Dark Victory

by Michele Lang

  I shrugged as if the burdens Gisele and I bore were of no account, but I still worried about her. “I trust nobody but you and Raziel. And besides, demons, like vampires, tend to sleep in, of a morning. We won’t be in any danger at all at the Mephisto Café.”

  I could not have been more wrong.

  * * *

  So it was that the three of us ushered in the last day of August from the dubious safety of the Café Mephisto, favorite Budapest haunt of the resident demons and other air spirits. Their coffee was terrible, the pastry often stale, but I trusted the regulars there more than I did the human members of the Fascist Arrow Cross Party, and the vampires now were too dangerous for me to challenge again.

  I scanned the headlines of the Pesti Hirlap, hungry to read stories of an ordinary day. Raziel sat next to me, his body all but thrumming with tension, while Gisele plowed through a soggy napoleon and a veritable bucket of watery coffee. Most demons do not have a sophisticated palate, and will eat almost anything so long as it is sweet enough.

  The paper dispensed with, I carefully folded it back together and rested it on its wooden dowel against the wall.

  Far across the expanse of the grand café, the front door swung in with a faint tinkling of bells, and the battered hulk that was Imre shuffled in, well bundled against the morning sun.

  He scanned the café as if looking for someone in particular, and our eyes met. He shook his head in disbelief, and his craggy face opened up in a sudden enormous smile.

  He trundled around the mostly empty tables, shedding layers of wraps as he drew away from the lead-paneled windows near the entrance. “You still live,” he said, all out of breath.

  “Not for long, not if I stay in Budapest, eh?” I said softly. “I’d like you to meet my sister, Gisele. You’ve already encountered Raziel.”

  Gisele and Imre exchanged a lingering look, and it discomfited me to know they had also met before, while I was off adventuring in Amsterdam. In her desperation, Gisele had come to Bathory to sell her blood and innocence in exchange for survival. I had a hard time forgiving Bathory for that, even though considering the circumstances he had behaved with chivalrous restraint.

  “Bathory owes me three months’ pay, at double salary,” I said, hesitating to disturb Imre’s dreamy, Gisele-fueled reverie.

  “I know,” he said, even as he never took his eyes off my cherubic little sister. “I meant to leave the money with the maître d’ at the Istanbul so you could claim it there as customary. But after last night…”

  “Thank you for finding us,” Gisele whispered. “And bless you for all of your help.”

  Imre’s meaty, scarred face softened, and for a moment his prizefighter’s features became beautiful. He knelt to kiss her hand, opened up her palm, and put an enormous wad of pengö notes inside.

  “Watch out for your crazy sister,” he said, and straightened. “Magda’ll end up getting the three of you killed.” And with a curt nod at Raziel and a tip of the hat to me, Imre wrapped himself up again and slipped away, presumably to go to his customary spot across town at the Istanbul, where his morning libation consisted of something much stronger than a cup of crummy coffee.

  “There goes an honest man,” I said under my breath as I watched him go. “If only the Imres of the world weren’t so terribly rare.”

  My mind involuntarily strayed to the immediate future, the future that awaited all of us. Once Poland fell, what next? I knew Hitler wouldn’t stop there. Aside from the prophecy that specifically doomed Gisele and me, I had a hard time imagining a Europe as dreadful as Gisele’s visions. Her descriptions of a world in flames made it hard to think of what to do, how to escape the conflagration somehow.

  “I see that you have made up your mind, Magduska, and I for one am glad,” Gisele said, her voice very faint. “Shall we head into Poland before or after the war begins?”

  I choked on my coffee. “Poland?” I could not keep my shock out of my voice. “I admit it. I was a fool to think I had a chance of preventing the war. But now it is too late. Why ever would we go to Poland, my darling mouse?”

  “But the people in Poland…” Gisele’s voice trailed off, and she carefully, too carefully, licked her sticky fork clean and laid it to rest next to the bone china cup holding the dregs of her awful coffee. “Think of the children trapped there, the mothers. I can hardly bear it; please don’t make me go in there alone.”

  Understanding began to dawn. “Did that Asmodel put the notion into your head?”

  She shrugged, and I could see that my guess was right. I could only imagine the terrible things he had told her, in her long watch at the kitchen table. My poor Gisele. Traitorous tears began pooling in my eyes, but my fury at the demon helpfully held them back.

  I tried to reason with her. It sounds funny to me now in retrospect that I did, but I tried. “But my darling, going into Poland now is madness. Immolating yourself in the fire isn’t going to save anybody else. How will it help those poor Polish children if we go in and get ourselves killed too?”

  The tears started leaking from her enormous brown eyes, and I could have torn out my hair with frustration. “But we cannot do nothing. The fate of those children plays out in my mind’s eye, every waking moment, and in my dreams, too. Their deaths are driving me mad. How can we just run away, save our skins? And leave those helpless people to be murdered?” She paused, then said again, “Knowing what we know?”

  I could hardly stand her words. How did my poor little sister keep from losing her sanity, seeing the pictures in her mind, never able to close her eyes against those terrible visions of the mass murder of millions of people? And Asmodel taunting her with them?

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said again, and suddenly my voice was hoarse from the lump in my throat. “I don’t speak Polish, I can’t kill every German in Poland, I already told the Poles at the embassy what is happening. There is nothing more I know to do.”

  I turned to Raziel, to appeal to his superior wisdom and strength. There was indeed something more I could do—allow Asmodel to enter me, imbue my power with demonic resurgence. Our collective power was almost certainly enough to murder Hitler himself, ensorcelled or not.

  He shook his head no, knowing what I contemplated in my desperation. And in my heart of hearts I knew he was right. I didn’t have the strength to command such an ancient, malevolent creature, not without the power of The Book of Raziel itself behind me. No, if I tried that I would merely become Asmodel’s pawn in a battle with Hitler, and perhaps Stalin as well.

  So that left one last choice, to run away. It would break Gisele’s heart to run west, and probably destroy her belief in me, but I would rather have her alive and hating me rather than grateful and dead because of my grandiose overreaching. I had already caused enough trouble trying to alter the ways of the world.

  But how far could we run, with three months of a vampire lieutenant’s pay?

  Raziel’s sudden burst of amazed laughter interrupted my desperate thoughts. “Look behind you, Magduska. Quick!”

  I twisted around in my wicker-backed chair, ready to invoke every dark witchery I knew to protect the two people I loved, who sat next to me at the table in the demons’ café.

  But no witchery could protect me from the person I beheld.

  “Ulysses Knox,” I muttered under my breath in shocked disbelief. Though he stood not ten meters away from me, my mind could not accept the reality of his presence, here in Budapest.

  “Who is that?” Gisele asked. I shot her a glance, and I could see that she had turned white as death.

  “I told you about him. He is the bookseller in Amsterdam, the one who had the remnant of The Book of Raziel hidden away in his warehouse. Bathory recommended me to him, but he could not help me in the end.”

  “Help you…” Her voice, stretched tight with fear, shocked me even more than the fact of Knox’s presence.

  “Whatever is the matter, Gisi? He turned out to be a friend, he helped Eva, and he kn
ows Bathory quite well.”

  “But he has come to take you away from me.”

  I looked to Raziel in consternation. The circumstances of my life spun out of my grasp faster and faster as we left August behind.

  Before I could reply to Gisele or ask Raziel for help, Knox had made his way to our table, slightly out of breath. His walrus mustache drooped in the August heat.

  “You seem to have an affinity for demons, Mr. Knox,” I said in French.

  He bowed and laughed, shaking his head even as he reached for my hand. Bathory had trusted this American with his life, and my employer’s opinion meant a great deal to me. But his appearance at such a time was nothing short of extraordinary.

  “I am not here for the demons, Miss Lazarus. And thanks to you, demons are no longer all that fond of me either.” I swallowed and my smile faltered at his words, for his spy network of demonesses in Nazi Germany had been violently disrupted as a result of my blunderings in Amsterdam.

  But that fact only made Knox’s next words all the more shocking. “I came here looking for you—the folks at Café Istanbul had no idea where you had gone. Imre pointed me in the right direction, but it took some doing to find this place.”

  I covered my confusion by pausing to take a sip of the terrible, now tepid coffee in the bone china cup at my elbow. “Looking for me, are you? How fascinating. But I forget my manners, Mr. Knox. Would you care to take a seat? This is my sister, Gisele, and my … friend, Raziel.”

  If Knox registered my stumbling over Raziel’s name he gave no sign of it. “A pleasure to meet you,” he murmured in French as he maneuvered his well-fed body into a chair that looked too frail to bear his weight.

  “Neither of my companions speaks French, dear sir,” I replied, and for at least the thousandth time since she had gone to join the Zionists in their battle against the Nazis, I wished for my friend Eva Farkas. Eva not only spoke impeccable French, she could charm Satan himself into doing her bidding. Whereas I am prickly, and preoccupied, and too serious to charm the denizens of polite, nonmagical society. Especially an upstanding, steady American Mason who had just happened to endure unspeakable havoc as the result of my activities in Amsterdam.

  I glanced at Gisele and almost spilled the dregs of my coffee. The girl stared at Knox with huge, saucer-shaped eyes, as if he were the Angel of Death come to finish off her napoleon pastry and then take her away.

  There was nothing for it. Premonition or simple case of nerves, Gisele was going to have to tolerate his presence. “Smile and say hello to Mr. Knox,” I murmured under my breath in Hungarian.

  Her eyes blinked once, twice, and her lashes fluttered as if she were going to faint. “Hello, sir.”

  My heart tightened with worry even as I slid my chair closer to hers, but I kept my voice playful, light, as if we were talking about a play or the price of sardines. “No fear, nothing is going to hurt you here, my darling,” I murmured.

  “I did not think to say farewell again to you so soon, Magduska!”

  I restrained a sigh of impatience. I had nothing to fear from the bookseller. He had a soft spot for murderous demonesses, vampires like my old boss Bathory, and even for fierce and somewhat confused witches like me.

  “Let me talk to him,” I said in Hungarian to Gisele. “See why he is here. Maybe he can help us now. We could use all the help we can get.”

  My little sister hiccupped and said nothing more, only looked so miserable I almost gave up on the job of reassuring her and instead let her run away. But another glance, this time directed at Raziel, made up my mind. I had to find out what Knox’s sudden appearance portended.

  Raziel nodded at me to go on. “Magduska, you know there are no such things as coincidences.”

  The fact my angel was right did not render our surprise coffee klatch any less awkward. When I returned my attention to Knox, he inclined his head ever so slightly in my direction, as if he could sense both Gisele’s consternation and Raziel’s encouragement. “I will translate from the French for my companions, if you do not mind, Mr. Knox,” I said.

  “Certainly. What I say is not for your ears alone.” He leaned back in his chair and sighed, taking in the whole of the Mephisto Café with a single, weary glance. “I have come all this way to find you.”

  I hesitated, then decided to speak the truth to him. “If you come seeking Count Bathory, sir, you will not find him. Bathory is no longer here in Budapest.”

  Knox leaned forward, his face flushing. “I know. He is in Berlin, facing the MittelEuropa Vampirrat.”

  It was my turn to blink in surprise. Few nonmagical mortals, and even fewer Americans, had any inkling of how the vampires of the world organized and governed themselves. But Knox was no ordinary man, and for an American he was astonishing.

  “It is because of his plight that I have come for you. I still have friends in Berlin, and they warned me of Bathory’s fate. I need your help, and believe that you need mine too.”

  I translated his words in a nearly inaudible rush of Hungarian, and Raziel nodded for me to go on. Perhaps Gisele was right and I was soon to leave Budapest alone. Knox looked so rotund and harmless, so innocuous and bland, but apparently he had come on a perilous mission. It would be dangerous to underestimate such a man.

  “I am soon to become a refugee myself, as I believe you know. Tell me how I may help you, though I am not sure I can help even myself at the moment.”

  “Well, Miss Magda, let’s be frank. You have nothing left to lose. Do you realize what kind of power that gives you?”

  Knox’s vehemence caught me off guard, and for an awful moment the hopelessness of my situation threatened to overwhelm me and shut me down altogether. I reached for my purse and rummaged around for a cigarette in an effort to stave off a sudden terrible despair.

  “I don’t know about the power of nothing, monsieur. All I can say is that my situation is dreadfully precarious. But I am happy to entertain your notions.”

  “I am here to get you out of Budapest,” he said, his voice low and urgent. He reached across the table and grabbed one of my hands, squeezed my fingers until I stopped fidgeting. “You are almost out of chances, girl. I have a plane waiting on the runway for you, filled with Polish dignitaries headed west.”

  I could not suppress a gasp at this information. “Why would there be any room on that plane for me? And do you mean me, alone? I couldn’t possibly leave the country without Raziel and Gisele, not now.”

  Even as I pushed him away, I searched his face for the truth hidden in his words. If Knox meant it, he was an angel of salvation, not death, and he would extricate us from the east before war trapped us here to die.

  “I need your help,” Knox said again, and his fingers tightened around mine. “You … know things. You are in a position to find out more. There are people who need the information you possess.”

  “People? What kind of people?” I said. I could not keep the roughness out of my voice. “People have killed me before for what I know, for what I wish I knew. They didn’t get what they wanted out of me. Why should I willingly give up to a stranger what I have left?”

  I pulled my hand away, and began translating for Raziel and Gisele. “He cannot pay me enough,” I muttered to them.

  “Don’t be so stubborn,” Gisele said, surprising me anew. “Bathory adores this man, yes? The least you can do is hear him out. Even if … he means to take you away from me.”

  Lord, I needed a cigarette. My sister did not mean to torment me, but her mysterious little pronouncements drove me crazy sometimes. “He’s let me down before,” I said in Hungarian, playing devil’s advocate against myself. I desperately wanted to trust Knox, wanted to go west for any reason, or none. Anything to flee from the horror of Friday, September the first.

  I appealed to Raziel with a glance, but he half smiled and wearily shrugged, looking like he had been born and raised in Budapest. “What do you have to lose, Magduska? The bookseller is correct, of course. But do not go wit
h him simply to run away. You will have to go into the storm, and I think that is what he is going to ask of you in the end.”

  My two beloveds had given me little in the way of comfort. I sighed and resigned myself to hearing him out. “Let me see if I understand, monsieur. You propose to put me on the plane with the Polish diplomats, yes? To go west? But why? And what must I pay for the chance to run away from my death here?”

  Knox looked up at the ceiling of the Mephisto, as if he were appealing to his own army of angels to overpower my nonsense. He squinted hard as he studied the crystal chandeliers above our heads. “No less a personage than Winston Churchill wishes to consult with you regarding the impending war,” he said, his voice flat and noncommittal. I searched his face, but now he avoided me and studied the ceiling of the Mephisto instead.

  Before I could force a word past my strangled throat, Raziel murmured in Hungarian, “Who is this Winston Churchill?” Clever man … he understood no French, but had caught the name in the torrent of Knox’s foreign words. And while a clever man, he had not been one long enough to know who Winston Churchill was, and what he would become.

  “A great Englishman,” I replied. “One who has warned the world against Hitler for longer than Gisele has, and who has been ignored pretty much as thoroughly as she.”

  I spoke to Knox’s meaty chin. “Is Churchill still out of power in the British government?”

  “Yes. But that is bound to change should England enter the war.”

  My mind could not think past the words “Winston Churchill.” I shook my head hard, as if I could dislodge the man’s name from my mind. “What would such a powerful Englishman, one with no magic, want from me? He knows better than I do what kind of enemy he has in Hitler.”

  “I cannot speak for Churchill. I bring you as a favor to him.” He tore his gaze away from the dusty crystal chandeliers that hovered like swords over our heads.

  His eyes were bloodshot. “You do not have the Book,” he whispered. “But should we get it away from the Germans, you alone can use it. The British are the only ones strong enough to stand against the Nazis now. Winnie has an extensive network of his own throughout all of Europe. You may know something, a fact meaningless to you, which is of profound import to him.”