Hexed_ The Iron Druid Chronicles - Kevin Hearne [97]
“Die Töchter des dritten Hauses.”
I shook my head. “No, I’m sorry, I do know a little bit about his death. They exhumed the body and performed an autopsy and confirmed he died of heart failure, nothing more.”
“Precisely,” Roksana said in her clipped English, and glanced at Malina by way of apology for jumping in. “It wasn’t a poisoning by the Germans, which is one of the conspiracy theories running around, nor was it a scheme of the Russians. It was the German hexen who got past our wards and killed him with a curse.”
“They have a curse that causes heart failure?”
The Polish witches all nodded in synch, and the visible half of Bogumila’s mouth said, “It is a spell of necrosis that they aim at the heart. It merely causes a small area of tissue to die, but if that tissue is heart tissue, the result is a fatal coronary.”
“It’s their favorite tool in combat,” Klaudia volunteered. So that was what they’d tried to kill me with and why the amulet punched me in the chest each time. And that was how they’d killed Perry. I’d known the curse they were throwing around was deadly, obviously, but I didn’t know precisely what it did to people. The medical examiners would pronounce Perry dead of an inexplicable heart attack, nothing more.
“It’s practically their only tool,” Berta snorted around a mouthful of cookie. “They can hardly do a damn thing otherwise without a demon to help them.”
“Yes, but unfortunately there are far too many demons willing to help,” Roksana said. “Though they always demand their price.”
“Wait.” I held up my hands. “Back to Boris. Why in nine hells would the hexen want to kill him?”
“Just like Hitler, they wanted him to invade Russia,” Roksana replied.
“So are we talking about the proverbial Nazi witches from hell?”
“No, no, no.” Malina shook her head. “They were around long before the Nazis, and they certainly have survived where the Nazis did not. They merely took advantage of the Nazis to get what they wanted.”
“So calling themselves the Daughters of the Third House has nothing to do with the Third Reich?”
“Not that I know of,” Malina said uncertainly, and Roksana confirmed her supposition.
“They were called that before the Nazis even existed,” she said. “But we have no idea what it means. They’ve never sat down to chat with us about their origins.”
“All right, so what did they want? Why kill Boris?”
Malina said, “They wanted what Hitler did—or, rather, Hitler wanted what they did—Russia.”
“What? You’re suggesting he launched that entire bloody stupid offensive due to their influence?”
“That’s precisely what I’m suggesting,” Malina agreed, nodding. “They sent him succubi and they gave him the proper dreams of Lebensraum—they’d done the same thing with Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg in World War One. And when the eastern front was going poorly and Boris refused to send troops in 1943—thanks to our influence—the hexen killed him and everybody thought Hitler had done it.”
“It didn’t turn out the way they’d hoped, though.” Roksana smiled grimly. “They hoped the Bulgarian regents left behind would be more malleable and harder for us to control and protect, but the regents proved ridiculously stupid and weak, and instead of invading Russia, Russia invaded Bulgaria and that was that.”
“Which was fine with us, really,” Malina explained. “The Bulgarian Jews were safe and the hexen’s plots were foiled, so that was all that mattered.”
“They’ve always wanted revenge for our role in that, however,” Roksana added, “because they probably still think they could have won if Bulgaria had joined in.”
“Why did they want to invade Russia so badly?”
The coven members looked at one another’s faces to see who wished to answer. It was Kazimiera who finally spoke. “There is a group of witch hunters based there that plagues their kind especially. If they found us by accident, they would not hesitate to attack, but they actively hunt die Töchter des dritten Hauses because of their associations with demonkind. The hexen hoped the SS would take care of the witch hunters and eliminate