Hexed

Chapter 21

We called ahead to make sure they knew we were coming and all enchantments would be dissolved for the duration of our visit. The entire coven was waiting for us in Malina’s condo when we arrived just after four p.m.

“This is Bogumila,” Malina said, gesturing to a slim brunette who regarded me steadily with one large eye; the other eye was hidden behind a dark curtain of hair that occluded half of her face, and I wondered what I’d see if I peeked behind it. She nodded curtly at me, and the candlelight Malina favored shimmered across the curtain as it rippled gently with the movement.

“You may call me Mila in public,” Bogumila said. “The Americans stare if your name is too ethnic.”

I nodded with a half grin, and Hal—whose full name was Hallbjörn—said, “I know exactly what you mean.”

“Berta is over there in the kitchen.” Malina pointed to another dark-haired woman. Berta, who might be described as “festively plump,” was snacking on some kind of hors d’oeuvre, and she waved casually at the mention of her name. Malina proceeded to introduce the other three members of her coven, all of them blondes. Kazimiera was very tall and leggy, her tan skin and bright white teeth suggesting that she’d grown up on the beaches of California rather than under the cloudy skies of eastern Europe. Klaudia was the petite, waifish sort, with a pair of sleepy eyes and a set of pouty lips, her hair cut short and layered at the neck and her bangs teased around her face in a wet, languorous fashion, giving the impression that whenever you saw her, she had just finished having sex before you walked into the room and would now like nothing more than a French cigarette. I used to carry around a cigarette case expressly for the purpose of offering them to women like her, but that social custom lost its luster when people finally realized that offering someone a cigarette was the same thing as offering them lung cancer. Still, I patted absently where my vest pocket would be if I’d been wearing a vest, as in the late Victorian era.

The last of the Polish witches, Roksana, had her thick hair pulled back so tightly from her face that it appeared to be a crash helmet, but after routing itself severely through a silver loop at the base of her skull, it exploded into an untamed curly mane. Her owlish blue eyes regarded me steadily through a pair of round spectacles. She wore a power suit with a white blouse, shoulder-padded purple coat and black pants, and the pointy-toed black boots I’d come to associate with Malina. After a quick survey, I realized they all wore the same boots—and all of them wore something purple, though in Kazimiera’s case it was present only on a brooch she had fastened to her coat above her left breast.

I introduced Hal, because some of the witches had not met him yet. He produced two copies of the nonaggression treaty from his briefcase, all business, and likewise seven extremely sharp quills that we would use to sign it. The witches and I were each given a quill, and the signature pages of the treaties were settled on the black coffee table in front of Malina’s couch. One by one, the witches stabbed their palms with the quill and signed each copy of the treaty in blood. Then it was my turn.

I had argued for some time against signing in blood, when a fountain pen would have done just as well in legal terms; I did not want the coven to have any of my blood, period. The coven had argued vociferously for it, and eventually I gave way. In magical terms, it was much more binding, and those terms were far more strict than the legal ones. “People break the law all the time, Mr. O’Sullivan,” Malina pointed out. “People rarely break magical contracts, and those who do fail to live long afterward. Signing in blood is therefore not only for our protection, it is also for yours.”

Still, now that the moment had arrived, and six bloody signatures darkened as they dried in front of me, I hesitated. Signing it would contradict centuries of what I considered “best practice” in denying witches the opportunity to snuff me. But, truly, I saw no way forward without their help, and I needed it if I ever wished to have peace enough to restore the land around Tony Cabin. The sharp sting of the quill lingered as the blood welled out of my palm, and I did nothing to dampen the pain as I signed the treaties; it was right that I should feel it.

A general sigh of relief traveled around the room as I finished, tension releasing and tightly closeted smiles bursting free.

Berta clapped and said with a grin, “We should celebrate. Who wants chocolate and schnapps?” The suggestion was generally regarded as a fantastic one, and she bustled happily into the kitchen. The other witches came forward and shook Hal’s hand and mine, thanking us for our vision and willingness to cooperate; never had they felt so valued and respected; et cetera.

The hot chocolate and schnapps was served up with a plate of fresh-baked cookies that Berta had somehow produced. Malina rolled up the coven’s copy of the treaty, and Hal took mine and put it back in his briefcase so that the cookies could rest on the coffee table. Half of the coven sat themselves on the couch, and the rest of us pulled up assorted chairs so that we all sat in a sort of rough ellipse, with our chocolate and cookies in front of us and the orange and cardamom candles glowing merrily behind us around the room. It felt like one of the old European coffeehouses, except with far more purple than was advisable or permissible in Amsterdam or Paris.

I complimented Berta on the chocolate, then I said, “Tell me about die Töchter des dritten Hauses.”

The witches all cleared their expressions. “What would you like to know?” Malina said in neutral tones, but only with some effort. She seemed to be controlling her anger against them rather than concealing anything from me.

“Could you perhaps fill me in on the nature of their grudge against you?” I asked. “You said it began during World War Two, but I’m a little sketchy on what you were doing then. I only heard a little bit of the story when we first met.”

“What did I tell you then?”

“You told me that you all met somehow in Poland during the Blitzkrieg,” I replied, “and an indeterminate time after that, you wound up in America.”

“That was all? Okay, we found each other in Warsaw,” Malina said. “Or, rather, Radomila found us and brought us together. And once we’d formed a coven, there was much discussion of what to do. We were divining almost constantly, trying to see what would happen, what we could do, where we could go. We saw the horror that was coming and knew there was nothing we could do about it in Poland—things had progressed so far, so quickly, that our protections would be useless, and the people we needed to reach in Germany were unreachable. We may have been powerful as witches go, but even we could not turn back the Panzer divisions or stop the SS from doing whatever they pleased. We did see where we could do some good, though, so we left Warsaw a week before it fell and made our way into Bulgaria.”

“Bulgaria?” I frowned. “But that was an Axis power as well.”

“Yes, but on what terms? Czar Boris the Third joined the Axis to prevent German invasion of his country, but he committed no Bulgarian troops to the fighting. Hitler wanted him to invade Russia and ease some of the pressure on his eastern front, but Boris refused. He also flatly refused to send fifty thousand Bulgarian Jews to the death camps in Poland. I think we did well there for a while.”

My jaw dropped as the import of her words hit home. “You’re seriously taking credit for that?”

“We settled in Sofia and stayed until the assassination. We saved many lives.”

I ignored her self-congratulation and asked, “Whose assassination?”

“We’re still talking about Boris the Third.”

“Ah, yes. Who do you think killed him? There wasn’t a grassy knoll in the palace of Sofia.”

“Die Töchter des dritten Hauses.”

I shook my head. “No, I’m sorry, I do know a little bit about his death. They exhumed the body and performed an autopsy and confirmed he died of heart failure, nothing more.”

“Precisely,” Roksana said in her clipped English, and glanced at Malina by way of apology for jumping in. “It wasn’t a poisoning by the Germans, which is one of the conspiracy theories running around, nor was it a scheme of the Russians. It was the German hexen who got past our wards and killed him with a curse.”

“They have a curse that causes heart failure?”

The Polish witches all nodded in synch, and the visible half of Bogumila’s mouth said, “It is a spell of necrosis that they aim at the heart. It merely causes a small area of tissue to die, but if that tissue is heart tissue, the result is a fatal coronary.”

“It’s their favorite tool in combat,” Klaudia volunteered. So that was what they’d tried to kill me with and why the amulet punched me in the chest each time. And that was how they’d killed Perry. I’d known the curse they were throwing around was deadly, obviously, but I didn’t know precisely what it did to people. The medical examiners would pronounce Perry dead of an inexplicable heart attack, nothing more.

“It’s practically their only tool,” Berta snorted around a mouthful of cookie. “They can hardly do a damn thing otherwise without a demon to help them.”

“Yes, but unfortunately there are far too many demons willing to help,” Roksana said. “Though they always demand their price.”

“Wait.” I held up my hands. “Back to Boris. Why in nine hells would the hexen want to kill him?”

“Just like Hitler, they wanted him to invade Russia,” Roksana replied.

“So are we talking about the proverbial Nazi witches from hell?”

“No, no, no.” Malina shook her head. “They were around long before the Nazis, and they certainly have survived where the Nazis did not. They merely took advantage of the Nazis to get what they wanted.”

“So calling themselves the Daughters of the Third House has nothing to do with the Third Reich?”

“Not that I know of,” Malina said uncertainly, and Roksana confirmed her supposition.

“They were called that before the Nazis even existed,” she said. “But we have no idea what it means. They’ve never sat down to chat with us about their origins.”

“All right, so what did they want? Why kill Boris?”

Malina said, “They wanted what Hitler did—or, rather, Hitler wanted what they did—Russia.”

“What? You’re suggesting he launched that entire bloody stupid offensive due to their influence?”

“That’s precisely what I’m suggesting,” Malina agreed, nodding. “They sent him succubi and they gave him the proper dreams of Lebensraum—they’d done the same thing with Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg in World War One. And when the eastern front was going poorly and Boris refused to send troops in 1943—thanks to our influence—the hexen killed him and everybody thought Hitler had done it.”

“It didn’t turn out the way they’d hoped, though.” Roksana smiled grimly. “They hoped the Bulgarian regents left behind would be more malleable and harder for us to control and protect, but the regents proved ridiculously stupid and weak, and instead of invading Russia, Russia invaded Bulgaria and that was that.”

“Which was fine with us, really,” Malina explained. “The Bulgarian Jews were safe and the hexen’s plots were foiled, so that was all that mattered.”

“They’ve always wanted revenge for our role in that, however,” Roksana added, “because they probably still think they could have won if Bulgaria had joined in.”

“Why did they want to invade Russia so badly?”

The coven members looked at one another’s faces to see who wished to answer. It was Kazimiera who finally spoke. “There is a group of witch hunters based there that plagues their kind especially. If they found us by accident, they would not hesitate to attack, but they actively hunt die Töchter des dritten Hauses because of their associations with demonkind. The hexen hoped the SS would take care of the witch hunters and eliminate a thorn in their side. Himmler was obsessed with the occult and would have found them for sure if he’d had a free hand in Russia.”

Rabbi Yosef Bialik’s Russian accent and shadowy organization came to mind. “I’m surprised Stalin didn’t stamp them out. Any idea what these witch hunters called themselves?”

The ladies all shook their heads slowly yet in unison. It was a creepy effect. I wondered idly if they practiced such maneuvers.

“And how do you know that the hexen were motivated by these mysterious Russians—or, rather, by their desire to kill the Russians?”

The witches swiveled their heads in synch to Malina and so did I, waiting for the answer. Her eyes fell to her lap. “We captured the one who assassinated Boris the Third and interrogated her. Thoroughly. Radomila led it,” she said, referring to their erstwhile coven leader, “but I was present. She told us much before she died. And that is another reason die Töchter des dritten Hauses hate us so much.”

“I see. Well, they appear to have had much influence on Germany’s side. They had access to the Führer himself, you say. Did they also suggest to him, via succubi or some other method, all of that master-race nonsense? Did they suggest the death camps and so on?”

“Not that we know of,” Berta said, a few crumbs of her third cookie spraying from her mouth as she talked. “They just wanted to use Germany as a club to bash Russia with. They weren’t Nazis; they were opportunists. Believe me, I would like to assign to them every evil of that war, but the most unspeakable atrocities were committed by humans without any infernal influence whatsoever.”

“She’s right,” Klaudia agreed, “the Holocaust wasn’t their idea. But they didn’t seem to disapprove either. And they joined in when it suited them.”

I frowned. “How do you mean they joined in?”

“They were specifically hunting Kabbalists for a while—”

“Kabbalists!” I exclaimed. I slapped my forehead. “So that’s why he didn’t die.”

“Who didn’t die?” the witches all said in polyphonic harmony. They were like a Greek chorus.

I sighed and collected my thoughts. “I have known since this morning that I have met these hexen before—or at least seen their work. They tried to kill me outside my home with the same necrotic curse they used on Boris the Third, but my wards deflected it.” I purposely failed to explain that my cold iron amulet deflected it. Nothing in the nonaggression treaty required me to reveal the true nature of my defenses to them. “The last time my wards reacted in such a manner was during World War Two.”

Berta stopped chewing and looked at me with widened eyes. “Really? Where were you?”

“I was in the Atlantic Pyrenees, escorting a Jewish family into Spain, where they could have taken a train all the way to Lisbon and gained passage to safety in South America.”

Berta held up her hands. “Stop right there. This sounds good,” she said, and hauled herself off the couch. “I’m going to make popcorn.” The other witches made sounds of protest, perceiving that it was rude somehow to expect me to weave a tale worthy of movie snackage, but Berta waved off their protests. “Come on, he’s a Druid; he’ll love playing the bard for a while.” More protests followed, but they were halfhearted, and eventually the witches turned to me with pleading looks to forgive them for being so ineffective.

In truth, it made me feel closer to the witches. One thing that’s never changed in two millennia is that people love to hear war stories—at least, stories in which their side wins. The gods know that there was little enough in that war to cheer about other than the eventual victory. But the coven had lived through it, I had lived through it, and we had both fought in it, albeit in an unconventional manner. It was a bond between us, and telling this story would strengthen it and provide the foundation for shared victories to come.

Seeing that I would be required to speak at length, I mentally reorganized my tale. The real reason I didn’t take a more active role in the war was that the Morrigan had forbidden it. During that period, our relationship had been a bit uncertain.

“Do you know how many battles there are for me to watch over throughout the world right now?” she’d asked me when I’d tried to enlist with the British. “I cannot be worrying about you every bloody moment and making sure you don’t step on a mine or get bombed by the Luftwaffe. Stay out of the war, Siodhachan, and don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself—specifically, attention from the Fae.”

I didn’t want to imply that I had any sort of relationship with the Morrigan now, though, so I told the witches a half-truth once Berta returned to the couch with bowls of popcorn and indicated that I could proceed. The witches all leaned forward in their seats, and so did Hal. He’d never heard what I’d done during the war either.

“As you know, I was hiding from Aenghus Óg at the time, as I had been for most of the common era, and I could do nothing overtly magical that would draw his attention. But neither could I simply hide in the Amazon and wait for it all to be over: My conscience would not allow it. So I became a maquisard, joining the French Resistance in the southwest, where I shepherded Jewish families through the wilderness to escape the Nazis.

“The people in my network knew me as the Green Man. If someone insisted on a Christian name, I called myself Claude and left it at that. The families under my care arrived in Spain faster and healthier and more reliably than those of any other smuggler. All told, I saved sixty-seven families, taking them in large groups at times. That’s not on the scale of your fifty thousand saved in Bulgaria”—an accomplishment I privately doubted they could reasonably take credit for—“but it was my small contribution to peace. And you must keep in mind I was in the Gascony region, which was fairly overrun with Nazis, away from the bulk of the maquisards. Getting them safely out of the cities was often more trouble than taking them across the mountains.

“Only one family in my care failed to make it out of France. I picked them up outside Pau, and we were to take the Somport Pass over the Pyrenees. The father was a kind man who doted on his children, a scientist of some kind, but I couldn’t tell you their names even if I wished. So much of the work was an anonymous business, for everyone’s safety.” I paused to take a sip of my hot chocolate, which had cooled somewhat, and Berta watched me impatiently.

“They were a fairly young couple with three children: a boy of ten, a girl of eight, and another boy of five. The boys had little suits on—their best—and the girl had a gray wool coat buttoned over a red dress. The mother was dressed in similar fashion, with a heavy coat worn over a dress. The father carried a briefcase of papers and photos, and the family had nothing more than the clothes on their backs. The father—well, there were traces of magic in his aura that I didn’t take the trouble to examine, but now I see that he was a Kabbalist, and his wards were sufficient, as were mine, to deflect this necrotic spell of the hexen—Gewebetod, ja?”

“Ja,” Malina nodded. “That is the word they use.”

“Six witches ambushed us in the night before we were even halfway to the Somport Pass—one witch for each member of our party, which led me to believe we’d been betrayed somehow. The mother and three children fell immediately, clutching their chests as they landed in the leaves of autumn. I fell down too, because I had felt the strike upon my wards, and I expected a grenade or a spray of machine gun fire next. I cast camouflage on myself once I hit the ground, then crawled as quietly as I could away from where I had fallen.

“Whatever noise I made was masked well. The father was the only one left standing, but he was screaming the names of his wife and children, then crouching over them and trying to revive them as I headed for cover.”

“His Kabbalistic wards shielded him.” Berta narrowed her eyes and nodded knowingly.

“Correct. But I did not know this at the time. I never heard him utter a spell, I’d never bothered to check his aura closely, and so while I suspected he must be special somehow—why else would we be singled out for such attention?—he could have just as easily been politically important, rather than magically. In any event, he was too carried away with his grief to respond to the attack. I do not know why his family had no protection—perhaps his abilities were a secret even from them; perhaps they would not have approved. I simply do not know.

“The question of his power, however, was quickly rendered moot. Six figures leached out of the surrounding forest, darker shapes hovering in the darkness, and they poured bullets into him out of handguns fitted with silencers. He fell dead on top of his wife, and when the figures ran out of bullets, they reloaded and shot his still corpse again and again, many times in the head and in the chest, so that the body was so unsuitable, he could not possibly recover by any kind of sorcery.

“They even stood and watched the corpse for a while, to make sure no healing began, and all that time I remained silent and unmoving, perhaps nine or ten meters away, next to a tree. There was nothing I could do for any of the family at that point. I had no defense against bullets besides the ability to heal, and these figures had already demonstrated what they would do if they suspected I could; and, beyond that, I was armed with nothing but my sword. I also had no idea who or what the assassins were, besides witches of some kind. Given the setting, I assumed they were some secret squad of Himmler’s who’d been sent after this particular man.

“Eventually one of them noticed I wasn’t there. ‘Gab es nicht sechs von ihnen? Ich zähle nur fünf Körper,’ she said.”

“Scheisse!” Berta cursed in German. “What did they do then?”

“Wait a moment, Atticus,” Hal interjected. “I don’t speak German. What was that you just said?”

“Weren’t there six of them? I count only five bodies.”

“Oh, shit,” Hal said, and grabbed a bowl of popcorn out of Bogumila’s lap. Her visible eye widened comically, but otherwise she made no protest. “What happened next?” he asked, throwing a handful in his mouth.

“They chose one of the witches to stay behind and watch the dead Kabbalist for miraculous healing, while the other five spread out looking for me. They couldn’t see through my camouflage, though, and they quickly passed my position and melted into the woods.”

“They had no infrared abilities or a half-decent sense of smell?” Hal asked.

Klaudia shook her head and answered him. “As Berta said earlier, they are practically useless in the field without a demon riding along. Had there been one with them, they would have spotted him easily. They probably had some sort of aid for night vision but nothing to penetrate the kind of cloak he had on.”

Camouflage isn’t a cloaking spell—it’s camouflage—but I didn’t bother to correct her as I continued. “That left me alone with a single witch and an opportunity to take a little vengeance for the family before I made my escape. The man’s suit jacket was made of natural fibers, so I formed a bond between his left sleeve and his side, which caused his arm to move abruptly down. As you may imagine, this movement of a supposedly über-dead corpse startled the witch excessively, and she shrieked and began emptying yet another clip into the poor man. Using her noise as cover, I drew my sword, dashed forward ten meters, and struck off her head.”

This elicited a round of cheers from the Polish witches, and there was a general toast and more schnapps poured before I could continue.

“She fell next to the family, and I pelted down the mountain toward Pau as the other witches returned to investigate the shrieking. I was far ahead of them by the time they discovered the body and figured out what must have happened. They gave some pursuit, but they never came close. I stopped using the Somport Pass for the duration of the war, and I never saw them again or figured out why they attacked us, until just now when you gave me the information I lacked.”

“So what happened when they attacked you today?” Kazimiera asked. “Did you kill another one?” Her tone was hopeful.

“No, the setting where we met was not appropriate,” I replied, disappointing the entire coven. “But I did acquire a little something,” I added, as I reached into my pocket and withdrew the blond witch’s lock of hair, “that should enable us to find them a bit more easily.”

“That’s theirs?” Malina asked incredulously, eyes riveted on the hair held between my thumb and forefinger.

“It’s from only one of them, but, yes,” I said. “Can you figure out where they’ve been staying with this?”

The witches all nodded together and said, “Definitely.”