by Michele Lang
The blond girl began sobbing and moaning as the bloodlust took her. I watched her passionate suffering, and could not help imagining Raziel turned that way. My stomach did a sick, slow flip.
Her travails convinced me. Despite the murky implications of accepting Bathory’s protection, I had little choice. My power, strong as it was, still wasn’t enough to hide Raziel from the magical denizens of Budapest. I was banking on the fact that Bathory’s temporal power as chief would be enough.
I held out my hand for Bathory to shake. He licked his lips and squeezed my hand hard. For the first time, I worried that the bloodlust would overtake him and that Bathory himself would attack me.
“Good,” he said, his voice short. “Consult with Imre. And go now. I will see you in a few days. Hopefully we will have news of Gisele’s safe passage to England by then. Hide, stay safe.”
I had never heard the bloodlust choking Bathory’s voice before. He held himself in check now only with great difficulty.
“Go now,” he repeated. “And ask Imre to see you safely to your hiding place. The city will be crawling with bloodsuckers tonight. The floor show this evening was so marvelously … stimulating.”
3
Raziel and I hid with various allies and enemies until we met with Bathory the following week. When we met, Bathory read us the following letter, which I have mentioned before:
October 22, 1939
Café Istanbul
Budapest, Hungary
10 P.M.
By Hand Delivery
To Magdalena Lazarus
c/o the vampire Bathory, chief vampire of Budapest
My dear Hungarian witch,
Brava, and brava again. I cannot call upon the angels the way that you do, but whispering spirits tell me that you have put quite a dent in the Nazi war machine. Oh, the papers put about that Herr Hitler was burned in a curious electrical fire, but I know the truth. He is recovering, but from all reports the Führer will never be the same.
I am, to be frank about it, quite pleased. You have bought Britain time, time to arm against the Hun. Every extra day we gain before Hitler turns his ambitions westward is another day to build munitions, call upon our soldiers, prepare our fair island to defend against Nazi attack.
And there is no honor amongst thieves. There are rumors that Stalin and Hitler have already fallen out. Stalin, too, buys time, but Hitler grows impatient already, I hear. This is an educated guess, but one that I believe you will make good use of: Hitler will make a break for the Caucasus oil fields, and sooner than I had thought. Hitler needs oil to run his war machine, however much you have dented it. Once he seeks to invade the Caucasus, Hitler will enrage the Russian Bear.
And you will be ready, dear Lady Lazarus, won’t you? Knox, who has delivered this letter for me, believes that what you seek is also in the Caucasus. And he wanted you to know this fact, particularly.
Most importantly, know that your sister has arrived safely to our shores, with the assistance of both Knox and Bathory. She will stay at Chartwell until we have found her a more suitable place. She is very quiet, and very sweet, your little sister. But she is possessed of your family’s dark and terrible fire as well. She is not such a dreamy little mouse as you described at our dinner at Chartwell.
Please find enclosed a small token of my esteem. I had Knox take the trouble of changing it from British pounds to Hungarian pengoes, as those will be more useful to you. I would have sent you gold, but Knox would not have been able to carry this much so easily.
I bid you well, my dear. Your former employer has reportedly been restored in Budapest, above his former position, so I am hopeful this letter finds you in fine fettle.
With all good wishes,
Your obt. servant,
Sir Winston Churchill
* * *
I lingered most over the section about my little sister, Gisele, now lost to me in Budapest. I had to trust in Churchill to keep Gisele safe, now …
My employer, Bathory, took the news of my secret marriage to Raziel better than I could have hoped. Cheered by the great Churchill’s letter, Bathory insisted on a hotel suite for a honeymoon, a real night of passion to celebrate our wedding in Poland.
After I reminded him of the dangers, he instead offered us his own lair, a gorgeous, crumbling mansion high on Rose Hill, so that we could consecrate our union, a single night of love, not war.
That night, our honeymoon, was a mistake.
Marrying Raziel was not a mistake. It was the smartest, bravest thing I had ever done. But that night of indulgence, that single night devoted to celebrating our love alone, led to a world of troubles. The world shouldn’t be like that, but alas it is, and there is no point resisting the world’s way.
Bathory’s protection was not enough to save my life, but at least it saved Raziel’s. I am a Lazarus witch, capable of summoning my soul back from the dead. By my honeymoon night, I had died so many times I made it look easy. But every death exacted a price. Oh, a heavy price. I never let my enemies know how much it hurt to die, that was just another of the world’s hard truths.
But that night alone with Raziel … it was worth dying for. For a single night we did not run, we did not fight, or scheme or worry or foretell. We had cheated death, and for a single night we dedicated ourselves to celebrating our love, and life.
And celebrating Raziel was easy. Angel he was no longer; now he was a man, a magnificent, fierce, passionate man.
He was powerful enough to open me, the defended one, the lonely one. I loved Raziel enough to surrender to him, to allow him inside my defenses to love me.
Bathory had abandoned his quarters for haunts unknown for my and Raziel’s night together; in any case, he hunted the night and ordinarily went abroad by moonlight. He left his trusty factotum, Imre, to guard the doorway against intruders, and I knew there was no place safer for us in all of Budapest.
There was no truly safe place for us in Budapest. No safe place in all the world.
Once we retired to Bathory’s guest room, which was musty and filled with enormous pillows and ancient Persian carpets, we spent a moment looking at each other. Alone at last.
And then like two waves crashing against each other, Raziel and I met, standing beside the low bed piled with blankets and pillows.
With great gentleness Raziel removed my hat, placed it on the nightstand. He ran his fingers through my hair and lowered his lips to mine.
We kissed each other hard, bruising kisses filled with desperate passion. We kissed as if every touch were the last.
Raziel’s hands had grown rough in the forests of Poland. But his callused fingers were gentle against my skin, and he undressed me with tenderness.
My heart pounded as he lowered me onto the pillows. As above, so below. A cosmic truth my teacher, the tzaddik Yankel Horowitz, had taught me in the forest. Would that it were simply so, for my joining with Raziel was the most perfect connection to another soul that I have ever known.
It was one night. It cost me nearly everything. And it was all worth it, it was so glorious.
When I came back to earth long enough to think, I glanced at the alarm clock tick-tocking away on the bedside table. Three thirty A.M. In my life before this war, this love, it was the hour of my employer’s court, my time as well, the witching hour. The hour when the dark mystery of night prevails.
I rolled over in the bed, all tangled up in the slippery satin sheets, and I studied Raziel’s profile as he dozed. Ah, that nose. I caressed the line of his jaw, and his smile widened, and his eyes opened.
“Awake?” he asked, and he rolled onto his side.
Darkness is attracted to light, a dusky moth to the flame. And my Raziel, even fallen, shone with a pure and righteous light.
I basked in that light, surrendered to it.
And right then, all hell was unleashed around us.
Over Raziel’s shoulder, hidden in the long shadows along the walls, a hideous creature climbed out of the darkness a
nd slashed my husband across the face with his long, curved claws.
Raziel sprawled across the bed, his hands grappling with the creature’s ropy forearms. I leaped backward with a hoarse yell and fought my enemy, as naked as the day I was born, unashamed, clothed only in my elemental fury.
The smell of Raziel’s blood drove me crazy. I gathered a ball of witchfire in my palms and threw it as hard as I could into the creature’s leering, hideous face.
He toppled back, cursing and screaming, and a horde of similar creatures rose up in a mob out of the shadows with unholy yowls.
“Imre!” I yelled, though I despaired of his life, too. “Imre!”
I stood steady on my feet and took a deep, shuddering breath, the power rising up from deep inside.
“No,” I said, and the power in me poured from my center out along my limbs, sizzled to the very ends of my hair.
Raziel crawled off the bed, wiping the blood off his face. “I’m all right,” he said, choking on the blood still pouring from his nose. He reached under his pillow and retrieved his Mauser pistol, a gun that he had taken off of a German soldier in our journey south from Poland.
Without hesitating, Raziel slid back the safety and shot his attacker in the face. Whatever the creature was, he could not survive a point-blank bullet. Magic notwithstanding, the creature had manifested on our plane, could bleed and die like us.
The supernatural being that had slashed Raziel was dead. It was maybe ten seconds since the attack began. No magic among this mob other than what they were, nonhuman creatures invested with inherent magic. And even if they had some kind of spell-casting skills, these attackers had not yet wielded magic strong enough to match mine.
I didn’t have time to weave a spell, so I simply whispered a ward onto Raziel and blasted the rest with witchfire. They retreated to the wall, burned by that slashing blue light.
“Parley,” the largest of them gasped, in German.
“Go parley in Hell,” I snarled back, and gathered up another ball of crackling witchfire. But Raziel’s hand on my shoulder stayed me.
“Stop,” he said, and wiped at his bloody face again. “Listen to what he wants to say.”
“He attacked you,” I said, still half out of my mind with fury.
“Magdalena. Listen. No harm in a moment’s truce.”
Slowly Raziel’s calm, reasonable words seeped into my brain. Of course he was right. I could perhaps learn why they had come by speaking to these creatures.
I wrapped myself in the now-bloody bedsheet; now that I was more in my right mind I remembered my naked state. “Speak your piece,” I said.
“Thank you,” the head thug said, and he clumsily bowed.
His manners made me laugh. “How nice and polite you are now, Herr Monster, now that your fellow is dead.” I tried my best not to taunt them, but my best wasn’t very good at all.
“You come from Berlin,” I continued. No need to ask: an attack of this magnitude, violating the wards of the Chief Vampire of Budapest, was obviously the work of the German High Command.
The head of the mob nodded and licked at his nose nervously: he had failed in his prime directive, to kill me.
“What are you?” I asked.
“Wood trolls. From Bavaria, we come.”
My curiosity faded into an uneasy dismay. Wood trolls, though bad tempered and meddlesome, are not known for their magic or their ability to violate wards. The foul Teutonic magic that Hitler commanded in concert with Asmodel had augmented the trolls’ natural power. But had the trolls attacked alone, or with other magical allies?
“So what is your parley?” I asked with a sigh. All the while knowing I would not accede, so confident in my magic that I could not imagine compromising with my enemies.
“If you will not die, surrender,” he said, sounding like he didn’t even believe in his parley himself. “Stop fighting and we will spare Raziel’s life, and Gisele’s. If you surrender your person, they can live their lives in peace. Isn’t that what you really want?”
When I had first started fighting, it was. When Gisele first received the awful visions of what 1939 would bring to Europe, Budapest, and our own little lives, all I had wanted was to see Gisele through the war alive, and Eva, too, to ride out the storm, and afterward life would go on as before.
But everything had changed since then. I had found my inheritance—The Book of Raziel—and my power within it. I had fallen in love with the author, the source of my true magic, my soul mate. I could not turn my back on that power and simply walk away; my conscience would not allow it. Of course I could not stop the war, no matter how hard I tried. But I could fight. I had to fight. And the fact my enemies saw my potential retreat as a victory only confirmed my conviction that I had to fight to win.
Victory or death. No other choice. No matter the price I had to pay.
But my girls, the ones I loved … and Raziel …
I hesitated, considered the wood troll’s words. Really I did. But it was too late to heed them now.
“I will not surrender,” I said.
“Then die,” a woman’s voice said from behind me.
And a white-hot poker pierced me between the shoulder blades, and clean through the heart.
Ah, the pain! Brutally sharp, slicing through my spirit as well as my body. That pain struck me down, struck me dead.
I was dead.
And Raziel, surrounded by murderous enemies, would soon be next.
4
Into the second Heaven I fled, shooting into the gray nothingness like a sparrow fleeing a hawk. By now, I knew the second Heaven like the backstreets of Budapest—another bad neighborhood, to be sure, but mine.
In my astral form I came to a stop in the ether and took a long look around, hoping to see my dearly departed mother, Tekla, here to welcome me. My mother died when I was only sixteen, but since then I had not let her rest in peace. I needed her help again now, as always. And as usual, my need was urgent. I had to return and save Raziel, without getting killed again if I could help it.
“Mama!” I called, unwilling to risk her wrath by compelling her soul to appear. I had once believed I did not have the power to work magic in the astral. But after many desperate battles in this fateful year of 1939 I had learned better, by sheer necessity.
The last time I had seen my mother’s spirit, she was leading a cohort of murdered ghosts back to Heaven. I still desperately needed her help, but the better part of my nature hoped she had found a more peaceful corner of the afterworld than this one in which to rest.
A dark shower of sparks exploded on the horizon, tiny at first, then growing larger. I braced myself for a visitation of a creature of air, most likely less than friendly. The second Heaven used to be a kinder place when Raziel presided over it.
I expected a spirit of air, out hunting, hoped it might be Viktor, my newly appointed guardian angel. But my visitor was none of these, and when I saw who it was I almost died again of shock.
It was Obizuth, one of the three demonesses I had set free from the terrible Nazi wizard known as the Staff. My first murderess—she and her sisters had killed me in an Austrian field, the summer before.
I braced for a fight. At least this time, she couldn’t kill me again. And unlike the Bavarian trolls, Obizuth swore fealty only to herself. Self-interest can usually be reasoned with.
“Daughter of women,” Obizuth said, her voice tart. “How like a demoness you have become.”
Here in the realm of air she revealed her true aspect: her teeth, long and pointy, gleamed pearlescent in the dull, gray light of the astral plane.
I ignored the needle prick of her veiled taunt, and crossed my arms against the flutter of fear under my ribs. “I have become cruel like you, I suppose. But our bargain still holds; you have no claim upon me.”
“I warned you, Lazarus. Beware of me. Of my sisters.”
I sighed with impatience. “I know that. I am your sister of the air, and your sisters have never fared wel
l in league with you. Warring sisters we will be for always.”
Because of Obizuth, I had learned of my demonic lineage: fallen angels had lain with my foremothers long ago, in time out of mind. And because of this, death did not consign me to the next world with the ordinary finality. My gift—the ability to return from the dead—was at least in part bequeathed to me by my line’s fallen patriarchs.
Obizuth’s laugh was low and scratchy, a hoarse little growl. “I have come to warn you again.”
“Warn me? Why?”
She shrugged and stared away into the middle distance. “Perhaps I am not as neutral in this war as I like to pretend. Perhaps freedom is not all I crave, but also revenge.”
I considered her cryptic-as-always words. “Go ahead. Explain.”
“Can you not guess?” she said, so low I could barely hear her. “The Ancient One has finally discovered your whereabouts. He has seduced my sisters back into his service, to destroy you and everything you fight to save. Your safety is all illusion.”
Not even Bathory could keep me hidden, not when Asmodel and his minions hunted me. Raziel and I had managed to evade them for an entire month, in our escape from Poland. But we could not remain invisible forever.
I drew closer, and Obizuth’s yellow reptilian eyes widened. “Safety is not what I am after,” I said. “Do your sisters not realize that I will not let them destroy me? Killing me is not enough to stop me.”
“But that is not what I mean, witchling, not at all. My sister demonesses are not the danger. You are. You rely on your power and your magic to sustain you, Lazarus. That is an idolatry. And a desperate illusion.”
Anger flashed through my astral body—how dare Obizuth accuse me of idolatry when it was her sisters who had thrown my gift of freedom away.
I kept my voice level. “No. I know my gift and I use it. And I remember always that it is a gift, nothing of my own to claim credit for. I never earned my magic.”
Obizuth squinted and pursed her lips. “You are a fool. Do you not understand?” She looked uneasily over her shoulder and shook her head. “You all but killed his host, Hitler, and the Führer is now scarred and twisted, burned almost beyond recognition. Their grasp on the Reich is slipping away. Every day now, another traitor is caught and punished. But that is not enough to stop the rebels, now that the Führer is maimed so terribly.”