She met my gaze and grinned. “My Libor, he has grown cranky. He needs a good meal and his wife to cheer him up.”
“Don’t look at me,” I told her. “I’m not that young, and I’m very much married.”
About that time, I realized several things. The first was that her English was awfully good, complete with an American accent that came straight out of the Pacific Northwest. The second was that she was about four feet from me, and I still didn’t smell her. The third was that Libor, after a quick glance behind him that didn’t land on the woman whose hand was on his shoulder, stared at me intently, his eyes going gold with the presence of his wolf.
“Damn it,” I said with feeling. I was good at this. I was very good at spotting the ghosts. The days of my randomly addressing people and only realizing later that no one else could see them were long gone. Or so I’d thought.
The golem’s odd effect on my ability with ghosts was still making my life difficult.
“I had heard this,” Libor said, frowning, “that the Marrok’s little coyote could see ghosts.”
The ghost behind him smiled at me and brushed at Libor’s hair as if there were something out of place, though his hair wasn’t long enough to be obstreperous. She leaned back and angled her face as if checking to make sure she’d managed everything correctly, and I suddenly knew, without a doubt, what it was that Libor held against the Marrok.
Zack.
If this woman were male and had been starved for six months, then she’d be a dead ringer for our pack’s sole submissive wolf, Zack. It wasn’t just a passing resemblance. I’d seen twins who didn’t share as many similarities.
Zack had come to us a restless wanderer who showed signs of abuse. He’d gradually settled into the pack, losing most of the wariness he’d arrived with.
But Zack still thought he was going to take off again for someplace else someday real soon, but that “real soon” had changed in emphasis as if it were gradually lengthening from “probably tomorrow” to “next week” and finally a vague time receding into the future.
He was rooming with Warren and his human partner, Kyle, another temporary situation that was sliding into a permanent one. Warren’s presence kept the pack happy with the safety of our submissive wolf (something that preoccupied the wolves in a way I’d never understood until Adam had made me part of the pack’s magical ties), and Warren was never obvious with his protectiveness. Unlike almost any other old wolf I’ve ever met (and Zack had once told me he’d been a werewolf for over a century), Zack was not homophobic and seemed content with the place he’d made for himself in Warren and Kyle’s home.
The whole pack was trying to make a home for Zack with us, and we were all holding our breath, hoping he wouldn’t notice until it was too late and he already belonged to us. A submissive wolf was a gift to any pack. They tended to cut down the petty bickering that was part and parcel of having a roomful of dominant personalities, and they settled the pack, made it feel, for everyone, as if pack was more than a necessity, that it was a good thing to be a part of. A submissive made the survival of all the wolves in the pack more likely.
I don’t know how Zack had become a bone of contention between Libor and Bran—but I would bet all the money I didn’t have at the moment that he was at the bottom of their feud. Because there was no way that lady could look so much like Zack and not be closely related to him.
“There’s a ghost here,” said Libor.
I looked at him and sighed. “I try not to pay attention to them,” I told him. “There’s no good to be had from it.”
“Who is it?” he asked.
“Don’t tell him,” said the ghost, still sounding like she’d grown up in Aspen Creek, Montana, like I had. Some of the stronger spirits did that—they communicated so forcefully that I heard them without any distortion, as if death granted them a universal language, a quick conduit to my brain without language at all, maybe. I found it very disturbing when they did that. “It would hurt him to know that I watch over him still.”
But she didn’t, not really. This wasn’t truly the woman she resembled, just a skin of personality shed when she’d died however long ago and her soul had gone to wherever souls go. I didn’t know why some ghosts stayed fresh and strong while most others faded—though sometimes it was because the living paid too much attention to the dead. But that didn’t make the ghosts into the person whose face they wore; it just made them stronger ghosts. I’d seen souls tied to their ghosts once, and I’d never again made the mistake of thinking of a normal ghost as a real person. This woman’s soul had gone on a long, long time ago.
I was coming to believe that ghosts were something, though, something that could think and plan and do. Not living, precisely, but not inert, either. It was a belief that went against everything I’ve ever heard about ghosts—but I interact with them more than most people.
Still, even though she was not the person who had been Libor’s wife, she had once been part of her. She knew Libor, and I chose to follow her advice.
“I don’t know, and I’m not going to talk about it long enough to give it more power,” I told Libor. “Look, ghosts are like discarded clothing left behind when a person dies.” Of so much I was still sure. “I’m sorry to distract you from the matter at hand. I wouldn’t have if I weren’t tired.”
“Is it my wife?” he asked softly. “She was a tiny thing, but rounded where a woman should be rounded. Her eyes were blue as a Viking’s.”
“I don’t talk about ghosts I see,” I told him. “No good comes of it.”
The ghost of his wife smiled at me. “He doesn’t like it when people don’t do what he says. I’d watch my step if I were you.”
Another ghost had found its way out to the courtyard, attracted by the attention I was trying not to pay to Libor’s dead wife. This one wasn’t anything anyone would have called pretty. Werewolf killed, I’d guess from the damage. If I were a normal human, I’d probably have been more appalled. But my other self is a coyote. I might not take down humans (or any other large prey), but I’ve eaten a lot of field mice and rabbits. I let my gaze pass over that ghost.
“Is it my wife?” Libor asked intently, and this time there was a bit of growl in his voice.
“I don’t talk about ghosts,” I told him. “I don’t describe them. I don’t name them. I don’t look at them if I can help it.”
We had ourselves a little bit of a stare-down again. Three more ghosts, one of those I’d seen in the main room of the bakery, drifted in. I was busy staring at Libor, and it weirded me out that I still knew they’d come in. Usually I have to use my eyes (or ears or nose or some normal thing) to know when they are around. Evidently not today. Stupid golem.
“Look,” I said. “It isn’t safe to pay too much attention to ghosts. They start to linger, and they pull you in the wrong direction.” My half brother had told me that it was less safe for someone of our lineage to pay attention to the dead than it was for regular people. Too much attention tended to strengthen ghosts and anchor them in the world of the living. Attention from one of our kind was apparently even more energizing.
“I am very old, little girl,” Libor told me. “If ghosts were going to get me killed, they would have done it a long time ago.” He frowned at me with consideration. “You will tell me what I want to know—and I will give you your three days.”
“You want me to describe the ghost I see here?” I asked him. “Though I have clearly stated that it is a bad idea. But after I do this, you will grant me sanctuary for three days.”
“Yes,” he said, sounding half-irritated, half-amused. “Talk for two minutes, a description and maybe a little conversation. Then I and my pack will protect you for three days. I give you the better end of the bargain.”
He was going to get the bad end of the bargain, that was for certain. Fine. I’d warned him, and it was on his head. He was so certai
n he wanted me to do this—I was going to do it right for him. I closed my eyes and tried to draw upon the power that I’d only touched a time or two on purpose.
There were a lot of ghosts here in the courtyard of Libor’s bakery. More than I’d sensed before. When I reached out to them, it felt as though I were breathing them—bits of pain and fear and terror, most so faint that they’d lost any touch of personality or coherence.
I opened my eyes and looked around. I might have been a little ticked with Libor for not listening to me when I told him it was a bad idea, but I was also concerned about adding any power to the woman who was still petting him. If she could get into my head enough to talk to me without an accent, then she was powerful enough to affect things in the real world. And if I gave her more power while he was still here loving her, I might never be able to get rid of her.
She was tied to Libor already. People tied too closely to ghosts tended to do things like drive their cars into trees, shoot themselves, or drink themselves to death. The dead want to be closer to the living.
So I picked someone else.
“He looks as though he was attacked by your pack,” I told Libor with not-really-faked reluctance. This guy wasn’t someone I’d want to be haunted by. “The suit he is wearing looks like it is from the 1950s, and it looks like he was wearing it when he was killed, because it is shredded and covered with blood.”
Dan, whispered the ghost painfully, though the bottom half of his face was gone. Dan. Under my attention, the misty edges of the transparent body drew together, condensing and solidifying at the same time.
“His name is Dan . . .”
Danek. The ghost’s voice was suddenly stronger, as if my voice on his name was giving him energy.
“Danek,” I said at the same time Libor did.
As soon as I spoke his name, the ghost was as solid as any person I’ve ever seen in my life. I could smell him, could smell his anguish and his sweat. I could see the weave of his blood-soaked silk tie. If I’d seen him on the street, I’d have called 911 for him.
What had that golem done to me? And how?
“Danek is a ghost?” asked Libor, who evidently wasn’t getting the same sensory load as I was, because, though he looked over his shoulder, he wasn’t looking in the right direction.
“Apparently,” I told him.
The old wolf laughed without amusement. “Of course he is. Danek never knew which way to go without someone’s telling him first when he was alive. It makes sense that he’d be the same dead.”
I almost gave my speech about how ghosts are not really the people who died, again, but Libor was one of those people who liked to tell others how the world worked and not listen to anyone who thought differently. I kept my mouth closed.
Libor smiled sourly. “Danek worked for the resistance here, such as it was, during World War II. His resistance group contained some of my pack and was supported by the rest of us. We only found out later, after the war was over, that he’d been working for both sides. He told the Nazis that the people who planned the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich came from the village of Lidice. It wasn’t true, the Nazis even knew it wasn’t true, but they paid him. Do you know what they did to Lidice?”
I did, actually. I’d written a term paper on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May of 1942. Heydrich had survived the initial attempt, and if he hadn’t been adamant that only German surgeons work on him, he might have lived through it. Then again, maybe he’d been right to be afraid. If I’d been a Czech surgeon, I’d have made sure Heydrich didn’t survive. Heydrich made Hitler look like he should win the Humanitarian of the Twentieth Century award. Nasty piece of work. In any case, Heydrich died. And so had Lidice.
“The Nazis killed all the men over fifteen right off the bat,” Libor told me, without waiting for my reply. “They picked out a handful of very young children who looked German and sent those off to be raised as good little Nazis. Then they shipped the women and the rest of the children to concentration camps. They killed all the livestock and all the pets in the village. They looted the village, down to digging up the cemetery, hunting for gold teeth or jewelry. When they were done, they burned the buildings. When that wasn’t complete enough for them, they blew it up. They covered the whole thing with topsoil and planted it. The roads that led in and out of town were rerouted, as was a stream. When they finished, there was no sign that Lidice had ever existed there.”
Delenda est Carthago, said the ghost, just before Libor said the same thing.
“When the Romans destroyed Carthage, they leveled it so not one stone stood upon another,” Libor continued. “Lidice was a multilevel message from the Nazis. The first message was to those under their rule, that any assassination would be punished, and punishment would not just fall on the conspirators but on their families. Second, to the German people, that Heydrich was properly avenged and that it was Czech rebels, not Hitler, who engineered his death. Heydrich was being groomed or grooming himself, accounts vary, to take over the Third Reich from Hitler. Heydrich, unlike Hitler, was tall, blond, athletic, and smart. The German ideal, in fact—which Hitler himself was not.”
Had we killed Heydrich? They asked me, said Danek’s ghost. How could I tell the Nazis that? They would have killed me, too, even though I was working for them. They would have asked why I had not warned them. If I told them nothing, they would have suspected me. So I gave them something else. A rumor, I said, that the assassins came from a little village. They didn’t need the real assassins if they had a village to punish. Lidice didn’t die for a lie. For my lie. Not really. It died so we could go on fighting the Nazis. We won. We beat them. I did the right thing. For Prague. For the resistance.
The other ghosts, including the woman who must, from his description and her behavior, have been Libor’s wife, were backing away from Danek, as if something about him was repellent to other ghosts. They drifted, almost casually, through the walls until, by the end of Danek’s self-justification speech, the only ghost in the garden was Danek’s.
I was working really hard at keeping a calm facade. I’d never done anything like this. I was pretty sure that I should have kept on following my brother’s advice instead of giving in to my temper when Libor pushed me.
“We killed Danek when we found out what he had done,” Libor said. “He knew what the Nazis would do, and he gave them a random target that was away from him. A village small enough to destroy—because that’s what Hitler wanted.”
Monsters, said Danek in my ear. I might have jumped a little because he hadn’t been anywhere close to me when he said it. I’d been working with monsters, and I didn’t know it. I thought the Nazis were the monsters, and I was so afraid of them. I was wrong.
“He was so afraid of the Nazis,” said Libor, “that he betrayed that little village to them. Oh, he took money, too. But mostly it was to save his own skin. We’d never have known it, but he started dating one of my pack—and he lied to her about it.”
Libor’s commentary and the ghost’s were so close to the same topic that I wondered if the ghost was somehow influencing Libor even though he couldn’t hear what the dead man said.
“The village of Lidice wasn’t the only thing he’d given to the Nazis,” said the Alpha werewolf. “He sold them some of our group, too. One of the ones he sold was a boy who ran messages for us. He was ten.”
No one important, said Danek. Just a few, so the Nazis would know that I was cooperating fully. So they wouldn’t kill me. But I was afraid of the wrong monsters.
“He was a coward,” said Libor. “And he feared the wrong monsters.”
The war was over, Danek said. We won. My side won, then they killed me. I died anyway. It wasn’t fair. They didn’t even allow me a funeral. No marker for my grave. No mourners.
“He died too easily,” Libor said. “But the war was over, and time enough had passed that we co
uldn’t just leave his body. So we buried it here.” He nodded toward a corner of the garden. “Under the cobblestones beneath that green table.”
“I see,” I said. The effect of the two-sided narration was really eerie.
“Danek is the only ghost here?” asked Libor.
I made a production of looking around carefully. “Yes. He is the only one here in the garden with us.”
Danek reached out and touched the back of the chair that sat at the green table. Frost followed his fingertips but melted away quickly. It left no moisture behind, so maybe it hadn’t been frost at all but some sort of residue. I’d never seen a ghost do that.
“Then I will give you the sanctuary I offered,” Libor said briskly.
“Thank you,” I said, my eyes still on the ghost. “And when you are tired of Danek, let me know. I’ll come back and see if I can fix this.”
“Fix what?” Libor asked.
“I told you,” I said. “It isn’t smart to pay too much attention to the dead. It is especially not smart for me to pay too much attention to the dead.”
The chair Danek had touched fell over on its side. Libor jumped and stared at it.
“I don’t think,” I said, “that Danek is going to be the sweet kind of ghost who finds lost things and contents himself shutting doors a little too hard. We can give him a few weeks, to see if he fades on his own. But if that doesn’t work, I’ll see what I can do.”
Hopefully I’d be home in a couple of weeks. That would mean I would have to fly back. I could fly back with Adam and see Prague properly. As long as we all survived.
—
HOT WATER AND SWEET-SMELLING SOAP DID A LOT for my spirits. I was still stuck in Prague without papers or money, but at least I was clean and had a change of clothes I hadn’t had to steal. I had a bed and a safe place to sleep.
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