Hexed

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