Rebel Angels

by Michele Lang

  Obizuth looked down at her bare scaly feet and bit her lower lip. Sighed. “Beware the cornered beast, witch. The Ancient One is most dangerous now that he grows desperate. The old ways fall away,” she said, her grief and longing now audible in her voice. “Your magic never was infallible. Even the Witch of Ein Dor died at last.”

  “Asmodel wasn’t the one who killed the Witch of Ein Dor,” I said.

  That did it—I had made a terrible mistake on the plane of souls, to speak of my nemesis by name. And I knew it was a mistake, the second I made it.

  Obizuth’s eyes widened and she drew away from me with a sharp gasp. “You disdain my warnings. You do not even bother to guard your own words. So be it.”

  She rose into the air as the gray clouds surrounding us billowed in the sudden astral winds. “I came to warn you to get the hell out of Budapest. But obviously I came too late. Well, here’s another warning: Get your little sister, the vampire’s lamb, out of London. Before that warning is too late as well.”

  Obizuth hesitated, looked down from where she now hovered, far above my astral head. “There is no safe, and never was.” And with that, she sailed off like a shot, not bothering to say good-bye.

  Before I could answer her, or thank her, I saw a great, black shadow move over the horizon, like a hole opening in the world. I watched it come, knowing I had done the unthinkable.

  Summoned Asmodel by name.

  He already had known my whereabouts, I reminded myself. It didn’t matter that we met here, now, in the astral. I might even have a chance now to destroy him.

  None of my desperate rationalizations made any difference. My nightmare trampled through the second Heaven, and soon the ancient demon and I stood at thirty paces, a good distance for a duel.

  “Your host, Herr Hitler, has not made much of a recovery, I hear,” I said.

  “Never mind him,” The ancient demon snarled. He hovered in the air, like a thundercloud with a twisted mouth full of fangs.

  “You cannot harm me here,” I said, though I wasn’t exactly sure I was right.

  He laughed at that, a cruel, echoing laugh that shook my courage. “I don’t need to, witch. That is not why I have come.”

  Only my curiosity stayed my hand from hurling a ball of witchfire across the ether at his face. “Oh? You have sent your minions to kill me if they can. Is that not harm?”

  He laughed again and shook his massive, ugly head. “You think you are so wise, little gnat. Why do you think I had you killed?”

  I hesitated, crossed my arms against his voice. A part of me agreed with every word that Asmodel said, and I had to keep that wayward remnant in check.

  Instead of replying I shrugged, and secretly worried about Raziel, who was still embroiled in battle in the world below.

  “I know killing you makes not much difference in your magic,” Asmodel said. “I had you killed so that we could speak again.”

  “Parley? It didn’t work with your Bavarian troll offering it to me below, I don’t know that it will work up here, either.”

  “Your bravado is shit, child. Do you not understand?”

  I shrugged again, not willing to admit my ignorance any more overtly than that.

  “My host, the Führer, is maimed. He is not dead, he will not die. But his physical body must withstand the terrible rigors of war.”

  I smiled at him. “That’s the best news I’ve had for a month. Thank you, Asmodel.”

  He snarled again.… I had yanked at his soul with his name like a massive silver chain. “Insolence!”

  “Yes, that is me, all around. Obnoxious brat. Ungrateful child. Idle dreamer. My mother called me all these things and more. Hearing any of it from you isn’t going to change me a bit.”

  “I am here to offer you a choice, witch.”

  I stood in the clouds, absolutely still.

  “Take up the mantle of the Führer when he succumbs to his wounds at last. I will hurry him on his way should you agree. Or waste your magnificent talents on fighting me. Don’t you understand? You can turn aside the Witch’s curse, the prophecy that dooms you and your sister. You can undo everything that Hitler has done.”

  “There is nothing more to discuss,” I said, sincerely disappointed that the demon only offered me the same tired temptations he had dangled before me in our last encounter. “You are the Prince of Lies. I will never bow to you, never join forces with you.”

  He gnashed his great tusklike fangs and rolled his eyes to the hostile heavens. “You throw away your only chance to deliver your people from destruction, all for the chance to defeat me with your magic. You think your magic will destroy me in the end. It can only serve me. Do you not understand from where it flows?”

  “From the Fallen Ones. Perhaps directly from you. But I still have the power to choose.”

  “So you want to believe.” His tongue lolled out, as if the effort of restraining himself from attacking me had utterly exhausted him. “But you must consider your other choice. If I cannot have a witch, I will have the nearest thing to serve me; demonesses of the air. Perhaps you will not meet your doom tonight. But if you do not join me, you will pay a terrible price.”

  I thought of Obizuth’s warnings and shuddered. “Go. You are well warded, I sense. There is no point trying to fight each other here. This is not our final battle. Let’s fight that battle in the flesh.”

  I had summoned the ancient creature by accident, and now I turned away. I was half-convinced I had made a mistake somehow. For something in his words troubled me, revealed a flaw in my magic.

  But as in a dream, I could not solve the puzzle both Asmodel and Obizuth had put to me. I only knew that now the ancient demon knew my whereabouts and his minions would hunt me no matter how fast I ran away.

  * * *

  Obizuth’s warnings, and Asmodel’s futile temptations, weighed upon my thoughts, sparked new worries for my mouse, and I began to sink down, with no ministering soul to raise me up again. In any case, Raziel needed me to return to the mortal plane. I had no idea how long I had been dead, or what battles Raziel fought in my absence … and I had no more time to lose.

  Instead of returning blindly to my body I sent my witch’s sight ahead … and almost tumbled altogether out of the second Heaven.

  Raziel stood athwart my bloody body, fighting off the mob of trolls doing their best to steal my corpse away. He had shot another two of them, but Raziel was still terribly outnumbered. I searched the perimeter for my murderer and found her outside the room.…

  It was another demoness, Onoskelis, the youngest and weakest of the trio that had first killed me outside Linz. Obizuth was right—she had returned to the command of the Reich, and sought to rise in her masters’ good graces by murdering me.

  The world turned red with my rage. I swooped down upon her and instead of returning to my mortal form I struck her with pure magic, pure vengeance.

  “Onoskelis! I bind you thus!” I began. The great courtesan of Amsterdam, Lucretia de Merode, had first taught me my spellcraft, and I wove her Bane of Concubines into a baleful spell that I hurled at Onoskelis’s blond hair like a bomb.

  The demoness staggered back, hair aflame. She had manifested in her physical form and was vulnerable to death, as I had been.

  Her blond earthly guise was innocence itself, rat poison baked in a tea cake. I recited the malefaction and choked her hard, and she scrambbled away, clutching at her throat.

  Her eyes widened as my spirit wavered into visibility, as translucent and insubstantial as a ghost but capable of harming living, animate creatures like a demoness incarnate.

  The first time we had met, Onoskelis and her sisters Obizuth and Enepsigos had an easy time of murdering me. But I had died half a dozen times since then. I no longer hesitated to inflict the ultimate punishment on my enemies with my witchcraft.

  She tried to speak, but no air could pass through her windpipe. Onoskelis’s eyes bulged as she sank to her knees, and she entreated me with a stare that I
am sure had disarmed the many human males she had entrapped and destroyed over the centuries.

  It didn’t work on me. I wove my spell tighter and tighter until the ancient demon Onoskelis was dead. Or more precisely, until I had forced her from this plane onto the astral, for a demon cannot, strictly speaking, die. I sent her spirit into a noncorporeal, lower level of being. She could stab me in the heart no more. When I was done, all that was left of Onoskelis was a smoking little pile of clotted goo, bound together with scorched tufts of blond hair.

  I had no time to bask in my triumph. I had exacted a quick revenge, but Raziel was still in danger of his life.

  With no time to waste, I shot back to my body, and saw that Raziel was taking care of the trolls one by one. But where was Imre?

  I stayed near my body, unsure whether I was better off dead or alive in this battle. Not for the first time, I determined to return, despite the pain such magic demanded.

  But as I hovered over my body, crumpled by my honeymoon bed, I thought of Asmodel and hesitated. If I could fight just as well dead as alive, why did I bother coming back at all?

  I ran from that whisper of doubt back into my body. With a hiss, I whispered my family spell and returned to life with a needle-hot pain I knew well by now, as if the thread of my life was thrust back through the needle.

  The pain between my shoulder blades punched into me once again, now that I was back in my body to feel it. I reached behind me and yanked out the blade Onoskelis had used to murder me, a Teutonic-spelled knife strengthened with Nazi sorcery.

  The trolls staggered back with a cry when they saw me stir. “You’re surprised?” I spat low, furious with pain. “Curse you.”

  The trolls stumbled back out over the threshold, sneezing furiously—my spells are worse than pepper sometimes.

  Raziel lunged after them, then paused in the doorway when he saw the trolls had truly fled.

  He whirled and returned to my side in an instant, kneeling by my body. “You’re bleeding back to death,” he said, his voice low and steady as a heartbeat. “Heal, or you’ll die again.”

  The world was turning gray and my lacerated heart twisted in my chest, trying desperately to beat. I whispered the healing spell I used most often, and the wound began to knit itself back together.

  Slowly the pain receded. I stared at the ceiling, concentrated on the effort of taking breath, and again I chose to live and fight on the human plane.

  * * *

  I blacked out, then awoke nestled in Raziel’s arms. When he saw that I had managed to stay in this world he scooped me up and settled me gently on the bed.

  “I put the dead trolls in the hall,” he said.

  I nodded and looked at the door, still ajar, where weak morning sunlight was streaming in.

  “Imre?” I asked, my voice a tiny puff of breath. “We have to find him. It might be too late … the sun.”

  I only barely managed to get up—the Teutonic knife had harmed soul as well as body. We could not find a trace of him, no blood, nothing. Almost fainting, I sent my witch’s sight in search of Bathory’s factotum.

  I saw with my second sight Imre’s crumpled body, dragged by wolves. My sight caught a flash of yellow eyes, of gray slashing teeth, and I gasped in surprise. “By my creed,” I sputtered, “it was the werewolves that took him. Didn’t kill him, either, that I can tell. They’re the ones who have taken Imre away. They attacked him while the trolls attacked us. But why? The vampires and the weres declared a truce. Officially, they are both allied with the Fascists.”

  “Both the wolves and the trolls answer to Berlin,” Raziel observed.

  My mind scrambled to find an explanation that made any sense. “Maybe we have tilted the balance.” I spoke my thoughts aloud, trying to solve the disastrous mystery like a puzzle. “We are the variable here. The Arrow Cross wolves must be acting in concert with Bathory’s enemies.” I thought of the former Vampirrat chief, and winced. “Erszebet Fekete—she will not give up her power easily, and perhaps the Reich itself will restore her to power here.”

  Raziel shook his head. “But this is Bathory’s stronghold. They have violated his lair. How is this not war?”

  A wave of dizziness suddenly overtook me, and I tottered on my feet. This was my doing. “My darling, it is Asmodel. He has found us, his minions must have been watching Bathory’s haunts for any sight of us. And I obliged him. How stupid of me. I am sorry.”

  Raziel steadied me and guided me back to the bed. “It was only a matter of time until he found us, you know,” he said.

  “But he came to me just now, in the second Heaven. And he … I think he was warning me, Raziel, that I was making a big mistake.”

  “Asmodel, with his words of honey,” Raziel murmured with a sigh. “He may speak true, my love, but his words are twisted by his lust for power, and their meaning is a mirror image of the truth at best. Ignore his words, for they are meant to wound.”

  I resolved to follow Raziel’s advice, and let the ancient demon go so that we could look after Imre. “He told me that I was throwing my magic away.”

  Raziel laughed at that. “He covets your magic like treasure. If it’s not his, then it’s wasted. Never mind Asmodel.”

  He spoke his name so freely, knowing that we could not hide from the demon’s spies and his evil machinations. There was no point in worrying about what Asmodel did or didn’t know. We had more immediate worries to consider.

  I racked my brain for a plausible explanation for why the wolves had let Imre live, even as my battered, bone-tired body screamed in pain.

  “They want us to follow Imre,” I finally said. “The wolves didn’t even try to cover their tracks, they knew I’d be able to track him, or that Bathory himself would be able to smell them once he discovered their crime.”

  “Can the wolves be so subtle? The ones in Poland only lusted to kill.”

  “Most are mad dogs, it is true, the turned ones. The wolves of the blood can be wily, the born wolves like Krueger. Aside from Asmodel’s battle with us, the wolves have their own local position to secure.”

  We exchanged a stare and a mutual shudder, remembering the late, unlamented Gestapo chief of Kraków. Krueger, the alpha dog of the greatest free wolf pack in Europe, had been bloodthirsty, but wily, crafty, and brave, too.

  Imre now was the prisoner of that terrible wolf’s kin. We had to rescue him without starting a war between the wolves and the bats—Imre had always been true, and had gotten into trouble on my account before. I had to find him before it was too late.

  “I’m rested enough,” I said with a low gasp. “Let’s go. It’s better to hunt the dogs by day. By night their power only grows, as the moon rises.”

  I dressed slowly, my muscles quivering with the effort. Haunted worse by the specter of the demoness’s disgust with me, and Asmodel’s taunts, sowing doubts no matter how I resisted his words. I could not erase the image of Imre, dragged by wolves along the ground like prey, from my mind, and I considered the possibility that Raziel and I could be the spark igniting a war between the vampires and the werewolves of Budapest.

  We had to get Imre out alive. And, much as I hated to concede anything to my sister enemy Obizuth, we had to leave Budapest, fast as we could. Ever since we had returned, I had only meant to stay long enough to get Gisele safely away. And now I worried that I had only sent my little sister into even greater danger, given the demoness’s strange warning. A third sister, Enepsigos, still lived, and I worried that she could get to Gisele despite all of Churchill’s protections. In order to save Gisele as well as fight my enemies, I had to get that gem, quick. And that meant saving Imre if possible, then getting out of town. Somehow.

  I could not speak to Bathory now—with daylight, he slept in his native soil as was the way of his kind, and I didn’t dare disturb him. As we emerged from Bathory’s lair, I blinked hard in the dappled autumn sunlight. It had been so long since I had walked in the daylight that I felt half vampire myself.

&nb
sp; Instead of rousting Bathory, I had telephoned the head of the Budapest Hashomer to find out where his archenemies the Arrow Cross operated. He could tell me where the Arrow Cross headquarters was located, but not where the local wolves made their dens.

  “The wolves hide in the Buda hills,” I said to Raziel after I hung up. We hiked up Bathory’s street, away from the Danube behind and below us. “The Arrow Cross is settled here, and the wolves must hide in the Buda caves when they go to ground.”

  I didn’t know the werewolves’ names, and could not summon their souls without their true names at hand, or use spellcraft against them in any particularly effective way. But then I was struck by an inspiration.

  “Eva,” I said, and I stopped trudging along the cobblestoned street. Raziel raised an eyebrow.

  If my dearest friend Eva’s cover as Szalasi’s girlfriend still held, she wouldn’t be far away from Martin and his pack brothers. And I knew Eva, true name and soul, as well as I knew my own.

  I sent my witch’s sense after her name, and I looked for her soul, though I didn’t intend to summon her. And before a minute had passed, I had found her, soul still bright and sharp like a little knife.

  Her heart beat in the vicinity of the Arrow Cross headquarters … a confirmation of my hunch. She was either with the human Arrow Cross or with her werewolf paramour, Szalasi.

  We were close. Very, very close.

  “We need to surprise them,” I said to Raziel after I explained what I now knew. “They’ll smell us out if we hesitate. And daylight is to our advantage.”

  “But do werewolves turn men by day, like Krueger? When the world was young, werewolves did not hunt men, or turn into men, either.”

  “Turned werewolves are slaves to the moon,” I replied. “At the full moon, they turn, whether they want to or not, and when they turn they are wolves, incapable of communication or even human thought, it seems. But the wolves of the blood…” I shuddered, thinking of the great Eastern Werewolf Pack. “They can change at will, any time, the stronger ones. They can speak and reason like men, no matter their form. They live as a pack, as both men and beasts.”