“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.
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 thre
aten 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 sayi
ng. 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.