Domek opened the door to Cord’s butler, Hollas. He peered curiously past Domek into the room. “Do you have company? I thought I heard another voice.”
“No,” Domek said. “Who sent this?”
“There was a messenger boy. He insisted it get to you immediately.”
Domek accepted the envelope, and Hollas did not linger to chat. Frowning, Domek tore open the letter.
It was from Anton, though they had just seen each other that morning. The letter had clearly been jotted down quickly, with ink blotches on the edges.
Webber is dead.
The words swam in front of his eyes. Domek pressed a hand to his chest, trying to find the breath that had vanished.
Assisting Abrahams with unknown disturbance. Details uncertain. Family has been told. Funeral tomorrow, 2PM.
Come see Paluska. He still needs to speak with you.
Death was a part of the job. Lamplighters knew that any night could be their last, and watched innocents die when they failed. It still gutted Domek every time. He had just seen Webber at the guildhall. Two days ago, Webber had been laughing with Anton and Abrahams about Domek’s love life. Now, he was gone.
Dear God, Abrahams would be devastated. The two had been best friends for years, and had been together in the end.
Was this what his mother’s cards had been warning him would happen?
Domek looked at the inert jar still sitting on the floor. There was more to discuss with Kája, but today, he had other responsibilities.
* * *
Over the years, Domek had become a regular at Mesto Tavern, a rowdy pub that stayed open as long as the moon was up. It sat just outside the Jewish Quarter, near the opera house. Inside, he was greeted by the heavy, warm smells of ale, sausages, and tobacco smoke. On cool nights, the tavern was warm and inviting, full and boisterous. Clientele came to the Mesto fresh off the river boats, looking to spend the night in good company, or from the gambling halls—either to enjoy a windfall or use their last coins to drown their sorrows.
This afternoon, walking in from the warm spring day, the tavern seemed stifling. Domek nodded toward the barmaid, Thea, who gave him a small wave in return. As expected, Abrahams was sitting at the bar, staring down into a glass of red wine.
Domek slid onto the stool beside him. Words failed him, and he folded his hands on the counter.
Without prompting, Thea pulled him a glass of pilsner. The amber liquid seemed dull in the dark tavern, the white foam a jarring spot of brightness.
“L’chayim,” Abrahams said wryly, clicking their glasses together.
“I’m so sorry, Abrahams,” Domek said after taking the required sip from his beer.
He grunted and took another sip of his wine.
They drank in silence. Domek could barely taste the pilsner, its light taste overshadowed by the heavy atmosphere. Webber would have laughed at them for the melancholy. He had never been able to dwell, and had hated long silences. Abrahams and Domek had always been more comfortable with the quiet than Webber or Anton, who filled every space with chatter.
Domek finished two beers while Abrahams nursed his single glass of red wine. Thea, intuitive as she was, brought them a plate of beer cheese. Domek tipped a splash of his pilsner onto the plate and mashed it together with the soft cheese, onions, and paprika. He smeared the cheese onto a slice of rye and slid it in front of Abrahams.
Abrahams took it, stared at the traditional bar food, and then set it back down. “I’ve never seen anything like it, Myska.” He shook his head. “It was supposed to be an easy job. Webber helped me in the Jewish Quarter whenever I needed the extra set of hands. We’re spread too thin there, but he was always happy to help and then convince my mother to make him dinner. He’s seen what we deal with there. The buildings are decrepit, rundown. It’s a nesting ground for all sorts of demons. Opening the ghetto helped some of us leave, but it’s still the most dangerous neighborhood in Prague. You know they’ve been talking about renovating it?”
Domek hummed.
“Going to tear down our homes and build new places for goyim to move into. For now, we’re stuck living in cramped conditions, preyed on by monsters. But Webber was always willing to help. Someone complained that they had been hearing strange sounds from inside their walls. They said they had thought they had a rat infestation, before they started hearing the voice. Mad muttering, stuttering. I thought they had a ghost, but their pet dog went missing.”
Thea had gone to help another customer, so Domek guessed quietly, “Pijavica.”
“That’s what we thought. That some recently turned monster had gotten itself wedged in their cellar and was driving itself mad. It’s happened before.”
The change from mortal into the bloodthirsty monsters was fraught, even before the family massacres started. Some pijavice never left behind that early madness, and the ones that remained on the streets to hunt embraced it.
When the lamplighters knew a pijavica’s daytime position, they didn’t wait until night, and the height of its power, to destroy it. If there was a way to find the creature and break a shaft of sunlight into its hiding space, the problem would be solved with no risk. Too many of them hid deep in the tunnels where sunlight could not pierce, creating an impenetrable domain.
“The people in my neighborhood know that they can call me with strange occurrences. I’ve helped clean out a number of real rat infestations looking for the more sinister kind, but they’re always grateful. Webber and I sent the family away, and then found the abandoned, alternate entrance to the cellar the creature must have used to get down there. We waited outside and listened. We were careful. It had a human voice, male. Muttering some nonsense about never going back somewhere. We waited until the sun was at the perfect angle this morning, and then threw open the door.” He traced a line of condensation on the countertop. “Myska, it looked like a human. It was dressed in rags. It blinked against the sunlight, but survived its touch.”
Domek frowned. Very few of the demons they hunted could exist in direct sunlight, requiring the shadows to mask the sins of their souls. Vodníks and wisps were examples Domek knew, as well as some ghosts, but it was a rare ability among the monsters.
“There are humans afflicted by madness that makes them seem monsters. We were going to escort it out, find it some help. But when it saw us, its face split open like a pijavica’s and it launched at us.” Abrahams’s hand clenched into a fist. “Webber was smart. Even when we thought it was a human, he didn’t drop his stake. He stabbed it through the heart before it could touch us. Myska, it didn’t die. What type of demon looks like a pijavica, but is immune to hawthorn and sunlight?”
“I don’t know,” Domek breathed. Abrahams’s tale was fantastical, a horror story to a lamplighter.
“I scrambled for my silver dagger—not many things can survive without their heads—but it already had Webber by then.” He bowed his head. “By the time I killed it, it was too late. Webber was dead. Then, it fell apart into ash. There’s not even a body to prove my story.”
“Prove your story?” Domek repeated.
“Paluska told me that grief had rattled my mind. He warned me not to tell any of the other lamplighters. He’s worried I’m going to start a panic. Maybe I should—I can’t let anyone else be caught by surprise.” He huffed. “You know Paluska has never trusted me.”
“He’s from a different era,” Domek said, the words feeling stilted on his tongue.
“The era where Jewish people weren’t citizens and they had to defend their neighborhood on their own,” Abrahams said. “The old hunters, the ones before the gas lamps, wouldn’t have let me fight beside them. Even my death would not have been good enough for them. Men like Paluska are still not sure I’m not one of the demons they’re supposed to be protecting this city against.” Abrahams knocked his fist against the table. “He’s not the only one in our group, much less in all of Prague.”
Domek shook his head. “They don’t deserve you.”
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“I know. But this job isn’t one we do for the glory. You just have to keep saving people and hope they see you’re human too. And in the end, save them even when they don’t,” Abrahams said.
Domek nodded and sipped from his beer.
“Webber knew no one would know how he might die,” Abrahams mused. “But he never would have believed that Paluska would be the one to bury it. I’ll find out what that thing was and stop this from happening again.”
“I’ll be there with you,” Domek promised.
There were few doors Ora hesitated to walk through.
All of Prague was open to her. With enough money and confidence, Ora was welcome most places. The ones she wasn’t, she entered anyway. She had strode into more than one gentlemen’s club, and watched with amusement as the staff attempted to find the words to eject a lady who refused to take their gentle hints. Her fine clothes were out of place in the less wealthy areas of the city, but if she smiled brightly and tipped well, no one would turn her away.
She nearly ran away from Alena Nováková’s door.
In just the last few days, she had stormed back into the palace of her nightmares and then slept with a man who killed her kind for a living. Speaking to one frail, elderly woman should have been nothing. Instead, Ora found her hands shaking as she finally rapped on the door.
The butler led her through a series of halls toward the sitting room. After Alena’s husband had died, she had covered the dark woods and dull patterns he had insisted upon with layers of delicate lace and embroidery. It was the way Alena lived—with her gentle touch, she could transform even the most dull or unwelcoming things under her glow.
“Ora,” Alena said, putting down her book when she saw her. She let her reading glasses dangle from a chain at her neck. “I didn’t expect to see you again.” She waved the butler away, but kept a tight grip on the chair’s arm with her other hand.
“Alena,” Ora said, ignoring the seat in favor of pacing. The windows in the room were shuttered against the night outside, but Ora didn’t do more than pull her cloak’s hood off her head. Its weight was a comfort, a blanket and promise of a quick exit at once. She hesitated under Alena’s cautious gaze, and finally said, “I didn’t mean to tell you like that.”
“You resent me. You resented me for years. And I was a fool who thought we were sisters.”
“We are sisters,” Ora said.
Alena was still shaking her head. “I imposed myself into your life because I believed that was what you wanted, even when you avoided me. This is only your fourth time to my home. Four times in ten years. I used to believe I was clever, but I was blind in this.” Her jaw worked, stretching her parchment skin. “You’ll have to forgive me.”
“After a century away, I came back to Prague. The city I was born in, the city where I met my death, the city where I fought men trying to protect innocent people and killed them. I traveled the world to stay away from these city walls. But I came back, and I’ve been here ten years, which is longer than I spent anywhere but Mělník. People are starting to notice that I haven’t aged. Have you not wondered why I’m here?”
“I don’t know,” Alena said faintly.
“For you,” Ora said. “I moved here to be near you, even though I can barely stand it. I moved in down the street from you, but seeing you hurt. I wanted you near me, even if all I could think about was losing you too. Franz’s death broke my heart. You’re my sister, and my only living tie to my time with him. I loved you so much that the thought of losing you made me never want to see you again. I was angry before. What I told you wasn’t the whole story. I told Franz about the bloodline curse, but neither of us could fathom hurting you. It was never a decision, Alena.”
Alena hesitated, and then pointed firmly at the chair. “You should sit down.”
“Should I?” Even Ora was not sure how the conversation would go on.
“I feel my age,” Alena said shortly. “I don’t want to stare up at you while we talk. It will hurt my neck.”
Ora sat. Alena’s scent had soaked into the house as though she had spilled the essence of herself onto the worn cushions and rugs: lavender and plums and dust. She leaned into the chair, memorizing the smell.
“You’ve been hiding from me for so long that you don’t even know the person you claim you’ll be missing,” Alena said finally.
The blow landed like hawthorn inside Ora’s chest. “I was heartbroken,” she protested.
“So was I. And you chose for us to both be heartbroken and alone,” Alena said. She sighed. “My husband and I didn’t have the same type of relationship that you and Franz had, but his loss left me wishing I could numb my emotions too. For me, that lasted a few months, but you’ve always been on a different time scale than us.”
“I am good at numbing myself,” Ora said bitterly. “There was nothing Franz hated more than when I disengaged. He didn’t care that I was flirtatious with everyone I met, or that I liked intellectual debates, or any of the other things that would have horrified another man about a woman. The only thing that bothered him was when I was so disillusioned by how much I’d seen that I stopped caring. And for the last ten years, I’ve cared about nothing. And I hate myself for it. If I act the way I did before I met him, then I’m saying that his part in my life was a blip.”
“You’re not disengaged because you don’t care—it’s because you care too much, and you’ve refused to let yourself truly feel it. You avoided me, you kept all your new friends at a distance, but you couldn’t move away from Prague and couldn’t stop yourself from making those friends. You’re still the woman I first met.”
Ora shook her head. “I can’t go back to how I was with Franz. There is no Franz to go back to. Our life in Mělník was idyllic, but it was only ever him who could make me live somewhere so quiet and feel content. I don’t know who I am after him.”
“You told me once that it was a flaw of your kind to stagnate. Don’t let yourself get stuck in your grief.”
Ora thought of Czernin alone in his palace in the countryside, drenched in the blood of the past. “Franz once gave me a pocket watch to prove that no matter how long I live, time will keep moving with me. As though that were a good thing.”
“He was right. You’re going to have a long life after Franz and I are both gone.”
“Every death hurts, Alena. Every one. I’m tired of watching them happen.”
“Regret makes the pain worse, and you’ll regret this,” Alena said, gesturing between them. “You can’t love me from afar. I’m here, Ora. If you want to be here, it’s not too late.” She took a shaky breath, and there were tears in her eyes. “You are the only sister I’ve ever had.”
“I’m sorry,” Ora said.
“Can you stay tonight? I don’t sleep like I used to, and since you don’t sleep at all, you can keep me company. We could talk.”
“I will. As long as I can,” Ora said. “But then there’s something I have to do.”
* * *
Shadows stretched over Prague like fingers grasping for gold, scraping away the last bits of sunlight. Night was seeping in.
As the sun set, the warmth of the spring day was swept away in favor of a sharp briskness that shocked the back of the throat with every inhale. The sun’s hold over the city was still tenuous after the long winter, and the cold was eager to roll back in.
There was a crackle in the air—despite the nearly clear skies, Domek thought a storm might have been approaching. After trading his shift with another lamplighter, he had trekked upriver to a secluded spot under a tree bursting with foliage. The Vltava swirled at his feet. He sat on the twisted roots of the tree, waving a hand to shoo away the ducks that swam up, hoping for bread. The Provisional Theater sat proud on the opposite bank, and a line of orange tiles and copper domes led toward where Charles Bridge stretched over the river. Boats floated past, preparing to make their trades at one of the river ports.
After one last glance to make sure he was out
of sight of any passersby, Domek said, “Kája? Come out.”
The wisp appeared beside him. “What now?”
Domek leaned back on his hands, feeling the cool dirt beneath his palms, and nodded toward the sunset. “The stars will be out soon.”
“What do you need?”
Domek didn’t answer. Words had always failed him, and apologies were the most difficult of all. Instead, he looked toward the horizon and took a deep breath of the evening air.
The wisp’s fiery orb flickered. He moved around Domek’s still form, exploring the small alcove.
Then, finally, he settled. The fire still crackled, but with the slow, steady effect of a candle instead of a wildfire.
In silence, they watched the sun dip below the Vltava, leaving a canvas of bright orange and purple streaking the sky. The colors were riotous after a day of cloud coverage, a vibrant performance that few noticed. As the sunset faded, stars began to appear overhead, peeking through the darkness. The crescent moon cupped the sky, bright and distant.
“I used to live there,” Kája said suddenly.
“Where?” Domek asked.
“The castle.”
Domek looked at the wisp. Beyond it, the castle loomed on the hill. “In the castle? You lived in Prague? I thought the vodník caught you in the woods.”
“It’s a long story.”
Domek didn’t answer. With the skewed balance of power between them, it felt wrong to say anything to force the question. Their quiet truce on the riverbank felt delicate, something small and fragile that a single wrong move could shatter.
“My wife and I were both servants for the emperor. We were both witches, and he had us use our power to help around the castle. He collected witches and alchemists alike for his whim, but he underutilized our powers. We could have changed his rule, but he had us in attendance for the prestige. He was awed by magic, and thought our presence in his castle made him seem more elite.”
“Which emperor was this?”
“Rudolf II.”
Domek bit back a gasp. If he was remembering correctly, Rudolf II had died at the start of the seventeenth century—more than two hundred years ago.
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