Perun looked up at the sky and twisted his lips. “Eh. Okay. Is little cold maybe.”
“No maybe about it.” A couple of queries on the street led us a few blocks south to a square full of fashion shops and sausage vendors. Oberon’s tail sawed the air when he saw sausages just dangling from the ceiling of the kiosks. We paused to buy him a couple and then entered a store promising that there was “couture” inside, which meant I’d be paying for that word more than practicality, but I did manage to find a selection of leather jackets that would keep my core warm and also provide a handy inner pocket for Luchta’s stake. I picked a brown one and hoped Granuaile would like it. Just like a seasoned shopping companion, Perun assured me that I had made a good choice.
“Is very handsome. Too bad they no have jacket like this for my size. Flidais would love. She would be very excited and then tear from my body. Ehh … Now that I think this, maybe is good they no have my size.”
“It’s too late,” Flidais said from behind us, smiling at Perun as she walked up to him. “Now that you’ve put the idea into my head, nothing will do but I must have you in leather.”
Oberon grumbled while Perun and Flidais made happy reuniting noises. Once Flidais pointed out that we were far easier to track from the Grand Bohemia than Theophilus, she let me know where to find my quarry.
“He’s in Berlin,” she said, “and he has a significant entourage. He’s staying at the Monbijou Hotel, in that neighborhood with all the museums and fancy restaurants.”
I knew exactly where that was. There were some outstanding works of art in those museums—mostly on Museum Island, formed by the Spree River forking and reuniting—and I had visited them several times in the past decades. “Your skills remain unparalleled,” I said to Flidais by way of thanks. “I’ll leave you to your search for suitable leathers.”
I said farewell, returned to the trees of Petřín Hill, and shifted through Tír na nÓg to Tiergarten in Berlin, a pleasant and rather large wooded park with paths that radiated out from the famous Victory Column. The old tree bound there was a knotted, lichen-covered sycamore, currently occupied by an alarmed red squirrel, which Oberon saw immediately and lunged after, nearly catching it by the tail before it scampered up the trunk, out of reach.
“Maybe next time, Oberon.”
Oberon said, more to the squirrel than to me. He still had his front paws on the tree trunk, and his eyes tracked the one that got away. He barked for emphasis.
There was an efficient train system nearby called the S-Bahn, which would take us to Hackescher Markt in only four stops, but since it was the evening rush hour and everyone was returning home from work, the cars were far too crowded to sneak Oberon on board. We had to go on foot, and that was all right. We needed time for full darkness to fall anyway.
We jogged in gray twilight through the outskirts of Tiergarten, with only a brief pause while Oberon tried and failed to catch a couple of rabbits, and then past blocks of flats and office buildings covered in unimaginative graffiti. Halfway to our destination it began to rain, the sort that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be sleet or not. It was more piercingly cold than refreshing, and I was grateful for the jacket. I distracted Oberon from the weather with the memory that somewhere nearby, there was a road whose name—Große Hamburger Straße—translated to Big Hamburger Street.
“I don’t know if there’s a story,” I said. It most likely meant that road was a fairly wide one that led to the city of Hamburg, but Oberon wouldn’t find that interesting. “If there isn’t, we should make one.”
“I believe so. It would be a tragic waste of natural marketing if not.”
It was dismal, cold, and dark when we arrived at the Monbijou Hotel, a modern building in cream and sporting a cool gray logo above the revolving glass door. I peeked into the interior from outside: Directly opposite the door was a lift, one of the narrow but deep elevators more commonly found in Europe. The reception area was to the left, complete with a primly uniformed employee, and to the right a fireplace beckoned, inviting people to sit at the small round tables scattered about. It was a lounge area, with the bar no doubt secreted out of sight from the street, and several people were already busy lounging in it. They were lounging, in fact, in an almost ostentatious manner, as if to say to passersby like myself, “Look uponst my exquisite lounging, foolish mortal, and mourn that you will never lounge with such cosmopolitan savoir faire.” I flipped my vision to the magical spectrum and saw that three of the four people were not human. They had gray auras around their heads and hearts with a fiery red center, which meant they were vampires. None wore infrared goggles, so that was encouraging. The only human I could see appeared nervous, with ample justification. I thought at first that I would enter in camouflage and simply go to work, but that wouldn’t be wise. They’d be warned by a revolving door moving by itself.
I camouflaged only Oberon instead and had him follow me inside. Once I got to the lobby, I veered left toward the reception area so as not to invite a closer look. They might smell my old blood anyway, but if I gave them no cause to examine the air I might buy myself a few more seconds of surprise.
Oberon, I want you to stay over here and dry off, I said, pointing to the couches in the reception area. No one was there except for the single employee behind the reception half-circle desk. Untouched German newspapers and magazines waited to be perused on an expansive black leather ottoman. Be quiet and don’t come after me. I’m going to pick a fight and don’t want you in danger. These are very strong vampires.
Yes, you did help, but you also got hurt. This is different. That time before, the vampires ambushed me and I needed your help. This time I’m ambushing them. If I don’t have to worry about your safety, that will be a tremendous help to me.
I think that’s an excellent plan, I replied, though I didn’t think he’d feel like napping once the fighting started. Let’s get you hidden behind this furniture here, so the guy at the front desk doesn’t see you. Then I can drop your camouflage and use that energy for kicking ass.
I waved casually to the receptionist and pretended to be interested in a newspaper while Oberon got himself stretched out on the floor, out of sight. Once the receptionist lost interest in me and dropped his eyes, I dispelled the camouflage on Oberon and cast it on myself instead.
Nap well, I told him. But guard my jacket. I kind of liked it and it was sure to get messy in a few minutes. I took it off and laid it on the ottoman. As soon as it left my hands I dropped its camouflage, but the receptionist didn’t notice its sudden appearance. I took Luchta’s stake out of the inside pocket.
I returned my sight to the magical spectrum and crossed the lobby to the lounge on the other side. Through the open doorway, the lounge continued quite far back to a bar and then to an area with restaurant seating, where the hotel served its breakfast. In the lounge, round tables rested in front of couches built into the wall, and on the opposite side of those tables were a few modern armless chairs right out of a Copenhagen design haus. Ten tables, seating three or four each, and they were all full. Thirty vampires and one very nervous human serving them drinks they did not touch—though I had serious doubts that she knew who or what she was serving. She only knew that something about this group seemed wrong.
Up
to this point I had slain very few vampires myself; most of the war had been conducted for me by the yewmen or the Hammers of God. Unless these vampires were all very old, they had yet to see why vampires of early days had cause to fear Druids. Except perhaps for Theophilus. I did hope that he was there; I had no idea what he looked like, and their auras all appeared the same to me—so I had no way to identify which one was measurably older or more powerful than another.
I shifted my grip on the stake, carved with the unbinding that would undo the vampires’ magic and then forcibly separate their component elements. I was anxious to try it out here, since it never got a test run in Prague. I’d examined the bindings earlier, and it was a clever execution. If there was no vampirism to unbind, it would do nothing to a human but hurt every bit as much as a normal stabbing would. But for a vampire, stabbing it anywhere with this stake would end its undead existence.
Murmuring the bindings to increase my strength and speed, drawing all the energy from the pool stored in my bear charm, I hoped I’d be able to either end this quickly or else lure them outside, where I could tap into more power from the earth. But I had my semi-effective unbinding charm, my ability to verbally unbind them, my stake, and at least a temporary visual advantage.
I really wished I knew how to tell the older vampires from the younger ones. Cosmetically, they were all frozen at the age they were when they died, and their clothing didn’t give any clues either: They all wore bespoke Italian suits and expensive shoes. I would not be surprised if each vampire’s ensemble was worth a year’s salary to the average worker. And “younger” was a relative term. I thought of it as “younger than Theophilus and myself,” but I had no doubt that every one of those vampires was a few hundred years old. Age equaled prestige in the vampire world, and truly young vampires would not be allowed to accompany Theophilus.
They spoke Italian too—a good clue that this crew had spent at least some time near the vampire power center of Rome, from which the campaign against the Druids had originated millennia ago. So when one vampire seated against the wall and facing the door lifted his nose and said, “Sentite l’odore di quel sangue? E veramente strano,” that was my cue to get the slaughter started, because they had smelled me.
I mentally targeted that vampire and surged forward, coming up behind the seated vamp and plunging the stake down over the back of the chair and into his right shoulder, puncturing the suit and his flesh. He made a short gurgling noise before his body liquefied and squirted in five directions—out his pant legs, his shirtsleeves, and his collar. I repeated the exercise with the vampire next to him and then completed the verbal unbinding on the third, taking out three vampires in a little more than three seconds.
And then, while the rest of the room was figuring out that, hey, maybe something ugly was going on, I staked another two and unbound three more verbally, using a macro-binding and simply changing the target. It was six or seven seconds, therefore, before the back of the room figured out that something was taking them apart and the champion lounging session was over. They all sprang to their feet, in some cases knocking over tables and chairs, and in one specific case throwing a chair in my general direction. It moved fast and I wasn’t expecting it and it took me down, though it did no real damage apart from giving them more time to set themselves in defense. I gave zero fucks about that: Vampires had no true defense against Druidry, and I was going to thunderdome every single one of them.
I kept re-targeting and unbinding the vampires closest to me. The nearest two lunged in my direction, came apart, and showered me in blood. My camouflage was then useless, because I was silhouetted in red, so I dispelled it and kept unbinding as I climbed to my feet. I’d ended ten vampires in fifteen seconds; perhaps I could get the rest in under a minute.
A whole furniture set sailed through the air at my head, the vampires figuring that if it had worked once, perhaps it would work again. And it did, because dodging that many chairs and tables is impossible.
I crumpled underneath them, making sure to hold on to the stake, and the twenty remaining vampires charged for the exit. Most of them flowed around me, but a pair landed on top of the chairs, pinning me to the floor and allowing the others time to escape. Or at least that was their plan. I targeted each one in turn and unbound them; the weight lifted off me, and their entrails glopped onto the floor. I threw off the chairs just in time to see that there were only five or so vampires remaining in the room: The rest had scarpered off, but one landed on me with his knee in my gut, one hand around my throat and the other pinning down my stake hand. He was strong and would crush my larynx if I let him get comfortable; his nails were already drawing blood. I triggered the unbinding charm on my necklace, imperfect as it was, and let it do its thing: It affected the vampire like a punch to the solar plexus and he wheezed, the strength temporarily gone from his limbs. I wrenched the stake hand free and slammed it into his side beneath the ribs as his buddies scrambled past. He turned into something like melted raspberry gelato right on top of me, and I was so glad that I’d left my jacket with Oberon.
I gasped and coughed to get my breath back, then scrambled to my feet, even though without oxygen my muscles felt like Jell-O. The time I’d spent on the ground had let the vampires crash through the front floor-to-ceiling windows—they didn’t bother with the revolving door—meaning that almost half of them were getting away.
A faintly heard “Sheiße” from behind the bar was my only clue that the human server had survived.
Oberon’s voice asked in my head.
Yep! I’ll be back. Take your nap.
Jumping through the jagged portal of glass, I saw that the vampires had split into two groups. One had gone left at a diagonal angle toward the S-Bahn station at Hackescher Markt, and another had gone right toward Monbijou Park and the Spree River.
Considering my low reserves of energy, I hauled off after the group to the right, since chasing them through the park would allow me to reconnect with Gaia and replenish. There was a flower bed, now sad and brown for the winter, surrounding a pedestal with a bust of somebody on top staring with blank bronze eyes at me. The straggling vampire in the back was approaching it as I unbound him. He exploded and covered the statue in gore.
It said CHAMISSO underneath the bust, and I recognized it as I passed. “Hey! Adelbert von Chamisso! ’Sup, Bert?” I’d helped him back in the day to “discover” and classify some flower species. He was a good guy; I didn’t realize he’d been so well thought of in Berlin, and it’s not every botanist who gets a statue made of him. “Sorry about the vampire guts, big guy.”
I caught five more, able to move faster than them, with Gaia’s aid. Four in the park, and the last one in the Spree River. He jumped in out of desperation and disappeared underwater; since he didn’t need to breathe, he wouldn’t come up until he was good and ready. But that same lack of buoyancy made vampires terrible swimmers. They sank to the bottom and had to walk instead of swim, much slower than anything else. He couldn’t float up; he’d have to claw and crawl his way out, if I ever let him get that far. I splashed after him, shape-shifted to a sea otter, swam right out of my clothes, and held the stake between my wee front paws until I was able to close the gap between us. Then I shifted back to human and sank the stake into the vampire’s calf. He dissolved in the river beneath the Bode Museum and got washed away by the current.
That left me naked in the Spree River, and I’m not ashamed to say the temperature led to some shrinkage.
That was nineteen very old vampires erased from the world, however, and all I got was naked and some bruising. Not bad. Quite good, in fact. And if one of the unbound had been Theophilus, then I would count it as a perfect ambush. But eleven of them had escaped cleanly to the S-Bahn, and there was no telling where they had gone.
I returned to the Monbijou Hotel in shivering camouflage to avoid alarming the local populace. My priorities amused me and I snorted into the darkness. I had no problem disassemb
ling vampires in plain view but didn’t want to truly terrify anyone with my full frontal nudity. Once outside the hotel, I called Oberon to come join me outside. And bring my jacket, will you, please? I asked.
Sirens began to wail and grow closer. Yes, I imagine so. He just saw men crash through the window, and if he’s been into the lounge he’s seen an awful lot of blood. The sudden appearance of a huge hound after all that probably made him lose bladder control.
We scooted around the corner to a Nike store on Hackescher Markt, where I was able to discreetly snatch a pair of sweatpants and a shirt. I didn’t bother with shoes, and the leather jacket didn’t exactly match, but it was better than bare skin in this weather. I made a mental note to come back and pay for them later.
Let’s head back to the park, Oberon. You have a fateful date with a squirrel.
I wondered how the hotel staff would explain to the police what had happened. I wondered if maybe I’d been caught on a security video, unbinding vampires—a distinct possibility and one I hadn’t worried about as I had in the past. If that encounter was recorded, it could prove problematic, but I doubted it would make the news. There were too many uncomfortable questions for police to answer: Did I have a new, horrifying weapon that liquefied or exploded people on contact, or were those victims not exactly human? Or both? They couldn’t let that get out until they had the answers. Governments have been in the habit of suppressing information “for the population’s own protection” for centuries now; it’s how gods and monsters can still walk the earth and the mass of humanity thinks of them as mere stories for their entertainment, an escape from a lifetime of toil to pay the bills. Maybe they would call in the real-life equivalent of Fox Mulder to investigate this. Or the authorities might be so desperate to catch me that I would find a screen cap of my face on every television in Germany.