by Michele Lang
Asmodel’s smile, pasted on Hitler’s lips, turned surprisingly kind and genuine, a clean, joyful smile. “Angels are not Jews. Nor are demons. Germany will now arise from the ashes of the Great War, and angels and demons will take their welcome places in my Reich, unencumbered by the chains of your God.”
I crossed my arms, took a long, steadying breath. “You know that book is worthless to you without a sorceror’s magic.”
He grinned, drew closer. “But I have an entire coven to choose from, my pet witches in Berchtesgaden.”
My heart all but stopped. “Trudy,” I whispered. Their safety in Bavaria had not even been a vivid illusion, more like a desperate wish. But I had wished for it, too.
“Don’t listen to him,” Gisele said, in the singsong voice she used in prophecy. “The Daughters of Arachne remain true, true to the death.” A sob caught in her throat, and her voice stilled.
My heart pounded so hard I thought my body would perish from fear. But I thought of my own imprisonment inside the amulet, and kept my voice steady. “I know what it is like to be captured by mortal magic; and Hitler first captured you, yes, using the Staff’s power the way Solomon employed the witch of Ein Dor. I have a simple proposition, Asmodel. Let’s trade—the Book for your freedom. Release my book to me, and I will bend the Book’s power to free you and every spirit of air, angel and demon alike, entrapped by human sorcery. I understand that vengeance moves you. But freedom is better than revenge. Leave Hitler to commit his own human evil.”
I held my breath; hope is such a fragile thing, but it is very hard to kill. We all stood in the silence of the night, the marble pagan Árpád standing guard alongside us.
Asmodel, wearing Hitler’s aspect like a costume, looked from me to Gisele, and then his gaze rested long on Raziel, his fingers nervously rubbing at his mustache.
I watched him as he considered my parley, as he imagined flying free, unencumbered by power or human desire, into the darkness. And then he growled again, his eyes glowing orange in the darkness like banked fires. “Silence, mortal.”
Far, far above our heads I heard the shrieking of the airborne demons, and in the distance I heard the faint baying of wolves in the city center. My sister’s fear quickened along my skin, sharp like a razor blade at the throat.
“Gisele will die first,” he said.
I saw the movement out of the corner of my eye and reacted instantly, without thinking. I leaped back and sent a blast of witchfire scorching in a circle all around the three of us.
But the demons had been instructed to miss, I am sure. Like a cat, Asmodel toyed with me, enjoying the endgame. I drew a cone of protection around us in the air, and Raziel drew his sword.
“Raziel, what do we do?”
His face stilled in the flashing lights that surrounded us like fireworks. “We die like heroes, Magda.”
It seemed a hard end, after all our adventures in the land of the living and the dead, after we had done so much to avert the harsh decree. I did not know if I could return from death again, not after what I had endured the last time. Gisele had not the gift. As for Raziel, I did not know that he could die at all.
“What are the rules of death for fallen angels, Raziel?”
He smiled then, a fierce warlike smile that filled me with determination. “I am about to find out.”
Outside the cone, the demons swarmed like a cloud of black flies. Through the buzzing clot of darkness, I saw the Book glowing like a secret ember in Asmodel’s black-gloved hands.
Through all my hunting, all my scheming, I had never dreamed the search would end this way. Never imagined that, like me, The Book of Raziel could be summoned back from the dead whole, entire, complete and yet not what it was before.
Asmodel’s laugh, a screaming gale, slammed against my circle of protection. His human form melted away, and through the mass of demons he loomed huge over the square, a giant clot of evil blocking the starlight from earth. Huge ram’s horns curled around his pointed ears; his fangs reached low enough to graze the sides of his massive neck.
“Now you die, your people die. And the rest of the world rejoices to see your kind die.”
“No.”
He laughed again, flickered in and out of Hitler’s form in the midst of the demonstorm.
“Sh’ma!” I sang in reply, and he drew back with an enraged roar. The trembling in my body stilled, and I took a deep breath, summoned my power up through the soles of my feet, up from the living earth.
Asmodel roared again to drown out my voice and break the concentration I needed to unleash the spell. Gisele touched my shoulder, her presence strengthened my intention, and I heard the voice of Raziel calling to the Almighty Himself to augment the force of my spell. I sent my spell down, and the earth under our feet rumbled it in an echo.
“Now, Leopold,” I called. His name ripped a hole in the sky, and my imp child led forth the host of demons born of my willfulness. They swarmed their demonic brothers, the host of Asmodel, and demon to demon they fought in the sky, a furious clash of darkness against darkness.
I stepped out of the circle of protection to face Asmodel. He towered over my head, but I held my ground.
“You are damned,” he said. “You have cursed yourself and your kind for all eternity. You dare to work sorcery.”
I knew Raziel stood at my back, and I was filled with a crazy courage, the courage of someone who is expert in the art of death. “Back to Hell, Asmodel! I come in the name of the Lord.”
“You presume, Magda Lazarus,” he said, in a mockery of Raziel’s words. “You presume. So I fell, so Raziel falls. So you fall. Do you not know? Do you not know your lineage?”
I thought of Obizuth, and I did not falter. “Even the daughter of demons may serve the Lord.”
He frowned. “And that is why you fail.”
“Perhaps. But I choose to fail with glory. Do you not remember, Asmodel? Even you were made by the Most High, and no matter what you do, or how far you stray, you still serve His plan.”
He roared in negation and threw a huge bolt of fire at my head. I blocked it and sent it back at him, and Asmodel screamed in agony. Like a wild beast, the demon lunged for me, but faster than the eye could follow, Raziel hurled himself between us. Gisele waited inside the circle of protection I had drawn, but it certainly would not hold out for long.
Demon and angel looked into each other’s faces, in the middle of a scorched circle on the stones of Heroes’ Square. Their profiles mirrored each other, brothers of the higher and lower realms.
I touched Raziel’s shoulder, and he jerked roughly away from my hand. “Magda, stay back.” His voice sounded calm and ordinary, the same as in the apartment on Dohány Street.
We both knew he could not vanquish Asmodel alone. And though my magic was not enough to save us, it was still something. He swept his sword in an arc, held it high above his head to keep Asmodel at bay. “He doesn’t want me, Magda. The demon only needs you, a sorcerer to work his will. The Daughters of Arachne do not have your blood. Stay back!”
Raziel shot me a knowing glance. “Not long ago, we made a pact, you and I. I was the one to stand aside, I was the one who could not be spared. It is the other way, now. You are the one we cannot afford to lose.”
I drew inside my wards, my lungs burning with the black sulfurous smoke that now surrounded us. “No, Raziel, I cannot just stand by—”
“You must. Magduska, you must be free.”
He didn’t wait for my response, instead pressed forward to attack his demonic adversary.
“You make a fatal mistake, my brother,” Raziel called. He no longer sounded furious, only resolved to fight, and the compassion in his voice pierced my heart. The witch of Amsterdam had taught me my strength lay in my vulnerability. Only now did I understand what she had meant.
A low growl ripped my attention back to Asmodel. He and my angel circled low as the battle raged all around us, in the air as well as on the ground of Heroes’ Square.
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br /> “Brother, why do you throw your soul away?” To my surprise, it was Asmodel who spoke.
Raziel stopped circling, his sword at the ready. “Because I could no longer stand by and watch you pervert The Book of Raziel to suit your ends. The Lord has His ways, but Heaven stays neutral.” He glanced back at me and smiled. “And I am no neutral.”
Raziel made a dazzling feint with his sword, and Asmodel parried using his huge claws. “Yes, the Almighty did not send you,” Asmodel growled. “And so you are mine.”
And they fought so fiercely the limbs of demon and angel blurred together in a furious cloud of black smoke.
I stepped forward, to the very edge of the cone of protection I had created, and I peered into the acrid darkness. I could not stand it, the zone of safety in which I stood. “Raziel, I’m coming—we can try to beat him together.”
“That is what he wants! Get back, Magduska. Let me handle him alone. Keep Gisele safe, and stay clear.”
“But Raziel—”
I saw his face, half consumed in smoke and flame. “At last you understand the frustration of angels. Be strong, Magduska.” And he disappeared back into the fury of the battle, as I and Gisele stayed back, protected, safe and lost to him.
All of us die moment to moment. Each day slips away and it can never return again, no matter what our magic. In all my grim determination to master death and to avenge it, I had forgotten that what I fought for was love, the gift that passes through time and yet lasts forever.
Now, Raziel gave me that gift. The angel unfurled his wings in all their blinding, golden glory. In a brilliant flash, he assailed the demon, filled the darkness with his painful, white-hot light.
Asmodel screamed and belched bloodred and orange flames. Red hellfire consumed Raziel’s wings, and smoke rose from him in billowing sheets. “Be strong, Magduska,” he said again. Smoke enveloped him, and Raziel ascended to heaven in a white plume, like a gigantic feather reaching into the sky.
My soul seemed to follow his trajectory into the sky, and only Gisele restrained me to earth. “Magda,” she cried, “bind him, stop him. Don’t let him get away.”
Asmodel could not sustain such a massive blow only to remain unscathed. Before Raziel ascended, he had blasted him with godlight, and it had shriveled Asmodel’s thick, mailed skin; it hung, peeling, off the bloody muscles of his cabled body. Raziel had weakened him. I could not destroy him—if Raziel could not, no one could but the Almighty—but I could stop him, now.
Lucretia had taught me the ancient binding spell of Solomon, as recorded in his Testament. I stood with her, with Trudy, the Daughters of Arachne and the daughters of women. “I bind you with chains, with words, with clay and with blood. ASMODEL, I bind you thus . . .”
Asmodel writhed within the cone of energy I held within my hands. I chained him fast, compressed him between my palms, and kept him wrapped tight like a sick, vicious cat caught in a blanket.
I searched for the Book upon Asmodel’s person. But, alas, the Book he had held in his hands was no more than a sending, a projection of reality like the form of Hitler had been. Adolf Hitler, the mortal man, held the real Book in Berlin, or wherever he waited for the invasion of Poland to begin.
Asmodel snapped at my fingers and snarled, compressed now into a reduced form. With the sounds of his struggle, the demons all around us realized that the demon general was captured. Leopold’s brothers screamed in hoarse triumph and they assailed Asmodel’s children, harried them in the sky.
The battle drifted away like smoke into the night, and Gisele and I were alone except for the demon I had trapped in my spell. Asmodel snarled but said no more. I bound him tighter, so tight that he could not escape, as tightly as the Staff had once bound me.
A low howl in the distance rose to our ears and Gisele trembled. “The wolves . . .”
“After Asmodel, I am no longer afraid of the wolves.” I held the demon fast, and took in the sight of the carnage left behind, the bodies of demons smoking all around us. Leopold had vanished: ascended, I was sure, as Raziel had ascended.
I looked in vain for the sight of Raziel’s face, and my heart finally broke. It was true: he was gone.
The marble angel stood on his pedestal, unreachable, his blank eyes blind to the battle we had just fought. I never expected to see Raziel again.
31
We had failed most magnificently. As with the Staff, I had dispatched the supernatural threat, not the real one, the human one. The world braced for war: Hitler planned to invade Poland on September first, and he didn’t need a resident demon to do it. If anything, by binding the demon, I had freed Hitler’s vril to rule even more strongly on its own.
A day or two after I had captured Asmodel, I got word from Eva that she still lived. The doorbell rang at the flat on Dohány Street, and when I opened the front door, a little runner, a red-nosed little guttersnipe no older than eleven or twelve, handed me a wadded-up, filthy piece of paper, and he ran away before I could say a single word.
I uncrumpled the sheet of paper. In Eva’s strikingly beautiful handwriting, she had written:
Little Star,
I am on the bridge, and the Horvath twins are coming. Please bring the medicine; I am with Blue Eyes.
Eva did not sign her name. She did not need to.
Blue Eyes was an ancient crone from Tokaj; we called her Blue Eyes because she used to sing the old lullaby in a great, mournful voice as she gathered her flowers up into tissue-wrapped, soggy bundles to sell by the train station. Her florist’s shop was on Ferenc körút, and once upon a time in a different universe, she had been Eva’s nursemaid. In an extended thank-you to Eva’s own long-dead mother, Blue Eyes had hired her to work in the flower shop, though she could pay Eva only in posies, not even in roses.
As for the Horvath twins, they were among the bullies I had tossed off the bridge long ago, as a schoolgirl and latent witch back in Tokaj.
So: Eva was in trouble, but thank goodness she was alive. I left Asmodel locked securely in his prison, an empty tin of sweet paprika that made him sneeze red pepper dust out of the sifting holes on the top. Gisele made the world’s most gentle and trustworthy jailer.
When I arrived at Blue Eyes’s florist shop, the corrugated metal grating was pulled down and padlocked, and the place looked deserted. Why not? Who could eat flowers? But I knocked on the metal grating anyway, in our old code: tumbelah, tumbelah, tumbelah laika . . .
The grating rolled up a foot, and Eva’s face peeked out from beneath. The plate to which the padlock was attached slid up with the grating, detached from the wall. Eva reached out and yanked me under the bottom of the grate and into the darkened store.
Blue Eyes was nowhere in evidence. Eva herself was as well dressed and as pretty as ever, as if she were unaware we met in the dingy shadows of a defunct florist shop. Instead of flowers, the place was now packed to the rafters with crates of guns, ski boots, and bullets—evidently the Zionists had taken her warnings to heart.
Eva struck a long wooden match and lit a gas lamp, and then lowered the flame as low as she could. To a casual observer she looked more beautiful than Marlene Dietrich, but to me . . . anyone who loved her could see the depths of Eva’s trouble.
“Did you get the Book?” she asked, without bothering to say hello. Her fingers played nervously over the edge of the big wooden matchbox.
She caught me staring, and she put the matchbox on the brass cash register with a great show of restrained dignity.
I couldn’t stand the silence for another minute. “Hitler has the Book.”
The calmness in my voice finally cracked her reserved façade. “So why are you smiling? Have you completely lost your mind, Magdalena!”
My smile widened, and for once I let the tears fall freely, smoothing over my cheekbones, burning my lips where I tasted salt. “But I’ve always been crazy, silly goose. How do you think I’ve stayed alive and in rumballs for so long? It’s a crazy world we’re living in.”
&
nbsp; Eva exhaled loudly, as if she’d been holding her breath since before I’d arrived. “Ah. If crazy was royalty, you, my dear little star, would be the queen.”
“Forget crazy. Even if we are doomed, we still have to fight. Win or lose.”
She winked at me, but in the shadows Eva seemed more frightened than unflappable. “You know, sometimes the best way to win is to run away as fast as you can, save the fight for another day. Zanzibar still sounds pretty good.”
Bless her, Eva made me laugh even now. “Nowhere for us to run, my darling. Not even Zanzibar.”
The smile faded from her lips. “Palestine. We are getting at least the children of Budapest out, any way we can. Britain has blockaded the coasts, but as always, a smile and some hard cash can work magic. And Knox, of all people, is supplying us with money and connections.” But she wasn’t smiling; for once, Eva was dead serious.
“Don’t despair. I swore I’d see you and Gisele through, and I haven’t broken my vow yet. But we still have a long way to go.”
Eva started pacing, ten steps one way, ten steps back. “Give me something I can use. You were always so good with gossip . . .”
“That’s because I make everything up.”
“Of course, we make everything up, every day we’re alive. It’s the only way anything gets done in this mad world.”
I laughed again, and hugged her, hard. Fate may drive our steps in a certain direction, but we decide whether to shuffle or to dance as we go. Though my Raziel was gone, at least I hadn’t lost Eva to death’s dominion as I had once feared.
I reached for her hand, smiled when I found the little red-gold ring I’d given her still on her thumb. “Do you remember?” I half whispered into the curve of her neck, wiggling the ring. “Being good never will get you anywhere but dead.”
Eva half cried, half laughed, and I pulled her even closer. I whispered into her ear: these were things I did not want the Zionists to know, and Eva would keep my secret if I asked her to. “Hitler has the Book, yes, but I’m too crazy to just give up now. I will summon a demonic army.”