“Wake up, woman,” said a gruff voice that belonged to a man I hadn’t seen before.
He was slender and compact, like a gymnast. If you saw him in a suit, you would never know how much muscle he carried. In the tight tank shirt and jeans, he emphasized it. He looked a little like the man who had followed me until I’d taken refuge in the garden of the friendly mastiff. Maybe they were related. He was one of those men who would look like a teenager until his hair started graying, but since he was a werewolf, that would never happen. I wondered if he’d learned to turn that into a strength yet.
I’d been raised in the Marrok’s pack. I never judged the strength of a person by their outward appearance. The Marrok didn’t look like a man who held the reins of thousands of werewolves who would die for him. He looked like a pizza delivery boy or a gas-station attendant—right up until he didn’t.
“What do you need?” I asked.
“Libor says to tell you that there are vampires here, looking for you and being forceful about it. We need to move you. Gather your things, and I’ll take you.” His voice was British-pure, though that wasn’t a guarantee that he was from the UK. Most English speakers in Europe, I was discovering, had learned to speak British English rather than the American version.
I turned on the table lamp and realized that my other set of clothing was in the wash. I put the borrowed shoes on without socks and took the pack that contained a very little money and a dead e-reader.
“Ready,” I said.
Danek met us at the base of the stairs and pointed in the opposite direction the werewolf was trying to take me. That left me in a quandary. Ghosts, like the fae, don’t lie. They are so literal, you have to be careful about believing anything they say. He might have been pointing us toward the bad guys instead of away.
Before I could ask him anything, Libor’s dead wife appeared and pointed the same way.
Tell him to take the way through the kitchens, she said. The vampires have the usual exits surrounded.
“The ghosts say that there are vampires at the usual exits,” I told the werewolf. “We need to use the way through the kitchens.”
He froze.
“I only get weirder the longer you know me,” I told him, quoting one of the T-shirts I’d gotten for my last birthday.
His nostrils flared, and he looked around a little wildly, trying to see the ghosts, I think. Danek brushed against a table, making it scrape across the floor, and the werewolf jumped.
I rolled my eyes (a gesture I’d caught from my teenage stepdaughter). Sometimes it was the only thing that properly expressed my opinion. Seriously? The werewolf was afraid of ghosts?
Ignoring him, I started down the route Libor’s dead wife was still indicating, across the room and down a dark hallway.
“I thought ghosts were just bits and pieces of the person who died,” said the werewolf very quietly as he passed me.
He seemed to suddenly know where we were going and led the way at a brisk pace.
“Yes,” I said. “No. Sometimes.” His words were close enough to what I’d said to Libor that I was pretty sure Libor had been talking to his wolves. And well he should, because though his wife had been relatively benign, I was pretty sure Danek was going to be a problem.
“Then why are they warning us about something happening right now?” he asked.
The hall floor suddenly dropped about three inches and took a jag to the right. A few paces farther on, there were three shallow stairs that took us up about a foot altogether. The wolf had continued speaking quietly as he held my arm to make sure I didn’t stumble up the steps. “If they are just bits and pieces, don’t you think they should be moaning here and tossing things about rather than giving warnings about vampires?”
“Some of them retain a lot of their predecessor’s personality,” I told him, though I’d wondered about the nature of ghosts for exactly the same kinds of reasons. All well and good to dismiss them as . . . as nothings when one of them wasn’t leaving you drawings or another one wasn’t trying to help you survive. But I gave him the only answer I had. “The ones who bear grudges or are extremely attached to someone who is still living seem to be the most independent of thought.”
The kitchens were huge, and there were two of them. The front half was modern and filled with ovens, various kinds of cooking surfaces, and giant mixing machines taller than I was, with bowls that sat on the ground. Everything was immaculate.
There was a half wall and a wider than the usual doorway opening that led into a room that looked as though it had been pulled directly from the Middle Ages. The far wall had a giant fireplace with a spit. Beside it was a stack of metal pots that looked as though they should have a witch throwing eyes of newts and snail tails or something in them. One of the long walls was covered by a giant brick oven with rows and columns of regularly spaced openings that were about two feet square.
My werewolf guide trotted right up to the farthest opening and climbed through. I did the same and found that the inside of the oven was a room in its own right. Against one of the inner walls was a narrow metal ladder, up which my guide was already climbing. I followed him up a couple of stories and out to the roof of the building.
The werewolf had quit talking and was making an effort to be silent, so I followed suit. We weaved our way between chimneys on the roof of the bakery. When we reached the end of the bakery, there was a narrow hop, and we kept going on the roof of the next building. We probably made a quarter of a mile before we jumped to the ground.
The werewolf, still quiet, didn’t speed up from the easy jog we’d begun on the rooftops, and he took us into a more residential and modern section of the town. In total, we ran maybe six miles, long enough for me to regret my lack of socks. He took me to a garage under an apartment building built in the last hundred years and stopped by a motorcycle. He started to get on it, then stopped.
“We’ll attract too much attention without helmets,” he said. “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”
He was as good as his word, returning with a pair of helmets. He tossed me one and put on the other himself.
Mine wasn’t a perfect fit—and I didn’t like the way it restricted my vision—but I didn’t complain. When he mounted the bike, I climbed on behind him and held on.
The last time I’d ridden behind someone on a motorcycle I’d been in college. Char, my roommate, had had a Harley. We’d taken it out and gone camping now and then, just to get away from school.
This bike was about half the size of Char’s and much quieter, but being a passenger behind the werewolf wasn’t much different than being a passenger behind Char had been.
7
Adam
Bonarata’s villa in Milan, in the wee small hours of the first night I spent in Prague. At this moment I was huddled next to the Vltava while a ghost dripped water on my head. So this chapter begins before the previous chapter started. I told you it was going to get tricksy.
THEY WERE GIVEN A LARGE SUITE WITH THREE bedrooms, each equipped with a king-sized bed and a bathroom. They looked pristine and newly remodeled, but this was a very old building, and it had seen a lot of violence. Adam could smell the faint musk of fear and the rotten iron of old blood as if it, like the stone, wood, and paint, was part of the material that made up the structure.
Their luggage had been piled tidily inside the main door of the suite when they got there. Adam figured that they’d been driven from the airfield the long way to allow the luggage to beat them.
“Dress for dinner, he says?” said Larry as soon as their escorting vampire guide had left. “It’s four in the morning Milan time.”
“You can hardly expect vampires to eat in the day,” said Marsilia.