by Michele Lang
Emboldened by Raziel’s gentle words, I drew closer to my mother, and we stood nose to astral nose. “Give. Me. My. Spell.”
“Do not defile my memory, Magda.”
I steeled myself against the beloved cadences of her voice. “I’ll do what I must.”
“You don’t understand what you are asking of me.”
We stood together in the silence. Her features wavered and broke as she realized I would not relent. “I cannot fulfill my destiny in the afterworld when you hold me this way. The two of us will sink down into the lower emanations, where demons reside, if you do not stop it. Only the angel’s protection keeps us here at all.”
“So be it.”
Her face went blank, iridescent and fine as the surface of a soap bubble. Her features contorted with grief, and the pain of her anger and disappointment cut through me like a strike of the angel’s sword. Well I remembered that pain from my misguided youth, and that familiarity helped me to withstand it now.
For a moment she held her arms out to me, then she lowered them, slowly. And my mother’s spirit looked away. “Your father, Magda. You say Gisele needs you—you have no idea how much your father needs me. He is a mere mortal, assailed by demons for his sin of consorting with me. You forced me from my soul mate.”
That was the unkindest cut of all; she knew all too well how much I adored that man. But still I held fast. “Give me the spell and you can return to Papa in time. Give it to me for Gisele’s sake, if not for mine.”
We stared each other down, a contest of wills. My mother broke first. “You stubborn wretch, you get my spell, but it comes with my curse.”
“I’ll take it any way I can get it,” I said, even as I winced at her words. But I would not relent.
She rubbed at her face with her hands, as if she could wash herself clean of what she was about to do to me. “I will give you the key to return, Magdalena. But if you dare to use it you will lose your humanity, one degree of your soul at a time, nefesh, ruach, neshamah. Piece by piece, you will become what you resist. Every time you go back from death, you leave a piece of your soul here with me.”
I had to smile. Without her blessing, I was broken-souled anyway. “How about this, Mama? Don’t leave me, then. Just haunt me until your shade is satisfied.”
Her thin lips twisted into a sardonic smile. “In that case, Magdalena, my shade would haunt you until the end of time.”
Raziel cleared his astral throat and both of us turned. “Do you accept your mother’s curse?” He looked every inch the warrior, with his muscular shape and brutal sword. But it was the compassion in Raziel’s voice that almost broke me.
I fought to keep my voice steady. “For Gisele’s sake, yes.”
Our eyes met, and in that moment the angel and I made our peace, one with the other. He could not yet understand why I preferred cursed life to the serenity of death, but he respected my right to choose. And this acceptance gave me the courage to shoulder the burden of my choice.
My mother began intoning our family spell, in Hebrew but filtered in this place into a universal language that I could understand.
I turned to her, tried to touch her face, and she wavered like a shadow at midday. “Farewell, Mama, thank you, thank you. I kiss your hands, will kiss Gisele for you.”
She turned away and closed her eyes in concentration, murmuring her spell all the while. Now I knew: astral spirits could shed tears. My attention strayed to Raziel, and I whispered again, to both of them, “Farewell . . .”
My astral body trembled like a tumbling leaf in a winter wind, and my being coalesced into an infinite number of tiny globules of pure light. I reached for the angel, stroked his bare shoulder, my fingertips rolling over and around him like a shower of ball bearings. “Bless you, Raziel. I will try my best to set you at your leisure.”
His smile widened as I caught his gaze, and for the first time in that gray, indeterminate place, his eyes twinkled. “You are lying . . .”
His words trailed off after me as my mother’s spell shot me back to earth, threaded through a needle of light.
I came back to myself with a hideous groan so guttural I thought at first it emanated from a beast in the forest. But no, it was my own throat, raw and choked.
The spell had healed the fatal wounds inflicted by the demonesses, enough to allow me to live again—but that didn’t mean that my every scratch had vanished. Oh, no. The flies rose in a furious cloud as I sat up and rearranged my blood-matted hair, wiped the dirt out of my eyes.
I was alive again. Altogether, being dead seemed easier, considering the circumstances in which I found myself. And yet, my life was an inexpressibly precious gift, for it was a weapon that allowed my fight to continue.
My lovely suit was shredded into useless bloody rags, and I was wounded and filthy, vulnerable to my enemies. Who was to say that the demonesses wouldn’t come to kill me again? I considered their absence—anything to distract myself from the physical pain of the long slashes they had sliced into my skin. They knew what I was. Why didn’t they stick around to make sure I stayed dead for good?
A cool, mossy voice interrupted the tangled train of my thoughts, and the first spoken syllable shot a bolt of fear through my brain like a bullet.
“They won’t bother with you anymore, Lazarus. The three already got what they wanted.”
11
I forced my bloodshot, stinging eyes to focus on the source of the voice—I was too weak to hide myself or to run away. Still, when I discovered the creature who spoke, I scrabbled backward as best as I could, my bottom prickled by fir needles, my battered heart pounding hard enough to burst.
The demon crouched in the shadows, not even a meter’s distance away. Only the flash of his white, blunted fangs betrayed his location to my blurry vision. His smile was like a pearl in the shifting face, animated like iron filings in the presence of a magnet.
I bit back a curse as I watched him watching me. He rocked back and forth on his haunches and folded his long fingers over his knobby knees. I rubbed my eyes to behold him more clearly, and when he didn’t lunge for my throat, I slowly began to calm myself. “What are you?” I finally asked, as the heat of the waxing day grew.
He laughed then, and the sound pierced me with a strange pain of recognition. The long fingers rubbed at the corners of his jewel-like eyes. “You can’t make me tell you.” His singsong voice poked at my bad temper.
“Don’t tease me, whatever you are.” I tried to keep the pain and impatience out of my voice, and I failed, of course. Not even breakfast time yet, and I had already leaped out of a train, defied a messenger of the Almighty, been murdered by demons, and absorbed my own mother’s curse to return from the dead.
I stood up, forgetting my modesty in my determination to stand up against this unnatural creature and protect myself any way I could. A snail clambered across my left breastbone, and I gently reached up and plucked it off my skin as if it were a gray, sticky pearl.
My clothes hung off my limbs in filthy tatters. Ah, Gisele . . . such a waste of a gifted seamstress’s talents. The gray suit she’d made for me was a blood-soaked ruin.
“I have a new dress for you. It’s blue, your favorite color,” the creature of the shadows muttered.
His familiarity with my preferences gave me pause. I crossed my arms over my breasts and saw, folded neatly at his feet, the dress he described. “I look better in green, don’t you think?”
He chuckled, an almost pleasing, throaty sound, the sound I imagine a dragonfly’s laugh would make. That laugh gave me joy, I don’t know why.
I smiled, and the warmth of simple amusement brought me a little more out of the grave. “Blue will suit me fine, of course. But you didn’t mention the price.” I waited for the trick, the temptation. Surely, all he wanted was my soul. That’s all he was supposed to want.
The little imp covered his face with his long fingers and giggled. “You shouldn’t look a gift dress askance, for I do mean it as a gif
t, a love offering, if you must know. When a forest spirit gives you a present, you should welcome it with open arms. Ever your doubt and despair are your worst enemies, Magdalena.”
My hand paused in midair, mere centimeters from the dress. “How do you know me so well, since we are only now first acquainted?”
He shrugged and scuttled sideways, clutching the dress now against his bare, hairless chest. “Now that you question me, I must demand a fair price for the dress. A shame, really. But you don’t have a choice. You can’t fight your battles wearing a shroud, dearie.”
I tensed against his words. “What do you want?”
“A name. Give me a name, lovely witchling. Any name will do.”
His request caught me by surprise. I licked my lips, looked for the danger in it, found none. “You don’t have a name? Nobody ever named you? How sad.” And despite the utter strangeness of the setting and circumstance, my heart swelled with protective instincts toward this mysterious stranger.
He shrugged but said no more. For a moment we stared at each other, and I was overcome simultaneously with a powerful thirst and a revulsion for the dirt that covered me. I motioned for him to stay, and I went in search of a stream or some standing water, anything I could drink and wash with.
I limped deeper into the trees, my bare soles tickled and scratched by the fir needles and broken twigs underfoot, wondering whether I would find a place of safety by the end of this unholy day.
“The nearest river is too far for you to walk,” the creature said from behind me. He had followed me through the trees at some small distance, as if he were afraid of me.
“Leopold.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your name. You asked me for one.”
He sat back on his haunches, smacked his lips together as if he was tasting it, to see if the name was to his liking. The heavy eyelids narrowed. “Why Leopold?”
“I don’t know.” I was telling the truth . . . his name sprung into my mind, spoke itself through my lips unbidden by me.
He tilted his round little head. “Leopold.” He rolled the name over his tongue like wine, a low, trilling sound, and he repeated it again and again. With every repetition, he grew a bit in size. He stopped, and nodded. Now he was the size of a twelve-year-old boy.
Our eyes met, and he smiled. “Handsome.” He bowed, clicked his heels together smartly like a hussar on parade. Bending from the waist, he presented me with his offering, the dress that hung loosely in his hands.
I sighed and accepted the pretty cotton dress; I could now see it had pearl buttons and an embroidered collar. Covered in dirt and blood, I looked like what I was—a murder victim. But if I could only cover myself properly and get washed before encountering a living mortal . . .
I shucked off the rags that hung from my body, absurdly wished for a silk slip so the skirt would hang perfectly from my hips. “So, the demonesses got what they wanted from me, Leopold? What do you mean?” I asked him to distract myself from my appalling physical condition, not because I believed he actually knew the answer.
“You know quite well. Your blood, Lazarus.”
As soon as the words had escaped his lips, I realized that they were true. My spirits sank within me. “My blood. Why?”
“They seek your holy book. Your blood speaks to the Book, and that is all they need to hunt it down for themselves.”
“My blood.” I sounded stupid to my own ears, weak and stupid and slow. I buttoned the pearl buttons, my fingertips shaking with vexation. Leopold chuckled again. I looked up to see that his smile had widened, huge and inviting, and terrifyingly intimate.
“Blood, you know, is an inherently magical substance. It contains the essence of life. They’ll trick your book, they will. Like Jacob stealing Esau’s blessing by dressing in disguise as his hairy big brother.”
Vague memories of Sunday school flickered in my mind. A picture from a child’s book of stories, a trickster swathed in goat skins, a ruse he had learned at his mother’s knee.
I remembered asking my own mother about that story . . . and she described it the same way that Leopold did now. Esau as the hairy big brother. The blood I still had left in me ran cold in my veins. “How do you know so much about me, Leopold?” Somewhere deep inside of me I already knew the answer, but I needed him to spell it out, speak the words in the brilliant light of a summer’s day in the wild countryside of Austria.
“I will spell it out for you, Mama. If you need me to.” He stretched to his full height, exactly my own height now.
The hairs on my forearms prickled and my long-suffering, battered heart began to pound anew. The blood on my lips tasted like rusty iron. “Don’t call me Mama.”
“But you are my mama. You made me. You named me.”
I blinked hard, forced myself to keep my wits about me. I had heard fairy tales of demons forged of princesses’ words and thoughts; heard of great rebbes who formed golems to save their humble Jewish folk from destruction.
But this was something different. “I didn’t set out to create you, Leopold. I don’t know any spells that could make you.”
“But ah, your epic fury. Such bad temper is a luxury, in the path that you walk, Mama dear. Throwing sparks like you did into astral ether will surely seed the clouds with life. Who knows how many of my kind you spawned in the next world? Only I cleaved to you; you should be thanking your boy for that.”
“No, Leopold. Oh, no . . .”
“Hah. I thought raising an army of demons was what you were aiming to do with your fancy book?”
My tormented heart skipped a beat. “An army?”
“Oh, yes.”
“But even if I made you all, I couldn’t lead you.”
“If you ever get that book, you can. How do you think Solomon got that big golden temple all built? By himself?”
Wily Leopold, my deepest, darkest thoughts come alive and spoken out loud in the mundane world. Created from my evil impulses, he knew as well as I did what I desired but wasn’t brave enough to admit aloud.
I took a deep breath and accepted the consequences of my evil, and hoped Raziel had taken himself away from me altogether so he couldn’t see me choose. I understood my mother’s curse now. My highest aspect of soul had sheared away, lost to me. I had come back, but not all of me. Some of my soul had sparked away to fuel the creation of Leopold and his countless escaped brothers.
“We go to raise an army, then, Leopold. But first I have to get mopped up somehow.”
“You need help, Mama dear. But I am just a baby imp. I don’t know how to find it.”
“Well, where did you get this dress from? Let’s start with that.”
“From a girl.”
He hesitated, and I leaned forward, my fear of him all but gone. “Are you lying to me, imp?”
He pulled a face. “So what if I am?”
“Don’t do it, Leopold,” I warned.
“Or you’ll what, Magdalena? Get angry again?”
He knew as well as I that my anger would feed his power, give him dominion. I studied the swaying fir branches overhead until my vision cleared. The clean smell of the evergreen sap calmed me. “No, I won’t let my temper get the best of me again. I’ll send you away instead, Leopold. Take back your name.”
“Y-you don’t know how.” His stutter gave away his fear.
“Oh I will, straightaway, I will. I may be untaught, but the talent flows in the blood the demonesses stole. So mind me well, and we’ll get along. Just don’t forget who’s boss.”
My lack of skills continued to worry me, ate away at my peace of mind. I had to learn, and quickly, how to harness the power of my lineage, my book, my anger. If I didn’t learn, my many enemies would break me.
I smoothed my new dress, admired the stitchery. No machine had finished the cuffs and collar . . . the energy of their maker hovered around the hems. I cautiously casted, to find the seamstress, and to my complete shock I found a vibration, faint but sure, far to the west—a ge
ntle whisper of encouragement from kin.
“Not just a girl, Leopold. A witch. A Jewish witch, like me.”
He shrugged, picked at his toes as he settled into a crouch again, and studied me without the merest pretense of circumspection. “Maybe she can help you, but I don’t think she will. Stealing her dress was enough to do to her, no?”
Leopold and I did our best to clean me up. And then we traversed some of the loveliest countryside in Europe in our flight to the west. In the distance, the Bavarian Alps loomed over us, a brooding, white-faced glory hovering in the air, clouds made of stone.
The thin cotton of my new dress hardly protected me from the cool mountain air, even in summer, but I no longer cared. Before I was murdered, I felt the cold most particularly, and often felt chilled even when other people felt warm enough. But now, as we stumbled along, I no longer cared about the external temperature.
Leopold, who seemed to feel the cold more severely than I ever had, even as a girl, never complained, only shrank in size, burrowed into my hair, and snuggled up against the back of my skull. He and I spoke only a dozen words or so across our entire walking tour of Austria, but his presence proved a comfort, because he reminded me I still walked the earth, a mortal being. Alive. And as an additional benefit, he reminded me to drink water and eat what I could find in the fields: berries, bitter dandelion leaves. One glorious time, a field full of juicy peppers, ripe red and as voluptuous as a fever dream.
It is about 148 kilometers between Linz and Salzburg, and what would have taken me three hours by train instead took Leopold and me the better part of two weeks. During that time, I hid from the few mortal, nonmagical souls that crossed our path, and I slowly came to realize that I no longer had a place among the ordinary world of the living.
I did not dwell on the implications of that realization; all that mattered to me, and by extension to Leopold, was to get to Amsterdam so that I could find The Book of Raziel. And that was all I allowed myself to think about.