by Michele Lang
And if Bathory had no country, then neither did I.
28
Two times before I had battled Asmodel. The first time, as a witch unsure of my power. The second, as the Lazarus, in command of my inborn gifts, fighting to claim The Book of Raziel as my inheritance.
I knew this was the last time. Third time for keeps, as Eva and I used to say as girls. And this time I fought the ancient demon without my magic, vulnerable to his terrible power.
Raziel’s brothers joined the Soviet army southwest of Stalingrad. They went to fight the magical creatures that fought alongside the German Wehrmacht. And after a lot of insisting, Viktor, my angel, went with them, to fight once more against the Nazis.
After the angels had gone, it was just Raziel and me. I had nowhere else to go, nowhere to run. Third time for keeps. This time, either Asmodel or I would win.
Bathory, technically a foreign national from a hostile state, stayed behind with Churchill, and mustered what vampiric allies he could, though most of his people had sided with the Reich, after Hungary had succumbed to the Arrow Cross Nazis and come into the war on the side of the Germans.
In the end, Raziel stayed with me, Raziel alone. Together we safeguarded the gem, and prepared to join Raziel’s brothers at the front so that our superweapon would not go unused. But the thought of the damage it would cause troubled me. And I was afraid of the corrupting influence of the gem, even upon a soul as pure as Raziel’s.
We left to follow the army. We had a tentative, shaky sort of plan: instead of running in the vanguard, the conventional army would, we hoped, shield us and the gem from Asmodel. And Raziel would make of the gem what he could.
We took our time getting to the front, in a sputtery rust brown truck, backfiring and burning oil in a sooty plume as we pressed northeast from Krasnaya Polyana. Raziel drove, I sat next to him in the front passenger seat.
“Asmodel doesn’t fight in the vanguard,” I said. “We won’t find him on the battlefield, either.”
The ancient truck jolted and jounced over the uneven terrain. We had driven hard and long, behind the Russian army, and now sped through the countryside north of the Black Sea.
“No, our fight with Asmodel will take place on a different battlefield, I am sure of it,” Raziel said.
“So how are we going to find him? Isn’t his host, the Führer, guarded as usual by the SS Werewolves, German army, and by spell?”
Raziel smiled then, so quickly I almost missed it. “The gem will bring us together, you’ll see.”
“They aren’t at the Wolf’s Lair any longer.” I had no way to magically verify my suspicions, but I was virtually certain they followed the army, one way or another.
“No.”
“So where are they?”
“They seek the Garden.”
We had arrived at our destination for the evening, and Raziel brought the truck to a rolling stop. We stood now on the broken high plains, cold and frozen and dead, the depths of February. Our surroundings could not have resembled the primeval Garden of Eden any less.
The smell of burning rubber polluted the stark, frigid air, and I coughed a little and wished for earmuffs. “They may seek the Garden, but they are going after it the long way, through hell.”
Raziel smiled again and sighed. “Well, yes. But they know you are coming. They are watching for you. They’ve sighted you by now. Asmodel will be sure to get you, himself.”
Raziel and I intercepted the path of the German blitzkrieg, knowing that Asmodel had a special interest in me and what my magic could give him. We sought to tempt the ancient tempter, and while I distracted him and drew him out Raziel’s brothers could deliver the coup de grâce to his army from behind, by surprise.
That was our initial plan. But even as we formulated it, I could see the flaws. For one, we all assumed Asmodel still had an interest in me, the Lazarus witch of Budapest. For another, the chance that we could surprise Asmodel with the Heaven Sapphire seemed dim indeed.
But we didn’t have a better plan, just this one. And maybe in the end, a plan with so many holes, one that didn’t make any provision for retreat, would prove the right one for the job after all.
Raziel and I drove toward my doom, and I knew it. And the knowledge gave me a certain serenity. We had no second plan. This was it.
“You really think that Asmodel is going to find me, and venture out of his defenses to attack?”
“From his point of view, you have attacked already, and he’s just capitalizing on your overreaching.”
I sighed. The wind picked up along the low steppes and crackled the iced-over grasses on the plains. “But what if he doesn’t attack? What, then?”
“Well, then. Then we’re finished, that’s what.”
“So how do we get his attention?”
“Oh, you have his attention. It’s just a question of calling him out here and now.”
One more night before we reached the front, before here and now could no longer be avoided. For now, we rested at a pretty little dacha in the middle of nowhere, which Knox had arranged, and the caretaker gave us wood for the fire and some sausage to eat for dinner.
We ate in silence as the darkness overtook us. One night left. And then we fought for keeps.
* * *
Now that I had lost my magic, our situation was very clear to me, and very sad. We possessed the Gem of Raziel, we had each other, and we believed in the justice of our cause. All good.
But it was not enough. None of it was enough because Hitler and his army, the greatest power in Europe, had already proven it could crush any other in its path.
We knew we had to fight. We intended to fight. But when examined with dispassion, without the soft glow of magic to mitigate the hard reality, our chances of success looked slim indeed.
The caretaker of the dacha didn’t appear quite human, but I was too despondent thinking of the imminent battle to inquire into his origins. With a wink and a smile, once dinner was done and the fire in the bedroom properly stoked, the old man made sure that we had what we needed, and he shuffled off to bed.
Churchill had toasted our marriage before we left, making it clear, even without proper French, that he approved of us together. I didn’t know that I did. I adored Raziel, with all of my heart and soul and body. But loving him was wrong; he was made for wings, not a wife.
I thought I had put my guilty feelings to rest when I had said “I do” in our wartime ceremony. But now that I no longer had my magic, my vows took on a different cast.
I thought all these dangerous thoughts as we prepared to go to bed, very late, at almost three in the morning. Raziel watched me, stewing under the blankets, but knew better than to poke at me. “You are exhausted, my love,” he murmured into my shoulder. He kissed the back of my neck and left me to my desperate thoughts. Of all people, Raziel understood that he could not lift my black spirits by poking and prodding at them.
I had to exorcise my demons for myself.
I listened in the flickering dark until Raziel’s breathing became slow and even. How that man could sleep, no matter how precarious our circumstances. For a while I believed that listening to Raziel sleeping would somehow heal the grief eating me up alive.
But no. Raziel was my husband, not a martyr or a human sacrifice. I had to solve the puzzle of why I still lived. I could no longer vanquish my enemies or even fight them. Bathory’s bright ideas aside, I still didn’t understand what role I could now play in battling my foes.
Maybe unearthing the sapphire stone would prove enough by itself. No small thing, capturing the Heaven Sapphire, even if I did secretly worry the stone would ultimately prove our undoing.
“Leo?” I whispered into the night. Hoping that my imp could hear my ordinary human voice, that he would come to me despite my maimed state.
I called to him again and again, out loud and by wishing for him, too. But nothing. He seemed so close to me, somehow—I couldn’t see or hear Leo, but he stayed in the forefront of
my thoughts. I was with Leo in my heart, but I couldn’t hear him, no matter how hard I tried.
I don’t know why, but losing my courageous little imp was the last straw. Something snapped inside of me, some tether to the world I had known. I wandered in a no-man’s-land of grief. To be honest, I don’t think I was in my right mind.
I slipped out of bed, my feet shaky under me. The cigar box was wrapped in a woolen sweater and stuffed under the bed. Not much of a protection laid on the gem, but considering it had resided in a stone hut for hundreds of years, lying around like a paperweight, we probably guarded it better this way than in some ostentatious kind of prison for the thing.
As I pulled the box from under the bed, I wondered about my “thing” assumption. What made someone a person and not a thing? The gem had emotions, it had memory, it had will. What separated it from a soul, besides the lack of a living body?
I lugged the box across the room to a wing chair set up next to the fireplace. Except for its heaviness, I could no longer decipher anything unusual about the bundle I hauled around.
I unwrapped the sweater and put it on, then opened the cigar box and released the jewel of Raziel from its white swaddling cloth. I looked at it in the flickering firelight, and it was beautiful, a king’s gem no doubt. But I could no longer see into the gemstone, and I suspected it could no longer see into me.
I cradled the sapphire in my hands, and the stone grew warm under my touch. I held it to my heart, and whispered, “I’m sorry,” to it.
The gem grew warmer. “Forgive me for treating you like a prisoner,” I said, a tear escaping down to my chin. Part of me was embarrassed, crying over an ageless, all-seeing Eye. But most of me really did just feel sorry for the fate of the Raziel sapphire. It reminded me too much of the fate of its bearer, Raziel himself.
The warmth seeped through my fingers and into my body, so much like the warmth that Raziel himself emanated that I stopped crying. A gigantic wave of peace and gentleness washed over me, calming me, comforting me.
I smiled through my tears with a growing wonder. Finally, after all my journeys and choices and battles, I understood. The Heaven Sapphire was not made to conquer armies. Raziel hadn’t brought it into the world to terrify, or to punish, or to open the mind to visions.
He had brought the gem to Earth to comfort the daughters of Eve. That was all. That was what the gem had been created to achieve. Nothing more. It was we makers of magic who had subverted its original purpose.
I know, I am slow. Raziel had told me exactly this when I had first asked him why he had brought the gem, later translated into the Book, to Earth. To console.
Now that I desperately needed consolation, I could finally understand.
I cradled the gem to my chest, whispered “thank you” again and again and again, and the gem sparkled in the semidarkness.
Raziel turned over in his sleep and groaned. I looked up from the gem—
And Asmodel stood next to my chair, between me and my husband, a small smile playing over his spectacularly beautiful features.
When the world was young, Asmodel had looked like this, like an older, blond brother of Uzziel. And Asmodel loved a human woman, one who had once cradled this very gem to her breast.
But then his frustration set in … and choice by choice, he strayed from the Garden into a world of pain and evil.
“At last,” Asmodel murmured. “At last, at last…”
The gem grew cold. My grip tightened upon it, and I turned to face my nemesis. “How did you get in here? Through all the anti-magic in this part of the world?”
He smiled and crouched next to my chair, his face level with the gem. “I have my ways, Lazarus. Or should I say … King?”
I gulped and set the gem in my lap. Ice-cold now.
“You married him. A shame. Your fate and his are now entwined together, tighter than Bathory and his lamb, tighter than Churchill and his England.”
I had no words. I had nothing, nothing at all. In all our fevered planning for war, we had never expected that Asmodel would leave Hitler unguarded and come to us of his own volition, in the dead of night, far from the battlefield.
“I wanted you to find the gem,” he went on. “I attacked you in Budapest, I harried you with the Soviet Institute—Stalin was most accommodating when he heard what I was after. I killed your Gisele, too. And you did exactly as I wanted.”
My mind flashed on the cows milling over the foothills of the Five Fingers of God. And I realized that Asmodel had herded me more expertly than did the shepherd and his son.
I gulped. “Well, it worked. Here we are.”
He smiled, and the demonic face warred with the angelic for control. “You have sacrificed your soul for the gem’s power. The fact my agent could kill Gisele without revenge proves it. The German army is almost past Stalingrad now. Once we break though, we reclaim the Garden.”
“Even without the gem?” I asked, my voice quiet. Asmodel spoke aloud my deepest, darkest fears. But I could not hide from them any longer—after all, my fears had all come true already. Keeping them a secret, or revealing them to the world, no longer mattered a whit.
He growled at that. “Stalin refused to give it to us. That is what made us decide to attack our worthless ally.”
“You are assuming that Stalin ever had it to give to you. Stalin never had it.”
He hesitated. By now, he knew me well, almost as well as did Raziel, and he expected, I’m sure, some fireworks of fury, some crackling witchfire, or at least a whispered ward thrown over my husband’s shoulders.
“So where is your host?” I asked. “You know, Herr Hitler. You left him all alone to his own devices? Isn’t that rather unwise?”
Based on the battle plans we had made before the angels went, I knew that the vanguard of avenging angels, together with a division of the Soviet army, had already begun the offensive out of Stalingrad. On the physical plane, the battle already raged.
“None of that matters,” Asmodel said. “All that matters is the gem. Give it to me.”
The sapphire grew warm against my fingertips once more. I tried my hardest to look into it, to fry my eyes and my brain for once and for all so that Asmodel could not possess me, which now he could all too easily do.
But I could no longer see into the gem. It could only comfort me now, not destroy me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t give you the gem.”
Raziel stirred and behind Asmodel’s rounded shoulder I saw that he was awake.
“You will,” Asmodel said. “And because of our long love affair, witch, I will give you a choice. One last choice before the time for choosing is gone forever. You can join me, like the creature who murdered your Gisele has joined me. Or I will finally kill you for good, too.”
“You are assuming, dear demon, that those are the only two choices that I have.” Just within my field of vision, I could see Raziel noiselessly sliding out of bed, reaching under his pillow.
I wished I could warn him that his Mauser would have no effect on Asmodel. I could no longer sense the wards and the immense power the ancient demon had amassed through the perverted use of The Book of Raziel. But after our battle in Wolf’s Lair, I knew that he still wielded the power.
A bullet could not reach Asmodel.
“Give me the sapphire, witch,” he said, more menacingly this time.
By now I saw that Raziel had pointed the Mauser at the demon’s head. If Raziel pulled the trigger, I knew in my bones that he would die. Asmodel’s wards would exact their revenge for the bullet, and they would protect the demon from any physical harm.
Because despite the fact I knew my magic was gone, Asmodel, somehow, didn’t.
Before I could warn Raziel away, the air next to Asmodel shimmered and a slender, sharp figure stepped out of the darkness.
And I rose out of the chair and onto my feet, holding the gem like a rock. Because it was Enepsigos who stood in front of me now. The third demoness, she who had murdere
d my Gisele.
She was smiling. “Stupid girl,” she purred from next to Asmodel’s shoulder. “Stupid, stupid. You threw your sister away on a fool’s errand. You worked for Asmodel more faithfully than I.”
“Shut up.”
She laughed, and I saw the flash of her cruel, slashing teeth, her sharp fingernails. “Bind yourself to serve the evil one. You will at least get something back for all your trouble, besides pain. And death.”
I shrugged. “I’m mortal, Enepsigos. Death is part of the bargain, no matter what magic I wield. Death is the master, not Asmodel.”
She snarled, and I could see that my weary acceptance enraged her beyond all measure. “Stupid!”
Raziel slid past Asmodel to join my side, and inwardly I groaned with worry for him. I could no longer protect him with my magic, not ever again. “We have company,” I said.
“I can see that.”
Asmodel laughed when he saw the two of us together. “I have won, brother. If she gives me the gem, you have lost. If she doesn’t give me the gem, you have lost. You will suffer long and hard, and I will gain the gem in the end anyway.”
“Give her to me, master,” Enepsigos growled. For some reason, I drove her crazy.
“No,” Asmodel said, a note of surprise in his voice. “The girl is mine.”
“I want to eat her heart. For daring to mock me with my pain.”
I thought of Gisele’s death, and my heart grew cold, not angry. I knew with a heavy certainty that defeating Enepsigos or even Asmodel wouldn’t bring Gisele back.
But that wasn’t why I was fighting them now.
I could no longer fight them magic to magic. I was only Magda now. And the sapphire I held in my hand no longer a superweapon for me to wield.
But in other hands … “Here, demoness, take the gem,” I said, and I tossed it to her.
She goggled in surprise and almost dropped it, but then scrabbled with it, and squatted on the floor before the fire, clutching the treasure.