The clothing they had found me was typical of spare werewolf-pack clothes (apparently) the world over: running pants and a tank top—a little closer fitting than what our pack used, but still stretchy enough to fit a wide variety of body types, male or female.
I had a small room at the top of the stairs, a little isolated from the rest of the living space over the bakery. It was still daylight, I was surrounded by strangers—one of whom was pretty unhappy with me even if he did acknowledge that I had told him over and over that what he wanted was not a good idea. Even so, I think I was asleep before my body hit the mattress.
I woke in darkness, and someone was stroking my cheek gently. I rolled away from the touch and buried my head in the blankets.
“Leave me alone,” I said with force.
Then I realized that I was alone in the room—and had been while those fingers had been touching my cheek.
I hoped sincerely that it was still a residual effect of meeting the golem that left me such a magnet for the ghosts of Prague. I hoped even more fervently that whatever it was that had caused this would go away soon.
I also felt guilty.
I try not to give orders to the dead unless it’s important because they can’t refuse me, not if I focus my will strongly enough. I wouldn’t have done it except that I had been mostly asleep. But I had ordered the ghost to go away—and it had gone.
I think it had been trying to warn me because, a few minutes later, my door popped open.
I was up on my feet beside the bed, with my right hand still trying to close around a gun that wasn’t there, before I was aware enough to remember where I was.
“Wake up, woman,” said a gruff voice that belonged to a man I hadn’t seen before.
He was slender and compact, like a gymnast. If you saw him in a suit, you would never know how much muscle he carried. In the tight tank shirt and jeans, he emphasized it. He looked a little like the man who had followed me until I’d taken refuge in the garden of the friendly mastiff. Maybe they were related. He was one of those men who would look like a teenager until his hair started graying, but since he was a werewolf, that would never happen. I wondered if he’d learned to turn that into a strength yet.
I’d been raised in the Marrok’s pack. I never judged the strength of a person by their outward appearance. The Marrok didn’t look like a man who held the reins of thousands of werewolves who would die for him. He looked like a pizza delivery boy or a gas-station attendant—right up until he didn’t.
“What do you need?” I asked.
“Libor says to tell you that there are vampires here, looking for you and being forceful about it. We need to move you. Gather your things, and I’ll take you.” His voice was British-pure, though that wasn’t a guarantee that he was from the UK. Most English speakers in Europe, I was discovering, had learned to speak British English rather than the American version.
I turned on the table lamp and realized that my other set of clothing was in the wash. I put the borrowed shoes on without socks and took the pack that contained a very little money and a dead e-reader.
“Ready,” I said.
Danek met us at the base of the stairs and pointed in the opposite direction the werewolf was trying to take me. That left me in a quandary. Ghosts, like the fae, don’t lie. They are so literal, you have to be careful about believing anything they say. He might have been pointing us toward the bad guys instead of away.
Before I could ask him anything, Libor’s dead wife appeared and pointed the same way.
Tell him to take the way through the kitchens, she said. The vampires have the usual exits surrounded.
“The ghosts say that there are vampires at the usual exits,” I told the werewolf. “We need to use the way through the kitchens.”
He froze.
“I only get weirder the longer you know me,” I told him, quoting one of the T-shirts I’d gotten for my last birthday.
His nostrils flared, and he looked around a little wildly, trying to see the ghosts, I think. Danek brushed against a table, making it scrape across the floor, and the werewolf jumped.
I rolled my eyes (a gesture I’d caught from my teenage stepdaughter). Sometimes it was the only thing that properly expressed my opinion. Seriously? The werewolf was afraid of ghosts?
Ignoring him, I started down the route Libor’s dead wife was still indicating, across the room and down a dark hallway.
“I thought ghosts were just bits and pieces of the person who died,” said the werewolf very quietly as he passed me.
He seemed to suddenly know where we were going and led the way at a brisk pace.
“Yes,” I said. “No. Sometimes.” His words were close enough to what I’d said to Libor that I was pretty sure Libor had been talking to his wolves. And well he should, because though his wife had been relatively benign, I was pretty sure Danek was going to be a problem.
“Then why are they warning us about something happening right now?” he asked.
The hall floor suddenly dropped about three inches and took a jag to the right. A few paces farther on, there were three shallow stairs that took us up about a foot altogether. The wolf had continued speaking quietly as he held my arm to make sure I didn’t stumble up the steps. “If they are just bits and pieces, don’t you think they should be moaning here and tossing things about rather than giving warnings about vampires?”
“Some of them retain a lot of their predecessor’s personality,” I told him, though I’d wondered about the nature of ghosts for exactly the same kinds of reasons. All well and good to dismiss them as . . . as nothings when one of them wasn’t leaving you drawings or another one wasn’t trying to help you survive. But I gave him the only answer I had. “The ones who bear grudges or are extremely attached to someone who is still living seem to be the most independent of thought.”
The kitchens were huge, and there were two of them. The front half was modern and filled with ovens, various kinds of cooking surfaces, and giant mixing machines taller than I was, with bowls that sat on the ground. Everything was immaculate.
There was a half wall and a wider than the usual doorway opening that led into a room that looked as though it had been pulled directly from the Middle Ages. The far wall had a giant fireplace with a spit. Beside it was a stack of metal pots that looked as though they should have a witch throwing eyes of newts and snail tails or something in them. One of the long walls was covered by a giant brick oven with rows and columns of regularly spaced openings that were about two feet square.
My werewolf guide trotted right up to the farthest opening and climbed through. I did the same and found that the inside of the oven was a room in its own right. Against one of the inner walls was a narrow metal ladder, up which my guide was already climbing. I followed him up a couple of stories and out to the roof of the building.
The werewolf had quit talking and was making an effort to be silent, so I followed suit. We weaved our way between chimneys on the roof of the bakery. When we reached the end of the bakery, there was a narrow hop, and we kept going on the roof of the next building. We probably made a quarter of a mile before we jumped to the ground.
The werewolf, still quiet, didn’t speed up from the easy jog we’d begun on the rooftops, and he took us into a more residential and modern section of the town. In total, we ran maybe six miles, long enough for me to regret my lack of socks. He took me to a garage under an apartment building built in the last hundred years and stopped by a motorcycle. He started to get on it, then stopped.
“We’ll attract too much attention without helmets,” he said. “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”
He was as good as his word, returning with a pair of helmets. He tossed me one and put on the other himself.
Mine wasn’t a perfect fit—and I didn’t like the way it restricted my vision—but I didn’t complain. When he mounted the bik
e, I climbed on behind him and held on.
The last time I’d ridden behind someone on a motorcycle I’d been in college. Char, my roommate, had had a Harley. We’d taken it out and gone camping now and then, just to get away from school.
This bike was about half the size of Char’s and much quieter, but being a passenger behind the werewolf wasn’t much different than being a passenger behind Char had been.
7
Adam
Bonarata’s villa in Milan, in the wee small hours of the first night I spent in Prague. At this moment I was huddled next to the Vltava while a ghost dripped water on my head. So this chapter begins before the previous chapter started. I told you it was going to get tricksy.
THEY WERE GIVEN A LARGE SUITE WITH THREE bedrooms, each equipped with a king-sized bed and a bathroom. They looked pristine and newly remodeled, but this was a very old building, and it had seen a lot of violence. Adam could smell the faint musk of fear and the rotten iron of old blood as if it, like the stone, wood, and paint, was part of the material that made up the structure.
Their luggage had been piled tidily inside the main door of the suite when they got there. Adam figured that they’d been driven from the airfield the long way to allow the luggage to beat them.
“Dress for dinner, he says?” said Larry as soon as their escorting vampire guide had left. “It’s four in the morning Milan time.”
“You can hardly expect vampires to eat in the day,” said Marsilia.
“Or to eat at all,” offered Honey. “Are we going to be dinner?”
“They always have last meal at 5 A.M. here,” answered Stefan. “‘Dinner’ is a word used for guests—think of it as a very early breakfast if you’d like. There are usually guests who aren’t vampires. Bonarata uses it as a gathering for the seethe. There will be fresh blood for all the vampires and good food for everyone else.”
Elizaveta had paced around the room muttering to herself. She entered the first bedroom, and Larry moved to follow her.
“Leave her be,” said Stefan. “She’s checking for magic. Bonarata has a few witches in his employ, had a very good witch at one time, and, according to rumor, a fae half-blood. There are a lot of things a witch could do to us without breaking guesting laws. I don’t have to tell you to clean your hairbrushes and burn the stray hairs, do I?”
“Standard stuff,” grumbled Larry amiably. “Trimmed toenails get eaten, I know.”
Honey made a sound, and the goblin flashed a grin at her. “Of course, you can flush them if you’d like. I prefer to be certain. Witches are bitches and they’ll burn your britches sure as kittens have itches if you give ’em half a chance.”
Elizaveta was in one of the bedrooms. She might not have heard Larry. But Honey was standing right next to him.
“I’m a bitch,” said Honey in a smooth voice.
The goblin laughed. “That you are, dearie. Don’t take offense where none is meant.” He wasn’t dumb, thought Adam. This was about establishing boundaries. He was telling the room that he was sure enough of his ability to protect himself that he wasn’t afraid of offending anyone in the room.
Good to know. Adam was sure he’d appreciate the information at some other time. Just as he was sure that another time he’d have been pleased and impressed with the suite they’d been given.
“Just keeping things out in the open,” said Honey, but she wasn’t really paying attention to the goblin. She was watching Adam out of the corner of her eye.
The noise of their getting-to-know-you bickering rubbed like sandpaper on Adam’s skin. Adam was sure before this was over he’d be wishing for a hotel room by himself. Or with Mercy. He checked, like a man with a toothache, and their bond was still there. He wasn’t getting much from it. He knew it was because she was no longer here and that without more of the pack, he couldn’t reach her more clearly.
His control was fraying. His wolf . . . no, to be honest, it wasn’t just his wolf who wanted to rip out Bonarata’s throat. Having his pack back home was not making his wolf any more comfortable, any safer for the people around him.
Honey knew it. She wasn’t exactly avoiding him, but she was being very careful not to meet his eyes and to give him plenty of space. If he let this continue, he’d either kill Bonarata or Bonarata would kill him—and that’s what they had come here to prevent, right?
Part of him, the biggest part of him and not just the monster, wondered why he was standing in the vampire’s stronghold and not over the vampire’s dead body or out hunting down Mercy.
He abruptly turned to Marsilia, interrupting a quiet-voiced conversation she was having with Stefan about sleeping arrangements.
“Tell me that leaving Bonarata animate another hour is the right thing to do,” he said. “And make me believe it.” If he couldn’t figure it out, maybe someone else could. If not . . .
Adam didn’t know what was in his face, but Marsilia looked at him and stilled. But it was Stefan who answered him.
“Iacopo Bonarata is a monster,” Stefan said. “He does terrible things, then lies to himself about it because he doesn’t want to believe that he is any different from the Renaissance prince he once was.”
“I agree,” Marsilia said a little sadly. “He was never a hero like you were, Stefan—no matter what either of us tried to believe.”
Stefan didn’t look at her, just continued to speak. “Iacopo Bonarata is an addict who glories in his addiction because it brings him more power. He broke the werewolf he feeds upon so that no one will ever believe that the addiction he won’t admit to is a weakness or a problem to anyone except the poor damned wolf.”
Everyone, including Elizaveta, had stopped doing whatever they’d been doing to pay attention to Stefan.
“He is a monster,” said Stefan. “But he is good at it. Good at survival—and that makes him good for the rest of the monsters who have to live, seen or unseen, with the human population, who have grown a lot more deadly since they virtually wiped out the witch population in Europe.”
“It was a civil war among the witch families that did the most damage,” said Elizaveta. “But the Inquisition was thorough about sniffing out the remainders.”
Stefan nodded carefully in Elizaveta’s direction, giving her the point. Then he continued, “Bonarata is smart, savvy, and incredibly wealthy, and he uses it to ensure his own survival. But because he sees his survival as depending upon how the supernatural predators interact with humans, he is a very strong force for stability.”
Marsilia put her hand out and touched Stefan, who fell silent.
“Killing him,” Marsilia said, “will cause the death of thousands—not just vampires, but all of the people who will fall victim to their power plays.” She hesitated briefly. “Mercy doesn’t need you, Adam—she doesn’t need us—to rescue her or avenge her. She rescued herself. By doing so, she gave us the opportunity to build bridges, to keep all the monsters”—here she curtsied with an ironic lift of her brow—“behaving themselves.”
It was a good answer. Adam didn’t know that it would be enough of a good answer to keep him from going for Bonarata’s throat at the first opportunity. Mercy’s rescuing herself didn’t mean that Bonarata deserved to be excused for taking her in the first place. He remembered the blood and glass all over the SUV, all of Mercy’s blood staining the leather seat, the necklace he kept tucked safely in his pocket.
“He nearly killed my wife,” Adam said.
Stefan said, “But he failed.”
“Not good enough,” Adam said. “Not a good enough reason.”
There was a small silence, then Larry spoke.
“You aren’t used to dealing with bad guys who are this much more powerful than you are,” he said. “No offense meant. One-on-one, if you and Bonarata got into it, the betting would be pretty even. But Bonarata isn’t just an old vampire. He’s the head of a collective of vampi
res—just as your Marrok is the head of a collective of werewolves. And it is the collective that is most important to the choice you are making tonight.”
Adam looked at the goblin, and Larry dropped his eyes, without otherwise changing his body language. Larry wasn’t afraid of him. He was just doing his best not to cause a fight.
“Go on,” he said, because Larry seemed to be waiting for him to respond in some way.
The goblin nodded. “Bonarata has not named an heir for a very long time.”
“The ones he picked kept getting ambitions,” murmured Marsilia. “He got tired of killing his favorites. What he has now is a collection of lieutenants, powerful in their own ways, but not a second. He has no Darryl.”
Larry said, “So what happens to the collective when Bonarata dies is this. Every Master Vampire in Europe and a fair number of them back home think that they should step into Bonarata’s place. Most of ’em because of ambition, because vampires, present company excepted, I’m sure, are ambitions. But there will be some of them who are interested because they don’t want to be bowing and scraping to a vampire who might be stupider or more horrid than Bonarata.”
“You have a point?” Adam said.
“So how do you think that they will make their first bid to step under Bonarata’s empty crown, eh?”
“Kill the dumb werewolf who assassinated the king,” Adam said slowly.
“And failing that—or even if someone gets you, Adam—someone else will go after your people and your family, too, in an effort to build a name for themselves. Killing Bonarata won’t keep Mercy safe. If you kill him, his successors will go after you, after Mercy, after your daughter, Jesse, your whole pack, Marsilia’s seethe, and any supernatural or human who has been associated with you. The best way to keep your people safe is to make Bonarata believe that it is in his best interests that your wife and daughter—as well as everyone in this room and their loved ones—stay alive.”