Lady Lazarus Read online

  Obizuth’s face was closed and still, but I caught a flash of reptilian yellow in her deceptively mild human eyes. “We all watched him, wizard, watched you, too. Watched Solomon bind Asmodel just as you. And we watched Solomon fall, in the end.”

  I watched fear coat her face like a creeping slime, and knew the Staff had pinned her with one of his hard, cruel gazes, one that hinted of the pain he could easily inflict as punishment for any infraction or none.

  His voice was low, but it crept along the edge of the table, a malign creature born of his lips, ready to strike. “I watched King Solomon bind and torture demons to work his will as he built the Great Temple of Jerusalem. I have bound you and your sisters, lo, a thousand years and more! Is not the land of mortal earth sweet and lovely, my pretty girls!”

  His voice stretched taut, a near whisper now. “You know what I mean to do with her. Do not forget your master.”

  A heavy silence crushed us in its jaws.

  When the wizard spoke again, he sounded almost normal. “I have rooms for us at the Hotel Gellert, across the river in the old city, in Buda. We will rest until the full moon, and then we use this girl to draw our quarry.”

  Enepsigos dared to sneer. “Our quarry? You mean to capture her little sister?”

  The Staff chose to ignore her sourpuss, instead rolled the amulet up. All of them disappeared from sight, though I could hear them through the displaced alephs. “What use is the saint, the little one? No. I mean to capture the Angel Raziel himself.”

  The demonesses and I gasped in unison. They, creatures of air, winced in pain at the angel’s very name; I cringed at the thought that the time had come all too soon, the moment I had long dreaded. The Staff was ready to capture Raziel, to bind him and bend his angelic spirit to the sorceror’s service.

  The Staff polished off the last of the toppled napoleon with lip-smacking gusto. “Once we bind the angel, we compel him to serve my will. Mine. Not only Europe, but Hitler himself, his resident demon too, all will serve me. Asmodel believes he has gained the upper hand. But no.”

  His shadow fell across the Hebrew-shaped bars of my prison. The parchment rustled, and I saw his enormous eye looking down at me, a mere handsbreadth away. His foul breath stirred the edges of the amulet. He smiled—smiled at me—and I, who thought I was past fear, clutched at the letters to keep from fading all away in sudden terror. The wizard knew I had heard every word; he did not care.

  Unless I somehow found the key to this prison of incantation, it would become much more crowded. All of us, angel, Hitler-possessing demon, and mortal, stuffed into the Staff’s satin breast pocket like an unholy passport.

  25

  Time had another meaning in the land of the dead. Our gravest misdeeds lived through all eternity, hatching the day the Almighty moved over the surface of the darkness, and will be resonating through the universe after the final trumpet sounds. So why struggle and twist in the trap of our fate? My efforts to avert the witch’s dread decree had only hastened it.

  The beautiful façade of the Hotel Gellert mocked me in my tribulation. Its magnificence had not faded since Hungary’s defeat in the Great War, or in the worldwide Great Depression that had followed. If anything, the rococo facades and wedding-cake spires looked bigger and grander now than they had the last time I had seen them as a girl, in better, simpler days.

  The green-striped awnings and sweeping marble columns contrasted dreadfully with my circumstances. I met my end surrounded by pink marble, the delicate fronds of potted palm trees, ornate gilded fountains, and filigreed window boxes. As the Staff and his demonic entourage swept through the grand lobby, my vantage point obscured and incomplete, I sat paralyzed, and more alone than ever before or since.

  The concierge’s voice, wheedling and cracked, speaking German so fast I could barely understand, bade the Staff and his lovely ladies welcome. He swept us up the grand staircase to the mezzanine, and after his offer of coffee was coldly rejected, he ushered us into the elevator, escorted us personally to the hotel’s grandest suite, hoped it was suitable, on and on he went until I hung on the edge of a scream.

  Mercifully, the genuflecting concierge faded away, and with a rustle of silk and paper, my rolled-up prison came to rest on a flat surface somewhere in the room. If I looked out as far as I could see from the single curling aleph I could displace, the elaborate crown molding and the crystal and brass chandelier shimmered above me like a faraway horizon.

  I waited in the sudden profound silence for I don’t know how long, an eternity of gray emptiness more foreboding than the second Heaven. Time ended, stretched away into infinity.

  I held on to my memory of Raziel, hoarded the blessing of his absence like a treasure. I ached for him, I wanted him to come and rescue me, I wanted to lay my head down and bawl like a baby.

  But nobody could save me, not even Raziel. So instead I remembered him as he was in Paris, and my panic drifted away, along with my life, all nothing more than dancing cigarette smoke in a Parisian café with no windows or customers. I was no longer Magdalena Lazarus, wayward daughter, beloved sister, malign witch.

  But what was I?

  A crinkle of paper, and then a whisper rattled the Hebrew letters like a chain-link fence in a punishing rush of wind. They peeled away one by one, and with a curious sense of detachment I watched them go.

  As each letter went, more of my earthly surroundings revealed themselves. A grand suite at the Gellert, a glory of green satin, sweeping balcony outside French windows, sheer curtains glowing in the inky moonlight. All of it gorgeous, all as transient and inconsequential as a soap bubble.

  “The moon is cruel, but I love her,” a voice said in German.

  By now I hated speaking German, replied in Hungarian. Screw the voice if it didn’t understand me. “I don’t love anything, anymore.”

  “Nein? Why are you still here, then?” the voice replied in surprise, still in German, still hateful. But mercifully, the voice did not belong to Staff.

  My curiosity worked on me, got the better of me. I leaned out to look for the source of the voice.

  Obizuth. The eldest demoness, naked and bathed in moonlight, cruel and pale as the moon. Her long white hair tumbled over her bony shoulders and down her reptilian back, and overspread her ankles and the marble floor. She drank champagne from a fluted glass, her mailed, webbed fingers etching little scratches along the gilded rim.

  When our gazes met, she smiled. Obizuth had no interest in hiding herself from me. I drew halfway out of my amulet prison. “Where are the others?”

  “Gone to take the waters. The hotel management kindly closed the baths to the public so Rabdos and the girls could swim alone, together.”

  I flinched at the languid wave of the hands, her apparent friendliness. “Why didn’t you take the waters, too?”

  Obizuth tossed back the last of her champagne, twirling the leaded flute between her scaly fingertips. With exaggerated gentleness she perched the empty glass on the top of the black grand piano that hulked in the corner. “Somebody had to guard you. But really I stayed back so that we could have a little chat, Lazarus.”

  The breeze off the Danube picked up, and the long, sheer drapes blew diaphanous into the room, wrapping her naked body in wisps of white chiffon.

  Her diabolical beauty left me cold. How tired I was of marble and chiffon, of the gilded accoutrements of power and corruption. “Enough with the glamour by moonlight, just spit it out already.”

  Obizuth’s laugh, a low scratchy growl, rattled my paper cage. “Your confinement has made you savage, my little pet. So come out. Now.”

  No one had ever summoned me against my will, and the sensation was curious, a sick compulsion I could not resist. Bit by bit, her summons dragged me along the edge of the amulet and around the circle of the Hebrew script until a gap between two words afforded me enough room so that I could squeeze through.

  It hurt. I saw stars despite my resolution not to cry out in pain or shock. And then
the hurt faded, and I stood in the moonlight, my full size again. I looked down at my hands, saw silver and starlight. I was a creature of the air.

  “Not so nice, the summoning, eh?”

  I said nothing. When I finally looked up, Obizuth was only an arm’s length away. Her vulpine features no longer frightened or repelled me; to the contrary, she haunted me with a strangely familiar beauty.

  “Knox told you about us, yes?”

  I tried to ignore her aquiline nose, the slope of her tiny, firm breasts. “Some. He just hinted about you, really. About your true—sympathies.”

  She trailed the long fingers of one hand up the length of my arm, and I gasped. I flicked my hair behind my ears and tried to move away as discreetly as I could: how she laughed at me! “My little mousie, the Staff has the three of us in his thrall. We are trapped, as surely as are you.”

  “Well, you certainly murdered me with gusto—nobody forced you to enjoy killing me.” I refused to speak German, and she wouldn’t speak Hungarian, so our conversation limped along in two languages, a deformed linguistic mismatch.

  “Nonsense, you should be thanking us. You needed to die to claim your full power—or did your old grandmama from Ein Dor forget to mention that?”

  Obizuth’s outburst shook me like a leaf in the wind. For once, I wished the demon spoke truth: nothing now could save me except my own power made manifest.

  I turned away, and she sidled closer. “Besides, we are desperate. We must have the power of your book!”

  I turned to her. “Who? And why?”

  “We three. And with the power of the Book we will be free. Surely now you understand.”

  Her voice wheedled and pled. Altogether, I preferred Obizuth murderous and cruel; the implications of her sudden genuflections disturbed me. “You don’t need my book to get away, and you know it. Go ahead and repent. Ascend to your Maker, answer for your sins. That will set you free, book or no book.”

  She shuddered, her reptilian features creasing with fear in the quicksilver moonlight. Her long, thin tongue darted at her lips. “No, no. No facing the Maker.”

  I had to laugh, though I honestly didn’t wish her harm, not even now. “I guess you just don’t want to go free badly enough.”

  Her yellow eyes narrowed. “Why don’t you take your own advice? Not so sure your Maker would approve of you either, yes?”

  Her hand shot out and captured my forearm in a viselike grip. The empty champagne glass on the piano wobbled and fell to the floor with a tinkling crash.

  I yanked my arm back, but she held me fast, and I realized with a sudden jolt that Obizuth could reach from flesh to spirit, manhandle and capture a ghost.

  I stopped struggling. Her fierce grip on my ghostly arm raised a number of disturbing questions. I put my free hand over her claw, and my ghostly grip met her demonic one. We touched. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

  I shrugged and tried to look unimpressed. “You’re right, I admit it, you and I have something in common. So tell me what you want from me.”

  “Freedom. Freedom! Surely you now understand how desperately we three wish to escape.”

  “I bet you do. So that you could start smothering babies in their sleep again, no doubt.”

  “No, no, we forget revenge. All we want now is the moonlight, the pleasure of the open sky.”

  Slowly Obizuth let go of my arm. How had she touched me? I rubbed at the shimmering skin of my forearm, and muttered, “Why, for Solomon’s sake, do you think for a second I could do the slightest bit to help you?”

  “You do not see?” Her eyes widened, and I saw the elongated pupils narrow into vertical slits. Her yellow eyes glowed like streetlamps. “Knox never explained!”

  “No, he didn’t. I’m hard-pressed to help myself, obviously. I can’t avert the witch’s prophecies. My witchcraft is no match for the wizard’s sorcery, and I’m dead. Dead!”

  “But you don’t understand. You have power enough to beat the wizard. And we sisters have granted it to you!”

  What Obizuth said was absurd, a fantastical lie. But she spoke so earnestly, it was impossible to dismiss her words out of hand.

  She nodded, her lips pressed together hard. “Knox stayed out of it because he feared you, wanted to protect us from you, the Lazarus. Kind American mortal he is.”

  Protecting the demonesses—from me! I could not keep the skepticism out of my voice. “Go on, tell me your tale, quickly. Before your friends get back here.”

  Obizuth watched me warily with her yellow lizard’s eyes as I swept along the room’s shadowy corners, stretching my ghostly legs.

  I paused at the open French doors. I could have passed right through the glass as a spirit and entered into the night; I too wanted to rise up into the moonlight and fly away, alone and free under the stars, freed from my lineage and my determination to master the Book, even now.

  I looked back at her, and her inscrutable eyes showed me no mercy. But I sensed with foreboding the pain hidden behind those strange amber irises, the suffering the Staff would inflict if he should return to find me, his golden goose, flown. Obizuth would pay the price for my flight.

  She caught my hesitation, and her lips curved into a slow, knowing smile. “You are weak, your heart is your downfall, you mortal girl.”

  My unspoken reply echoed in the silence: She knew as well as I that I was no longer mortal.

  Her smile widened. “Are you ready to hear the story I have to tell?”

  “I don’t know. What does it portend, for my people or me?”

  She shrugged, her bare shoulder glowing like a bone. “I don’t care about you, your stiff-necked people, or your doom. I want that miserable worm the Staff ground into dust. And you’re the girl to do it for me.” Her eyes flashed, deadly as knives.

  I nodded for her to begin.

  “When the world was young, the daughters of men loved the sons of God. Asmodel, beloved of the Almighty, worshiped beauty, pleasure, and the passage of time. And a girl, a silly thinarmed girl by the name of Obizuth, tempted him into loving her.

  “Long we lived, outside the Lord’s sanction. Our children, Fallen Ones, drowned in the Flood, fell victim to God’s armies, died one by one before their limitless time, each death a murder of my human heart. By the time the last one died, felled by a shepherd boy with a stone shot between his eyes, I had sold away the last of my soul and could no longer walk the earth, or love at all.

  “My Asmodel could stay no longer. He descended into the lowest levels of being, what you mortals call Hell in your ignorance, and I became something I did not recognize: a scaly thing, a creature born of air and night. And I, who no longer had sons, took my revenge on the daughters of men, that they may know the torment I now refuse to suffer.

  “I have forgotten more than I can tell you, creature trapped like a cricket in a cage. But if you unlock my prison, I will unlock yours.

  “You say you cannot defeat the Staff. That your magic, too weak, can only strike through the hands of a living, mortal soul.

  “To that, I reply:

  “One, the love that has broken you will set you free;

  “Two, you are the rightful heir of the Book, no matter what its form; and

  “Three, you are a daughter of women, not of men. I speak in riddles, but consider now what I have to say.”

  I indeed considered what Obizuth had said low and quickly, like an incantation or a curse. She had called me a daughter of women, not of men: did she mean I was now a demoness myself?

  Her obtuseness wearied me. “I still don’t understand. I thought only living mortals may work magic, throw spells, commit necromancy. That’s why you can’t beat the Staff, why you can’t kill me in human form except with your bare talons.”

  “Yes, good girl.” She drew close to me, her skin smelling of soap and sulfur. “We are sisters, you and I. You are both mortal and creature of air, now. No one can stop you. Not unless you let them.”

  “I’m only a ghost, Obizuth.”


  “Still you do not understand.” Her voice held a note of pure amazement. “How do you think the Lazarii obtained the power?”

  I stared at her, still uncomprehending. And then, with a gasp, my mind flooded with understanding.

  Raziel had spoken of the Fallen Ones, the Nephilim, not with loathing but with tenderness and regret. Obizuth had called me a daughter of women. The descended angels had taught mortal women how to compose spells and collect their power in writing.

  I finally knew. A fallen angel lurked somewhere in my family tree.

  Obizuth laughed at the conflicting emotions battling for supremacy within me. “Now at last you see, witchling. Now you know why you still remain, more than a ghost, a creature of air.”

  She smoothed her fingertips along her bony temples, combing back her long hair. “At the moment the Staff takes you for the sacrifice, rise up and call upon me, the same way that you summon your winged one. Together, we will crush him into nothingness and fly into freedom, each our own way.”

  I stared into her eyes, and she leaned forward and kissed me lightly on the lips. And though I kept my eyes open, I saw endless desert plains, a blackened sky, a cracked white earth. I suddenly understood why the Staff kept such dangerous creatures within his physical reach. Her touch contained worlds of torturous delights.

  Obizuth drew back, and her hot breath caressed my ghostly cheek. Perhaps she did not lie: if I could whisper alephs aside in my current state, maybe I could do more than die and die again, a sacrifice under the waxing moon.

  “Knox spoke up for you,” I whispered. “And Bathory spoke for Knox. That will have to be enough for me. So. We are sisters for this battle, Obizuth.”

  26

  Before the Staff returned from the baths, Obizuth had outlined for me his master plan. He intended to summon and bind Raziel, using my torment and agony as bait. Now that the moon had waxed to the full, his sorceror’s power was at its apex. Under Buda Castle, built directly on the main ley line running through the old city, ancient caves gathered the subterranean energy of the earth spirits clustered underneath the surface, where the mortals rushed above, through their brief, modern lives.