8

Mercy

Running from vampires, again. Still. Go me!

I DIDN’T HAVE A WRISTWATCH, AND, SINCE IT WAS nighttime, there was no sun to help tell the time. It felt like we’d been riding the motorcycle less than an hour, but I had no way to be sure. We sped our way out of Prague proper and into a more rural area, where the road seemed to weave in and out of one tiny village after another.

We turned off the main road onto a blue-railed modern bridge that crossed a river and into the labyrinthian streets of yet another village. We drove past a castle—because it was the Czech Republic, and apparently castles were required by all the best villages.

The Tri-Cities had no castles. I’d never felt the lack before.

My guardian-angel werewolf slowed, and we puttered very quietly through a sleepy residential area. If we’d been in the US, I’d have said it was a bedroom community for Prague. But, remembering that there was a castle, I was hesitant to apply New World labels to Old World places.

Some of the houses looked very Bohemian. Some of them were very modern. We passed a couple of apartment complexes, took a hard right just past the second one, and found ourselves in an area where, on one side of the road, houses had gardens, huge yards, and trees. On the other side of the road was open land. It was too dark to be sure, but I thought they might be growing hay. Though it could just as easily have been some other grassy plant. It was dark, and I wasn’t a farmer.

We pulled into the driveway of a mansion-sized house that could have been a well-preserved three or four hundred years old—or a run-down twenty years old. It was hard to tell in the darkness.

My werewolf driver barely slowed down as we passed the ornate building, a swimming pool, and a stable, to park next to a much smaller house that might once have been a carriage house. Unlike the big building, where all the lights were on the outside and the interior was dark, the smaller house had no exterior lights on. There were fixtures beside both of the doors I could see, but the bulbs had been removed.

The purr of the engine stopped, and my werewolf guard removed his helmet and braced his feet. I was wise to the invitation, and I hopped off and took my own helmet off, giving it to him when he held out his hands for it.

I could smell and hear horses nearby—the swish of a lazy tail and an occasional snort. Horses are prey, and they don’t sleep in long stretches.

In the pen nearest the house, someone was in the middle of planting a garden in a pen that had been set up for livestock. They weren’t there now, of course, but the area had been expertly scythed. The cut hay was piled to the side, presumably to feed to the horses I’d sensed. Turf had been cut and was partially rolled, exposing rich, dark soil. Packets of seeds and a couple of mesh bags of bulbs sat in a cardboard box for planting.

I only knew it had been scythed because the implement was leaning against a fence post. I knew it was expert because I’d scythed a very small pasture once—a punishment for the Easter bunny incident, I think. My field had looked nothing like the neatly trimmed grass in the pen.

While I’d been getting the lay of the land, my companion knocked at the door softly.

It popped open after a bit. A woman clothed in a man’s white shirt and nothing else said something in Czech that was both quiet and irritated. Her hair was dark and cut in an asymmetrical bob that flattered her cheekbones.

My escort responded in a voice that was conciliatory without being submissive. The woman was a werewolf, too, a pack mate from their body language. Near equal in status, too, if I was reading it right.

She turned from him to me. “You are English?” she asked.

“American,” I told her.

“So what are you doing here, and why are the vampires after you?” Her English was very good—smooth, as if she spoke it often. Her vowels were thick, though, and the consonants muted.

I rubbed my face wearily. “I got in the way of a murky vampire plot,” I told her.

She threw her hands up impatiently. “Vampire plots are always murky. What kind of murky?”

I said, “The Lord of Night hit me with a car and kidnapped me from Washington—the state—in the US and brought me to Milan. I escaped with nothing but my skin and hitched a ride on a couple of random buses and ended up in Prague. Is that murky enough?”

“You are not a werewolf,” she said suspiciously, “and still Libor helps you?”

The man who’d brought me here spoke, and whatever he said made her frown. Frown harder, anyway.

“Stop that” was what she said. “You are being rude, Martin. Speak English.” To me she said, “Why are we helping you?”

Martin was evidently my rescuer’s name.

“I’m the mate of the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack,” I said.

She stared at me for a moment, then said, a little incredulously, “You are Bran Cornick’s foster daughter?”

I nodded carefully, keeping my eyes up because her reaction was a little off. “Expecting someone better-looking?” I tried. “Smarter? Taller?”

The wind came up, rustling in the grassy fields and blowing her scent to me. In addition to the werewolf, I could tell she was the person who had most recently used the helmet I’d worn here, and, from the scent of rich earth and broken grass, she was the person responsible for the project of turning a horse run into a garden.

“Well,” she said after a silence that lingered a little too long to be comfortable, “you must be the Mercedes who goes by Mercy, then. I’m Jitka—” and she told me her last name, but the sounds in it had little to do with English, and I’m not sure I caught it all.

I looked at the man, who gave a little laugh. “Yes,” he agreed, “matters were a little fraught for introductions. I’m Martin Zajíc, Libor’s second. Jitka is—”

“A lowly woman,” she said with a little growl in her voice. “But after the Great War, Libor said that for me to be last because I would not take a mate was stupid. Clearly, I was more fierce than most of the pack and more clever than any. He set me third behind Martin. It was acceptable—and I buried the ones who objected with my own hands.”

Martin grinned and said, “Pavel didn’t die.”

“Or I seduced them,” she agreed placidly. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, though she wasn’t exactly not beautiful, either. But she looked soft, warm, and strong. Sexy. She looked like someone who could give comfort when you needed it—or a belt in the jaw if that was more appropriate. “Pavel is a good man who needed to rethink a few things. There were several like Pavel.”

She looked at Martin. “I am going to get dressed. Then you two may come in, and we will discuss what has happened and what is to be done.”

She left us abruptly and went back inside the little house.

Martin started to speak, stopped, then laughed. “I was going to give you my standard warning—how you should not underestimate our Jitka, who has been outwitting men since the day she was born—but I imagine that you know better.”

“Not being a man?” I asked.

“Being a person used to having people underestimate her,” he said. “Libor feels that you bested him. We’ve been . . . pack mates for a very long time. He doesn’t pout like a child on the outside. But when he does not get what he expects, then he pouts on the inside. Anyone who can get one over on Libor is—”

“Lucky?” I guessed.

He smiled again. “Maybe luck would work once. Against Libor or against Iacopo Bonarata. But not against both, one after another.”

“You aren’t afraid to say his name?” I asked. I was pretty sure that Marsilia was—there was an edge of defiance in her voice whenever she said his full name. “And you missed the memo. I guess he’s in the process of turning from Iacopo to Jacob.”

Most of the immortals changed their names as time passed. I used to think it was to protect themselves from the humans discovering how old they were. But I’d changed my hypothesis lately. I think after a long time, some people grew tired of themselves. A new name gave them a chance to reinvent who they were, to become someone else, some other kind of person. Or sometimes, as in Iacopo Bonarata’s case apparently, they decide to pick a name easier for their soon-to-be minions to say.

“Jacob,” Martin said thoughtfully. “I had not heard.” He shrugged. “I am not a vampire to fear Bonarata’s power. He will not lightly take on Libor or the Vltava Pack. That is not to say that someday there might not be war between us. But it won’t be over something as small as my saying his name.” He smiled, and it lit his eyes. “It might take something like you. Or not.”

Jitka’s door opened. “Okay,” she said. “You—”

And that’s when the vampire dropped off the roof and on top of Jitka like a piano falling on Roger Rabbit.

Vampires are hard to detect because when they are still, they really don’t make any noise at all. I don’t know what they had done to disguise their smell, but I’d seen too many vampires move to mistake them for anything else. And once the one landed on Jitka, there were suddenly more of them.

My whole life, I’ve heard people trying to compare vampires and werewolves. Vampires are faster and werewolves stronger. Or werewolves are faster, and vampires are stronger. I’ve now seen them both in combat enough to form my own opinion: the one thing that really matters is that both werewolves and vampires are stronger than I am. The only thing I have going to match them is speed—which is why I broke and ran.

I didn’t run to the road—there were innocent civilians in that direction. I didn’t run to the woods. I didn’t know the lay of the land, I didn’t like being lost with vampires chasing me, and my coyote didn’t blend in with the local fauna.

Because I also didn’t believe in letting other people fight my battles while I watched, I ran to the fenced paddock, rolled over the rail fence, and grabbed the scythe. I especially didn’t run from a fight when there was such a handy weapon lying around.

Properly armed, I turned to see what had happened while I’d been running. There were four vampires swarming Martin and Jitka—presumably having gone through the same basic evaluation that I’d just done. The werewolves were more of a threat than I was.

Assuming they came from Bonarata, the only thing they knew about me was that I’d run from Bonarata and I was weaker than a werewolf. In the fields and the woodlands beyond the fields, it would take me a long time to run far enough that the vampires couldn’t find me. So they’d ignored me and attacked the werewolves.

Fights usually happen really fast, especially fights between supernatural creatures. I’d seen one or two that lasted longer because the combatants were just that tough, but even then, seconds counted.

I stood behind the fence, waiting for what seemed like ten minutes and was probably closer to thirty or forty seconds. I thought I was going to have to try something else because the fight stayed too far away.

But then Jitka threw one of her attackers like a shot put. She—the vampire, not Jitka—hit a post and staggered. She grabbed the fence for support, her eyes on Jitka.

I hooked the scythe between the top two rails of the fence and around the vampire’s neck, just under her jaw.

I never, ever thought that mowing that field with a scythe would be useful to me. Who uses a scythe in the era of lawn mowers and tractors? To make that exact point, Bran had parked a new, wide-swath, riding lawn mower just outside the field. He wanted to rub in the fact that all the sweaty, backbreaking work I was doing could have been done in an hour on the riding lawn mower. By the time I’d finished, I’d had blisters, muscles in my arms and back in places I didn’t know I had muscles—and I’d learned a lot about how a scythe worked.

The first rule of cutting grass with a medieval farm implement is that the blade has to be sharp, or when it hits the grass, it will bend it over instead of cutting it. The sharp side of the blade is on the side nearest the scytheman, so he hooks the grass and pulls it with a smooth motion that uses his whole body, like a golfer. I think. I don’t golf, but the motion a golfer makes when hitting the ball looks a lot like the one I developed by trial and error to cut waist-high grass.

The same motion I used on the vampire. I caught her totally by surprise because her attention was on the werewolves.

Evidently, Jitka knew about keeping her scythe sharp, because it slid through flesh like a hot knife through butter. It was easy, only a little hesitation as the blade hit the bone, and it was done. Expecting a more difficult task, I used too much force and overbalanced myself, put a foot on the edge where the sod had been cut, and rolled and fell on my butt in the dirt.

I was too worried about cutting myself with the scythe to try to roll, but I scrambled to my feet as quickly as I could. Or almost as quickly as I could, because I found a little more speed when I realized that the head had landed right next to me.

Pretty much anything that is decapitated dies and stays that way, even the kinds of things that are otherwise immortal. Vampires’ bodies turn to ash when they are dead, mostly—though I’ve learned over the past few years that isn’t always true. There are apparently some strains of vampirism that don’t do that at all. Younger vampires tend to have bodies just like real people. But vampirism is magic-fueled, and magic doesn’t follow the rules all the time like science does.

What that means is this: if I decapitate Wulfe someday, he will probably turn to ash because he is very old. If he doesn’t turn to ash, I’ll burn his body and his head. Either way, I will take his ashes and scatter them in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans—salt being a pretty effective deterrent to magic. I don’t know of anything that decapitation followed by burning doesn’t kill, but with Wulfe, I wouldn’t take any chances.

I was comfortable that the vampire I’d scythed was dead. The eyes staring at me were blank and fogged. I didn’t know her well enough to know if I should have been as scared of her as I was of Wulfe, so I assumed not.

While beheading the vampire had only taken seconds, the fight had gone on without us. I didn’t think anyone had noticed what I’d done—the vampire hadn’t made much noise, and the other combatants were fully engaged in their own battles. Moving fast requires a lot of focus. It takes a Charles or an Adam to pay attention to anything more than the fight in front of him.

Jitka had a knife in one hand and something I couldn’t see too well in the other. Maybe it was a screwdriver. The vampire she was fighting had a short sword. Jitka hadn’t been exaggerating her competence. Despite the inequality in weaponry, the battle was not going in the vampire’s favor.

Martin had incapacitated one of his opponents. The big male vampire wasn’t going anywhere with his back broken and his body spasming helplessly under the randomized signals his nervous system sent out.

Short swords must have been the weapon of choice, because Martin had one that he was using to engage the short sword his second vampire opponent had. The wolf must have taken the sword from the disabled vampire, because he hadn’t been carrying it with him on the motorcycle. I’d have noticed.

The vampire jumped back out of the way of Martin’s strike and staggered. I hopped on the top rail of the fence and brought the point of the scythe over his shoulder and into his abdomen. The blade stuck—maybe it caught on a belt buckle. I tried to throw myself backward off the fence to use the weight of my body to force the blade deeper. Had the vampire panicked or frozen, I’d have eviscerated him. But he grabbed the shaft of the scythe, and I had to let go or risk his pulling me somewhere I didn’t want to go. I could not afford to let him get a shot at me.

When I hit the dirt this time, I rolled to my feet and took a quick step back before I figured out that the vampire wasn’t going to be coming after me—or anyone—again. Martin had taken advantage of the vampire’s distraction and used his sword to do what I hadn’t managed. He’d broken the blade doing it, but he’d cut the vampire—pretty messily—in half from belly through collarbone and out the top of the shoulder. The end of the sword had lodged in a rib and broken off. Martin brought the broken blade down on the vampire’s neck and decapitated him.

Jitka’s final opponent went boneless and dropped to the ground, a screwdriver sticking out of one eye. Face grim, the werewolf took the sword the vampire had been using and struck off his head as if she’d worked for years decapitating vampires on an assembly line—the stroke was that precise and emotionless. The dead vampire crumbled to ash in a flash of heat that ate the clothes he was wearing but left the shoes untouched. About that time, the female I’d killed just sort of faded into dust—a lot less dramatic than her comrade.

Jitka took the sword and looked around, her body language relaxed. She walked to the spasming vampire, looked closely at his face with a frown, then beheaded him. Without a guillotine or, evidently, a scythe, beheading someone isn’t as easy as the werewolves made it look, which is why most human-strength people are better off hammering a wooden stake into a sleeping vampire’s heart.

Martin and I were both watching Jitka, so we jumped when the vampire who was wearing the scythe burst into flame, scorching the grass, the fence, and the scythe, but not quite getting Martin, who’d been standing too close.

The scythe fell to the ground, a third of its blade blackened.

Jitka looked at me. “Do you know how long it’s going to take to sharpen that blade after this?”

I touched it with my toe, and the blade broke in half. “Huh,” I said. “When a job can’t be done, does that mean it will take forever—or no time at all?”

She laughed. “You fight good,” she said. “And smart, which is rarer.”

Martin said, “I think we might have a problem.”

She turned to look at him.

“Did you recognize any of them?”

She snorted and nodded at the vampire Martin had disabled and she had killed. That one had done the creepy thing where one moment it was a body and the next the body had become ash, which blew away.

“I would know that idiot,” she said, “if I were blindfolded. Someone should have rid the world of him fifty years ago. Ivan Novák.”

“What if I told you that the vampires who attacked the bakery were from Kocourek’s seethe?”

It certainly told her something more than it told me, because she stiffened and grunted. “Let’s get this mess cleaned up and go inside before someone looks out of the big house and wonders what we are doing.”

—

JITKA’S HOUSE WAS MORE OF A STUDIO APARTMENT than a house. The bedroom, kitchen, and living room were all one space. She sat on the bed, and Martin and I each took one of the kitchen chairs. There wasn’t any more furniture in the room than that. Jitka was not a cluttered person—except for the wall of plants that were set about two feet from the north-facing windows.

“So what do you think, Martin?” she asked. “Are the two seethes working together?”

“Excuse me,” I said. “You think that the vampires who attacked the bakery and the ones who attacked us here are two different groups of vampires?”

“Yes,” said Jitka.

“We know they are,” said Martin. “The thing is, having them fighting on the same team is like . . .”

“Bosnians and Serbs,” suggested Jitka helpfully. “Russians and Germans—or cowboys and Indians.”

“I get it,” I said. “Would they both follow orders from Bonarata? Cooperate by mistake because they are doing what Bonarata tells them to do?”

Both shook their heads, and Martin added, “No.”

“Kocourek is the Master of Praha,” said Martin.

“Prague,” said Jitka. “Americans call her Prague.”

“Prague,” agreed Martin. “Yes. He is the Master of Prague, and like all the Master Vampires in Europe, he obeys Bonarata. Otherwise, he is destroyed.”

“Not like the Marrok,” Jitka said disapprovingly. “Bonarata protects no one. He just dictates, and they do or they die. Kocourek has been Master here for longer than I have been alive. Only Libor is older than Kocourek. Kocourek would not dream of disobeying Bonarata. Kocourek is a survivor. Vampires who defy Bonarata die.”

“Ivan belongs to the other seethe in Prague,” Martin said. “The woman who rules it calls herself Mary.” He said the name with a decided English twist. “She’s been gathering the scum of the vampires to her for the last four or five decades. As best we can figure it, she must have come in at the close of World War II. But we only noticed her in the middle of the fifties, when Kocourek blew up an old factory trying to find her and kill her and her people. He’s been trying to run her down ever since.”

“Someone is helping her,” said Jitka.

“Yes, I know,” Martin returned in an exasperated tone. This, it seemed, was an old argument. “But we have no clue as to who it is, right?”

“So what do we do now?” I asked. “I could go find a hotel—a hostel, something. I honestly didn’t expect to run into trouble here. Prague is a long way from Milan. I figured that I could hit up Libor—your pack—for room and board for a couple of nights. I didn’t intend to get anyone killed.”

“No one’s been killed,” said Jitka.

“Four vampires here,” I retorted, “who would have been running around free and clear if I hadn’t come to Prague.”

“Didn’t sound like you had much choice,” said Martin.

“That lot isn’t worth anyone’s time mourning,” said Jitka at the same time. “Mary’s vampires go out and harvest food wherever. They take more than they need because they have to replenish the vampires Kocourek’s people have destroyed. They are somehow tied up with the drug trade here, too. Most of their vampires are young, see. They haven’t accumulated wealth, and so they are going in some nasty directions to get it.” She looked at Martin.

He sighed and shrugged. “I’ve told you before—Libor is letting the vampires feed on each other. Eventually, either Kocourek will find them all and eradicate them, or they’ll weaken his seethe, and Libor will finish them both off.”

“Lots of folk dying and hurting in the meantime,” Jitka said.

Martin nodded. “But Libor is old and slow to act when it is something outside of pack that is wrong. He doesn’t view humans as people, much. Like as not he’s right to sit this out. If Kocourek can’t find Mary’s people, there’s nothing saying we could, either. Let Kocourek do the work.”

“He cared about people during the war,” she said. “During World War II.”

“No,” Martin disagreed, his voice soft. “He just hated the Germans. Hated to see Prague under German control. It was when his wife died and Radim, his son, left.”

Radim, I thought. Zack’s real name is Radim.

“Look,” I said. “All this is well and good. But it appears that at least two groups of vampires are after me, here, in Prague. They are attacking your pack. I need to leave before someone else gets killed.”

They both looked at me as though I was being ridiculous.

Martin said, “Kocourek attacked the pack stronghold, Mercy. Whether you are here or in Germany, there will be more blood spilled between Kocourek and our pack. As for Mary’s seethe . . .” He shrugged. “They have been launching offensives at us ever since one of them seduced Pavel and tried to turn him into her servant. We think that somebody decided that the reason Bonarata was so scary was because he drinks werewolf blood.”

Jitka shivered. “Bonarata is scary because he is scary. The werewolf thing . . . that he could do that to an Alpha and his mate is scary. But—” She looked at Martin.

“It is also a weakness,” he said in a low voice. “I remember when no one thought he had any weaknesses. When the Lord of Night had his Blade and the Soldier and the Wizard . . . it was like the Avengers—except they were bad.”

Vampires did the one-name thing before Madonna and Prince. The Soldier, I knew, was Stefan. The Wizard was Wulfe. The Blade had to be Marsilia.

“I’m not that old,” said Jitka. “They left a hundred years before I was born. But I know that anyone who has an addiction as strong as Bonarata’s must have more weaknesses.”

“At any rate,” Martin said briskly, “an idiot is born every minute, and someone in Mary’s seethe—possibly Mary herself—decided that werewolf blood would make vampires stronger. So they got a pretty little thing to seduce Pavel.”

“Not difficult,” said Jitka. “He’s a good man, but”—she smiled wryly—“he has a weakness for women.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Libor happened,” said Jitka at the same time as Martin said, “Libor killed her and forbade sexual congress with vampires.” They spoke over the top of each other without really noticing it, so it must have been habitual.

“And how does he enforce that?” I asked.

They both looked at me incredulously. “He can tell through the pack bonds.”

I blinked. “Libor knows if his wolves have sex with a vampire through the pack bonds?”

Martin nodded. “It’s part of being the Alpha. And it’s not just sex—it’s anything very intense. Grief, joy, horror—he gets it.”

I was pretty sure that Adam wasn’t that connected with his pack. Almost sure. Because . . . ick. Invasion of privacy didn’t even begin to cover it. Maybe he just hadn’t told me because he knew how I’d react.

I was tired, and they must have been, too, because we kept wandering away from the point.

“What do I do to keep your pack as safe as I can?” I asked.

Jitka snorted. “Not your job, by my reckoning. Libor gave you three days of pack protection. Your job is to let us keep you safe.”

Martin grinned at me. “But if you want to behead a few vampires with a scythe, that’s okay, too.”

“It was only the one,” I said.

But he was looking at Jitka. “She got one and a half. I got two halves, and you got one and a half.”

Jitka shook her head. “No. I got one—I just finished off the one you’d already done.”

“So one and a half vampires for the poor weakling who matched or beat the scorecard for the werewolves.” Martin gave me a look. “All luck, was it? Luck didn’t kill those vampires, did it?”

“Martin,” Jitka said mildly. “We need to find all of us someplace safe to rest.” To me she said, “We didn’t think any of the vampires knew about this place. I only just moved out here, and Dobrichovice is pretty far out of their usual haunting ground.”

“We need to find a safe place for Mercy to sleep the rest of the night,” Martin said.

I don’t know why it bothered me so much. I mean, that’s what I’d been doing since I got to Prague, right? Finding a safe place to wait for Adam.

But we’d just killed four vampires. I wasn’t helpless. Helpless people get hurt.

And just for a moment, I flashed back to the time when I had been rendered helpless by a fae artifact and a creep named Tim . . .

“Mercy?” Jitka asked.

I realized I was sitting on the floor in the corner of her room. Martin was as far from me as he could get, watching me with a concerned look. Jitka was crouching about three feet from me, careful to give me space.

I met her eyes and said, “I hate PTSD, you know?” I remembered I was talking to a werewolf and turned my gaze to the floor. It was less humiliating talking to the floor, anyway. “It’s been years—and I killed that bastard. And it’s not like I was really hurt, right? I’ve been sent to the hospital by a volcano god, and that didn’t do anything but give my husband nightmares.”

Jitka nodded like all this was making sense. “Hurt comes in all forms. I wake up at least once a year to a memory that makes me shake for hours—something that happened 122 years ago. I have seen and done so much worse since that thing, and it wasn’t even something that happened to me. And still.”

She didn’t say what it was she dreamed of, and I didn’t ask. The whole room smelled like fear. My fear.

I didn’t do this hardly at all anymore. Maybe once or twice a month as opposed to the three or four times a day it used to be. Most of the panic attacks weren’t this bad. I hadn’t had a real episode for a couple of months.

And it had turned the respect in Martin’s face into compassion, into worry, into pity.

I stood up. Went into the little bathroom and closed the door behind me. I washed my face and looked at myself in Jitka’s mirror. The big bruise on my left cheek had spread since I looked at it this morning. There were dark circles under my eyes from lack of sleep.

I looked like a victim.

I was done, really done, with being a victim.

I opened the bathroom door and sat down where I’d started. “We cannot stay here because the vampires know where we are, right?” I knew, I knew that I shouldn’t do this. But the image of the victim remained in my mind.

I was dog-tired, and when I moved again, I was going to be stiff from hitting the ground and from bruises I didn’t remember getting: this wasn’t my first fight. I knew all about the aftermath. I should go and let Libor’s pack pay for a hotel room for me until we could pay them back. I should wait for Adam.

“Yes,” said Jitka.

I didn’t want to get anyone into trouble. So I said, “At this point, even if I ship off to Port-au-Prince or Timbuktu, the violence is going to continue between your pack and the vampires.”

Jitka said, “This attack and the one on our pack home make it quite clear that battle with the vampires is coming. It no longer matters if you are here or in China, Libor will not let this rest.”

“Yes,” said Martin at the same time. Jitka was just talking, but Martin watched me. His shoulders tightened. Maybe it wasn’t just me who needed to do something.

“And you would love to rid Prague of Mary’s seethe . . .” I said.

“Yes,” said Jitka, frowning at me. “But we cannot find it. We track them, and the trails just fade into vampire magic.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “I think I might be able to help you with that. What do you think the chances are that the vampires came here in a car with GPS?”

In the US, the chances would be pretty good. GPS or a cell phone with GPS, which would be harder.

Martin shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. The vampires tend to have expensive things—especially Mary’s people, who are trying to establish themselves with humans.”

“If you can get me to the place the vampires got in their car in Prague, assuming they walked from their seethe, then I can find it,” I told them.

Martin gave me a pitying look. “We have tried that many times, and we are werewolves.”

“Vampire magic doesn’t work right on me,” I told him. “Sometimes not at all.”

“Why not?” Jitka asked.

“I have no idea,” I told her honestly. “But I can see ghosts, too. Maybe one has something to do with the other.” I didn’t say that I could do other things with the dead. If no one knew, then no one could force me to do something I didn’t want to.

“What are you?” Martin asked.

“Not a werewolf,” I said. “Would it be useful to know where Mary’s seethe is?”

“We could go kill them,” said Jitka. She was all but vibrating with eagerness. “Kill them again, I mean, so they stay dead this time. Destroy Mary and her filthy followers in one shot.”

Martin’s eyes brightened. “Yes,” he said.

It wasn’t as stupid as it sounded. If Mary had been strong, she’d have already battled the Master of Prague. Instead, she’d been reduced to rebuilding her vampires, which was a slow and troublesome process, with failure rates higher than the werewolf Change. Most seethes, as I understood it, had a bare handful of strong vampires, then maybe as many as a dozen lesser vampires who depended upon their Master to sustain them.

We’d just killed four of Mary’s seethe. All of them had been vampires for a long time or their bodies wouldn’t have gone to dust. That didn’t mean that they weren’t still lesser vampires, because that usually required a century at least and often more. But I bet she didn’t have a whole lot more at that level. Not if her seethe was only sixty or seventy years old.

And, presumably, Jitka and Martin meant to gather the rest of their pack to destroy the seethe.

But they didn’t know how many vampires they were facing. I’d been raised by a master strategist who taught me that you never go to battle with an unknown enemy.

The werewolves probably knew that, too. Either they knew more about Mary’s seethe than it sounded like, or, more likely, the frustration of hunting her for so long was driving them into recklessness. Apparently it was going to be my job to be the cooler head.

Adam would think that was pretty funny, but I was not a rash person. I did think things through—and then I tried to do the right thing. Just because the right thing and the safest or easiest thing weren’t usually the same didn’t make me rash.

We planned and talked for maybe an hour. When Jitka couldn’t get through to Libor—something that didn’t seem to be unusual—we came up with an alternate plan to frontal assault, which, though satisfying to talk about, was (we decided) unlikely to result in anything useful, especially if we had to do it without help.

It required a lot of tact for me to steer the wolves, since I wasn’t a member of their pack or a werewolf. Only because I was the one they were counting on being able to find the vampires did they listen to me at all.

Martin suggested that we take a page out of Bonarata’s playbook and extract a single vampire. We’d question that one, then turn them over to Libor for further questioning.

That made me pretty queasy. Killing an attacker is an entirely different thing than turning one over for torture. Happily, Jitka batted that one back, so I didn’t have to.

“That is foolish,” she said. “We have tried that. They do not talk. After the third one, Libor said it was enough. That if they were not talking after what he did to them, it was because they could not, not because they would not. There are some witchcraft spells that will do that. Maybe there is vampire magic that stopped their tongues.”

I tried not to think beyond the surface of her words.

Torture was a lot further than I was prepared to go just to find out why they’d decided to work with the other Prague seethe. Maybe I’d feel differently if I lived in Prague, though I didn’t think so. There were probably circumstances that would make me reconsider, but this wasn’t one of those. Probably I should feel badly that Jitka and Martin seemed quite convinced that the endgame would be to destroy the seethe—but vampires are evil. I might like one or two on a personal level—but they kill people in order to keep living.

“So let’s just go find the seethe,” I said, “get what information we can get from watching them, then go back to Libor with that.”

Safe enough, I thought. I’d already proved I could get away from the biggest, baddest vampire in Europe. This shouldn’t be so bad. And I would be going out and doing something.

—

WE STARTED BY BACKTRACKING THE FOUR WHO HAD attacked us to their car, parked a couple of miles away. Actually, I started by sifting through vampire ashes looking for a car key or fob or something. Jitka and Martin put together a pack of things they were sure would allow us to extract a single vampire and restrain it with minimum chances of having it break free and kill us all. Just in case, they said when I objected that we were only going in to observe and report back.

The car was an expensive new model with a correspondingly expensive new guidance system on board. Jitka and Martin complained about how well financed Mary seemed to be getting. They seemed to take the luxury car as a personal insult, and I was reminded that not so long ago by the standards of long-lived creatures, the Czech Republic had been part of the Soviet bloc. Under the communist regime, personal wealth had been viewed as a moral failure.

I wasn’t sure that wasn’t correct.

We got lucky with the car key I’d found on the third ash pile I’d gone through. It was one of the keyless fobs and half-melted, but apparently the right half was undamaged, because the car unlocked when Martin held it next to the door.

I did know how to start a car without a key—even a modern car—but I needed a few more supplies than I had at hand. It was a good thing the key had survived.

Still commenting—presumably, because they’d switched back to Czech to continue their complaints—Martin started the car, switched on the nav system, and found, in the saved locations, one that was helpfully labeled with the “home” icon.

If their car hadn’t had GPS, Martin knew of a few places where one of the dead vampires had been spotted a couple of days ago. I could have tried picking up his trail and following it. But, probably, we would have given the whole thing up and gotten a hotel room for the rest of the night. The GPS was a big break.

“If they weren’t living like rich people,” said Jitka in satisfied tones, “then we would have had to give up. This is what living too well does. It makes you weak.”

We piled in, and Martin drove the car sedately back through the streets of Dobrichovice, past the castle, and back on the highway. Home got us to a parking garage in a section of Prague filled with older apartment complexes. In the Tri-Cities, older would mean fifty or sixty years; here, older was two or three hundred years.

There were two spaces empty, and we pulled the car into one and parked. The smell of cars and city and lots and lots of people filled the garage. It was pretty easy to tell we’d hit gold because the cars on either side of the car we’d come in smelled of vampire, too.

Less happily, Jitka, who’d begun calling as soon as we started back toward the city, hadn’t been able to get through to Libor. She put her phone in her pocket.

“I left a message for him this time,” she said. “He does not text. I told him we were in Josefov, and we have a way to find where Mary and her vampires are. I told him we would go looking and call him if we find something.”

Martin nodded. “Can you trail anyone in this?” He waved his hands around to indicate the complex muddle of scents.

She took a deep breath, then shook her head. “I can smell vampire, but to track, I will need to be wolf.”

Martin nodded agreement. “Me as well. I have not changed for three days. I could do it as long as I could stay in wolf form for four or five hours.”

“Hold it,” I said. “We probably want both of you in human skins, assuming we can keep this from being an outright battle. Why don’t you let me do this?”

“What are you?” Jitka asked with an edge to her voice, as if she had already been anticipating the beginning of her change.

I stripped off my borrowed clothes and looked around helplessly for a moment. In any other circumstances, I’d have thrown them in the nearest garbage can, but I’d started to feel possessive of my meager wardrobe.

I rolled the shirt and pants into a bundle as quickly as I could manage—it wasn’t likely that there would be visitors to the garage this late at night. Still, I preferred not to moon people who didn’t deserve it.

I gave my clothes to Jitka because that was slightly less embarrassing than handing them over to Martin.

“You aren’t a werewolf,” said Jitka positively, and not for the first time.

“There are supposed to be other kinds of shapeshifters.” Martin’s voice was hushed. “I’ve read stories. Weretigers. Dragons. That sort of thing.”

“If you are expecting a dragon, you’re going to be disappointed,” I told him.

And I changed into my coyote shape. When I was a teenager, I changed back and forth in front of a mirror, trying to see what it looked like. But one of the things that changes dramatically for me while shifting is my vision, so things get blurry. I’ve never seen much, but Adam told me there isn’t a lot to see—one moment I’m human, the next a coyote.

I might not get to see myself change, but I’d seen a lot of werewolf changes, and I’m very glad that mine is both quick and painless.

Martin’s jaw dropped open.

“What are you?” Jitka asked. “Some sort of dog?”

I flattened my ears at her and gave an impatient yip.

“You aren’t a wolf,” said Martin. “Something native to the US?”

“Coyote?” Jitka said. “Like in the cartoons with the Road Runner.”

I let my ears pop back up and smiled at them both.

“Well.” Jitka dragged the word out as she inspected me. “I thought coyotes were bigger.”

“Maybe roadrunners are smaller,” speculated Martin. “I guess the question is, how is your sense of smell?”

I yipped once, put my nose to the ground, and began casting about.

Scent trails are something that training makes better. The real trouble I’ve always had is that the information my canine nose gives me is overwhelming. When I was a teenager, Charles spent a lot of time and effort teaching me how to sort things out. I’d gotten a good sniff of our attackers, but the scent of the woman I’d killed with the scythe was strongest in my memory, so I focused on her.

I caught her scent right away, but I didn’t start following immediately. I let my mind relax and walked back and forth for a while until I was sure that I’d found the freshest scent. It was the one with a hint of absinthe, as though she’d been intimate with someone who was drinking or maybe someone spilled some on her. Maybe she’d been drinking it herself, though that was fairly unusual for vampires.

In any case, the absinthe edge distinguished that trail from all the others. It was the trail that contained the most nuanced complex of odors, which meant it was freshest, because those fade with time.

She had used the steps instead of the elevator. I focused on my prey and let the werewolves take care of keeping up with me.