by Michele Lang
The angel looked directly into my eyes. “No, Magda. Gisele could die for you and still it would change nothing. The wizard was right.”
“So this is how all our striving and scheming ends? A ghost, and a girl left all alone with her old cat?”
“If you truly mean to return, you will. You must be willing to rise,” Raziel said. “And if you insist on fighting, you must return. You cannot summon demons in spirit form. To work spells, to invoke your will, to sin—you must live.”
I thought of Obizuth, a shadow flashing across the face of the moon and into the night. “Couldn’t I do the job as a spirit of the air?”
“No,” Raziel replied. “No matter what your lineage, you must live. You can fight as a vengeful spirit in death, and so you have, but your power can fully manifest only with life.”
His expression filled with sadness. “You can still return to life. But the way is hard and narrow. You will suffer.”
“I don’t understand how I can return to life with no body to return to!”
“Wait!” Gisi’s face shone triumphant, and she let the blanket slip from her shoulders to fall all around her fat little feet. “You are not all gone, my darling. Only . . .”
“Only what? What?” I sprang to her, almost passed through her in my anticipation.
She shivered and rubbed her arms. “Raziel’s right. Oh, dear, this isn’t going to be easy. My poor sweetheart. I’ll do anything to help you. Even die. Anything.”
I knelt at her feet, as on the day of her prophecies in this very room. “Don’t die, Gisi, please. I don’t see how two dead girls is any improvement over one.”
Gisele played with the split ends of her long curls. I could see her fingers shaking. “I’m just a sentimental girl, Magda, you know that.”
“No, that’s earth-shattering news to me, Gisi.” The teasing tone in my voice coaxed a smile onto her lips, but her eyes still looked remote and wild. She looked like a creature of the woods, a vadleany or a maenad on the verge of madness.
She blinked hard, nibbled at the frayed ends of her hair. “Do you remember when Mama died?”
“Are you kidding? Of course, silly.” My astral fingers raked through the artifact of my own hair in my frustration—and the truth suddenly struck me like a stake through the heart.
My hair. After my mother had left this world, left me the head of the family, I had bobbed my hair, I guess to make it easier to pretend I was all grown up at sixteen. All brave artifice, but somehow I could pretend I was more in control of my fate with the short, rather daring bob, my first adult do.
When I looked again into Gisele’s face, she had a crazy smile pasted on her lips like a cunning disguise. “And I of course kept your long locks. Safe, with my mementos.”
Her expression made me laugh out loud. Gisele’s memory box was filled with decrepit dolls, broken ballerina figurines, the feathers of eagles she had seen flying high overhead during summer vacations in the northern mountains. Out of such flotsam and jetsam of an ordinary life did my sister weave her magic of home. And out of such tschotskes I would have to somehow regenerate an entire body.
I shot Raziel an incredulous look. “But that’s ridiculous. I can’t come back alive through a lock of dead old hair!”
My sister turned on me, furious, looking like she wished she could punch me through the ether and knock some sense into me. “That’s the way. The only way. You’ve had to do worse things already. And if you manage it, you’ll have to go ahead and do much worse again.”
She crossed her arms against me. “No princesses at this address.”
I couldn’t believe it. “Is this what you had in mind, Raziel?”
I never saw him go so pale. “It’s going to hurt,” was all he would say.
That night, at midnight, I found out just how much that return would cost me. The scene looked much as it had the night that I and the girls had once faced down the Witch of Ein Dor. Lace tablecloth, flickering candle. Except now a dull penknife and a hank of my old hair rested together on the table.
And this time, an angel of the Lord stood with us, his right hand resting on the hilt of an enormous sword.
Gisi and I exchanged glances. We knew what we had to do now, knew it was dead wrong. But we no longer had the luxury of being right.
Gisele covered her face in her hands, murmured a silent prayer so pure I could all but see the words floating up to Heaven. When her soft incantations had collected the three of us into a sacred circle, I began.
Slowly at first, then faster and faster, I began to declaim the words of the family spell of return. A cone of power rose like a waterspout over the table; Gisele drew forward and her fingers closed over the handle of the blade.
We looked at each other as she lifted the knife edge to her fingertip. Tears pooled in her enormous eyes. “I’m so sorry, Magduska.”
She winced as the point of the knife pierced her skin. Blood welled at the tip of her finger, then dripped slowly, drop by drop, over my hair.
Her blood, we hoped, would animate my lifeless hair the way my blood had brought the fragment of The Book of Raziel back to life in Amsterdam. As I watched the droplets collect into a little puddle on the curling auburn lock of hair tied with a white ribbon, I prayed that Gisele’s innocence could somehow carry me back to life.
The blood ran over the ribbon, staining it with pretty splashes of poppy red. I whispered the final words of the song of return, squeezed into a needle of light—
—and experienced the purest agony I have ever known. My ghost form struggled to melt into the bloody hair, and I screamed as I tried to fill out a human form that no longer existed.
My skin peeled, dead, dead, my senses were on fire underneath. I reached for Gisele’s spark, frantically called her blood to me, and I almost died when I came into contact with the alien presence in her blood, a contagion.
My Gisele was not so pure as when I had left her. Her blood was not untouched. I detected, swimming like a living organism, the taint of Bathory’s bite.
Oh, Gisele, what had you done while I was gone? How could I have lost you? The pain of knowing she had offered herself to Bathory tormented me more than the physical ordeal of regrowing bone, muscle, organs, from a dry, dead husk of hair. As I came together into a living form, my body and soul felt like they were being ripped apart.
After, my sister made me plates of egg noodles smothered in sour cream and sugar, pots of chamomile tea. She wrapped me in every blanket and knitted thing she had, and cried salty tears into my shoulders. But it changed nothing. Nothing, past or future, was changed; nothing that Gisele had done, nothing that I was still going to have to do.
I looked alive, sounded alive, acted alive. But I wasn’t going to fool anybody.
28
Bathory’s apartments reminded me of the Christians’ “whited sepulchres.” From the street, the champagne marble façade glowed in the moonlight, cool and milky like the moon herself. And once inside, his rooms were cavernous, with vaulted ceilings and curtains made of fabric that cost thousands of pengös a yard.
But threaded through this silky opulence was a humming undertone of rot. If you tore your attention away from the Louis XIV settee and the pair of magnificent Ming vases that framed the oversized entryway, you would see pathways of dirt tracking over the Persian silk carpets and polished parquet floors. The air, too, held a mausoleum mustiness trapped like cigarette smoke. Bathory’s coffin rested atop a bed once owned by the Emperor Franz Josef, but he still needed a fresh supply of Transylvanian dirt to keep him in fine fettle.
Still, if one did not study the scene too closely, the public areas of Bathory’s apartments dazzled like a rare, if somewhat musty, jewel. I sometimes expected to see a writhing knot of worms emerge through the silk fringes of his favorite horsehair-stuffed armchair, or a mischief of rats nesting in his enormous, dusty bookcases. But someone like Eva, or even Gisele, would be in grave danger should they dare to enter my master’s deceptively luxurious l
air.
I had been here before, but never of my own volition. When I rang the bell, Bathory, unlike himself, answered the door. He evinced no surprise at the sight of me standing, living, on his threshold. “Back at last,” he said, his smile businesslike and cordial.
“Yes. After a fashion.”
His smile faded as he drew closer, seeming to float along the ground. He squinted against the moonlight that filtered in behind me, backlighting my silhouette with shifting, restless night.
“Good heavens, Magda.” He sounded put out, as if I had shown up to work sick, or drunk. “You haven’t come back at all. Not at all.”
“I am no ghost.”
“Let’s not play nicey, shall we? You are more undead than am I, little chicken.”
His pet name drew a little chuff of laughter out of me, though laughing still hurt me all the way to the marrow.
He braved the moonlight to come out to the threshold where I stood, still unsteady on my feet. “So pale. Like the blood in you, a pale memory of life and youth.”
He wore a crimson nobleman’s pelisse, quilted by nuns no doubt sometime in the sixteenth century, patient hands long dead. It looked new and unsullied, just as he did. The count must have feasted on fresh human blood, and recently.
If only a long drink of blood could revive me. I would even have resorted to that, if it could strengthen me for the battle that was all but upon us now. “I didn’t come to discuss my health, or the lack of it.”
His thin, bony hand caressed the edge of my cheek, and slowly his long, manicured fingers withdrew. “Certainly not. Did Knox find you the Book?”
“Not hardly. The Book found me, more like.”
His face lit up with the news. “Ah, the superweapon. That means a great deal of money for me from the carpet merchants, you know. Do you have it with you?” He tried to restrain himself, but the greed in his voice overshadowed his excellent manners for once.
“No. A wizard stole it from me, murdered me. And no less a personage than Hitler himself holds the power of it in his grasp.”
“Ah.” His shrewd, bloodshot eyes widened, and he turned and shuffled back into his magnificent mausoleum of a mansion. He seemed to age with every step, but I still had trouble keeping up with him as he retreated into the sanctuary of his sitting room.
He lit a cigarette, drew deeply on it, and reclined languorously on a tangle of Turkish silk pillows and wrappers thrown pell-mell over a huge leather couch. “Bad news for my revolutionary friends with the deep pockets. And for me.”
My throat tightened as I thought how very bad the news was for me and my kind. “Deep pockets” was the least of it, for us. “Why do the Azeris care, anyway?”
“Hitler will surely invade in the East now, in short order.” He took a long, slow drag of smoke into his lungs, and it seemed to steady his nerves. “The Nazi-Soviet pact is the final toss of dirt on our graves. It is most unfortunate.”
“The what?” I suddenly had run out of breath, and sat next to him with a thump; my unreliable, new limbs could not bear the weight of this sudden, shocking news.
“Did you not hear? Hitler and Stalin have signed a mutual non-aggression pact. Yesterday the Fascists and Communists were sworn blood enemies. Today, they toast one another and curse the Jewish plutocrats who force the world into war.”
I reached for his smoldering cigarette, took a huge drag, and felt the reassuring burn of the smoke in my battered, new lungs. “So, my little book has done its work already. They would never have joined forces without it.”
“I am not so sure, if that is any consolation. Most people think that wily old bear Stalin is only buying time until he attacks the Germans. Or maybe that is only a comforting fairy tale we all tell ourselves.” He crushed the stub of the cigarette out in an enormous square glass ashtray overwhelming the rickety side table, and he leaned forward to stare intently into my face. “What shall you do now?”
I sat straighter among the slippery cushions. “As long as Hitler draws breath, I must fight him. To do less will guarantee he will kill us all. So that is why I have come to you now.”
“Rest assured, I will not betray you. I am a Hungarian patriot, but Horthy is a useless pig. You are as Hungarian as I, and your fight is mine.”
His protestations of loyalty made my head ache. “Is it, now? I, too, love Hungary, but let us face facts, Count Bathory. Beautiful, aristocratic Hungary doesn’t love me back.”
Bathory knew it as well as I did; there was no point in haggling over the truth. He shrugged, watched the cigarette smoke dwindle away into nothingness. “Love need not be returned, to be true.”
“I have come to ask you to release me from your service.”
His gaze stayed direct. “Why?”
I shrugged. “You know why. In any event, Hitler has my book, or some part of it, anyway. I have to stop him, or die trying, it’s the end. Gisele was right.”
“No.”
I shook my head, my negative fiercer than his. “I will not accept no for an answer, Count Bathory.”
“Yes, you will. I order you to stop Hitler, immediately. And because the job is so very odious and dangerous, I am doubling your salary.” His thin pursed lips stretched in a sudden, genuine smile, and his fangs peeked out from under his whiskers, like pearls.
“By God, you are a patriot.”
He laughed. “I always enjoyed your Budapest sarcasm, my dear. You know what motivates me. Those Azeris want that book, and you, on their side. They will pay cold cash, gold even, to get it, and you. They take you as part of the bargain, for they believe they can free themselves from Stalin with that book. Apparently they have their own seer and set of prophecies. We both know patriotism has nothing to do with this.”
I could not bear our dance of courteous deception any longer. “I know about my sister.”
He licked his lips, but otherwise became entirely still. As I watched his pupils dilate and his face go paper white, I almost pitied him.
Almost. It is dangerous to feel anything for a vampire, even a courtly, personable charmer like Bathory. Human as he looked, he was not. As I am now not. And though human beings had proven my bitterest enemies, a vampire scorned was no small adversary.
“You did not turn her, and for that I thank you. But when she came to you, in despair, desperate, you did not turn her away.”
Silence.
“After I came back to the living, this last time, I could see the changes. Her spirit—untouched. Again, I thank you for that. But her body . . .”
My heart battered my ribs from the inside. “You drank from her, Bathory! Almost drained her dry.”
“She did nothing a hundred starving artists haven’t done to survive. She gave me what she wanted to give, and I let her keep the rest. I did more than that. I kept her alive and safe.”
We both knew he had not betrayed my trust. He had only done what was in his nature to do; my fury and grief were all for Gisele, or that is to say, for the innocent, fragile creature I had created as an idol of the mind.
I picked at the hem of my skirt, which Gisele had expertly finished with her nimble little fingers. “I haven’t figured out what to live for yet, Bathory, but I certainly have learned how to die.”
“She came to me, Magda. I did not seek her out.”
“You speak the truth. But you need to repay us for what you took. My sister’s blood.”
His spine stiffened with the insult: it was more than mere rudeness to refer directly to blood-drinking to a vampire’s face. Bathory hissed softly under his breath.
Once I would have been afraid of his anger. But no more. “I mean what I say, count. Everything is ending now: the only choice is how we will end with it. Choose, vampire. You say you are a patriot. But this battle goes deeper than Hungary or the blasted Treaty of Trianon. Are you a man? Or a servant of evil?”
He gaped at me, and I stared back, unwavering. I was sixteen when I started my apprenticeship, the same age as Gisele now. I had always s
uspected he meant to turn me, when I had served him long enough to come willingly to him. But now . . .
The count bared his fangs at me, but it was an empty threat. I stared him down, and after a time he dropped his gaze.
I kept my voice quiet, respectful at least in tone. “I need you to write to your connections in Berlin. Hitler is occupied, willingly, by a demon named Asmodel. In my name, challenge the demon to a duel. Heroes’ Square. Tomorrow night.”
Bathory gasped. “You cannot rush a duel, Magda. You are completely mad—challenging Hitler to a duel!”
“Not Hitler. His demon. And you must.” I left the threat unspoken, but he winced, because he knew I no longer had any compunctions worth appealing to, that I would compel him by spellcraft if he did not serve my cause willingly.
Bathory blinked hard and smoothed his brilliantined hair against his delicate skull. He removed another cigarette from the ornately carved wooden case, rolled it between his fingers like a silver bullet. “I am not your enemy. Wasting your fury on me is pointless.”
My smile was sad; my words remained merciless. “I have no time to debate niceties with you. Hitler is on the verge of invading Poland. The world is about to explode.”
Bathory stared down at his cigarette, a tiny smile playing over his thin, delicate lips. Slowly, he rubbed his jaw against the stiff collar of his quilted pelisse, and for a moment’s flash I could see the young nobleman he once had been, long ago in another vanished world.
“Please, Count Bathory.”
The supplication in my voice was concession enough to satisfy his wounded pride. His smile became steadier. “Horthy will have my head for this.”
“You said yourself he was a buffoon.”
“Do not underestimate the old man. His motives are at least decent.” Bathory sighed, lit the cigarette with a heavy brass lighter, sucked at the smoke like blood. “It means my head to write that letter. But I will do it. And not because you threaten me, little chicken.”
He reached for the telephone, which rested inoffensively in its cradle on the side table next to the giant ashtray. Bathory, still reclined on the cushions, cleared his throat. “Janos, bring the car around. We must go to Café Istanbul, immediately.”