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.
10
Adam
Adam’s story continues, at daybreak of the first morning he spent in Milan. At about this time, I got to my feet, put on my clothes, and went out to find the café that had free Wi-Fi so I could try to contact someone. Adam and his people have retreated to their assigned rooms.
ADAM KNEW A DOZEN WAYS TO DEAL WITH A TIME-ZONE shift, but mostly he’d found that staying up when he had to stay up and sleeping whenever he could took care of fatigue eventually. He hoped not to be in Europe long enough to adjust.
Since their host was a vampire, that meant they went to bed at dawn. The good news was that since his inner clock was already screwed up from the time change to Europe, adding the whole switch from functioning in the night rather than the day was just a blip.
He didn’t like that their party was split up, but there had been no way to include Harris and Smith without indicating that he didn’t trust Bonarata’s ability to keep his people safe. Adam was pretty sure Bonarata could keep his vampires under control if he wanted to. He just didn’t trust that Bonarata wanted to keep Adam’s people safe.
He also wasn’t sure that letting Bonarata think they were all one big traveling sex orgy was helping their cause. The meal they’d spent with the vampires made him suspicious that Marsilia’s act was mostly because of matters between her and Bonarata and had nothing to do with consolidating the sleeping space for defensive reasons.
He was pretty sure that Bonarata—for all that he was as jealous as a cat whose owner had two dogs—knew they weren’t sleeping together in any but the most mundane sense of the word. Any werewolf worth his salt could have figured it out. There was something about body language and scent that made such things obvious.
At least her machinations had reduced his patrol area to two. His two outliers were only down a short hall and up a staircase from them. Adam wasn’t happy; it was too far for tactical safety. Smith’s victim-like demeanor made him a target in this house of predators.
If something happened in Harris’s room, Adam was pretty sure he’d hear the screams from the big suite. It didn’t make the beast who lived in his heart content—or Adam, either—but it was the hand he had been dealt.
“Dawn is coming,” said Marsilia as Stefan closed the door of the suite. The two vampires had volunteered to escort the pilots to their room. “There isn’t much time.”
“Rest well,” Adam said, though he knew that it wasn’t a rest at all—the vampires died with the rising of the sun.
Stefan, who had followed Marsilia as she walked rapidly toward their room, paused to give Adam a wry smile. “Stay safe,” he said, then disappeared through the doorway behind Marsilia.
Larry rubbed his hands together thoughtfully, staring at the door that had just closed behind their vampires. But when he spoke, it wasn’t—directly—about Marsilia or Stefan.
“I think that went about as well as could be expected,” he said. Then he said what Adam had just been thinking. “I’m not sure anyone but a love-struck fool, which Bonarata isn’t quite, would think there was anything between you and Marsilia. But the Lord of Night was plenty jealous anyway, for what it’s worth. I heard you open Bonarata’s eyes about the relationship between the Marrok and your wife. Is it true? Would the Marrok still go to war for her?”
If the goblin had heard all of that, he not only could hear as well as any werewolf Adam had ever met, he also had a larger capacity to sort through data than Adam had. The conversations in the dinner hall had blurred to incomprehensible for Adam.
He nodded in response to the goblin’s question. “Bran would not be pleased if something happened to Mercy. Very not pleased.”
Larry tilted his head in a way that was neither human nor quite wolflike. “Bran was Grendel?”
He thought about Larry the goblin king and how everyone underestimated goblins. He decided it would be a good thing if the goblin king knew something of what the Marrok was.
“Not quite,” Adam said. “As I understand it, Beowulf was written down a long time after the events it purports to tell. The purpose of th
e story as it was recorded was to recite the final deeds of Beowulf, a great hero. Somewhere along the way, someone put him up against the scariest monsters they’d ever heard of instead of the terrible monsters who did kill him. That tale then blended back to the original.”
On one remarkable night, not long after Adam had been Changed, the Marrok’s son Samuel had sung (then translated) several versions of the tale of Beowulf.
“Beowulf,” Adam told the goblin, “isn’t any more accurate than any story told by mouth for centuries before it was written down, which is not very. Bran’s story is that a long time ago, he was broken. It had something to do with protecting his son. For a very long time afterward—decades and maybe longer—Bran was a mindless monster who killed every living thing in his territory.”
“When you were talking to Jacob, you said Bran’s mother was a witch,” said Elizaveta.
He hadn’t. She was fishing. So he said, “Bran has never said so. I’ve heard the rumors, though. So has Bonarata.”
Samuel had told him that Bran’s mother was a witch, and Adam figured that, being Bran’s son, Samuel had been in a position to know. But he didn’t have to tell Elizaveta who his source was. If Bran had wanted it to be known that he was witchborn, he’d have told everyone himself. Since he hadn’t, Adam wasn’t going to do it for him. But everyone had heard the rumors, and those Bran encouraged. Adam just didn’t need to confirm them.
“Interesting,” she said thoughtfully. “It would explain some things if it were true.” She smiled wickedly at Adam. “Some things that others have tried to do to Bran Cornick and failed miserably.”
He didn’t want to know, especially because she wanted to tell him. Elizaveta was one of his, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know what she was—witch and all that entailed. He wouldn’t invite her to bring her brand of horror to their suite—and it did not matter to him in the slightest that it was only Larry and Honey here, and they could protect themselves.
“Be that as it may,” Elizaveta said when it became clear he wasn’t going to question her. He could tell she was disappointed with him for spoiling her fun, though she knew him better than to have expected him to allow her to play her games here. “I am an old woman, and I’ve been up for far too long. I’m going to bed and going to sleep.”
“Wait,” he said impulsively. “Can you help me contact Mercy again?” It was maddening the way the faintness of their bond told him nothing except that she was alive.
Elizaveta sighed. “I can. But it is not easy, Adya. And I do not think that it is wise to do not-easy magic in the home of one such as Bonarata unless it is necessary. Especially since such an effort will weaken me in this place where we might need every bit of power all of us can muster. Is there something that makes you think this is necessary?”
He gave her a tight smile. “Nothing more than that she is on her own, without friends or money, alone in Europe.”
“Your mate is good at finding friends wherever she goes,” Elizaveta said with a little acid. Elizaveta was not herself a friend of his mate. “She escaped Bonarata. I expect she can look after herself for a day or two.”
Looking after her is my job, he thought. But he said, “I expect you’re right. But even so, I might ask it of you at a later time.” If the wolf demanded it.
She nodded. “That is fine, so long as you know what you risk. I bid you all good night. Wake me, Adya, if anything interesting happens.”
“I will if I can,” he promised.
After Elizaveta’s door closed, Larry gave Adam a measured look, then waved casually at Adam and Honey before he went into the room Elizaveta had picked for him. He closed his door, too, leaving Honey and Adam alone.
Adam considered staying in human guise. After daylight, it was unlikely that he’d run into trouble from the vampires. But vampires have allies—and this one had a werewolf under his thumb. His wolf form was the better one to face a true attack. Unlike less dominant wolves, he could shift back and forth several times in a day—though having the pack so far away would limit that a bit.
He began stripping out of his clothes. Honey made a sound as he pulled off his suit jacket, and he looked at her.
“Is it legal for you to carry that in Italy?” she asked. “And what did you do to the scent? I didn’t smell it—still don’t.”
“Not legal, no,” he said, taking off his shoulder holster and the HK P2000 that was his usual concealed carry. “But who is going to try to arrest me? If they do, they’re going to be more worried about the werewolf than the gun.”
“So they should,” she conceded. She frowned. “Your shaving-lotion smell is different. Does that have something to do with my not picking up the gun scent?”
“Elizaveta,” Adam said. “Not much magic, mostly just something that smells a little like gunpowder and oil that isn’t.”
Honey took a deep breath. She nodded and didn’t say anything else. Honey was like that. She didn’t mind quiet and only said what she had to say.
He stripped off the rest of his clothing, laying the suit across a chair for the night. Everything else he folded on the chair seat. When he was naked, he changed.
Honey followed his example without a word. When the whole painful business was over, he curled up on the rug in front of the fireplace, checked that somewhere Mercy was still tethered to him, and settled in to wait. Honey hopped on the couch and put her head on the arm with a deep sigh.
He drifted into the light doze that would leave the wolf on alert to any changes but still allow him to rest. It was something that he’d learned to do in Vietnam, when he had been a soldier and not a werewolf. The wolf just made it more effective.
It was late morning when his phone rang. Grumbling, he rose to his feet and stalked to the table where his satellite phone rested. He knocked it to the floor where it would be easier to see and looked at the display.
Ben.
The phone quit ringing, and a few moments later, a text message popped up. URGENT.
He checked his bond, and Mercy was still there. He could breathe again without his chest hurting. The URGENT didn’t go away—it just became more manageable.
So he could breathe, but worry still hung on. A host of possibly urgent things popped into his mind. Maybe something had happened to the children. And when had Aiden become one of his children? Aiden, who was older than . . . well, probably older than Bran for all that he looked like he belonged in elementary school.
Speaking of Aiden, maybe he’d finally succeeded in burning the house down. It was bound to happen one of these days.
Change with speed, then, he decided. It hurt more when he forced it—especially without the pack to draw upon. Honey whined, and he realized that he was automatically pulling energy from her. He stopped that, and his change slowed. Growling, he redoubled his efforts, and in something under ten minutes by his phone’s reckoning, he was in human form: naked, covered in sweat, shivering from pain and shock that made the warmish room feel chilly, but human.
He picked up the phone without bothering to dress and called Ben. “Yes?”
“Hey,” Ben said cheerfully. “We are sodding and shagging in honey, Adam. Mercy stole an e-book reader from the Dark Ages and used it to contact me via Gmail. She’s in the Czech Republic. I think they call it Czechia for short now. Prague.”
And it took a moment for Adam to breathe again, but when he did, the air was sweet. He collected himself, aware of Ben waiting patiently on the other side of the phone connection.
“Prague?” He did a quick check of his mental map of Europe and blinked. “That’s what, five hundred miles from here?” That was some bus ride, Mercy. No wonder his bond was so weak. Without the pack, he was surprised he could touch her at all.
“About that,” agreed Ben blandly. “I contacted Charles, and he told me to put her in touch with Libor of the Vltava Pack. I haven’t heard back from her,
but the e-reader was out of juice, and she apparently didn’t steal the charger when she took the reader.”
Prague. Adam took a deep breath. He’d have to wait for Marsilia and Stefan to wake up; he couldn’t abandon them in Bonarata’s care. He took another breath and tried to subdue the wolf, who wanted to go right-the-hell-yesterday.
“She’s okay?” he asked.
“She’s okay,” Ben assured him. “I told her you were hot on her ass to Europe. She’ll hunker down with Libor for a couple of days.”
Adam pinched his nose—a habit he’d gotten from watching Bran do it one too many times. “Tell me about Libor.”
“Alpha of the Vltava Pack. Been around since the Middle fucking Ages. Apparently a baker—of all the sodding things for a fearsome Alpha to be. We are all glad we don’t have to tell people our Alpha is a motherhumping baker.”
Adam made an encouraging sound and waited for Ben to quit distracting himself. As the other wolf got back to matters at hand, Adam filtered out the expletives that were Ben’s attempt to shrug off an upper-crust but hellish upbringing—Adam was able to assume from Ben’s casual attitude that various people weren’t really pedophiles nor did they do interesting and unlikely things with animals and/or machinery. When Ben was finished, he left Adam with something worth worrying about.
“Libor has a legendary grudge against Bran,” Adam said slowly. “Charles doesn’t know what it was about. Did you try Samuel?” Surely one of the two would have the story.
“Sorry,” Ben said regretfully. “I did try. Since it was I sending Mercy into the mouth of the monster, I decided I was on the need-to-know list. Took an act of God to get in touch. Samuel doesn’t know. Charles says he doesn’t know what it was. All he has is a couple of comments Bran made once upon a time—and Bran won’t say anything more. Apparently there was an oath involved, and you know how Bran is about that.”
Adam cursed under his breath.
“How many years in the army, and that’s all you’ve got?” Ben said. “I thought the army guys really know how to swear.”