by Michele Lang
Raziel grabbed my arm. When I looked at him, he stared deep into my eyes. “Magda, why?” Raziel said.
It was the closest he’d come to ever doubting me. “I can’t use it. If you use it in an attempt to destroy them, my love, I’ll lose you, too. And to what end? At best, you’d end up like Asmodel. I couldn’t bear it.”
Enepsigos looked into the gem, and howled in triumph. Her scaly fingers clawed over the gem’s surface, and she pulled it up to her face, staring and staring. Her tongue probed the surface of the gem, the point of the star, and her eyes glazed with the intensity of her stare. Her howls devolved into shrieks, and still she gazed.
Asmodel looked at me. “What did you do to her?”
I shrugged. “Nothing.”
“Why do you not use the stone? Why do you not destroy her with your inheritance?”
“I don’t need to.”
Asmodel’s features melted a bit, and the golden, angelic beauty of his face went a bit askew, like a slipped mask. “Don’t you want to, witch?”
I sighed. I could not fight Asmodel magic to magic, but I hadn’t lied to him. My strength lay in the truth, no matter how grim. “No. I don’t want to fight you. War gives me no pleasure. But you brought the fight to me. You bring it here, where I am defenseless. Your death is not on my hands.”
“My death?” Asmodel chuckled then, a horrifying sound. “Death has no dominion over me. And once I have the stone in my hands, I shall have dominion over death. Like a Lazarus, a keeper of the gem.”
By now, Enepsigos had stopped screaming. Asmodel strolled over and casually plucked the stone from between her palms. A thin line of drool trailed out of her mouth and over the nipple of her left breast. Her eyes stared endlessly into nothingness. The gem had gnawed her soul away.
“She looked into the stone, just like you wanted,” Asmodel remarked, his smile so cruel now that I flinched. “You got your revenge on her the back way, didn’t you.”
I caught Raziel’s movement out of the corner of my eye. “Don’t try to shoot him, it won’t work,” I said under my breath to Raziel. He muttered a curse in Hebrew and lowered the Mauser again.
“She only sees now through the stone,” Asmodel continued, as if I hadn’t said anything. “She is trapped inside the star. So did King Solomon lose his power.”
By now, the demonic features had overtaken the angelic ones on Asmodel’s face. He dragged Enepsigos to the fireplace, grabbed her by the hair, then shoved her face-first into the roaring fire. Enepsigos, the most vicious and effective of the three demonic sisters who had first murdered me, made no move to shield herself from the flames.
I watched her twitch and burn. Smelled her flesh burning. So did Asmodel reward his faithful demoness for her service.
I listened to Asmodel’s low growls.
“You, come here, to the fire,” he snarled.
I looked at him and remained perfectly still.
“If you don’t come here, I’ll tear Raziel apart.”
“You cannot. Before Wolf’s Lair, I bound you by spell so you could not touch him. Or me.”
He snarled again, but his eyes flashed with impotent rage.
I couldn’t help smiling. “Could you have forgotten? I never will.”
He looked back to Enepsigos and kicked her deeper into the flames, taking his fury out on her inert body. She twitched again as the flames licked over her scaly skin, but Enepsigos made no sound. “If you don’t come here, I will take the gem and destroy the world.”
I said nothing, and still moved not a muscle.
He growled, rolled the gem between his thick fingers. Hesitated.
“You failed, Lazarus.”
He was right. I still said nothing.
“I stand here, owning your Book. Owning your gem. Your sister is dead—you swore to protect her, and you failed. You failed in everything that you tried. All you succeeded in doing was tempt Raziel into falling.”
I sighed at that, for the Prince of Lies was right again. “Are you going to use the gem or not? You are talking and talking, but I suspect you are afraid. What will keep you from ending up dead inside the gem, like Enepsigos?”
He growled under his breath, and his fangs grew to reach below his chin. “You will use the gem. And serve me!”
“No, I won’t. I can’t.”
Every minute I delayed him, every minute we dickered over the gem, was another minute that the Soviet army threw its weight against the German attack. And what I had been unable to stop by magic, mortal soldiers might destroy with their guns, their bayonets, and their government’s anti-magic.
“You are right, Asmodel. I’ve lost everything, just as you have described. So what more do I have to lose? And what do I have to gain, by picking up the gem, mastering it for you, fighting for glory and for power?”
He smiled then, an awful sight. “So it’s true. You have lost your magic.”
I winced but said nothing. Raziel held out his hand. “Give it to me, my brother. And I will keep it safe.”
Asmodel roared with laughter. “You think me a fool? Magda cannot use the stone, or she would have. You trusted her, and look how she has betrayed you.”
The sapphire suddenly flashed with light from the fire. Enepsigos was nearly dead by now. Or more precisely, forced into a lower level of existence, the way I had dispatched her sister Onoskelis. It is difficult to kill a demon.
The fire blazed higher, roared out of the chimney, licking over the demoness’s prone body. The fire raged out of control.
“For the last time, give it to me.” Raziel took a single step toward his brother, and the gem.
Asmodel looked back and forth between his hands and the fire, the stone trapped in his talons.
And then, with a terrible roar, he fixed his gaze upon the stone. “I claim the power of the Heaven Sapphire for the Reich!” he roared.
I gaped. Unlike Enepsigos, Asmodel mastered the stone. I could do no more to stop Asmodel from claiming the world, now that he had enslaved both Book and gem.
He roared again, grew even bigger, swaggered around the room, knocking over the chair by the fire. I sprang backward, shielding my eyes from the flames.
And only saw through my fingers as Enepsigos reached with one horribly burned hand for Asmodel’s ankle. Revenge animated her body, as it had once fueled my determination to return from the dead. She and I were sisters of the air, and I remembered that my stubbornness was an inheritance I had received from the fallen angels in my lineage. Like me, she refused to die until her retribution was complete.
Enepsigos twined her burning flesh around the demon’s leg. He screamed and staggered, and the flames licked up his leg, hungry for the gem.
I could not fight Asmodel for the Heaven Sapphire. I did not have to. Ziyad’s superweapon detonated at long last. The flames gathered into a blue, hovering ball, wavered in front of Asmodel’s face—
Then engulfed his features in blackening, searing fire. The sapphire itself had broken the demon’s mastery.
He screamed and tried to throw away the gem, but it had melted to his hands. The fire invaded his body through his mouth, his eyes, burned away his visage until he stood, a smoking skeleton holding a blue-flamed gem, fit for a king’s diadem.
Demoness, gem, Asmodel all fused together in flame. The inferno roared through him, then shot into a flaming line of energy running behind him and through the walls of the dacha.
“He is still connected to the Führer,” Raziel said, his voice soft with awe. “The fire runs through the ethereal plane, the silver cord connecting Asmodel to the demonic host.”
Blue flame shot through the wall, blasting into the night like artillery.
The entire structure caught like tinder, and we fled for our lives. Stood barefoot in the snow until the horrified caretaker found us in the frozen, dead garden behind the patio. We tried to explain that it wasn’t his fault, that he would be in no trouble. But the poor old creature spoke no Hungarian, no Hebrew, and we spo
ke no Russian.
We stood together, and watched the little dacha burn. Blue flames kept shooting into the night from where we stood to Hitler’s hiding place, where Asmodel had unknowingly made his demonic host vulnerable to destruction.
I turned to Raziel. “Now I know why your brothers in the mountains worship the fire,” I whispered.
29
Once daylight came, we drove right back south, in the dodgy rusty truck, oil burning all the way. At midmorning, we made a rest stop and fell asleep on the side of the road, utterly exhausted.
The Heaven Sapphire rested in my lap, the cigar box having been devoured by the fire. At least Leyla’s portrait on the inside of the box got to feed the fire she adored.
The sapphire, too, was dead. I wasn’t sure if it had sacrificed its life to stop Asmodel, indeed if the intelligence within it could be classified as “life.” For once, I didn’t pester Raziel with my many questions.
Once we woke up, Raziel started up the truck again and we drove all the way back to Krasnaya Polyana without speaking. The death of Asmodel, maybe of the sapphire itself, weighed heavily on him, but I sensed that he could not explain the inner life of the sapphire to me, even if he knew.
Now the sapphire was no more than a blue paperweight, pretty, eye-catching perhaps, but inert. It reminded me of me. But I remembered what it had been, and what it meant to my people. “Little star,” I whispered. It had been my father’s pet name for me, and now I knew why. This was the star that my creed followed.
The Lazarus witches. I the eldest. The second daughter, Gisele, was dead. My magic was dead, and that meant one thing I had not had the luxury to consider until our drive back to Churchill’s dacha.
My line too, dead. The Witch of Ein Dor’s prophecy had proven true. The lineage of the Lazarus witches, stretching in an unbroken line all the way back to time out of mind. With the death of my magic, the story of the Lazarus witches was ended.
The few people we met on the drive back to the Black Sea were possessed by a boundless elation, almost a madness of joy. The offense at Stalingrad had prevented the Wehrmacht attack on the Caucasus, broken it. The war in the East was over.
Now that Hitler and Asmodel were dead, the rebellions that had been bubbling under the surface in Nazi Germany burst into the open. Aristocratic German nationalists and patriotic army generals, joined by the commander of the Valkyrie Corps, sprang forward to wrest control from the Nazi Party and declare a military dictatorship. Overnight, the Nazi Party was outlawed and high-ranking members summarily executed before they could effectively mobilize their own resistance.
It was prudent for the new, Prussian military leadership to achieve an accommodation as soon as possible with the West. The hated Communist empire was another matter. Stalin’s Red Army had just delivered a crushing blow. The generals didn’t have the resources or the inclination to fight the Soviets, not now.
So both Soviet bear and German wolf remained strong after this short, attenuated war of the Caucasus. I couldn’t help worrying that another war would soon erupt, one meant to contain Stalin from his own plans for world domination.
But that was not today’s war.
The Reich had not unconditionally surrendered. The politicians now had their jobs to do, the postmortem of diplomats and business magnates. But the Reich’s Eastern invasion was broken, for a while at least.
And that meant that Gisele’s visions no longer obtained. I thought of all that Gisele had told me, the summer before in Budapest. The ovens, the factories of death, the warehouses filled with human hair and pyramids of baby shoes.
None of this would happen now, because Hitler had not gotten the chance to create the death factories, what Gisele called “the concentration camps.” The sapphire had immolated him first.
The prophecy of the Witch of Ein Dor had indeed fallen upon us Lazarus witches. But with the intercession of a fallen archangel, and the stubborn refusal of some orphaned girls in Budapest to accept the inevitable, a terrible holocaust had now, somehow, been set aside. We lived in a world free of Gisele’s horrifying visions, a world liberated from the fate foretold by the Witch of Ein Dor.
Gisele gladly had traded her life for this state of affairs. So, too, would I, if I only could have brought Gisele back again, the way that I had returned so many times before.
But such violations of the world’s way it was not my privilege to make. No longer.
I longed to see Churchill, and Bathory. And dreaded it, too. For now that my war was over, I’d have to find a way to survive the peace.
30
CONEY ISLAND,
BROOKLYN
JUNE 1, 1940
Nearly six months had passed since Asmodel had met his end in a remote little dacha near the Black Sea, Hitler and his army vaporized by a mysterious Soviet superweapon. Raziel and I had come to America at Knox’s urging, to encourage the Americans to negotiate the Treaty of Baku, despite their minimal involvement in the Eastern European War of 1939.
We came to America on urgent business, but we had time to spend on pleasure, too. Raziel and I were designated members of an unofficial delegation commissioned by Churchill himself to come to America. We had come in order to convince the Roosevelt administration to participate in the ongoing peace talks in Baku, which, predictably perhaps, had encountered roadblocks and tangles. An outside, objective party could remove those barriers and allow the negotiations for a peace treaty to proceed once again, or so Churchill hoped.
The stipend we received from Churchill gave us the luxury of a leisurely trip from New York to the capital, Washington, D.C., to the south.
Once the Treaty of Baku was concluded, our position as unofficial emissaries of the Churchill government would come to an end, and we would have to find another job, somehow, one that paid decent wages for honest, unmagical work.
Raziel had a strong back, and I loved to write and could speak nearly fluent French. But otherwise we were all but unemployable.
I had more immediate matters to attend to, in any case. The butterflies in my stomach started fluttering again, and I pulled Raziel’s hand over the spot. “Here! She kicked me.”
“She’s too little for me yet to feel her foot from the outside, Magduska.”
The New York City sun beat down on the top of my head, and my flowered cotton dress stuck to my curves like wet tissue paper. Raziel and I sat on a park bench on the Coney Island boardwalk, and he had just bought me a vanilla custard with chocolate sprinkles, to feed my strange cravings and my growing belly.
I sighed, watched the waves crash to shore, again and again and again, while dirty-looking gulls swooped overhead like tough New York angels.
New York City was loud, grimy, gray, and cacophonous. So different from Budapest in so many ways. But I was falling in love with New York, not at first sight, but bit by bit.
The baby fluttered again under my ribs as I ate the frozen custard—she liked dessert as much as Gisele ever did.
A butterfly, pink and gold, rose above our heads, making its way upside down and backward down the boardwalk, improbably staying aloft despite the gusting breeze, the hungry gulls, and the briny air.
“Ah, Eva,” I said, with a lump in my throat that even the frozen custard couldn’t soothe. Ever since I had begun carrying this little Lazarus, I had become a weepy, sentimental Hungarian lady. The little butterfly fluttered madly, paused over an overflowing trash can, then continued on its merry, upside-down way.
“Eva,” Raziel said, his warm voice gentle and thoughtful as always. He stroked my knuckles with his fingertips.
I sighed, tried to regain my composure. “You’ll never guess the dream I had last night, my love.”
Raziel leaned closer so he could hear me over the crashing waves and loud Brooklyn voices all along the splintery boardwalk.
I couldn’t help smiling. “I know the soul of this child. You’ll never guess who it is.”
“Gisele,” he said, and he cleared his throat. We rarely spoke
of my little sister, but I knew he thought of her as often as I did.
“No, Gisi’s off to the highest emanations of Heaven. I wouldn’t be surprised to find she is learning how to read Hebrew from Yankel Horowitz himself.”
“Hm, if it isn’t Gisele…” Raziel trailed off, wondering.
Sadly, we knew too many people who had died in the war who would gladly return. Most recently, Ziyad Juhuri, the carpet trader of Baku. Long after our final battle with Asmodel, I’d learned of his fate.
When the professor and the Institute had destroyed Ziyad’s superweapon, namely me, Ziyad in his despair chose to embrace a final act of rebellion. He sacrificed himself to the fire before the battle of Stalingrad, in order to augment the power of Uzziel and his band of fallen angelic brothers.
But the soul growing a new life inside of me was not Ziyad’s. Nor was it Leyla, nor Viktor. Not even Obizuth, the ancient demoness who in the end chose her freedom over power and revenge.
It was not any of these. “My darling Leopold,” I whispered, and I couldn’t suppress a low laugh of wonder. “He never did leave me, did he. Not even when I couldn’t tell he had stayed.”
“Leopold!” Raziel said, his eyes widening in surprise.
“He comforted Gisele in her despair at Chartwell, and he comforted me, too. How much merit did he gain? Enough to return as a human child. Kindness is the greatest magic.”
“But are you ready?” Raziel said, only half joking. Leo was so much like me that fireworks came with the package, for certain. “Boys can wear their mamas out.”
“Oh no,” I said, my voice as serene as Raziel’s had ever been, emanating from the seat of the second Heaven. “I am carrying a girl. The eldest daughter of the eldest daughter…”
And I sighed again, in happiness but also in fear. I had grown into my power as an untrained witch, and look at all the trouble I had caused. This child’s mama had no magic left to share—how could I teach this Leo-lah, this little Gisele (for that was going to be her name)?