The Lights of Prague

by Nicole Jarvis

  Another pair of pijavice stumbled in looking as worse for wear as the rest of the room. Crane, finally donning a shirt, and Mayer both followed after. From the parlor’s other door, three more entered. Lady R sent a flirtatious wave at one of the men. Five members in total. From all the whispers and drama, Ora had expected more. The guests outnumbered the hosts twice over.

  There was only one woman in the Zizkov family, a brunette who was more striking than beautiful, with a hawkish nose and dark eyes. In a lush green gown covered in ribbons and ruffles, she was dressed to impress. Like the house itself, the effect was too deliberate to be effective. Lady R nudged Ora, her studied lack of expression as clear as a snide remark.

  One of the two new men looked familiar, but Ora couldn’t place him. His hair was the color of a wheat field touched by fall’s first frost, and he had a lush mustache settled above plump lips. He scanned the room, giving Ora a glimpse of familiar pale green eyes. She ducked so that she was hidden behind Lady R. She did know him.

  Czernin had told her Mayer was turning local intellectuals. Ora hadn’t thought to wonder if it had been anyone in her circles.

  His name was Jakob Weintraub, and he had been a professor of chemistry at Charles University a decade ago, just after Ora had returned to Prague. They had met at a salon, and he had flirted with her well into the night. She’d enjoyed his cleverness, but his arrogance had gotten tiring. Back then, he’d been human.

  If he spotted her, he’d recognize her. Using her true name would have made them suspicious, but the lie would paint her as a target. She should have watched the house before she had made her plan.

  Mayer cleared his throat, drawing everyone’s attention. “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you all for coming tonight. We apologize for how you were greeted. You can’t blame us for being careful.” There was a tangible coolness in the room. No one appeared amused. “To make up for it, we’d like to provide a meal before we begin our meeting. We’ve brought in a variety of options. Please, help yourselves.”

  The doors opened again, and a line of humans entered the room. There were more of them than the pijavice, at least twenty. Though they were mostly women, there were some men, and they were all unusually attractive. Every single one had a bare neck. With practiced ease, they each selected a floor cushion and knelt down. Each cushion was within easy reach of a chair or couch. Like dinner plates.

  One of the guests, a pijavica with pale eyes and a low ponytail, stepped forward. “You can’t be serious,” he hissed. “This is too obvious.”

  Other than those who were sworn members of a pijavica’s household staff, humans were kept oblivious to the existence of pijavice. The man didn’t mention Czernin or another of the old guard by name, but everyone knew who kept the pijavice restricted to dark alleys. It wasn’t men like Sokol or Domek, but their own kind.

  Though Darina had told her that Czernin had approved their experiments, Ora doubted even at his most mad that he would approve of this. Czernin had carefully crafted a system over centuries that allowed him to live in his palace without stirring the locals into a terrified mob.

  Then again, he seemed to have lost that long-held control. Perhaps this was another sign of his decline.

  Mayer waved off the man’s complaint. “All tonight’s entertainment is being well compensated. And you can imagine the penalty for anyone breathing a word of this outside the room.”

  Ora’s hands fisted in the folds of her gown. The Zizkov family was out of control. Killing their own guests, bringing in humans for a blood orgy in the middle of the city—even if the rumors of the ‘cure’ turned out to be nothing, the family needed to be ended immediately. The first wouldn’t draw censure from Sokol’s team, but the latter was inexcusable on all fronts. Either he was telling the truth and the score of humans would be back on the streets to whisper about the monsters on Kampa Island, or he was lying…and there would be a massacre at the end of the night.

  “Please, enjoy.”

  Lady R, having apparently accepted Ora as her companion for the evening, nudged her to sit on a small couch near the edge of the room. “It’d be rude to refuse,” Lady R said. Her pupils were already dilated and her pretty red lips widened to reveal her layer of secret teeth. Was this what Domek had seen when he had looked at Ora? A monster in a lady’s dress?

  Ora sat down on the couch and placed one hand on the closest human’s neck.

  * * *

  Domek and Kája slipped through the pijavice’s house, invisible as promised. After they emerged from the disturbing scene in the kitchen, they discovered an ornately decorated house. Vases, furs, trinkets—it was like entering a museum. Domek could not have afforded a single decoration, even if he had saved everything he’d made.

  “Can wisps create money?” Domek asked Kája. “If these are the pijavice who found you in the vodník’s pond, could they have worked with the wisps to build this house?”

  “You’re invisible. You could steal every expensive item in this building and no one would know until they checked their empty pedestals,” Kája pointed out. “With control of a wisp, anyone could become a rich man.”

  Domek hummed and moved forward.

  Near the front of the house, he heard voices muffled by the walls.

  “Any reason why we’re avoiding the room where everyone is?” Kája asked as Domek approached the grand staircase, which was made of dark wood and lined with gold filigree.

  “I’d rather see what they’re keeping secret.”

  A door opened and a butler emerged into the entrance hall, carrying a stack of white towels. He must have been human. There was sweat on his brow. Domek froze with one foot on the stairs, but the man did not look at them. Instead, he bustled on toward the back of the house, leaving them alone again.

  “You don’t trust my magic?” Kája asked, already floating ahead up the stairs.

  “Can you blame me?” Domek muttered, following him. He had been right—it was disconcerting to have to trust you were invisible, though the world seemed the same.

  Outside of the opulent ground floor, the house was less extravagant. Though the building materials were still as fine as those Domek had seen at the opera house, the hallways upstairs were more sparsely decorated. It was easier to walk here without the constant threat of knocking over some expensive vase that would have the entire nest hunting him.

  On the first floor, Domek found a storage room stacked high with wooden boxes. Moving carefully, and conscious of the supernaturally sharp ears downstairs, he lifted the lid of the first. Sifting through a bundle of straw, he expected to find one of the vodník jars Bazil had warned him had been smuggled into Prague.

  Instead, he found rows of metal tins. They were unmarked, but a quick sniff confirmed that they were filled with opium. In another crate, he found empty glass vials still packaged with the maker’s wax, unopened. A third had copper tubing, the type he had seen in Imrich’s apartment. Were these crates a random amalgamation of a trading business, or part of some larger scheme? The latter two crates seemed more appropriate for an alchemist than a wealthy trader.

  “Can you look inside these crates?” he asked Kája. “Are you able to tell if there are any vodník jars here?”

  Kája floated quickly through the room, his orange glow passing in and out of the various boxes incorporeally. Though the flames brushed the wooden frames and straw packaging within, nothing caught fire. Kája returned to his side. “If they are keeping any, they aren’t here.”

  Perhaps…perhaps there were pijavice who lived as humans. If Ora was the woman he had first thought, her friends could also be pijavice living within mortal laws. The human meals downstairs may have known precisely what they were being paid to do. There were prostitutes for all tastes. Though drinking human blood was repugnant, if the victims were compensated well and survived the encounter, could Domek let Ora live?

  In the next room, Domek froze in the doorway. Any idea of a cabal of benign pijavice was dashed to piec
es.

  The stench, hidden by the previously closed door, was unmistakable. In his time as a lamplighter, he had uncovered a dozen pijavica nests in and under Prague. The stink of their victims haunted his dreams.

  Bones, stripped clumsily of their flesh and belongings, were stacked in the corners of the room. Empty boxes sat in the middle, already lined with straw. Despite the expensive trappings of the house, despite Ora’s smiles, this was still the lair of monsters. “Are they planning on shipping them somewhere?” Domek wondered.

  “They have no yard for burials, and I’d imagine throwing them in the stream would be suspicious,” Kája said, hovering in front of an abandoned skull.

  Domek’s stomach churned with anger. “We’ll get them their justice,” he said, closing the door on the macabre discovery.

  The staircase to the top level was a simple, narrow spiral twisting upward like a storm cloud. The ceiling of the second floor was cramped where the slanted roof cut downward, making the walls close in on them.

  In addition to a collection of small bedrooms—which must have belonged to the house staff, as pijavice needed no sleep—they found a long, narrow office. A heavy wooden desk stacked with papers sat near the door, and the walls were covered with maps. Some were country maps, outlining all of Europe and beyond, but most focused in on various regions of the nearby countryside. Metal pins had been stuck throughout, labeled with small scraps of paper featuring miniscule handwriting.

  “Kája, I need your light,” Domek said, drawing the wisp from where he had been exploring the far end of the room. He plucked one of the scraps of paper from a pin, revealing that the mark was directly over a small pond in the Black Forest. With the bright flame of Kája’s core, he was able to read the cramped handwriting. Empty.

  He returned the slip of paper and picked another, this one pinned to the middle of a tributary of the Morava River toward the west. One vodník. Five soul jars, four occupied. No wisps.

  There was no longer space for uncertainty. Ora was one of the pijavice who had found Kája.

  “These are all the places they’ve been searching for wisps captured by vodníks,” Domek realized. He blinked at the vast map. It stretched far across the Empire. “They must have been searching for years.”

  “From this house, they seem to have enough money to not need to do all the searching themselves,” Kája pointed out. “I wonder where they found me.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I was wandering for so long before the vodník caught me, I lost track of where I was. I was in an unfamiliar forest. In a hundred years of drifting, I could have been anywhere.” Kája was silent for a contemplative moment while Domek continued checking the different scraps of paper. Between the wavering light and the sloppy handwriting, they were difficult to decipher. “How many of us have they found? It must be like striking gold—the exact combination of finding a vodník who managed to capture a wisp in one of its jars would be almost impossible. Each step is rare by itself.”

  “Most of these mark failures,” Domek said, sifting through a few more. “It’s no wonder they’ve been trying so hard to get you back from me. They can’t have found very many.”

  Domek abandoned the maps to examine the stacks of papers. Most were shipping logs from various boats, with high numbers in the payment columns. “Would having a wisp on their side help them find others?” he mused.

  “Unlikely. If they’re only trying to find wisps that have already been captured, everything they’re looking for would be underwater inside a vodník’s lair. Without the jar to protect our essences, going underwater to try to detect another spirit would be suicide,” Kája said. “That’s why the ones who found me had so many smashed jars with them. They’d been checking them one by one.”

  There was a worn leather journal under the loose sheets of paper. The notes inside were even less legible than on the map. Domek doubted their author could even read them—some words were just rows of erratic loops, and none of the accents seemed connected to any specific letter. He pulled out a few words—light, silver, and death all started with the same distinctive ‘s’—but the context was incomprehensible.

  “The wisps aren’t up here,” Domek said, giving up and shutting the book. “We haven’t seen a single jar or freed wisp floating around. If they’ve been gathering them—where are they? Could they be hiding from us the way we are from them?”

  “It depends on the spirit. I’m powerful, stronger than most. At least, I assume so—I was in life. My illusions would likely overpower theirs. I believe I would know if there were any wisps nearby, and I’m sure there are not.”

  Domek looked around the attic. “Do you think this building has a cellar?”

  “It’s likely,” Kája said.

  “Can you check?”

  Silently, Kája sunk through the floor. It was eerily quiet while Domek waited, alert for any sign the monsters gathered below had noticed their presence. Kája returned quickly from his reconnaissance. “There is. I’ve found the door.”

  “Lead on,” Domek said.

  They crept down the two staircases until they reached a door in a narrow hallway near the front entrance. After making sure the hallway was clear, they slipped inside the unlocked door. The cellar was dark and damp, and a cold wall of air made Domek shiver. The blackness consumed the wooden steps midway down, cloaking the rest of the cellar. With Kája’s light, Domek carefully descended into a single open room.

  Most of Prague’s underground was left over from the ancient city centuries ago that had resided by the Vltava. The small river stones covering the floor and the pale stone walls were a familiar sight; less so were the chains. Blood coated the cuffs dangling from the walls, thick and black with age.

  Domek inspected the chains while Kája hovered across the room. In the center was a long table full of beakers, copper tubing, and what looked like a portable distillery. If the pijavice were selling their own homemade drugs, like that opium from upstairs, they might have used their cellar to dilute and experiment with tinctures. Ora must have been putting her scientific interest to use for her nest. “Don’t touch anything,” he instructed.

  Beneath the blood, the chains were coated with ash, likely hawthorn. Thick mesh gloves hung on the wall nearby so that the residents could manipulate the poisoned metal without being burned themselves. Between these and the ashes the maid had tossed out earlier, Domek was growing more confused. The house was crawling with pijavice. Why did it seem like so many of their victims were also pijavice? Where did the wisps the nest had so clearly been searching for fit in, and where could they be?

  There was another door in the corner of the room, at the base of a short, steep set of stairs. Domek went over and pressed his ear to it to make sure that no pijavice were waiting nearby. It was as silent as the rest of the basement. He opened it, hoping to find the chamber where they’d hidden the soul jars, but the door led down to a dark underground tunnel, which disappeared around a bend ahead.

  He closed the door, shaking his head. “I don’t understand it. The wisps aren’t here.”

  “No. They’re not,” Kája said. For the first time since Domek had met him, the wisp sounded truly unnerved.

  The distillery was of unusual design. There was a section to boil and separate the layers from the raw substance, pipes that could be used to draw out the different levels, and a winding tube that dripped into a final container. There were pliers and scalpels on the far side of the table, more likely used on the victims they kept in those chains than in any experiments. From their luster, they seemed crafted of silver rather than the standard steel. The pijavice clearly had more money than they knew what to do with.

  Finally, Domek noticed the pile of clay jars abandoned on the floor. Some were shattered into large pieces, their intricately carved curves shadowed in the dim light.

  Kája wasn’t looking down there, though.

  One of the vials at the center of the table was full. The liquid inside shimm
ered slightly and had a rainbow sheen, like it had been touched by oil.

  “What is that?” Domek asked.

  “This is the last spirit they took,” he said. His voice wavered like his flames. “I can feel her energy. There’s still power here, even though it’s been poisoned and diluted.”

  “That’s a wisp?” Was the essence in the vial what Kája would look like if his fire were snuffed? It seemed too small, too lifeless.

  “It was. They killed her and then tore her into pieces. No soul should look like this.” Kája looked around the room. “They aren’t teaming up with my people. This is a slaughterhouse.”

  “Stay very still,” Ora whispered into the human’s ear. The woman at her feet was young, no more than fourteen. Her small breasts were pushed up by a tight corset and there was dark lip color swiped across her mouth. She seemed fragile and innocent, kneeling in a room full of pijavice. Her pulse beat wildly in her pale, bare throat. Cradling her head was like holding a rabbit in her palm: delicate, fragile, powerless. Had the Zizkovs warned the evening’s entertainment just what they were going to be subjected to?

  The Zizkov family watched as the guests enjoyed their meals. Mayer and Crane remained beside the door, conversing quietly. It was a display of power—all of these bodies were spare, selected for their guests. No one in the family needed to consume the free blood to survive. Some of the humans remained untouched, sitting still as statues, and Ora was relieved, even though her performance would have been easier had Mayer and Crane been distracted.

  Glancing around to make sure that the other pijavice were indulging, Ora used a sharpened nail to prick the girl’s neck. The fresh human blood smelled fantastic, raw and wild. Ora inhaled deeply. Then, she pressed a chaste kiss on the skin above it, using her thumb to wipe away the blood. She smeared her wet thumb on her bottom lip and then sat up. The girl shuddered.

  Beside her, Lady R was drinking deeply. There were ways to drain blood painlessly, but either Lady R had never learned or didn’t bother. Despite her aggressive handling, the man at her feet appeared dazed and lost. Even with the prick of three-dozen sharp teeth in his neck, he was on the verge of falling asleep. The soporific in Lady R’s fangs was taking effect.