“Mercy?” Jitka asked.
I realized I was sitting on the floor in the corner of her room. Martin was as far from me as he could get, watching me with a concerned look. Jitka was crouching about three feet from me, careful to give me space.
I met her eyes and said, “I hate PTSD, you know?” I remembered I was talking to a werewolf and turned my gaze to the floor. It was less humiliating talking to the floor, anyway. “It’s been years—and I killed that bastard. And it’s not like I was really hurt, right? I’ve been sent to the hospital by a volcano god, and that didn’t do anything but give my husband nightmares.”
Jitka nodded like all this was making sense. “Hurt comes in all forms. I wake up at least once a year to a memory that makes me shake for hours—something that happened 122 years ago. I have seen and done so much worse since that thing, and it wasn’t even something that happened to me. And still.”
She didn’t say what it was she dreamed of, and I didn’t ask. The whole room smelled like fear. My fear.
I didn’t do this hardly at all anymore. Maybe once or twice a month as opposed to the three or four times a day it used to be. Most of the panic attacks weren’t this bad. I hadn’t had a real episode for a couple of months.
And it had turned the respect in Martin’s face into compassion, into worry, into pity.
I stood up. Went into the little bathroom and closed the door behind me. I washed my face and looked at myself in Jitka’s mirror. The big bruise on my left cheek had spread since I looked at it this morning. There were dark circles under my eyes from lack of sleep.
I looked like a victim.
I was done, really done, with being a victim.
I opened the bathroom door and sat down where I’d started. “We cannot stay here because the vampires know where we are, right?” I knew, I knew that I shouldn’t do this. But the image of the victim remained in my mind.
I was dog-tired, and when I moved again, I was going to be stiff from hitting the ground and from bruises I didn’t remember getting: this wasn’t my first fight. I knew all about the aftermath. I should go and let Libor’s pack pay for a hotel room for me until we could pay them back. I should wait for Adam.
“Yes,” said Jitka.
I didn’t want to get anyone into trouble. So I said, “At this point, even if I ship off to Port-au-Prince or Timbuktu, the violence is going to continue between your pack and the vampires.”
Jitka said, “This attack and the one on our pack home make it quite clear that battle with the vampires is coming. It no longer matters if you are here or in China, Libor will not let this rest.”
“Yes,” said Martin at the same time. Jitka was just talking, but Martin watched me. His shoulders tightened. Maybe it wasn’t just me who needed to do something.
“And you would love to rid Prague of Mary’s seethe . . .” I said.
“Yes,” said Jitka, frowning at me. “But we cannot find it. We track them, and the trails just fade into vampire magic.”
“Okay, then,” I said. “I think I might be able to help you with that. What do you think the chances are that the vampires came here in a car with GPS?”
In the US, the chances would be pretty good. GPS or a cell phone with GPS, which would be harder.
Martin shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. The vampires tend to have expensive things—especially Mary’s people, who are trying to establish themselves with humans.”
“If you can get me to the place the vampires got in their car in Prague, assuming they walked from their seethe, then I can find it,” I told them.
Martin gave me a pitying look. “We have tried that many times, and we are werewolves.”
“Vampire magic doesn’t work right on me,” I told him. “Sometimes not at all.”
“Why not?” Jitka asked.
“I have no idea,” I told her honestly. “But I can see ghosts, too. Maybe one has something to do with the other.” I didn’t say that I could do other things with the dead. If no one knew, then no one could force me to do something I didn’t want to.
“What are you?” Martin asked.
“Not a werewolf,” I said. “Would it be useful to know where Mary’s seethe is?”
“We could go kill them,” said Jitka. She was all but vibrating with eagerness. “Kill them again, I mean, so they stay dead this time. Destroy Mary and her filthy followers in one shot.”
Martin’s eyes brightened. “Yes,” he said.
It wasn’t as stupid as it sounded. If Mary had been strong, she’d have already battled the Master of Prague. Instead, she’d been reduced to rebuilding her vampires, which was a slow and troublesome process, with failure rates higher than the werewolf Change. Most seethes, as I understood it, had a bare handful of strong vampires, then maybe as many as a dozen lesser vampires who depended upon their Master to sustain them.
We’d just killed four of Mary’s seethe. All of them had been vampires for a long time or their bodies wouldn’t have gone to dust. That didn’t mean that they weren’t still lesser vampires, because that usually required a century at least and often more. But I bet she didn’t have a whole lot more at that level. Not if her seethe was only sixty or seventy years old.
And, presumably, Jitka and Martin meant to gather the rest of their pack to destroy the seethe.
But they didn’t know how many vampires they were facing. I’d been raised by a master strategist who taught me that you never go to battle with an unknown enemy.
The werewolves probably knew that, too. Either they knew more about Mary’s seethe than it sounded like, or, more likely, the frustration of hunting her for so long was driving them into recklessness. Apparently it was going to be my job to be the cooler head.
Adam would think that was pretty funny, but I was not a rash person. I did think things through—and then I tried to do the right thing. Just because the right thing and the safest or easiest thing weren’t usually the same didn’t make me rash.
We planned and talked for maybe an hour. When Jitka couldn’t get through to Libor—something that didn’t seem to be unusual—we came up with an alternate plan to frontal assault, which, though satisfying to talk about, was (we decided) unlikely to result in anything useful, especially if we had to do it without help.
It required a lot of tact for me to steer the wolves, since I wasn’t a member of their pack or a werewolf. Only because I was the one they were counting on being able to find the vampires did they listen to me at all.
Martin suggested that we take a page out of Bonarata’s playbook and extract a single vampire. We’d question that one, then turn them over to Libor for further questioning.
That made me pretty queasy. Killing an attacker is an entirely different thing than turning one over for torture. Happily, Jitka batted that one back, so I didn’t have to.
“That is foolish,” she said. “We have tried that. They do not talk. After the third one, Libor said it was enough. That if they were not talking after what he did to them, it was because they could not, not because they would not. There are some witchcraft spells that will do that. Maybe there is vampire magic that stopped their tongues.”
I tried not to think beyond the surface of her words.
Torture was a lot further than I was prepared to go just to find out why they’d decided to work with the other Prague seethe. Maybe I’d feel differently if I lived in Prague, though I didn’t think so. There were probably circumstances that would make me reconsider, but this wasn’t one of those. Probably I should feel badly that Jitka and Martin seemed quite convinced that the endgame would be to destroy the seethe—but vampires are evil. I might like one or two on a personal level—but they kill people in order to keep living.
“So let’s just go find the seethe,” I said, “get what information we can get from watching them, then go back to Libor with that.”
Safe enough, I thought. I’d already proved I could get away from the biggest, baddest vampire in Europe. This shouldn’t be so bad. And I would be going out and doing something.