My guardian-angel werewolf slowed, and we puttered very quietly through a sleepy residential area. If we’d been in the US, I’d have said it was a bedroom community for Prague. But, remembering that there was a castle, I was hesitant to apply New World labels to Old World places.
Some of the houses looked very Bohemian. Some of them were very modern. We passed a couple of apartment complexes, took a hard right just past the second one, and found ourselves in an area where, on one side of the road, houses had gardens, huge yards, and trees. On the other side of the road was open land. It was too dark to be sure, but I thought they might be growing hay. Though it could just as easily have been some other grassy plant. It was dark, and I wasn’t a farmer.
We pulled into the driveway of a mansion-sized house that could have been a well-preserved three or four hundred years old—or a run-down twenty years old. It was hard to tell in the darkness.
My werewolf driver barely slowed down as we passed the ornate building, a swimming pool, and a stable, to park next to a much smaller house that might once have been a carriage house. Unlike the big building, where all the lights were on the outside and the interior was dark, the smaller house had no exterior lights on. There were fixtures beside both of the doors I could see, but the bulbs had been removed.
The purr of the engine stopped, and my werewolf guard removed his helmet and braced his feet. I was wise to the invitation, and I hopped off and took my own helmet off, giving it to him when he held out his hands for it.
I could smell and hear horses nearby—the swish of a lazy tail and an occasional snort. Horses are prey, and they don’t sleep in long stretches.
In the pen nearest the house, someone was in the middle of planting a garden in a pen that had been set up for livestock. They weren’t there now, of course, but the area had been expertly scythed. The cut hay was piled to the side, presumably to feed to the horses I’d sensed. Turf had been cut and was partially rolled, exposing rich, dark soil. Packets of seeds and a couple of mesh bags of bulbs sat in a cardboard box for planting.
I only knew it had been scythed because the implement was leaning against a fence post. I knew it was expert because I’d scythed a very small pasture once—a punishment for the Easter bunny incident, I think. My field had looked nothing like the neatly trimmed grass in the pen.
While I’d been getting the lay of the land, my companion knocked at the door softly.
It popped open after a bit. A woman clothed in a man’s white shirt and nothing else said something in Czech that was both quiet and irritated. Her hair was dark and cut in an asymmetrical bob that flattered her cheekbones.
My escort responded in a voice that was conciliatory without being submissive. The woman was a werewolf, too, a pack mate from their body language. Near equal in status, too, if I was reading it right.
She turned from him to me. “You are English?” she asked.
“American,” I told her.
“So what are you doing here, and why are the vampires after you?” Her English was very good—smooth, as if she spoke it often. Her vowels were thick, though, and the consonants muted.
I rubbed my face wearily. “I got in the way of a murky vampire plot,” I told her.
She threw her hands up impatiently. “Vampire plots are always murky. What kind of murky?”
I said, “The Lord of Night hit me with a car and kidnapped me from Washington—the state—in the US and brought me to Milan. I escaped with nothing but my skin and hitched a ride on a couple of random buses and ended up in Prague. Is that murky enough?”
“You are not a werewolf,” she said suspiciously, “and still Libor helps you?”
The man who’d brought me here spoke, and whatever he said made her frown. Frown harder, anyway.
“Stop that” was what she said. “You are being rude, Martin. Speak English.” To me she said, “Why are we helping you?”
Martin was evidently my rescuer’s name.
“I’m the mate of the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack,” I said.
She stared at me for a moment, then said, a little incredulously, “You are Bran Cornick’s foster daughter?”
I nodded carefully, keeping my eyes up because her reaction was a little off. “Expecting someone better-looking?” I tried. “Smarter? Taller?”
The wind came up, rustling in the grassy fields and blowing her scent to me. In addition to the werewolf, I could tell she was the person who had most recently used the helmet I’d worn here, and, from the scent of rich earth and broken grass, she was the person responsible for the project of turning a horse run into a garden.
“Well,” she said after a silence that lingered a little too long to be comfortable, “you must be the Mercedes who goes by Mercy, then. I’m Jitka—” and she told me her last name, but the sounds in it had little to do with English, and I’m not sure I caught it all.
I looked at the man, who gave a little laugh. “Yes,” he agreed, “matters were a little fraught for introductions. I’m Martin Zajíc, Libor’s second. Jitka is—”
“A lowly woman,” she said with a little growl in her voice. “But after the Great War, Libor said that for me to be last because I would not take a mate was stupid. Clearly, I was more fierce than most of the pack and more clever than any. He set me third behind Martin. It was acceptable—and I buried the ones who objected with my own hands.”
Martin grinned and said, “Pavel didn’t die.”
“Or I seduced them,” she agreed placidly. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, though she wasn’t exactly not beautiful, either. But she looked soft, warm, and strong. Sexy. She looked like someone who could give comfort when you needed it—or a belt in the jaw if that was more appropriate. “Pavel is a good man who needed to rethink a few things. There were several like Pavel.”
She looked at Martin. “I am going to get dressed. Then you two may come in, and we will discuss what has happened and what is to be done.”
She left us abruptly and went back inside the little house.
Martin started to speak, stopped, then laughed. “I was going to give you my standard warning—how you should not underestimate our Jitka, who has been outwitting men since the day she was born—but I imagine that you know better.”
“Not being a man?” I asked.
“Being a person used to having people underestimate her,” he said. “Libor feels that you bested him. We’ve been . . . pack mates for a very long time. He doesn’t pout like a child on the outside. But when he does not get what he expects, then he pouts on the inside. Anyone who can get one over on Libor is—”
“Lucky?” I guessed.
He smiled again. “Maybe luck would work once. Against Libor or against Iacopo Bonarata. But not against both, one after another.”
“You aren’t afraid to say his name?” I asked. I was pretty sure that Marsilia was—there was an edge of defiance in her voice whenever she said his full name. “And you missed the memo. I guess he’s in the process of turning from Iacopo to Jacob.”
Most of the immortals changed their names as time passed. I used to think it was to protect themselves from the humans discovering how old they were. But I’d changed my hypothesis lately. I think after a long time, some people grew tired of themselves. A new name gave them a chance to reinvent who they were, to become someone else, some other kind of person. Or sometimes, as in Iacopo Bonarata’s case apparently, they decide to pick a name easier for their soon-to-be minions to say.
“Jacob,” Martin said thoughtfully. “I had not heard.” He shrugged. “I am not a vampire to fear Bonarata’s power. He will not lightly take on Libor or the Vltava Pack. That is not to say that someday there might not be war between us. But it won’t be over something as small as my saying his name.” He smiled, and it lit his eyes. “It might take something like you. Or not.”
Jitka’s door opened. “Okay,” she sa
id. “You—”
And that’s when the vampire dropped off the roof and on top of Jitka like a piano falling on Roger Rabbit.
Vampires are hard to detect because when they are still, they really don’t make any noise at all. I don’t know what they had done to disguise their smell, but I’d seen too many vampires move to mistake them for anything else. And once the one landed on Jitka, there were suddenly more of them.
My whole life, I’ve heard people trying to compare vampires and werewolves. Vampires are faster and werewolves stronger. Or werewolves are faster, and vampires are stronger. I’ve now seen them both in combat enough to form my own opinion: the one thing that really matters is that both werewolves and vampires are stronger than I am. The only thing I have going to match them is speed—which is why I broke and ran.
I didn’t run to the road—there were innocent civilians in that direction. I didn’t run to the woods. I didn’t know the lay of the land, I didn’t like being lost with vampires chasing me, and my coyote didn’t blend in with the local fauna.
Because I also didn’t believe in letting other people fight my battles while I watched, I ran to the fenced paddock, rolled over the rail fence, and grabbed the scythe. I especially didn’t run from a fight when there was such a handy weapon lying around.
Properly armed, I turned to see what had happened while I’d been running. There were four vampires swarming Martin and Jitka—presumably having gone through the same basic evaluation that I’d just done. The werewolves were more of a threat than I was.
Assuming they came from Bonarata, the only thing they knew about me was that I’d run from Bonarata and I was weaker than a werewolf. In the fields and the woodlands beyond the fields, it would take me a long time to run far enough that the vampires couldn’t find me. So they’d ignored me and attacked the werewolves.
Fights usually happen really fast, especially fights between supernatural creatures. I’d seen one or two that lasted longer because the combatants were just that tough, but even then, seconds counted.
I stood behind the fence, waiting for what seemed like ten minutes and was probably closer to thirty or forty seconds. I thought I was going to have to try something else because the fight stayed too far away.
But then Jitka threw one of her attackers like a shot put. She—the vampire, not Jitka—hit a post and staggered. She grabbed the fence for support, her eyes on Jitka.
I hooked the scythe between the top two rails of the fence and around the vampire’s neck, just under her jaw.
I never, ever thought that mowing that field with a scythe would be useful to me. Who uses a scythe in the era of lawn mowers and tractors? To make that exact point, Bran had parked a new, wide-swath, riding lawn mower just outside the field. He wanted to rub in the fact that all the sweaty, backbreaking work I was doing could have been done in an hour on the riding lawn mower. By the time I’d finished, I’d had blisters, muscles in my arms and back in places I didn’t know I had muscles—and I’d learned a lot about how a scythe worked.
The first rule of cutting grass with a medieval farm implement is that the blade has to be sharp, or when it hits the grass, it will bend it over instead of cutting it. The sharp side of the blade is on the side nearest the scytheman, so he hooks the grass and pulls it with a smooth motion that uses his whole body, like a golfer. I think. I don’t golf, but the motion a golfer makes when hitting the ball looks a lot like the one I developed by trial and error to cut waist-high grass.
The same motion I used on the vampire. I caught her totally by surprise because her attention was on the werewolves.
Evidently, Jitka knew about keeping her scythe sharp, because it slid through flesh like a hot knife through butter. It was easy, only a little hesitation as the blade hit the bone, and it was done. Expecting a more difficult task, I used too much force and overbalanced myself, put a foot on the edge where the sod had been cut, and rolled and fell on my butt in the dirt.
I was too worried about cutting myself with the scythe to try to roll, but I scrambled to my feet as quickly as I could. Or almost as quickly as I could, because I found a little more speed when I realized that the head had landed right next to me.
Pretty much anything that is decapitated dies and stays that way, even the kinds of things that are otherwise immortal. Vampires’ bodies turn to ash when they are dead, mostly—though I’ve learned over the past few years that isn’t always true. There are apparently some strains of vampirism that don’t do that at all. Younger vampires tend to have bodies just like real people. But vampirism is magic-fueled, and magic doesn’t follow the rules all the time like science does.
What that means is this: if I decapitate Wulfe someday, he will probably turn to ash because he is very old. If he doesn’t turn to ash, I’ll burn his body and his head. Either way, I will take his ashes and scatter them in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans—salt being a pretty effective deterrent to magic. I don’t know of anything that decapitation followed by burning doesn’t kill, but with Wulfe, I wouldn’t take any chances.
I was comfortable that the vampire I’d scythed was dead. The eyes staring at me were blank and fogged. I didn’t know her well enough to know if I should have been as scared of her as I was of Wulfe, so I assumed not.
While beheading the vampire had only taken seconds, the fight had gone on without us. I didn’t think anyone had noticed what I’d done—the vampire hadn’t made much noise, and the other combatants were fully engaged in their own battles. Moving fast requires a lot of focus. It takes a Charles or an Adam to pay attention to anything more than the fight in front of him.
Jitka had a knife in one hand and something I couldn’t see too well in the other. Maybe it was a screwdriver. The vampire she was fighting had a short sword. Jitka hadn’t been exaggerating her competence. Despite the inequality in weaponry, the battle was not going in the vampire’s favor.
Martin had incapacitated one of his opponents. The big male vampire wasn’t going anywhere with his back broken and his body spasming helplessly under the randomized signals his nervous system sent out.
Short swords must have been the weapon of choice, because Martin had one that he was using to engage the short sword his second vampire opponent had. The wolf must have taken the sword from the disabled vampire, because he hadn’t been carrying it with him on the motorcycle. I’d have noticed.
The vampire jumped back out of the way of Martin’s strike and staggered. I hopped on the top rail of the fence and brought the point of the scythe over his shoulder and into his abdomen. The blade stuck—maybe it caught on a belt buckle. I tried to throw myself backward off the fence to use the weight of my body to force the blade deeper. Had the vampire panicked or frozen, I’d have eviscerated him. But he grabbed the shaft of the scythe, and I had to let go or risk his pulling me somewhere I didn’t want to go. I could not afford to let him get a shot at me.
When I hit the dirt this time, I rolled to my feet and took a quick step back before I figured out that the vampire wasn’t going to be coming after me—or anyone—again. Martin had taken advantage of the vampire’s distraction and used his sword to do what I hadn’t managed. He’d broken the blade doing it, but he’d cut the vampire—pretty messily—in half from belly through collarbone and out the top of the shoulder. The end of the sword had lodged in a rib and broken off. Martin brought the broken blade down on the vampire’s neck and decapitated him.
Jitka’s final opponent went boneless and dropped to the ground, a screwdriver sticking out of one eye. Face grim, the werewolf took the sword the vampire had been using and struck off his head as if she’d worked for years decapitating vampires on an assembly line—the stroke was that precise and emotionless. The dead vampire crumbled to ash in a flash of heat that ate the clothes he was wearing but left the shoes untouched. About that time, the female I’d killed just sort of faded into dust—a lot less dramatic than her comrade.
Jitka took the sword and looked around, her body language relaxed. She walked to the spasming vampire, looked closely at his face with a frown, then beheaded him. Without a guillotine or, evidently, a scythe, beheading someone isn’t as easy as the werewolves made it look, which is why most human-strength people are better off hammering a wooden stake into a sleeping vampire’s heart.
Martin and I were both watching Jitka, so we jumped when the vampire who was wearing the scythe burst into flame, scorching the grass, the fence, and the scythe, but not quite getting Martin, who’d been standing too close.
The scythe fell to the ground, a third of its blade blackened.
Jitka looked at me. “Do you know how long it’s going to take to sharpen that blade after this?”
I touched it with my toe, and the blade broke in half. “Huh,” I said. “When a job can’t be done, does that mean it will take forever—or no time at all?”
She laughed. “You fight good,” she said. “And smart, which is rarer.”
Martin said, “I think we might have a problem.”
She turned to look at him.
“Did you recognize any of them?”
She snorted and nodded at the vampire Martin had disabled and she had killed. That one had done the creepy thing where one moment it was a body and the next the body had become ash, which blew away.
“I would know that idiot,” she said, “if I were blindfolded. Someone should have rid the world of him fifty years ago. Ivan Novák.”
“What if I told you that the vampires who attacked the bakery were from Kocourek’s seethe?”
It certainly told her something more than it told me, because she stiffened and grunted. “Let’s get this mess cleaned up and go inside before someone looks out of the big house and wonders what we are doing.”
—
JITKA’S HOUSE WAS MORE OF A STUDIO APARTMENT than a house. The bedroom, kitchen, and living room were all one space. She sat on the bed, and Martin and I each took one of the kitchen chairs. There wasn’t any more furniture in the room than that. Jitka was not a cluttered person—except for the wall of plants that were set about two feet from the north-facing windows.
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