by Michele Lang
I saw them with my eyes before I could sense them with my witch’s sendings; they wanted the advantage of surprise. The three sailed through the branches, like wraiths, ordinary human ghosts. But in full daylight.
I wasn’t fooled. I squinted hard, saw three old babas of the forest, ancient demons, coming for me. And there was nowhere I could run to escape them, so I stood my ground instead.
“Lazarus,” the one in the center crooned. Without squinting, I saw through their disguises: three beautiful women, each one what we Hungarians would call a vadleany, a forest spirit, innocent and seductive. They knew as well as I their charms were wasted on me, for when I homed in with my witch’s sight, I saw their scaly skin, their long curved claws, their fangs.
Daughters of Lilith.
“I have no quarrel with you, sisters,” I said. And I meant it. Such demonesses hunted men and newborn babies, not young, childless women. They were not my natural enemies. But, alas, we all were trapped in unnatural times.
“No quarrel indeed,” the crone to my left agreed. She came close, caressed my cheek with one long, scaly hand. “Little sister, you know something of a thing we seek. In the name of Adolf Hitler, we seek it.”
I stifled a groan. It seemed half the supernatural world wanted my book. “I know nothing except that I hunt for what is mine.” The crone stroked my cheek a little harder, but I kept my gaze steady, didn’t flinch under her probing fingers.
“The Book,” the third demoness whispered.
“Yes. The Book of Raziel.” My breath took on the golden light of my angel’s name, and the three demonesses drew back, hissing.
I licked my lips, thought of him. Refused to call upon him, even now. “I can’t let you have my book,” I said. Raziel at least stood in solidarity with me behind that statement. I’d keep faith with him, even in his absence, for as long as I could.
“You will, little sister. You will. Blood calls to blood. You will call the Book for us, or we will have your blood from you and call the Book ourselves.”
“No. I can’t let you do that.” I thought of what Raziel had said. The Book was dangerous enough in human hands, let alone in the clutches of demons.
They moved closer, and the crone’s fingers entwined in my hair. A whisper of fear blew its soft breath along my spine, but only a whisper. Fear was too much of a luxury for me to indulge in at that moment. I looked the crone in the face. “No. That book is not meant for you.”
All at once, the three of them were upon me. I let them pin me to the ground, the gravel gouging new holes in the back of my arms. “Give us the Book, or you die!” the young one screamed.
“I don’t have the Book,” I tried to explain, though their voices rose together in an unholy cacophany. Their false beauty began to slip away, their eyes glowing red in the rising light.
Only the crone fought to keep control of her rage, and it was to her that I appealed. “If you kill me, you gain nothing.”
“If you live, we gain nothing,” the third demoness hissed. Her hatred was so hot and pure it all but stood and stalked me in the clearing. Pale sunlight filtered overhead through the trees, but unlike vampires and even werewolves, these dread creatures did not fear the light of day.
I twisted out of their grasp and grabbed for my satchel. My sister had insisted I bring her book of Psalms with me, and it was this book I reached for and drew out like a pistol. I held it before me. Tiny and fat, its gilded pages caught the morning light.
The Psalms were in Hungarian translation, not their original Hebrew, but even that vestige of their original power held the demonesses at bay. I held the book between us, and I frantically riffled through the pages in search of Psalm 91:
Because Thou hast made the LORD, which is thy refuge, even the most HIGH, thy habitation;
And there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. For HE shall give His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.
I read aloud, and I stumbled over the archaic, strange words, their sounds thick and heavy in my mouth.
“That is not the book we want,” the young demoness said, and she laughed. That hard sound cut through my armor of self-control, and I began to tremble.
The crone shielded her eyes against the light reflecting from the little book’s pages. “These are words, just words. Written by human hand, no more.”
She was right. The Psalms, written by mortals, had the power to inspire prayer and magic in the human heart. No small thing. But the book itself held no inherent power.
My magic was rooted in the power of words. I could work spells, but only ones based in the power of the Hebrew language, the language in which the Bible had originally been written. Unlike the Book of the Angel Raziel, my little book of Psalms in Hungarian translation was written in human tongue, not the language of the Bible. If I had spoken the Psalms in Hebrew, I might have had a chance. But Hungarian held no elemental magic for me that I could wield with my native power.
I had just played my last hand and had come out the loser. I didn’t have the power to withstand them. “This is the only book you will get from me,” I replied.
My poor mother. She left this world, insisted on following my father into the grave, even as she knew I was not prepared to face its dangers. She knew I resisted the lessons she was able to teach, so she left me to learn those lessons for myself the hard way.
Dying hurts as much for me as for any hapless human being caught in the trap of life. I wanted to live—I fought them hard, fought them hand to hand. But I could not prevail against three. By the time full sunlight shone upon the face of Austria, I was dead.
But not for long.
10
Being dead has its advantages. The first time I died, at the hands of the daughters of Lilith, I left my failures and worries behind like a heavy package full of junk.
The physical shock of death—a jump into a numbingly cold lake too early in spring—slapped my worries clear out of mind. I recovered consciousness in bits and pieces, disjointed and disconnected, as broken as my dead body.
My first conscious thoughts in the beyond—of course of Gisele, and then of Eva—burned me with the knowledge of separation. I’d thought I was alone in the fields after my angel had left me. But I’d had no idea how agonizingly alone a human spirit could be.
That isolation, my profound sense of disconnection, drew my awareness to the fact that “I” existed, an entity separate from the cold, wide world. I blinked hard—then realized to my shock that I, in fact, could blink while dead.
My confusion spun into a huge snarl when I raised my hands to my eyes and saw—saw—my fingertips, the long, straight lines of my somehow unbroken arm.
“You are in the second Heaven, Magda. In my home domain,” a by-now familiar voice said.
The sound reverberated through me, a concussive bomb that shook me so hard my form began to unravel. “I thought I had set you free, Raziel,” I said, to cover my shock at finding another being I recognized in the hereafter. For I had believed Gehenna was my destination.
“Free,” Raziel muttered, a little too quickly.
I gathered my form together and forced myself to look where he stood in the swirling, endless gray mist that surrounded us.
There he was, in all his golden glory. Just seeing him, his wings unfurled, bathed in celestial mist and godlight, Raziel sounded in me a strange cacophony of mixed emotions.
“You are free, and yet you are here, Raziel. And where is here?”
“As I said, the second Heaven, the place of transit for souls in the balance. This emanation is where I come to rest and contemplate the Glory. Here, Magda, you too may rest.”
I resisted the temptation of Raziel’s comfort. “I don’t have time to rest. I have to get back. Now.”
“Do you, really? Are you sure it really matters?”
Raziel’s soothing voice threatened me, threw the floodgates of doubt wide open. “I don’t have time to consider the cosmi
c implications, dear angel. I don’t suspect Hitler sits around and thinks about whether he matters or not.”
I distracted myself with an astral hangnail. “How curious, though, to have a body in this alternate place. What do I do with it? Can it get hurt?”
“Your astral body reflects the physical, a prism through the many planes of existence. Magda, you are of the same essence, whether in body or spirit, at every level of emanation.”
I nibbled at my astral thumb, and had to laugh. “Even Gisele’s suit survived the trip to the next world! Shouldn’t I be wrapped in a shroud, or . . .” Naked, I wanted to say. But my astral cheeks burned as I sneaked a glance at my companion. I blushed not because Raziel was an angel. But because he was a “he.”
When I looked back at him, Raziel was smiling. He drew a little closer to me, but kept a respectable distance, as if he understood how profoundly his presence confounded me. “You don’t have to go back, you know.”
I pulled back, testing my ability to function on this new, dreamlike level of existence. “No. I must get back. For all I know, it may be already too late, but I have to try.”
A shadow caressed the edge of Raziel’s jaw, its darkness dimming the extraordinary light in his enormous eyes. “But do you know the way? If you don’t, and you refuse to pass into the afterworld, I fear you will become lost between the emanations, and wander this intermediate plane as a ghost. Lost to the world, and to yourself.”
I squinted hard, encouraged myself to get mad at him, anything to stop me from agreeing with him and giving in to his decency and reasonableness. “So help me descend, then! You are my guardian. I’m not forcing you, not ever again, but please, protect me, lead me back. It’s my choice; you are absolved of it.”
He opened his hands in mock helplessness, and suddenly my anger was no mere affectation. How could Raziel pretend he had no power to help me—he was an angel of the Lord, for goodness’ sake!
“I am a messenger, not an earthly actor,” Raziel said, the smile on his face clashing with the real grief in his voice. “I convey, I do not lead. That is not my portion in this world.”
“That’s a bunch of piffle! What’s your sword for, then?”
A flash of anger passed over his features like lightning. “My function is to render the judgment of the Almighty, not my own. How can I explain it to you? Ah . . . remember Madame Rodinsky?”
His question, such a non sequitur, made me blink. The name brought back a lost world of Chopin, satin pointe shoes, and a long-vanished, innocent opulence. “Madame? Of course, she was my ballet teacher. But—”
“But nothing. She was the fiercest ballet master in all Budapest, correct?”
My lips twitched at the memory of her hard, square, tiny body, the white-haired bun yanked into place at the very top of her hard, square, tiny head. May Madame rest in eternal peace for a blessing. “She was a fury sent straight from Bolshoi Hell to torment every baby ballerina in Budapest.”
“So. Did Madame lift your legs for you? Pull you up onto pointe? Did she toss you into the air every time you jumped?”
“No, but . . .” I crossed my arms against his Socratic argument. The fact he was right only made our exercise more tiresome. I remained all too aware of time’s passage: Lazarus lore held that I only had three days to return to my dead body.
I had to change his mind somehow, or come up with a better plan. “Madame did force my turnout with her stick, smacked my behind too if I got lazy in class or too mossyheaded. Madame had a clear opinion on what I was supposed to do, and she used whatever she had to make me do it.”
The silence hung suspended between us. His fingers brushed along my shoulder, feather light but full of voltage. “I only encouraged you to leap,” he whispered, his voice choked with some emotion I fought not to recognize. “I urged you to jump! Jump! You did the jumping, you made your pirouettes and leaps.”
“But now, you do not urge me to leap? To return?”
He withdrew his hand, rubbed at his eyes with the tips of his fingers. “I want your salvation, want you to arise, not descend.”
The absurdity of my situation—arguing in the second Heaven with an angel about my right to reinhabit my corpse—made me hesitate. I thought I was an expert in disaster. Little did I know, then, the complexities that disaster generates.
I tried to keep focused on practicalities; that way, I could avoid thinking about the fact that my own guardian angel opposed my plan. Which way back to Earth? I began to move down in what I thought was the right direction, but Raziel blocked my path.
“Your time is done.” He spoke into my mind, in the universal tongue of the angels. And his voice roughened with regret.
“No.”
His features sharpened, creased into a smile, one with no mirth. “No? But here you still are, Magdalena. Dead.”
Could disembodied souls cry tears? I did not intend to hang around long enough to find out for sure. “So you double as the Angel of Death, dear Raziel? You know my task is not done, I must go back. Please, please, don’t get in my way.”
He crossed his arms, flexed the muscles in his shoulders. Raziel was visibly annoyed with me. “Your poor mother—did you never learn the meaning of no? The silver cord is cut. There is a peace in death, if you will only embrace it.”
Panic rose in me. “But I am a Lazarus . . .” My words trailed off; it was useless to plead.
He hesitated; awaiting, I imagined, an expertly wielded litany of spells to force him to return me from this swirling night of souls. We hovered together, I ensnared by fear, his face shadowed with frustration.
When I kept silent and no spells were forthcoming, he sighed, shrugged, and moved forward. “Alas, Magda, there’s nothing for it. Come with me, and I will speak for you in the place of judgment.”
“No, no, never!” And despite myself, I laughed. I had inadvertently parroted the official Hungarian protest against the outcome of the Great War.
Raziel’s laughter mingled with mine. “So you protest the Treaty of Trianon in the great beyond. A true Hungarian patriot!”
Our shared amusement gave me a way to reach him, and only strengthened my resolve. “My poor Raziel. If you cannot help me, then farewell. I will find the way back myself.”
A sly expression flashed over his features, and I could see I amused him. Good. Anything to win him over as an ally, anything to coax him to join in my mad crusade.
He leaned forward, arms still crossed. “How will you find the way if you don’t know it?”
We looked at each other for a long moment. Only one being in the wide world had the knowledge I needed, the spiritual map back to my body. I gathered myself up for the inevitable battle, consolidated my energy, prepared to lose to a more formidable foe.
“I summon my mother. Tekla the Lazarus, daughter of Rachel.”
The smile died on Raziel’s lips, but before he could stop me, my mother’s shade interrupted him. I watched my mother arrange herself before us, and the depth of the gray intensified all around. I had desperately wished to see my mother, ask her forgiveness. But not like this.
We gazed into each other’s ethereal eyes, hovered less than a handsbreadth away from each other, and yet she seemed more inaccessible to me than ever. Her beautiful, familiar face was closed to me.
“Mama,” I whispered, my voice choked into nothingness.
She floated in the silence, her eyes speaking eloquently of grievances and bitter regrets. I heard the angel impatiently clearing his throat as he hovered beside us, but I dared not glance away, lest I break my connection and allow my mother to escape.
I drew as close to her as I dared. “I was wrong. I am so sorry.”
“And well you should be.” Her lips folded into the thin, straight line of disapproval that had haunted me in my imagination since her death. I had failed her in my willfulness, but that didn’t give her the right to abandon Gisele and me to our terrible fate.
Fury in me rose up huge, a demon willing to strike a
t even my own mother, and the weight of it began to drag me lower, out of the second Heaven altogether. I counted forward and backward, and did long division in my mind until I calmed myself.
“Mama. I am desperate, and I call to you in the hour of my greatest need.”
“You know not to.”
She was relentless, but so was I. We faced off against each other, and I am sure to Raziel we looked like mirror images. “I do not know that I should not call upon you. Mama, you never taught me! And Gisele needs me to come back.”
Her eyes softened at the mention of her favorite, my mild little sister, nobody’s enemy except Hitler’s. “My poor girl. Soon her sufferings will be over, and she will be swept away, to join me.”
“No. I need your spell to go back and save her.”
“No. Let my little girl come to me.”
No. That was all I let my mother teach me, the power of the negative. Fury rose in me again, implacable. “No, mother. The family spell. I compel you.”
She laughed at me then, but it was a sick, frightened echo of a living soul’s honest amusement.
“No.” I pulled on the word like a chain, drew us still closer together. She tried to draw away, but I held her fast. “Teach me, now. Before I am dead too long.”
Her eyes narrowed and we stared each other down, will to will. “I never taught you, child, because you were not ready to learn. Are still not! You are too willful, too naïve, too lost. You don’t know what you are, the damage you could cause. The knowledge will turn you into an evil creature. Don’t you understand, even yet?”
“I don’t care. You owe me this knowledge, Mother. You owe it to me. You don’t have the right to hoard it, not when I need it so badly!”
We both knew I could not force her to say the actual words of the spell. Without training, all I could do was compel her to stay.
My mother yanked against my compulsion once more, grew still when she could not break our connection. She turned to our angel, her smile hard. “See, angel, how my own daughter mistreats me so.”
To my surprise, Raziel did not immediately take my mother’s part. “I have seen worse, Tekla. Worse by an infinite magnitude. To her credit, Magda’s heart is true and she seeks the good, misguided as she is.”