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.
&nbs
p; 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.