by Michele Lang
I nodded, knowing what he meant, and taking some cold comfort in it. Hitler and Asmodel were on their way, striking eastward from their Prussian base, the Wolf’s Lair, to the Caucasus oil fields and the ancient hiding place of the Heaven Sapphire.
If the Nazis succeeded in defeating the Soviet army and smashing through to Baku, they were effectively the victors in this conflagration, unless the gem could somehow reverse the military victory.
The best way to defend the oil fields was to attack first, using the gem, before Hitler’s army arrived. And with the French and English armies now mobilized, opening up a second front on the Wehrmacht’s rear could slow down the German attack enough for Raziel to reach the vanguard in time—and stop them outside the Caucasus altogether.
The problem was that nobody had yet been able to stop the Nazi juggernaut. And Raziel, brave and wise as he was, could not work the spells I once could wield. The gem was a different weapon in his hands than it would have been in mine.
Knowing I could no longer work magic to stop Hitler embittered me. But I was still too physically tired to ruminate too much upon the fact.
The Tupolev landed with a hard, skidding bump. Stalin hated to fly, so this airfield wasn’t equipped for handling the arrival of a head of state. Fortunately for all of us, we weren’t anybody outwardly important, just the shadowy grunts who did all of the work behind the scenes, out of the glare of the footlights.
We slipped into Krasnaya Polyana like vengeful ghosts.
A car idled outside the hangar, steam rising in an enormous plume all around it. A Russian sat in the front passenger seat, cradling an enormous machine gun in his lap.
Knox nodded his greetings to the driver, and presented some official-looking document with big Soviet seals and stamps festooned all over it.
“I am surprised we have no handlers,” I said to Raziel as we straggled behind Knox. “It wasn’t so long ago that we were cosmopolitan enemies of the Soviet motherland.”
Raziel shrugged. “I don’t know. I think they assume I have some Azeri ties, given my brothers. And remember, Stalin himself is from Georgia. He understands the mountains of the south better than his Muscovite party machine ever will.”
I smiled, to hear Raziel sound so world-weary and clear-eyed. He opened the back passenger door for me, and with a sigh I slipped inside, between him and Knox. Raziel slammed the door, and the car pulled away smoothly, following a gravel path straight into the forest.
“No snow falling,” Knox said in French. “Good luck.”
He smiled at me, and tears pricked at my eyes. He had never before spoken to me in so patient and kind a tone. Before, I was a threat to Knox, somebody who had previously made a hash of his careful plans through my naïve and misguided magic. Now, I couldn’t do anything to anybody’s well-laid magical plans. Just follow along, and maybe learn something if I paid attention and kept my mouth shut.
Raziel couldn’t talk at length with Knox. Knox’s Hungarian, while admirable for an American, was too faulty, so he instead leaned back against the cushions and sighed. While I considered Churchill, and how we could possibly speak this time. For I still spoke no English, and couldn’t call upon Albion, as I had the first time we’d met.
And worse. I wouldn’t call on Albion even if I could—for Raziel, and I, too, had brought the angels themselves into this thing. The war had invaded the very heavens. That was another reason it would have to be over soon. Such an unnatural situation could not obtain for long.
We drove deeper into the forest, ascending steep, winding roads and disappearing into the woods like lost children in a fairy tale. As we drove higher and higher into the mountains, the ground turned white with already-fallen snow.
Churchill stood at the doorway of the dacha nestled in the snow, waiting for us. This was not only an honor, but a sign of how little time we had left before the battle would be joined.
A strange lassitude overtook my limbs as I walked toward him, the English Bulldog. I had already lost the most urgent war, to save Gisele’s life. I fought now so that Gisele’s death would not be in vain. My grief for her almost killed me, too. Gisele would have scolded me for weeks over that.
As we drew closer to the great man I tried to smile. The few phrases in English that I knew fled from my poor brain as we approached, but it didn’t matter. Churchill enveloped me in a gigantic, wholly unexpected embrace.
I stiffened for a moment, then relaxed inside his arms, felt the hidden frailty of the man inside his bulky clothes. Despite Churchill’s strength, he was not a young man, and the hug revealed it.
Somehow his frailty gave me strength. We need not be a David to fight Goliath, only willing.
“My poor purple witch,” Churchill said in his terrible French. Behind me, Knox groaned—he worried at the indiscretions Churchill could make in that lovely Latinate tongue that he over-trusted. “You are still very charming, dear Miss Lazarus. Charming, so!”
He patted me on the back and let me go. Without another word, he turned and crossed through the open door at his back into the dacha, and the three of us, Knox, Raziel, and I, followed close behind.
As I went inside I gave only a single glance to the Russian fellow in the greatcoat and wool hat guarding the door with his machine gun.
A roaring fire and a low table set with English tea and scones only deepened my grief instead of setting me at my ease. My sister would have loved those buttery round treats, the sweet, milky tea …
Raziel caught me sighing and led me to a chair. “Magduska, rest,” he commanded, and gratefully I obeyed. I suppose I should have felt guilty, surrendering to his kindness and leaning on his strength. But I knew I would have done the same for him without thinking twice.
With an audible groan Churchill settled into the chair nearest the fire. “Sacre bleu, arthritis,” he muttered under his breath.
Knox stepped between me and the great Churchill, and said something in rapid, unintelligible English. I closed my eyes against the Babel of languages.
“We have a surprise for you, Miss Magda,” Knox said.
I was no longer Miss Magda, but I was too worn out to correct him. Instead, I opened my eyes again, and almost fell off the chair in my shock.
For my former employer, Count Gabor Bathory, stood before me in all his vampiric glory. He had come to me again.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I just blinked up at him, and waited for him to reject me, his maimed, useless girl assistant. Me, Magda Lazarus, the fiery, thoughtless one who had accepted my vampire’s protection upon my return from Poland, and who had barely even thanked him before leaving Budapest behind, and exposing him to demonic dangers he hadn’t earned.
And now I was useless to him. How Bathory detested useless, broken things.
We stared at each other for what seemed like an eternity. I waited for him to toss me away with a single comment, a flick of his aristocratic white hand.
And then Bathory kneeled, and he kissed my exposed wrist, long and gentle. The submissive vampire kiss, the one that proclaimed the receiver’s superior authority.
He was deferring all of his considerable power to me. Not to Raziel. But to me.
I had never seen something so incomprehensible and unbelievable in my entire life. The terrifying Lord Vampire of Budapest, Bathory, had declared his fealty to me, with a single subservient kiss.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I had once believed your power resided in your magic. What a fool I was. Forgive me, my mistress.”
I goggled, and only stopped to blink when the sound of Raziel’s laughter permeated my thoughts. “Magda, your mother was right—you could catch flies in your mouth, your jaw is hitting the floor so hard. Come back to earth, my love!”
I blinked hard, and finally had the presence of mind to stand up, and pull Lord Bathory to his feet. “You are beyond ridiculous, my dearest count,” I finally managed to stutter out. “I have never heard such amazing nonsense.”
He looked me right
in the eye, then, and I remembered how terrified my mortal friend Eva was of the vampire’s gaze. How I had myself warned her against staring into a vampire’s eyes, that an ordinary mortal had no recourse against their thrall.
But I felt no thrall. I felt absolutely nothing.
“It is true, then,” Bathory said, his voice heavy with wonder. “My dear little ex-witch, you are more of a marvel alive than dead.”
I blinked again at his words. “Count Bathory, I am too muddleheaded to follow your words where they are leading. I don’t know a single thing I thought that I knew. I am cut apart, and maimed, and … useless.” My voice caught on that last, however much I tried to keep the tone calm, light even.
“I have never heard you speak this way, not even when you ran from your gifts,” Bathory replied. “And yet, you clearly still don’t realize.”
“No. Please explain, dear sir. And while you’re about it, please take back your fealty. It is absurd to offer it to a magic-less one like me.”
“But that is just the thing.” Bathory’s voice was lit from inside with wonder. “You are truly magic-less. Completely devoid of the gifts you once possessed.”
“Why, yes,” I said, my voice dry as tinder now. “And I’d appreciate your not scrubbing salt into that wound over and over.”
“But you looked into my eyes, far into me, as I looked into you. My dear, you not only cannot work magic. You are utterly impervious to it.”
My scalp had more or less healed—some Soviet doctor had plucked the stitches out and pronounced me good enough a day or two before. But the skin tingled and itched now, as if Bathory tickled the wound with his words.
“I don’t think any spell against you could stick,” he continued. “None.”
Knox spoke in rapid French. “No, it’s true, Miss … errr. Mrs.… Miss Magda. Before I came to Baku, I had even the witch of Amsterdam, Lucretia de Merode herself, concoct a spell of binding, just to test it. And it slipped right off your shoulders. It dazzled her.”
“So what?” I said, a flash of my old temper flaring. “What difference does it make, what other people can or can’t do to me? I can’t do a thing myself.”
Bathory bared his teeth in his frustration, earning an outraged rebuke in English from Churchill. “Oh, dear, infuriating child,” he murmured before turning to speak with Churchill. For Bathory, fluent in Hungarian, English, French, and even Latin, could talk to everybody present in the room.
Churchill chortled when Bathory explained the change in me. He spoke for a long time, his eyes glinting and twinkling in turns.
Finally, Bathory returned to me. “Please sit again, you are pale as marble. You are marvelous and thrilling, my dear little chicken, but you are terrifying as well. Sit, now.”
I did as I was bidden, completely confused and befuddled. “Did you not hear about Gisele?” I said, not meaning to cut my former boss with my words. I honestly didn’t know.
His eyes grew moist and I realized he had known, before I did. After all, Gisele was his in a way she was not even mine.
He had tasted her blood, and their spirits had entwined after that. From what I knew of vampire lore, the death of a vampire’s lamb caused terrible suffering to the sponsor.
I had forgotten. I had wanted to forget.
“Please, take back your fealty,” I said again. “It is too much of an honor, completely undeserved.”
“My dear,” Bathory said, his voice hoarse now with emotion, “the battle is joined. The Arrow Cross have overrun Hungary now that the Nazis have attacked the Russians. Hundreds of thousands of Hungarians, the cream of our young men, are attacking Stalin’s army as we speak.”
“My God,” I said. “What happened to Eva in all of this?”
“Ah, Eva, my poor kitty. Even a cat has only nine lives.”
My blood turned to ice. “No.”
My “no” no longer held any power. Bathory shook his head sadly. “I do not know her fate for certain, but I fear that Eva, too, is dead. Martin Szalasi had his throat ripped out by his own wolves in the battle for power in the streets. Budapest is in utter chaos. Martin did not have the cunning or the brutality to survive.”
If a vicious dog like Martin was too tender to live, my beloved Budapest had truly become a hell. How could Eva survive such a conflagration?
My mind reeled with the thought that my girl Eva had lost her fight at last. I couldn’t bear to dwell upon it, or her. It was only after a moment that I managed to move past Eva’s fate to catch the import of what Bathory didn’t say. Of course. Hungary fought on the side of the Nazis. Bathory refused to offer the Nazis his fealty—he wasn’t averse to fooling them, but the time for subterfuge was past. We now fought our battles in the open.
Bathory’s rule of the Budapest vampires was at an end. My dear count no longer had a country.
He smiled when he saw I understood, careful this time to keep his fangs well hidden away from the mortals surrounding us. “My dear, you may have no more magic. You are no longer my little chicken, she with the hidden witchery, waiting to come forth.”
I nodded, miserable as hell but unwilling to give in to despair, not in the presence of Churchill. I no longer cared what the man thought of me, but some remnant of my old pride demanded that I maintain the decencies for Raziel’s sake.
“I see that you do not understand, Magda. You only see what you have lost, the gift you were given by virtue of your birth, and not what you have gained.”
The old Magda, the eldest of the eldest of the Lazarii witches, would have given my old employer what for after that. But he was right—I was that powerful witch no longer.
“My head hurts,” I replied. “I am sure spirits attend us here, but I cannot see them, nor sense them in any way. I did not even notice my old teacher’s spell when she cast it. You are right, dear count. I do not see what I have gained in all of this. Besides my husband. Love is worth all, even losing yourself. So I won’t complain. But I don’t see what earthly use I have any longer.”
Bathory began pacing like a caged black panther, coiled up and fighting not to strike. “You are such a bullhead, you haven’t changed a bit. Stop your thinking for half a second and listen. You have no magic. Your enemies do not know that. Lucretia herself could not tell at the time she hurled her spell—she did it to test your defenses, and she was shocked, shocked to find that you have none.”
I couldn’t help laughing a bit at that. “Forgive me for failing to understand the benefit.”
“You will, eventually,” he said, evidently taking me exactly at my word. “But hush. You are the fell witch of Budapest, the most deadly and fearful creature to emerge in a generation. You are now in possession of the famed Gem of Raziel, the gem that Solomon the Great used to build the Holy Temple.”
I sat perfectly still, willing myself to listen for once, just listen, not protest or interject. To allow the words to enter my mind without judging them first.
“You will ride in the vanguard of the storm, with your band of fallen angels. This is a fight, brother against brother. The spirits of the air, the elemental demons and devils, against the angels of fire who have taken the side of mortalkind.”
“And what side does the Almighty fight on?”
Bathory glared at me until I sat back and gave up on getting any kind of answer. “Asmodel does not know what happened to you. He does not know even that the Soviets didn’t augment your powers instead of destroying them.”
“But wait. Everybody knows how much Stalin hates magic of any kind.”
“Stalin is a bloody hypocrite.”
Churchill cleared his throat, and Knox hurriedly translated this entire exchange from Hungarian into English. Churchill’s booming laugh filled the room, and then he lit an enormous cigar and puffed away, squinting at Bathory with great, undisguised curiosity.
“You will take the blasts directed at you. And Raziel’s brothers will do the attacking.”
The fact I could do nothing to protect myself from
an attack didn’t seem to concern him. I shrugged. “All right.”
Bathory stroked his mustache, ready to make an even more impassioned argument for his battle plan, and then he paused, dumbstruck.
“No, really,” I said, “that’s fine.”
Bathory blinked hard, cleared his throat.
I nodded at him. “If any of this is going to work, it will be Raziel and his brothers who will do it. You are basically saying I will be the decoy. I will go down while Raziel leads the battle. So be it.”
I did not for the life of me understand why Bathory thought my lack of magic was such an advantage. Perhaps because our enemies would put all of their efforts into destroying me, and leave their flank open to a conventional attack.
Either way, I didn’t mind. I had prepared to die, actually thought a heroic death the perfect way to depart this world. Much as I treasured life now as a gift, part of me still wanted to join Gisele in the afterworld.
I knew that Gisele would be disappointed in me if I showed up without having done my best to keep my promise to her, even now. For I had promised to do everything in my power to stop her visions from coming to pass. Just because those visions tormented Gisele no longer didn’t mean that the monsters she had prophesied had vanished from Europe.
I had promised to use the Book to stop Hitler if I could. I wasn’t giving up the fight yet, no matter how sharply I grieved for Gisele. I could die of grief later. But the time to fight was now.
And if I died in the fight, well … in many ways, if it was my fate to now die, that would serve as the perfect end of the story, the Book of Magdalena Lazarus. It sounded good to me, had the perfect ring of martyrdom to it.
“You don’t have to convince me,” I said to Bathory, and to everyone collected in the cozy room with the roaring fire in the hearth. “Let us fight.”
I turned my gaze to Bathory, and looked him full in the eye, not afraid of him anymore. “And I accept your fealty after all, dear count. If we manage to win, you will end up King of Hungary, and I can go back to being your ex-assistant. But for now, you are the government-in-exile of the Budapest vampires.”