9

Mercy

I seemed to be spending a lot of time wandering the streets of Prague at night. Not the best way to see Prague, but at least we weren’t running into very many tourists.

THE APARTMENT BUILDINGS THAT LINED THE STREETS were probably not old by Prague standards, since they certainly didn’t date back to the Middle Ages. But they weren’t built in this century, either. They were stacked six or seven floors high and shoulder to shoulder, leaving no room for a mouse to squeeze through between them.

They also looked vaguely familiar. We were close enough to Old Town that the streets and sidewalks were cobbled, so at first I assumed that it was because I’d passed this way when I had traveled the streets alone last night, and that was sort of true.

I looked down a cross street and suddenly got it. Someone, a century or more ago, had been trying to make this neighborhood look like Paris—which is why all the buildings had appeared so familiar. I hadn’t been to Paris, either, or I’d have figured it out sooner.

The cobbles were very picturesque, but my feet were looking forward to going home, where I could run in the fields. Even the cheatgrass and the tackweed didn’t seem so bad in retrospect, because I could avoid them. The cobbles were everywhere, hard and sharp-edged, and they dug into the pads of my feet.

When we passed by the Old-New Synagogue, I realized we were in the Jewish Quarter, near where I’d had my run-in with the golem—so that probably had added to the feeling of familiarity. Jitka had said we were in Josefov, and that name had thrown me. I’d heard it called Josefstadt, which would be German for Josef’s city. Presumably, Josefov meant the same in Czech.

This seemed awfully . . . in the middle of things, for a seethe that had been evading the Master of Prague for half a century or more. I’d expected someplace less densely populated with a few more hidden places and a thousand or so fewer people.

But scents generally don’t lie, and the female vampire’s scent was definitely leading me through the Jewish Quarter. I was starting to pick up more of her trails, too, as if she’d passed this way many, many times. And she wasn’t the only vampire who’d been down this sidewalk, either.

The scents of vampires gradually coalesced into something much worse. Someone wasn’t good at housekeeping, either, because the smell of blood and rot and old death wafted thickly around my nose. It was so obvious that I glanced at the werewolves, but both of them were paying attention to me rather than looking around for the building housing a couple of dozen vampires.

Given the stench of vampire, I thought the werewolves’ focus on me was weird, but I couldn’t ask them about it. I rounded a corner, and there it was, just across the street.

There was a huge park. Any open land I had seen in Prague was covered in lush green, whether tended park or wild riverbank. It wasn’t as overwhelming as the greenery in Seattle or Portland, where they fight a losing battle against the blackberry bushes that threaten to take over any spot with more than an inch of exposed soil. But it was very green.

This one reminded me of Howard Amon Park at home. Huge old trees shaded graceful paths and lots and lots of grass—most of the parks I’d seen here had more flower gardens. The whole park was carefully tended until it wasn’t. As if there were an invisible fence, a sharp line marked where lawn mowers stopped, and beyond that line was a jungle of overgrown grass and brush.

In the center of the overgrown area was one of the ubiquitous off-white apartment buildings I’d been walking past. This building wouldn’t look at home in Paris, any more than it looked at home in the neat and tidy (with graffiti) streets of Prague: it was in terrible shape.

I stopped, standing on the tidy side of the demarcation line. I’d spent the better part of the hour with the coyote in charge of the human because the trail had not been an easy one. I was puzzled by the situation with the grass and a little uneasy, and that started to bring my human side out. I didn’t think that I was as dual-natured as the werewolves, but when I operated on instinct for a while—it sometimes took me a moment to think like a person again.

In the center of the wilder area, the ruined building was, as far as I could tell, something that should have been used for a horror film about vampires in Prague. And no one had checked here to see if, maybe, possibly, there were vampires tucked in here? And not just any vampires—these were filthy, degenerate vampires.

Marsilia’s seethe was clean enough that I’d feel comfortable eating off the floor. Even the freezer (serving as a jail cell) at Bonarata’s had been pristine. This place smelled like those photographs of people who were found to have two hundred dogs and forty-five cats living in their house in itty-bitty cages that no one ever cleaned. And Libor’s pack had no idea it was here?

I didn’t know if Prague had been bombed during World War II, but the building in the heart of the wild looked as though it had been bombed—and then simply left where it stood, including the broken bits of the apartment buildings whose walls it had once shared. Unbelievable that it had just been left here among the meticulously maintained streets of the Jewish Quarter. Maybe it was a war memorial, or something like, a memorial filled with vampires. Somehow, it didn’t seem likely.

I was just getting ready to change to human so I could ask Jitka and Martin what was wrong with the collective noses of their pack when something moved inside the building. It was just a glimpse, but it was enough to tip the balance back. The coyote had been hunting or hunted by vampires all night, and she stuffed my human reasoning aside because she could see our prey.

I crossed the invisible border from tended lawn to wilderness, instinctively trying to blend in, though the coyote’s coat, a mix of beiges and grays that served me well in the dry scrublands of the Tri-Cities, wasn’t as useful in the lush green of Prague.

I crouched low and wiggled my way into the underbrush, leaving the trail of the female vampire entirely. I had the sense that we weren’t very far from the parking garage where we’d started, though her trail had led all over Josefov.

Hidden in the greenery, I stared at the building, but the figure that had caught the coyote’s attention was gone. About that time, I realized that I was alone in the middle of vampire territory. Impossible that I’d lost two werewolves while I was doing nothing more taxing than following a trail at walking speed or a little less. Impossible that they hadn’t known about the seethe. Impossible, unless . . .

A cold chill slid across my spine as I realized what had happened and how much trouble I was in right now. Stupid, imprudent coyote had gotten me into the vampire seethe without backup.

I tried to be silent as I withdrew from the bushes I’d buried myself in. It took longer to get out than it had to get in, but as soon as I was out of the undergrowth, I spotted my werewolves. I’d traveled farther than I thought I had.

Martin and Jitka were pacing uneasily back and forth along the line that demarcated the change in territory from city park to vampire seethe, maybe half a football field away. I’d seen that sort of behavior, or something very like it, before, though the sheer power necessary was something I’d only seen from the fae lords, and the magic here reeked of vampire. And witchcraft. In fact, now that I was paying attention with my other senses instead of only my nose, there was a huge amount of witchcraft all around me.

I knew what this was.

Mary or one of her minions was a witch. I really hate it when the bad guys double up on powers. To my sure and certain knowledge, it was forbidden to turn anything other than a mundane human into a vampire. That witch had set up a barrier around the seethe that kept it safe from prying eyes, noses, and anything else. Martin and Jitka had not smelled the vampire seethe—or they hadn’t known that they were smelling a vampire seethe.

That sounded more like it.

A spell that affected anyone in the area, that kept them from realizing they were sensing the vampires, was much less magic intensive than an actual barrier of the type the Gray Lords of the fae had placed around the Walla Walla reservation. Anyone who ventured into the area wouldn’t sense vampires, wouldn’t pay attention to anything the witch who set the spell didn’t want them to notice. Passersby probably saw the battered apartment building—they just didn’t notice it.

I’d heard about witchcraft spells like this.

When I was growing up in Bran’s pack, he required the pack and their families to attend a regular musical night. We all participated.

I sometimes wondered at the control that it took for Bran, a musician born and bred, to listen to an unhappy eleven-year-old (me) fight the piano through a Beethoven piece that would not have been one of the great man’s better melodies even had it been played well.

For two years, I played the same piece, as badly as I could manage without looking like that was what I was trying to do, at about half the speed it was meant to be played. I still hear it in my nightmares sometimes, and I imagine Bran does, too. Eventually, to my immense satisfaction, he quit calling upon me to play.

Usually Bran closed out those evenings by singing something himself, sometimes alone or with Charles or Samuel, his sons. But sometimes he’d tell us stories instead. His stories had the cadence of a fairy tale—something passed along and recited so often their words remained almost the same each time they were told. But most of his stories I’d never found anywhere else.

One of those stories that he’d told a couple of times talked about a castle bespelled by a wicked witch. Witches were always wicked in Bran’s stories. This story’s witch cast a spell that made people avoid looking at the castle, talking about it, or thinking about it until it was as well hidden in plain sight as it would have been surrounded by walls and a thicket of brambles. After a few generations, no one lived who knew there was a castle in the town though it sat upon the top of the hill in the center of town.

I wondered if Bran and this vampire had happened upon the same trove of stories and the vampire had found a witch to hire. No vampire who could do this, or who controlled a witch who could do this, was someone I wanted to trifle with. Especially not on a whim of curiosity. Whatever had caused Mary to take an interest in me was better discussed when I stood next to Adam in the center of the local werewolf den surrounded by werewolves. Or, better yet, over the phone, while I sat beside Adam in our own living room.

Being mostly unaffected by vampire magic had its upside and its downside. It meant that the mind tricks that most vampires could pull on their victims didn’t work well on me. But it also meant that I’d walked into the middle of a vampire’s stronghold by myself without meaning to.

I took another step, and something fell around my neck with brutal swiftness. In my misspent past, I’ve been picked up by a dog catcher or two, and I know what a catch pole feels like. I froze. Why would a vampire seethe have a catch pole?

A voice purred behind me in Czech. I had no idea what she was saying. She gave the pole a jerk, half strangling me, and I coughed.

Jitka and Martin were only fifty yards away, but they were on the other side of the barrier. They were no good to me at all. As I watched, they exchanged a few quiet words, shook their heads, and walked with brisk energy out of the park. The spell probably encouraged people to go away. That’s what I would have done if I could set a spell like that.

I would have been better off, in retrospect, if Jitka had gotten her way and we had grabbed all the werewolves and charged the front door of Mary’s home base. Assuming my coyote wouldn’t have allowed herself to be separated from the pack the way she’d just done with Jitka and Martin.

—

I SHIVERED MISERABLY IN THE DOG CRATE IN THE BASEMENT of the apartment of the vampire seethe.

The basement, lit by two bare bulb fixtures in the high ceiling, had a dirt floor and rough-cast cement walls. The crate I was in sat next to the remains of an old furnace that was in the same state the rest of the building was in. It probably hadn’t functioned for fifty years.

The dog crate answered why the vampires would have had a catch pole. It was made from welded metal mesh that was probably steel underneath its coat of silver and was riddled with magic. It had held werewolves—I could distinguish five or six different scents and some too faded to assess. No one I’d met. The silver affected me not at all, nor did the magic, but I was exhausted. The dead and rotting corpses I shared the basement with were not reassuring. Worse was the vampire chained to the wall, not too far from me. He was wearing jeans and a short-sleeved shirt over a tank top. None of them looked dirty enough to have been on his body for more than a day or two, proof that he had recently had enough control he could put on clothes. He watched me with hungry-mad eyes while he screamed in inchoate rage at irregular intervals.

I reached out to Adam. Though I couldn’t actually communicate with him yet, I could feel the steady warmth of his presence. I clung to that as hard as I could.

And attracted the attention of something else.

—

PERHAPS AN HOUR LATER, MARY, THE MISTRESS OF the seethe, came down the stairs of the basement with the easy, definite movements and bearing of a career soldier. She didn’t introduce herself, but she came striding boldly into the darkness with an I’m-in-charge air—who else could she have been?

If she’d been in Prague since the late 1940s, then I didn’t see how she could have been a soldier. There are a lot of werewolves I’d known who’d served time in the military of one sort or another, though, so I’d seen a lot of soldiers. The posture was unmistakable. If she were German, she could have been one of the Hitler Mädchen, maybe. The Hitler Mädchen were sort of a paramilitary Girl Scouts trained to nark on their parents and neighbors.

Mary was not a lovely person. Her face was broad and flat, her eyes small, and her mouth wide but ungenerous. As a human, I thought she probably had tended toward heaviness. Her frame looked gaunt and wrong, with the model thinness that most vampires carried. Her hair was blond and pulled back into a bun, and even I could tell that was an unfortunate choice.

She trailed followers behind her as though she were a bride and they the attendants assigned the task of carrying her veil off the ground. The attendants closest to her were human, one pretty blank-faced man and a pretty blank-faced woman.

Both humans were naked and covered with bite marks on all of their pulse points and lots of other points, too. The girl had suntan lines, and some jokester had drawn along the bikini top with a black Sharpie. The boy was very dark-skinned, and in the shadows of the basement, he was harder to see.

I tried not to look at their faces, because it was unlikely I could do anything to protect them. Unlikely I could do anything to protect myself from what was coming tonight. They’d been here long enough that some of the bite marks were scars, so there might not be a lot left of them to save.

A vampire like Stefan, who took care of the humans he fed from, could keep them mostly unaffected by his bite for decades. But most vampires were too impatient for that. I was betting that Mary’s seethe was full of vampires who didn’t care about the humans they fed from. The Sharpie bikini was a dead giveaway.

The rest of Mary’s attendants were vampires of both sexes and various appearances. None of them was the woman who had caught me and stuffed me down here. When they quit coming down the stairs, there were ten of them, not including the humans.

I wondered that she thought I was so dangerous. Surely she didn’t always travel around her own home with twelve minions? Maybe she was trying to impress me. Maybe she was simply making a statement of some sort.

Or possibly she trailed minions wherever she went. Just as she trailed the stench of a black witch. What idiot vampire had decided it was a good idea to change a witch into a vampire? She must be able to hide her scent—or she never went out on her own—because any werewolf with a nose would otherwise understand immediately what she was. I supposed that a witch who could hide her seethe in the middle of Prague for over half a century could probably manage to hide what she was if she wanted to.

Libor’s pack thought her a lesser vampire, but a vampire who could pull on the power of witchcraft was a contender for the scariest monster in town by any definition.

I clung to the contact I had with Adam, drawing courage and resolution in equal measure. I would not let this be the last place I saw on this earth. I would not let the last time I saw Adam be the laughing face he’d given me as I died a dramatic death at the hands of his daughter. I would not let the last air I breathed be the fetid stench rising from the dirt of this abattoir.

I would survive this. Somehow.

“Mercedes Thompson Hauptman,” Mary the vampire said. Her accent was heavy, definitely Eastern European, but I couldn’t decide if it was actually Czech, Serbian, or even Russian. That put paid to my Hitler Mädchen guess. Hers was not the usual Czech accent, though.

I stared at her without meeting her eyes. Probably she couldn’t have caught me with her gaze, but I’d met at least one who could. Being immune to most vampires sometimes seemed as useful as being immune to none.

She said something. I stared some more, and she made an impatient sound. One of the vampires came over, a male, and knelt beside her, facing me. She put her hand on his head and said something again.

The kneeling vampire said, his voice accented with the same upper-crust accent that Ben used, “How thou art fallen, daughter of the Werewolf King.”

I continued staring at Mary. She knew who I was. Possibly she’d gotten word from Bonarata. Less likely was that she knew more about the werewolves in the States and our families than the rest of the supernatural community I’d run into here.

What did she intend with the misquote of the Bible? I couldn’t see why she’d compare me to Lucifer, at whom the original quote had been aimed. I wondered if stealing and mutilating phrases from Isaiah was a kind of assumption of power—a dare of sorts. Though I knew that biblical readings did not affect vampires, not everyone (including some vampires I’d met) knew that.

Or maybe the translating vampire was taking a few liberties with what she said. I kept myself from looking away from Mary to look at her translator by force of will. Mary was the threat.

“I have seen nature films of coyotes,” Mary continued through her translator. “I expected that you would be bigger. More impressive. He told me that you had escaped the Lord of Night, so I should make sure of your captivity.”

It must be hard, I thought, to give a proper villain speech when your victim couldn’t say anything, and you could only speak through another person. It didn’t seem to bother Mary much. Nor did she appear to be rattled by the clank, clank, clank of the vampire chained to the wall. He’d quit screaming but now jerked on his chains in a heavy-metal precise rhythm that pounded my ears.

Mary paid him no obvious attention, though the structure of her sentences started to follow the beat of that chain. As bad as the clank, clank, clank was, I still preferred it to the screams.

“I think, Mercy . . . that is what they call you, yes?” Mary smiled a little at me, as if she found me charming or something. I was betting on the or something. She waited a moment or two after the other vampire had translated for her. Presumably, she thought I might respond, but I made no move.

“A shortened version of your real name,” she said. “Mercy, the weakest of all the virtues. I find your name ironically appropriate.”

She reached out and ran her long fingernails musically over the welded metal mesh. I noted that she had a French manicure, though the nail on her little finger was broken raggedly.

She whispered, “Mercy has no place here, except that she is locked behind bars of steel and silver and magic.”

As if no one had ever had clever things to say about my name before.

“I think,” Mary told me, “that you should not anticipate escaping from here. We have kept your greater cousins here for months at a time, and none have escaped us that we have not let go. We will keep you alive, because that is what he wants. You should remember that—that you owe him your life.”

Him who? Bonarata? Oddly, I thought not. The other Master Vampire, Kocourek, had Bonarata’s support. Bonarata, evil and rotten to the core though he might be, had a code of honor he followed. I knew the stories—and some of them were gruesome. It was the belief that Bonarata would keep his word that had allowed him to amass power for as long as he had. If he supported one seethe, he would not undermine that with another in the same hunting ground.

So whom did she mean?

I cocked an ear at her. And she got it.

Her eyes half-lidded, and she smiled secretly. “Guccio,” she said.

It took me a moment to process his name. Pretty Vampire. Hadn’t his name been Guccio? I’d been meeting a lot of people in the past day or two. But I was pretty sure that Pretty Vampire had been Guccio.

“I see you know of whom I speak. Though you met him only briefly, he leaves an impression most rare.” She took a step forward and dropped to her heels, so her face and mine were even. “He said you were ugly and fat. He said he prefers me.”

Yippee. She was welcome to him. Even if I wasn’t married, I don’t date the dead.

Mary’s mouth was pursed unhappily as she examined me. “You do not look as though you are fat. You look puny and stupid, but not fat. I think he lied to me. And why would he lie unless he wanted you and he didn’t want me to know it? Are you ugly?”

Heaven save me from jealous vampires. I’d always thought that vampires were cold-blooded, and, if they thought about another creature at all, it came with thoughts of food.

I didn’t make the mistake of trying to answer her question. There was no right answer to a question like that. In my coyote shape, I had the perfect excuse to maintain my silence.

“You brought another witch with you,” she said after a moment.

I had no idea what she was talking about. Had Bonarata had a witch travel with me from the US?

“He said”—she frowned unhappily—“he said he wasn’t looking for another witch because he had me.” Shrewd eyes examined me. “But I’m not stupid—I’m not as stupid as he thinks I am, anyway. He lied about you. If he weren’t interested in the witch, he wouldn’t have brought her up.”

He wanted to keep her on edge, I judged. Keep her trying to please him. It was easier to control someone who understood that they were replaceable.

“He told me he thought about taking her, too, since I worked out so well for him. But she was old—and while vampires don’t age, they don’t get younger-looking, either.” She leaned close to the cage and murmured sweetly, “And it looked as though she had her claws into your mate anyway. They are sleeping together.”

My mate. Adam had made it to Milan, then, to speak with Bonarata. Had he brought Elizaveta? Why had he brought Elizaveta? That was a stupid question. Elizaveta was a very strong arrow in our quiver as long as she chose to aim herself in a useful direction. She liked Adam. I realized that I should have known he’d brought her—it must have been her magic that had allowed him to contact me while I was in the bus’s luggage compartment.

Mary made a disappointed sound. I guess I was supposed to be jealous over the comment about Elizaveta and Adam sleeping together. If there was one constant in my life, it was my mate. Pyramids would roll down the desert before Adam would break his word or betray anyone, let alone me.

Finally, with a little unattractive pout, she said, “It is good for you that Guccio didn’t like that witch. He said he didn’t think she’d be cooperative, not useful to him as I have been. If he chose another to do for him what I do—I would not have liked that. You might have had an accident.”

Elizaveta was well able to defend herself. I expected that if Guccio had tried to suborn Elizaveta, the vampire would have found himself overmatched. I didn’t know much about him, but I knew quite a bit about Elizaveta.

“He’ll be so pleased with me,” she said, apparently to herself, because she got to her feet and turned her back to me, though the translating vampire kept translating.

Her gaze fell upon the chained vampire.

“Why is he still here?” she said. “I told you that experiment was a failure.”

Someone said something.

“Not him?”

Apparently my translator was only translating Mary, so I was getting half the conversation.

She looked at the vampire on the wall and frowned. “This is Weis? He was doing well, I thought.”

The translating vampire looked up and met my eyes and broke protocol while Mary’s attention was elsewhere.

He spoke to me very quickly in a low tone. “She has been using witchcraft to try to make humans into vampires more quickly. Recently, she has been successful. That one took her two weeks to make, and he functioned for three months. But they devolve with suddenness and without warning.” He paused. “If you escaped the Master of Milan, then perhaps you will survive this. Someone should know what she has done, so that they are prepared for the problems this will cause. They should destroy any vampire who belonged to her, so that news of this does not get out.”

Two weeks to make a vampire, something that could take years by the standard manner. He was absolutely right. If the other vampires knew there was a way to make vampires so quickly, we’d be armpit deep in them before we knew what we were doing. Armpit deep in vampires who could switch to mindless monsters.

I nodded to show him I heard what he was saying.

Mary, meanwhile, walked up to the vampire chained to the wall. At her approach, he quieted. She held her wrist to him, and he lunged forward violently, digging his fangs into her as if he were afraid she would pull away.

But, though her body stiffened a little, she did not move away. The smell of witchcraft grew stronger, and I remembered that witches turned pain into power, even their own pain. She reached up with her free hand and petted his hair.

She said something to him, but my translator fell silent, so I don’t know what it was. It sounded tender, something a mother would say to a sick child.

The feeding took a long time, and no one but Mary made a move of any kind. I don’t think they were performing for me, so I upped my assessment of how scary Mary was, and she was already pretty far up there.

I put my head down and tried to look small and innocuous, and at the same time keep an eye on everyone. The only good thing about the cage, from my perspective, was that for any of them to touch me skin to skin, they’d have to open the cage door.

Murmuring softly, Mary pulled her ravaged wrist away from the feeding vampire. He stood for a moment in a daze, blinked, then looked around.

He said something.

“Why am I in this place?” translated my ally—if he was an ally. “Why am I here, Mistress? Did I displease you?”

Mary patted his cheek with her good hand while the human girl wrapped her wrist with a cleanish once-white cloth. She said something to him, and he smiled.

In a blink of an eye, his face changed and he lunged forward. This time he buried his fangs in the neck of the girl, whom Mary jerked in front of her as a shield against the attack. Mary stepped back out of range. She reached out, grabbed the girl’s arm, and pulled her away from the crazed vampire without any care for how much more damage she was doing to her pet. The human girl stood where Mary had set her for a moment, her mouth open in pain or astonishment. Blood gushed out of her torn throat, a black arterial flow that covered her tan skin and slid downward. The girl brought her hand to her throat, then fell, face forward. She hit the dirt floor with a thump, dead, I judged, as she fell, though her body kept moving for a few moments more.

Mary turned her attention to the vampire, who was now hanging limply from his chains. She raised her hand toward him—a hand covered liberally with blood, both hers and the dead girl’s and probably the other vampire’s as well. And she began chanting.

Witchcraft.

For a moment, hers was the only voice in the room. I could feel the draw of it. It crawled over me like a wet mouth looking for something good to eat, but it slid off me, leaving only a residue of magic behind.

Just about then the vampire in the chains began screaming again, but it was a different kind of scream. His body jerked and shook as if he were hooked up to electric prods. After a few minutes, his voice broke under the strain—and still he screamed.

Witches feed on pain.

Eventually, he fell silent and I knew—because I could feel it through the residual bits of her magic—that he was gone. He didn’t rot or turn to dust. He must have been very new, though, because he didn’t even smell like a rotten corpse. He just smelled dead.

“So you see,” said the English-speaking vampire very quietly. “Abomination.”

This time Mary heard him. She turned to him, her eyes cool. She said something.

“Why are you whispering to her, Kocourek?” she asked, and he translated her words for me.

Kocourek. Kocourek was the Master of the primary seethe of Prague. So what was he doing on his knees in front of Mary? I wondered how long he’d been under her thumb.

Libor should have paid more attention to the vampires in his city.

Kocourek said something to her.

Mary considered the kneeling vampire. She looked around and said something to the rest of the room.

“Who else speaks English here?” she asked, and again he translated.

No one volunteered.

She said a word and closed her fingers briefly next to her mouth. He bowed his head and rose. When she walked up the old wooden stairs, he followed without looking back at me. Her train was a little lopsided, without the human girl, but no one seemed to notice except for me.

She stopped at the top of the landing. “He says that your mate convinced the Lord of Night that your death will cause a war between the Werewolf King and Bonarata’s people. He asked me not to kill you just yet until he can check it out.” She smiled, and this time it was the kind of joyous smile that made her plain face beautiful. “But he will let me know shortly. And in the meantime, I am welcome to enjoy myself. I am busy just now, but look for me in a few hours. I’ve never gotten to play with one of your kind before.”

They left the two bodies where they were. They weren’t the only dead in that basement. A city as old as Prague, a place as old as this building, has a lot of ghosts. And the dead of this part of Prague had witnessed Mary’s visit. Now they, like me, turned their attention to the other monster who had waited while those who could not see the dead conducted their business.

—

ALMOST AN HOUR EARLIER, WHEN I’D REACHED FOR Adam, hoping that somehow our link would function as it should, that somehow I could find him, let him know that I needed him, that I loved him, that I was scared and alone . . . I’d felt something touch my bond with Adam and slide away, unable to penetrate, to get inside of me or my bond. Instead, whoever it was used our bond to slide through the witch’s spells and into the basement where I was held.

It was different than it had been before. Its presence was even bigger. I could feel its magic, unfamiliar and familiar at the same time, and it flowed through me like an electric current as all around us, ghosts stirred. There were a lot of ghosts.

The vampire on the wall had drawn a breath to scream again, but instead he fell silent, as if he could sense the golem’s presence. He flattened against the wall and turned his face away from us.

The biggest difference between the first time I met the golem and this time was that it spoke to me.

Mercy, said the golem in my head. It didn’t really use my name, not as such, but an identifier that was more who I was than my own name could convey.

Its magic felt like . . . I swallowed when I figured out why some of it felt familiar. It felt like Guayota, the volcano god who had almost killed me not so long ago. My ankle still ached before storms.

I’d lived with magic my whole life—and not in a happy Harry Potter sort of way, either. Sure, magic worked by rules, but those rules were flexible, and different kinds of magic worked differently, and there were lots of different kinds of people and creatures who could access certain aspects of it. So there was pack magic, vampire magic. Witch magic. Wizard magic. Fae magic. Sorcerer magic.

Me? I had a bare thread of magic. I could shift into a coyote. I was a walker, descendant of the avatars who represented the animals to the native peoples of the American continents. Among other things, our jobs—back before the European invasion and their attendant diseases nearly wiped the native peoples off the planet—had been to attend the spirits of the dead. For that reason, as best as I could piece it together, the magic of the dead did not affect me, and the influence worked the other way around.

But the dead golem’s presence had amped my attraction for ghosts up to maximum, until I’d been swimming in ghosts. If there was any question that it had been my encounter with the spirit of the golem that had been responsible, the effect of its presence here answered that.

With it in the cellar, ghosts were flooding in despite the presence of vampires. Ghosts didn’t like vampires. I’d once thought it was because the vampires had killed them. But then I learned that there are some vampire gifts that allow vampires to command ghosts and other gifts that allow a vampire to consume them and use their substance for power.

Or it might be something as simple as the instinctive revulsion that cats (my own cat is an exception) feel for vampires.

The dead gathered around the golem and me like we were a campfire in a Montana winter. The air grew thick with that not-substance that seems to make up their immaterial bodies, and the feel of it vibrated my bones.

We are like, the golem said. We guard against evil. You found what magic has hidden from me, a canker, a cancer, a rot at the heart of my territory and lit me the path here also. Can you destroy these demons?

If we were going to have a conversation, I needed to be human. I supposed that we could converse without sound, as the golem was not really making sound. But I preferred to use real words, something I could shape with more sureness than the unruly babble that was my usual thought process.

The golem’s presence initially stirred up some hope that I might make it out of this alive. But by the time I was back in my human skin, the hope had drifted away with the warmth of my vanished fur. The basement was a lot colder when I was kneeling naked in the cage, and the golem was a ghost.

At the very least it was a spirit without form—that it passed through the witch’s wards was proof that it could not affect the material world any more than it could be affected by it.

I took a deep breath and felt the golem with other senses. It didn’t feel quite like a ghost, not quite, which is why I kept trying to identify it as a spirit instead. A different word for the same thing, but not quite. What was left of Rabbi Loew’s golem was very close kin to a ghost. I couldn’t figure out if it was the rabbi’s magic that made him feel so different, or if it was the magic that felt like Guayota’s magic.

He—unlike the first time I’d encountered the golem, it felt like a him, so I went with that feeling—had no power because it had been taken from him by Rabbi Loew all those centuries ago when the rabbi had stolen back the life he had bestowed.

When I had thought of golems, which wasn’t often because they are not common back in the Tri-Cities, I had conceived of them as magical robots, an animated bit of stone, obedient to the will of the man who had called them into being.

Our earlier meeting in the streets of the old Jewish Quarter had shaken that conviction. There had been an element of . . . self-determination and thought that had not belonged to a robot. And no robot ever had a spirit that traveled the streets long after the body was gone to dust.

Part of me had been working on the puzzle of the golem ever since I’d first met him.

I am no kind of skilled magic user. I didn’t know anything at all about the kabbalistic magic the old rabbi had used to create the Golem of Prague. But I’ve been exposed to lots of other kinds of magic.

Whatever it was now, based on the feel of the magic that surrounded him, I was pretty sure that the golem had started out as a manitou.

Manitou, according to Coyote (yes, that Coyote), are the bits of the spirit of the earth. The whole earth has an enormous manitou, it can stir as one spirit, but it is too large to be concerned with minor things. Mostly the earth’s manitou sleeps, and all of us should thank our lucky stars that is true.

Each dandelion or pebble has a bit of that manitou, a bit that is fully independent of the whole. But the manitou of a dandelion is very small and does not have much power to affect things around it. The mountains and lakes also have manitou; theirs are powerful and tend, like Mother Earth’s greater manitou, to be dangerous when roused. Mostly, that doesn’t happen a lot.

As he explained it, Coyote and his fellow avatars are very closely related to manitou—like a horse and a jackass. He’d flashed me a wicked grin as I lay in a hospital bed—put there by Guayota, who was, again according to Coyote, the manitou of a great volcano.

I might not be an expert on kabbalistic magic, but I was pretty sure that Rabbi Loew, who had created the golem, had found a manitou from something in between a mountain and a pebble. It had been strong enough to become the golem but small enough to be controlled by a man who worked kabbalistic magic. It had probably not been the manitou of the Vltava, which would be huge and powerful. Maybe it was from some long-buried stream or hill or something native to the earth of Josefov.

To me, such an act would have been evil. He had enslaved a living spirit. I doubted that a man European-born and -bred would have thought of the spirit as living. He would have considered it magical energy, maybe. That a manitou spirit was naturally territorial would only have helped the rabbi’s magic along.

The rabbi was a good man in all the stories I ever heard. If he’d known what he’d done, I was sure he’d have been appalled. But most Judeo-Christian churches do not believe in manitou. He had, as I had previously, thought of the golem as a robot, an object without feelings or true life.

When the rabbi had, to go with the robot analogy, turned the golem off, he’d locked the manitou in an artificial and uncomfortable existence. Dead but not dead. Partially, I thought, by the way the off switch had worked.

Depending upon the story—probably because there were several ways to power a golem—Rabbi Loew had carved into the golem’s forehead the word “emet,” which is the Hebrew word for truth. When the rabbi deactivated the golem, he removed a letter and left the word “met,” which is dead.

The problem with this, as I saw it, was that a manitou cannot die. It just is, like the sun and the rain. It can be changed or hidden, but it cannot be killed. But the rabbi’s magic imbued the death command too strongly for the golem to ignore, so it could not live, either.

In my head and without real words, the golem had been following my thought process. I couldn’t tell if he agreed with my assessment or not, or even if he understood it, but something made him speak.

Neither spirit nor golem nor ghost, he told me, but at the same time all of them together, I kept watch over the streets of Prague. I was helpless to do anything against human evil or things like the vampires, those who could neither see nor sense me.

But I was driven to do this thing that I could not. Rabbi Loew gave me the task of keeping Josefov safe. So I drifted through the night streets of Prague, able neither to forsake my task nor accomplish it. And then I encountered you. Afterward, I frightened a thief away—I, who no one could perceive before. You did something to me, made me more real, real enough to rip a door off its hinges.

His interaction with me had lit up my magic until I’d been swamped (almost literally) by ghosts anywhere near me. That was another reason I thought the golem had been created from a manitou. If we weren’t as closely related as “a horse and a jackass,” then he probably wouldn’t have affected me that way. I hadn’t considered what it had done to him.

The golem returned to his original question. Can you destroy these demons?

I gave a disbelieving laugh. “Does it look like I am in a position to do anything to the vampires?”

The cage was coated with silver, which mattered not a whit to me, but the metal-welded mesh was strong. The holes were too fine to allow me to stick more than a pair of fingers through it. If someone handed me the key to the padlock, I couldn’t have unlocked it from inside.

I patted the cage door. “But even if I were out and free, I’d be no match for them. I’m not a power, golem.”

The golem made a rumbling sound that made the vampire on the wall flinch. You are one who walks the path of the dead, he told me. The dead must hear you and obey. These demons, these vampires, have swallowed death to stay on this earth. They are not exempt from your power.

In one brief statement, the golem had clarified something that I’d been working through my whole life: that my kind had a purpose, a reason, for existence.

I stared at the golem and sucked in a breath of air. I reminded myself that my kind originated on another continent. The golem could not have encountered someone like me.

I know what you are, the golem said. Mercy. Again it wasn’t my name; it was bigger than that. It fit better.

To him I said carefully, “My experience is that I might be able to make one vampire obey me, and only for a very short time. But there are a lot of vampires in this place.” I could feel the weight of them.

The vampire on the wall screamed at me again, as he been doing off and on since the vampires who’d caught me had stuck me in the cage. This time it made me jump, because he’d been quiet awhile and I’d been paying attention to the golem.

I turned to him and, pulling on the authority I’d been learning use in the pack, said, “Quiet.”

He screamed louder and with more feeling.

I said it again. As I did, the golem reached through the cage and touched my chest. Power flooded me, and the vampire shut his mouth.

“Quit looking at me,” I whispered, pushed by the golem’s wishes rather than my own, and the vampire turned his head away.

I clamped my mouth shut. It was wrong to do that, to have that kind of power over someone, even a vampire, and to use it as if they weren’t a thinking being. To give them no choice but to listen to me.

A cold hand stroked my shoulder. One of the ghosts had crawled in beside me and touched me. I shivered, but I didn’t give it any orders. Cooperation is one thing; enslavement is another. I knew better than Rabbi Loew, so there was no excuse for me when I did it.

Not that I had never forced a ghost to obey me. Ghosts weren’t the humans whose death had birthed them. But I was increasingly uncomfortable with the assumption that that meant they weren’t alive anymore. And that meant that other than for my own defense or in defense of someone else, I could not bind them to my will again.

If my whisper could influence the vampire as strongly as it had, no ghost had a chance of resisting me.

The vampire, not looking at me, began to jerk on his chains. Clank, clank, clank. He kept going with the steady reliability of a drum major. Clank. Clank. Clank.

“See?” I said to the golem. “He’s working his way out of it. Imagine if I were trying to control a dozen of them. And he’s crazy—I don’t think that helps him resist me.”

The golem looked back at me. He didn’t have eyes—I saw him more with my other senses than I saw him with my eyes. But I could feel his regard.

I have a counterproposal, he said. I have had a very long time to think about what I could manage. My master worked his magic in front of me and taught his students in front of me. I have knowledge but no power.

“I can’t help you there,” I said. “I have no power to give you.”

Do you not?

The golem turned his attention to the ghost beside me. She shrank away from him, huddled against my side as if she thought I might help her. I don’t know how long she’d been a ghost, maybe a day, maybe a century. She could have been a victim of the vampires or the Nazis or one of the pogroms that had inspired Rabbi Loew to protect the Jewish Quarter with a golem.

I could see twenty or thirty ghosts clearly enough to see their faces. Another dozen were wisps of whatever substance ghosts are made of. But beyond them I could feel them filling the room. I realized I was paying attention to them because the golem wanted me to.

Don’t you? asked the golem, again. Feed them to me, and I can go remake myself. I know how to do it. So I can protect my territory again.

“Feed them to you?” I asked.

Feed me the ghosts, he said, as if he thought I hadn’t understood him the first time.

“No,” I told him. “They don’t belong to me.” As if to disagree, the ghost who clung to my side put her face against my shoulder and wept silently. Her tears ran down my shoulder.

Feed them to me. I will clean this place of the vermin who prey upon my people. If you tell them, the ghosts, to let me eat them, they will give themselves to me. He paused. I cannot get them to do that, though I have tried since you and I met, and I conceived of this possibility.

I opened my mouth to answer, but at the top of the stairs, the doorknob turned. The ghosts left more quickly than they had come. I shifted to coyote and waited to meet Mary and discover just how bad a fix I was in.

—

I HAD BEEN VERY SURE OF MY ANSWER TO THE GOLEM before Mary’s visitation, but Kocourek’s information changed everything.

—

AS SOON AS MARY AND HER CADRE TOOK THEIR LEAVE, I changed back to human and looked at the golem, who’d observed the whole thing undetected.

I did not order the dead to give themselves up to the golem. Apparently he needed their consent, but he did not need their informed consent or even their willing consent.

But I did. Because unlike Rabbi Loew, I knew what I was doing. I knew the difference between good and evil, and I knew that the humans on this planet were not the only ones deserving of being treated under the “do unto others as you would have done unto you” clause of good behavior.

I called the ghosts to us, not just those who had come initially, drawn by the combination of our presence together. I called all the ghosts I could sense. When the golem touched me to reach farther, I accepted it. This was a horrible thing to do—and the only thing more horrible would be to take everything from those who had only a little existence left and have it not be enough to get the job done. They came, filling the basement impossibly deep, until I breathed shallowly in an attempt not to breathe them in with the air I needed to live.

“Listen,” I told them. As with Libor’s ghosts and the golem, there was no language barrier between me and the dead here. They fell silent, and I could feel their attention, like the sun on the back of my neck in the summer.

“I have an offer for you,” I told them. “It will mean that you will cease to exist here. I do not know what that means, exactly, to you or for you.”

I explained what we needed and why, ignoring the golem’s impatience. I think about half of them understood me. The others were too fragmented to reason or communicate what they thought even if they could comprehend what I told them. Some of them were old, older than the apartment building. And they kept coming as I talked until the weight of their presence dropped the temperature in the basement, until I could see my breath and frost formed on the metal of the cage.

I explained everything twice. When I had finished, I waited. The weight of the dead was heavy on my chest.

Yes, they said as one. Those who could speak.

“Feed him,” I said, and the golem’s power gave my voice more authority somehow, both an order and a spellcrafting that was of the golem’s making.

They came to him. There were ghosts so lifelike, I could have mistaken them for the living. There were others who were reduced to an emotion or a single moment of time. Still more I could only sense and not see, even with the augmentation the golem provided.

The golem’s spirit surrounded them, sucked them into his darkness, until only one remained, the young woman who had stayed by my side through Mary’s visit. She hid her face from the golem.

That one, too, he said.

No, she whispered in my ear, sending a chill across my skin that raised goose bumps.

“No,” I told him. “Only those who were willing.”

I need them all, he thundered in a voice that made my bones ache.

I didn’t say anything more. Her tears were real enough now that I could feel them slide down the naked skin of my shoulder. The golem wasn’t solid, not yet, but his presence thickened the air as he leaned his will against mine—and lost.

Eventually, he left.

I told myself that I would not have given the dead to the golem had I not found that Mary was doing something even worse than I’d believed possible. I told myself that the evil in Prague was my business, because if word of what Mary had managed got out, it would affect everyone. Every human, every vampire, and every person in between.

The vampires, long subdued because of the difficulty of making more of themselves, would jump at the chance to increase the speed and effectiveness of their procreation. They would recruit witches.

I tried to imagine Elizaveta as a vampire and stopped myself because I really needed to think and not rock back and forth in the corner of my cage.

The newly created vampires apparently had a shelf life with an explosion at the end. So it wouldn’t be long before the humans noticed.

There would be war. I was old enough to remember the rampant paranoia about the fae when they came out. I remember mobs in small towns burning down the houses of their neighbors on suspicion that someone was fae. I remember people being torn apart. There was a reason that, when the fae proposed forming reservations, the government had no trouble making that happen. And the fae, especially the fae as they had represented themselves at the time, were not considered predators. They did not need to kill humans to live.

Vampires did.

Lots and lots of people, all kinds of people, would die if the human population decided to believe that vampires were real the way that the fae and the werewolves were real. I think one of the reasons that Bran had held out so long before allowing the werewolves to come out was that he knew that people who believed in werewolves would have less trouble believing in vampires.

So there was a very good reason to loose the golem on the vampires and hope he did not continue on to the unsuspecting inhabitants of Prague. Rabbi Loew had tried to kill the golem in the end. I remembered the rake of the golem’s fingers across my face and the burning pain he’d left behind.

I was very much afraid that the real reason I had done as the golem asked was because I could not bear what would happen to Adam if I died here. My faith was strong enough to believe with confidence that death was not the end. Torture was nothing I looked forward to—we had a wolf in the pack who’d been tortured by witches—but there would be an end to it. But Adam . . .

Adam, I worried about. I had promised him once that I would do everything I could do to live, to survive for his sake. I was still bound by that promise.

Yes, I would have asked the ghosts to sacrifice themselves, would have given the golem the means to remake himself, all for Adam’s sake. That there were other, very good reasons for it only made it easier, but it didn’t make me a better person.

Rats scurried around the edges of the cellar. Confused, I think, by me. They might not know what a coyote was, but they knew all about dogs—and I worried them despite the call of freshly bleeding corpses.

I put my muzzle down on my front paws and closed my eyes. After all the energy I’d expended, I was hungry. But behind the mesh of the cage, I wasn’t going to go hunting rats, and they weren’t going to be nibbling on me, either.

I waited for the golem and hoped. Hoped I’d done the right thing. Hoped that it worked as the golem expected it would. Hoped that, burdened with a physical body, he could still find his way through the witchcraft to find this place. Hoped that he would be a match for the vampires in this place. Hoped that something good would come of this.

But mostly? I worried.