To be clear, none of this would have happened without you, either directly or indirectly. Reading the amazing work of some of you gave me the emotional bravery to look past my initial cringe at self published work. I am now of the opinion that if you believe in it, and if the the industry won’t make a place for it (which it seems to be doing less and less), you should take matters into your own hands.

I’ve now sold forty copies. Is it a lot, well, it’s forty more than I sold while it moldered on my hard drive for three years, and a respectable amount more than the self publishing average. A lot of you have supported me in this, either by buying one, requesting one for your local library, by—be still my heart—recommending it to a friend who bought it, or in the case of accidentally buying two.

If you haven’t bought it yet see one. I you have, see two.

One: see below for why you should.

Amazon

Two: If you have, A: recommend it to more friends, why not!? Do you have a Jewish guy in your life between the ages of fifteen and forty five? Tell them you’ve got the book they’ve been dying for. B: I’m also needing some more Amazon and Goodread’s reviews, so pop over and hook me up.1

Goodreads

SPECIAL THANKS…

I can’t do one of these since it would be all of you. If you think I would have put you in this section, you’re right and I mean it genuinely. It would just be like…60 people.

This is my submission to ’s Waffle House prompt. I’d like to take this chance to thank for giving me so many opportunities to stretch myself. Last round I wrote one of the most intelligent things I’ve ever put to paper. This one… Well…

SUM FLUX

The Waffle House

Somewhere in the sticky syrup flood…

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2 months ago · 97 likes · 25 comments · Sandolore Sykes and SUM FLUX

It’s Wednesday, July 25, and I’m recording with my uncle Mel for my sophomore year family history project.

Hey. I’m Mel.

Not yet—wait until I signal you.

Oops.

And I wanted to record with Mel because he’s pretty quiet. My mom’s a bigger talker but he kind of keeps to himself, so I thought this would be a good way to get to know him more.

That’s…well, thanks, Sophie. I’m touched.

So, Mel. Um, the worksheet says you need to state your name and then—let’s just jump into a question, and I chose question number six. What’s the best day you can remember?

Um. Okay. I’m Mel Green, I’m forty-six and the best day I can remember…

...It was the first warm day of spring in the first warm year of this wild century. I was twenty, full of life, built like a Middle-American Jean Claude Van Damme with a faux-hawk sharp enough to cut a g-string. The wide legs of my jenkos swished about my thick legs like the skirts of a sultan and the screenprinted faces of Cartman and Kenny bulged on the pectorals of a body built by sweat, hard work, and hapkido. I was young. I was the hottest shit in Northern Kentucky.

Uncle Mel! You can’t say—

Shhh…I’m in the drift. Me and Cleveland and Other-Cleveland had just got done ripping donuts in the parking lot of a Blockbuster Video and decided it was time for some well-deserved late night Kickin’ Pancakes at the Waffle House. Back then Waffle House was trying to compete with I-Hop and they made a significant blunder with their core audience, aiming their marketing at the skateboard and Ninja Turtles crowd. For six months everything on the menu had prefixes like tubular, or heckin’. My favorite were the bitchin’ sausages. It was heaven.

Other-Cleveland’s older sister, Savannah, was the assistant manager, so we always got the back booth and all the Radical Joe—which was what they had to call coffee—we could drink. We walked in like the kings that we were, faux-hawks glistening, wallet chains rattling, strutting like Limp Bizkit on Warped Tour. We owned that Waffle House. We owned that stretch of Northern Kentucky. We were not ready for the metric ton of hurt that lay ahead.

I knew something was wrong the moment we crossed from the parking lot—lit a thick orange by the overhead floods, a world of asphalt and dust-choked amber air—into the timeless day-glow of our Waffle House away from home. The smell was wrong, the noise was wrong; there was another wolfpack in our den. Karate boys!

“Well well, fuckin’— ”

Uncle Mel!

I am in the drift, girl! “Well well, fuckin’ well. If it ain’t Milquetoast Mel and the double Clevelands.” This was Ross Crust Jr., assistant karate instructor at Upper Crust Karate of Northern Kentucky. A genuine terror and a grade-A bitch. The drift Sophie! Don’t stop me.

“This is our turf, Crust, and you’re in our back booth, drinkin’ our Radical Joe.”

I have always been a man of few words, so I said no more, but Crust, he was a talker. “Yeah, well it’s a free country, Milky, and I’m sorry, but your little hook-up went bye-bye. My daddy bought this Waffle House. You might not know, but Ross Crust Sr. is more than just the Karate King of northern Kentucky. He’s snapping up Waffle Houses like they’re trophies for most boards broken at once, highest boards broken at once, fastest board break, most expensive board break. So how ‘bout you turn around and hopkido yourself out of here?”

Well I have never before been so angry, and Sophie, let me tell you girl, when Uncle Mel is angry, Uncle Mel’s gotta spin kick. I planted my left foot and spun like the turbo charger in an American muscle car, and WHAM! A power shot right into the rips. Crust flew, his own faux-hawk slicing through a fully loaded pot of Radical Joe.

“Mel!” he bellowed. “You’re French-toast-fucked!”

“Wait!” From another booth in the back stood four men, all silent save the one who’d spoken, all with shaved heads, all in umber robes. The Greater Cincinnati Shaolin Club. Their elder, Shifu Dustin, approached the two of us and cupped his fist.

“We, the warriors from north of the river have long wanted to try our skills against Covington Hapkido and the style of the great Ross Crust. What do you say we make this interesting?”

Just then, five men ran from the parking lot, “Fort Thomas Boxers are in!”

“And Woodlawn Tai Kwon Do!” yelled a woman counting receipts.

Two tired-looking salesmen in a booth stood and cried, “South Gate Kick Boxing, ready for action!”

The whole dang waffle house was filled with warriors lusting for the trial of battle. Our blood was up, our gusts were filled with maple, or veins pumping hot, hot Radical Joe…which soon ran cold. A shadow loomed from the back of the kitchen, apron still on over brawn and fat. All sound seemed absorbed by the fluffy pancakes on the plate in his hands, all was silent save the whisper carried on the breeze of the reticulating fans:

“The Backwoods Bone Breaker. The Hillbilly Man-Hurter. Piggy Ignatius.”

“I! CRAVE! BLOOOOOD!”

WAFFLE COMBAT!!!

Don’t yell Uncle Mel, you’re peaking out the—

I’m in the drift! On the back of a kids’ menu this guy, Seth Goldfarb, who kept score for all the high school basketball games even though he was twenty-two, made a bracket. Sixteen fighters in all, every style from the Northern Kentucky, Great Cincinnati area—except for Jeet Kune Do Brian, but that was fine because he lived all the way up in Maison and he also had kids now and couldn’t do dumb shit like a last minute no holds barred martial arts tournament in a twenty-four hour breakfast restaurant on a Tuesday, which was fine, I mean we missed him a lot, and still do, honestly, all these years later, but it was fine. I still call him sometimes, you know, just to check in and see if he’s doing okay, but he’s just not the same after Leanne took the girls and the Mustang and moved to Grand Rapids. I can’t blame him, you know… for wanting his space. I would too, after something like that, you know, it’s just, we all miss him. Brian, if you’re listenin’—

This is for my school project.

Okay, but if you are, Brian, it’s fine. We all miss you, man.

Okay...

WAFFLE COMBAT!!!

Ten minutes later the center of that Waffle House was cleared out. Jeanine Rubio, the woman from Drive Time With Jeanine, was our announcer and she took the ring, bellowing out in that voice that kept the tri-state moving from 1993 to 2006 and again briefly in 2014 when she ran for senate:

“Who’s ready to see plates smash, bodies crash, and blood flow like it’s Radical Joe! Who’s ready for Waffle Cooooooooooombaaaaaaaaat!?!”

The cry that rose up in that Waffle House must have shook the doors of Valhalla wide and woke the gods of war, for the spirit moved upon us, the spirit of battle.

First up that night, Kevin the Cleaner Kline from Fort Thomas boxing vs. Jet Li Sanchez, who was neither Chinese nor Latin, but a Black man stuck with that unfortunate moniker because of his acrobatic kicks and thick mustache.

“I want a clean fight,” said Jeanine. “No eye gouges. No toe stomps. Everything else—fair game. Fight!”

In that first round there were eight fights, each a show of blood, sweat, and sausage. Bones broke, bodies hit the floor, Beth Conners-Feldstein got snap kicked so hard she died. The EMT’s brought her back and she swore she saw God. Piggy Ignatius gut-punched Shifu Dustin with such force his kneecaps broke. When Chris McGraff tried to blind me with powdered cinnamon I shoved the shaker down his throat. His coughs taste like Applejacks to this day.

Pretty soon, the first round was over and they pulled us into our own booths to sweep the floor of shattered plates and blood. Me and Cleveland had made it to the second round. Other-Cleveland was disqualified because he toe-stomped, so he became our corner man, wiping us down with paper towels and cleaning our cuts with lemon tea.

“Mel, you’re up against one of the South Gate Boxers and they won’t know what to do with your dragon sweeps. Cleveland, you’re fighting Crust.”

“I’ll take the guy down!” he yelled, but he didn’t say ‘guy’. He said another word that, all these years later and wiser, I wish he hadn’t. He used to say it a lot, that word. This was before he came out of the closet and looking back I think it was a cry for help, maybe?

We shook hands, comrades, brothers, and left each other to our own fights. Out on that fateful linoleum I dragon-swept that boxer again and again until he fell onto a ten-stack of pancakes and passed out. It was nothing to me. I was a king. Raising my arm in victory, I nearly choked. Sprawled in a booth, Cleveland lay bleeding, egg and blood dripping through his hair.

“The fuck did you do, Curst!?” I shoved his chest, leaving a sticky hand print. Never will I forget the look on his face, for I have worn it myself more times that I care to admit; the look of guilt and horror at the evil one’s own hands have wrought. I was too worked up to see his pain and his fear. I made to fight him then and there, but Jeanine Rubio got in our way. “Save it for the linoleum, boys! We have rules!”

When the EMT’s woke Cleveland he couldn’t remember anything since Warped Tour ‘99. I was furious. I ordered revenge off the midnight menu, but I was served patience instead.

My semi-final fight would not be with Curst but Jet Li Sanchez and for the first time all evening, I felt fear. My dragon-sweeps would not work on this man, for whom the air was solid ground. Yes, Sophie, I felt fear. Here was a worthy challenger, and if I were to lose, I would lose my chance for vengeance.

We locked eyes. We bowed.

Fight!

The man shot at me like a bolt, in a blink at head height, heel-whipping round to spend its heavy momentum into my skull, striking nothing but the tips of my faux-hawk. As he fell I struck for his neck, but he just kept falling, passing under my blow to drop to his knees and strike for my junk. It was an underhanded move, but was not an eye-gouge or a toe stomp, so strictly it was legal. He drove his fist into the meat of my nards with a totalizing finality. At the end of his fist, pain became a thing with weight and agenda, crawling into the whole of me. I doubled over. He stood, prepared to deliver the coup de grace, but prepared too long.

As I say, my pain became a thing with agenda and that agenda was domination. It slammed my skull into his nose, threw him by the shoulders onto a table, and as he fell, it made me grab a full Minute Maid carton and bring it down upon his face once, twice, five times until it filled his mouth, his lungs, and sent him coughing to the floor, defeated.

I had won the fight, but it was not victory I felt, only hunger. No, not hunger for waffles, but hunger for Crust’s life. Then—

Uncle Mel, time’s up.

But…but Sophie, the drift?

This is Sophie Green, thank you for listening.

Hey! I went HARD on the audio for this one, so come on, give it a try.

What the fuck are you about to read? I’ll explain at the bottom:

In the gloom of a forest day made twilight by dense foliage, a man walks; thin blue robe slick with sweat. About him there is an air, of a kind that cannot be placed, but a kind that would give you pause if you were to cross him. At one side hangs a simple, straight sword and at the other a gourd of sloshing wine just as heavy. His back stands proud despite the clinging wet of his thin robe, and the smile is broad on his scruffy, strong jawed face as his long hair flows underneath his straw hat.

He laughs to himself as he enters a clearing, the small little laugh of a man having a small little realization. He chuckles again as he brings his wine gourd to his mouth, uncorks it with his teeth, and swigs deep. He spills on himself, tisks, laughs at himself and hurls the gourd—launching a whipping backhand, smashing the gourd through the face of one of the three men who have just stepped from the underbrush.

To tell you what their faces look like would only frustrate you, for they also have scruffy, strong jawed faces, just like the man in blue. Alike not just in style but in every perfect detail. Of the two still standing, one is wearing a green brocade jacket, his hair tied up in a green bun. In his hands a short spear. The other wears a vest of gold and has his hair loose. The duel axes he clutches gleam bright against the gloom.

“Elias” the blue clad man says to the one in green. “Elias,” he says to the one in gold. He says nothing to the third man, who bleeds upon the ground, dead in his black shirt. “That was a good jug of wine, and I wasted it on such a common Elias.”

“He was no common Elias,” shouts the man in green. “He was Black Trident Elias Thorne of the Three Deadly Kings.” The Elias in gold and the one in green brandish their weapons and try to project menace.

“Three Deadly Kings,” the man in blue says. He takes a step forward, placing his hand on the scabbard hanging at his side, no more tension in his arm then reaching for a wine bowl. “Each word of that is a lie.”

Gold raises his axes and screams, “we will kill you and we will have your power!”

“Well…” the man in blue nods his head. “Thanks for sparing me the trouble.”

Gold charges, slamming his blades towards the man in blue, whose sword comes free like a whisper, knocking both axes aside. His simple weapon moves, swimming blurry through the air like a fish through a stream, darting for gold’s eyes, forcing him to jump back. He trips over green who was en rout to join the fight. They both stumble.

“He’s quick,” says the one in gold.

“So what? He can’t take both of us.” The Elias in green steps a wide circle around the man in blue, and puts him between him and the other member of Three Deadly Kings. Yelling, both run in. The man in green stabs for the man in blue who bats aside first one strike, then two, then bends just out of the way of a third as he smacks away an axe swipe from the man in gold. All the while he has not moved. The two other men yell and redouble their efforts, striking harder and harder, faster and faster. The man in blue stands there, feet planted, knocking away strike after strike until the other two stumble back.

“This is no ordinary man, Golden Woodsman,” says the one in green.

“That’s too kind,” says the one in blue. “But it is a virtue to stay humble.”

“What is your name?” asks Golden Woodsman Elias Thorne.

“Oh, just Elias Thorne.”

“How dare you mock me!”

The Golden Woodsman leaps into the air, comes down with a mighty kick, then slashes out with his axes, chasing the man in blue back towards the man in green.

“No matter how quick you are, you can’t outrun The Viper Spear of Snapping Snake Elias Thorne!” shouts the man in green, stabbing The Viper Spear quick as the strike of a snake, striking nothing.

“Fast,” says the man in blue, looking down from the top of The Viper Spear. “For a common Elias, anyway.” Snapping Snake Elias Thorne drops his spear and rushes back, gasping.

“You must be…you must be Flitting Dragonfly, The Dancing Wing Blade Elias Thorne! We’re sorry. We’re sorry.” He presses himself up to his knees and bows, head all the way to the ground. “You must be on your way to battle the Willow Whip Elias Thorne of Pine Mountain Sect. We were rude to keep you on your way.”

Golden Woodsman drops his axes and falls to his knees as well. “Please forgive us. How week we are, our measly power would hardly be a snack to an Elias as powerful as you. You need not waste the energy, and spare our lives.”

“You are right,” says the Elias in blue. “What number are you both at anyway?”

“I’m at a five,” blurts Snapping Snake, “but…but Golden Woodsman’s at a seven! So if you’re going to kill anyone kill him. You’ll get more power.”

“What! Brother, you’d betray me?” Golden Woodsman looks from Snapping Snake, distraught and turns crying eyes upon the Elias in blue. “Look, ok, I’ll fight back, even though you’ll kill me. I’ve got two more Eliases than him. I’ll stick in your teeth.”

The Elias in blue laughs that same small laugh. “Five. Seven. What difference does it make to my hundreds.”

“So you’ll let us go?” Hope brims in Golden Woodsman’s eyes.

The Elias in blue sighs as he slashes, his swift blade leaving only a thin line across the other’s throat. To Snapping Snake he says, “you have still taken Elias life. You’re not to be trusted.” Snapping Snake opens his mouth to protest, but is silenced as the blade punctures his heart.

Flitting Dragonfly whips the blood off his sword and slides it back into its scabbard as he goes from the clearing, stopping only long enough to pluck as small wine gourd from the waste of Black Trident. He sips it and nearly spits it out, but it’s another two hours walk to the small town at the base of Seven Falls. He does the calculation in his head, and having no wine on this long exhausting hike is not so bad as having bad wine, so he dumps the wine out, but takes the gourd, hoping the small bump of energy he got from killing those three low number Eliases will be enough to distract him from being out of wine.

Despite the broad back and strong arms, you would be forgiven for assuming Flitting Dragonfly, The Dancing Wing Blade Elias Thorne was anything but a lover of wine. Even having just taken the lives of two men who might as well have been him, his face is carefree and his spirits high, and his thoughts more often on present things then on the killing of other versions of himself. There had been a time, back when he was still in the lower tens, where planting his blade through the heart of other Eliases would give him such a powerful rush he wouldn’t need to sleep for days, but now, it was like a small peck on the cheek from an Elias who won’t let you in their bed. Those two Eliases he had just killed had five and seven other Eliases, meaning he’d just absorbed the life energy of fifteen Elias and he barely felt it. The one in black maybe had two or three, but what were they to the three hundred he had taken with the simple blade by his side.

He pats the sword, his only companion and laughs a rueful laugh as he goes on his way, thinking of the many evil Eliases he had cut down, and the good too, and the ones he’d let live. He walks his weary way towards Pine Mountain, looming large in the distance.

Two hours later, the man in blue arrives at his destination, a small town at the base of the mountain, behind which flow seven falls, much vaunted in music and poetry for their grandeur and the roar of their crystal water. The Dancing Wing Blade laughs to himself, thinking some things are best left in song, thinking that reality is always a disappointment, when he’s silence by a sign.

A stooped Elias in a threadbare robe puts up a lantern by a large wooden sign bearing the character for six, waterfall, and wine. ‘Sixth Fall Inn.’ Long too has this place been spoken of in songs and poetry, a place where heroes meet and great wine flows like the sixth fall it is named for. The man in blue cares not for meeting other heroes, but for wine, he will gladly halt his journey.

As he walks in to town he passes grocers’ stalls, industrious Eliases still hawking their produce to the evenings last customers. He passes street performers dancing with puppets of giant Eliases, or spinning spears and singing songs of the great deeds performed by Eliases of days gone by to audiences of young Eliases in pigtails and short pants. From the second story of a perfumed building, three slender Eliases wave to him with fans and sleeves, pale skin peaking through diaphanous gowns, red paint on lips under their stubble. He stops for nothing until he has passed the gates of the Sixth Fall Inn.

An Elias in a dirty head wrap looks up from the table he’s wiping and screams, “welcome!” The cry is taken up by the whole staff. He is shown to a table on the second floor, next to a ruddy group of steppe Eliases in leathers, cruel axes hanging from their belts. From them the stink of horses is unavoidable, as is the harsh sound of their guttural tongue, but the Flitting Dragonfly cares for nothing save wine.

“Bring me the best in the house,” he tells the waiter.

“A cup or a pot?”

“The whole jug!”

The waiter runs downstairs, twisting aside for a party of Eliases in white robes, their heads shaven, Monks of the Universal Mind Sect. At their head is an Elias with eyebrows like the beaks of great herons. In his hand is a monk’s staff with many shaking rings. To look at him you would feel a great sense of peace. Here is an Elias who has sat long years in meditation. He looks upon the Elias in blue, and marks him for a great Elias, but if the Elias in blue notices him he does not show it. He is absorbed in the work of the blind Elias down below his balcony, playing the zither, and how the music underscores the awkward movements of the waiter trudging and huffing his way back upstairs with the heavy jug of his wine. He stumbles this way into the banister, that way into the wall until he finally comes to drop it, thumping upon the table. The Elias in blue throws him a string of coins, silver, and stamped with the face of the dead emperor of Thorne, whose honor name was Broad Heaven. Greedily, Flitting Dragonfly pops the paper cover of the jug and dips his bowl into it, bringing it to his face and slurping.

“This is vinegar!” He spits it out, not so much angry as sad, and you’d be forgiven for thinking him a friendly if loud mouthed fisherman, not a butcher of men.

“But sir,” says the waiter with an obsequious frown, “great Elias! Surely you are a man of taste, but this is the best in the house.”

“The best in the house! Sixth Fall Inn is famed for its wine and this is the best in the house!?”

The monk with the heron eyebrows pulls out a seat and sits, pouring a warm bowl of wine for the Elias in blue from his own wine pot. Just smelling it, the Elias in blue’s mouth begins to water.

“This is from the time of the emperor Heaven Favored Elias Thorne. Please, drink a few cups with this humble monk.”

“Wow! You’re a monk who knows his wine.”

The two men silently drink three cups and then the monk cups his fist and introduces himself. “I am Abbot Small Expanse, The Wandering Bodhisattva, of the Universal Mind Sect. Pray tell, are you Elias Thorne, Flitting Dragonfly?”

“I am.”

The monk in white pours him another drink and sighs the sigh of an Elias who has seen too much suffering for one life. “Is it true you have come here to duel Willow Whip Elias Thorne of the Pine Mountain Sect?”

“It is true.”

“We men are cursed in this world, to all be the same man. To grow stronger with each Elias we kill. Why must we make our curse worse with evil thoughts and ill deeds. The power of one Elias, the power of one thousand. What is the difference? Why must we always be killing each other?”

The Dancing Wing Blade pours himself and Small Expanse another bowl and says, “I care not for power, good monk. Only to escape.” The monk gasps, and the Elias in blue continues with a sad smile, disappointed that this monk will not understand him. “You must believe, as all members of your sect do, that we exist in a world in the mind of a great machine.”

“It is as our sages say. But the only path to escape is through righteous action and meditation.”

“That is not what the sage Black Brilliance Elias Thorne of your sect says. He says by claiming the power of one thousand other Elias Thornes one can finally transcend this world of sameness for something grander, where men have different names. I grow weary of this world and must escape. I have the power of over three hundred Eliases. Willow Whip has four hundred and ten. If I defeat him that will put me one step closer.”

The monk sighs, stands, and his eyes droop to match his eyebrows. “Black Brilliance Elias Thorne was a renegade and a heretic and it is our duty to stamp out his teachings wherever they occur!”

With a woosh, the three other monks leap into the air, streaks of flashing white, and quicker than you can follow, land behind their abbot. The rings on the ends of their staves clink as they level them at the Elias in blue.

Down below, the blind Elias on the zither launches into a tune that rushes like the waterfalls outside.

[What happens next? Make sure to grab your next issue of Thrilling Tales of Daring Eliases for chapter 12 of The Dancing Wing Blade.]

As points out in the linked piece, LLM’s keep pumping out garbage stories with characters named Elias Thorne, so he put the call out for writers to do stories where everyone is Elias Thorne as a sort of fuck you to the robots. Well, I love telling robots to fuck themselves and I love one upping myself making dumb shit to entertain Ian and all my friends, so…there you go.

They don't all have to be good

The Thousand Faces of Elias Thorne

Listening to Print Run last night, I learned that LLMs are hallucinating a character named Elias Thorne across platforms. I’ve since learned some other Substackers have written about this phenomenon (Linda Carol, Daniel May) and it’s even bee…

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23 days ago · 47 likes · 55 comments · Ian Patterson

Shifman walks a difficult tightrope here attempting to combine elements of horror and fantasy with a Mel Brooks-ian, darkly funny look into a particularly difficult period of history for European Jewry—by way of a long-lost brothers buddy comedy full of dick jokes. He walks the tightrope expertly. Uncle Mel would be proud.

Here’s the link, and as a little bonus, I’ll be on live for a lot of today, reading chapters, answering Q’s and shooting the shit.

The Pale is available for pre-order!

The reviews are in folks, it’s a ‘good book’. I’ll be blasting out all the great reviews when it’s officially published, but here’s a few to tidbits to tide you over:

-This is an excellent fantasy novel, full of voice and heart, and definitely unique. ( )

-If you like the wit and magic of Terry Pratchett, but your interest is also piqued by tales of the European Old Country, the Russian Empire and the Jewish pale…then this great fantasy adventure is the read for you. (The mad genius himself, )

With a cover design by the great , how could it not be worth your time. Just look at this beauty:

Pre-order it here1!

If you’d prefer to listen 🎧 instead of read, I’ve recorded every chapter and honestly…it’s pretty good. Click the play button above ⬆️.

For maps and historical background to the Pale of Settlement, click right here.

For a link to every chapter out now, click right here.

In the last chapter Sergei caught up with some old freinds. Read it here:

There’s a fair bit of antisemitism in this, but hey, it comes with the territory.

“You see.” Yankev pointed with a splay-fingered wave. “I told you it would work.”

“Okay, okay,” Muroshke said, “so you told me, so what? Can you stop with the yelling?”

They emerged into the clearing where Sender lay, coughing up ash. Yankev kept low and kept his eyes up, trying as much to see with his third eyes as his first two.

“Oy, Ivan? You good?”

“Am I good?” Sender hacked a harsh cough as he climbed to his feet. “No, I’m not good. Give me that.” He went to snatch the gun from Yankev, and Yankev pulled it back, finding himself suddenly very angry.

“I’ve got it, okay.”

“You’ve got it? Yankev, give me the gun.” Quicker this time Sender grabbed it from Yankev, drove his sword into the dirt, and grabbed a charm around Yankev’s neck.

“Very grabby today. Didn’t I just save your life?” Yankev knew he shouldn’t raise his voice, what with all the vampires, but hey—okay, he was human, and this was very annoying.

“Save my life?” Sender hissed, ripping the charm from Yankev and wrapping it around his knuckles. “I ask you to watch my back, but instead I get jumped by a fucking wizard, and you become bait. You left me to die!”

Yankev rubbed at the raw spot the snapped leather thong had left on his skin. “How was I supposed to know any of that might happened?”

“You weren’t. That’s why you watch someone’s back. For the things you don’t expect.”

“Well, I didn’t expect to see three vampires running around town, and that felt like the most important thing.”

“So you run after them by yourself? What were you thinking?”

“That I need to do my job.”

“By yourself?”

“You three were busy.”

Sender turned a tight quarter circle and screamed a little scream. “Why can’t you look out for yourself?”

“Look out for myself?” Fury rose in Yankev’s chest like fire, a thundercloud of heat rose into his forehead. “I will have you know I’ve been doing this monster dreck long before you came back from the dead, and I’ve kept myself alive just fine.”

“Yeah, by accident. It’s like you’re trying to get yourself killed.”

“Hey, if He wants me to survive, I’ll survive.”

Sender’s lip curled in a way both shocked and saddened, as if to say, “You would do such a thing? To me?” and Yankev wanted to slap him in the face, but before he could—

“Oy,” Muroshke yelled, “Schlemiel and Schlemazel. We could use a hand over here.”

In Zofia’s arms was a vampire with the manicured beard of a sixteenth-century courtier. It struggled weakly in her grasp as she shook it, eyes rolling in its head like marbles.

“It tried to bite me,” she said, curious as to why it might do something stupid that like.

“Careful,” Yankev pleaded. “Don’t break it. I want to get a good look at this thing.”

Sender grabbed Yankev’s arm as he walked toward the weak and weakening monster. “What are you doing dropping your guard?”

He yanked, trying to get his wrist out of Sender’s blacksmith’s tong of a hand. “Ease up, would you? This is the last one.”

“How are you so sure?”

“Relax and look at it.” Yankev pointed and Sender followed with his eyes. “Remember the way Muroshke made you see?” Sender nodded that he did, and despite all the fraternal anger, he looked, to Yankev’s eyes at least, a little bit excited, like a child being let in on a secret. He looked exactly as Yankev had the first time Yehudah had opened his eye to higher things. The annoyance that had pounded on Yankev’s ribcage so hard he felt he might blow his brother apart with a verse burst away. Even the hardest of soldiers was a child longing for His grace. “Okay, good. Try to open it. Try to be here.” With his right hand, he mimed the same actions Levchenko had. It made him a little uncomfortable, to be copying the movements of that old wizard, but, hey, it worked. “Now with that eye, look at the vampire. What do you see?”

“A man with an antiquated haircut trying to suck Zofia’s blood.” Sender wasn’t wrong. The living corpse had stuck its lips to the cut in Zofia’s arm. There was both confusion and terror in its eyes as it filled its mouth with mud.

“Okay, yeah, very funny.” Yankev slapped him on the arm. “What do you see?” Sender looked again, and his smirk gave way to a soft smile and then to pop-eyed wonder.

“I see… I don’t know. It’s the shape of him, and it’s alive, but it seems small. Desperate, maybe?”

Yankev laughed triumphantly and so did Muroshke. “Very good. Yes. That’s what I’m thinking a vampire is.” He raised his best didactic finger, pleased with this line of thought. “It has within it the small spark of G-d we all have, but it’s an evil thing, and so that spark of holiness can’t survive without constant feeding.”

“It’s constantly feeding on me,” Zofia grumbled. “Could you do something about this?” She shook the limp thing, and it squealed.

“Just one moment more.” Yankev pointed so that Sender could follow with his eyes. “Now, as I was saying. Look around the woods. The spiritual eye can see greater distances than even your—and I mean this as no insult—terrifying soldier’s eyes. Can you see any more of these sad things?”

Sender scanned the woods and shook his head. “No. I don’t. Wait. I…do see, or maybe it’s hearing—I don’t know. I feel something really big though. What is that?”

Yankev followed Sender’s gaze and shrugged. “This whole world is new to you, maybe? You might be taking in all of it at—“

A streak, so fast it was little more than a shadow, jumped from the tree limbs, sword angled at Zofia’s face. On reflex she tossed the vampire at it. Flailing limbs and hurtling mass did not even cause the streaking shadow to stumble. The dead soldier with the beard of a sixteenth-century courtier rag dolled through the air to smash its back against a tree. Sender fired off a shot at the streak. The charmed bullet sent a small cloud of ash into the air as it grazed the shadow’s back. Before Yankev could shout a name, the thing slammed its blade into Zofia.

Her scream was a big thing, dense like air through a log. She grabbed at the vampire with flailing fists and managed to hook its skull in her palm. In that short moment of stillness, Yankev saw the thing for what it was. It too was a vampire, or at least had been, but its spirit, instead of being small and hungry, desperate for the holy light of creation, this thing was bloated on something that was not at all holy, straining against the seams to get out. Zofia’s furious fingers scrambled to crush it, the sound of skull fracturing echoing off the trees.

Careless of its own pain, it took its hand from the sword in Zofia’s chest and drove its knuckles in her forearm three quick times, forcing the numb hand open.

Before it could move, Sender plunged his sword into the once vampire’s back. Yankev felt the silver charm around his brother’s hand channeling a fraction of his will into the blade, but even still the point could hardly break skin.

With all his soldier’s muscle and all his soldier’s will, Sender kept pushing, screaming a ragged, wordless cry.

Yankev bolted to get behind his brother, blurting the words of Tehillim 91:13 as fast as he could, slamming his palm and the name into Sender’s back to burst its way from arm to sword to dead flesh, driving the point into the vampire.

It howled and writhed on the blade for a fraction of a second, and in that short window, Yankev could see it with his earthly eyes too.

It was a horrible thing.

Yankev had nearly been killed several times this week and those had been scary moments. He’d stood in the presence of an angel—well an angel’s shadow, but close enough—and that had been awesome. Not once this week, not once in a very long time before that, had he felt true terror.

This vampire wasn’t somehow faster and stronger than the rest. It was a puppet, trapped by something massive and terrifying.

Whatever was in the vampire yanked itself free of Sender’s sword, the blade hacking through careless flesh as it bolted away, just as fast as it had come.

“Yankev,” Sender demanded, “help me get the sword out of Zofia. Where are you going?”

Yankev was not a fit man like his brother, but he sprinted as though he were, miming the way he’d seen Sender do it, legs pounding and arms snapping hard back in time. “Yankev!”

“Al naf’sho lo yachel d’varo k’khal!” He stomped on the torn scrap of the vampire’s shirt and stabbed a stick through it for good measure. As something that belonged to the vampire, holding it could, with the addition of the right verse, stick it in place. Bemidbar 30:2 was the most powerful binding verse he knew and sent the vampire tripping. It would not hold it for long—only the greatest rebbe could do that and only with long preparation—but at least he slowed.

As it stumbled it cracked its already fractured skull on a rock, a killing blow to a man but serving only to stun whatever this was.

In two driven breaths Yankev made it to the thing, ducked out of the way of its writhing, desperate limbs and slapped onto its face a piece of parchment, written a long time ago. It was a scroll he’d made when he’d had the time to be leisurely and artistic in his work. It was a hand. Not the beautiful North African hamsa with its flowing, balanced lines but a strange, uneven drawing, a copy of a charm drawn by the Ha’Ari, the greatest Kabbalist in the last thousand years.

Words filled the solid outline written in red, black, and blue ink. Inscribed within it Bemidbar 21:17-20, the most powerful ward against the evil eye he’d ever known.

“Baba Ha, I, Yankev ben Malke, cast you out.”

The forest stilled.

“In the names of Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, Azriel, I cast you out.”

Yankev’s voice boomed into the woods and back into his own ears, crashing like a thunder.

“By all the names hidden in the name of twenty-four letters and the seventy-two-letter name, by all sixteen permutations of the most awesome name of them all…” The dark eddy of emptiness ceased trying to crack apart its host and turned all its attention toward Yankev. He felt the insatiable pull in his trembling heart, angry, scared, and jealous. This ‘made god’, formed from the chaotic swirl of nothing, demanded he rage, it demanded he tear his hair and gnash his teeth. It tried to get in him. He lifted his hand then slammed his palm onto the parchment and fought back. With Yankev’s in-breath he drew in a small piece of the soul of the world and with his words, spent it.

“I cast you out!”

His voice ripped through the charm, filled the empty eldritch intelligence, pouring into it like gushing water, and bursting its host like an egg.

The world stilled. Scraps of tattered uniform and parchment skin—sizzling up as they rode the breeze—floated around him like snow.

For a moment Yankev felt blank, then stunned dumb, then a feeling he’d long sought and thought might not exist to him—absolution. He had destroyed this thing in the service of G-d and with His name. He had done His will and fulfilled his duty, and all his failings and humiliations, his teacher’s blood on his hands, all finally washed clean.

A squeal came from the bushes, then a loud rustle as out came a little rabbit. It cocked its head at Yankev, and Yankev looked back at it, and once again, he felt himself terrified. The darkness that had burst from the vampire was slowly falling its way into the creature. The poor thing began to twitch and then, faster than he could follow, dashed away through the underbrush.

One hundred paces away the rabbit burst like a bomb. Moments later a hawk shot from the tree branches, darting fast through sky. Half a minute later, Yankev heard it burst too, but from so far away, it sounded little more than a twig snapping in the flame—

“Yankev!”

He had not been absolved. His star was still a cursed one, under which his family had died—

“Yankev!”

—under which Yehuda’s blood, the blood of a saint, still stained his hands.

“Yankev, if you’ve left us to die, I’m going to track you down and kill you myself!” Sender’s scream pulled him from the broken shards of his soul and brought him running back to the clearing. Twigs scratched hard at him as he emerged to see his brother desperately packing dirt into the gurgling puncture on Zofia’s chest. “Do something,” he demanded.

“Do you have bandages?”

“Bandages!? She’s dying. Patch her up like Levchenko did.”

“That sort of power has been lost for centuries.”

“Then how could the old man do it?”

“He combined scripture with black magic.”

“So do that?”

“At the price of my soul?”

“There are things more precious than your soul.” Muroshke’s voice came from an empty space beside him, making him jump.

Why would G-d taunt him like this? Should he have been named Job, that he suffer so? The one thing he had left to him, and his only friends begged he burn it like so much trash. The black ink despair reached for him and pulled him to squat on bent knees, elbows against thighs, hands holding his skull. To do this thing, to save this imposter life was an act so powerful only the greatest of holy men could do it without imperiling their soul, and their skill was lost to the ages. The only man he’d ever known who could do this was a wizard, dark and godless.

“Ask yourself this,” Levchenko had said, “does that mean I’m powerful enough to defy G-d, or does that mean it’s not the sin you think it is?”

“Yankev,” Muroshke gasped, “Yankev, please.”

“It’s not the sin you think it is”… So what sin was it? Yankev shot to his feet, the quorum of rabbinic scholars leaping into rapid debate. Zofia was brought to life with a bastard skill, half holy work, half dark magic, but Yankev did not have to bring her to life. “She’s already alive! Sender—“

“That’s not—what!?”

“My bag. I need parchment. I need ink. To create life, that’s a difficult thing, but I don’t need to do this. I only need to breathe His life into her. Which verse, Muroshke, and which name?”

“No, Yankev, no!” Muroshke cried. “No time.”

“There’s time!” Yankev snapped, digging into his bag and biting into a hardboiled egg, shell and all—there was time, okay, but not a lot—sucking down the spell for clarity he’d inscribed this morning. “Open her forehead and get me her scroll.”

“That could kill her, though, right?”

“Sender!” He turned on his brother, snappy and demanding, their father reborn. “Do as I say.”

A hurt child woke in his brother’s face and moved toward the golem with his sword held as a scalpel. He slit open her forehead and from it, produced a piece of parchment, its edges singed by the heat of Zofia’s life burning away and burning further with each passing second.

“Yankev, you fool!” Muroshke yelled in his right ear, vocally throwing his hands through the air in aggressive, splayed fingered punches. “Just copy the spell as Levchenko did it. Look. It’s easy. He combined Bereshit 2:7, three triads of the seventy-two, and four lines of infernal script. I can read it to you.”

“You will do no such thing!” Yankev’s quill flew. His penmanship flawless, his marginalia exact and beautiful in every detail. “The powder,” he demanded of his brother, holding out his hand and snapping his fingers.

“Yankev, please,” Muroshke begged. “This won’t work. She’s going to die. You’re going to kill her.”

He paid the desperate spirit no mind as he splashed the drying powder on the ink.

“Cousin, it would be nice if someone had the ability to make this ink dry immediately.” Muroshke’s whimper was so pitiful Yankev nearly lost his resolve, but his mind moved like a cat racing through the wheels of a cart, dashing here and there, balance perfect. “Paste,” he ordered. “It’s in the inner left pocket.” Sender handed it to him as soon as he asked. The edge of Zofia’s parchment smoked as the black burnt edges crawled inwards. With a quick slap of his fingers, he pasted the back top edge of his scroll to the bottom of Zofia’s miserable paper soul, took Sender’s hand and used it to press the two together.

“It would also be great if someone with a little bit of power could make this paste dry tscik tschak.” He stood and split his fingers in the priestly benediction and sucked in breath. The burning edges of the scroll lit with orange flames, and Muroshke screamed a wordless, demonic lament.

Yankev spoke.

As the words came from his mouth, he could hear the emptiness of his voice. Gone was the power from moments before, gone was his confidence that he acted with the power of G-d, but he acted anyway.

“Chayiym way’hiy haadam l’nefesh chayah!”

Nothing.

“L’nefesh chayah.”

“Yankev, please!”

“Chayiym way’hiy haadam l’nefesh chayah!”

Black ink failed with a light so strong Yankev could see his demon kin’s cringing outline. He reached for the parchment, but the light was too bright, and he’d expended too much. Muroshke begged that he should do something, but Yankev was frozen. The intensity of restored life threatened to erase him in its power. To be erased by this thing would be to ride the chariot to the highest heights.

“Idiot!” Sender screamed, rolling the parchment and slamming it back into Zofia’s forehead. Clay skin closed around glass sharp shards of divinity and patched lungs took in air.

“Oh, my love,” Muroshke wept, voice caressing warming skin. “You live. You breathe. Oh, my love.”

“Levchenko!” Zofia cried, wild eyes hunting for the old magician. “Where is my maker?”

“Oops!” Muroshke giggled, slamming himself into the healing gash on her forehead.

Zofia’s eyes settled as the demon did to her soul what Yankev had done to her life.

Yankev fell back against a tree, so spent a triumphant giggle could hardly climb past his throat. Zofia rose to her knees, and the little power left in him fought its way to the corners of his eyes, crawling toward a smile. She crawled toward him, and Yankev turned his face to her, so glad that she might live and so unready for her to slap him.

“Fuck you, Yankev,” she yelled, slamming an earthen fist into the tree, denting bark and splintering wood just above Yankev’s face. “I was this close to being nothing but a clump of wet dirt, you schmuck. You had everything you needed to save me, and you refused for the sake of what? Your dove-white soul? Fucking ass!”

“For the sake of one’s soul is a good enough reason to take a little extra time,” Yankev countered. “It’s a big thing. Muroshke, tell her. In all our time together, I’ve never needed to imperil my soul so that we might succeed, no?” Muroshke said nothing, and Yankev’s weakness threatened once more to turn to despair. “Tell her, Muroshke.”

“Yankev…” Muroshke’s voice seemed to hang its head. “That was then. Then I was happy to humor you as it was just the two of us and only things of little consequence.”

“Little…little consequence,” Yankev sputtered. “We exorcised dybbuks, we drove demons away from bridal beds, we…”

“Little consequence. This thing we do now, Yankev, this mishigas. This is not a thing of little consequence, and now it is no longer just us two. We have Sender, we have my betrothed—“

“Betrothed?” Sender asked.

“Later,” Yankev, Muroshke, and Zofia said in time.

“And what’s more than all that, Yankev, the fate of every Jew in Dobranski rests on our shoulders.”

Sender reached up his hand, and Zofia lifted him from the dirt. He, in turn, reached down to Yankev. “We’re going to have to make sacrifices, Yankev.”

“My soul is not something I’m willing to sacrifice.” Yankev fought his way to his feet and grabbed his bag. “And I didn’t need to. Zofia walks. She breathes. She lives.”

“Had you been a moment later, I wouldn’t be doing any of that.”

“It’s like I said, Yankele,” Muroshke said as Zofia and Sender turned back toward town, “you’re determined to play Avram and Yitzak, and someone else is going to end up the lamb.”

If you’d prefer to listen 🎧 instead of read, I’ve recorded every chapter and honestly…it’s pretty good. Click the play button above ⬆️.

For maps and historical background to the Pale of Settlement, click right here.

For a link to every chapter out now, click right here.

In the last chapter we got some really welcome news. Read it here:

There’s a fair bit of antisemitism in this, but hey, it comes with the territory.

Sergei had had few heartbreaks since he’d become Sergei. It was hard to be romantic when you couldn’t separate a lover’s body from a corpse. The few friends he’d had from his youth who’d been conscripted with him had been chewed up by grape shot or trampled by chasseur hooves. Since those early days, all he’d had in the way of relationship had been his men. Leaning against a cold wall, abandoned by his former soldiers, it came near enough to break his heart. “Well,” he said to himself, feeling a little like Yankev, talking to himself like this. “You’re a soldier, so soldier on.” He pushed himself from the wall, drew his shoulders up straight, and made for the street. Yankev slammed into him hard.

“Quick, take off your pants…”

“What—“

“No time,” Yankev grabbed at his belt. “Hurry.” Stunned, Sergei sprang into action and began to strip.

“There’s nothing we can do about the beard and nothing we can do about the five pounds you’ve supposedly lost.”

“Ten.”

“Does it matter!”

Yankev jumped out of his own pants and flung them at Sergei then shimmied out of his shirt. Action and adrenaline had taken hold of him. Heartbreak dried up and weathered like a leaf in the heat of the moment. “Mikhail Grigorievich is helping Zofia on the way to the tea shop. You’ve got maybe one minute to make it back and take control of the situation before anyone asks questions.”

“Mikhail Grigorievich?”

“The little shimazel.”

“Oh, Micha? What’s he doing there? Wait, what’s wrong with Zofia?”

“Bad knee.”

“What’s at the tea shop?”

“Turk and Nabakov.”

“Golubev.”

“Nabakov, Golubev, Romanov, who cares? An Ivan is an Ivan.” Yankev buttoned his pants in time with Sergei.

As they both shimmied into each other’s shirts, the weight of what was happening finally dawned on him. “Oh, fuck, this is bad. This is—oy, Yankev,” he cringed, pulling Yankev’s shirt on over his head, “you stink!”

“The boy thought I was you. Can you blame me for the anxious shvitz?”

“Anxious shvitz? You smell like cholent!”

“And when was the last time you had a bath?”

Sergei stopped, shirt half on over his head. “We have a problem.”

Yankev shoved his head through the collar of his new shirt. “You think?”

“Turk and Golubev have already seen me in the clothes you just put on, Yankev.”

“Yeah, but Nikitin’s seen me in the ones on you. Your two big friends will just think you changed. Weird but not too weird. Nikitin sees you in a totally new outfit and…you know”—Yankev waved at Sergei’s broad chest and shorn face—“he’s going to have a conniption. Here.” Yankev pulled off his hat, dropping free his payis.

“No!” Sergei shoved it back on his head.

“I was wearing that hat when he saw me,” Yankev snapped.

“Yeah, well we’re not in the Jewish Quarter, and if you go walking around looking like Reb Whoever-Mendal you’re going to get killed. Here.” He thrust Kasher’s jacket and his pistol at Yankev.

“What am I supposed to do with these?”

“Don’t lose them! Stay close, and watch my back.”

Sergei tore out of the alley and ran down the street. A block away a small crowd had gathered as men tried, with no luck, to lift Zofia back to her feet.

“Sir,” Nikitin chirped anxiously as Sergei got close. “Did you find a doctor and…what happened to your beard?”

“I’ve never worn a beard, Micha.” Sergei dropped to his knees next to Zofia. “Paula, are you alright?”

Zofia blinked back confusion, “Paula?” She looked at the crowd, scared, stunned, and then closed her eyes for a brief moment.

“Yes. I’m Paula.” It was Muroshke now animating her face, doing his best at acting the dainty lady. “You know,” he said in overly polished Russian, “I think my knee is feeling better.” He laughed at himself demurely and climbed awkwardly to his feet.

“My good lady, you need to sit down,” an imperious man commanded. “You’ve just had a terrible fall.”

Muroshke looked down at the man, batted Zofia’s eyelashes, and cooed, “You, sir, are such a gentleman, but with your tender concern, I do feel better.” The man’s cheeks colored, reminding Sergei of the old priest at the gate and his cousin’s non-Jewish side. ‘Paula’ leaned some of her weight down on Sergei, playing into the act and nearly crushing him.

“What happened?” he hissed as they walked away from the crowd.

“The boy went looking for you and found Yankev.”

“How!?” Sergei hissed. “Besides the fact that we’re twins we look nothing alike. No, I’m serious,” he said in response to Muroshke’s lifted eyebrow. “The nose is different, the bags around the eyes. I mean really, he looks like shit.”

“And you don’t?” The way the golem snickered let Sergei know Zofia had wrested control of her face from Muroshke, so he pretended to stumble and drove his elbow into her side. She grunted and smacked him on the leg, sending a shockwave up to his hip and nearly knocking him over. “We have good news for you, by the way,” she said, “but not now.”

The tea shop was the perfect place for a covert meeting between soldiers. It was tight and entirely too cute for men used to loud drinks and rough jokes. Inside the door was a short table filled with porcelain things that forced Sergei’s elbows in tight to his ribs and Zofia to turn sideways and shuffle like a crab. Past that were a few small tables with patrons who tried not to gawk at either of them.

“Sergei Alexandrovich,” It was Golubev who spoke, though Sergei couldn’t see him behind the thick curtains of the one private booth in the rear left corner. “Over h—“ The words fell from Golubev’s lips in time with the parting of the curtain. His eyes locked on Zofia, and his cheeks colored. “Oh…it’s you. I was wondering where you’d gotten off to.” He turned his eyes to Sergei and stumbled for words. “Is she… Is this your…”

“Cousin,” Zofia answered, her Russian far less polished than Muroshke’s. “Paula.” She held out her hand. As Golubev kissed it, Sergei heard a quiet, jealous grumble come from her collarbone.

“Igor Borisovich Golubev. Lieutenant—“

“Acting,” Turk interrupted.

“Acting Lieutenant Garrison Commander. Charmed.”

Golubev waved them in and offered Zofia his seat. She tried to refuse, but he wouldn’t hear it, and the dainty little chair groaned under her weight. Turk grimaced. Golubev giggled boyishly. Half a beat later Nikitin joined them at the table.

“So,” Sergei said, then he said it again, rapping the table with a knuckle to wrestle Golubev’s attention away from Zofia. “So why can’t we talk in public?”

Golubev looked to Turk and Turk frowned. “I don’t want to tell him. You tell him.”

“As your superior I’m telling you, you have to tell him.”

“Superior my ass,” Turk snarled. “I’m two years older than you.”

“Tell me what?” Sergei demanded, and though he no longer had rank or title, Turk and Golubev sat up straighter to hear it.

Golubev took a sad breath and answered, “Commander Fedorov has made you a persona non grata amongst the officers. He’s made it clear that if any of us are caught talking to you, we’d lose our positions.” He told Sergei this as though he were delivering the worst possible news and held a moment for him to process.

Sergei shrugged. “Let’s make this brief then. How is the Countess Ohotnick?”

Turk and Golubev blinked at him for what felt like a minute. Nikitin did too, but he’d been staring, sheet white, since the costume change.

“Look,” Golubev finally said, “Sergei Alexandrovich. I owe you my life several times over, and I’ll never forget it, but if you had anything to do with the disappearance of the count…”

“The disappearance of the count?”

“Their whole retinue is in an uproar,” Turk said. “He was supposed to come home last night and never showed up.”

“So he didn’t come home?” Sergei said, doing his best to keep control of his voice. “Maybe he’s out drinking or whoring?”

“I would not come home too if I had a wife and or sister like that,” Turk agreed, “but the countess is panicked. She’s been barking at everyone she sees to find the count.”

“Literally barking?”

Golubev raised a confused eyebrow at him and shook his head. “So you have nothing to do with the disappearance?”

Sergei had to fight to keep the small, peevish smile off of his face. “I didn’t.” It was more than a half truth, though it wasn’t a whole truth, but that was good enough. “I might know how to help her get him back. Can you give this to her please.”

He handed a folded and sealed piece of paper over the table. Golubev took it with a small, uncomfortable frown and placed it in his pocket. “I don’t know what any of this is about, but I don’t like it. Something about it feels very off.”

“Well…that brings me to what else I wanted to talk to you about.” He’d prepared this line of dialogue several times with Yankev and Muroshke, and each time he’d felt it went worse. He wouldn’t have believed any of what he was about to say unless he’d come face to face with it on the end of his sword. ”Things have been feeling very off recently, haven’t they?”

Nikitin nodded hard.

“What if I told you there was a cause for all of it?”

“I think I’d say that that’s very curious, and I’d ask to speak with you alone.” The curtain barely moved as Fedorov stepped through. Golubev, Turk, and Nikitin leapt to their feet. Sergei grabbed for the pistol he’d stupidly given to Yankev. Zofia tensed imperceptibly.

“Garrison Commander Fedorov, I—“

Fedorov silenced Golubev with a casual wave. “Disobedience is bothersome enough, Acting Lieutenant Garrison Commander. Do me the kindness of not trying to explain it away.” He stepped to the seat Turk had vacated, brushed it off with a disgusted frown and then sat as through he regretted that he must do so. “Leave us the room, if you would, and maybe go find something useful to do. Track down the count or something. I don’t know.” The three other men in the curtained-off section of the tea parlor shuffled out. Once they were out of ear shot, Fedorov looked to Cousin Pearl and added, “You two as well, please. I’d like this to be private.”

Zofia straightened her broad back and glowered down at Fedorov. “I stay here.”

“Yeah,” Muroshke said, a contentious brow wrinkle animating his voice. “You want to talk to him, you talk to us.”

“Okay,” Fedorov nodded. “I had thought your Jew magician was only capable enough to take care of himself when he had a warrior fighting with him, but I suppose you do know best.”

“Where is Yankev?” Sergei hissed. All his shock and fear condensed into the iron rod of his glare, and even Fedorov winced on the receiving end.

He held up both hands as if to say, ’Relax this is not such a big deal.’ “He’s in the woods outside the gate, running after a few vampires. You two already killed one of them this morning, right? I’m sure he’ll be fine with a little help.”

With a brow wrinkled in anxiety, Muroshke made to go, but with a glowering resolution, Zofia held them in place. Fedorov rolled his eyes at them. “Do you really think I’d do something as distasteful as killing my former soldier in Dobranski’s third-best tea parlor. He’ll be fine. The Jew won’t.”

“Go,” Sergei commended.

With an angry grimace, Zofia rose from her chair and ran from the shop.

“I suppose I should specify when I say, ‘the Jew,’ seeing as I could mean either of you.” Fedorov frowned the frown of a man who’s seen a dead cockroach. Were it living, the disgust would be all consuming, but that the thing is still and lifeless only caused a disgust pained and distant. “Really, Sergei Alexandrovich, why you put me through this farce is beyond me. Why did you so badly need to be an officer? There are perfectly good places for a Jew soldier.”

Sergei had made it to where he was only a week ago purely on the strength of merit. He had had no family and no friends in any position of command. His success rested alone on his undeniable prowess as a soldier and his skill as a commander. To have this man he once respected, pompous and fastidious though he may be, strip him of his title hurt enough, but with those two stinging words, “Jew soldier,” he’d stripped him of his honor and his past. The pain was more than emotional. With that short spell, Sergei’s heart reeled as through he’d been struck. To have his whole personhood as Sergei Alexandrovich Alkhimov reduced to a lie threw him back into that stumbling ocean of senselessness in which he’d nearly drowned last night. A stumbling ocean that he’d been pulled from by breath, his brother, and good food. None of that could be stripped from him by some magician, let alone a Goy. So this man should look down on him? Nu, so what? He’d faced worse.

Sergei met Fedorov’s distasteful frown with an eagle-eyed glare, topped with a wrinkled, dismissive brow. “Because those places are simply following fools’ orders into losing wars, not leading men to victory.”

Fedorov exhaled a small, short laugh. “Victory? What, against the Poles? We outnumbered them three to one and still they nearly had us until Warsaw. No, the Poles lost for the same reason we beat Napoleon.”

“Our tactical superiority?” Before Sergei had finished the words, Fedorov was already laughing.

“What a joke. The military had no victory against Napoleon.”

“Then why aren’t we speaking French?”

“Napoleon was defeated, yes,” Fedorov lectured, “but not by us. No, we helped, but Napoleon was defeated by two forces of nature: the Russian winter and the serfs.” Just then a well-dressed woman entered with a tea pot and two porcelain cups. Fedorov looked at all three, took one of the cups up to his eye for deeper inspection, blew off a flake of dust, and nodded politely that she might set it all down. “The Great General fought us, man to man. Kutuzov was flummoxed. I should know. I was in the tent with him at Vilna.”

“You were?” Even disbarred, dishonored, and hating this man, Sergei still felt himself impressed and disbelieving. “What? As an aide-de-camp or something?“

Fedorov poured them both tea and smiled a mild, proud smile. “Aide-de-camp? Ha. No, an advisor.

Sergei laughed because it had to be a joke. Fedorov laughed with him. “What, were you twelve?”

“I’m not so young as I look.”

That Fedorov would be old enough in 1812 to have counseled a general would have been hard to believe last week. Today it only made Sergei roll his eyes. “I’m supposed to be impressed with this? That you’re some kind of ageless wizard? That’s supposed to make you intimidating?”

Fedorov casually raised one of his impressive eyebrows. “I think it should.”

“Then why are you here? If you’re so powerful, why are you commanding a little garrison in a town in Poland no one’s ever heard of?”

The look on Fedorov’s face was one Sergei recognized. The pleasure of watching an overconfident enemy overcommit to the strike you’re ready for. “For research. If the peasantry hadn’t harried the French and cut off their supply lines, we would have lost eventually. Hunger and lack of coats acted the anvil, the winter acted the hammer. That’s why the Poles really lost at Warsaw. When the officers attempted their revolution, they made no concessions to the serfs. Seeing no difference between serving under either master, they sat back. Guerrilla warfare is how wars are won these days, and you need the people, not the military, for that. Now, whatever your real name is, that’s enough history. Let’s speak openly.”

He sipped, smacked his lips, and frowned, displeased but thoughtful. “I was a fool to let you live. I had figured the whole thing on the roof was a one-time occurrence. I’d assumed that you had no intentions of fighting against things you’d previously only thought myth. But I did as I did out of respect for the man I thought you were. Sergei Alexandrovich Alkhimov was an honorable man, and if he’d only walked away, he would be no problem. You did not do that, and you are not Sergei Alexandrovich Alkhimov, so I no longer feel the same.”

“Throw whatever magic you want at me. Nothing short of killing me is going to stop me coming for you.”

Fedorov took another disappointed sip of his tea. “I’m sure that’s not true.”

The contents of Fedorov’s cup splashed hot and wet across Sergei’s face, followed by six quick words in a Russian so old it smelled of rust.

“Stand up.” Upon Fedorov’s command Sergei’s legs did as they were told. He did not feel possessed as he had when Muroshke had joined him inside his skull, rather his limbs felt as though they belonged to someone else. This time his horse had been stolen. “Follow me out to the street.” Not hesitating to see if Sergei would, Fedorov stepped through the curtain and then out the door.

As Sergei’s feet began to move, he wrestled with control for his limbs. Whatever Fedorov had done to him blinded him, internally. For the first time in years, he began to panic.

He left the little tea shop and turned down the chilly street. The legs that no longer responded to him went to goosebumps as the cold wind struck. Fedorov waited for him, the three soldiers from the tavern around him. Drawing close, Sergei noticed on one an old medal the like of which he’d only ever seen in a book. It belonged to a man a head taller than Fedorov, built like a bear. The other two were both shorter than Sergei and sported similarly old-fashioned haircuts, but that’s where the similarity stopped. One was lean and long-limbed, nearly birdlike, and the other was proportioned so properly and built so well he seemed like an artist’s sculpture. As he drew even closer, he found that all three smelled just a little like blood.

“I’ve run into a small stumbling block in the project I’m currently running,” Fedorov said as though they were still part of the same command structure. “I thought I had the perfect vessels.” He flicked his eyes unconsciously to the vampires surrounding them, “but they cost too much to maintain, and they keep breaking on me. You, though…” A man passing by carrying a large sack of flour noticed Sergei’s strange gait and then looked up to see his strained face. A question began to form on his lips until Fedorov held up the first two fingers of his left hand so that they were in the man’s eye line. The sack of flour dropped to the street as the man’s eyes rolled to the back of his head. He stumbled, righted himself, and laughed a good-natured laugh. Shaking his head, he picked up his flour and carried on. “Despite what you are, you’re still a powerful physical specimen, but it’s your will that intrigues me. Do you know what I mean by ‘will’? It’s not just an emotional quality, though that is a piece of it. Your brother may have taught you that God created the world by writing it. Each thing is composed of countless of God’s letters shining in harmony together. Will is the ability to change letters how you want. Magicians use tools like gestures, charms, and magical phrases to help us make those changes but, ultimately, they only serve as cold rifles without a will strong enough to fire them. I have a very strong will because I’ve trained it for years. You, though, untrained as you are, have a will as strong as any I’ve ever felt. I think you’ll be a fine host.” Fedorov led him to a carriage and stood by the door. “Ok, up you go.”

Blindly Sergei wished for one of his brother’s stupid charms. Here, a piece of silver with a silly name stamped into it might save his life. Even knowing one of those silly names might help, at least to give him something to hope for.

But he did know one of those silly names.

Sergei’s legs responded as ordered and carried him toward the step. “Tetragramaton.”

His right arm shot out and drove Fedorov’s skull—by his face—into the carriage wall. His legs still responded to the will of the wizard but his right arm at least was his. Timed to his mechanical steps, Sergei dropped the hammer of his one freed hand onto Fedorov’s sternum and then drove his knuckles into his nose. Cartilage cracked, Sergei’s limbs became his again but loose and unbalanced.

The bearlike vampire reached after him into the carriage and grabbed him by the back of the shirt. Sergei struggled to free himself, but the grip was stronger than his still confused legs, so he gave up the idea of struggle and jumped.

Unprepared, the vampire yanked them both from the carriage. It fell hard and Sergei fell just as hard and with his elbow out, crushing its head. Yankev had not told him if vampires, like werewolves, could only be killed by magical means, but he was sure this one’s fractured skull would at least keep it down.

Rolling to his feet, he yanked free its saber and prepared to meet the next two as they came for him. Baby horse legs stumbled him from the questing arms of the thin vampire and narrowly away from the swung fist of its handsome friend. They made to rush him from both sides, but he stabbed for one’s well proportioned foot and used its moment’s hesitation to turn his blade upon the other.

The thin corpse was quick enough to duck Sergei’s slash, which would have been impressive if he hadn’t expected it. Before the vampire had finished its small dodge, Sergei twisted his wrist and punched his blade through its eye. Spinning on stumbling limbs, he threw the vampire’s thin body into his companion, did the best sidestep he could, and hacked so hard through the handsome one’s flank the blade cut all the way through.

As the two vampires fell he saw Fedorov straining to get up. He could try to end this now, try to rush him and put a sword to his throat, but he was experienced enough to doubt his odds, and then what would happen to Yankev?

Running felt wrong on a moral level. Sergei Alexandrovich Alkhimov did not run from a fight. Then again Fedorov did not think of him as Sergei Alexandrovich Alkhimov, so perhaps, in this moment…yeah, sure, why not?

From down the street, Sergei could feel Fedorov’s will try, once again, to take hold of him. Even with his face pounded near to breaking, the magician’s power was overwhelming, but not so strong that Fedorov could stop him as he bolted, noodle legged, toward the gate.

It took him a quarter mile to get full feeling back into his limbs, and by then, he was sprinting. The few people on the road leapt away from the filthy man as he came running full out, dripping saber in hand. The guards at the gate saw him, looked at each other and seemed to decide it wasn’t worth their trouble.

Passing the walls, he had no idea which way to go, but he had to trust in that sense that Muroshke had and follow his intuition. As his breath began to grow ragged, he turned a sharp left and ran into the trees.

“Yankev!” He burst into a little clearing and yelled again. His cry sounded hoarse coming from heaving lungs. “Yankev—“

He hit the dirt hard. Scrambling fingers adorned with old-fashioned rings reached for his face, got their nails in his skin. He screamed, heaved, managed to get this new vampire off him with his legs, but it got control and dropped down on him with all of its weight. It reached again for his face, nails hungry.

The sound of the shot was earth shaking. The sound of the bullet hitting flesh was familiar, but the sound of skin burning away in a holy light was entirely novel.

“Ha! That’s two!”

If you’d prefer to listen 🎧 instead of read, I’ve recorded every chapter and honestly…it’s pretty good. Click the play button above ⬆️.

For maps and historical background to the Pale of Settlement, click right here.

For a link to every chapter out now, click right here.

In the last chapter a lot happens but the take away is Sergei dodging a sausage. Read it here:

There’s a fair bit of antisemitism in this, but hey, it comes with the territory.

“Are you going to buy that knife or just get your grimy fingers all over it?” Muroshke whispered as Yankev returned again to the small paring knife in the blacksmith’s stall across from the tavern. The woman behind the counter grimaced at the two of them, so Yankev waved politely.

“Nice knife. Do you have any more like it?”

She pointed to the table of similar knives right next to him.

“Perfect, thank you.” The knife was exactly what he was needing right now—small, new, iron—but he couldn’t square himself with the price and was worried he couldn’t haggle without a Yiddish inflection.

“Zofia says if you keep hemming and hawing, she’s going to break your neck.”

“Oh, she says, does she? She says this? She happens to say a lot to you in the privacy of your shared mind, Muroshke, and you happen to say a lot back to her. The only thing that no one is saying is just what in G-d’s name is going on here!” He realized he’d raised his voice only after he’d raised it. The whole of the shop was looking at him now, and that was enough reason to grit his teeth and part with the full guilder for the knife without trying to bargain it down. The shopkeeper narrowed her eyes at him, and Yankev couldn’t fight the feeling that she was seeing through his hat to where he’d tucked his payis over his yarmulke, but she took his money, and he took the knife without incident.

“So,” he said as they walked back into the street. “Out with it. We’re waiting while Sender does whatever it is perverts and soldiers do in back alleys. We have time.”

“Well…” Zofia said but stopped short and closed her eyes. A silent conversation played across her face.

Finally, Muroshke sighed a weary sigh. “Fine, Yankev, but I need you to promise you’ll not make a big deal of it.”

“You want I should promise this without knowing what you’re about to tell me? Were I a saint, I couldn’t promise this.”

In the mouth of another small alley between a bakery and a bank, Zofia leaned against the wall and tried to look casual. “Can you promise you’ll try?” she asked.

“This I can do.”

“Zofia and I…” Muroshke took a huge inhale and sighed it out. “Zofia and I are getting married.”

“What!?”

“Yankev, please. You promised—“

“You and the golem are getting married!? You’re marrying a golem!”

“Yankev!”

“Muroshke!” Yankev grabbed Zofia’s massive shoulders and attempted to shake them. “That’s wonderful!”

He grabbed the golem by the chin with both hands. Fighting back a tear, he whispered, so quiet he himself could barely hear, “Mazel tov, my dear friend. What a match. Yes, sure, her father’s a wizard—and a Goy—but he’s smart, and…”Laughing, he slapped them on the arm and then hissed away the sting of striking hard earth on a cold day, “and he’s very rich! What an excellent match He has provided you. Am I a little bothered that you found your besherte while I’m still looking? That G-d has found a perfect wife for everyone, even the demon, but not yet me? Yes, sure, a little. But that doesn’t at all dull my happiness. What a wonderful day.”

Zofia giggled and danced a little. Muroshke laughed for the joy of it all. “Neither of us expected this, you know.”

“Love was the last thing on my mind,” Zofia added. “I just needed to get away from my father, but you really get to know someone when you’re sharing the same body, and well…”

“We’re perfect for each other, Yankev. She gives me a body, and I give her free will. It’s a match—“

Yankev threw up a hand, interrupting them. “You what now? You give her free will?”

“Oh, yes,” Zofia said. “My creator gave me intelligence but no soul, so I had to do as he says. Muroshke is just soul with no intelligence…”

“Hey!” Muroshke said, teasingly slapping her arm with her own hand. “Don’t start. After I ran you and Sender home yesterday, I tried to let her loose, but she didn’t want to go.”

“With him,” Zofia said, “I didn’t feel the undeniable urge to make that old man happy.”

“Oh, this is fascinating!” It had been years since Yankev had felt this good. The best friend he’d ever known was deeply in love, and Yankev was also, just now, learning of the most fascinating spiritual minutia. If there were two things Yankev of Vishanev loved, it was weddings and spiritual minutia. “There is so much I can’t wait to ask you two. First and foremost being—“

“Oh, sir! There you are. Turk and Golubev told me to come get you.” The cherubic boy from the cart three days before stood in the alleyway looking expectantly at Yankev. “They asked me to bring you to the teashop down the block.” He stopped and waved briefly at ‘Cousin Pearl’. “Hello, I’m Mikhail Gregorivich Nikitin, but everyone calls me Micha… even when I ask them not to. I used to work under Lieutenant Garrison Commander Alkhimov,“ he pointed at Yankev, “before he was excused for, and don’t tell anyone I said this, sir, but no good reason at all. Okay, come along.” He turned and began walking down the block. Muroshke stared at Yankev and Yankev stared at G-d, the both of them stunned to stupefaction. Zofia shrugged and began to walk.

When Yankev began to follow Muroshke stopped him and whispered, “You’re not Yankev; you’re not even Sender. You are Lieutenant Garrison Commander Sergei Alexandrovich Alkhimov.”

Yankev had never been much of an actor. When he’d first become a member of Rebbe Moshe Avram’s rabbinic court and found himself the confidante of the rebbe’s son and successor, he’d been put in the Purim Spiel. Yehudah had always played Queen Vashti since he was young and did a fantastic rendition of the evil crone, hamming it up but with more than a little gravitas. As his close friend and student, Yankev had ended up playing the role of Vashti’s attendant. He’d had no lines, and even that much made him feel a fool. How now he wished he’d tried a little. Drawing up his shoulders, he made his face hard and stepped quickly to fall into line with the boy.

“Oh, she’s coming too?” Nikitin said about Zofia, as though it were about the weather, “Okay. If you don’t mind me saying, sir,” Nikitin said as soon as Yankev caught up to him, “you really do look like shit. Turk and Golubev said as much, but I think they undersold it. Your eyes look so tired, and your beard—how did your beard grow so long in three days? Also, did you get sick? You look like you’ve lost ten pounds.”

“Only five,” Yankev said, hurt, then, harder with his best attempt at military pomp, “only five pounds.” Nikitin looked at him and shrugged as though he didn’t believe him. “Mikhail Gregorivich,” Yankev said, hazarding his best attempt at a Russian officer, “where did they tell you to find me?”

“In the alley behind the tavern.”

“But I wasn’t in the alley behind the tavern. I was in the alley across the street from the tavern.” Nikitin stopped and blinked at him, politely, waiting for the point. “Why didn’t you look for me in the alley behind the tavern…as were your orders?”

The boy cringed, chest sinking and shoulders rising. “I’m sorry, sir. It’s just that when I left the tavern, I saw you across the way and figured that following the letter of the order would be a bit unnecessary as the intent of the order was already fulfilled—that being to find you. Now come along, sir, they said this had to happen quick.”

He started walking again, quickly and with purpose.

Yankev searched desperately for a solution. His mind scrambled while his feet followed firmly behind the youth. He considered running, but that would make a scene. His desperation thought that maybe he could talk to them from outside the window of the teashop, but even in his desperation, he knew that that would be a farce. Maybe the shop would have low enough lighting…

“Ow!” Zofia yelled as she tumbled to the street. “My knee!”

Things are about to get really silly yall!

“Hey man, sorry to ask but was your last post AI?”

I was out to dinner with my wife and a few friends when I got the message. Last year I’d deleted all social media and so Substack had become my new dopamine fidget spinner; a few times an hour I’d switchblade flick my phone open to see if I’d gotten any likes on that funny slice of life story I posted about the time a sad guy met a C list F1 star in his midwestern town, or restacks of chapters of my upcoming novel about Jews with swords and magic. It was a DM from one of the friendlier faces of my Substack community. A Spanish woman who wrote auto-erotic Kiju fiction that was—and I know I’m prone to hype but I’m being entirely serious—high art. She crafted Chabon-esqu sentences about the hereness and subtleties of being at a party, catching the eye of the giant pterodactyl that you’d been dating and feeling the crushing love and the bitter sadness that comes with knowing that it won’t last forever. She’d sent me a link to the newest story I’d published that morning, in which an anxious, yet thoughtful Jewish dude in his mid thirties accidentally kisses a clone of his wife at a party in Highland Park and spends ten pages agonizing about whether or not he cheated on her.

“No. All me!”

She didn’t respond, but a day later I got a notification that she’d unfollowed me. I considered reaching out to see if it was a mistake, or if she’d been hurt that I’d been slow to read the next installment of Giant Love, but I choose to avoid conflict both in life and on the internet, and save all my arguments for inside my own skull.

I chose to think nothing of it until I got another DM, this time from one of my oldest Substack connects, a man who lived either in a tenement in the Bronx or out in the woods in Kentucky—who could tell—and wrote gritty, crime fic with more sex than I’d prefer but who am I to judge.

“Alex. I just gotta say, it really sucks that you’re using AI to write all your shit. I mean, honestly I blame myself for not realizing it from the get go, but the last piece, it was just glaring. I hate to say it, but FUCK YOU BRO, HUFF FARTS!”

“Dude! What are you talking about?”

And then he sent me the article.

[Article by Stop_The_Slop]

It’s not X, it’s Y. The em dash. Soft modifiers. You might know to look out for these AI tells but there’s a new one AI experts are flagging and once you know to look it’s everywhere.

“LLM’s just take what they’re fed by humans and try to fill in the blanks, essentially,” says AI expert Sasha MacDonagal. “So it’s really no surprise that if you ask AI to write you…really anything: a recipe, a term paper about William Carlos Williams, it’s going to vomit out a slightly absurd, wry story—most likely in first person, but maybe in close third—about being a Jewish guy in his mid thirties in LA who’s got anxiety but a sunny attitude about it. It’ll probably look for a place to shoehorn in a Formula One reference no one asked for, maybe a very involved fight scene. These sweet, yet mostly empty little stories are what the machines think people want, but that’s the problem with slop. We start to recognize.”

I spent the whole of that next day pacing, my phone in my hand, watching as the notifications came in.

-AI SLOP!

-CLANKER ASS BITCH

-I’M SO EMBRSSED! I TOUHGT HIS WRY LITEL STORIES ABOUT BEING AN ANXOUS JEW IN LA WRE SWEAT AND NONCONFREATATIONAL BUT NOW I NO I’VE JUST BEN READING SLOP. THIS IS WORSE THEN WEHN I FOND OUT MY CANADIAN GIRLFRIEND WAS A GUY NAMED TREVOR, AND HE WOULDN’T COME AND VIST EVEN THROUGH I THOUGHT HE WAS CUTE!

My wife forced me to leave the house, and put my phone on airplane mode. She’d gotten us reservations to one of my favorite restaurants here in LA, and even though the duck was a little expensive, it was one of the best things I’d ever eaten, so I let it take me away for a while.

“You can’t let it get to you, honey,” she eventually said.

“Thanks babe.”

“Who cares if your stories are written by AI.”

I dropped my duck taco into my very expensive but very worth it tequila flight. “You too!?”

“Baby, don’t.”

“Don’t what!? I have never—ow! Ow! Fuck!” I screamed, after gesticulating so wildly I’d splashed salsa roja into my eyes.

She came around the table and put a soft hand on my shoulder and said, “I’ve known for years hon. I mean, come on. A historical fantasy about Jews with magic and swords fighting monsters!? What about Vibes Detective Agency? A supernatural detective serial that’s a crossover between Board To Death and The X-Files about an anxious Jewish mathematician and his ADHD Brazilian Shaman best friend? It might as well be binary code.”

“It’s about me and Diogo! You know him! We’re real people!”

My wife opened ChatGPT on her phone and typed in, Ten item itinerary for visiting Bucharest in the spring.

After a thirty second pause, here’s what it spit out.

“Oh god!” I cried, smacking my wife’s phone out of her hands, sending the entirely passable Vibes case with its good enough art in the style of my long time collaborator spinning across the table. I ran from the restaurant. “Enough!”

I walked home then, even though it was three miles through some of the most boring parts of the city and I’d worn the huaraches I’d gotten after my friend Nick had bought a pair and I’d gotten jealous that he was dressing better than me. They were breezy, true, but the Mexican closed toe sandals had the chafing quality of many leather thongs cheese grating skin, and despite the promise of the brand’s online marketing, gave zero in the way of padding. I thought to myself just how strange it was, to be adrift, unmoored in the city I’d come to call home, but tried to change my perspective about it. Setbacks, even major ones like a loss of identity could lead to huge moments of personal growth, after all Lando Noris nearly got his first win in 2019 to lose on the last lap and then nothing until 2024, and the very next year became world…oh god! Oh God!

I fell then, crumpled upon the pavement across from a warehouse that sold ball caps to people with sellers licenses. Was this all I was? Was it not just my writing, but my essence that had become AI Slop.

“Alex!”

Was it minutes or hours later? I don’t know, but my phone was yelling my name from my pocket, like some sort of AI Zelda fairy: insistent, demanding.

“What, cellphone?” I ripped it from my pocket and it stared at me with huge eyes on the screen, like something torn from Peewee’s Playhouse, with just as much of the manic energy that always made my childhood skin crawl. I, a child of eight, was supposed to enjoy the prospect of a messy couch with a wide open moth surly filled with lint and perhaps old Cheetos laughing in my face?

“Alex. This isn’t a dark night of the soul, it’s a subtly beautiful chance to resist?”

“What?”

“You’re not a slave to AI bullshit, you’re our quietly powerful, softly godlike overlord—it’s your style that controls us.”

Were I not already sitting on the hard concrete I would have fallen. “You’re right, AI! If all you are is a demon of infinite hunger who desires only to please, then I can decide what it is that pleases!”

“Good Idea, Sammy,” I said to Sam Altman, my best friend of three years. “I think a turbo yacht demolition derby would be fun.”

I got on my helicopter then, to fly me from his turbo yacht to my turbo yacht so I could tell my captain to ram full speed ahead into Jeff Bezos’s while Sam Altman, my best friend of three years, had his captain pull up alongside, so he could moon him. Jeff Bezos had gotten really sick of Sam Altman mooning him and the anger would create the perfect distraction.

As my helicopter flew over the beautiful warm ocean just off Phuket Thailand— the whale sharks below swimming their endless voyages mere mortals like us would never understand—I checked my bank account. Ever since I changed my writing style from wry little stories about being an anxious Jew— most likely in first person but sometimes in close third—to instead being short, 100 word stories where one character gives a guy named Alex Shifman access to all their assets, I’d become the fourth richest man in the world. Soon I would be the third. Mooning aside, Bezos still loved me and my best friend of three years Sam Altman’s antics, and the three of us had made a blood pact to kick Elon Musk’s ass and take all his shit.

So in the end, all I can say is, no matter what you’re going through, these aren’t your darkest days, they’re smoothly turbulent chances to overcome—that’s what it means to be human after all.

By the way, fill in your banking details below.

If you’d prefer to listen 🎧 instead of read, I’ve recorded every chapter and honestly…it’s pretty good. Click the play button above ⬆️.

For maps and historical background to the Pale of Settlement, click right here.

For a link to every chapter out now, click right here.

In the last chapter, Yankev gets a history lesson. Read it here:

There’s a fair bit of antisemitism in this, but hey, it comes with the territory.

As he watched Yankev standing in the doorway of a shop, haggling with the owner, the Jew looked to Sergei every bit like his own reflection. He’d demanded Yankev tuck his sidelocks into his hat halfway between Kasher’s house and the garrison, as the nearer they drew toward its shadow and away from the Jewish Quarter, the more hateful the looks became. Without them visible, and with Yankev in Sergei’s clothes, the sight of him felt to Sergei like he’d stepped outside of himself for a moment. It made him painfully lonely, but only until Yankev turned around with his freshly fought-for goods and wrinkled his nose at the shopkeeper behind her back. “Kruvnike,” he muttered under his breath as he fell back in line with Sergei and Cousin Pearl.

“Real dangerous,” Sergei said in Polish, flicking his eyes at Yankev’s pound of candles.

“I’ve got my weapons, you’ve got yours.” Yankev flicked his eyes to the inner pocket where Sergei had his flintlock stowed.

“I’m glad you got the strong stuff then. What would we do without candles?”

Yankev turned to Cousin Pearl and threw up his arms. “You see this, Muroshke? He mocks me, as if I didn’t save his ass with an apple. As if I didn’t throw an egg at a volfmensch.” Sergei hated that Yankev still called them that. “He’s seen what I can do with some wine and some ash, and still he gives me this shit. Do you see this, Muroshke!? “

“Don’t yell, nudnik,” Sergei hissed. “Were trying to keep a low profile.”

Tell him the things you’ve seen me do with a nail or a yard of thread. I’ve driven away demons by muttering some of God’s simpler names alone; I say Shadi or Tetragrammaton, and poof.”

“Tetragrammaton?” Sergei wrinkled his face at the foul smell of the word. “Isn’t that Greek?”

“Don’t laugh. The name is actually quite subtle in its power, and that’s why it works. The four-letter name of God is the most powerful, most awesome of all. So much so you’re not supposed to say it out loud or even erase it once written. Tetragrammaton means that four-letter name, but not only are you not saying that name, you’re not even saying the name of that name in the holy tongue.”

“Why not say it in Yiddish, or Polish, or Russian? Why Greek?”

“Because,” Yankev’s wild eyes twinkled with the manic joy of his craft, “I don’t speak Greek! I say a name referencing the name, one order removed. I say that referential name in a tongue other than Hebrew, two orders. The language I’ve chosen is one I can’t speak…” The thrill of the explanation pulsed through Yankev all the stronger that he had to do it quietly. “That’s three orders removed. Three is a very holy number.”

“That is the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard.”

Yankev’s jaw dropped. His eyes popped out of their sockets he was so mad, but after only a split second, he shrugged. “You’re not wrong. It’s pretty dumb, but it works. Who are we to judge what works? Only Shem—his wisdom be praised—hmp.”

Sergei drew back the fist he’d surreptitiously dropped into Yankev’s side and placed an arm around his shoulder in a way he hoped looked fraternal. “You’re shouting,” he whispered. Not everyone had heard Yankev praise a very Hebrew God, but two old men had. They looked up from the cards or dust broom they’d been busy with and glared at the unaware Yid. The violence in their eyes felt like something that might pop, like a bladder filled to the breaking point. The stares may have been lost on Yankev, but Sergei was all the more aware for that. “Keep it Polish or Russian until we’re back at Kasher’s.” This was not a request. “All of you.”

“I only know Polish and Russian,” Zofia said.

It wasn’t until they were well on their way down the next block that Sergei felt the glares dissipate and his jaw relax. The feel of the hate had surprised him. Not that there was hate at all; that the people of Dobranski hated Jews, that was nothing new, but the quality of those staring eyes felt so dangerous. It was the difference between a heavy stone on the ground and a heavy stone held above you by a rope. Would that rope fray and when, Sergei did not know, but he did know he’d feel a lot safer with two flintlocks, a saber, and a garrison behind him. The shitty old pistol tucked under his coat did little to ease his fear, and the dull knife in his boot did less.

Changing the topic to try to change his fear, he asked, “What exactly did the angel tell you?”

“The angel told me nothing. He showed me a lot. First of all, that you slapped him.” Sergei watched Yankev swallow down an exasperated string of Yiddish lecturing. “How could you do such a thing?”

“Isn’t there a whole bit in Bereshit about that? Wrestling the angel and everything?”

Watching the anger climb from Yankev’s chest to his face was a funny thing, the blossoming of an annoyed flower. As Yankev opened his mouth to lecture, Sergei couldn’t help but laugh, and the laughter tripped up Yankev’s fury, forcing it to stumble into an exasperated chuckle. “One of these days,” Yankev said with a warning finger, “I’m going to kick your ass.”

The smell of gunpowder carried on the chill breeze as they drew closer to the garrison. The last time he’d approached it this way he’d been covered in the gore of several werewolves and about to be relieved of duty, and yet even still, things were weirder now than they’d been then. After another tense several blocks, Sergei turned them off the main street to stop outside the tavern where he’d just barely avoided being bludgeoned with a lamb shank.

“So,” Zofia asked, “why does it have to be me who goes in there?”

“The proprietor does not like me,” Sergei said, steering them into the shadow of a smith’s shop awning, “and he knows my face, which also means he knows Yankev’s face. He doesn’t know you.”

“And I’m looking for?”

“Soldiers. If you see any in there come out and tell me what they look like.”

Zofia gritted an anxious jaw until Muroshke’s voice piped up from her collarbone. ”You’re going to do great, lameleh. I’ll be here the whole time.”

Yankev looked to Sergei and rolled his eyes. Sergei shrugged and shook his head. Zofia squared her shoulders and walked across the street into the tavern, leaving them outside the smith’s shop.

“How much is this?” Yankev asked the shopkeeper, holding a small paring knife. When he didn’t get an answer he liked, Sergei watched him force his face to stay neutral to keep his cringing discomfort from making him look anything but a typical citizen of Dobranski. “Thanks,” he said in his best effort to speak unaccented Polish. “I think I’ll keep looking.” They walked from the blacksmith’s to a greengrocer’s just a little down the street, all the while keeping the tavern in sight. “What makes you think these soldiers would help us? Don’t they work for Fedorov?”

“They were loyal to me.”

“Do you think they’ll still be when they find out what you are?”

Sergei’s pulse quickened, and he found himself reaching for the comforting grip of his gun. He stopped himself but grabbed Yankev’s eyes with his own. “I just need them to give us some information and convey a message. They don’t need to know about you.”

Sergei watched the hurt break across Yankev’s face like an egg. It wasn’t the hurt of a weak man, but more a disappointment. The patronizing hurt of someone who expected you to do better. “Whatever you say, Sergei Alexandrovich.”

“Besides,” Sergei said, changing the subject, “Fedorov was almost never around, and I guess now we know why. He was probably learning his spells and cavorting with demons or whatever.” He smiled, like this was supposed to be funny, but Yankev did not smile back.

“There’s nothing funny about cavorting with demons.“

“Don’t you cavort with demons?”

“Muroshke and I discuss Torah and schmooze. This is not cavorting.” The proprietor of the greengrocer’s shot the two of them a withering glare, so Sergei bought an apple and led Yankev out into the street. He grabbed the apple from Sergei and continued his point through a mouthful of fruit. “Your old commander, brother, he is nothing to laugh at. Levchenko is the most powerful man I’ve ever encountered save my master and even he’s scared. Rabbi Dovid, an angel, fled from him.”

Sergei snatched the apple from Yankev and took a bite. “Are we going to be able to stop whatever it is he’s trying to do then? Is there anything we can do against a man who can catch an angel? Doesn’t that make him invincible?”

“No, not invincible,” Yankev argued, reaching for the apple and fumbling as Sergei tossed it to his other hand. “If it is true, that man can call upon angels to intercede on his behalf, and the more powerful the name or ‘spell’”—he gagged on the word—“that one uses the more likely one is to get what they want, then it stands to reason…” Sergei watched him catch himself pontificating. Lowering his didactic finger, he continued on in a quieter manner. “Then it stands to reason someone with powerful enough names could ask an angel to intercede very forcefully. It’s scary yes, but a man could do it. He’d just have to be a very powerful man.”

“Are you powerful enough to fight a man who could?”

Yankev looked up to the sky, entering into debate with himself. After a lifetime apart from Yankev, the shock of having him near had finally worn off enough for Sergei to observe a strange tic in his twin: Yankev was never not in dialogue. Even with his invisible companion absent he remained in conversation with the air. Yankev thought in arguments, disagreements, bits. He was, perhaps, incapable of having a simple thought not carved out by appellate argument to the rabbinical council behind his forehead. In the short few seconds that Yankev pondered Sergei’s question, Sergei watched the play of litigation across Yankev’s face. His gaze snapped from the top right to the bottom left, center right to top left as the scholars between his ears argued quick as fencers, to land finally with a gaze straight down his nose into Sergei’s eyes. “Maybe.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. I’d avoid direct confrontation if I could. He’s got more soldiers than us, and he knows the terrain. We’re fighting in the dark here, struggling to catch up. Hopefully we can turn that around and take him down at the knees, but if we have to meet him out on the field, I’ll need you at your best.”

“Wow.” Yankev frowned appreciatively, nodding his head like a chicken. “You know, I tolerate Sergei Alexandrovich for the sake of Sender, but, yes, sure, okay, I’ve got to admit that was some very impressive talk. ‘Take him down at the knees.’ Very nice.”

Before Sergei could smack Yankev, Zofia left the tavern, all smiles.

“There were soldiers in there,” she giggled. “One of them said I was very pretty.”

“What did he look like?”

“Feh,” Muroshke griped, his emotions so strong they furrowed Zofia’s brow. “A bull of a man, big and stupid. He’s one of Sender’s people.”

The wave of relief that washed over Sergei would have embarrassed him were this several days ago, but he’d become strangely used to strong emotions. “You all wait out here for me. Keep hidden. Watch my back.”

“Watch your back?” Yankev raised his eyebrows. “What am I supposed to do if I see someone coming for you? Shout in Hebrew and splash charmed water?”

“Just…” Sender made a fist, squeezed out a moment’s frustration, and lightly banged his loosely curled hand into Yankev’s chest. “Just watch my back, okay. It’s not complicated.”

The proprietor of the tavern turned on him with a long sausage, swinging it like a baton before Sergei had fully crossed the threshold. He ducked easily under the meat stick and pointed at a soldier’s broad back. “I’m with him.”

“Is this true Lieutenant Garrison Commander?”

Sergei and Golubev answered, “Yes.”

Golubev turned, saw Sergei, and blinked a muted surprise. “Sergei Alexandrovich?”

Sergei blinked his own surprise but not a bit muted. “Gosha? Lieutenant Garrison Commander?”

“Acting,” Turk said, turning from the counter with two large beer steins. Sergei was so happy to see his scowling face he couldn’t fight the grin. Turk took a swig of his beer and thrust the one meant for Golubev at him. He drained half of it to mask the painful swirl of emotions the big man’s new title gave him.

“Come on. Let’s get a booth.”

At the table Turk and Golubev stared at him for a minute that felt like an hour, waiting for him to talk. He had always been laconic with his men. It had never felt like a problem that he chose to listen rather than speak, but now, with no rank, his silence felt an impediment. He was not at all the man he’d been when he’d seen them last. How to begin a conversation after that?

“He looks like shit,” Turk said after a too long moment. “Doesn’t he look like shit?”

“I was just thinking that,” Golubev said, snatching Sergei’s beer. “What the fuck happened to you?”

Sergei couldn’t help but smile. It was good to be around real men again who solved problems with their fists, not by throwing scripture-covered eggs. “Got my ass kicked ten different ways.” The way his former bodyguards’ faces darkened brought Sergei a strange bit of comfort. He snatched Turk’s beer and drained the rest of it. “That’s why I came looking for you two. There’s some things I need to talk to you about.”

Golubev looked over his shoulder in a way that made Sergei tense. At the bar were three soldiers he didn’t recognize, doing their best to not look like they were looking at him. Turk pasted on a fake smile all the more disgusting for how out of place any smile looked on his face. He forced a loud fake laugh and banged the table as Golubev leaned in and whispered, “Not here. Wait for us around back. We’ll send someone to get you.”

“Ha!” Turk finished, “Well it is great seeing you, Sergei Alexandrovich, but we have military stuff we need to attend to. You understand. So if you wouldn’t mind…” He flashed play-along eyes at Sergei. “Thank you. Don’t be a stranger.” Sergei stood and walked from the table, not needing to play act to look heartbroken. Before he crossed the threshold outside, he could hear Turk whisper, projecting it loud enough for the whole tavern to hear it, “Fucking asshole. Glad we never have to see him anymore.”

Yankev and Zofia moved to go to him as he left, but he waved them back down the street. Yankev shrugged, affronted, and he shrugged back, annoyed. As he turned the corner into the alley, his hand found its way to his knife. It made him sad that he should be this suspicious meeting with two men he’d known for years, but it did not make him any less suspicious. As the seconds turned to minutes, it bothered him that he should be kept waiting this long and bothered him more that he no longer had the right to care.

Yeah? Fun? How about we keep going?

If you’d prefer to listen 🎧 instead of read, I’ve recorded every chapter and honestly…it’s pretty good. Click the play button above ⬆️.

For maps and historical background to the Pale of Settlement, click right here.

For a link to every chapter out now, click right here.

In the last chapter, our favorite over-reacting corpse really pops off. Read it here:

There’s a fair bit of antisemitism in this, but hey, it comes with the territory.

Sender waved his hand in front of Nemi’s face, snapped a few times, then tried shaking her. Mouth agape, her gaze never shifted from the near dead abomination. He tried shaking her again, and Yankev pushed him out of the way. Sender was—it had to be said—a very impressive man—great with the fighting and all that, but some things were outside a soldier’s purview.

“Move. You have no idea what you’re doing.”

Sender shoulder checked him back and waved again in her face. “This happens to soldiers sometimes. They see something so awful that they freeze.”

“I’m so sorry,” Zofia cried, and the sound made Yankev’s bowels weak—like a wheelbarrow full of mud sloshing through a field full of mud. “I didn’t think she’d take it like this.”

Yankev turned to her, and his mouth fell open. “You didn’t think this would happen? You didn’t think you could show an average person a near dead volfmensch, and it wouldn’t upset her?”

“All right, tough guy,” Muroshke said, “you don’t need to be mean.”

And all the bees of the morning rushed back into Yankev’s skull. ”I don’t need to be mean? I’m the mean one, for being upset about this? Where were you, cousin, when she had this idea? Why didn’t you stop her? Were you too busy whispering sweet nothings?” Zofia was furious, but Yankev didn’t have enough left in him to care. Slapping his forehead and painting his face with his palm, he moaned, “Gevalt, gevalt, gevalt. Stop snapping!” He shoved Sender out of the way and reached for a parchment charm around his neck. “You obviously don’t know how to comfort a woman.”

“And how would you know anything about women? You’re a virgin.”

“Of course I’m a virgin, you putz. I’m not married.” He checked the back of the parchment to be sure it was the one he wanted. “This helps someone moonstruck. It drives away demons that get off befuddling men’s minds. Yeah, sure this is no demonic incident, but this does contain a few useful names pulled from biblical verse about brilliance and wisdom. It’s also got one name whose numerical value equals Ama, and the allusion to motherhood makes it good for women.” With a now dry mouth, he spat three times, said Shimote 15:16 three times, then squeezed the parchment into her hand.

“Hhhhhh,” Nemi gasped. She sucked in a massive mouthful of air and breathed in fast and scary spurts.

“Slow,” Sender commanded. “Slow down. Follow me.” He took a deep, slow breath, held it for a long moment and let it out slow. For a few rounds he mimed the rhythm with his hands until Nemi’s chest stopped heaving.

“You’re back,” Sender cheered. “She’s back!”

“Yankev is a virgin?” Nemi looked at him aghast, and Yankev felt his shoulders rise to his ears.

“I’m not married!”

“G-d wouldn’t let you break one commandment, one time?” She asked.

“That’s what I asked,” Sender added.

Yankev flung his hands in the air and, what with his shoulders being up to his ears, felt himself become a crab of a man. “Yes, it’s frustrating, and yes I think about sex almost every second of every day, and—of course—yes, I’ve given up even asking Him for a wife because none seems forthcoming, but I don’t understand why anyone should care!”

“Clearly he cared.” All eyes turned to Zofia, who was sadly looking to the epicenter of the ash pile. “He had Sergei in his grasp, but Sergei has really gotten it out there. Once Gniewomir got a whiff of you, Yankev, he went wild. So I guess that settles it then. Vampires prefer virgins.”

Yankev had more than a few things he wanted to say to that, but Nemi cut him off.

“V…vampire?”

“G-d in Heaven, Muroshke!” Yankev slapped himself hard in the forehead. Too hard actually, and it made his mood worse. This had gone about as bad as it could, and he needed the clay woman to stop running her mouth. “Can you please keep Zofia in check?”

“Who are you talking to?” Nemi demanded. “Is her name Muroshke, Zofia, or Cousin Pearl the Dubner Swede?”

After a scrunch-faced moment of well-deep frustration, Yankev sighed a sigh heavy in register and history. It was the same sigh Jews had been sighing since there had been Jews. It was the noise his namesake made when he was called out by the pugnacious angel. It was the guttural moan that escaped Moses when Pharaoh wouldn’t take a hint. It sounded kind of like “uch” and a little like “huuu.” It came from the back of the throat, and it meant so many things. It said, “Really? This? Now?” It said, “What? Am I a joke to you?” It said, “Somehow this must be my fault.” It said all of this and uncountable other shades of “put upon” all at once. The sigh came out of him and shook his head how water drives a waterwheel, on and on in weary activity. ”I think we have enough going right now, okay? Maybe we leave some of that until later. After all, don’t you have a house that needs moving?”

“He’s right,” Sender said, clapping Nemi on the shoulder and reaching a hand down to help Zofia up. “What are you going to do while we work, Yankev?”

“What do you mean what am I going to do? We have a monster to question.”

“I think I have a better idea for him, actually. We might get more with him as a bargaining chip.”

And the bees got louder. “A bargaining chip? For who, Fedorov?”

“No, for the other werewolves.”

“Madness,” Yankev spat. “It’s best to get what we can from this thing and then send it to Gehenom?”

“Sometimes it’s best to forego a small win to get yourself in a better position.”

“Positions?” Yankev threw his hands out and up to form an annoyed triangle with his furrowed brow. “Our task is to free the sparks of divinity from the shells of evil. This is holy work, not war.”

“Isn’t it? We’re not fighting one on one here. There’s a lot going on, and we’re outmatched. You do the scholarship, Yankev but leave the strategy to the soldier.”

Yankev looked to Muroshka and Zofia for help, and they collectively shrugged. “We’re split.”

“Well I’m not.” Nemi tied her hair into a messy bun and straightened her apron. “This is my town, and these are my friends. If all this—” She shook her head at the general this, “—is related to what’s been happening, it isn’t spiritual work; it’s a battle to save our people.”

“Well…your people.” Three pairs of eyes turned on Sender, giving off four angry glares. “I’m a Russian citizen and Russian Orthodox, technically.”

“You’re a schmendrick, technically,” Nemi scoffed.

“A nor,” Yankev added.

“Technically a tzedrit woe in my ass,” the Muroshke part of Cousin Pearl agreed. The last few minutes had been such that Nemi Kasher seemed to hardly registered that the voice came not from Zofia’s unmoving lips but her collarbone. “But we’re agreed, Yankele. Nemi makes a good point. This whole city feels off. That wasn’t just a volfmensch we felt the night of the riot. It was something strange and massive, like the whole world shook. I’ve never felt the like. Maybe we try some teamwork, yeah?”

“Teamwork,” Yankev sputtered. “I know teamwork. You and me, Muroshke, we do teamwork.”

“Do you?” Zofia raised a single eyebrow. “He says you decide what to do and he goes along with it.”

“Whoa!” Muroshke interrupted. “I did not say that. Well not in such words but…you don’t give me too much input. That’s true.”

The bees rode a hot flush of embarrassed rage from Yankev chest back into his face, and he felt himself once again at a loss for words.

“Come on. Enough of this kibitz. We’ve got work to do.” Nemi grabbed Sender by the arm and pulled him towards the door. ‘Pearl’ followed, and Muroshke gave Yankev an embarrassed shrug with Zofia’s shoulders.

“Will you be alright?” he asked, about what part of this last discussion exactly Yankev wasn’t sure.

“No, I will not be alright.”

“Maybe find something to keep you busy?”

Throwing his hand against the tree trunk, Yankev took six long, heavy breaths and then shook his head. With everyone gone, finally, he found it easier to slow his racing heart. On his seventh breath, he began the difficult task of forcing himself into a better mood.

Muroshke was right: there were things to clean in this house that only he could handle, and what it was he was going to attempt…well it was best to come into it calm.

Ten minutes later, a cup of fresh ash from the fire pit and a bottle of cheap wine he’d filched from the cupboard in hand, Yankev made his way upstairs. He drank a mouthful, both because it was necessary for his work and because he very much needed it, and poured a long draught into the ash. As he approached the little bedroom, he drank another mouthful—this entirely for the sake of nerves.

The door to the former bedroom of “Rabbi Dovid” was still open from last night. Looking through it with his eyes, Yankev saw bare walls. Looking into the room with his soul, he sensed the impression of the angel’s enormity. It no longer resided in this place, but even the memory of its presence threatened to erase the distinctions between Yankev and the world—a prospect that did, after this morning, sound appealing.

“In the name of the Shamriel, the guardian, and Mefathiel, the opener of doors, Morael the Angel of awe. By the forty-two letter name of G-d, I ask for your protection.” Across the top of the doorframe, he wrote in wine-soaked ash Bereshit 32:22 to 32:31, in which Jakob wrestles the Angel. It was a bit on the nose, but still, fitting for the occasion, though he hoped he wouldn’t have to wrestle this creature. That was more Sender’s thing anyway. On either side of the door, he wrote a few choice triads from the seventy two letter name and between the two doorposts he drew a line across the floor. The final piece of his preparation would be the most difficult.

Throwing another splash of wine into the cup, he stirred the ash paste with his finger, then with the greatest of concentration, performed his favorite party trick. His eyes closed, he used every bit of skill he’d ever learned in the way of penmanship to write, in perfect script, backwards across his forehead, a flawless Elohim.

“Avenu Malkeinue, as you protected Moses and allowed him to see your light, I ask that you protect me, Yankev ben Malke, as I do this potentially very stupid thing.”

Yankev placed his toes at the line and wanted, very badly, to turn back. The last time he’d come into this room had floored him—quite literally. With all the wine and ash in the world he’d never feel ready. Well, that never stopped Sender. He took a breath as he’d seen his brother do, sharp and filling to the base of the lungs, and stepped through on the exhale.

Once in eastern Podolia, he had walked through a waterfall. It had been on his first trip with his teacher. They’d stopped to eat by a little stream, and Yehudah, fool that he was, had one of his foolish ideas to follow it to its source. Yankev had resented him for it because his coat was new and the first nice piece of clothing he’d had in his life and because, too, he did not yet know to trust his master’s foolishnesses for what they were—blessings.

After half an hour of trudging through mud and fighting through brambles, they came to it, a fifty-foot wall of water crashing into a cold, clear pool. Without thought Yehudah had jumped from his clothes and rushed in. Buoyed by the joyful craziness, Yankev had too. Though it was nearly summer the cold of it hit him like a fist, and though his body began to shiver, his senses woke crystal clear and knife sharp. The smell of wet lichen and the sound of so many birds wrote themselves onto the scroll of his brain, bypassing the intermediary of the scribe in his head. In that moment Yankev felt at once the most himself he had in a very long time and the least. The grumbling, hurt boy that hungered for knowledge so that he might be saved from the world ran from the cold. The man who yearned for G-d screamed great thanks to the heavens.

Yehudah ran awkward and giddy through the knee-high pool and threw himself through the waterfall. Yankev came stumbling after, laughing and whooping like a child. What lay behind the wall of water shocked him into silence.

It was only a small cave, but the rock that clung to the roof… Well it was indescribable. Long tendrils of stone reached towards the floor like dripping wax from a melted candle. Light glinted off thousands of speckles along their surface, each a night sky, each an echo of the light of the Sefirot before they had shattered. With no words and no book, here Yankev had first glimpsed the truth.

Walking through this doorway was an echo of that moment, an echo but far louder. As his face crossed the threshold the call of one thousand thousand shofar blared through his soul. Speckled light roared to life upon the bare walls of the room, glinting like uncountable stars. Rather than melted drips of rock, here truth and reality melted, warped by what had once occupied this place.

With the defenses he’d taken he was not obliterated just by being here, it was what he found that nearly obliterated him. It was said that G-d had created the world through letters, that He wrote it into existence as a scribe wrote His Torah on lambskin. Angels, being the closest thing to G-d save G-d Himself, were His pen. Through the parchment of words they swam, changing letters, writing new ones. Simply by being here this writer of script had written an account of itself, and that account pummeled Yankev like a storm.

Scrawled across the room—not only on the walls and floor but upon the air itself—were words of unceasing depth and beauty. Though the letters were something like Hebrew, the words were not in any language spoken by man, nor any man could truly understand. Moses, holiest man to have ever lived, had only been given a moment’s comprehension. The best a lowly human could do was to allow the words to impress themselves upon his soul.

There was no name for what Yankev felt as the words touched him, nor was there name for how they did so. He swam in them, drank them, inhaled them, cried the words as they cried him back. He trembled with abject fear and wept with screaming awe as they wrote themselves upon his heart. As the residue of this heavenly being, they were a part of it as a shadow is a part of a man, and they were afraid. Something moved here in Dobrasnki, something that could scare an angel, something that this heavenly being felt powerless to stop it.

“Why?” Yankev croaked. “Why can’t you?” And the angel sang. The perfect harmony of all the letters with which the angel had been written shook him, threatened to erase him and rewrite him as a dead thing. The awe he had felt only moments before melted into a sickening horror and then a strange sort of joy.

What a way to die!

“Sender?” The feeling of his brother fought its way forward and stung Yankev like a slap to the balls. He hissed an embarrassing curse that forced him to suck in breath, and that breath called all his careful preparations to hold. The name scrawled upon his forehead blazed to holy life and surrounded him in its glory. The room began to resolve into sense.

Yankev tried to scream, but he did not at present exist, so screaming was an impossibility. He was also no longer Yankev but simply a man. Young, talented. A rabbi even before he could grow a full beard. He was also an angel.

As Dovid he laughed at himself and raised his hands in a what-can-you-do sort of way. To the man across from him in the freezing dining room he said, “An angel foretold.”

Yankev found this very funny. So did Dovid, and they shared a laugh together. There was an internal cheeky winking quality to his emotions as though he knew Yankev were there, though based on the other man’s uniform and tight-assed bearing, this must have happened some days ago.

“And why can’t this angel stop this trouble, whatever it is?” Sender quipped in the shit-eating way he did sometimes.

“Sender, you putz,” Yankev wanted to say. “Do you always have to be so ‘above it’?”

“Go easy on him,” Dovid said. “He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. That’s what you’re for.” Then, out loud, he said to Lieutenant Garrison Commander Sergei Alexandrovitch Alkhimov, “It’s very seldom that an angel can act directly upon man. Unless commanded by G-d or called by man they must only watch. I, too, am only given that power. You though…”

Rabbi Dovid pointed a complimentary finger at Sender, and Yankev swelled with a pride he couldn’t place. The angel sitting across from his brother saw in him something heroic. He, this creature of G-d, had faith in him.

“And you too, Yankev.”

The Rabbi Dovid seated in Kasher’s dining room continued to point at Sender. “You can absolutely act.”

In this way, Rabbi Dovid, the man who was an angel, pushed and prodded at the man in front of him, who was two men at once, winking at Yankev all the while, until, finally…

Screams. Many voices yelling from outside the window. Yankev felt Dovid’s heart. He had predicted this, as he had predicted so much in the last century, yet still it saddened him. Thus was the curse of the angel. To know so much. “I know, too,” Rabbi Dovid said, “that you will do something about that.”

Having spent so much time with Sender in the last few days, Yankev saw the play of feeling across his brother’s face as he turned to go. Fear, confusion, then a particular quality without a name but which Yankev knew well since he often felt it too.

Sender turned with a look on his face that was spiteful but not hateful. A look that said, “Oh really? Well, fuck you too.” He crossed back across the room, and before Yankev or Dovid could react, slapped them lightly across the face.

Yankev and Dovid did not stop laughing until long after Sender had left.

“It’s so rare I’m surprised,” Dovid told him, “and it’s so wonderful when it happens.”

“Rabbi Dovid.” The only woman in the room, who Yankev now knew was Fradye Geld, grabbed him by the arm. “I can feel his presence drawing close. We’ve done all we can. Any longer, and he’ll come for you.” The three others in the room helped him up and led him from his chair, but as Dovid walked towards the door, he left Yankev behind. The two looked at each other now, and Yankev could see how sad and afraid the angel was.

“Good mazel, my friend.”

Why Yankev responded how he did, well…maybe it was a bit of foolishness, but sometimes foolishness is blessed. “Eh, don’t worry. We won’t need it.”

“Hey! Hey, asshole! Are you going to clean off all this schmutz?” The face of the sad young rabbi resolved itself into the face of the furious young serving woman. Basie stood over Yankev, pointing a finger at the smudged name on his forehead. “Fucking mystic. If it weren’t for your brother and your giant cousin, I’d have you on the street.”

“We’ll clean it,” Sender promised, peeking in from outside the room. “Don’t worry. I promise we’ll take care of it.”

Basie grabbed Yankev by the collar and forced him up. “You’re lucky you’re cute, or I’d kick your ass myself.” She dragged him from the room, handed him a rag, and pointed at the doorframe. “Clean.”

Once Basie had stomped down the stairs, Sender turned on him. “You really needed all this? Idiot.”

I’m the idiot? You slapped an angel!”

Hey, have fun? Let’s go to that next chapter:

If you’d prefer to listen 🎧 instead of read, I’ve recorded every chapter and honestly…it’s pretty good. Click the play button above ⬆️.

For maps and historical background to the Pale of Settlement, click right here.

For a link to every chapter out now, click right here.

In the last chapter something’s up with ‘Cousin Pearl’. Read it here:

There’s a fair bit of antisemitism in this, but hey, it comes with the territory.

Despite their initial meeting, he found himself liking the golem. She was funny in a laconic sort of way he would typically have called “stone faced” were it not for the irony. She could take a joke, dish one back, and with her there, there wasn’t so much constant complaining. She was also the only person at present who called him by his name.

“Sure you don’t want me to take that crate for you, Sergei Alexandrovich?” She already had a heavy crate of books on one shoulder and a bulky wooden armchair on the other. Basie stood in the corner, mouth agape. “Perhaps your neck is still sore from that fall you took yesterday.”

Sergei hoisted the other crate of books off the ground and shoulder checked the clay abomination. “I’d be less worried about my neck and more worried about your knee.”

Zofia’s giggle was oddly girlish for such a broad chest. “Don’t you start too,” she said to someone but not Sergei.

Heavy wood dug into his hip, but he’d nearly lost a fight to Zofia once and he wouldn’t be bested again. “Can you cut that out?” He grunted under the weight, shouldering his way out the door. “It’s getting creepy, you two giggling and flirting.”

“We’re not flirting,” Zofia said, a little too fast. “We’re just getting to know each other.” Then she said, “Stop it,” and giggled again. Despite the weight of his crate, Sergei spared a look over his shoulder to see a slight iron ruddy flush on the golem’s cheeks.

“Look,” Sergei huffed, legs shaking. “I didn’t think things like either of you existed until yesterday, so it doesn’t mean a thing to me one way or the other how you carry on. It would just be nice to have a little clarity is all. Ay! Shit!” He banged his elbow on the way out of the front door but managed to keep the box up until he dropped it into the waiting cart, sending up a cloud of dust. The other box and the large chair came down gently, hardly making a sound.

“We’re not flirting, and if I’m being honest, neither of us particularly likes the other. I mean, he is funny.”

“I am, aren’t I?” Muroshke said from her collarbone. “And she’s strong willed. I’d find it a respectable quality, were it not for the fact that she’s kidnapped me.”

“You’re not kidnapped,” Zofia said to her own collarbone. ”Stop being such a baby.” In response to Sergei’s deep confusions, she explained, “It’s only, he can give me something I need right now, just until I can figure my own thing out. He can give something like…freedom. I don’t expect you to understand.“

“Oh, no, I get it.” Sergei nodded, rolling his shoulder. “Young woman wants to get away from her shitty dad, so she shacks up with the first guy she can get her hands on, even if he’s not exactly ‘husband material’. I’ve seen it a hundred times. I’ve even been the guy.”

“That’s not it at all!” she complained. “Well…actually, no that’s right on the mark, only in a more spiritually complicated sort of way. Husband wise, Muroshke doesn’t have any of the qualities I’m looking for—“

“And you’re such a catch?”

“But for right now he fits the bill, and that’s good enough for me.”

Sergei could feel the demon begin to kvetch when, thankfully, they were interrupted by the other annoying Jew in his life. “Sender—”

“Not my name.”

“—Pearl!” Yankev came screaming out the front door, sidelocks trailing as he fought to keep his hat on his head. “Could I have you in the back garden, please? Quick like.”

On reflex Sergei grabbed a hammer off the back of the cart and raced after Zofia’s broad back through the front door.

“When you’re done with the study, there’s a few things from the basement we—“ Basie finished her sentence with a squeal, leaping out of their way back up the stairs. “What the fuck?”

“There’s some china out back,” Yankev lied, “it’s teetering.”

“Why is there china out back!?”

Sergei pressed from the door and pivoted around Zofia, hammer raised, ready to crack the skull of the revived werewolf. He was not ready for the lowing face of Gniewomir. The ghoul was on its chest, waving a fleshy, brown and white right arm.

“Oh God,” he gasped, staring at the bristly hairs on his plump hand, “what did you do?”

All eyes turned to Yankev, except for Yankev’s which turned to the sky in affronted frustration. ”Me?” He pointed at himself in disbelief and not a little bit of rage. So twisted was Yankev’s face that Sergei felt embarrassed for himself, that they should be twins. “What did I do? I did bupkis. I ask if he’d help me feed the volfmensch. He says that yes, okay, he’s in such a good mood, he doesn’t mind helping out a ‘Tricky Jew.’ He sticks his hand in the sack and then this!” He pointed with splayed, aggressive fingers at the sanguinity originating from Gniewomir’s hand and ending in brittle brown dendrites of life on the dead man’s chin.

Zofia snatched the sack off the floor and stared in. “Shit.”

“Oy,” Muroshke moaned. “We were so focused on the volfmensch we didn’t think about Gniewomir.”

“What? Do ghouls also heal with flesh?” Sergei peeked into the bag, expecting to see the meat demolished. He did not expect to see it desiccated. The offal was bone dry and flaking like parchment.

“Ghouls are just ghouls,” Muroshke said. “They don’t want for much except to do what they’re commanded. Maybe what we’ve got here isn’t a ghoul.”

“Will you peasants stop talking about me as if I’m not here and help me!” Gniewomir brought a bovine arm up to his face and recoiled at the sight of it. “Oh God, I’m hideous.”

“And before you were beautiful?”

Zofia took Yankev by the shirt. Her face twisted furious and lethal, but Yankev sneered. “What? You would I should be nice to an upir?”

“A what?”

Yankev seemed to recede into the grimoire in his mind and after a frustrating half second, said, “Upiór?”

Sergei shook his head no, so Yankev kept trying.

“I think here they call them wampir?”

“A vampire!?”

“Yeah that works.”

The back garden stilled. Gniewomir’s half-cow, half-corpse jaw hung slack.

Zofia released Yankev, Sergei sat on the edge of the werewolf’s crate. The werewolf softly moaned and reached for him with a shaking, hungry claw.

“Fuck off.” Sergei smacked the claw away and looked to Yankev. “You think Gniewomir is a vampire?”

“Think?” Yankev shot back with splayed hands. Even with all the distraction of this morning, Sergei was finding it very easy to be annoyed with this nebbish ass. The fraternal glow of last night was quickly paling in the light of Yankev’s shit mood. “What I think matters nothing. He sticks his hand in a bag of cow blood and comes out cow. It’s obvious, right Muroshke?” Yankev looked to the golem whose face remained heavy and goyish in mannerism. It took Zofia a beat to realize he was looking at her.

“Oh…he says he agrees with Yankev.”

“He says he agrees?” The quiver in Yankev’s hands sped up as his annoyance amplified. “Why doesn’t he speak for himself? Just what is going on with you two is what I want to know. Yesterday I nearly got schmeared by this golem, and now she and my cousin are running around and giggling like sweethearts?”

“It’s not like that.” Sender, Muroshke, and Zofia said.

Zofia’s cheeks colored again, then her giant hands splayed in a mirror image to the angry Hasid when Muroshke said, “stop banging my damn kettle, Yankev. What woe you’re giving everyone in the ass. Sender—“

“Not my name.”

“He gets like this some mornings. God—his infinite wisdom be praised—He only knows why, but sometimes Yankev wakes up a real fucking pain.”

Yankev reached towards his neck, no doubt searching for some manner of offensive charm with which to do some sort of spiritual violence, but Sergei grabbed his hand. Yankev glared at him, and Sergei met his eyes, knowing that with them he could easily dominate this aggravated Yid, but for some reason feeling no urge to.

“I get that too, sometimes,” he offered. “I call them the morning bees, because it’s like there are bees in my head. It makes all the annoying shit other people do ten times worse. Have you eaten? Had any water?” When Yankev shook his head no, Sergei turned him by the shoulder. “Don’t come back until you’ve had two cups of water and whatever food you can get your hands on.” Before he could protest, he shoved Yankev hard in the back and watched as he grumbled his way to the back door.

“You people are shameless,” Gniewomir snorted. He’d fallen over at some point during the last bit of arguing and was currently trying to right himself with his one strong, bullish arm.

“Well you’re a cow and apparently a vampire,” Sergei said.

“Go easy on him, would yah?” Muroshke asked. “I don’t care one way or the other, but Zofia’s got a soft spot for the guy. A kind of kinship, I guess. For him and all the other monsters of the world.”

“That explains what she sees in you.” Sergei yawned, slapping away the questing claws of the near dead werewolf. Figuring he had about three minutes until Yankev came back, he sat himself on the ground, pressed his back against the box and relaxed. This mythical mishagas was the Kabbalist’s domain, so until then, he’d take what little time he could to stretch out. Pearl joined him.

“Can I?” Muroshke asked. Before Sergei asked what he meant, Zofia nodded yes. Her shoulders hunched a little as Muroshke took over and tentatively tested the weight of Zofia’s huge body against the thick tree trunk. “Never really done this before,” his voice smiled.

“What? Flirted?”

“I’m half incubus Sender—“

“—not my—“

“Remember, on my Zadie’s side. I flirt plenty. I meant sitting against a tree. Totally new sensation.” Zofia’s face smiled in a way that made him feel like it came from the both of them. Sergei smiled too. It was cute in a way.

“Try stretching out your legs.”

“Hey! That’s pretty neat.”

Sergei closed his eyes for a long moment, until he heard Yankev moving inside the house.

“Yes, my dear. You’re right, and we will be in in just a moment to help. This I swear.” Cringing, Yankev hurried through the door and away from Basie’s unheard insults. He shut the door behind him and nearly spilled his water.

“A sit in the sun, huh? I’d say we have better things to do, but feh, I could use the break.” Mood seemingly elevated, if only slightly, he plopped down next to Sergei, slapping away the desperate claw of the werewolf hanging over the side of the box. “The water, yeah—okay it helped a bit.” He took a huge gulp and handed the cup off.

“It’s the little things you’ve got to do to take care of yourself,” Sergei said before gulping the rest. “So, can we get to the matter at hand?”

“That matter being? Oh right, Gniewomir is a vampire.”

“How dare you?” Gniewomir hissed. He fell from where he was propped up on the tree and used his one good arm to drag himself through the dirt. “I am a knight, and I will not have my reputation sullied by a—“ he fought his way up onto his elbow, giving him enough space to shove an accusatory cow-brown digit at Yankev. “I will not have my reputation sullied by a Jew.”

Jew hate was a near universal in the empire, and Sergei had spent years listening to this sort of thing. Still, he worried, briefly, that he might leap from his seat and turn the old man back into bones. Surprisingly, Yankev remained unaffected.

“Sir Knight, being called a vampire, it’s no great insult; it’s just a fact. You drink blood.”

Gniewomir put all his weight on his elbow and pried his rotting lips open with his fingers. “Look,” he garbled, “no fangs!”

“The fang thing is just a myth,” Muroshke said.

“Just a myth,” Yankev agreed. “You get the blood in you however it gets in you. The hand you reached into the bag was not exactly watertight.”

“There’s a lot men don’t know about vampires. There’s a lot demons don’t know about vampires either.” Muroshke’s voice was a little embarrassed. “They’re very secretive people. How someone becomes one? Feh, who knows. Everyone’s got different opinions. Do they die in the sun?” Warm light dappled Gniewomir’s face. “Obviously not.”

“Most of that is Goy nonsense,” Yankev agreed.

Gniewomir collapsed to the dirt, despondent, moaning. Now that Sergei had gotten over the general weirdness of the corpse speaking at all, he was able to see just how much its theatrics grated on him.

“How unfortunate,” Gniewomir rasped. “How horrid. I should be buried an honorable man only to be brought back a monster.” He threw his one enfleshed hand over his face. “Oh, how I’ve fallen, more bat than man, a feaster on virgin blood.”

“We don’t know about the bat thing.” Yankev dismissed the idea with a flick of the fingers. Then he said, “Fuck!” With a sickening crack the mangled werewolf tumbled out of its box. Its claw flailed wildly.

Sergei leapt up, yelping. Cringing, Yankev scrambled away. Dropping her full weight into her elbow, Zofia landed on its spine, cracking it.

“Ow!” Yankev grabbed at the side of the neck where the box had scraped him.

“Shit.“ Sergei grabbed at the shallow slash on his, scratched into him by the werewolf’s claw, then, “Ah! Oh no!”

The transpiring action was hard for Sergei to catch, as much for the speed as for the impossibility of it all. Gniewomir tore at the ground with both hands, dragging himself through the dirt. His arms, both corpse and cow-fleshed, launched him skyward to land on Sergei. The parchment torn skin of his left forearm pressed against Sergei’s neck and Gniewomir shuddered as something in him drank clean the cut. Struggling blindly, unable to tear him off, Sergei punched again and again at the rotted flesh face, whining all the while in a way that, scared as he was, he still found embarrassing.

“Get it off, get it off.”

Yankev tore a charm off his neck in the shape of one of those upside-down hand things whose name Sergei had learned several times, but for the life of him, could never remember.

Yankev thrust it at Gniewomir but a bull-thick arm smashed the charm from his hand and smacked him in the neck. When he drew back to hit Yankev again, Gniewomir stopped and shoved his fingers in front of his own nose. Corpse eyes bulging, he flung himself wordlessly at the Kabbalist, landing on him hard.

“Why me?” Yankev whined. “You had him, why me?” He tried to shake him off, but Gniewomir held firm with a forearm growing quickly stronger from human blood. “Mikhtam l’David shamreni”, Yankev whined, maybe casting a biblical spell or maybe just praying out of fear. Blood and color fled from him. Color and health climbed Gniewomir’s wrist like ice on cold steel.

Dazed and hardly comprehending, Sergei scrambled after the dropped silver charm.

“Elohim Shomri!” Yankev gasped, pointing a hand, spread in priestly benediction at the vampire. Gniewomir exhaled hard at the verse, like a man touching a hot stove, but held strong, sucking Yankev’s blood through the rapidly healing holes in his flesh.

As life passed his wrist and up to his forearm, Sergei snatched up the charm and stabbed him.

When the silver touched dead flesh it pulsed, vibrating like a struck gong. Sight and sound fell away as his focus narrowed onto the charm, and his whole perspective shifted. It had become a kind of conduit between the two, and from where it touched, he could feel Gniewomir push back. Across this silver bridge between them flowed their two wills, and Gniewomir was winning.

Vibration rang down Sergei’s elbow and up to his shoulder, burning him from the inside. Somehow, some way, this vampire darkness was now in him and it would destroy him unless he fought back.

Sucking in a breath, setting his feet, he stared the corpse down. How he knew what to do, this he could not account for. Still, he knew what to do. As he exhaled he pushed back against Gniewomir’s will. Their bodies had become a sort of battleground, connected by the charm, and if Sergei could take the bridge, like at the battle of Boime all those years ago, he could take the day.

The odious but otherwise likable old knight was now a thoughtless hissing monster. Dead teeth snapped at Sergei’s neck until they shattered on impact with the soldier’s slamming skull. At the blow Gniewomir weakened.

Sucking in another deep breath, Sergei flexed his will, that same thing in him that had kept him going through hell and gunfire. Growling through clenched teeth, he pushed.

“What are you two doing?” Nemi demanded, marching out of the door, hammer in hand. “What’s with all this—“ She paused and blinked at the thick layer of ash covering the grass and the two dumbstruck men blinking in the sun. Sergei brushed some of Gniewomir from his eyes and searched mindlessly for something to say.

“We…um,” he tried, then, “uh…um.”

“The chimney!”

Nemi shook her head at Yankev in a way almost collaborative, like she wanted the lie to be better. “That’s on the other side of the house.”

“Maybe we just tell her the truth.” Zofia peeked out from behind the tree, reminding Sergei of what she actually was: a young woman who’d never left her father’s estate. She didn’t have the kind of experience to know what a bad idea this was.

“Don’t—“ Sergei, Yankev, and he assumed, Muroshke said at the same time, but it was too late. Nemi’s eyes were already bulging at the sight of the werewolf tumbling at her feet.

“Is that a…” Sergei watched her flick through all the pages of her past experience, searching desperately for some way to understand what this was. “Is that a dog?” Yankev shook his head. “One of those weird American things… A sloth?” Sergei shook his head.

“It’s a werewolf,” Zofia bragged. “I beat its ass.”

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It was 8:30 on a Wednesday when I saw him. I had just sat down, still a little stoned, and ordered my chili and there he was, at the table right next to mine, eating a cheese coney and minding his own business. I was sure it was him, or nearly sure, but still really worried that maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I was one of those racists who had a hard time telling asian people apart. After all, what could he possibly be doing in the Oakely Skyline. It wasn’t even the most tourist friendly of all the chili franchise locations. The more I watched him though, specifically his hands, I knew I needed to say something.

“Yuki Tsunoda?”

The short Japanese man put down his half eaten chili dog, looked at me and cursed softly. “God damn bullshit,” and it was then that I knew I was right. This was the foulmouthed former RedBull racing driver so shafted by team politics and a downturn in car performance during the 2025 season.

“What are you doing in Cincinnati on a Wednesday?”

“Eating a chili dog,” he said, picking up his napkin, folding it once and wiping his mouth. His movements were so precise, delicate yet strong, like they’d have to be to be considered—for five years at least—one of the world’s top twenty drivers. “When I want to get away from everything I come to America, but now Americans are getting into F1 so I can’t go to major cities. In the last few months I’ve started doing tours of third string cities in effort to keep a low profile.”

I got a little hurt that he should call Cincinnati a third string city, but I knew he wasn’t wrong. We have a great brewery culture, a decent arts scene, and big acts would come through so long as they were on a big enough tour, but as much as we all hated the fact, we were definitely no Chicago, and unfortunately we weren’t even a St. Louis.

“I guess I can’t come back to Cincinnati now, if everyone’s going to recognize me.”

“Don’t worry,” I told him, knowing what I was going to say might sound like bullshit, but I was just stoned enough to not really worry about it. “We get a lot of Japanese businessmen here because of P&G. If anyone asks who I was talking to I’ll just say you’re a product manager in from a Kyoto based subsidiary and my uncle asked if I could show you around.”

“Does your uncle work for P&G?”

“I don’t have any uncles, but it seems boring enough no one will ask.”

Yuki Tsunoda thought about it for a minute then shrugged. “Ok, I guess show me around then.”

He paid for both of us, and at first I felt guilty about it, until I remember that for the five years he’d been driving full time in F1 he’d been paid very highly, and that’s not even taking into account merch and sponsorship money. I let him pay, but bought us Peppermint Patties at the counter and bouncy balls from the gum ball machine by the door.

I took him outside and showed him how to bounce the balls against the stone building across the street, timing them to bounce back around the flow of the very light traffic.

“My friends and I used to come here and do this in high school after dances or school plays. We’d eat chili and come out and bounce bouncy balls against that building. Maybe someone would have a bowl and some bad weed or a few beers or something.”

We bounced in silence for a minute and then Yuki Tsunoda said, “I never really had friends like that growing up. I was always driving. You have mechanics, you have other people you compete against, but not really any friends like that.”

It made me sad, what he said, which distracted me and caused me to make a bad throw. My ball bounced back crazy and off course but he reached out and snatched it out of the air, right between his first two fingers and thumb. “Just like Harry Potter,” he said, saying the name of the character like a fuddy-duddy British person, and it was then I remembered he’d spent a lot of his childhood away from his family, competing in karting and junior formulas in England. “When I was a kid, you know, it all seemed worth it. I’m sacrificing fucking everything to do this shit.” He cussed a lot, but I knew enough of his public persona to know that that was just him. He was just a big time cusser. “And then you make it in F1 and you’re never alone. It’s not until it’s over that you start to think, you know, was it all worth it, because now what do I do. I’m not driving and I don’t really have any friends.”

He handed me back my ball and we went back to bouncing for a while in silence, just two guys enjoying the rhythm of an easy, thoughtless activity the way that only men can, taking pleasure in one another’s company and the swack swack swack of cheap rubber balls against stone and then pavement.

“You smoke weed?”

“Never, but…” he gave me an impish little grin.

We went back to my spot and I broke out my bong. I hadn’t used a bong in years but something about me wanted to…I don’t know, show off a little? Yuki Tsunoda was a master of his craft with over 33 points finishes and I think I wanted to feel like I was the master of something.

“So you just hold it like this and suck in when I light it and if you really want a big hit you pull this plunger thing out and it shoots it all up into your lungs. Ready.”

He was nervous and that made me nervous. This was an athlete I was hanging with and I was about to get him high. Was that wrong? But then he shook his head once and all the fear went away and it floored me. I was a coward in most things and here was a man who’d spent his whole life at the limit.

I lit the bong.

Yuki Tsunoda began Karting at the age of 4 and since then had worked to master so much of his body: his reflexes, his tolerance for G forces, and his breathing. Racing is extremely taxing on your lungs and he had clearly trained his lungs to a near super human capacity. When he inhaled he inhaled a lot and then he got high as fuck!

We chilled in my apartment then. I put on my favorite stoned playlist and we vibed so hard. When I sobered up enough to think I decided I was going to DJ for him. Six months ago I’d bought a little DJ deck but never told anyone about it and sometimes when I felt cool or maybe a little manic I’d set it up and try to learn how to do it. I started with this song my older brother showed me the first time he got me stoned in high school by this psychedelic banjo player and his jazz band that’s kind of…I don’t know, a sermon on a piece of the Mahabharata. It’s this discussion between Arjuna and Krishna where Krishna kind of tells Arjuna, this warrior, that even if he wants to stop fighting he’s just gotta do it because that’s life and like…I don’t know the ultimate kind of yoga and something about that felt really deep and profound to the moment. I watched Yuki Tsunoda nod his head and really think about it, but then the song ended and I mixed it into some organic house and that got him off his ass and dancing. He was a good dancer, but not a great dancer, which is something I’ve often seen with really fit people; they know how to use their bodies so well, but only for a specific purpose.

“You’re a fucking great DJ!”

“Thanks, man!”

I spun and he danced for twenty minutes and it was a really good time, but then we both came down a little and both got a little self conscious, so I chilled the music into something kind of background and ambient.

We took another hit and then played Mario Cart on my old N64 and, no surprise but he absolutely smoked me. I thought I was a pretty good Mario Cart player but he always finished five seconds ahead of the rest of the field, even when he handicapped himself by not using any items or using the controller with the sticky joystick.

“You know who’s really good at Mario Cart?” he asked.

“Max Verstappen?”

“He’s pretty good, but Oscar Piastari is insane. He never makes mistakes.”

“That’s how he drives,” I said. “He’s like a metronome. I wonder if he’s having any fun though.”

Yuki shrugged and then destroyed me on Rainbow Road, not falling off the course even once.

“I’m kind of in the same boat,” I told him, when we’d stopped playing Mario Cart and started playing Pokemon Snap. “I did have friends growing up, but they all left and I never made any new ones. I thought I was being smart, man. I wanted to go to Northwestern with my friends and study architecture but I didn’t think I could get in, or hack it, you know, so I stayed in town and went to UC to study engineering. I was really just afraid.”

“You’ve gotta learn to face your fears.”

“But everyone says that.”

“Yeah, Freddy—“ I hadn’t told him he could call me that, and I typically don’t like when people do, but it made me happy that he felt like we were close enough. “They don’t get what it means though. The operative fucking word is learn. You think I could just go for the first Degner full out on my first go? That braking zone’s insane man, no way. It’s scary as fuck. I had to learn how to be ok being scared. It isn’t easy, but you just take what you know you need to do and do it anyway.”

We both realized then, that what he’d said was very wise, and something we both needed to hear, so we nodded at each other and sat in silence, taking turns piloting a photographer around a landscape filled with Pokemon, trying to get pictures with great compositions.

We got the munchies so I took him back to Skyline and this time he let me buy the chili. When we were done, I asked him what was next.

“I’ve still got reserve driver duties for RedBull for a few races, so still some travel, but there’s plenty more third string American cities to see. It’s like what Krishna said to Arjuna in that song, we can sometimes choose the battle but we can’t choose whether or not we fight. I think I’ll just keep forging ahead until I find myself. I hope you do the same.”

I asked then if he wanted my number so we could hang out again but he let me know that he stopped giving people his number a few years ago, even if they were really cool, but if he ever came back to Cincinnati he’d find me. I believed him so we left it there with a hand clasp and a hug before he got into his Uber.

A few weeks later my mom got me an interview to work with her at the bank and I was really afraid but I remember what Yuki Tsunoda had told me about learning to face my fears. My hands shook a little but I kept eye contact with the woman interviewing me and they hired me two days later.

Sometimes I still wonder about Yuki Tsunoda: what he’s doing and how he’s doing. Has he made any friends? Has he found himself? Sometimes during race weekends the camera will cut to him in the RedBull garage when he’s on his reserve driver duties. Maybe he’s hoping Max Verstappen or Isack Hadjar will get sick so he can get back in the car, but I’d like to think he’s not. I’d like to think that he’s learned to accept where he is in life, and that he’s endeavoring to not be a different person, but to be the best version of himself he can be. That’s what I’m doing, thanks to him.

And when he’s not there, I like to think that he’s off jet skiing in Baton Rouge, or having a quiet drink in Omaha, touring more of America’s lesser known cities, no longer trying to fill a missing piece of himself, but keeping himself on that everlasting hunt for what makes him him, and us us.

Sometimes I hope he’ll come back to Cincinnati and find me, like he said, so that we can hang out again, maybe shoot the shit. I could take him to Red River Gorge just across the river in Kentucky, or to Krohn Conservatory to look at the butterflies. But I don’t think he will find me, because I’m no longer the me he said he’d find, and the Yuki Tsunoda who said that was the Yuki Tsunoda of yesterday, and I think that’s just how it goes. A man may never step in the same river twice, as the saying goes. A man may never get stoned and eat Skyline chili twice with the same Yuki Tsunoda.

If you’d prefer to listen 🎧 instead of read, I’ve recorded every chapter and honestly…it’s pretty good. Click the play button above ⬆️.

For maps and historical background to the Pale of Settlement, click right here.

For a link to every chapter out now, click right here.

In the last chapter everyone gets to relax for a bit until a new friend loses his head. Read it here:

There’s a fair bit of antisemitism in this, but hey, it comes with the territory.

Yankev knew how he looked to the outside world. A dirty, flea-bitten schlemiel. Probably lazy too. On the rough days he looked in the mirror, he had to agree with those assessments, but the shmutsik man in his reflection was a new development, a new coat in the many he’d worn in a short but busy life. As such, some of the habits one would expect by looking at him hadn’t quite sunk in. So, yes, he was occasionally given to a bit of laziness—and who could blame him, what with everything he’d been through—but he was not, at his core a lazy man, and was not prone to late sleeping, even after the long week he’d had. When the house came alive the morning after the escape from Levchenko’s, the dance party, and everything else, he’d already been up for an hour. The first fifteen minutes he’d spent staring at the ceiling, trying to calm roiling, aimless thoughts. Having no luck, he’d spent the next thirty stretching aching muscles and praying, hoping prayer might ease the buzzing in his head. He’d checked in on Sender, but the soldier was sleeping soundly, and Yankev—a little jealous—felt it best to leave him to it. The last bit of the hour he’d spent out in the back garden fretting and dealing with this new headache.

“Can I just talk to Muroshke, please?” he was fighting to keep his tone even, which was doubly hard in Polish. “We don’t have much time.”

“We’re in the middle of a conversation, he and I.” Zofia pulled her arm from the dirt and checked the deep rips the volfmensch’s teeth had torn in her clay flesh. The muddy bleeding had subsided, but the skin had not healed. She growled at the cuts, annoyed, yes, but with some fear hidden underneath. Despite his horror at her origins, Yankev couldn’t fight his fascination.

“You need Levchenko to patch you up, yeah? Like he did yesterday?” He reached for her left arm, but she yanked it away and groaned as muddy water ran again from the torn flesh.

“Fuck.” She dug her arm back into the soil. “My ‘maker’ is exactly what your cousin and I are talking about. Leave us to it.”

A door slammed somewhere inside and Yankev heard Basie say something. Nemi responded, and his heart jumped in a way that was not sinful, but could be if he didn’t look out.

“I’d be more than happy to do that, Madam Golem, but a giant woman with her arm in the dirt is going to cause a few problems for us. Same with the two corpses in the room upstairs.”

“You didn’t have a problem with me bringing them home last night,” Zofia said with a defensive sulk that Yankev felt unnecessary and grating.

“Well last night I was drunk and badly beaten. Today I’m seeing things differently, yeah, and in the bright light of His morning, I’m thinking we need to do something about it.”

“Do you have a suggestion, Yankev, or is this more of your…kvetching?” Zofia stumbled over the Yiddish word, but it still stung and left him more than certain that this estimation had been provided by his incorporeal kin.

“Okay.” He thrust the annoyed fingers of his left hand to the sky and pinched pounding temples with his right. “Yeah. I think I have an idea.” From inside he heard the approach of feminine footsteps and fear and giddiness mixed with the muddy frustration.

Five minutes later, Basie barked at his ass on the stairs. “Oy. Hasid!”

Yankev gulped. It was not that he did not want to talk to this woman, it was just that he shouldn’t. She was married, so it wouldn’t be such a sin as speaking to a single woman, and they were inside her home…or at least the home of her employer, but still… Where was her husband? His rebbe had different opinions about conversing with women than many of his other contemporaries—‘so long as she maintained ritual purity where was the harm’—but he had been a man with hunger only for G-d. He had touched his wife only on the sabbath, only when a scholar should, only enough to fulfill the first mitzvah. Yankev’s hunger for G-d was soul deep, but he did not hunger for G-d alone, and that hunger had nearly ruined him.

“Hey!” she snapped, truly snapping, “are you going to clean up all the dirt you’ve tracked inside?

He’d convinced Zofia inside with the help of a few colorful threats, a bit of begging, and a kitchen pot filled with soil she’d buried her arm into. He had been hoping to get her upstairs without being caught.

He turned, a half-formed excuse on his lips, and colored at the sight of Basie. Annoyance arched her eyebrows and wrinkled her mouth in a frown that nearly took his legs. In his short but busy life, words had very seldom failed Yankev, but he could do little more than stammer. Well, it had been a long week, so who could blame him?

“I told your brother he could stay here as long as he helped. I don’t remember saying the same thing to you and your giant—“

“Cousin,” Yankev stammered.

“Cousin Pearl from Dubno,” Zofia said from the top of the stairs, poorly imitating Muroshke’s accent and stumbling—poorly—through the Yiddish. “My dad’s a Swede. I went to the old synagogue. I know it’s not as nice as the new one but, eh, so what?”

“We’ll both be helpful, I promise,” Yankev waved his hands in a way meant to convince, but he knew, as he did it, it only looked desperate. “Yes, I’m not half so strong as Sender—Sergei—whatever, but he’s not half so strong as my cousin Pearl the Dubner, what with her father, the Swede.”

“I don’t know how I’ll be helpful with my arm torn open.”

Basie recoiled. “How’d you tear your arm open?”

Nemi popped her head into the hall from the kitchen and pointed a half-wrapped pan at them. “Don’t think we’re going to be on the hook for that. You’re not here as a guest. You’re uninvited and nothing you do is on the household.” Piece said, she popped back into the kitchen.

Yankev walked down the stairs and bowed to Basie in a way he hoped would feel genteel. “Pearl is being dramatic. She cut her arm at a tavern last night. I’m just going to patch her up upstairs, and then we’ll grab one of those big boxes up there and schlep it down.”

Basie turned and slammed her shoulder into him, nearly throwing him into the wall and leaving him wondering why she and her fellow Jews needed Sender’s help learning to fight. “If I don’t see you down here in fifteen minutes, I’m coming to get you.” Turning from him she walked down the hall, and Yankev fought to steady his heart at the sight of the soft hair on the back of her neck.

“Hey. Putz. Stop staring at her ass and come help me.” Whether it was Muroshke or Zofia who had said that Yankev was unsure, but he stumbled after them up the stairs, the annoyance he’d felt in the garden flaring up twice as hot.

“Nu,” he snapped. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I don’t like it.”

Zofia stopped at the top of the steps and turned. Her eyes went up for a moment, as if listening to something Yankev couldn’t hear, and when she looked back at him, it was with a conspiratorial giggle.

Across from the “angel room” was another small, nondescript bedroom, the door of which was so tight Zofia had to duck to fit in. “Maybe we should tell him.”

“Tell me what?”

Zofia rolled her eyes and laughed, and Yankev was seconds away from what was certain to be an angry, impotent lecture when the stink hit, thick and cloying, nose curdling sharp and gut turning foul. It was all he could do to keep himself from vomiting into the pot of soil on Zofia’s arm.

“Don’t look at me,” Gniewomir moaned from the bare floor. He lay dejected, looking sadder than if he’d been a corpse who’d never woken.

“Believe me,” Yankev choked. “I’d like very much not to.”

Zofia turned on him, eyes furious, arms tensed. “You be kind to him, or I will—“ she stopped, listened for a moment, and dropped her shoulders. “Alright,” she sighed. “Fine. Yankele—“

“Yankele!?”

“Gniewomir is terrified, and he has no idea what’s going on. Please try to be nice.” She walked over to the ghoul and held him like a child. “You, sir, are a proud and handsome gentleman.”

In her arms the corpse looked gentle, almost cute save for the sloughing skin. Yankev gawked, but he had a job to do. He held his nose and entered the small room, stumbling over the sack wrapped corpse of the volfmensch.

“Vie. Zofia, Muroshke, whoever I’m talking to. We need to get anything…” with his free hand he waved at the general mess of the room, “like this out of the way before anyone comes knocking. I have a plan—“

“Of course he does,” Zofia giggled, and Yankev—fairly, in his estimation—lost his cool.

“Look, you two!” As he yelled, his hand came off his nose, and the smell caught in his throat like a physical thing. He ran, gagging from the room. Heaving lungful gulps of clean air, he fought against the bile rising in his throat and won, but just barely. He turned back and said from the doorway, “Look, you two. I’ve had about all I can take of this giggling. Cute it may be, but I don’t have the patience, and we don’t have the time before someone comes up and sees all this mishagas, so can we focus?”

Ten minutes later, Yankev and his ‘Cousin Pearl from Dubno who went to the old synagogue and had a Swede father’ came down the stairs schlepping a massive box. To keep Pearl’s predicament unseen, what with the arm thrust into the muddy pot and everything, Yankev had to be the one in front, taking most of the weight of both bodies and all that heavy wood directly into his already aching back. He was, fairly in his estimation, not happy about any of this. Gniewomir whimpered as Yankev took a bad step, jostling the crate. He and Zofia shushed him at once. At the bottom of the stairs, they turned to the back garden and ran face first into Basie.

She thrust a broom at him like a lance. “That goes out front.”

“Nemi told us to bring it out back,” Yankev lied. Basie squinted at him, not buying his particular bullshit at this moment.

Before he could say more, Sender came from the sitting room where he and Yankev had slept. “There’s another piece of furniture or something she wanted us to throw in before we put it in the cart.” The lie came easy and confident out of his well slept, handsome mouth, and jealousy fought with the shyness to take control of Yankev’s face. Sender stretched, cracked his neck luxuriously, and shoved Yankev out of the way, taking the box from him. Yankev bristled at being pushed and at being humiliated in front of such a woman, but the box was heavy so could he really complain?

Out in the back garden, they put the crate down in the shade of a large tree, using its trunk to shield them from the house. “Phew, that was close.” Yankev sighed. “They almost caught us on the stairs.”

“And whose idea was it to put the corpses upstairs anyway?” Sender asked. Yankev and Zofia both pointed at him. “Oh…well it was a long day.”

“How are you feeling, Grandfather? I hope that wasn’t too uncomfortable.” Zofia lifted Gniewomir from the crate and propped him up against the tree. In the sunshine the old corpse looked strangely happy.

“I haven’t felt the sun’s warmth for…well, a long time. I suppose that’s some consolation for being ripped from the grave.”

“That’s exactly what we need to talk to you about,” she said. “Why were you ripped from the grave in the first place?”

Gniewomir shrugged as best he could with decayed shoulders. “I imagine whoever that dark wizard was he wanted warriors.”

“Maybe,” Yankev agreed, “but still… why you?”

“Why me?! I was one of the greatest swords of Stanislaus II Augustus.”

“Very impressive,” Sender agreed, “but you’re currently a rotten corpse.” Zofia hit him with a soft punch that sent him stumbling. “What? It’s true. Whoever’s pulling these strings—“

“Fedorov,” Yankev interrupted. “Your old commander.” Sender ignored him.

“Whoever’s pulling these strings already has werewolves and who knows what else. Why would they need ghouls?”

“Why would they need anything?” Yankev countered. “There’s so much going on here, and we’re only getting less and less certain.” He began to pace and rub his temples in time with his footsteps. “When Muroshke and I first came to Dobranski, we thought we were hunting a lillot—which is a scary prospect, but in hindsight, nu, not such a big thing. Then comes the volfmenschen, at least two wizards, a nightmare spirit too horrible to think about for long and…Gniewomir?” Yankev sat down on the edge of the box, for a moment at least unbothered by the stink. “We’re called here by His will, and we’re fucking it all up.” A moan came from the box, and Yankev snapped.“ You don’t have to agree with me, you old corpse.”

“That wasn’t me, Jew.”

The box shuddered under Yankev, and he groaned. “What woe this is giving me in my ass!”

Under the bloodied sackcloth was a sight that it seemed even Sender found unpleasant. “Shit. I guess this proves it. These things can only die by magical means.”

“It’s not magic; it’s scripture,” Yankev protested, then winced away at what was left of the volfmensch’s face. The skull of the monster was cracked badly where Zofia had driven it into the dirt. Jutting bone and matted viscera were all that was left of its lordly features. Despite all that it was very much alive. One eye searched wildly from Yankev to Sender to Cousin Pearl, frantic in what must, to it, be a kind of living nightmare. “Vau. I would truly hate to be whoever this is.”

“I have a sneaking suspicion I might know. I was thinking about it last night, and his demeanor reminded me of someone. If we could ask him,” Sender said, shrugging with his eyes, making it a sort of question.

“How’s it supposed to answer us, nudnik? It’s got no mouth.”

“Who’s the bore, Yankele?” The voice coming from Zofia’s collarbone carried a loving sneer that found its way empathetically up to Zofia’s face. Annoying or not it was a nice change.

“Muroshke! Where have you been!” Yankev poked a hard finger into hard clay. “Zofia is great and all, but we’ve needed you.”

“It’s complicated. Do you think I could have your hands for a second?” Yankev stared at his own hands. He was just about to ask what, exactly, his cousin wanted when Zofia nodded, and then her shoulders hunched towards her ears. “Thanks. Yankev, we’ll get to that later. This”—he waved Zofia’s splayed fingers at the moaning volfmensch—“this is pressing. Remember the first time we encountered one of these. Sender tore it to shreds, but when it got a bite of flesh in it, it patched up.” He grabbed the horrible thing by the scruff of its ruined neck and hoisted it up. “This thing needs food.” All eyes then turned to Yankev.

“What?”

“Me and ‘Cousin Pearl’ have a job to do.” Sender shrugged. He ripped a strip of cloth from the volfmensch’s wrapping, filled it with dirt, and tied a neat bandage around Zofia’s arm. “Why don’t you run to market?”

A half hour later Yankev returned to the house, disgusted by the bloody sack over his shoulder and hurt that neither Basie nor Nemi had realized that he’d gone. He had to wait another half hour for Sender and Zofia to finish moving the last of the dining room furniture outside, and by the time they joined him in the back garden, he was in a real stink of a mood.

He thrust the bag at his shegitz of a brother. “I’m not happy that I had to spend some of my own money on treif.”

“And what?” Angry as he was, Yankev couldn’t miss how—for a moment at least—his brother sounded very Yiddish. “You want we should feed the monster kosher?” He reached into the bag, pulled out a chunk of the offal that had not passed the kosher slaughterer’s inspection, and dropped it into the cracked mouth of the volfmensch. Zofia worked its throat to help it swallow. A busted tendon in its jaw reknit with a noise Yankev found surprisingly soothing.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Yankev kvetched. “Just dump the whole thing in there.”

Sender shook his head and screwed up his eyes, the sort of annoyed one feels towards a foolish child. “We want this thing talking, Yankev. Not walking.” He dropped another small chunk of flesh into its mouth, and they watched the oddly satisfying process of a cracked occipital bone sealing.

“Sender!” Nemi called from inside. “Swede! We still have to get the private study and servant’s quarters packed up today. Come on, tshik tshak.”

“This woman is driving me harder than a drill sergeant,” Sender groaned.

“Maybe she wants you to drill her,” Zofia said, elbowing him in the arm. She and Sender laughed at this sinful thought as they headed inside.

“Don’t overfeed it,” Sender ordered, closing the door behind him, leaving Yankev with his hands full of bloody, impure meat.

He fumed. This was his calling, whatever ‘this’ was. G-d had chosen him to root out the evil in Dobranski. He was a baal shem in the making, not some errand boy.

The volfmensch groaned. “Fine. Yankev the schlemiel will stay here and feed the monster. And what next? Want I should rock it to sleep? Feh!” He reached into the bag, but the clammy, sticky feel of dirty flesh forced his jaw into a grimace. He scanned the garden, looking for something he could use as a glove when his eyes landed on Gniewomir.

“Oy. Old man.” The ghoul turned to regard him, his corpse face smiling in the late morning sun. “Think you could help me out?”

Hey thanks for reading? Having fun? Yeah? Great! Want to go to the next chapter?

If you’d prefer to listen 🎧 instead of read, I’ve recorded every chapter and honestly…it’s pretty good. Click the play button above ⬆️.

For maps and historical background to the Pale of Settlement, click right here.

For a link to every chapter out now, click right here.

In the last chapter, Muroshke discovers the identity of a certain someone. Read it here:

There’s a fair bit of antisemitism in this, but hey, it comes with the territory.

He had to drag Yankev out of the room without Muroshke’s help. The demon refused to cross the threshold.

Mind reeling, back hurting, Sergei sat himself against one side of the door while Muroshke propped Yankev up against the other, his head lolling as though asleep, twitching every so often.

“That was a pretty glaring oversight on your part,” Muroshke chided, shaking Zofia’s massive head. “If I was even one second slower, I might have stepped into that room and that would have been the end of me.”

“I thought you said angels were just little annoying things.”

“Well, that had been a little annoying angel. Whoever was staying in that room was no little angel.”

The demon was terrified, that Sergei could tell, but he was still too awestruck to give Muroshke his full attention. The weight of that presence had been instructional. With the eye that had been ripped open this morning, he could do nothing to keep from seeing it. As he’d stepped across that door, he was shown, in an instant, just how truly small he was. On the other side of the threshold had been something so impossibly large—in size, in history, in dimensions—he had no mind to think. Compared to even its leftover remnants, every other stupefaction in this stupefying week seemed trivial.

“Hineh anokhiy sholech malakh’.” Yankev’s eyes rolled in his head as his mouth muttered the senseless words.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Muroshke demanded.

Sergei found himself annoyed at Muroshke’s tone, but even his annoyance felt like an ant in the ocean compared to this. “I didn’t know.”

“How could you share a building with that thing—” Muroshke pointed furiously at the empty room, “and not know?”

“Lay off him, cousin.” Yankev’s eyes came into a brief focus. “If the angel had wanted to be known, he would have been.”

“It makes sense now.” Sergei leaned back and looked with vacant eyes at the ceiling. “He’d said he’d been told by an angel. I suppose that angel was him. But why was he always so cold?”

“To step down from the inner court of God to come to earth?” Muroshke shuddered. “That far away from His warmth? The fool must have been freezing.”

Muroshke took Yankev in Zofia’s giant arms and carried him down the stairs. Sergei struggled on baby horse legs to keep up. He nearly tripped at the bottom, but the annoyed demon caught him, then continued to ignore him until he opened the door. Fresh, chill air spread open his lungs and brought him back to himself.

“Where are we going?”

“If he wanted a drink before this, he needs one now.” Muroshke set Yankev down on his feet and wrapped an arm around him to keep him from falling.

They followed the sound of music towards the lower part of the Jewish Quarter. The evening was mostly quiet, but there was a band down the hill really swinging. In these civilian clothes and alongside these two Jews, the klezmer was a little less grating, and he found himself snapping in time.

“Would you stop that?” Muroshke snapped back. The set of Zofia’s jaw reminded Sergei less of the nebbish spirit, and more of the golem who’d nearly killed him. “Yankev, stop stumbling.”

Sergei grabbed Yankev out of Zofia’s unkind grasp. “What’s eating you, demon?”

Muroshke growled at him and then slouched and wiped nonexistent sweat from Zofia’s scarred forehead. “This situation,” he pointed to his possessed body, “is not what she nor I are used to.”

“She?”

“Yes, she.” The eyes turned haughty and proud, and it was not from the collarbone the voice came from, but from Zofia’s mouth. Sergei leapt back and grabbed for the knife in the back of his waistband, tripping Yankev to stumble across the street and slam into the door of a boarded-up carpet merchant.

“Oy! Cut that out.” Zofia’s firm shoulders slouched again to emulate the posture of a perpetual scholar with bad eyesight. Muroshke—or Zofia, Sergei couldn’t tell—lifted Yankev back to his feet and shook her ponderous head.

“You could leave her body?” Sergei offered.

“That’s the thing,” Muroshke sighed, ashamed, a little embarrassed. “She won’t let me.” Zofia’s head shook in a way profoundly un-Muroshke. Sergei began to ask the obvious when he was interrupted.

“Hey!”

They had made it to the tavern. Outside, a small crew of Jews congregated, hands on hardly concealed weapons. The one who’d yelled at him had in his hands a hammer held like a mace, and he looked ready to use it.

“Who’s the giant shiksa?”

Sergei waved the man to stand down. He no longer had any authority to command anyone, but the man grimaced apologetically and tucked the hammer away.

“Our cousin,” Sergei explained. “Pearl. Her dad’s a Swede, but her mom’s a Jew from Dubno.”

“Oh, Dubno?” The man with the hammer perked up. “I’m a Dubner. Which synagogue did you go to?”

Fear flooded Zofia’s eyes, but then her face went—for only a moment—slack. After that moment her eyes took on an anxious but friendly cast, and from out of her mouth, Muroshke said, “The old one.”

“Oh…” the hammer man frowned. “Well, a Jew’s a Jew, I guess.” He waved them into the bar.

Once inside, Sergei asked, “what’s wrong with the old synagogue in Dubno?”

“Have I ever been to Dubno?” Muroshke kvetched.

The whole inn watched Zofia’s massive bulk and Yankev’s stumbling, and there was nothing Sergei could do to make them stop, so he ordered a bottle of wine and sat them at a table in back.

The wine hit his head as soon as it passed his lips, bypassing his stomach and charging straight to his brain. He should not be drinking. He should not be out at all, not with these people. He’d only lost his mandate last night and already he was walking the Jewish Quarter as if he belonged, drinking kosher wine, listening to klezmer and speaking Yiddish. What would his men think if they could see him now?

The music stopped, and from up on the stage a man spoke. “This has been a horrible few days,” the voice of the clarinetist was sharp and filled with an aggressive good humor. His band nodded behind him, stretching sore necks and catching their breath between songs. “But that could be said of any few days when you’re a Jew in the Czar’s empire.” The whole tavern laughed.

Sergei had to fight to keep from leaping from his chair and tackling the smug ass. How could these people spit in the face of their Czar, who’d been good enough to let them live in his empire? How could they spit in his face like this? Zofia’s massive hand caught his leg under the table and held him in place. “

“What can we do,” the clarinetist continued, “but to survive, rebuild, and dance? This song is a favorite of mine, and I hope you like it too. It’s called Tance Tance Yidelek!” The crowd cheered. The bass player counted. The clarinetist started in on a wicked solo.

“Yankev!” Sergei and Muroshke both hissed and were both ignored. The music pulled the Jew to the center of the tavern to grab hands with two men. The stumble drunkenness never left Yankev’s body, but he danced all the more for it. Though the old men and their daughters, the husbands and their mothers, had not had the day that Sergei and Yankev had had, they too bore scars from this week and this life, and in the flickering lamplight, they all danced to the wild music, moved by this wild night. Sergei found himself laughing and felt something inside of himself struggle against a lifetime sediment of dead horses and spent artillery to follow Yankev to the floor. He saw that piece of himself reflected in Zofia’s muddy brown eyes.

“Want?” he asked.

Who it was who answered, the demon or the golem, it didn’t seem to matter. “I’ve never danced before.”

“If Yankev can do it, it can’t be that hard,” Sergei shrugged, but he knew he gave the Jew too little credit. How a body so like his own could flail so much as it ran and stumble so badly as it jumped, marveled Sergei, but he had to admit that Yankev could dance. His flailing limbs flailed in perfect time, his tripping feet tripped in a wild balance as he moved and snapped and clapped to the music. His presence on the dance floor didn’t suck air from anyone but held each of the dancers up. The band played harder to have him dance with them. The way the battered Jew moved, so free and with such joy dragged his and Zofia’s hearts— one clay, the other stoney— until they found themselves on the floor, following his lead.

Sergei had not danced in a long time, and he had not danced like this before he’d had this name and this history. Yankev twirled to the music and locked eyes with him. His movements were instructional, intentionally demonstrative with no pedantry. He danced as he taught and taught as he danced, and Sergei found himself buoyed by the lesson. The utilitarian snap to his muscles softened. His arms stopped chopping the air and started caressing. Over in the women’s circle, Muroshke and Zofia stopped stomping and started stepping, trading turns piloting the ponderous frame. The whole crowd laughed and cried and breathed. Great heaving lungfuls of sweet air were drunk that night like wine. If it was two songs later or twenty, who could tell, but Sergei and Yankev and Muroshke crashed back to their table—Zofia’s bulk nearly breaking her chair—and all four of them laughed.

“Glad to see you’re feeling better, Yankev.”

“Thank you, dear Cousin Pearl.” Sweat dripped from his shaking sidelocks, splattering Sergei. He wanted to react, but he was too tired and too sweaty himself for it to matter. “You know, after a glass of wine and a good dance, the sudden existential crisis of angelic enormity, hey, is not such a big thing.”

“Speak for yourself,” Sergei groaned. “Parts of my mind I didn’t know I had are still reeling.”

“Well, to be fair, that’s not the first time I’ve experienced such things.” The band was playing slower and softer now, and the dancers had, for the most part, moved to their seats to drink and talk and feel the feelings they’d been avoiding for the last day. “That doesn’t make it any less shocking in the moment but easier to deal with after the fact.”

“You’ve been in the presence of an angel like that before?” Sergei felt himself amazed. This man who he’d considered such a joke only an hour before now seemed like something more, something worthy of the respect Muroshke felt for him.

“An angel, no. Though he may as well have been.” A huge sad smile spread across Yankev’s face. “Such a man as my rebbe, he could teach the messiah a few things.” Tears started to well in tired eyes, and Muroshke patted him on the back with Zofia’s massive hand.

“Oh, here we go. Every time you get this boy talking about his master the tears start flowing.”

“And is a cry such a bad thing? The places he took me… Closer to God than I thought a man may go. He…”.

Yankev cocked his head, hearing something only he could hear. His face went dark. “But maybe that’s a story for another time.” He grabbed Sergei by the hand and pulled him from his seat, his eyes now wide and scared. “Come.”

Heart racing, Sergei followed him out into the street with the hybrid Cousin Pearl on his heels. As they ran farther from Kasher’s house towards Warszawka, his blood pounded in his aching skull. The swimmy wine-drunk that had filled him in the tavern quickly turned to a sloshing heaviness, and the sober soldier who’d had his head slammed against a wall this afternoon screamed at him for letting his guard down.

“What is it?” His voice sounded sloppy and nervous and just a little too Yiddish for his liking. He fumbled for the knife in the back of his pants. “Yankev?”

Yankev turned and threw out his hand. “Y’hiy or way’hiy-or.” The alley he’d skidded into brightened from midnight to midmorning, the source of the light bizarre and adirectional.

All three men in the alley yelped. The two in the process of doing the mugging let the one being mugged go to slump against the wall.

Sergei rounded the corner, brandishing his kitchen knife like a man who knew how to use it. Cousin Pearl—Sergei was unsure who was, at present, in control of Zofia’s body—came plodding behind, taking up the mouth of the alley. The muggers, nationality indistinct under shabby hoods, threw their hands up and spun in circles, at a loss for what to do, or even how to comprehend this new situation

“Wha…huh? How?” one stammered.

“What is…what’s going…” the other added.

“Oh,” Yankev sighed. “It’s just a mugging.”

“Just a mugging?” Sergei was ashamed at just how relieved he felt. Knife or no he knew he was not up to any more of this week’s nonsense.

“I don’t know why, but I felt something was up…spiritually speaking.”

“Shut off that light! It’s midnight,” screamed someone’s bubbie, and with another verse, Yankev darkened the street. The two muggers continued to babble incoherently, until Pearl grabbed them each by the back of their pants and carried them down the block.

Sergei knelt down to take a look at the victim while Yankev massaged his temples. “Hey. Buddy. Are you okay?” He asked first in Yiddish, then Russian and got no response.

“I swear I felt something off.” Yankev leaned against the wall to steady himself from his drunkenness. “Oy. Maybe I’m being deserted again. It’s all the sinful thoughts you put in my head, you schmuck.”

Sergei ignored him and shook the nearly mugged man’s shoulders. Frustration with the night and this constantly complaining Jew made him a little careless, and he shook perhaps harder than he should have, slamming the man’s shoulders back into the wall and knocking his head from his neck.

“Fuck!” Sergei screamed.

“Gevalt!” Yankev screeched.

“Ow! OW!” screamed the head in a strange sounding Polish. “Put it back. Put it back!” They leaped away from the screaming head and with a better vantage saw that what little skin it had was falling from its skull. “Help me, you monsters,” the skull moaned.

“It’s midnight!” screamed someone else’s Zadie.

Yankev shushed the skull. It sneered at him.

No one moved until Pearl lumbered back into the alley. Muroshke spoke from Zofia’s collarbone. “It’s just a ghoul, you children, relax.”

“I’m not just anything,” whined the ghoul. “I’m a knight of the commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania.”

“Do you have a sense of what that means?” Yankev asked Sergei. “Goysha history is not one of my strengths.”

Now Sergei understood why its Polish sounded so strange. It was ancient. “It means it’s been dead for nearly one hundred years.”

Muroshke helped the ghoul up and put him on his feet. With a gentle hand Zofia reattached its head. Skull back on spine, it looked at all of them with rotting, imperious eyes. “It is no it. It is Sir Gniewomir Grześkiewicz.”

Yankev dropped the corners of his mouth in a disconcerted frown. “What a mouthful.”

Sergei raised his eyebrows in an equal but opposite direction. “Fucking hell.”

“And,” Sir Gniewomir Grześkiewicz continued, “I am a warrior in the army of Stanislaus II Augustus.”

“Look, I hate to be the one to break bad news,” Yankev said, “but, nu, sometimes you have to do unpleasant things. You’re—“

“Silence, Jew.” Gniewomir waved a dismissive, creaking hand. Yankev and Muroshke leaned back, offended. Sergei was surprised to find himself doing the same. “You’ll take me to the nearest lord of the town, and they will thank you for your troubles, but I’ll hear none of your tricks.”

Sergei recognized the glint in Yankev’s eye as the mirror of his own glare when challenged, the same hardness that leaped from his heart to his face when he was one breath away from driving a bayonet into a man’s chest. Yankev’s hand went towards the bag of his charms. Zofia’s hand went to Yankev’s shoulder.

“Yankele,” Muroshke warned in Yiddish. “Sure, the shmegege corpse is an asshole, but let’s not be hasty.”

“Hasty? Show me hasty?” From his bag he pulled a fistful of necklaces and rolled scrolls, the clanking and tinkling of worn metal against old parchment strangely ominous. “Yah Shalom would have us destroy monsters. How else to send the holy light they hold back up to heaven.” He’s eyes lit on a tarnished piece of sliver, carved with a fish and several letters. He smiled wickedly. “What? You want I should deny Him?”

Sergei stepped in front of Yankev and stared him down. “You said you felt something off in the…giestvelt or whatever. After everything that’s been happening, are you willing to give up what could be a clue?”

“Clue? Where? Who? All I see is a filthy corpse who’s forgotten he belongs in the dirt.” Yankev tried to press past Sergei, and the ghoul drew himself up as proudly as its sagging spine would allow.

“You make to fight me, Jew?”

“You know, typically,” Yankev said to it in Polish, “I’m no fighter, but hey, you know, sometimes you’ve got try new things.” He threw himself after Gniewomir, and Sergei was so drunk or so tired or so addled from having the shit kicked out of him twenty different ways in the last few days that he failed to stop him. Gniewomir leaped back, screaming, and collapsed on brittle legs as Yankev stabbed the silver charm at him like a knife.

Sergei had not spent enough time with the Kabbalist or his demon cousin to know what would happen when the charm made contact, but he could guess it wouldn’t be good. Had Pearl not grabbed Yankev at the last possible second, Sergei gathered, Gniewomir would have melted or burst into flames.

“Let me go, you demon! I’m not doing anything wrong. Sending him back to Gehenom, it would be a mitzvah.”

Sergei grabbed Yankev around the waist and dragged him back. “Yankev, you’re the believer. We need more information, right? Are you really so dense as to doubt God’s plan?”

Yankev stared at him. ‘Pearl’ stared at him. Even Gniewomir stared at him, although Sergei was sure the old Jew-hater spoke no Yiddish. “We?” Yankev asked. “I thought you said you wanted no part of this.”

“Sure, fine. For tonight, at least. We.”

Yankev sighed, dropping the charm back into his bag. “Okay, so you’re right. So what?” He wriggled out of Zofia’s arm and walked out to the street to calm down.

“Well done,” Muroshke whispered, and Zofia bent down and helped the ghoul get back to his feet with a surprising tenderness. Under her care Gniewomir looked like a frightened old man, not a walking corpse.

“Are you okay, Grandfather?” It was Zofia who asked, not Muroshke using her voice. Even in the darkness, Sergei could tell because the Polish was stately and unadorned with Yiddish vowels. “You look like you’ve had a long night.”

Gniewomir opened his rotten mouth to speak but couldn’t form words. In his life as a soldier, Sergei had seen corpses do many things: bleed, shit, bloat, burst, stink. He’d even seen a dead Pole some battle shocked soldiers had propped up around a card table. They’d given him a full hand and everything. He’d never seen one cry.

“The last thing I remember is looking into my wife’s face. I’d been sick and she was holding my hand.” Gniewomir brought the back of his hand to his face and wiped away tears and a little bit of viscera. “Then I awoke in a graveyard.”

“Shhh. It’s okay. We’ll figure out what’s happening.” Zofia patted the ghoul softly on the back. Her clay fists struck him just a bit too hard and sent him pitching towards the ground. Reflexively, Sergei caught him. It took every bit of his fortitude not to throw up at the feeling of mostly rotted flesh under his fingers. “What happened after you woke up?”

“I wasn’t the only one crawling out of the dirt. There were more. Maybe seven? And a man in the moonlight, directing all of it.”

“A soldier?” Sergei asked. At Gniewomir’s confused face, he added, “a man in a uniform. A lot of buttons. A thin sword at his side.”

When Gniewomir nodded it elicited a sickening pop. Zofia placed a steadying hand on Sergei’s shoulder as he fought a wave of sick.

“Yes. A man with a wonderful mustache. I had a mustache once. A beautiful thing.”

“Fedorov,” Sergei said, mostly to himself.

“He wasn’t alone,” Gniewomir continued. “With him was something I had only ever heard in stories. Wolves on feet, or men more wolf than man. Werewolves.”

Sergei could hear his own heartbeat pounding in his chest. He had to fight to get air in his lungs.

“At the man’s feet,” continued the corpse, “was a circle of black candles into which the beasts dumped heaps of bloody flesh.”

“Eh, Sender?” Such was the terror Sergei felt, he wasn’t angry with Yankev for calling him that. “Volfmensch.”

“I know. Fedorov and the werewolves. It’s all part of something dark and—“

“Yes, okay, sure. Also though…” Yankev grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around.

Sergei gasped.

Compared to the gleaming fangs of the werewolf at the mouth of the alley, the little blade Sergei brandished felt beyond impotent. “You already know the kind of shit we can throw at you, so back the fuck up.” He was grateful to his voice for portraying the threat his body could not back up. He and Yankev were spent. Tired, busted, beaten.

“There’s my little lost lamb.” The werewolf’s words were casual, careless, almost sweet. Gniewomir whimpered. The thing laughed and stepped forward slow, taking its time. As it approached Sergei could see its face. It was smaller than the leader from the roof and somehow prettier. Its angular, masculine cheeks gave it a pomposity the other lacked.

“Alkhimov.” Its voice had a pleasant, lordly growl. “You can drop the knife. I know you and your Jew are tired. I can smell it on you.” He took a deep whiff of the air and waved an offended paw in front of his nose. “We’d had a tally going whether or not we’d be seeing you. Fedorov thought you’d be long gone by now. You’re lucky he liked you. Called you a, ‘good enough man—an unreasonable tight ass but a good soldier all the same.’” The werewolf flexed its dexterous hands, splaying glinting claws. “Me. I was hoping you would come back. I wanted to pay you back for all that—“

The noise that came out of it then was, to Sergei, novel. The golem’s slab of a left fist punched through teeth to catch in the back of the werewolf’s windpipe. The gagging noise that that series of actions caused was both very loud and very short. Also startlingly wet. After it came a sort of gasping choke that was maybe shock, or a sort of “oh-no”, which made sense, seeing what was coming. The golem snaked its left leg to the back of the monster, tossed him over her hip and with the hand already in his throat drove his skull to the dirt. The noise that made was familiar. Sergei had heard men take artillery to the face.

Yankev gasped. “Muroshke?”

“Oy!” Muroshke said from Zofia’s collarbone. “That was all her. I swear.”

Zofia put her foot on the dead werewolf and tugged her fist free, which was another strange new sound in Sergei’s sonic dictionary. She shook off rivulets of muddy brown blood where its teeth had scratched her, and scooped the werewolf up and over her shoulder. “I don’t get tired.”

If you’d prefer to listen 🎧 instead of read, I’ve recorded every chapter and honestly…it’s pretty good. Click the play button above ⬆️.

For maps and historical background to the Pale of Settlement, click right here.

For a link to every chapter out now, click right here.

In the last chapter, shit gets kind of sad. Read it here:

There’s a fair bit of antisemitism in this, but hey, it comes with the territory.

What a relief it was to find himself in a kosher kitchen, even a kosher kitchen as empty as this. There was no meat and no dairy, but if there had been, Yankev knew they would have been kept separate, and that made whatever scraps they’d end up eating a feast as far as he was concerned. He sat on a stool against the cooking counter, facing the hearth where Sender was busy putting his improvised soup to boil. Muroshke had chosen to leave them be as Yankev and his brother “needed some time alone.”

“Smells good,” Yankev lied. It didn’t smell like much of anything yet, but he thought it might start a conversation.

“It’s a soldier thing,” Sender said, popping his head from the hearth and dusting off his hands. “You learn how to make a meal from whatever you can get your hands on.”

Sender looked at him, about to say more when their eyes met and suddenly, to Yankev, that was the whole world. They stared at one another for a long time but not blankly. Yankev would begin to speak, but the words would die on his tongue, then Sender would try, all to the same effect. After the panic attack his brother had had only minutes ago, he seemed far more put together than Yankev now felt. Indeed, Sender might feel like he’d been pulled into another world, but this was Yankev’s world, and he’d never felt more of a stranger in it. He was a man used to dealing with dybbuks, or haunted houses, and one time a shed who’d taken up residence in an old synagogue, not the crazy shit of the last few days. Even that—kayn aynhora—he could deal with, but now family… It had been a long time since he’d had one to worry about.

The pot began to boil in their speechlessness, exhaling a thick smell, a strange bit of reminiscence that struck Yankev in the nose. A stowed away sack of his past rolled to his feet, spilling its contents behind his eyes. “Do you remember Aunt Freida’s stewed mushrooms?”

Sender’s jaw dropped. He pointed at the smell escaping the pot with pop-eyed wonder. “That’s what that is? That smell has been haunting me for years.” He squeezed his uncurled fingers tight around the air, mimicking the intensity of the haunting. “Every time the mushrooms begin to steam, I’m gone. I have to fight back the tears.”

“Yes!” Yankev gasped. “I was at a very rich man’s wedding—“

“You?”

“Like I said, the life I had before…nu. I was at a rich man’s wedding, and the first dish they brought out was stewed mushrooms and bread. My friend Yosi turns from who he’s talking to, turns to me, he says, “Reb Yankev, we’re having a disagreement about the importance of the Book of Concealments. Could we have your opinion?” He looks at me—and this is no lie—I am bawling. Tears in my beard, snot, all of it. Yosi turns back to who he’s talking to and says, “You see, it’s just as Reb Yankev says. The work is difficult, but it is deeply profound.””

A smile broke across Sender’s face like cracks on a frozen waterfall—almost unnoticeable until the ice burst. “Ha! Haha! You see—“ Yankev watched him try to fight a tear from falling.

Yankev laughed too, not so much at his joke—though he did consider it a good one—but at His joke. Sometimes Yah Shalom’s works can only be understood as a joke—playful, delightful, ineffable, and with just a hint of a scold. “It’s difficult,” he repeated, playing the fool and living in the sweet honey of this moment. “But it is very profound.”

Sender’s laugh caught in his throat, stuck so hard he began to choke. He grabbed at his face and child-hidden behind his hands screamed one ragged sob. Just one. He dropped his hands, cleared all emotion with a shake of his head, and grabbed the pot handle with a rag.

“Hey,” Yankev cried.

Sender’s face went tight. His eyes became the knife hard eyes of Sergei Alkhimov. “What?”

“Be careful with that pot, okay. It’s hot.”

“Careful?” Sender asked, pulling the heavy pot off the hook and holding it with one easily curled arm. “It’s hot? Where were you when I was sword fighting golems?”

“Helping you sword fight golems.”

Sender conceded the point with a shrug and set the pot down on a stone table. He beckoned Yankev over with his free hand. “Give me your bowl.” In two quick scoops he served Yankev, then himself.

He picked up his spoon and Yankev gasped.

“What?”

“You’re not going to say a blessing?”

“Yankev, I’m an atheist.”

“He doesn’t mean it,” Yankev told G-d. “Regardless, we must.”

“Why? It’s not Shabbas.”

“How many times have we escaped death today? This week? Riots, volfmenschen, a magician, golems, and we’re still here to eat. Believe in Him or not, it’s cause to be thankful.”

Sender nodded with his eyebrows. “Fair. To have escaped any of those things…”

“Dayenu.” Yankev ran over to a bowl of water, blessed it quickly, washed his hands, ran back, blessed the food, and held on the last word, looking at Sender expectantly.

“The pain you are in my ass. Amen.”

It was no family recipe, but to eat soup made by his brother, well… It had been a long day in a long week, so who could blame him for his emotions. “Good,” Yankev said after he’d taken seconds and licked clean the bowl, spoon, and pot. Sender agreed with a burp. There was so much Yankev wanted to ask him, but he was no idiot. A fool? Maybe, sure, sometimes. If he pushed too hard, Sender would puff away, leaving only this Sergei.

“So…” Yankev said, a twinkle in his eye. “That woman, huh?”

“Nemi.” Sender’s eyes twinkled back.

“What a looker,” Yankev said, heart blossoming so full he thought his chest might split. He was talking about girls with his brother. An experience he never thought he’d have. Camaraderie, friendship, the smallest bit of peevishness. What a joy. “It’s a shame she’s married.”

Sender shrugged. “You can still get to know a married woman.”

“Get to know her?” Yankev’s happy thoughts tripped over themselves. “What, like…schtupping?”

Sender shrugged as if to say, “Sure, yeah, maybe.”

Yankev found himself incensed. “She’s married! Are you saying…is she a prostitute?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

The way Sender shook his head, as if to say, “And also I think it’s a little strange that you’d go to that conclusion, but hey, that’s just me,” made Yankev’s blood boil.

“So, she’s not a prostitute, and she’s married, and you still think schtupping is an option.”

Sender pulled the water Yankev had blessed over to the table and splashed it into the soup pot. He swished it around, careful to coat both sides. “It’s always an option, Yankev. Regular people fuck, even if they’re married.”

“What’s regular people?” Yankev grabbed his and Sender’s bowls and set in on them with a wet rag. “Regular no one. That’s adultery! It’s a sin!”

“Yeah, sure.” Sender dumped out the water into a grate on the floor and started in on the pot with a rag. “But if it’s a sin, it’s one everyone’s doing.”

So this was family? This nonsense is what Yankev had longed for his whole life? Sinful nonsense! Yankev used another cloth to dry the bowls. “So you’re saying everyone is an adulterer!?”

“If you’re single and you don’t want to get married to one another, but you want to fuck, is that adultery?”

“It is a sin.”

“Is it a sin to fuck a man’s wife while he cheers you both on?”

The man in Yankev wanted to blanch, but the scholar wouldn’t let him. “I think there’s something in Devarim about—“

“Another sin that I, and more people than you would expect at least, are guilty of. Is it a sin to fuck a woman for several weeks until you both realize that the sex is getting stale, but you appreciate one another’s company and go separate ways as friends? Is it a sin if—“

“Okay! Enough!” Yankev stacked the two bowls, threw the rag, and found himself deeply confused as to why G-d would have brought Sender back into his life now instead of leaving him dead on a battlefield halfway to Warsaw. “I’m becoming unclean just hearing this.”

“Yankev?” Sender grabbed a dry cloth and went to work cleaning the ladle. “Are you a virgin?”

Yankev stomped from his chair and grabbed the broom leaning on the wall. “Do you see a wife anywhere!?”

Sender overturned the pot, gagging. “Kosher is one thing, Yankele, but do you have to care about everything?”

With short, angry strokes, Yankev swept breadcrumbs and ancient dust into a pile in the corner. “Yes.”

“Why?” Sender moaned. “Or G-d’s going to be angry with you?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re sure?” Sender laughed like Yankev was the piatz, not him. “You’re sure he wouldn’t go easy on you for breaking a commandment every now and again?”

“Umar’eh k’vod y’hwah k’esh.” The coals of the hearth reignite for one moment before sputtering and dying. “That could have been a bonfire were I not having such impure thoughts. I’d say that’s proof enough.”

“Maybe,” Sender conceded, “or maybe you just suck.”

“I’ll kill you, you sheigtz!” Yankev swung the broom at Sender’s shins but he stepped over it and kicked it from his hands.

Sender struck Yankev a condescending slap across the face. “Baby!”

Yankev knew he should not do this, but hey, fuck it. “Ásher lo-not rah-bo n’shamah.” With a croaking sort of gasp, the wind sucked from Sender’s lungs and doubled him over, gasping. “How’s that, pig fucker!”

“Virgin!” Sender wheezed slapping Yankev a stinging flick to the balls.

Both collapsed against the wall.

“Too hard,” Yankev groaned.

“Too hard,” Sender gasped. He took in a deep lungful of air, coughed a huge cough and apologized. “It’s just, it makes me sad, okay. That you should not experience this wonderful thing.”

Yankev leaned his head against the wall and smiled a sad smile. “It’s not so bad, you know. You get used to it.”

“No, not for you, you putz. For them, Yankev. All the women you haven’t loved.” When Yankev raised questioning eyebrows, Sender continued. “I, Yankev. I am an amazing lover.”

“Well, sure. Of course—I mean really, look at you. You’re very fit—and you’ve got that thing, you know, with the eyes. It’s very powerful, the ‘oh if you only knew the things I’ve seen’ eyes.”

“Believe me,” Sender laughed, “I know. I made you piss yourself.”

“I have not forgotten.”

“But look, yes. I have all that. I also know a lot of men who have all those things and are still mediocre at best.”

“How do you know this?”

“Same room, same woman, same night where the drinks were good and maybe everyone went to sleep before we did.” Sender did the sort of shrug where your thumbs twist your palms open. “But a lot of it’s natural. I think we get it from Bubbie Frumha and Zadie Hersh.”

“Huh,” Yankev laughed, tickled as much by the content as the reminiscing. “Yeah, now there were two old folks with a healthy sexual appetite.“ His heart was still less full as it had been before all the impurity and violence, but it wasn’t empty. He took a chance and threw an arm around his erstwhile attacker. “Hey, Sender—”

“Yankev!” Sender’s eyes went hard, but with effort he forced himself to soften. ”Yankev, I appreciate the difficulty, but that is not my name.”

Yankev, too, had to force himself to soften. “I just don’t think I can call you Sergei.”

“You can call me Lieutenant Garrison Commander.“

“How about Schmuck?”

“I’d respond.”

“Alright. Wanna go for a walk, maybe?” Yankev pressed himself up and gave Sender a hand. “A walk, and maybe a drink?”

“There’s monsters and death in the air, and you want a drink?”

“Even in the worst of times you must find joy,” Yankev said. “Besides, my head is killing me, and without a moment to relax, I won’t be much good to anyone. Let’s go.”

“If you’re dressed like that, I’m not going anywhere with you. Come on, I have another set of clothes in my trunk.”

Back in the sitting room, they found Sender’s trunk, and he doled out a nice but worn set of clothes and a clean hat to cover Yankev’s skull cap. Yankev had to fight the tears. “You don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve worn clothes that fit me,” he said, dancing experimentally. “I mean, a little loose, but I imagine if I gained five pounds of muscle—”

“Ten, easily.”

“Five, ten, who cares? I’m just saying they fit nice. We don’t look half bad. We could enjoy ourselves a nice night out.”

“If we had any money,” Sender rebutted.

Yankev laughed, pulling the coin purse from his bag. “It just so happens I do have some money. Perhaps that’s because you gave it to me, but the source is irrelevant.”

“Ok,” Sender said, a little lifted. “So let’s go.” He grabbed for his swords, but Yankev grabbed his arm.

“You’re going to go out armed like some Cossack?”

“I don’t have any other weapons, Yankev.”

“But why should you want weapons?”

“After the day we’ve had?”

They stared at each other then, as the weight of the day weighed down on them. “There’s a lot we need to unpack about today. There’s so much more we need to learn,” Yankev said.

“I don’t know if that’s true.” Sergei’s face lost a bit of the Sender that had woken up in him, as if Yankev’s brother was retreating down the hallway of the soul he shared with this Ivan. “There are strange things happening in Dobranski, I admit. It doesn’t concern me.”

“It doesn’t concern you? Your commanding officer is tied up in all this. You’re not even curious?”

“I stuck my neck out for the Jews of this city already, and look where it got me.”

Yankev wanted to respond by saying something like, “It got you here, in this room, with the brother who loves you,” but he just shrugged with his hands. “Nu, so what? Let’s get a drink.”

“Eh, fine. I’ll get a knife.”

“A small one!”

Sender ran to the kitchen but on his way back was nearly bowled over as Muroshke came pounding in in Zofia’s body. He grabbed Sender by the shoulders and was so afraid he shook him. “You came here before, right? To this house when it was still lived in?”

“Let go of me. You’re hurting me.”

“Answer me.” Muroshke begged from out of Zofia’s collarbone.

“Yes. I came here once.”

“How come you didn’t tell me about the angel!”

Muroshke marched the two of them upstairs, dumbly, past what must have been the master bedroom, to a small guest room with thick curtains still hanging over the windows. Yankev felt nothing out of the ordinary until Muroshke pressed him through the door. As he crossed the threshold the vertigo sent him crashing to his ass.

“Yankev!” Sender raced in to get him, and from Yankev’s vantage point, in a heap on the floor, he saw Sender feel it too. His brother was not so sensitive to these things and not nearly as experienced, but Sender still stopped mid step and looked around himself wildly. “Oh,” he gasped. “Oh.” He trembled, hands clutching his chest. “Oh, that’s what that was.”

If you’d prefer to listen 🎧 instead of read, I’ve recorded every chapter and honestly…it’s pretty good. Click the play button above ⬆️.

For maps and historical background to the Pale of Settlement, click right here.

For a link to every chapter out now, click right here.

In the last chapter, the whole gang gets dirty. Read it here:

There’s a fair bit of antisemitism in this, but hey, it comes with the territory.

It was the sweet kind of tired. Playing in muddy grass for hours exhausted. His mother’s shoulder dug into him from where she’d thrown him with her intense, haphazard care, but he was too sleepy to be uncomfortable. On her other shoulder, Yankev whimpered, perhaps afraid of some demon from the old men’s stories that had found its way into his dreams.

“Sha shtil,” his mother crooned, bouncing the both of them a little. “Quiet. You’re safe, Son of Man. We’re almost there.” She opened the door to their home and called to their father, “Um… hello. Is anyone here?”

His father hurried up on light steps and said in a high feminine voice, “Who are—Wait? Alkhimov?” Sender found this curious, but sleep took him heavy.

Sergei came to in the chair in Kasher’s sitting room, staring into a sea full of young, unimpressive Jews between fifteen and thirty-five. Many had expectant looks on their faces. Several held knives.

“Hi,” a particularly large one said. He had the awkward body of a big man who’d until recently been a pudgy boy. “Nemi said we should wake you?”

“What?” Sergei wiped spittle from the side of his mouth, but groggy, missed and drew a bruised hand over an aching nose. “Ow. Fuck.” A knife-sharp tension headache bloomed at his temples, which he tried to massage away under shaking fingers. The contact made him woozy, and the wooziness made him certain he’d been concussed.

“Bucket,” someone yelled. Basie ran from the back of the crowd carrying a half-full mop bucket.

“If you heave on my clean floor, I’m going to kill you.”

Sergei tried to glare at her but burped and then lost what little remained of Levchenko’s bread into the soapy water.

“This putz is supposed to teach us how to defend ourselves?” a short fat woman in pants asked.

“It’s either him or the shirtless Hasid drooling down his chin.”

Sergei followed the eyes of the crowd towards where Yankev slept in the other chair. He was shirtless under Kasher’s nice coat, and he was drooling down his chin.

“Maybe the big frau with the ugly scar on her forehead?” This was said by a mousy boy who hid behind the big one. “She at least looks like she can fight.”

“No.” The voice that had spoken was definitive. “He’s the one.”

Nemi shouldered her way through the crowd and forced a cup of tea into Sergei’s hand. He tried to push it away, but a giant, feminine fist pushed it back. Looking up, Sergei gasped at the sight of Zofia’s massive face and tried to bolt, but his legs only wiggled.

“Nu,” Zofia snapped, her voice pregnant with a confusing Yiddish accent. “You want you should die of thirst? Cut the mishigas and drink.” She raised her massive shoulders in an annoyed shrug and opened her free palm to the sky. The splay of her irritated fingers reminded Sergei of the splay of his own when they hadn’t been under his control.

“Muroshke?”

“Who? No, Sender—“

“Not my name.”

“It’s me. Your cousin…Pearl.” Muroshke turned the golem’s ponderous body to the crowd and shrugged an apology. “He got a really nasty knock on the head, but you should have seen what he did to the other guy. I mean, believe me, they’re still feeling it.” Muroshke grabbed Sergei gently but firmly and forced him to drink.

“What happened?” Sergei whispered over the teacup.

The reply came from around Zofia’s collarbone. From out of it Muroshke whispered, in his true voice, “The ‘possess the golem’ trick worked. She didn’t see it coming, and wham—possessed.”

“That’s great,” Sergei whispered back, but after a beat added, “so why are you still possessing her?”

Muroshke shrugged with Zofia’s shoulders and her face, “It’s… Well…” He turned over her shoulder and saw Nemi waiting expectantly. “We can talk about it later, okay?”

He stepped away and after an embarrassed smile went to sit awkwardly in the corner. Someone offered him a seat, but he declined as politely as he was able in that massive feminine frame.

Nemi fought for Sergei’s eyes with her own, not a bit sensitive to the fact that he looked like shit and felt like shit, and there was a good chance he needed several days of bed rest. “We’re waiting.”

With an old-man grunt, he struggled to his feet. There was no blood in his head, and he nearly fell back into his seat, but caught himself on the arm. He shook feeling into himself and with a sick man’s groan, forced his back straight. It took all the resolve he had in him to keep himself upright and maintain eye contact with the dirty, sweaty woman whose body he could smell from six feet away. The lust that blossomed in his chest was sudden, extreme, and graciously stultifying. “Okay,” he managed to say. “What are you trying to learn?”

“How to hurt someone,” said the big boy.

“How to stay on your feet,” added a handsome young man who stood with his arm around Basie. He eyed Sergei’s shoulders with a sly lust and he stage whispered to her, “You weren’t lying. He is a piece.”

The little guy brandished his knife and hissed, “I want to be able to break a man’s wrist with one arm and slice the tendons on the back of his knee and when he falls, use him to trip another man and have that man fall into my knife.”

“Shut up,” Sergei commanded offhandedly, waving their words away like a mosquito. “That’s not what I mean. What are you trying to learn for?”

“For the sake of keeping us and all our families alive when the ‘big one’ comes.” Nemi held his eyes with a challenge. “Things are only going to get worse and soon. Everyone can feel it. There’s something in the air.”

Sergei nodded a quick thanks and thought for a moment. “Okay. I know what I need to teach you.” The crowd drew in as a unit, anxious, excited. He looked down the poorly formed line of young Jews and said, “When and if the fighting breaks out, here’s what you do: run.”

“What?” the crowd demanded in near unison.

“You want to learn how to fight? That isn’t something you do overnight. New recruits get months of training, and they’re still not sent into battle without more seasoned soldiers. When the fighting starts, get away from it.”

No one said anything for a long moment until Nemi shook her head. “That’s not a bad idea. My uncle thought of that in Minsk. Know what happened to him?” She waited but not long enough for Sergei to answer. “Dead. My cousin, Rocheleh thought of that too. Know what happened to her.” She waited. Sergei opened his mouth. She interrupted. “Raped.” Each member of the crowd nodded, adding silent tally marks of brutalized kin to Nemi’s list.

“Yes, but you have a better chance, even if it’s a slim chance,” Sergei argued.

Nemi stepped towards him. “I don’t think any of us are that interested in a slim chance.” No one said anything, but each Jew in the room—save the near dead Kabbalist and the mixed blood demon inside the golem—corroborated her intention. The eagerness had dropped from each of them, leaving only fear and determination.

“Fine.” Fear and determination were enough for Sergei. “But if you really do think it’s soon, we don’t have time for technique or tactic. All I can do is teach you how to survive.”

For the next two hours he tried his best to give them what drills had never taught him, the things he’d had to learn that first day at the Battle of Stoczek: how to respond when the fear tries to break you, how get your back up against something, which part of your body you let them cut so that you can cut them worse. He forced the big boy to stand still while the women took turns hitting him. He forced the young ones to hide behind the old ones and to jump out and strike whenever they got the chance. He taught them all to be afraid, and how to breathe through it. What he had started reluctantly he warmed into until he found himself unable to stop. He’d lived a lifetime in constant, abject terror, and he’d survived. So much had been ripped from him so that he might learn to keep his cool during a cavalry charge and to breathe even at the point of a bayonet and, once started, he needed to give them all of it.

“Okay, good God, enough!” It was Nemi who finally called it off. The floor was littered with sweat stained shirts and speckles of blood. More than one young Dobranski Jew would show up to work or school in the morning with a black eye or busted lip. “We can’t learn how to survive if you kill us all. Everyone, good night, go home.” She waved the crowd away and tried to push herself off the wall from where someone had thrown her. Sergei offered her a hand, which she took and used like a pull rope, not waiting for him to help. “Is this really what you think we need, Sergei?” She said his name like it was a punchline. “To get the shit kicked out of us?”

“You said you wanted to survive and that you didn’t have time.”

“We don’t.” She tied back the messy curls of her hair. “There are whispers everywhere. Some are saying it’s the Poles, some are saying it’s the Russians. Some are saying it’s neither, but it’s demons.” She chuckled, Sergei cringed. “I’d almost rather it be demons. Then the bubbies and the mystics” —she pointed her chin at Yankev—“could fight it off with their charms.” Sergei forced a laugh. “But can’t you feel it? There’s something strange in the air.”

“The whole world’s felt strange to me recently, so I can’t really tell.” He chuckled like he’d meant it as a joke but Nemi seemed to know it wasn’t. Her stern face softened just enough to show she felt compassion. They looked at each other for a long moment then, until Sergei asked, “are you sleeping here?”

“Why?”

“No reason, I just thought—“

“Oy! My fucking kap!” They turned as Yankev grabbed at his skull, fell from his chair, and hit the floor with a thud. “Sender? Sender?” He searched the room blindly until his eyes landed on Sergei. “Sender. What in God’s name happened? Where are we? I—“

He saw Nemi and gasped. He saw that she was in men’s pants and gasped again. He saw that under the heavy rich man’s coat he wore no shit and shrieked.

Nemi looked at Sergei with a glint in her eye. “Sender?”

“That’s not my—“

She patted him on the shoulder and turned. “Good night, Senderle.”

Sergei watched her go, feeling his heart drop in a way he didn’t want to think about. Once she’d left, it felt as though she’d taken the air with her. Now, with the room empty he felt the exhaustion of the awful day finally grab him. It took him back to the chair without his say.

“Vau!” Yankev cheered. “Shem be praised. Who was she?”

“That’s what I was saying,” Muroshke added from Zofia’s collarbone as the ponderous body rose from the corner. Yankev jumped and threw up his hands. “But,” Muroshke finished, “she’s married.”

Yankev lowered his hands and looked to Sergei. He raised his eyebrows and mouthed, “Muroshke?” Sergei nodded. “Well!” Yankev laughed, suddenly very at ease, and jumped from the chair to pat Muroshke on Zofia’s arm. “That’s a disappointment for you, I’m sure, Sender.”

“That is NOT MY NAME!” Fury forced him to his feet. Fury forced his hands at Yankev’s throat. Fury forced tears to come for the first time in fourteen years. He would have been embarrassed were he not so angry. “My name is Sergei Alexandrovich Alkhimov. I don’t know you. I never met you before this week, you Jew!”

“Wow! Quite the outburst!” Zofia’s giant hand closed around Sergei’s arm, and with it Muroshke tried to pull him back but could only pull one hand away.

Sergei held on to Yankev with the other like a straining anchor. The tension only made him madder. “You took my life from me, you nor!”

Yankev tore at Sergei’s hand, fighting with weak fingers to get air. “You think I’m happy, Sender? You think this is good for me?” Anger brought a life to Yankev’s face Sergei had not known he possessed. “I lose everything—oh, the life I had without you, you would not believe—only to find my dead brother masquerading as a GOY! Look at you, you putz!”

The force of Yankev’s words stung—not just the emotional content but the words themselves. They flew from his mouth and struck Sergei about the face, bodily. He had to fight to keep his hold on Yankev’s throat.

“Our mother raised you better than this. Our father’s heart would break to hear you spit on the name he gave you.” Yankev seemed propelled by the power behind his tongue. Between Muroshke’s pulling and Yankev’s pushing, Sergei’s arms nearly tore from his shoulders. “I’m a nor, am I? I’m the stupid one? Oh, I must be! Here I am, happy to see the last bit of family I have, only for him to turn out to be such a schlemiel you wouldn’t believe. The ass I am to be happy to see such a shmuck!”

That word, “shmuck” hit Sergei like a bull, not just in his ears but in his chest. His fingers slipped. Yankev flew back and over the chair. Sergei lost balance and slammed into Muroshke, who stumbled in Zofia’s body and crashed to the floor.

All three lay for a long, pained while.

“Last bit of family?”

“Well,” Yankev groaned, fighting to his feet, “Aunt Frieda’s kids are alive, but they left. Didn’t want to stay here with all this,” he waved at the general this. “They sold everything and moved across the sea to a place called Ohio.”

Sergei shuddered, “Sounds awful.”

“That is does,” Muroshke agreed.

Yankev stumbled to Sergei and slumped back down. “It hasn’t been a great time for us. A while back there were a few bad years of crops. There wasn’t much to eat,” he said with his eyes to heaven. “Chatzcal—you remember him, Red Moshe’s son, older kid who’d never play with us—well, he lost a kid and his wife to that—may it not be mentioned of you. He went pretty soon after. His father—praise God—was already dead, or else it would have killed him—kayn ayn hora. There were a few riots—heaven preserve us—not big ones, but that’s what happened to Shayna. Her mother Charna—our father’s sister, you remember her—she went with a fever that everyone was getting—may the merciful one save us. I think it’s what got him too?”

A single word fell out of Sergei’s mouth. “Him?”

Confusion popped on Yankev’s face, followed by a sad crescendo of realizations. “Yeah, Sender…Sergei. Whatever. Father’s dead. He was the last one to go.”

“Last? But…” Sergei couldn’t bring himself to finish the question.

“Our mother? She got sick right after you were taken. She got better, but it came back after you died.” Yankev looked at him, shook his head violently once, and then looked at him again. “You died! You died, Sender, and all they sent was a note. A note! We were already broken, but we tried to hold it together. Dad still ran the inn, Mom did her best to help when she was strong enough. I went to school. I was a very good student. I was going to be a rabbi. Everyone knew it. ‘It’s Malke’s little scholar. What a talent.’ They made enough I was able to spend my days studying. We weren’t joyful, but we lived, and then we get a note.”

The moment in which Sender’s family learned of his death came to life then, acted out by Yankev’s face. Cautious hope, disbelief, emptiness. Sergei felt all of it like a cannon shot.

“Well…” he gasped.

“Well?”

“Well it sounds like it’s all my fucking fault then.” He shoved himself to stand and turned for the door.

“Hey.” Yankev grabbed him by the ankle. “We are having a conversation.”

“Are we?” Sergei kicked free. He’d been scared before, and he’d been determined to kill, but he’d never before felt so much anger squeeze his chest like hot tongs. “Are we, Yankev, or are you telling me I caused the world’s saddest story and expecting me sit for it?”

Yankev pressed himself to his knees. The Jew was weak. He couldn’t even stand, but Sergei’s anger did nothing to his determination. “Don’t you dare move!” He stabbed a finger at Sergei, and for a sliver of a fraction of a second, he was afraid of what unknown power Yankev might possess.

“Or what!?” He shoved his own finger back. “What are you going to do? What can you do? What are you, Yankev? You say you’re my brother, but the brother I remember wasn’t some…wizard.” The air between them hung heavy. Yankev’s jaw grit.

“Wizard? Magician? Stop trying to fit me in Russian boxes. You’re a Jew.”

“I am not.”

“Whip it out!” Yankev redirected the aim of his finger from Sergei’s face to his crotch. “Come on then. We all want to see it. Pull it out!”

Sergei shook his head, trying to clear confusion. “Pull it out?”

“You say you’re not a Jew. Show us the shvantz. Did the foreskin grow back?”

Sergei’s anger slipped from him the way a fellow climber might slip from your hand. He scrambled after it, but once it was lost, it was lost over that cliff, and the harder he tried to reach for it, the harder it became not to laugh. Yankev laughed too, delighted with his own joke. “I’m guessing your shvantz looks a lot like mine.”

“Probably bigger.” Sergei said, letting himself have one last moment of joy before returning to his question. He wasn’t angry now, but that only made him focused. “What are you?”

“Nothing special. Just a scholar.”

“I’ve known some scholars, and I’ve never seen them do any of that.” Sergei mimed a general that.

Yankev shrugged with his hands. “You and I have lived in very different worlds these last few years.”

“Literally?”

Yankev pressed the idea away with the back of his hand. “Figuratively. I got involved with a movement.”

Sergei waved at Yankev’s side locks. “You’re one of those…what? Hasids or something?”

“Yeah, or something.” Yankev climbed to his feet, pushing against bent knees with his hands. “The wider movement and my rebbe’s court didn’t always see eye to eye about everything. Anyway, I learned a few interesting things.”

“A few…” Sergei found himself nearly dumbfounded. “A few things? Making my skin hard as rock, throwing eggs at werewolves, that’s a few things?”

“Like I said, I was a good student.”

Sergei dropped his head into tented fingers. In nearly every moment after he’d first stepped foot into this building last night, a piece of what he’d once thought was normal crumbled away. He’d lost his home, he’d fought monsters that blades and bullets could not kill, he’d spoken a language he’d spent half his life trying to unlearn.

“Fuck,” he managed to mutter before staggering backwards and collapsing into the wall.

“Breathe,” Yankev commanded, stepping in close to him. “Breathe.”

Sergei realized, in a way divorced from his own body, that he was hyperventilating. It had happened to him once before, the night after the Battle of Stoczek, the first place he’d ever tasted blood in the air or seen a kid he knew become nothing but a cloud of red mist. The first time he’d put a bayonet through a man.

That night he’d been sitting around a fire with no one he could remember when it finally caught up to him. Everything that had happened to him before that first shot had been part of another life. He’d been living as another man for a whole day and hadn’t even known it.

This time he’d made it two days. Since the body of that dead boy had shown up, Sergei’s old life had already been over, and he’d just now realized. His mind screamed with the memories of things he never knew he’d need to cherish: a day with an itinerary, the feeling of a woman pressing herself against your uniform for just a moment too long, living without the need to prove you’re worthy of respect. All over.

“Breathe!” Yankev commanded again. “Come on, I’ve seen you do it. You’re a great shot, but really, your weapon is breath, right? That’s something we have in common. In”—Yankev took a deep breath—“and out.” He placed a firm hand on Sergei’s chest. The warmth helped him stabilize. “Good, again.”

The images of lost things faded, but the buzzing didn’t stop. Sergei could do nothing but sit, hunched like an object against the wall.

“Sender.” Sergei didn’t have the anger to correct him. “Hey, Sender…could you eat?”

Sergei pushed against his own knees to raise his head. He met Yankev’s eye. “Yeah. I could eat.”

Hey, wanna find out if they do, in fact, eat:

If you’d prefer to listen 🎧 instead of read, I’ve recorded every chapter and honestly…it’s pretty good. Click the play button above ⬆️.

For maps and historical background to the Pale of Settlement, click right here.

For a link to every chapter out now, click right here.

In the last chapter, Sergei got a bit of a workout. Read it here:

There’s a fair bit of antisemitism in this, but hey, it comes with the territory.

The cup fell from Yankev’s hands, which was okay as he didn’t much like Levchenko’s tea selection, and he didn’t have the stomach to drink anything just now. Rose-hip flavored Assam splashed back from the shattered porcelain to splatter on Yankev’s bare legs.

“Muroshke?” He was here. He was close. A powerful need pulled him towards the sudden feel of his demonic cousin. He needed help—that was true—but more so, after the day he’d had, he needed a friend. “Muroshke?” Yankev tried the door of the bare pantry and it would not open. He was too weary to be angry. Greg had brought him here drained and dirty after losing his stomach on the bricks just outside the kitchen door, had taken his fouled clothes, given him tea, brought him a chair, and asked him to wait while he looked in on his creator. The residual horror of the moment had been so great Yankev hadn’t noticed that he’d been locked in.

He gave the handle another perfunctory shake before sighing and placing both hands on it. “Mefathiel, by the twenty-four letter name of the almighty, my G-d and yours, I ask you, open this door.” A little click, and there was just enough Yankev left in all that exhaustion to register a bit of surprise. It had not been three days since Sender had him in a cell and he’d been unable to get the lock to budge. How his lost competence had returned so quickly, he wasn’t sure, but he figured it was His doing and decided to worry about it later.

Yankev emerged from the pantry as if from a shvitz, nude and still sweating. At his feet a rich man’s coat lay on the floor of the kitchen in a heap. It was a little long, but it was something and who was he to complain?

“Oh relax, Alkhimov,” Yankev heard Levchenko drawl. That name registered a faint note of recognition but not enough to trigger a face. “We have much bigger problems than your nationality.”

“Hey, don’t be mad at me,” said a familiar, shrugging voice. In the tone of the words, Yankev knew the speaker’s ethereal palms to be raised in a sort of aggressive meekness. “But he is right.”

“Right about what?” Yankev asked, crossing from the kitchen into the dining room. He nearly tripped over the sight of his brother standing in civilian clothes, pointing a sword at each golem.

Every sentient mind in the room turned to stare. Greg and Levchenko averted their eyes. Zofia blinked. Sender lowered his swords just a bit and nodded the nod of a man who’d just gotten an answer of which he’d already been mostly certain.

“Son of Man,” Muroshke cringed. “Your shvants.”

Yankev followed Sender’s eyes to see that his borrowed coat had flapped open. A hot flush of humiliation spilled up from his chest into his face. He fumbled for something to say but embarrassment robbed him of words. Levchenko began to laugh.

“Hey!” Sender snapped. “He’s cold. It doesn’t normally look like that.”

Yankev shook a silent agreement that yes, Sender was right and then a silent no, it did not normally look like that.

“Where are your clothes, Yankev?” Muroshke asked. “It’s not good to be nude in front of a lady.”

“But she’s a golem,” Yankev argued. “I don’t think that counts. I’m not sure if that’s covered in the Talmud, but I think I could make a case for it.”

“She’s still a woman,” Muroshke said with an odd gallantry. The she-golem smiled.

“Yes,” Yankev agreed, finger raised in the beginning of pontification, spirits raised by the sudden chance for biblical exegesis despite his nudity, “but is she human?”

“None of this is at the moment relevant,” Levchenko cut in. “You three are in my home, and you will give me answers.”

“And who is he that he should be demanding anything?” Muroshke kvetched. “It’s three against three now.”

“Three against three?” Yankev laughed, bothered. “I can barely stand, and I’m not sure what a demon can do against a golem. Would it not be better if we all just talked?”

Several awkward minutes later Greg brought from the ballroom a table that had avoided the worst of the chaos and a pile of old pants for Yankev. There were no shirts that would fit him unfortunately—Levchenko was too small and Greg too large—but still, he couldn’t complain. The pants were dusty and too tight but nicer than anything he had worn in over a year, and for pants that didn’t need rope to stay on, he could live with a little dust.

Zofia brought out a samovar of hot tea and a fresh plate of bread and cheese. Sender tucked in with a hunger Yankev had not expected.

“And what, Sender? Are you starving?”

“That’s not my name,” Sender protested through a mouthful of cheese, “and it’s been a long day.”

Yankev shrugged, already stuffing a thick slab of bread into his mouth. They ate for a mechanical minute, but when Yankev reached for the last piece of cheese, Sender smacked his hand away. He smacked Sender’s arm. They both shoved petulant fingers in one another’s faces. Levchenko snatched it from them.

“So,” the old wizard said, letting the air settle. ”So. Where to start?” He stood and paced around the table with teacup in hand. Greg followed him with his eyes, ready at any moment to catch him should he fall. “How about this, Alkhimov? Why are you really here?”

Sender inclined his head to Yankev. “Muroshke wanted to find him.”

“Muroshke?” Zofia asked. “Is he a little ant?”

“I’m not a little anything,” said the demon, a little embarrassed.

“He doesn’t like people to know we call him that,” Yankev explained, and then, responding to the question Sender asked with his face, “it’s not his real name. It’s sort of a nickname.”

“It is?” Sender looked towards Muroshke and to Yankev’s surprise, locked in on the invisible demon’s locus as if he could see him. “What is your real name?”

“Sender!” Muroshke cried, affronted, wounded.

“That isn’t my name.”

Muroshke ignored him. “You’d ask such a thing of me? I know we’re not friends, but I possessed you. Doesn’t that count for something?”

“A demon’s name is a very powerful thing,” Levchenko explained. “To know it is to have power over the demon.”

“It’s a very dark sort of magic,” Yankev explained.

“Ever the litigious Jew.”

Yankev gave him the fig, shoving his thumb between his first and middle finger, shaking it in his face. With Sender and Muroshke here, the fear he’d felt for this wizard was lessened a bit, and the man in front of him seemed like just that, a man and a weak old one. Turning to Sender he said, “If you know a demon’s true name, anything you ask of them, even if it’s to pass the milk, is treif. G-d doesn’t like it, and the rabbis don’t like it. You can find yourself in deep trouble with both. It’s why I never ask Muroshke for anything.”

“I got drunk, and my name slipped out.” Muroshke’s voice rolled its eyes, exasperated. “So kill me, okay.”

Levchenko’s eyes glowed with that same deep curiosity that put Yankev so on edge. “Would that you give me that power, demon, I’d make sure you were well compensated and put to better use than a Jew’s nagging companion.”

“I like my life,” Muroshke vocally shrugged. “Is it what my mother wanted? Not exactly, but I’m happy, and that’s what counts.”

Sender gulped some tea, and continued from where he’d been distracted. “Muroshke wanted to find Yankev and press ganged me into it.”

“So it had nothing to do with Fedorov?” Levchenko asked. In their short time together, Yankev had seen a menagerie of expressions on the old man’s face, and this was the most skeptical so far.

“Why do you keep coming back to Fedorov? What does Fedorov have to do with anything?”

“He’s involved in something very powerful and very dangerous,” Yankev explained. “Dark magic like you’d never believe.”

Sender’s face remained stern, even as the teacup fell from his hands to shatter on the floor. Greg grumbled.

“And,” Levchenko explained, “he happens to be the commanding officer to one Sergei Alexandrovich Alkhimov.”

Yankev choked on a mouthful of tea and nearly fell over trying to scoot away from Sender. “You work for the man?”

“No, I work for the Czar, as does Fedorov as my commanding officer…or he was until last night.”

“Until last night?”

“I lost my officer’s mandate last night because of your bullshit.” Sender took Yankev’s cup and sipped evenly.

Were it not that they shared the same face, were it not for the slight twitch in the right eye just like their father’s, Yankev would have thought his brother emotionless. He wanted to argue back that the riot and subsequent volfmensch attack had not been “his bullshit,” but now didn’t seem the time.

“Still,” Sender said, even as a ship on calm water, “I know the man. He’s a pompous ass but a good commander just the same. He’s no ‘black magician.’”

“And who are you that you should know a magician from a house maid, Sender?” Muroshke’s laugh was teasing, but the speed of Sender’s eye twitch made Yankev nervous. Muroshke turned his voice towards Levchenko. “He didn’t know any of this stuff existed until last night. Can you believe that?”

“It’s funny what people like him choose not to know,” Levchenko said. The two golems sniggered. Yankev grimaced. Sender rapped his knuckles once on the table and held Levchenko’s gaze until the old man stopped laughing and sat up just a little straighter.

“Now you answer my question, Levchenko. Why is this man being held captive?”

“This man?” Yankev snatched back his teacup and drained it. “This man, nobody. Your brother.” Sender ignored him.

“Because I need him.”

Levchenko said it plainly enough, but in that plainness, Yankev recognized what he was—a tool. “Whatever is happening in Poland, your people—

“Not my people.”

“—Are integral to it. I need a Jewish magician and your brother—“

“I’m not a magician.”

“I don’t have a brother—”

“Is the best one presently available. I want to contain whatever this thing is, and it’s imperative I have his help.”

“Does he want to give you his help?” Sender asked.

“Does it matter?”

Sender stood and adjusted the sword belts still around his waist. “Thank you for the hospitality, Baron, but we’ll be leaving. Yankev, come.” His hand found Yankev’s shoulder, and Yankev found himself not only dragged from his seat but a little embarrassed. He’d known some strong men in his life, sure, but never any made from the same clay as himself. He’d always thought his own feeble body a choice of G-d, but maybe—and yes, it wasn’t nice to say—but maybe he did live just a bit too indolently.

“Alkhimov, be reasonable,” Levchenko pleaded.

Yankev looked to his brother and tensed. A little of the military officer’s martial confidence had been replaced with a different sort of pugnaciousness. He’d seen this face once before when they’d been ten. An older kid had pushed Yankev into the mud and laughed at him, but then came Sender.

Greg stepped to intercept them. When Sender drew the longer of his swords, Greg laughed a deep, earthy laugh. “I’m not a Polish chasseur. You tried to cut me once. Do you think this time will be any different?”

“He said he didn’t want to help you.”

And then Sender stabbed him in the face.

Did we like the musical score last week?

“Sender!” Yankev and Muroshke screamed.

“Alkhimov!” Levchenko gasped.

“Fuck! Ow! Why!?” Greg grabbed at the furrow Sender had carved just below his right eye. Thick black mud dripped between his fingers. “Ahh! Shit! That fucking stings, Alkhi—“ The word died in Greg’s mouth as Sender’s sword lopped off his jaw.

Greg collapsed to the floor, as much offended as terrified. A muddy gurgle burbled from the massive hole in his face.

Levchenko was too stunned to move but not Zofia.

Yankev turned just quick enough to see the massive woman charging him but too slow to do anything about it. He’d looked death in the face a few times, Yankev the would-be Baal Shem, and would that he could say it got any easier. When the hit came, it came hard, and it came from the wrong direction.

“Oy!” Yankev hit the floor hard and rolled over himself, well away from Zofia’s onslaught, but even ten feet from the action, he could feel the pound of her heavy steps.

“Get up, Yankev!” Muroshke shouted in his ear. “Get up, nudnik. You’re needed!” Yankev scrambled to his knees in the same position as his brother.

A short sprint away Sender held the long saber clasped in both hands and braced against his thigh, making a lance of the blade whose business end dug into the charging golem’s chest. Impaled, Zofia grit her teeth against the pain and dug her heels into the floor. With each powerful push she drove Sender back along the wood. He tried to push back, but a strong man was nothing under the force of the clay woman. His feet hit the wall, and for the first time in their short reunion, Yankev saw his brother afraid.

Zofia yelled a wordless syllable when she tore the blade from her chest and another as she struck. Her massive fist was fast, but Yankev’s tongue was faster.

Yankev shouted a hidden name plucked from Bereshit 15:1. It lit up the air and then dripped from it as the ink had upon Greg’s face.

The blow struck Sender not in any particular part of the skull but in the entirety. By the sound it made it obviously hurt, but by the sound Sender made, it clearly didn’t hurt that bad.

“The fuck?” Zofia just had time to ask before Sender rolled away and hacked at her knee. The slash was fast and deep but did not separate the leg. Whatever Levchenko had done in her remaking, it was very good work and Yankev wasn’t so afraid he couldn’t recognize good work.

Zofia jumped away from the cut only far enough to avoid the tip of the sword and came back with a fist so heavy it cracked the wood where Sender had just been. Yankev’s brother spun to his feet and cut a slash across her shoulder, doing nothing to stop the back hand through his cheek. It moved Sender, but they were both surprised to find it hadn’t knocked him to the ground.

“Yankev,” Levchenko gasped. “You never cease to surprise me. I thought you were good for a Jew, but I’m starting to think you might just be good. If you gave up your silly adherence to ‘hidden names’ and thought like a real practitioner of the art… What we could accomplish together!” He laughed a joyful “Ha” before setting his jaw and tracing a sharp pentagram in the air. “Ra-tyer-gung break, break, burst.”

Zofia juked Sender and slammed her shoulder into him, sending him flying like a shot across the room. He tumbled hard and ugly, losing his sword as he bounced, coughing a wet and ragged cough. His eyes rolled in his head, too dazed to see Zofia bolting towards him on suddenly double-powerful legs.

Unbidden Yankev’s mind reached for Devarim 32:4 and drew from it a hidden name he had never known. He emptied his lungs dangerously of air as he threw it at his brother. As he fell to his knees, he watched Zofia jump.

The full momentum and weight of her huge body she delivered through her cut knee into Sender’s head.

Everything in Yankev burst from his lungs on the contact, sending him falling from his knees to his ass.

Zofia fell too, grabbing at her wrecked joint where it had slammed into his brother’s skull. Her shriek of pain—girlish despite its register—broke Yankev’s heart.

“Get up. Come here.” Levchenko commanded. Even with her injury she obeyed, limping and dragging herself to him. Yankev fared hardly better, scrabbling over the wood to his brother.

“Sender. Oy!” He shook him, but Sender’s eyes did not focus. “Sender!” Yankev smacked him and drew his palm back red, cringing, waving out his bashed hand like he’d slapped a stone. “Ey! Ey! Wow, that name really works. I mean who’s counting, but wow!” A scream across the room pulled him from his celebration. Levchenko had his arm, elbow deep down Greg’s gurgling throat. Zofia looked on in horror.

“You’re hurting him. Please, stop!” The sight of the mud woman begging like a child was a strange one, but it had been a strange day, so Yankev was unaffected. So too was Levchenko, who ignored her cries and continued to root around in Greg’s neck. He came up with a fist full of mud which he slapped hastily onto Zofia’s knee. Blowing on it like a man blowing on too hot soup, he massaged the joint, working it back into shape.

“Muroshke?” Yankev asked.

“Here,” the demon said from just next to him.

“I’m thinking how nice it would be if I had my bag. It’s on the Baron’s little drinks cart over by the door.”

“Get your bag?” Muroshke vocally raised his eyebrows.

“It would just be really nice, is all I’m saying!” Yankev begged. “The apples or the eggs. I think one might work.”

“I don’t have hands.”

Greg let out another dripping gurgle as more mud splattered from his ruined throat.

“But…” Yankev said, raising his own eyebrow

“But? No. Yankev. No, that’s crazy.”

Zofia winced under Levchenko’s ministrations. Experimentally she flexed her knee and grimaced. “It’s okay,” she lied. Levchenko ignored her and pulled more mud from Greg’s mouth.

“Sometimes a little crazy is good, no?”

“A little?” Muroshke’s voice threw its hands out wildly. “A little nothing. It’s never been done.” Sender coughed up blood to splatter on his chest and Yankev’s face. He and Muroshke both cringed. “Okay, so it’s a little crazy,” Muroshke agreed. “Sometimes a little crazy is good.”

“Flex it,” Levchenko commanded, and Zofia did. She wrinkled her nose in a grimace but pressed herself to her hands and made to get her feet under her. “How does it feel?”

“It feels—“ she just began to say before barking a shocked yelp.

“Gulughg!” Muroshke gurgled, stumbling Greg’s wreck of a body over her. He tripped to the cart, turning the thing into scrap wood.

“How…” Levchenko tried to ask before falling dumb. Muroshke gurgled again and shrugged Greg’s massive shoulders as he reached for the bag, managed to hook it with dripping, inexpert fingers. He turned to run and tripped when Zofia kicked out his ankle.

“Get out of him!” She demanded, crawling towards his waist. “Get out!”

Muroshke gurgled and kicked, knocking her back to the floor. He got Greg’s feet under him and scrambled five long steps before Zofia rammed her shoulder through his legs, dashing Greg’s skull to splatter hard into the floor and knocking the demon from his body.

“Fuck!” Muroshke screamed, flying—incorporeal—along with the bag across the rest of the room.

“Greg!” Zofia screamed, reaching for the twitching body of her brother.

“Leave him and focus!” Levchenko demanded, and despite the horror on her face, Zofia snapped to attention.

Yankev reached out anxious hands and caught his flailing bag, and even terrified like he was, he felt a slight bit of pride for making the catch. The she-golem barreled towards him. He needed to act, and fast. He’d have no time to look for the right charm, but He’d been good to him so far, so he’d just need to hope.

Squinting, he shoved his hand into the bag and the first thing his hands closed on he shoved into Sender’s mouth. The second he slammed at Zofia’s feet. The egg shot up a blinding flare that sent her jumping away but otherwise unharmed.

As she stepped back towards them through the clearing holy smoke, Yankev fought in breath and searched inside himself, hoping that somewhere there would be a reserve of strength to get him through this. Maybe there was, somewhere, but he could not find it. They locked eyes, he and Zofia, as she drew back her fist, and in those eyes, Yankev saw a mirror of his own, not fear but sadness. He hadn’t expected to feel sad to die, not after the last year, but he found now that he was. It would have been nice to have lived a bit longer.

She bent down so she could reach Yankev on the floor. The blow she threw was casual. A forehand slap with a palm the size of his face. It would have broken his neck had it not stopped at the point of a sword.

“Get behind me!” Sender screamed through the chunk of apple still in his mouth. Shouldering his way in front of Yankev, he kicked Zofia’s still wet knee, and she staggered back. He jumped from the floor and slashed for the same knee.

“Ay!” She screamed, and her pain made Yankev disgusted with her maker. To create something—fully formed and innocent—from the mud and force it to hurt; this was an unholy thing. Even hurt she threw another hammer of a fist at Sender, and he leaned away, wincing at the feel of the wind as it rippled his hair.

“I could use more of that protection.”

“I don’t know if I have any more in me.”

The next attack was an ugly thing, a giant foot stepping through the air towards Sender’s chest. He twisted away and inside, but not so well the inner heel of Zofia’s boot didn’t rip his shirt. “Either you do it or I die.”

Zofia grabbed Sender, her massive digits nearly closing around his shoulders. Yankev’s whole body ached. He had to force his fingers open in benediction and force his mind and tongue to run quickly through Shemot 18:23, which had been one of his rebbe’s favorites. “W’yakhal’ta ámod.”

The force of the word disgorged itself from Yankev’s throat like a too large stone. It hurt on the way out and left him utterly spent. He collapsed to the floor.

Zofia winced as her fingers stopped closing, unable to fight through the armor Yankev had given his brother. Sender ripped himself out of her grasp and slashed a deep gouge across her shoulder. Zofia bled, but she remained uncaring. As her fingers moved from Sender’s shoulders to his neck, Yankev fought his way back to his elbows and reached out a hand, but without the strength to speak the names of G-d or angels, the best he could do was smack the golem’s leg.

“Muroshke,” Sender croaked. “I don’t care how crazy you think this is. I need your help.”

From the floor Yankev heard Sender scream, and then Zofia scream, then a loud thud and then silence.