ahem. Miss, your papers, please,” the man said.
The two men loomed huge in the doorway of my first-class compartment. One tall; one short. One man dressed all in white, an obsequious porter who respected all of the money it had cost to secure my superior accommodations; the other squat and heavy, with dark braid overspreading his double-breasted uniform like climbing vines. His brass buttons gleamed like ghoulish eyes in the dim light, and the man in white interrupted, with an apologetic whisper. “Forgive the intrusion, miss. But there is a report of undesirable persons on the train to Paris.”
I cursed my desperation, my need to trust in Bathory’s forgeries. These men had no special reason to detain me, or so I hoped, but the papers Bathory had obtained to hide my identity as a Jew exposed me to special scrutiny if anyone official questioned them.
“Miss, your papers.” The second man’s voice was ice, his face a passive mask. “And who is this, in your compartment, this gentleman? He certainly is not assigned to this compartment.” The man’s eyes narrowed, his long, disturbing eyebrows waggled in the breeze of his huffy breath. An edge of something—malice, fear—crept into his voice.
My heart shuddered, for that edge of something told me I was walking dead. Stupid, stupid! I cursed myself silently for my arrogance, for pretending I was indestructible. I smiled into one face, then the other; the smiles were not returned. I took the false papers out of my satchel, whispered a little prayer over them in my mind as I held them out.
The second man’s eyes glared down at the papers; this one had a scent of magic around him. Perhaps he was of goblin stock, or maybe was a warlock of some kind. The scent of the forest clung around his shoulders.
He sensed my magic too. I could see it in the tightness of his fist, bunched around my sheaf of papers. “Come with me, the both of you,” he muttered, his Tyrolean accent heavy and mossy. “We are nearly to Linz. Come.”
I forced my feet to walk, though my ears roared with the sound of my surging pulse. I had the presence of mind to clutch my satchel close to me, and we followed him down the gently rolling aisle, the compartment doors closed tight against our passage, stretching forever down the hallway as in a nightmare.
We reached the end of the sleeping car, and I braced my feet and held on to the leather strap near the exit door. The second man looked over my shoulder and nodded at the tremulous porter, who bobbed his head and turned to stagger away.
“Are you crazy?” he snapped, so quietly I thought at first I was imagining the words. I startled, gripped the leather strap above my head, felt the blood pumping through my muscles, urging me to run away.
“Your papers are shit. Utter shit.”
He emphasized his coarse words with a crackle of magical energy that ran up my arm like a mouse. “You will never make it through Germany.” He acknowledged my angelic companion with a curt jut of his pendulous chin. “I don’t care if you travel with the Almighty Himself, your only hope now is to jump.”
I had to blink hard and shake my head to get the words to make any sense. His rudeness to Raziel’s face stupefied me. I studied his craggy, gray face—the heavy, iron-hewn features, the saggy jowls. The lowering ey
es, filled with a darkness I didn’t want to absorb.
He shook his head, the tufted bristles along his beefy chin pointing in all directions; in my heightened state of alertness, it seemed as if I could count each one. His voice came out in a low, rough growl. “If you jump, I will say you slipped away and escaped.” He clutched my precious, worthless papers in his fist. “These will have to stay with me.”
He slid the door open with his other hand, and the night screamed outside, rushing by in a thunderous blur. “You must not reach Linz! Do it. Now.”
The night, my freedom, rushed past our feet, fast and dangerous. I shot a glance at Raziel; he nodded once, his face alight with hope.
I jumped.
I clutched my satchel to my chest and I rolled, over and over again down the side of the embankment, the gravel tearing at my forearms and my face. Gisele’s gray suit was in a sorry state by the time I reached the bottom. My forearms were pocked with gravel to the elbows, and I had lost a shoe somewhere in my tumble.
I sprawled on the ground, the breath knocked clean out of me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the stars whirling wildly overhead, and the tops of the trees swaying in the wind. I waited for the shout, for the gunshot, for rough hands to grab at me.
Instead the wind whistled through the branches, the train tooted mournfully as it disappeared into the night. I was alone.
Alone. My eyes narrowed and I whispered, “Raziel.”
Silence.
I sat up with a groan. “Raziel!” I tried to keep the panic out of my voice, but I failed.
Like a sunrise, the angel manifested slowly before me. He came against his will, but still I warmed myself in his light. “Stay with me, please. Don’t leave me alone here.”
Raziel cracked his knuckles. “Do not fear, Magdalena. I am always with you.”