Lady Lazarus

by Michele Lang

  Raziel. If the Staff captured him and used his celestial life force to reanimate the Book, it would be rewritten to suit the Staff’s propensities and his power. Forged to his specifications, bent to his purposes, the Book would become a devastating locus of power: the Staff could summon and bind an army of demons, snuff mortal souls, and compel magical creatures to die, the way that Raziel had defeated the werewolves in Vienna on the station platform.

  I had to keep Raziel out of the wizard’s clutches. Throwing my lot in with the demonesses who had murdered me seemed a small and bearable price to pay.

  Since time out of mind, shamans had descended into the caves to unearth secrets and bend the power of the lines to human will. As we ourselves descended, the power of the caves hummed through my prison like an electric current; I didn’t need to wiggle letters out of sync to know why my thoughts wavered and crackled with a curious, half-painful static, like an electric shock that originated inside my astral body.

  My tomb grew hot, so hot the letters began to glow orange. With the change, my curiosity grew fearful, and I ventured forward to watch the ancient cave paintings stir into life, the stags wheeling and stampeding all around us.

  Rabdos stood hideously naked inside a magic circle carved into the living rock. Candles set at the four compass points guttered in their places, half buried in the crumbling dirt. I saw with first and second sight as one, now; demonic energy crackled in a circle of fire above the stone.

  And with a horrible keening wail the Staff summoned me from out of the amulet, the only scrap of protection I had left. Because of Obizuth I was ready, and I was so far resolved to die that I was no longer afraid. Instead, I gloried in a vengeful rage, and I shot out of my lair with my own volition.

  If Obizuth was right, I was descended from Fallen Ones, angels that had turned away from the Almighty to walk with women on the Earth. Now that I was a creature of the air, a strange mix of demon and unquiet ghost, I intended to goad my wizard nemesis to his own destruction.

  I braced for battle, for the moment of soul sacrifice, and hoped that Obizuth had spoken true. The Staff marched counterclockwise within the stone circle, his feet backlit by the smoky candlelight.

  I had learned one important lesson in all my travels: if you stand up for what you believe, you will be swarmed by enemies. My adversaries had become my badges of honor, and I would not cede them, not to Obizuth, not even to Raziel.

  I drew myself up to my full height, stood in the middle of the magic circle, and I screamed:

  “MENE MENE TEKEL UPARSIN!”

  With every word I grew, until I reached my full size. The writing on Nebuchadnezzar’s wall formed the basis of the curse that Lucretia had taught me. I screamed it, really projected it outward, and the cave itself trembled.

  Even through the thicket of Hebrew words, the Staff’s gaze met mine, and he did not look in the least surprised. “Ah, your fortitude is most fascinating.”

  He hesitated; both of us paused in the midst of our battle. He and I were kindred spirits, driven by the same delight in wielding magical power in service to a greater end. Much as I hated him, I understood his joy in claiming that power for his own.

  The Staff began to laugh, and he shook his head: perhaps his thoughts had run in the same direction. “Come my pets—devour her!” he commanded, his eyes bloodshot and weeping big, flat tears. “Enepsigos, Onoskelis—Obizuth! My beauties! Rip her apart. Scatter her soul to the four winds . . . with the angel here, we need her no longer.”

  He turned to them, his expression expectant, his too-round eyes still wide. The three demonesses stood still against the ragged stone wall of the sorcerers’ cave, their inhuman faces flickering in the red candlelight as if they were characters in the cave paintings come to life behind them.

  The Staff’s face curdled with rage. Obizuth laughed then, her bony features lovely and possessed by red vengeance, and her sisters joined her in her terrifying merriment. My body filled with painful static, even as the battle turned in my favor.

  Did Raziel feel this way as he went on his great and terrible errands? Even as I played my part, I wondered at the role I was meant to fill.

  I had no physical body, so my ferocity was pure. I had no future, so I inhabited the present with my entire being. I no longer had any illusions or apologies, so I saw my enemies true.

  I wheeled upon the wizard, enchained him with the full fury of my spirit. I no longer feared to stare him down, and saw even the demonesses draw back as I cornered Rabdos the Staff and crushed him with a towering rage.

  He screamed and backed away from me, his skin smoking with steam, his face beginning to lose its shape. Desperately he clutched the paper amulet, to use against me as I had once tried to do in Amsterdam. But the paper ignited in his palms, and the primordial magic contained in my prison shriveled away to ash.

  Aghast, I watched the Book’s final remnant burn. But nothing would deter me from my vengeance. “Your own wickedness imprisons you,” I spat, and my anger threw hissing sparks into the air between us. “Rabdos Staff, return to your Maker: Rabdos, Abdos, Bdos, Dos, Os, S. Be. Gone.”

  Our eyes met for the last time, and a smile marred his ruined lips like a stain. “My death means nothing, Lazarus. The Book has a life of its own, lives on after me. You are too late. And you cannot avert the Lord’s hammer.”

  I leaned in so that he could see I was not afraid. “It doesn’t matter, Rabdos. And as for the Lord, banishing you from life is a good deed all by itself.”

  The demonesses three descended upon him then, slashing, screaming, tearing, and I was treated to a reenactment of my own death at their hands.

  I did not flinch. I did not waver. After terrible punishment, the Staff’s soul untangled itself from its mangled, murdered body, and it drifted upward, blighted as it was. And then it lost altitude, sunk lower as the Staff’s encumbered spirit screamed again.

  A huge wind arose in the sealed chamber, and the candles guttered out. The three demonesses wheeled into the air and punched through the ancient stone, and they screamed too, screams of unholy joy. The crone paused, hovered near the cave’s ceiling.

  “I thank you, little sister,” Obizuth hissed, opalescent in my witch’s sight. “Now, release us.”

  My fury had abandoned me, and I flickered like a candle about to go out. “Yes, yes—you kept your word. Go, leave. Trouble me no more.”

  She descended to where I stood near the shredded remains of the Staff’s body. “We go, daughter of women. But beware to meet us in a dark wood, beware Berlin. Sisters, but enemies still, you and we.”

  I tried to come up with a suitably frightening retort, but they vanished before I had time to say another word.

  I hovered in the center of the broken circle, surrounded by melted wax, the stink of the Staff’s broken remains, and complete darkness.

  The Staff was dead. But so, still, was I.

  27

  I searched the darkness for the Staff’s spirit, but he did not linger in the labyrinth beneath Buda Castle. Once I was sure everyone else was gone, I sank down, into the stone itself, and my astral being all but disintegrated with profound weariness.

  Silence filled the air like the peal of an unearthly bell. Then Raziel began to glow, brighter and brighter, until his light filled the entire cave in which he still hovered.

  And I, who had thought myself past all caring and human desire, felt my ghostly eyes prickle with tears. I had not called Raziel. He, as promised, came to me, of his own volition.

  “Fear not, Magduska. But rest not, either. Your work has only just begun.”

  I considered the angel’s words. With the intercession of the demonesses, I had defeated and dispatched the ancient wizard Rabdos Staff, a feat that had eluded the Witch of Ein Dor herself. And yet, the Staff’s parting curse was nothing more than the truth. Hitler and Asmodel, the Führer’s demonic tool, still planned to wreck the world, within days, Book or no Book.

  “What more can I do, dear an
gel? I can haunt Hitler, I suppose, but his demon will swat me into the next world like a swamp gnat.”

  I warmed myself in Raziel’s light, and the fact of his presence filled my field of vision, the entire sweep of my mind. He was back, my beloved angel. He had come back to stay.

  “You are still here,” I whispered, soul to celestial soul. “Surely your job is done, I am dead, you can go back to Heaven and watch over Gisele, yes?”

  His features, all but hidden by the brilliance of the light he emanated, grew sharp. “I can, but I have not yet begun to do my job on Earth.” He spread his wings, beat at the stale air in the cave with great violence.

  “How can you, a celestial servant of God, harbor such a violent fury?” I wasn’t trying to be smart with him. I honestly could not reconcile his anger with his angelic status, a creature of the higher realms.

  “My rage is righteous.” His arms opened wide in silent invitation.

  I flew into his gentle embrace, and his arms wrapped around my astral shoulders. His anger protected me. I grew calm inside the loving storm of his fury.

  “I am at peace,” I said, a small voice inside the whirlwind that was Raziel. “You don’t need to fall. Not for me.”

  He sighed and held me closer, and his rage burned hot as banked coals, a physical manifestation of his forbidden will. “I am a messenger of the King on High. He promised not to abandon his human children to evil. And yet—”

  “It is not for you or me to judge,” I finished his thought for him.

  “No, I do not judge. But the smallest act can tip the balance one way or the other.”

  “This time, Rabdos was the messenger,” I said, my voice a little too gentle. Raziel drew back so that he could look into my eyes.

  I took a deep breath and kept talking. “The Staff spoke true: the decree remains, the prophecy cannot be averted. So why fall now when it can do no good?”

  His lips thinned, and his hands rubbed against the length of my arms. “Because I can fight to save who I can, Magduska. Perhaps that is message enough.”

  I could not keep the sarcasm out of my voice. “So you descend to save the entire world.”

  We both knew the real reason Raziel would fall. “You presume, Raziel,” I said, my voice gently mocking. “And so a whole bunch of demons fell, as you once warned me.”

  The tension corded in the muscles of his arms. My astral fingertips feathered along the cables of his back, under the immense, sheltering circle of his wings.

  “Raziel,” I said. “You cannot save my life. My body is destroyed, I am no more. But you can still save Gisele. If you watch over her, I will be grateful and accept my fate. And if I could somehow be allowed to serve as your assistant in the second Heaven, I would do a good job. I have some experience in that regard.”

  He stroked my hair, and I surrendered to his ministrations, rested my cheek against his chest. We swayed together in the shadows, a slow dance in the middle of the wreckage.

  His lips touched the top of my head, and everything in the world stopped. We stood completely still, and our souls all but merged in the darkness surrounding us.

  “To rest in peace is not your fate,” he finally said, his voice sounding reluctant to impart this news.

  It was my turn to sigh and rustle. So my dream of repose with an angel in the next world was only a sweet temptation, and he had rightly roused me from the possibility. He understood me better than that. We both knew I would not rest now, not when Hitler was poised to strike.

  I shrugged and smiled up at him. He needed me to have courage, so I pretended to have it. “I see, as a ghost, it is my fate to battle on. So be it. But what about you?”

  “I am not the key. It is you. And you must battle on as a human woman, alive. You can still return to life.”

  My astral limbs went numb, jolted with his words. I pulled back and studied Raziel’s huge, deep brown eyes. “No, you’re joking. My body’s burnt up, it’s been three days, all over.”

  His face went so still it looked like it was carved from stone. “No. You may yet return, Magda. For a price, one perhaps too terrible to pay.”

  I didn’t want to ask, but he pulled at my hands. “Come,” he said. His expression became remote. “To do it, you will need Gisele’s help. Come, I will show you.”

  I returned to the Jewish Quarter of Budapest in a slow dream, led by an angel. The same narrow pavement, the same winding back streets, wreathed in morning mist. The local stray cat, a golden beauty with green eyes and the injured air of a deposed monarch, saw me move through the morning haze and, with a screaming yowl, shot into the alleyway behind the apartment building on Dohány Street. Otherwise, the neighborhood reposed in the silence of dawn.

  The pillars of the Great Temple glowed pink in the morning light, and I looked far above my head, at the Hebrew inscription over the great carved double doors.

  “Take words with you and return to the Lord,” Raziel intoned, translating the words for me. I half turned, reached for his hand, and held on tight.

  “From the book of the prophet Hosea,” he continued, his face tipped upward to read the inscription, the curve of his cheek caressed by sunlight.

  “Maybe the Great Temple is trying to tell me something.”

  Raziel’s only reply was a squeeze on my ghostly fingers. I roused myself to drift along the half block to the door of my apartment building. I half floated up the long, narrow stairway to the splintery front door. My house key had burned up in the warehouse fire in Amsterdam, along with the rest of me.

  Lucky for me, I had no need of house keys anymore. I faded through the battered wood, the sensation strange, like passing through a soap bubble, and Raziel came through with me. I drifted through the entryway, my mind a furious buzzing emptiness. Came to a stop over the threadbare needlepoint rug in the parlor.

  Gisele, I guess, couldn’t sleep.

  I watched her knitting needles dancing in her fingers, as she swung in her rocking chair, her kitty circled asleep on her lap. In her nightgown, wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket in the little apartment on Dohány Street, the only thing unchanged after all of my travels: same creaky floorboard under her chair, same hideous green and yellow embroidered curtains, same faint smell of chestnuts, sausage, and jam.

  Her nimble fingers twisted the yarn back and forth as she hummed a toneless little tune under her breath. My girl’s soft tumble of black hair curled along the tops of her round shoulders, and her brown eyes, mild as ever, focused on something invisible to me in the middle distance.

  There is a Hungarian saying: It is sometimes better to look in the window at a room than to go inside. I didn’t want to disturb this precious sight, this fleeting scene of Home. I had taken this place, the syncopated rhythm of rocking chair against bare wood, too much for granted in my life. I had not expected to see my sister again, and more than anything I wanted to leave her in peace, alone but undiscovered and undisturbed, anonymous in the glimmer of a misty August morning in Budapest.

  But this peaceful scene was all illusion. Hitler and his minions, millions of them, wanted her dead. She knew better than I what waited for her, invisible and in the middle distance, lurking outside the golden-tinted window.

  Gisele stopped her rocking, and she tilted her head, her smile interrupting the armies marching in my head. “Ah, Magdalena, you’ve come back to me at last, and safe!” The cat meowed once, looked up, then settled back to sleep.

  Without intending it, I had materialized enough for her to perceive me. I drew close to her, but not so close that she could pass her hand through my translucent form. “I’ve come back, yes and no.”

  Hot streaks of astral tears shot down my luminescent cheeks. I drew as close as I dared. “Gisi, I’ve come to say good-bye.”

  The breath caught in her throat, and a flush rose from her neck into her full cheeks. “But, you promised you’d come back, Magda.”

  “I know. I returned from the dead until I couldn’t do it anymore. Our angel says I can
do it again somehow, but I don’t know how, really. There’s none of me left to return to.”

  And I told her everything in a hushed half whisper, the train, the werewolves, the Staff, Capa and witches, Amsterdam and Paris. A guardian angel, a solemn oath sworn and forsworn, a madman possessed by a powerful demon.

  “So, where is Raziel?” she asked.

  “Here.” His voice was warm as sunshine. And the angel manifested into human sight, where I had seen him waiting silent.

  “Oh, you are beautiful. Thank you so for looking after Magda. I know you must have done your best.” She sighed, and solemnly smoothed the tops of her cheeks with her fingertips. “So, we’ve failed. Nagymama witch was right after all.”

  I had no idea that heartache could cut a ghost so sharp. “I defeated the wizard. That’s something. And freed the demonesses.”

  She nodded and smiled, a little too quickly. But we both knew my grand battles, victories though they were, had meant little, in the end. The prophecy would still be fulfilled, perhaps a few days later, perhaps not.

  Raziel fully manifested, his body looking huge on the frizzled rug at Gisele’s feet. “Do not fear.”

  Gisele’s hands scratched at the sleeping old cat’s ears. Her voice stayed steady and calm. “Magda’s angel, I will try. Raziel, what should we do now?”

  “Return to the Lord.”

  Gisele’s face grew shadowed, and she flinched away from Raziel’s words and my growing surprise. “No, angel. That can’t be the answer. Me, maybe, but Magda! She’s the one to live. I would trade for her in a minute.”

  The three of us faced each other, the points of a triangle that crackled with tension. I broke the silence, tried to still the tremble in my voice, failed. “That’s not what you have in mind, is it, Raziel? One sister’s life for another?”