No Surrender, No Retreat

by L. J. LaBarthe

“The war was hard,” Eleanora reflected. “And life after the war is still hard. But it is also sweet. There is much joy to be had, even though things are tough. So humanity will fight this new threat because what is sweet is worth protecting.”

  “You’re very wise,” Gabriel said.

  “I know.” She grinned. “It goes with being a witch, Saint Gabriel.”

  “Please, just Gabriel.”

  “As you prefer.”

  Gabriel polished off his food and sipped his wine, feeling comfortably full. “Do you have any contacts with any of the monsters?”

  “A few, oui. The dryads, they are unhappy because men still seek to cut down their forests and their magics are not enough to stop them now. The naiads are the same with their rivers and streams. The fairies and goblins do not show themselves much anymore. I cannot blame them, really.”

  Gabriel sighed. “Then I guess we’re limited to you and your eight colleagues.”

  “Oui, but it is not all bad. Just because I cannot help you does not mean that one of the others cannot. Lyudmila may have more information, because she works with magic different from my own, as does Brother Frank. As do all nine of us. We use magic, yes, but it is all different.”

  As Gabriel digested that, Raziel finished his wine and set the glass down on the table. “I’m sorry to have to cut this visit short, Eleanora.”

  “I understand, mon ami.” She stood as well, and Gabriel hastily got to his feet. “You take care, oui? And give my love to your overly bad-tempered lover.”

  Raziel laughed as he kissed her cheeks in farewell. “I will. Thanks for lunch, Eleanora. It was fantastic. As always.”

  “It were a pleasure to meet you,” Gabriel said politely. “And thank you for the food, it were delicious.”

  “You are both welcome.” Eleanora showed them out of her cottage. “Do visit again sometime soon. Both of you.”

  “We will.” Raziel waved and she waved back. Then he touched Gabriel’s hand and they were moving.

  GABRIEL stumbled as they emerged in the world, and then cursed. “Bloody hell, Raz, it’s fucking freezing!”

  “Welcome to St. Kilda islands. We’re on the island of Soay.” Raziel had wrapped his arms around himself. “I thought it’d be good to visit Frank before Lyudmila. Night comes early here, and he retires for sleep when darkness falls.”

  “Okay, but shit, it’s cold.” Gabriel pulled his woolen cloak to him with his power, wrapping it around himself.

  “Welcome to Scotland?” Raziel laughed and led Gabriel toward a grassy hillock.

  “So where’s his hermitage, then?” Gabriel looked around.

  “There.” Raziel pointed at the hillock.

  Gabriel’s expression was profoundly skeptical as he took in the hillock that had no apparent openings and seemed to be nothing more peculiar than a grass-covered mound of dirt. “Bullshit.”

  Raziel wiggled his fingers. “Magic, Gabriel,” he said, drawling the first word. “It’s hidden behind an illusion. Come on.” He led the way, walking straight into the grassy mound and disappearing; Gabriel, still not convinced, followed him.

  He was surprised when the illusion of grass vanished and he saw a small hut built into the hill. Gabriel blinked, looking behind him and seeing only grass and sea, then in front of him. “Remarkable. I couldn’t detect a thing.”

  “He’s pretty powerful,” Raziel agreed. He raised his hand and knocked on the wooden door of the hut.

  “Who’s there?” called a querulous voice.

  “Raziel the Archangel and Gabriel the Archangel,” Raziel said.

  The door swung open and Raziel entered the hut, Gabriel on his heels.

  The interior of the hut was dimly lit with oil lamps that hung from the ceiling on long rusty chains. It was warm inside, a warmth that came partially from the lamps and partially from the fire that burned in a fireplace just beyond the door. The hut contained a small woodstove, a cracked porcelain basin with a single faucet, and a rush pallet with blankets and furs. Books lined one wall, and sitting upon the pallet was one of the oldest humans that Gabriel had ever seen.

  He was also blind.

  The milky-white film that covered his eyes gave him a strange, almost alien appearance, and Gabriel wondered if Brother Frank had always been blind or if it had come upon him with his age. Raziel was already sitting down in front of the elderly man, and Gabriel quickly joined him.

  “Hello, Frank,” Raziel said, touching one gnarled and wrinkled hand.

  The old man smiled. “Raziel. It has been too long, old friend.”

  “It has,” Raziel agreed. “I don’t want to keep you from your studies too long, and my errand is urgent.”

  “I know what you seek.” Brother Frank nodded slowly. “I do not know that I can be more help than Eleanora was, though.”

  “Anything you could tell us would help,” Raziel said.

  The old man hummed, shifting a little on the pallet. “The nights are colder than before,” he said. “Is that part of the aftereffects of the war between Hell, Heaven, and Earth?”

  “Yes,” Raziel said. “Climate change is happening everywhere. Nothing drastic, nothing to panic over, however.”

  “These old bones feel the change more keenly.” Brother Frank smiled. “Very well, Raziel and Gabriel, I will tell you what little I know. As Eleanora said, there is a way to hide an Archangel. There are several ways. The spells are very potent, and they all require the use of the blood of the angel being hidden as well as the blood of a demon.”

  “So a demon’s involved in this?” Gabriel asked.

  “Not necessarily. The spells only require the blood, not the whole demon.” Brother Frank chuckled. “I don’t know who’d be behind this or what the reason would be, but I know that none of the nine of us you have listed are involved.”

  “How so?” Raziel asked.

  “Because it is not our nature to kidnap anything, let alone angelkind. Our powers are used to protect and to heal, Raziel. Sometimes to tell the future, other times to drive away enemies. We don’t kill except when we need to eat, and we don’t fight in wars. We study, we live, we love. We protect ourselves, and sometimes there have been injuries from those protections, but we are not tools to be used by anyone, no matter how powerful their social standing in the world.”

  “Forgive me, I didn’t think.” Raziel sounded humbled. “Is there anything else you can tell us, Brother Frank?”

  “I think, perhaps, that whoever has done this has a hatred of your kind, Raziel. Which I know does not limit the number of potential suspects, and I’m sorry for that. But there may also be another motivating factor—greed.”

  Gabriel frowned. “Greed?”

  “Medicine is failing the world, is it not? Diseases that were extinct are now returning. What better motivation for kidnapping the Archangel of Healing than holding the entire planet to ransom for its health?”

  Raziel hissed at that. “I didn’t even consider that possibility.”

  “It grieves me to have considered it,” Brother Frank said. “I am sorry.”

  “No, no, don’t be sorry. Thank you.” Raziel gently squeezed the old man’s hand. “It’s a possibility we will definitely look into.”

  Brother Frank inclined his head. “You are welcome, both of you. I’m sorry I could not be of more help.”

  Raziel got to his feet, and Gabriel did as well.

  “Brother Frank, you’ve done us a great service,” Raziel said.

  “I live only to serve.” Brother Frank crossed himself. “Go with God, my friends.”

  “And God be with you.” Raziel raised a hand, a light sheen of bronze light falling from his palm to bathe the head of the hermit in benediction.

  Brother Frank inclined his head. “Thank you, Saint Raziel.”

  Without another word, Raziel led the way out of the hermitage.

  Outside, the wind whipping at his cloak, Gabriel looked over the stormy gray sea. “So, greed,” he mused. “I didn’t th
ink of that.”

  “Me either.” Raziel was scowling. “Fucking hell.”

  “Aye, that about sums it up.” Gabriel shook his head. “Let’s go to Armenia. It’s fucking freezing here, and we need to see what the rest of your magic users have to say so we can report to Michael and the rest of the Brotherhood.”

  “Right.” Raziel moved them.

  9

  THEY emerged in a narrow side street in the city of Yerevan, capital of Armenia. Gabriel sent his cloak back to the house on the island he and Michael shared, and wrinkled his nose. “What a fascinating smell.”

  Raziel was also wrinkling his nose. “Garbage is disgusting. And there’s so much of it.”

  “So where does Lyudmila live?” Gabriel moved toward the entrance of the side street hastily, wanting to put the smell of rotting food and garbage behind him.

  “She’s got a flat in an old Soviet apartment block.” Raziel was moving just as quickly. Because their senses were heightened due to what they were, the garbage smell seemed to be worse than anything Gabriel could remember.

  “It’s a bit odd for a queen to live somewhere like that, ain’t it?”

  Raziel laughed as they emerged onto the main street. “Lyudmila isn’t what you’d imagine a queen to be in any sense. She was abandoned by her mother when she first shifted—she hadn’t learned how to separate her two animals, so she first morphed into a weird hybrid mink wolf. Her mother freaked out and left her in the forest, and the old King of the Eastern Weres found her and raised her as his own daughter and his heir. He had no kids, and Lyudmila having two animal shapes is pretty prestigious in shifter society. So when he died, she took the rulership and moved from an old Soviet apartment block in Moscow to an old Soviet apartment block in Armenia.”

  “Those old Soviet apartment blocks are all exactly alike, so it’d be a familiar sort of den for her and a new seat of power for the shifters she governs.” Gabriel nodded as he lit a cigarette. “Makes sense.”

  “Yes.” Raziel lit a cigarette as well. “Though don’t expect any glamor, Gabe. Her place really is the personification of old Soviet living. It’s two rooms, with a communal bathroom and kitchen that everyone who lives on that floor shares. It’s thirty stories high, and the elevators don’t always work. Neither does the electricity or the water. It’s poor and it’s dilapidated.”

  Gabriel sighed. “La plus ça change, as the French say.”

  “Quite. The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Raziel turned a corner. “Her block is over there.” He pointed at a tall, blocky, and unlovely building on the other side of the street.

  “You said she’s got a consort, Piotr.”

  “Yes. He’s Russian, right down to his toenails.” Raziel grinned. “He probably won’t speak any other language than Russian to us, though he knows English, Armenian, and French.”

  “Good thing my Russian’s up to speed, then.” Gabriel grinned back. “Is he surly?”

  “Oh, very. He also has an eerie physical resemblance to Lenin. The politician, not the musician.”

  Gabriel quirked an eyebrow. “Wow, okay. I’ll try not to stare, then.”

  “Good plan.” Raziel waited for a clear spot in the traffic and then jogged across the road with Gabriel at his side.

  They entered the building through a door that hung lopsided from one hinge. The lobby was dank, and there was the faint smell of stale water. Gabriel wrinkled his nose and tried not to gag. He cast a quick glance at Raziel and saw the other Archangel was beginning to turn green.

  “Should we brave the lift?” Gabriel looked at the open doors of the pair of elevators with distrust.

  Raziel shook his head. “’Port up, I think.”

  “Why didn’t we just do that in the first place?” Gabriel demanded.

  “It didn’t occur to me.” Raziel touched Gabriel’s shoulder and moved them up to the twentieth floor. “So this is the floor she lives on,” he said as they walked down a corridor covered with threadbare brown carpet.

  “Lovely.” Gabriel pulled a face.

  “Now, now, be respectful.”

  “I am, I am. I’m just commenting, me.”

  Raziel chuckled as he stopped at a door with roman numerals depicting the number seven. He knocked and the door opened.

  Gabriel quirked an eyebrow at the figure who opened the door. This was Piotr, he surmised, taking in the tousled dark hair, the narrowed blue eyes, and the expression of suspicion. He did have a passing resemblance to Lenin, but Gabriel thought that Lenin wouldn’t answer his front door dressed in faded boxer shorts and a gray singlet, with a cigarette hanging out the corner of his mouth.

  Piotr jerked a thumb over his shoulder and stood to the side so Raziel and Gabriel could enter.

  The apartment was typical of all apartments of the Soviet era—it was narrow, and the furniture barely fit inside it. The curtains were tied back with pieces of yarn to allow in the light from the afternoon sun, and the grimy windows were open, letting in a very faint breeze. The three-seater sofa was upholstered in a garish floral print, and a TV stood on a milk crate, with an antenna, a DVD player, and a small stack of newspapers balanced precariously on top.

  There was a coffee table in the middle of the room, and on it was the most beautiful antique samovar that Gabriel had seen. Preparing coffee from the samovar was Lyudmila.

  Lyudmila was pale and thin, with long, curly black hair that fell to her waist. She wore a simple blue dress and her feet were bare. Gabriel looked around and saw the bookcases stuffed almost to overflowing with books, and the narrow doorway that led, he presumed, into the bedroom. A mackerel tabby cat lay stretched in the doorway, its eyes half-lidded and the tip of its tail twitching.

  Piotr closed the door by the simple expedient of kicking it and sat down on the sofa beside Lyudmila. Raziel sat on the floor, and after a moment, Gabriel joined him.

  “I take it I’m third on your list of nine?” Lyudmila said, pushing a cup toward Raziel.

  “Thank you. Yes.”

  “You would be Gabriel.” She fixed Gabriel with a penetrating look, her dark eyes shrewd. “My icons depict you as a woman, Lord Gabriel.”

  Gabriel smiled. “Sometimes, I am a woman.”

  Lyudmila raised her eyebrows. “Are you now?”

  “You wanna see?” Gabriel met her skeptical look with a challenging one.

  “Why not? Go ahead, Archangel. Impress me.”

  Gabriel shrugged and got to his feet. He rolled his shoulders and changed, becoming female.

  “I always forget how short I am in this form,” he mused, pushing back a lock of blond hair.

  “Well now.” Lyudmila eyed him up and down. “That’s not something you see every day.”

  “Neither is meeting a queen in the Eastern Bloc,” Gabriel said as he changed back to his usual male shape.

  “Being queen is overrated, my lord,” Lyudmila said, pushing a cup toward him as Gabriel sat back down. “It involves a great deal of paperwork and settling of petty disputes. I know why my father often spoke of abolishing paperwork altogether.”

  Piotr chuckled at that, and she handed him a cup. “Spaseeba,” he said, kissing her cheek.

  Lyudmila smiled at him, a warm, affectionate expression. Then she looked back at Gabriel and Raziel. “My lords, I’m honored you consider me one of the few who would be powerful enough to hide an Archangel, but I have to say that although I could, I have no reason to do so. What would I do with a pet Archangel? I have a cat, and he’s demanding enough.”

  Raziel laughed. “I didn’t think you’d be the one who’d done this,” he said, sipping his coffee and making an approving noise. “I was sort of hoping you’d have some idea of who might.”

  “Then you’ll be disappointed, as I do not.” Lyudmila sat back. “I do, however, have something that will interest you.”

  “Oh?” Gabriel raised an eyebrow as he took a sip of his coffee. It was rich and thick and reminded him of Turkish coffee, though slightly
sweeter. “And this is wonderful coffee, Your Majesty.”

  “Thank you. The samovar belonged to my father. It’s been in the family for centuries.” Lyudmila held her cup between her hands, looking at them with unblinking eyes. “To business, then. Piotr, tell them of Archangelsk.”

  Piotr nodded and set down his cup. Gabriel was surprised when he spoke in heavily accented and impeccable English—he had been expecting the consort of the Queen of the Eastern Weres to speak to them only in Russian.

  “Last week, Lyudmila sent me to Archangelsk as her representative to settle a dispute between two shifter clans. One clan had found what they said was a relic of great historic importance. Unfortunately, the relic was in the domain of a neighbor clan, and there were rumblings about invasions of territories and other things. I went to see what was happening and settle the dispute if I could. What I found was alarming.”

  “Go on,” Raziel said, leaning forward.

  “The clan who had said it was a relic had been traveling to Solovki. They had been running in their animal forms, and one of them fell through the earth. He fell into what was an old cave system that no one had seen before. After he climbed back out, the rest of the clan, curious, climbed in to examine the cave.

  “Inside the cave were cells, the bars made of iron, reinforced with a magic so strong that not even the clan wizard could penetrate it. Touching the bars felt like touching an electrified fence. At first, they thought it was a remnant of a gulag, long forgotten, but the structure within the cave was nothing like any gulag.

  “They showed me this cave, and I went in to investigate closer. The cells were disturbing enough, but within them were collars made of leather and shining with magic that I did not recognize. They gave me an ill feeling, my lords. They felt of great evil. I puzzled over the purpose of these cells and collars, and then I saw this.” He stood up and went into the bedroom, and returned a moment later, holding something out to Raziel.

  It was a feather.

  Gabriel took a deep breath. “This is from an angel’s wing.”

  “Da.” Piotr sat down again. “I told both clans to hide the place with their magic and to guard it. I said that this was bigger than any disputes about borders and that Lyudmila would make the final decision, but for now, I would return to Armenia and make my report and then we would call for an Archangel.