By means that were never made clear, Etude had acquired a small cafe with a large, perfectly round door made of rough wood panels painted red. He called it Cafe Cinota, after the cenotes of the Yucatan—sinkhole wells that the Maya believed were doors to another world. The cafe was a door to a new world of cuisine, which the newly capitalist owner of the large yellow guest house across the courtyard resented. His customers—American tourists, Western European businessmen, the occasional Japanese salaryman—wanted croissants with marmalade, not maize-bread with cactus jelly. They wanted ghost tours and macabre Transylvanian lore, not bright Mayan decor and palm-leaf place mats. Of course, the locals wanted neither. They wanted a cheap place to drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and complain about the government. The cafe probably would’ve failed if it hadn’t been close to a university, which offered a small bohemian clientele.
Of course, being so close to the inn, the odd tourist naturally wandered in as well, particularly for breakfast, which they tried to the morning after our adventure in the mountains. I was woken by loud and very persistent banging. I thought my host would answer. After several minutes, when it was clear he would not, I sat up and stormed downstairs. The cafe was dark and empty. Outside, the balding and bulging proprietor of the inn was frantic. His guests wanted their morning coffee, which the innkeeper touted in his advertisements: Imported from Ecuador!
“Where is he?” the man asked in French.
His teal pants were at least two sizes too small, and despite that he wore no belt, he had tucked his white collared shirt into them all the same. The shirt had floral stitching. I saw him glance at my hands—at the marks. I can only imagine he thought Etude and I were part of the same cult, and I wondered then if he wouldn’t call the police. To prevent that, I thought I should beat him to the threat. I told him I had no idea where Etude was and if he didn’t cease with the noise, I would call the police immediately and make a complaint against him. Then I slammed the door and returned to bed.
But it was useless. By then, I couldn’t sleep. I washed and dressed and wandered to a nearby guest house, which had a terrace bar overlooking the narrow river. I bought a pack of cigarettes, despite that I hadn’t smoked in decades, and ordered some of the local wine. When half the pack was gone and the bottle empty, I asked for a telephone, which was brought to me on a long cord. I picked up the receiver and asked for the operator. It took several minutes of haggling in bad Romanian before I got through to Inspector Dragoș, who was somewhat surprised to hear from me—or so I could tell by the subtle chirp in his otherwise persistent deadpan. We greeted each other in Russian and I inquired after his wife and children as if we were old friends. I did not use my name in case his phone was tapped. He asked if I was okay, and I told him I was fine and that his “gift” was wonderful and had worked exactly as he had intended. I asked if he was free to speak and he said yes, albeit somewhat hesitantly, as if we should be careful what was said. I asked if the house we had once visited in Little Village was occupied and he said yes, which no doubt meant that all my belongings had been confiscated and the place thoroughly searched. I asked if he wouldn’t mind checking on an old friend, and he asked who without answering affirmatively. I gave him Etude’s name and suggested he call me back with whatever he could find, but he said there was no need and that there was bad news, that Interpol had been to all the police stations in the region, and that there was a WANTED notice hanging in all of them with that name below a picture of a bald man. Then I thanked him for his time, and he told me not to mention it.
“Milanova,” I said to him.
“Excuse me?”
“You wanted to know my name.”
He was quiet for a moment, and I explained that I owed him a debt, and that if he ever needed my help, I would do what I could. He said he understood and we made our goodbyes. I hung up the phone and kept my hand on the receiver a moment. I dialed, hesitating for a long moment on the last spin of the rotor.
It rang and Beltran’s secretary answered. It took a few minutes to convince her who I was.
“Mila?” I heard him say finally. “My God, is it really you? Where are you? I will come. Are you on the moon? I will fly there on the night breeze.”
“Beltran, I . . .”
I was taken aback by the sound of his voice. Immediately, I regretted the call. He sounded so old. It wasn’t how I remembered him. It wasn’t how I wanted to remember him. In my mind, he was ever vigorous and tall, a young bear in a high hat. But the man on the other end of the line was in the waning years of his life, and that made me sad, for it meant one day soon, I would live in a world without him. I felt tears. I had been his wife for as long as I could. I couldn’t anymore, but I still loved him.
“Mila, where are you?” he asked. “Are you in trouble? You must tell me.”
“No. Well . . . maybe. I’m not sure.”
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Beltran. Did something happen to me?”
“What do you mean?”
“In Siberia. Did something happen to me?”
There was a long silence.
“Where are you?” he repeated.
“Please just answer the question. Did something happen to me or not?”
“I have never spoken of it,” he said softly, “if that’s what you are asking.”
“I’m not. I’m asking what happened there. What do you know? What did I tell you?”
There was another long pause.
“I know it sounds odd, darling. Please, just—”
“Mila, what did you do?”
“I—” I stopped.
“What did you do?”
I knew that voice. I hung up the phone.
After the Wall Street crash of 1929, which saw most of their wealth disappear, our enemies fell to the brink. They were desperate, and through the ’30s, began to plot war as their final solution. After the fighting was over, thinking peace was upon us, Hank and I retired for a time. He married Nancy Willard, his childhood sweetheart, and started a family—a bit late for fatherhood, perhaps, but I was happy for him. I visited the couple at their home in Chicago whenever I could, but I never stayed long. Although she was only ever polite to me, Nancy was a straightforward woman from the middle of the continent and didn’t quite know what to make of her husband’s relaxed, casual joking with a foreign woman who always dressed sharply and who never seemed to grow a wrinkle. Rather than create trouble for my friend, I kept my visits brief and always withdrew without warning, as if to underline what an irresponsible person I was. Truth be known, seeing the happy couple and their young children stirred something in me that I hadn’t felt before. I did my best to ignore it.
As it happened, our parting was brief. Hank and I were revived by The Masters in the middle of the century. After conventional warfare had failed and their forces scattered in secret, Hitler’s sponsors turned to more directly occult mechanisms. Casting darkness—which is to say hiding objects or people in plain sight—had always required an experienced warlock, someone with the necessary skill to perform the ritual, as well as the Book of the Nameless itself, known in wider circles as the Necronomicon, from which the spell emanated. As such, our focus in the war shifted from elimination of the book—which had eluded The Masters since its rediscovery in the 19th century—to the elimination of the senior warlocks such that there would not be enough of them to use it effectively. The warlocks distrusted each other almost as much as they distrusted us, which meant very few of them were ever allowed to set eyes on its pages—an edge we exploited. Our unity was our strength, or so we were told.
But after the open conflict ended, everything changed. A Spanish warlock named Zaragoza, an acolyte of Rasputin and one-time adviser to General Franco, developed the means to imbue the power of the book within specially designed objects—amulets, mostly—such that they could cast the wearer in darkness indefinitely and without need of a talented magician. Suddenly, agents of the dark, though depleted in number, could move about in secret as never before, completely invisible to the Great Eye. Almost overnight, half of my colleagues were murdered in their beds, along with their families—including many children. At once, finding and destroying the book again became our organization’s singular mission.
As the surviving members of the Winter Bureau reassembled in a secret chamber, families in tow, I remember asking the aged Master Crowley why we had ever stopped seeking it. I suppose I was becoming disillusioned. I was starting to understand why it was The Masters had been so long unable to deliver the warlocks a knockout blow. They were too much like them. Still, leaving America to join the fight was convenient for me. I had no family to protect, and my adoptive home was becoming ever more hostile to anyone of Russian ancestry. But I begged Hank to stay. He was then past 50, and I tried to impress upon him the immense value of what he had. But then, one would sooner convince the tides to stop turning than Henry Hunter to forgo his duty, and after seeing Nancy and the children placed safely into hiding, once again we were off.
It wasn’t the same. Hank was heavier and grayer and used to life as a suburban father and teacher, and our enemies were desperate and vicious and nimble as never before. On our second mission, we met young Beltran, gregarious and cocksure. He kissed my hand wearing an amulet of steel and obsidian, and of course that fur hat that made him seem ten feet tall. He was barely twenty, and I laughed. We met him again a few years later when he was our contact in Turkey on the fateful trip that saw the gray-haired Dr. Hunter shot by Zaragoza himself.
“Stupid, stupid man,” I chided as I frantically tried to stop the blood from pouring from his chest. It covered his shirt and my hands and the floor.
We were in the back of a truck which shook violently back and forth as young Beltran, behind the wheel, weaved at speed through traffic to secure our escape.
“I know,” Hank said, smiling up at me. “Mila, don’t tell Nancy—”
They were his last words.
Some part of me died with Professor Henry Hunter. I realized then that in time, the rest of me would die as well—all the parts that mattered, anyway—and in 10,000 years, I would walk the world a zombie. Or worse, as a wicked thing who cared nothing for the mortal ants around her. I wanted desperately to deliver Hank’s body to his wife in person, but I was denied entry at the border. Now a superpower, almost against its will, America was beginning its long turn away from the freedom of its youth. It’s still turning.
Within days of Hank’s death, I was given new orders: an urgent mission, an impossible mission, one that made it clear both how desperate we were and how expendable I was, even to the point of damnation. Young Beltran, who had taken charge of Hank’s body out of sheer respect for the man, warned me not to accept, just as I had warned Hank. Standing on passenger liner, looking out at the Statue of Liberty, I told him I was going to do it, but not for The Masters. Nor even for the world. I would do it for my friend, because that’s what he would’ve wanted. I never saw Nancy or the children again.
Winter of the following year, haggard and alone, I rode a train through the Urals. It was quite possibly the defining moment of my long life, the fulcrum on which it all balanced. I traveled under a fake identity and didn’t dare leave my locked compartment. In my case I carried the most wanted item in the entire world. The most wanted item in the history of the world.
A book.
A book that never should’ve been written.
I was rushing to meet Beltran, who, against my prohibitions, had followed me as far as he could and had acted as my handler and lone contact. Although our communication was minimal, he was my sole tether to the world of men. When I fled, it was unexpected and without warning. The enemy had suffered a surprise attack. A young Lakota shaman named John Tenfeathers, acting on his own courage, had crossed the shadow realm on foot to open a secret front at the enemy’s rear. In the ensuing chaos, I stole the book and tried to cross the battle, but being confused for a warlock, was attacked by my own people. I fled. Beltran was my closest ally, but he was very far away. I wasn’t sure I could reach him. If I failed and was captured, I would be damned to an infinity of pain. But hearing of the attack, Beltran had traveled straight to the enemy’s fortress, the Handred Keep, at great risk to himself. Impossibly, he was waiting for me on the platform of a little station south of the Urals. As I stepped down from the train, shaking and emaciated, I broke into tears at the sight of him. All Hell was at our footsteps. Thunder cracked at the horizon, which was dark as if at the approach of a violent storm.
Mr. Morgan was right, or so it seemed. I hadn’t settled in Little Village by accident. Apparently, I’d had a plan. I needed a way to move about undetected. Something had happened to me in Siberia, inside the Handred Keep—something so terrible, I wanted to blot it from my mind. So I conspired to steal my own memories. I suspect a normal person would’ve simply killed themselves, but without the ability, I had had to find other means. In so doing, I had drawn attention. Mr. Morgan was clearly looking to exploit my precarious relationship with my ex-husband to unseat him and take his place among the seven. What that had to do with the strange young man I had met, or his mysterious quest, I didn’t know, but it seemed the answer lay buried in the forest of forgetting, and that if I was going to free myself from Mr. Morgan’s trap—and avoid a return to Everthorn—I would have to deliver it, whatever it was, to Beltran. That meant, first, helping my young friend find it, and then betraying him to the Bureau.
I needed a plan, and that meant I needed to know who this young fellow was. I left the bar and walked through the town center, where several of the streets were still paved with stones. I visited the red-roofed cathedral, which was quaint but beautiful. I lit a candle and said a prayer. After a long silence, I exited out the back and wandered across the square, where I lingered and turned about enough that I was confident I wasn’t being followed. I told a stranger my purse had been stolen and asked where I could find the police station, which I surmised would not be far from the church and nearby bank. They never are. I was right, and five minutes hence, I was staring at the police community billboard. It hung near the hall to the single unisex toilet, whose aquamarine door had a frosted glass pane at the top that made it possible to see the ghost movements of the occupant. Etude’s picture hung in black and white next to the announcement of an upcoming change to the hunting laws. New licenses were in effect, it seemed, and of course new fees as well.
There were few surveillance cameras in those days, especially in former Eastern Bloc countries, and I snagged the notice when no one was looking and walked out. With the help of a waiter at a cafe, I was able to translate most of it. Information was sparse, but it said Etude, a young man of 21 years, was “believed to be acting in the country,” and that he was a Satanist, a known practitioner of the black arts, and therefore “highly dangerous.” It warned that he was wanted for questioning in France in connection with “serious” but unspecified crimes. It gave his vital statistics and mentioned that he could be readily identified by his most distinguishing feature: tribal marks on his hands.
I looked at my own. I rubbed them together, as if the marks might come off.
I returned to the cafe just before dark, expecting to find my young friend there, but he was still missing without so much as a note. I made myself dinner and fell asleep reading. I was awoken by a large clatter. I grabbed a rug beater, which was the closest thing I could find to a weapon, and crept down the stairs in the dark. But it was only Etude.
“Where have you been?” I demanded.
He looked up innocently. His face reflected the light from the burner on the stove, and I realized he was so used to coming and going as he pleased that it simply hadn’t occurred to him to say anything, and so there was equally no point in getting mad. He wouldn’t have understood it. That early, I didn’t have the energy anyway.
“What are you doing?”
He had heated a vat of viscous amber, the color of dark beer, and was removing small quantities of it with a glass pipette.
I leaned closer. It smelled sweet. “Is that honey?”
“Yes,” he said again. “This is for you.”
“For me?”
I watched him dribble the amber liquid onto small dipping plates. “What is it?”
Cemeteries, he explained, have flowers. Lots of flowers. Some are cultivated in the landscaping. Others are brought cut and placed on stones and markers. All of them grow out of death—at least symbolically, if not literally as well. He had discovered a hive whose bees were dining on funerary flowers and cemetery growth and returned that morning with nearly a liter of honey that he had harvested at the witching hour the night before. “The Nectar of Death” he called it as he dribbled some from the end of the glass pipette. He served it to his guests that morning drizzled in espresso and brushed over fresh-baked maize-bread. Then he watched his guests through the window of the kitchen the way a wolf watches a hen through a fence.
“What are we looking for?” I asked.
“I have no idea.”
I looked at the unsuspecting patrons. I watched a plump German tourist with a sore at the side of her lip shove the last bite of buttery, honey-glazed croissant into her mouth. I watched a businessman from Bucharest in a snug V-neck dip his finger into the tiny porcelain pitcher in which the honey had been served and scoop the last drops into his mouth. He wiped the finger across his pursed lips with his eyes closed, like it was morphia.
“Well, what usually happens?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said with a curious scowl as he scribbled in his notebook. “No one has before made such a thing.”
He was reckless even then.
“With a curse as strong as yours,” he explained, “we must break new ground. We start with exposure to a concentrated sap of death.” He kept scribbling. “We will put it under an air hood until it reduces to a solid crystal.”
“And then?”
“You will eat it!” he exclaimed.
I turned back to the restaurant. “And what about them?”
He looked up. “A lawyer, two bourgeois tourists, a professor with his vapid mistress, three advertising men, and a French communist. If you can point to a single one who isn’t already dead inside, I shall rush to prepare an antidote!”
I looked back at the little dining room with the brightly painted windows. “They’re not going to . . .”
He scribbled in his notebook and raised an eyebrow. “Doubtful. Not with such a small quantity. I suspect at most a slight stupor, like an elixir of nightshade. Or Ulysses and the lotus.”
He looked up again and scanned the room with the penetrating gaze. The plump German did seem a bit listless. Her eyes fluttered.
“But I could be wrong,” he whispered. He picked up his notebook as if annoyed and walked toward the back. “Let me know promptly if any of them start raving about a knight.”
“A knight?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
“There is an apparition that haunts this place. If any of our patrons begin to succumb to the stupor of death, then the dead will appear to them.” He turned again for the back.
“How can be sure they’ll say anything?”
He called to me from the down the hall. “The poor wretch drags his innards across the floor like a sack of potatoes. I’m quite sure they’ll mention it!”
He was up early again the next day. He burst into my room well before the dawn.
“HA!” he yelled from my swinging door, which hit the wall with a crack.
I snapped awake.
“It was a trick! But I have seen. Come. We have work.”
I looked at the clock. “It’s nearly four in the morning.”
But he had already retreated down the stairs to the kitchen. I decided he was, if not a charlatan, then the most dedicated dabbler I had yet met. I was used to respectable and bespectacled men who didn’t contemplate the occult before their mid-morning pipe. I washed my face and slipped on my dress and came down the stairs to a great clatter. The stove was ablaze. I thought he was going to set the whole building on fire. And he almost did.
He’d had a dream, he explained, but wouldn’t say what. “The Chinese ancients were geomancers of enduring grace and skill.” And then, “a riddle and a riddle! But I have the key.”
Half an hour passed that way. He asked nothing of me, and I wasn’t sure why I was there. I sat with my head propped on my arm as he mixed earth with a tincture of mercury. My elbow grew cold from the steel counter and the chill crept up my arm. My eyes began to droop.
“HA!” He yelled at me with one finger raised.
I sat up and sighed. “I don’t know how you expect me to stay awake in the middle of the night. At least have the decency to brew some tea.”
I looked around the kitchen for evidence of where he kept the French presses. It was quiet, like the grave, and I remembered what he had said earlier about the knight. I pulled my shawl tighter.
“How do you know there’s an apparition?” I asked.
“My eyes were opened many years ago,” he said.
I’m sure I rolled my own. “That’s a boast. Not an answer.”
He turned from his twisting fire. He reached a hand to his face and stretched one eyelid. He showed it to me. Then he stretched the other. There were narrow scars across the top of both, near the sockets, extending almost, but not quite, the full width of the tissue. Whoever had cut them had left them attached, but only just.
He went back to his work.
“I don’t understand. Is that supposed to mean they were cut?”
He spoke softly without turning. “By the same man who washed my scalp clean of hair with water of lime. Who pressed barbed hooks into my fingertips until the nails lifted. Who pierced my chest with a long slender spike made from the seed pod of the a’htuai tree, whose roots run deep and whose branches touch the sky. He who was my master.”
“How old were you?”
“Seven,” he said without turning. “A most auspicious year.”
“Seven? Someone cut your eyelids and stuck barbs under your fingernails when you were seven years old? Who would do such a thing?”
“A man of great conviction.” His voice grew. “Who cared deeply for his people. It was an act of mercy.”
“It was an act of torture.”
“Not mercy for me,” he explained. “For those we served. It was necessary so that I could perform the duties for which I had been chosen. So I could call upon the great spirit to bless us. So that evil would be driven from our midst. So that the sick would become well and the community prosper. The eyes must be cut open,” he explained as he worked, “so that they may see the shades and shadows that prey on the weak and sinful. The head must be cleansed so that the thinking is clear and the mask and headdress become extensions of the body, without impediment. The fingertips must be barbed so that they can grasp the soul and drag it away to be cleansed, and return it whole. The heart must be pierced so it remains always open to the suffering of my neighbors, whom I would be called upon to heal.”
“So what happened?” I meant it as a jab.
Rather than jab back at me, as I expected him to, he acknowledged my observation of his cool, almost callous nature, and agreed. “Ah. Yes. The spike of a’htuai never reached my heart,” he said. “It snapped inside my sternum.” He turned to me again and touched the center of his chest. “It is still there. Under the skin. If you would like to feel.”
I declined.
Etude was always afflicted. To me, he always seemed bent, half in and half over the world, as if God had reached down and twisted him in space. He never fit. Anywhere. After his adoptive parents removed him to France, he was by all accounts universally reviled—by his teachers, by his classmates, by the French authorities, for whom he remained insufferably arrogant and insistently foreign. Because of his patent skill with ingredients and concoctions, he was given early admittance to a prestigious cooking school in Paris when he was only half past 16. I think madame et monsieurÉtranger cared for him as best they could but by then needed to be rid of him, for their own sake. What strange anomalies an angry, sulking, 14-year-old Etude summoned into their home, I can only imagine. Sending him to cooking school was a way to get him out of the house and to discharge their duty to supply him with an occupation. He excelled, of course, though he never graduated. He was ejected after 22 months.
It will be difficult for some people to hear, I’m sure, but cooking was only ever his hobby. It’s how the world knows him, but he saw it only as a distraction from his serious work, a way for him to make his way in a world that had no use for a shaman.
I sat in the kitchen and watched him douse the pillar of fire on the stove. As the steam and smoke cleared, a metal pot appeared. It was square and heavy and tinted copper green. It had a single handle but stood on four legs. The corners were round and the exterior was carved in shapes from the Shang Dynasty. Every tip and angle glowed red hot. It had been completely consumed by flame. Etude lifted it with heavy tongs and set it aside. Then he hung the tongs from a pot hook and leaned back. He didn’t speak. He just looked far, far away.
“The old man was shocked,” he said softly. He touched his chest again. His palms were still bare for his mark still adorned my own. “Even when the signs are clear, still we won’t accept them.”
I waited.
“I never knew she who bore me. There were signs. At my birth. When a shaman grows old, the Great Spirit sends his replacement and marks the coming. I came very late and my master was very old indeed. He had been looking for the signs for many years. For a time, I think he despaired that the knowledge would be lost. But one day, I came, and after I was weaned, I was taken from my mother to his home in the earth, far from the village, near where the jaguar dwelt. To me, he was father and mother, master and guide. He taught me everything, all he knew. When I was seven, he cut my eyes and washed away my hair. When the a’htuai seed snapped, he just looked at it in his hand. It had cut him as well, and he bled. The tip was lodged in my chest, and I writhed by the fire. Screaming in tongues. He said he had to consult our ancestors and left me to wail for many hours until I passed out from pain. When he returned, he said nothing of it. He cleaned what he could and bandaged my wound. And then the ceremony was done.”
There was a long pause.
“After that, he was never warm with me again. He was only teacher. Never lord.”
I frowned. So many of people today look back and see only the oppression of aristocracy. But a good lord was also a mighty servant of his people.
“Does it ever hurt?”
He reached for the tongs again with a weak smile. “It never stopped.”
I’m still not sure if he meant the shard or the old man’s change.
“Is that why you left?” I asked.
He smiled as if hiding a great pain. “No. At my thirteenth birthday, I was required to spend a year in the jungle alone. To prove I had mastered the skills required to serve my people. When I returned, the land was scorched.” He paused. “The Sacred Tree was cut down. As were all the others.”
“Loggers?”
CRACK!
I jumped when the lid of the metal pot popped open. It hit the ceiling and fell to the floor with a clatter. So much steam bellowed that I lost sight of the young chef, nor could I hear him over the loud bubbling. The liquid was still boiling. As the cloud parted, I saw Etude dunk the tongs into the scalding fluid, whose frothing bubbles rolled with all the colors of the rainbow, and what he returned glinted like sunlight between the serrated metal teeth. It seemed a giant diamond—oblong and uncut.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A jewel of many colors.”
“What does it do?”
“Now, nothing. But when carved, it will become a prism that refracts light from that which cannot be seen.” He put it inside a lead box waiting to one side. “It must be carved before the sun’s first rays strike it. Come. There is much to do before the dawn!”