The Midnight Court

by Jane Kindred

  “I don’t like the idea of asylum,” Vasily growled.

  “I know. But Dmitri had to grant it before the contact would reveal the source. It was their nonnegotiable condition for bringing Ola back. The rest of the Angliski clan will still be punished. At any rate, they’ve made arrangements for us to fly into Arkhangel’sk tomorrow afternoon to meet the plane coming in from Solovetsky.”

  I took Vasily’s hand again, my heart lighter than it had been in so long, and he didn’t resist.

  “But you’re not going to like who’s been granted asylum.”

  “Who?” Vasily’s eyes darkened toward red.

  Belphagor moved back from the seat as if removing himself from the range of Vasily’s fist. “Vashti.”

  I cried out as Vasily crushed my fingers in his.

  Desatoe: A Skylark Wounded on the Wing

  The plane had taken off from the frozen center of the White Sea at one thirty in the afternoon, dusk already as the sun hugged the arctic white horizon. The tiny vessel shuddered as it rumbled across the frozen runway, lurching its way into the sullen sky, and Love instinctively grabbed Kirill’s wrist on the armrest beside her, making him jump.

  He’d been in shock since stabbing Zeus, mutely following Vashti’s orders as he murmured his prayers. Apparently, she’d arranged everything in advance—except for Zeus’s death. Vashti had come to the monastery with plane tickets and forged papers for Love and Ola, and she hurried them out the door, pressing money into Kirill’s hand to bribe the airport officials for an extra seat on the plane and insisting it was his duty to get Love and Ola to safety. She would remain behind to report the death after they were safely away. Love didn’t ask any questions. She was happy to do whatever Vashti told her to as long as she and Ola were going home.

  Ola was quiet and solemn after her prolonged crying episode at the monastery, and Love waited until they were in the air to tell her they were on their way to see Mama. After so many weeks, she wasn’t sure if Ola understood who Mama was, but Ola’s eyes seemed bright and interested.

  “And we’ll see Papa and Beli, too,” she promised, but Ola only stared at this.

  Kirill was equally quiet, fingers counting the knots in his chotki and lips moving with his interminable prayer. When they reached the airport at Arkhangel’sk, he tried to stay on the plane, stubbornly insisting he had to go back, but there was only one flight in and out of Arkhangel’sk that day, and they’d been on it.

  Love managed to convince him to come with her to the dacha. She would tell them he’d taken care of her in the monastery, that keeping her and Ola there had been against his will and he’d been unable to free them until now.

  “This is not truth.” He spoke in angelic and then blushed, realizing it was no longer necessary. “Eto nepravda.”

  “It is the truth. You were lied to. I don’t believe you would have kept us there if it were up to your own conscience.”

  Kirill frowned but didn’t argue.

  They had enough money left for a taxi, and they arrived at last to discover the dacha dark, with no smoke at the chimney. Love found the key they kept beneath a pot in the garden and let herself into the cold, empty house.

  She left Kirill to light a fire as she went about with Ola, turning on lights and checking rooms, though it was obvious there was no one there, and hadn’t been for some time. Ola became more animated when she saw her crib and toys, examining her stuffed animals with interest as Love handed them to her.

  Keeping one eye on Ola as she explored the room, Love stripped out of the hateful black garments, trading them for a thermal undershirt and a heavy T-shirt that fit snugly over it. She pulled on a pair of her own underwear with relief, along with a favorite pair of overalls and the warmest woolen socks she could find. Ola no longer had anything that fit her here, so Love left her in the borrowed clothes from the monastery donations.

  In the bathroom, Love took a pair of scissors and trimmed her hair back to the short waves she preferred. The long wisps that kept falling into her eyes had been driving her mad. She freshened up, washing the grime from her face and putting on her moisturizer and deodorant at last. Every step of the routine denied her in the austere monastery made her feel more like herself.

  “Sobaka.” Ola held out a soft stuffed dog as Love picked her up. Belphagor had given it to her on her first birthday—just a few weeks before they’d gone to Solovetsky.

  “That’s right. That’s Ola’s sobaka. Beli gave that to you.”

  “La sobaka,” said Ola, clearly pleased.

  When they returned downstairs, Kirill looked up from warming his hands by the fire and regarded Love with surprise.

  She glared at him with a hand on her hip. “I hope you didn’t expect me to keep dressing like a nun.”

  Kirill shook his head almost shyly.

  Her computer still sat on the table, and Love started it up and checked her voicemail online. An angry message from Belphagor startled her, left the day after she and Ola had been taken.

  “You’re going to be sorry you ever laid eyes on that child,” his voice snarled at her. “I WILL find you, I promise you that. And by the time I’m done thrashing you, you’ll understand that the unseen world is real. You can bet your tsigane ass on that.”

  She stared at the computer, her heart pounding and her eyes burning. They thought she’d taken Ola. They thought she was part of it. Ola was looking at the computer with a puzzled expression, as if she found the voice familiar but couldn’t quite place it.

  “That was Beli. He was a little angry with me.”

  “Zoo.” Ola’s lower lip protruded in worry.

  “No, no.” Love hugged her. “Not like Zeus. Zeus was a bad man. Beli loves us. He was just angry because he was frightened and didn’t know where we were. He won’t be angry when he sees us. He’ll be so happy.” She pulled up the folder where she’d uploaded shots from her cell phone and showed Ola a picture of Belphagor and Vasily. “There’s Beli. Next to Papa. Do you remember Papa?”

  Ola patted the computer, looking shy. Love opened another picture of them standing beside Anazakia holding a six-month-old Ola.

  “And here’s—”

  “Mama. La’s mama.”

  “That’s right.” Love bit back tears as she ruffled the burnished hair. “Ola’s mama.”

  “Mama baby.” Ola pointed at herself in the picture.

  “That’s you. That’s baby Ola. See, Mama’s kissing you because she loves you. I know Mama misses you very much, and we’re going to see her soon.”

  Ola stared at the screen a little longer before squirming to get down. The picture would look nice above her crib, so Love printed it out and slipped it into the wide front pocket of her overalls to find a frame for it later.

  While Kirill ignored the meal Love managed to scrounge up, she took Ola upstairs for a bath, leaving him to his thoughts and his untouched plate. Ola splashed about with toys that were novelties to her now as Love luxuriated in the hot water with a profusion of bubbles, not wanting to get out until it was too cool to stay in any longer.

  Ola’s hair was soft and wispy after Love toweled it dry, the glow of the candles on the counter catching the ruby lights among the darkening curls. She took her in to bed, tucking her under the blankets in the center of Anazakia’s mattress, which seemed massive and decadent after the ascetic cot they’d shared. Ola tucked her toy sobaka under her arm and was asleep in an instant.

  When Love went down to sit by the fire, Kirill finally spoke to her. “You are very kind to offer me hospitality.” He stared into the flames. “But it isn’t true that I took care of you, and tomorrow I must return to face my crime. I have sinned against God and allowed you to suffer the gravest of abominations. And now I have damned my soul. The blood of God’s messenger is on my hands.” It was the most he’d spoken since she discovered him standing over Zeus’s body.

  “He was not God’s messenger. If anything, he was the devil’s.”

  “Then God has se
nt temptation to test me and I have failed, falling for the honeyed tongue of the serpent. And I have fled the judgment of my sins.”

  “You’re not to blame.” When he refused to look at her, she crouched down in front of him and put her hand on his where it rested on his knee. “If you hadn’t stopped him, he would have held me down and done what he wanted with me as Ola watched, and he meant to smother me while he did it.”

  Kirill shuddered. “I am to blame. You would not have been there if I had not allowed it. He would not have touched you if I had not turned a blind eye to it.”

  “Kirill—”

  “No.” He pulled his hand away from hers. “I must cleanse my soul of this wickedness. I must beseech the Lord to know how I am to atone.” He rose and went upstairs to the bathroom and closed the door, running water for a bath.

  Love went up to bed, climbing in beside Ola’s sleep-flushed heat, and lay awake, her mind whirling with how changed her situation was since going to sleep the night before. She’d nearly succumbed to a state of resignation and despair at Solovetsky, no longer thinking about when they would be released, concerned only with maintaining some kind of normalcy for Ola and counteracting the detriments to her development.

  She’d succeeded in potty training her, and had read to her for several hours a day, trying to make sure her vocabulary didn’t suffer for lack of socialization. Ola’s health and well-being had become the purpose of her life. Now she felt strangely unmoored, her purpose suddenly removed. She wasn’t certain how to go back to being the Love she’d been before—or even if she could. Belphagor’s angry voice repeated in a loop in her head.

  Just as her mad thoughts were finally wending toward sleep, a sound below made her instantly alert. The door had opened. She slipped out of bed and into her tapochki and paused in the hall to look in on Belphagor and Vasily’s empty room. Kirill hadn’t gone to bed.

  The light was still on in the bathroom, but the door was open and the room was empty. His robes lay on the floor next to the full tub—still steaming, which seemed odd for how long it must have been sitting. She dipped her fingers in it and discovered it was nearly scalding, as if he’d used no cold water in running the bath.

  A chill was rushing toward her up the stairs; the front door stood open. Love hurried down and grabbed her coat, and she found the monk standing naked in the garden, his skin covered in a thin layer of ice, like a human icicle.

  “Bozhe moi, Kirill!” She ran to him and tried to pull him toward the dacha. “What on earth are you doing?”

  He was beyond responding, his lips already blue, nearly convulsing with involuntary shivers. She took off her coat and threw it over him, and then tried to turn him toward the house, but he stumbled and fell in the snow, his feet too frozen to carry him. He was too heavy for her to try to lift, so she ran back inside and grabbed his ryasa and laid it flat on the ground beside him. Shoving as hard as she could, she rolled him onto the robe and grabbed the garment by the collar, dragging it like a sled along the path. It was like pulling a block of ice—which he very nearly was.

  At last she got him inside by the fire and covered him in blankets. His beard was a solid icicle extending from his chin, and the hair pulled back in his ponytail was similarly frozen.

  “Kirill.”

  His eyes were open, but he was shaking like a leaf and he didn’t respond. Love climbed beneath his blankets and tried to warm him with her body heat, her arms about his chest and shoulders. After several minutes, his shaking began to subside and he closed his eyes.

  “Kirill, can you hear me? Don’t go to sleep. You’re scaring me.”

  “L-leave me. It’s G-god’s will. The f-flesh must be mort—” He paused as his chattering teeth caused his jaw to clench. “Mortified.” Because of his beard and his air of authority, she’d thought of him as older, but right now he seemed surprisingly young and vulnerable, like a frightened adolescent boy, and she realized he couldn’t be much older than she was.

  Love shook her head. “I won’t leave you to freeze yourself to death. If God wants this, there’s something wrong with Him.”

  “You b-blaspheme!” He shivered and tried to extricate himself, too frozen to properly rebuke her.

  “I’ll blaspheme more if you don’t stop this,” she threatened, holding onto him stubbornly. “Then my damnation will be on your head.”

  Kirill turned his head away but stopped resisting her, and he said nothing more. She laid her head on his shoulder as his body warmed and his shivering stopped, and after a time, she realized she’d drifted off to sleep when his soft voice woke her. He was reciting the Prayer of the Heart again, low and rhythmic, as if it were part of his breath.

  Love listened, watching the rise and fall of his chest. He seemed to be able to carry the lilting chant of the prayer indefinitely, as though he was no longer conscious of it, might even be saying it in his sleep.

  “Gospodi Iisuse Khriste, Syne Bozhii,” he breathed in—Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God—and breathed out: “Pomilui, mya greshnago”—have mercy on me, a sinner. He paused, aware she was listening to him. “I need you to go, Sister Lyubov. You distract me from my purpose.”

  “What’s your purpose?”

  “To unite the body and mind with the heart.”

  Love hesitated. “You’re not going to harm yourself again?”

  “I give my word that I will not, as Christ is my witness.”

  She supposed she had to be satisfied with that. Love climbed out from under the blankets, listening to the embers sliding down against each other with a hiss as the log broke apart in the fireplace.

  “There’s another bed upstairs.”

  “The floor will do. Please go.” He resumed his unconscious recitation as if she’d already done so. Love gave up and went to snuggle under the covers with Ola.

  In the morning, Kirill seemed composed once more, dressed serenely in his robes and seated by the fire, though he stubbornly refused breakfast when Love prepared it for them. He insisted this was not an attempt to harm himself, only a temporary fast so he could more clearly hear God’s will.

  Ola wanted to play with the computer when Love opened it, so Love let her sit on her lap and bang on the keyboard, showing her the pictures of her parents. Ola hadn’t let go of her stuffed dog since Love had put it into her hands, and she patted it at the screen when the picture of Belphagor and Vasily came up.

  “Beli sobaka?”

  Love smiled. “Yes, sweetie, that’s Beli. He gave you the sobaka.” She dug around in her rucksack for an uncharged cell phone from her extensive collection for Ola to play with, and discovered three of the prepaid phones and chargers were gone. The others must have each taken one. She had all of the numbers in her contacts, so she plugged in her headset and tried each one, only to get voicemail for all three. There was no telling who had which phone, as they hadn’t changed the generic greetings, so she left the same message on each, letting them know she and Ola were safe and home and trying to reassure them she hadn’t been involved in Ola’s abduction.

  As she was leaving the last, she felt a strange prickling sensation at her ear, as if a static charge were building, and then a bright flash knocked her to the floor. She lay there dazed for a moment, the headset clattering across the polished wood. Ola was crying, and with the negative image of the flash burned into her retinas, Love couldn’t see.

  Kirill cried out and fell onto his knees beside her with a heavy thud. “Have mercy on me, a sinner! I am a humble servant of the Lord!”

  “Irrelevant.” A strange voice thundered in her head like the roar of a lion. “We are not acquainted with your ’lord.’ We come from Heaven.”

  …

  They arrived at Talagi Airport an hour before the flight from the Solovetsky Islands was due to land. The weather so far was clear and cold as crystal, and there was no indication the flight from the islands had been canceled, as was often the case this time of year.

  Vasily paced, nearly emitting smoke in his
pent-up rage, the emotion he habitually projected to cover worry or fear. Belphagor wished he could comfort him, but Vasily was too agitated for even Anazakia to get near him. The angel was quiet, peering out the window beneath the brown-tipped polecat ushanka Yulya had given her. He suspected Anazakia had no concept what a gift that had been for a woman of Yulya’s means.

  Dmitri had come along to take custody of Vashti. He might have granted her asylum, but she wouldn’t simply be free to go her way. Asylum meant she wouldn’t face death—or the particularly gruesome punishment reserved for violent criminals among the clans: pinioning of their terrestrial wings—but she would be confined at Dmitri’s discretion until he determined whether she was a threat to Fallen, Host, or Man.

  They’d met up with Dmitri and a Nephil named Nebo in St. Petersburg. Tall and beautiful, with skin as supple and rich as mink, Nebo was Vashti’s fraternal twin. He was the contact Dmitri had mentioned to Belphagor before their trip to the Unseen World, who’d arranged for Vashti’s surrender. Nebo had been trying to persuade Vashti to turn herself in, but Dmitri had heard nothing more from him until just days ago, when Nebo announced she was ready to come in if Dmitri’s offer of asylum still held. She’d promised to bring Ola with her, and Dmitri had readily agreed.

  The plane arrived at last just after the early arctic sunset. Anazakia pressed her hands against the icy glass as she watched the passengers emerge. There weren’t many who braved the White Sea this time of year, and they soon saw Vashti stepping onto the tarmac. She was alone. Belphagor’s heart jolted with alarm.

  Anazakia cried out and pounded on the window. “Where is she? Where’s Ola?”

  Beside her, Vasily lunged for the door, eyes wild with his fire, and Dmitri and Nebo barely managed to restrain him.

  Belphagor rounded on Nebo and grabbed him by the collar. “You said she was bringing Ola. What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. I swear to you.” The Nephil’s voice shook in his urban London accent. “She said she’d have her.”

  Vasily swore, struggling against Nebo’s grip. “This is the last day of your sister’s life.”