Though not as deranged as Guttman, these were not the type of creatures Ora would have willingly spent time with even if they had been human. Ora was not selective when it came to the class of her friends, but she valued certain things that these pijavice lacked: decency, cleverness, and hygiene being chief among them.
If they had been humans, these pijavice were the type of men who sat in pubs all day, complaining about the money and women that hadn’t fallen into their laps. Ora had never met these particular specimens before, but she knew the type. She could see it in their hungry eyes when she ducked into the nest.
The bare room could have passed for a lion’s den. Blood, both fresh and rotten, caked the floor beside a pit in the corner of the room. Once a well, it seemed to now serve for disposal of the pijavice’s victims. Ora listened carefully, but the pit was silent. That was a relief. Ora would not have been able to leave a human in these monsters’ care, and she had not dressed for a fight.
“What do we have here?” one of them hissed. All four of them had discarded their human façades, mouths split wide to show dark fangs.
“A tasty treat,” said another, a broad man with a surprisingly ruddy face for a pijavica. He must have fed recently.
Another one, so skinny that he could have passed for a sapling, punched him in the arm. “Smell her. She’s one of us,” he said.
The other man shrugged. “There are all different types of treats.”
“I’m no one’s ‘treat,’” Ora said, moving into the room. The tension made her nails sharpen to vicious points, and her jaw unhinged to reveal her second, sharper set of teeth.
From the corner, a pijavica with hooded eyes and bloodstained sleeves drawled, “All dressed up for us. Be a shame to let it go to waste.”
“I was transformed before any of you were even born. I’ll be asking the questions here.”
The first pijavica who had spoken got to his feet with disconcerting speed considering his size. He towered over the room like an oak in a field of wheat. “The only question left is who gets you first.”
In a blink, he charged her. Ora didn’t hesitate. Using his momentum against him, she ducked and heaved, sending him flying headfirst into the stone wall behind them. He crumpled to the ground, splashing in a rancid puddle. Before he could find his feet again, she landed on top of him. She drove her claws under his ribs, punching through his tough skin to reach his poisoned heart. She plucked it from the arteries it dangled from, and held it aloft. It dissolved in her hand, along with the body beneath her.
She stood, flicking blood from her hand. “Let’s start this over,” she hissed, the words elongating with her altered jaw. “I’m here to ask some questions. No one will touch me, so no one else will get hurt. I’m not looking for another fight—I’d prefer answers before your deaths. I’ve faced pijavice far more experienced and numerous than you.”
For a moment, she stayed tense, waiting for the rest of the pijavice to avenge their friend. Instead, the skinny one chuckled. “Horan always picked fights he couldn’t win.”
Crossing her arms, Ora said, “I could do the same to each of you.” Her claws pricked through the fabric of her sleeves like thorns.
“I’d enjoy that,” he said. The single candle that lit their hovel illuminated the strands of saliva dripping from his own needle-sharp fangs. “What are you offering? If you’re not here for fun, that is. I assume you’re not wanting to take our spot.”
Ora looked around the room. It reeked of offal and dirty pijavice. “Decidedly not.” She reluctantly took another breath—she needed the air for speech, if not for the oxygen. “I can offer your lives.”
“For all we know, you’ll kill us in the end anyway,” he said.
“I don’t kill for fun. Answer my questions, or I’ll make sure someone less nice than me finds their way to your hovel.”
There was a quiet conversation among the group. “All right,” the skinny one said. “What do you want to know?”
“Excellent. How much do you know about the other pijavice in Prague?”
The pijavica, who seemed to have taken the role of leader after Horan’s loss, said, “We fight them for territory and blood when it comes down to it. With the lamplighters popping up everywhere, it’s getting harder to keep territory. We’re being kept underground. One killed a friend of ours in the Jewish Quarter last week. That neighborhood has gotten harder and harder to hunt in now that the ghetto has been opened.”
“Tragic. Have you heard any rumors about anything… strange going on?” Ora was already losing hope in finding answers here. This was akin to asking a pack of rabid dogs whether they’d heard the news about local city politics.
“The butcher down on Botolph Lane started carrying venison,” the pijavica said. “Not as good as fresh flesh and blood, but it keeps you alive during a slow week when there’s no human or pork.”
“I actually prefer venison to pork,” Ora commented, and then shook her head. This was getting her nowhere. “Interesting, but irrelevant. I’m speaking of bigger whispers. Whispers about…a cure.”
“A cure for what?”
“The type of cure that sends you back into the sunlight. Something that undoes the pijavica curse and makes you mortal again.”
The pijavica recoiled. “That exists?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“Terrible.”
“I don’t know,” Ora said thoughtfully. “I don’t mind the idea.” She couldn’t remember what the sun felt like, but she remembered its warm scent. The way it bathed everything in richness and made the whole world more vivid. It had glinted off the gold accents around the city. Every church and statue in Prague was tipped with gold, an incorruptible substance on top of blackened sandstone and corroded copper. At night, it all looked the same. Gold was for the living.
The pijavica nudged its nearest companion. “What do you think, Stiven? Would you give up everything to get back in the sun?”
“And lose the power? Not on your life,” Stiven said. “Why be a sheep when you can be a wolf?”
Ora glanced around the hovel again. The pijavice reminded her more of maggots than wolves, but she was still trying to find answers. Insulting them would just lead to more fighting, and she already was concerned about the state of her dress. “So, none of you have heard anything.”
The skinny pijavica shook his head. “If there were something big stirring up, we wouldn’t be the ones to know, would we? You should be talking to the Zizkovs. I’m surprised you didn’t go there first, with your fancy gown.”
“You mean the little group over in Smichov?” Ora asked. “They’re small time, self-contained. They take care of themselves.”
“Where have you been?” he asked incredulously. “The Zizkov family moved out of Smichov and are in Kampa Island now. They have money, and they have an enforcer who works for them that can rip a man in half without trying.”
“The Zizkovs? You can’t be serious. They’re just thugs. I’ve never heard of them doing anything relevant at all.”
If someone was creating a cure, they’d need some scientific guidance. Ora had been listening to gossip for years, and there was little to no legitimate scholarship about her race. Any experimentation, whether run by humans or other pijavice, had usually been so gruesome that they couldn’t sustain themselves. There was little appreciation for the sanctity of pijavica life, and they would need extravagant resources and manpower to test any sort of cure. A group of common criminals who had gotten to the top of the power wheel by sheer luck wouldn’t have the brains.
“I don’t know anything about all that,” he said. “All I can tell you is that if you’re looking for information in Prague beyond where to find the sweetest blood, the Zizkovs are the place to start. They’re in control in this city.”
“You almost sound impressed. Why haven’t you gone begging to join their family yet instead of living down here?”
“You’re joking. They’re half the
reason we’re hiding down here. When they’re around, pijavice disappear. I don’t want any of their business—or yours.”
Ora tapped her fingers on her chin. She hadn’t seen a family strike fear in the hearts of sewer rats since her time with Lord Czernin. If the Zizkovs had managed to bring the lower predators to heel while keeping their activities quiet from both Sokol and Ora, they were more competent than she’d expected. “If they come by, don’t tell them I was here.”
The pijavica shrugged, a sharp, jittery motion. “Hopefully they won’t ask.”
* * *
Domek tugged at the scarf around his neck as he walked down the streets of Prague. He could feel bruises forming in his soft flesh. It seemed unfair that he had to continue with his patrol after nearly being strangled by the wisp, but he had a duty. At the end of his shift, he would take the wisp to Paluska, but he could not leave the streets unattended until then. A steady drizzle coated the world in a layer of water without the satisfaction of a real storm. Domek was tempted to go back to the nearest lamp and turn up the gas to create a flame with real heat he could rest in for a moment.
He resisted the urge. In the twenty years since gas lamps had been introduced to Prague, the inventors had been working on ways to make the system safer, but there were still the occasional explosions. Most of them were from simple human error, or an accidental gas leak. Some, including one Domek had been involved in the year before, were only reported as accidents; gas explosions were a quick method to exterminate monsters when there were no other options. The tunnels beneath Prague were impossible to monitor and patrol: narrow, labyrinthine, and far from the sun. But nothing could survive obliteration.
Around him, the trees planted along the rail by the river shook with a passing wind. To his right, the fountain at the center of the small Park of National Awakening stood taller than the trees. Domek remembered when the fountain had been completed nearly two decades ago. With its intricate spire and collected statues, it nearly seemed as though it could have always been there, but the sandstone was still mostly pale rather than blackened with age like its companions on Charles Bridge. The water inside burbled quietly, barely audible over the nearby river.
The bridge arched ahead, and Domek rubbed absently at the healing cut on his inner arm that had saved him from the attack. His branded palm seemed silver in the lamplight. When he had run to save the woman, he never could have predicted the strange events to follow.
Stepping around a bench by the river, Domek nearly slipped on the wet path. His boots had had solid traction when he’d first gotten them, but years of use had left the bottoms dangerously slick. He caught himself on the back of the bench, but the moment of distraction cost him.
Movement flickered in the corner of his eye, and then arms clamped tight around him. One covered his mouth, muffling his instinctive shout, and the other wrapped around his waist to pull him with superhuman speed across the street into the Park of National Awakening. Mud splattered around his boots as his feet dragged against the ground.
“Were you the man on patrol in this area last night?” The voice that hissed in his ear had a polished accent, crisp as an apple. Domek thought it was appropriate to try to bite the creature, but the hand over his mouth moved before he made contact.
“Let me go,” Domek snarled.
“You or one of your colleagues was here last night. They had a run-in with a friend of ours,” the pijavica continued. “A woman told us that a lamplighter saved her.”
“What did you do to her?” he demanded, struggling to get loose.
“You should be more worried about what we’re going to do to you,” said a voice behind them. It came from another man with a similarly posh accent.
Domek tried to reach into his pocket for his stake, but the pijavica jerked his arms behind his body. Domek’s wrists ground together, trapped in a vise.
“Your ‘friend’ deserved what he got,” Domek spat.
“I’m sure he did,” the second pijavica said mildly before jerking on Domek’s satchel. For a moment, the leather dug painfully into his shoulder—a strange echo of the night’s earlier struggle in the alley—before sliding free.
They were going after the will-o’-the-wisp. Domek should have gotten rid of the jar as soon as he’d found it. He struggled to get loose, but the pijavica was able to keep his wrists together without effort. This was exactly the sort of situation Paluska and the other veteran monster fighters told them to avoid. Pijavice were stronger than humans in every physical sense. Lamplighters relied on the element of surprise to win their fights. These two had been waiting for Domek, seeming to know what to expect.
He was only still alive because they would need to interrogate him if they couldn’t find the wisp on him. As soon as the pijavica found the jar at the bottom of his satchel, Domek would be dead. He wondered if the brand on his hands would fade after death, magic and life draining out with his last breath.
He shouldn’t have been so quick to tell the wisp that he didn’t need its help. It had gotten rid of the bubák in moments—could it do the same to his current assailants? With it tucked inside the bag, he would never know.
Domek’s brow furrowed. He had assumed that he would need to be holding the jar in order to access the wisp’s powers, but if that was the case, what was the point of the bond? Why were his hands branded if the wisp was only his when the container was in his grasp?
One of the lessons Paluska drilled into their heads since the first day of training was to take advantage of any opportunity that presented itself. Waiting to weigh each idea was dangerous when fighting creatures with five times the reaction speed of humans. No matter how much he had fumbled his last attempt to instruct the wisp, he couldn’t let his embarrassment lead to his death.
Domek clasped his hands behind his back. The scars pressed together, warm to the touch. “Wis—” he began to call, but the pijavica holding him was too fast. It clocked him across the head with enough force to daze him, and then wrapped a cold hand over his mouth again like a vise.
Domek jerked and struggled, fighting the haze from the blow to his head.
The other pijavica ignored the scuffle, digging through Domek’s bag with focused efficiency. Domek’s lamplighting tools clattered to the cobblestones. Any moment, the pijavica would close its hands on the jar and this would be over.
Then, between one blink and the next, there was another figure in the park.
Despite the speed of her arrival, the pale woman stood for a moment as though she had been there all night. Even though the wind had died, her long, white hair drifted in a breeze Domek could not feel. As Domek had thought in his brief glimpse of her last night, she was a wall of white. A long, frilled nightgown swept toward the ground, but did not touch the grass. It was impossible to tell her age from her expressionless face, which was blurred as though he were viewing it from a hundred meters away rather than two.
She was silent, watching them with dark eyes that stood out like coal scattered on a snowdrift. The pijavica holding Domek had noticed her as well, if its sudden stillness was any indication, while the other remained oblivious. It made a triumphant noise when it reached the bottom of the bag.
The White Lady’s serene face contorted into a silent scream. Though her lips were as pale as the rest of her, the inside of her mouth was a vivid, dark red.
The pijavica holding Domek took a breath as if about to speak, but the White Lady was already across the park. She grabbed the pijavica holding Domek’s bag and threw it as easily as someone tearing a weed from their garden. The pijavica hit the fountain with a grotesque smack, destroying one of the stone figures, and fell into the water with a splash. Domek’s bag dropped to the grass.
Domek used the distraction to wrest himself free, using the monster’s weight to knock it off-balance. He stumbled away, anticipating a fresh assault, but the pijavica was focused on the White Lady.
She was standing over the pijavica in the fountain, mouth still contorte
d in its silent scream. She lifted her pale hands and seemed to grasp the air in front of her. When she suddenly twisted her hands in opposing directions, the pijavica jerked, and then subsided into dust. His clothes sank into the water, empty.
The White Lady turned to Domek and the second pijavica. The monster turned and sprinted away, moving with supernatural speed toward a side street. Unfortunately for it, even the pijavica’s speed wasn’t enough to combat this spirit.
There was another blur, and the White Lady was upon it. Domek left it to its fate in favor of scrambling on the ground for his fallen stakes. No one in the lamplighters had ever fought the castle’s White Lady. According to Paluska, she never left the walkways of the castle, and was no threat to the city.
Clearly, Paluska didn’t know as much as Domek had once believed.
Domek recovered one of his two stakes and jumped back to his feet, holding it at the ready. Silver was a better weapon against spirits than hawthorn, but he couldn’t afford to be particular.
The second pijavica was already dust, its clothes strewn on the cobblestones as though it had been killed while still running. The White Lady stood facing Domek, her palms open by her sides. Her mouth was closed, and her gaze darted around the park.
Domek kept his stake at his side and held up a placating hand. “I—” he began. The word rang loudly, making Domek realize how quiet the fight had been.
She lunged toward him, fast as thought. He stumbled backward, slashing toward her face with his stake. The hawthorn passed through her as though she were only a memory, but the hand that collided with his cheek was solid enough.
Domek was lucky he had already been ducking, or the blow would have been enough to snap his neck. As it was, he tumbled back through the grass, hands scraping against the dirt. The stakes would be useless, but he was not weaponless. “Wisp,” he shouted, clapping his bloodied hands together. “Come here!”
The Lights of Prague Page 8