Dark Victory Read online

  The smile faded from Yankel’s lips, but only slightly. “For shame, Lazarus, to talk such a shanda. This ancient one is safest in a hidden place. Hm.”

  He glanced at Gisele. “Quiet one, do you have a pretty thing that you love? An earring, a bracelet? A watch would be perfect, my love.”

  He spoke in Yiddish, but again my little sister understood. She reached around to the back of her neck and unclasped a tiny gold chain that always hung around her neck. “My grandmother’s locket,” she said in Hungarian. “My mother left it to me when she died.”

  I knew that little locket well, had secretly grieved when I found my mother had bequeathed it to Gisele and not to me. It was a little red gold cameo locket my grandmother used to wear, dented from where Gisele had cut her teeth on it as a baby. Now, Gisele held out the locket to this stranger, eager to share her most precious treasure.

  Yankel took the locket with a smile and a grateful nod. He began to pray over the locket, rocking slowly at first then faster and faster, a furious gabble of Hebrew rising like an army of spirits into the sky.

  Periodically Raziel punctuated Yankel’s prayers with an ecstatic “Amen!” And Asmodel twitched and snarled at them from the dirt, as if trapped inside a hellish dream from which he could not waken.

  Yankel finished his prayer with a triumphant “Chodesh! Chodesh! Chodesh!” And a ring of fire surrounded all of us in a sudden shower of blue sparks. I managed to stay silent, but only barely: Yankel’s prayer was so infectious that I wanted to leap to my feet and cry Holy! Holy! Holy! myself.

  “Amen!” Raziel cried out, and a bolt of light blinded me. When I blinked the dazzle out of my eyes, I took in the scene with a gasp.

  Asmodel was gone.

  “Won’t it be too heavy to wear?” Gisele asked, her voice sounding completely ordinary in the fading whirlwind.

  I rubbed my eyes and saw that Gisele now stood next to Yankel, the locket nestled in her outstretched palm. Raziel stood behind her, and the three of them leaned in to see the locket.

  The scene would have seemed quaint and ordinary to the unknowing eye. But the entire clearing crackled with magical power, and the demon’s essence imbued the locket with a terrible, electric darkness. The locket dragged the very air down into it like a hole in the world.

  “How did you do that?” I demanded, my voice shaky. This scrawny little man was no wizard or warlock; in fact, from what I could tell, he was possessed of less innate magic than my old friend the Zionist Eva Farkas. But Yankel Horowitz had just performed the most powerful act of magic I had ever seen.

  “I did nothing.” For the first time a shadow passed over his ebullient old face. “The Almighty accomplishes all through me.”

  He gave me a significant look. “Magic is not something you do, my Hungarian stranger. It is the means by which God transcends death.”

  The words thundered in my head. I swallowed hard, stood completely still. It was as if the Almighty Himself, who had hidden from me even in the second Heaven, now spoke to me through this man’s words.

  “An angel is a messenger of God,” Yankel continued, his voice now gentle, as he leaned forward and returned the gold chain and locket to my sister’s neck. “But God Himself is the message, nu?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, my mouth dry.

  He worked the clasp on the locket, then straightened. “I know, my poor child, I know.” He smiled, held his hands open, defenseless, in front of him. “Maybe the message is not that you should understand, but that you should trust.

  “He is more securely restrained by gold,” Yankel continued. “The locket is further strengthened by the bonds you have to your sister and grandmother. It need not stay closed, even.” And to my horror, with an expert flick of his thumb, he opened the locket.

  I was prepared to fight, but Yankel was right. The only sign of the demon’s presence was his face, flat and serene, a portrait superimposed over the photograph of my father tucked inside.

  Trapped and still, the fangs hidden from view, Asmodel’s fine features revealed his celestial origins. Not for the first time, I pitied the demon’s journey farther and farther from Heaven.

  Yankel must have seen the expression on my face, for he closed up the locket again and stroked the black-and-white cameo on the front. “It is sad to see an Angel of the Lord so debased. But he chose it! And he could go back if he chose, too. Instead, he wants to drag you down with him.”

  With a final check of the clasp, he let the locket come to rest over Gisele’s heart, and he gave me a long, significant look. “This girl Gisele must carry Asmodel. But it is you I worry about, mamele.”

  11

  Dinner with Yankel, Gisele, and Raziel was as surreal as a fever dream. My joy at our reunion was tempered with the knowledge that we were in the middle of a shooting war in Poland. Gisele was sure her fate remained here. But if she stayed in Poland, should I stay, too, to protect her?

  The war had already smashed what remained of my old, comprehensible life. But despite the dangers, Raziel’s presence made even the burden of Asmodel bearable.

  Raziel protected me. Some men in this world find shelter in their academic degrees, their social status, or their money. They thrive in fine society and never learn what they are really made of. My man, Raziel, had no money, no social connections, and no academic laurels upon which to rest, a self-made, self-reliant man. And in this savage new world, he was well suited to fighting the grim battles we faced.

  After our meal, Gisele and Yankel went to sleep inside the hut, while Raziel and I stood guard outside in the clearing. I thought of my man’s attributes as I remembered our discussion with Yankel during dinner.

  I let my fingers stray to Raziel’s arm, and I stroked the cabled muscles as I spoke my thoughts aloud. “Did you hear what Yankel said about the salt mines where the Polish resistance is already gathering?”

  I bit my lip as I reached his hand and interlaced my fingers with his. Raziel looked deeply into my eyes, and a smile played over his lips. “I know what you are thinking. Don’t go chasing after Polish partisans, Magduska. Not yet.”

  “I love it when you say my name.”

  Raziel leaned forward and stole a tiny, perfect kiss. “Don’t try to change the subject. The people in the salt mines will not welcome us. We are not Polish.”

  “But what should we do instead? Gisele is as safe with Yankel as she would be alone in Budapest. Maybe safer,” I said. “But I don’t know what to do. For now, we will find a connection in Kraków with Yankel’s help. I owe Mr. Churchill no less, yes?”

  Raziel considered my words. “Do you speak any Polish?” he asked. He now understood the importance of fluency in a world divided by language.

  I suppressed a sigh. “No, but I speak French. Hopefully the assimilated Jews in the city will know some; the people of Poland have long had a love affair with France.”

  “Will that be enough to convince frightened people that they can resist the Nazis?”

  The wind picked up around us, and I shivered … but I wasn’t sure whether it was from the cold, or because I couldn’t stop thinking about my worries.

  * * *

  After an uneasy night, my concerns only multiplied in the morning. I asked Yankel to make introductions for me in Kraków.

  But he refused. “You are dangerous,” he said, his voice kind but his expression grim. “An untrained Lazarus witch! For shame. You have too much dark blood in you, too many fallen angels in your bloodline, for you not to understand what you are. You think you use Jewish magic, but I cannot let you leave without helping you learn to master yourself.”

  I looked over Yankel’s shoulder and Gisele nodded at me. She wanted me to learn Yankel’s ways.

  “Time is short, sir.”

  “Bah, time is always short. I know a very nice boy in Kraków who can help you. But first you must learn about your lineage. Who you are, mamele. Poland is not Budapest.”

  Before my mother had died four years earlie
r, she had failed to give me my magical inheritance, knowledge of the Lazarus creed and the limitations of our magic. It wasn’t her fault; at sixteen I was too wild to learn what she had had to teach.

  Now Yankel wanted to give me an introduction to what I should have learned. He crossed his arms across his narrow, sunken chest, and we sat down by the banks of the little stream.

  “You are the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter, the last of the Lazarus line,” he began. “You can summon souls, including your own, from the dead. Your little sister, the second daughter, has the gift of the second sight, the ability to foretell. These gifts are all governed by the Lazarus creed … but you never learned it! I cannot teach you your creed. Instead, I will teach you what I know. And somehow that will have to be enough.”

  He was no Lazarus witch. But once he taught me his own rules, Yankel Horowitz would be content to unleash me upon Kraków, and keep my sister safe with him.

  I had recently been schooled in magic’s rudiments by the enigmatic Lucretia de Merode, courtesan extraordinaire and matriarch of the clandestine Daughters of Arachne coven. But now Yankel taught me the greater lore that governed us all.

  But he would never call what he taught me “magic.” In his parlance, he taught me Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, the wonder-working of the great rabbis and sages of renown. The fact that I was a godless, bacon-eating female from Budapest seemed not to matter to him in the slightest. Though I was a terrible Jew by any conventional reckoning, in Yankel’s eyes I had a ferocity of spirit and an indestructible Jewish soul, and therefore I was a worthy instrument of the glory of the Almighty and His wondrous works.

  “The world is made of holy sparks,” Yankel began that cool, clear morning in September. “Our job is to collect them together to hasten the end of days.”

  That made me hesitate. I couldn’t care less about the end of days, unless it meant the end of the Nazis and their enormous army first.

  But I held my peace and strained to understand. I felt sure that had the war not upended everything, I never would have met such a man, and if we had somehow encountered one another, he never would have considered teaching me the secrets he now revealed.

  But in his way, Yankel was even more desperate than I, and more willing to compromise his ideals. For he understood, in a way I had not yet done, how short our time together would be. He had no other young disciple to teach; Yankel had resolved to do his best with me.

  We started that day with golems. “Have you heard of the golem of Prague?” Yankel asked.

  I had to admit that I had not. Yankel stroked his beard and tsked. “That you could do so much, untaught, and still not know such things!” he marveled. “You have been very lucky.”

  I told him about the remarkable Lucretia de Merode and all that she had taught me in her Amsterdam bordello: how to cast spells, how to throw witchfire. But Yankel dismissed her lessons with an impatient wave of an old, gnarled hand. “Parlor tricks,” he said, shaking his head.

  I privately, and vehemently, disagreed, but it did not matter. I nodded for him to go on.

  “Now, you will soon need an army, nu? We could do worse than an army of golems. They are made of mud and holy sparks from holy words. They are hard to kill because they aren’t really alive.”

  “But how much harm can they do, really?” I asked, skeptical.

  “Well, less than guns. But I am not speaking of harm, but protection.”

  Again I remembered the great battle Raziel, Gisele, and I had fought at Heroes’ Square in Budapest, how an army of imps had followed my brainchild, an imp called Leopold, into battle against Asmodel and his brother demons. And I thought of Asmodel, trapped inside Gisele’s locket.

  I hesitated to say what I was really thinking—and then I decided that I didn’t have time to play coy. “Why do we only consider protection? An army should do more than hide. Could we not call upon an army of demons?”

  Yankel didn’t find the prospect as scandalous as I thought he would. “It is an interesting idea,” he said, after a moment in which he was lost in thought. “But I see some problems with it.”

  “Like the damning of my soul,” I said, a statement, not a question.

  “No, not at all,” he said. “We are not Christians, and certainly not Catholics. I love and admire the Christians. They are, after all, Jews of a sort.”

  I found that assertion rather amazing. “But the Christians imagine Satan as an enemy general, in a fight against God. And demons aren’t?”

  “Some are, yes. They are air creatures, like the angels and the seraphim. Some are fallen angels, degraded by their hatred of human beings, their jealousy of mortals. But others were made that way, the way mosquitoes and asps were made. All serve the glory of the Almighty. Even the Adversary serves a greater plan—that fact drives the demons crazy because they know it, too.”

  My own personal imp, Leo, had gloried in serving the greater good, even if only to better his own station in the world. I tried to open my mind to the world as seen through Yankel’s eyes, a view that expected miracles to ripen like fresh fruit, part of the natural unfolding of life and its seasons. “Can demons ascend?”

  “Certainly. They are made of holy sparks as well. All will be gathered up, into the great One. It is that gathering up that the demons can’t stand.”

  “Because it is like death.” I was with the demons on that particular point.

  Yankel sighed again. “It is not like death.” He paused, seeming to search for the right words. “Death is not celebrated in the Jewish tradition. We accept it, we support our brethren when they lose their loved ones. We move on from it as the mitzvot decree we do. But each soul is a world. The death of that soul is the death of the world.

  “The gathering up is different. It is a return to the world as it was before creation. One singular creation…”

  His voice trailed off, and Yankel glowed with that pure light I had loved from the first moment when, lost in the forest, I had found it.

  But we lived in a world where the sparks were still scattered. “I cannot bring the demons into the light of creation, but I can summon them, whether they want to come or not. And if I were only strong enough, I could, like King Solomon or my ancient great-grandmama the Witch of Ein Dor, compel an army of demons to my will.”

  Yankel turned from his contemplation of the heavenly dance of angels and shot me a dirty look. “You can force them to show up, Magda. But how well do you think they would fight?”

  “I can call up the spirits, too. Don’t you think that Jewish ghosts would fight to save their living descendants?”

  Yankel muttered something unintelligible under his breath; my obstinacy seemed to be wearing him down. “Those souls have important places to be, Magda. You may cause more harm by calling them here.”

  “But am I forbidden by the Lazarus creed to call them?” I held up a hand so that I could finish my thought. “If they knew they could save their children, their grandchildren, I think they would come. If I am able to call them.”

  “My dear, the Lazarus creed is not the point. But let’s talk about the creed anyway. I do not know all of it, but I do know it says you can’t return after you have been dead for three days. Am I right?”

  I thought of my mother, who had refused to return after she had died four years before, and I sighed. “I don’t know the exact wording, but yes. My mother told me that.”

  “The creed is saying not that it isn’t possible to do it, but that you shouldn’t do it, it’s not kosher to do it. Listen, like eating pork kielbasa, you can do it, mamele. Come back, anytime. But you just might find that the maggots that now live in your corpse won’t go away so easy, they ruined your body too much to make it nice to come back. A practical rule, the three days.”

  I tried to keep the impatience out of my voice. “But what does kielbasa have to do with calling up an army of the dead?”

  “We were talking of the creed. Just because it is possible for you to do something, doesn’
t mean you should do it, mamele.

  “You have the strongest gifts I have ever seen in one who is unguided,” Yankel continued, his voice rumbling deep in his chest. “But I have to warn you against two things: calling up dead spirits, and seeking to harness the power of primordial demons, the ancient ones that fell in the early days of the world.”

  Demons like Asmodel, I was sure he meant. I looked down and listened as contritely as I could.

  “Such demons have been wielded by kings and sages,” Yankel continued. “But these are debased times in which we live, and you do not have the power to force such creatures to serve the Lord—not without doing great harm to yourself.”

  Binding Asmodel is a good enough deed. And my mother wants to come fight, I know she does, if I could but reach her again. I will not throw away the few advantages we have.

  But I did not voice my protests aloud.

  Yankel looked at me for a long time, then seemed to make a decision about me. It wasn’t until he smiled and I relaxed that I realized I had been holding my breath.

  “I will teach you how to raise golems,” Yankel said. “And how to call down the wrath of Heaven. But let go of this idea that you have, that you can fight Hitler himself, army against army. Let it go, mamele. To hell with Hitler. He is the Lord’s problem, not yours.”

  To Hell with Hitler, indeed. That is where I intended to send that man, as soon as I could. Surely it would alter the terrible visions my sister had endured: millions murdered, factories of death.

  But first, golems.

  Yankel and I worked by day, ate pierogies with Raziel and Gisele by night. And then, after only a few short days of instruction, Yankel Horowitz sent me on my way, to Kraków.

  12

  Yankel sent Raziel and me with a woman, Chana, the blessed maker of his pierogi, who also brought Yankel bread and firewood. Before we left, he promised to look after Gisele and Asmodel while we were gone, which I found a comfort.

  Kraków reminded me of a little Budapest. Its city squares, with their beautiful, oddly Mediterranean-looking stucco and archways gracing curved, cobblestone streets, seemed more the architecture of an Italian city.