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 said. “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.