Dark Victory

by Michele Lang

  “You can forget the Book in Berlin, little fool. You do not need it. The original of your Book still exists.”

  My body stiffened in shock, and only with a desperate effort was I able to keep my composure. All of us had fought a terrible battle over the mere reconstitution of the Book only a day or two before. If Asmodel spoke the truth, if the unsullied original could still be found …

  I closed my hand over the now empty paprika tin, the sharp edges cutting into my palm. I tried to imagine what the original Book, in my power, could mean to the future that Asmodel had predicted.

  “You are the prince of lies,” I said.

  His gaze locked onto mine, and my heart raced at the sight of him. I blinked hard to keep my focus despite the seduction of his words.

  Asmodel’s smile grew even wider. “But I tell the truth. It is your beautiful love, your own fine fallen one whom you tempted, your Raziel, who murders truth now with his silence.”

  I tore my gaze away and twisted around to look at Raziel, standing tall behind my chair. His face was as still as stone.

  Asmodel’s voice, soft now, snaked into my ears. “Tell her, brother, of the elemental nature of your Book. Tell her of the Sapphire Heaven. And of the power your girl may command with the gem in her hand.”

  Raziel said nothing.

  I knew the ancient one sought to divide us with his honeyed, poisoned words, but I listened to him anyway, hoping for a slip of the tongue that would help my cause. I kept my eyes trained on Raziel even as I spoke to the demon. “Raziel is not talking. So go on. I am listening.”

  Raziel closed his eyes against me, and I noticed for the first time the all-too-human stubble now tracing the line of his jaw. Raziel was no longer an angel, but a man. And men make mistakes.

  I turned to face Asmodel once more, and the demon leaned forward, his smile broadening, close enough to kiss me.

  “You speak in riddles, demon,” I said, and I could not keep the tremor out of my voice now. “The Book of Raziel is a book, not a gem. And why did we all chase the handwritten copy of the Book to Amsterdam last month if the original could still be found?”

  His gaze exposed me where I sat, my heart pounding so hard my pulse roared in my ears. Asmodel’s eyes narrowed. “You think so little of your angel, now that he is shorn of wings. Unlike you, I have not tasted the pleasures of my brother’s flesh. But he is no better than I; he is fallen as am I. He has no more reason to keep the secrets of God, not now. Make Raziel tell you, tempt him as Naamah once tempted me.”

  A trembling worked its way from the base of my throat to my lips. Again I blinked back the sting of tears and kept my voice as level as I could. “You are a liar. I cannot trust a thing you say.”

  Asmodel shrugged. “That is true,” he said, his oily voice now maddeningly mild. “But the truth is worth my speaking when it serves my purposes. And you said you wanted the truth.”

  I clutched at despair as to the side of a lifeboat. “It doesn’t matter now, regardless,” I said. “I’ve already lost everything. Without The Book of Raziel, gemstone or book of spells in Berlin, I cannot stop Hitler. You are right after all … I am too late.”

  “You don’t understand me, mortal girl. You cannot stop Hitler—but more than this, you cannot stop death. Now Raziel will die. No longer an angel, he will face the Throne upon his death, the Lord’s wrath. Like Naamah, he will die. He is no demon like me. No witch like you, with the power to return from the dead.

  “Raziel is now only a man. You cannot stop his death, you know that. As much evil as he has done to save you, you have gained nothing. But you can still save him, Magduska. Vanquish death itself! Forget Hitler—do it for Raziel’s sake.”

  Gasping, I turned to face Raziel. This time, Raziel smiled, a small, knowing smile, one that confirmed everything that Asmodel had said. It occurred to me that Asmodel had tempted him to fall many times before, in times long gone out of human memory—and now Raziel had succumbed, given up his place in Heaven, for no other reason but to stand with me. And he could only watch now as Asmodel similarly tempted me.

  I turned back again to Asmodel, my heart cold, an extinguished candle flame. “What is it like to be so very old?” I said, allowing my thoughts to take flight into words. “Killing humans must be like swatting gnats.”

  Asmodel sighed in what looked like bliss and closed his eyes. “Entertaining and useful gnats; foolish gnats, with the power to choose the way of the world.”

  “Do we really? Choose anything?”

  The demon’s eyes opened and he pierced me with his gaze, speared me. “You could make this world a paradise with your choices, Magduska.”

  This time I let him get away with the endearment. It was my turn to be silent and consider his words. I was listening, really listening.

  “Come with me as I restore the Garden,” he said, his voice low and beseeching. “You could be the one to do it. The Book of Raziel was first inscribed in the sapphire, its wisdom encased in the structure of the gem. The Book exists. It is a lost treasure, but it is real. We lost it when the Temple was destroyed, but we have our theories of its location, do we not, my brother Raziel?”

  “Why do you need the Book, copy or sapphire?” I asked. “You seem to exert your dominion quite well without it.”

  “Nonsense. I am in chains, dear sorceress,” he murmured. “My dominion has ended—I went from the great Führer to nothing, nobody, my prison an old tin of paprika.”

  “But how did you conquer Hitler in the first place?”

  “I already told you before, Magduska, and I do not lie. He invited me in, to augment his puny mortal powers. Had we but preserved The Book of Raziel as it had been transcribed, retained the original geography of the gemstone, no one could have stopped me.”

  “Not even Hitler himself,” I remarked, more to myself than to him.

  Asmodel shrugged and, like a cat, relaxed bit by bit against my forearm, the stubble of his cheek scratching through my flimsy cotton blouse. Abruptly I remembered his nakedness, and my cheeks flushed with shame.

  The demon pretended not to notice my mortification. “Hitler wanted me to own him. How could he live a thousand years otherwise?”

  “Could you give him a thousand years, demon?” I asked. My head throbbed and I was shrouded in weariness, dragged toward the grave by the hands of despair.

  I sat perfectly still, unwilling to betray my weakness. But I feared that Asmodel somehow sensed it nonetheless.

  “What does it matter? There is nothing more to say, my beautiful one,” he murmured. “Let me in. Raziel and I will share you, and you will experience such pleasure as you cannot comprehend. Together we will find the gemstone; you will learn to call it from its hidden place. And you would vanquish both Hitler and Stalin, stop this messy war, and perfect the fellowship of mankind. You know I do not lie.”

  Not in the words themselves, but in the totality of their meaning, did Asmodel twist the truth. I tore my gaze away from the demon’s nakedness, his deep, warm, amber eyes, and I turned again to look at Raziel.

  Raziel had cast his lot with me, with Gisele, with all the rest of us cursed by fate to fight and die in the terrible year of 1939. He would stay with me, even if I chose wrong—especially if I chose wrong. And he would not rob from me the choice only I could make.

  “What do you think, Raziel?”

  I could not hide from him the desperation in my voice, the strain of the temptation. Raziel leaned in to murmur into my ear. “I was a powerful angel yesterday, Magda. Now I am only a man, and not much of a man, not yet.”

  He caressed the nape of my neck with his gentle, warm fingers. “It is like this, Magduska. The choice is impossible. You either let Asmodel in and try your best to control him from inside your body, or you keep him locked away, safe but useless. But beware. Hitler let Asmodel in, and look what has happened. Hitler’s evil has only strengthened Asmodel’s.”

  I imagined the cold touch of Asmodel inside my body, possessing my fles
h, and I shuddered.

  “I don’t have the strength to use him,” I confessed in a whisper. “And I don’t have time to find that gem he speaks of, not before Hitler invades. We will have to find another way, at least for now. Gisele could hold him and not be tempted, but just holding him is not enough.”

  I looked deep into Asmodel’s amber eyes. I could not afford to hesitate any longer. “Go back into the darkness,” I said, even as Asmodel’s face fell.

  To spare us both another struggle I summoned a cone of silence to descend over the tin like a glass dome over a cake. The white tin with the red lettering looked sepia now, like a newsreel, and Asmodel gave me one last, despairing glance as he disappeared through the sifter into the darkness of his prison.

  The sudden silence thundered in my ears. I sat at the kitchen table, drenched in sweat, sick with exhaustion, the tin—again scorching hot—clenched in my fingers. Asmodel was trapped inside once more, the stalemate still between us.

  The demon was bound, certainly. And unlike most of my countrymen, I knew the time and place that Hitler would strike. I had tried my best to bend Asmodel’s will to my purposes, as sages and kings had done in ancient times. But I was no sage. I had failed.

  It was Asmodel, even trapped inside his tin prison, who held the upper hand.

  2

  Failure didn’t sit well on my shoulders, and after my war of words with Asmodel I wanted to tear out my hair. I was used to outwitting fate in my heretofore dodgy life as a vampire’s lieutenant, and I wasn’t ready to concede defeat, not yet, not without more of a fight.

  Even in the shadow of death, people need to eat. So when daylight failed, that final Wednesday night before the war, I insisted that Gisele and Raziel accompany me to my place of business, the Café Istanbul. My employer, the fearsome vampire Count Gabor Bathory, had doubled my salary before he disappeared only days before, and though the world was collapsing around our ears, his credit was still good.

  Raziel agreed to meet me at the Istanbul, but later, once he had found a way to ensure that Asmodel remained well secured inside the paprika tin; a den of vampires was no place to bring an imperfectly secured primeval demon. Given the dangers the Istanbul contained, and the fact I was bringing my little sister within its doors, I was anxious to depart before the sun had fully set. Despite my secret worries, I left Raziel to his labors.

  As we paused on the café’s threshold, I took Gisele’s left hand and tucked it in the crook of my arm, and I pulled her close to me so that we went in as a tightly connected entity. My principal place of business was a café for vampires, and my mortal little sister, untrained in spell-casting, was too delectable a morsel for a vampire to resist. Alas, even my employer, Count Bathory himself, had not been able to keep himself from tasting her in the past.

  The maître d’ did a double take when he saw us gliding past the huge marble bar on the way to the grand staircase that led to the mezzanine. He ran behind the bar to intercept us, and blocked our passage onto the stairway … politely.

  By politely, I mean that he kept his fangs tucked away, out of sight, and instead greeted us with a nervous smile. “Bathory is still not here,” he said.

  I winced at the news that Bathory was still not in Budapest, though I knew all too well where he had gone, and why.

  The maître d’ shifted his spectral attentions from me to Gisele, and his nostrils flared, not with annoyance but with an epicure’s appreciation for the gourmet possibilities of my all-but-defenseless virgin little sister.

  “Ma’m’selle, Count Bathory announced with great fanfare, less than two days ago, that he would fly to meet the great MittelEuropa Vampirrat in full session. He had been summoned. He has not—yet—returned.”

  He inserted that “yet” out of deference and consideration for me, Bathory’s loyal lieutenant, but he and I both knew the truth: Bathory had gone in answer to a summons. And the Vampirrat summoned vampires only to promote or to punish.

  My poor count had shown too much independence of spirit to expect promotion within the ranks of vampire nobility, they who of late had sworn fealty to the German Reich. I worried that he had earned a stake in the heart as payment for championing my cause, as well as that of independent Hungary.

  My shy little sister, heedless of the danger, bravely and uncharacteristically pressed forward. “Sir,” she ventured, “my sister here works for the count, Bathory. And she … well, she needs her wages. We all need to eat, dear sir.”

  The maître d’ could no longer restrain himself. As his lips parted in a huge smile, he flashed us the disconcerting sight of his long, yellowed fangs. “Indeed we do need to eat, ma’m’selle. Indeed, we do.”

  “Gaston,” I said, “she is here with me. The lamb walks under Bathory’s protection. Beware.”

  The smile grew wider. “Bathory? My dear, he can no longer protect even himself.”

  His words lit my rage like a match held to a gas stove. “Beware, Gaston.” My voice vibrated with the force of my power, held in check.

  Our eyes locked, and Gaston licked his lips again. Ordinarily, any mortal who met a vampire’s gaze was vulnerable to his thrall.

  But I am no ordinary mortal.

  Gaston stifled a shriek as he stumbled backward and against the balustrade.

  “I am not your breakfast, Gaston,” I murmured, as bloody tears welled over the bridge of his nose. “I will summon your dried-up old soul clear out of your body through your nostrils if you do not step aside and let us pass. In Bathory’s name!”

  I bit my tongue to keep from cursing him, or harming him in a more than transitory way. After all, it was not Gaston’s fault that Bathory had gone to Berlin to meet his terrible fate. It was mine.

  I eased my grip upon his mind and Gaston slapped his hands over his eyes, breaking our connection. Still half blinded, he bowed deeply and kissed his exposed wrist, the submissive salutation of a lesser vampire acknowledging a greater.

  He acknowledged Bathory’s power, not mine, but I hardly cared. I patted Gisele’s fingers, still tucked into the crook of my arm. “Very well, Gaston,” I said, my voice calm and reasonable once more. “Please, we’ll be sitting at Bathory’s customary table upstairs. Kindly send up Imre when he arrives. It is near dusk, and he should be here soon.”

  “Yes, certainly, Ma’m’selle Magda.” And Gaston wiped his eyes and slunk away.

  We climbed the stairs slowly and with a grand show of outward confidence. But Gisele’s hand trembled like a tiny creature hidden in the crook of my arm. “Steady,” I stage-whispered when we arrived at the mezzanine landing.

  The sight of Bathory’s table, perfectly set and devoid of its proper denizen, made me pause. With a sigh I pulled Gisele along and installed her in the corner against the wall, where she would be easier to defend. With a flourish I settled into Bathory’s seat; I used my witch’s sight to scan the entire café for danger.

  I surveyed my old domain, the gilded, Levantine Café Istanbul, and a sweet melancholy settled like a taste on my tongue.

  Oh, my old haunt was dangerous, all right. The place was filled with hungry vampires who were waiting for nightfall so they could feed. But theirs was the usual dangerous, the known dangerous. I wrapped myself within that familiar peril as if it were a goose-down quilt in February. As much as anywhere, this den of iniquity, with its strange denizens and lugubrious atmosphere, was home.

  Settling into my seat with a satisfied little sigh, I unfolded a linen napkin and smoothed it over my lap. “My dear, we are going to have a proper meal at last. Bathory’s credit is still good.”

  Her hand reached across the table to grasp mine, and Gisele half crushed my fingers as she spoke. “Magduska, you are too brave.”

  “I cannot give up. It would be too easy. Even if Bathory is gone, I can’t.” My voice caught on the count’s name. Even as the world collapsed around our ears, the thought of his destruction was a little too much for me to take.

  “But Bathory is still … alive, Ma
gduska! I can, you know—I can feel it.” Gisi bit her lip and blushed, and my throat tightened with both rage and guilt. Gisele, sweet Gisi, had bared her neck to Bathory in order to survive when I had left her behind in Budapest. He had not turned her vampire, and for that I was forever grateful. But the bond between Bathory and Gisele remained, and it was my fault she had bared her neck in the first place.

  I patted her hand with my free one—my other hand she still clutched in a death grip. Café Istanbul had this effect on mortal people; actually, my girl was handling herself pretty well.

  The bell attached to the front door gently sounded, and I glanced over the balcony to the café entrance and looked to see if Imre had arrived.

  My heart leaped when I saw it was Raziel, not Imre, who crossed the threshold and entered the Istanbul. His shoulders, backlit by the streetlights, filled the doorway, and I watched him adjust the fedora on his head as he stepped to the bar and looked around for me.

  So far away and below he was, out of reach and strangely vulnerable and alone-looking. My mind flooded with a welter of conflicting emotions: fear for him, now mortal and a temptation to the vampiric denizens of the café; pride in his beauty and the goodness that streamed like light from him; and sadness, that he began his life as a man in the encroaching darkness of total war.

  Gaston stood behind him, and I half expected him to waylay Raziel, now a mere mortal, before he ever knew where to find me. But he half turned, and as if I had worked some spell upon him, Raziel looked up to where I sat on the mezzanine, and he pierced me with his gaze.

  Even from this distance, I saw the desolation in his eyes. I wiggled my fingers in a regal little wave, and a smile broke over his face.

  He took the curving staircase two stairs at a time, and arrived at our table not the slightest bit out of breath. “Magduska,” he said, voice low. He doffed his fedora and made an absurdly formal little bow.

  Gisi laughed and applauded him. “You are charming, Raziel, sir,” she said, and patted the seat next to her for him to sit.