—
WE STARTED BY BACKTRACKING THE FOUR WHO HAD attacked us to their car, parked a couple of miles away. Actually, I started by sifting through vampire ashes looking for a car key or fob or something. Jitka and Martin put together a pack of things they were sure would allow us to extract a single vampire and restrain it with minimum chances of having it break free and kill us all. Just in case, they said when I objected that we were only going in to observe and report back.
The car was an expensive new model with a correspondingly expensive new guidance system on board. Jitka and Martin complained about how well financed Mary seemed to be getting. They seemed to take the luxury car as a personal insult, and I was reminded that not so long ago by the standards of long-lived creatures, the Czech Republic had been part of the Soviet bloc. Under the communist regime, personal wealth had been viewed as a moral failure.
I wasn’t sure that wasn’t correct.
We got lucky with the car key I’d found on the third ash pile I’d gone through. It was one of the keyless fobs and half-melted, but apparently the right half was undamaged, because the car unlocked when Martin held it next to the door.
I did know how to start a car without a key—even a modern car—but I needed a few more supplies than I had at hand. It was a good thing the key had survived.
Still commenting—presumably, because they’d switched back to Czech to continue their complaints—Martin started the car, switched on the nav system, and found, in the saved locations, one that was helpfully labeled with the “home” icon.
If their car hadn’t had GPS, Martin knew of a few places where one of the dead vampires had been spotted a couple of days ago. I could have tried picking up his trail and following it. But, probably, we would have given the whole thing up and gotten a hotel room for the rest of the night. The GPS was a big break.
“If they weren’t living like rich people,” said Jitka in satisfied tones, “then we would have had to give up. This is what living too well does. It makes you weak.”
We piled in, and Martin drove the car sedately back through the streets of Dobrichovice, past the castle, and back on the highway. Home got us to a parking garage in a section of Prague filled with older apartment complexes. In the TriCities, older would mean fifty or sixty years; here, older was two or three hundred years.
There were two spaces empty, and we pulled the car into one and parked. The smell of cars and city and lots and lots of people filled the garage. It was pretty easy to tell we’d hit gold because the cars on either side of the car we’d come in smelled of vampire, too.
Less happily, Jitka, who’d begun calling as soon as we started back toward the city, hadn’t been able to get through to Libor. She put her phone in her pocket.
“I left a message for him this time,” she said. “He does not text. I told him we were in Josefov, and we have a way to find where Mary and her vampires are. I told him we would go looking and call him if we find something.”
Martin nodded. “Can you trail anyone in this?” He waved his hands around to indicate the complex muddle of scents.
She took a deep breath, then shook her head. “I can smell vampire, but to track, I will need to be wolf.”
Martin nodded agreement. “Me as well. I have not changed for three days. I could do it as long as I could stay in wolf form for four or five hours.”
“Hold it,” I said. “We probably want both of you in human skins, assuming we can keep this from being an outright battle. Why don’t you let me do this?”
“What are you?” Jitka asked with an edge to her voice, as if she had already been anticipating the beginning of her change.
I stripped off my borrowed clothes and looked around helplessly for a moment. In any other circumstances, I’d have thrown them in the nearest garbage can, but I’d started to feel possessive of my meager wardrobe.
I rolled the shirt and pants into a bundle as quickly as I could manage—it wasn’t likely that there would be visitors to the garage this late at night. Still, I preferred not to moon people who didn’t deserve it.
I gave my clothes to Jitka because that was slightly less embarrassing than handing them over to Martin.
“You aren’t a werewolf,” said Jitka positively, and not for the first time.
“There are supposed to be other kinds of shapeshifters.” Martin’s voice was hushed. “I’ve read stories. Weretigers. Dragons. That sort of thing.”
“If you are expecting a dragon, you’re going to be disappointed,” I told him.
And I changed into my coyote shape. When I was a teenager, I changed back and forth in front of a mirror, trying to see what it looked like. But one of the things that changes dramatically for me while shifting is my vision, so things get blurry. I’ve never seen much, but Adam told me there isn’t a lot to see—one moment I’m human, the next a coyote.
I might not get to see myself change, but I’d seen a lot of werewolf changes, and I’m very glad that mine is both quick and painless.
Martin’s jaw dropped open.
“What are you?” Jitka asked. “Some sort of dog?”
I flattened my ears at her and gave an impatient yip.
“You aren’t a wolf,” said Martin. “Something native to the US?”
“Coyote?” Jitka said. “Like in the cartoons with the Road Runner.”
I let my ears pop back up and smiled at them both.
“Well.” Jitka dragged the word out as she inspected me. “I thought coyotes were bigger.”
“Maybe roadrunners are smaller,” speculated Martin. “I guess the question is, how is your sense of smell?”
I yipped once, put my nose to the ground, and began casting about.
Scent trails are something that training makes better. The real trouble I’ve always had is that the information my canine nose gives me is overwhelming. When I was a teenager, Charles spent a lot of time and effort teaching me how to sort things out. I’d gotten a good sniff of our attackers, but the scent of the woman I’d killed with the scythe was strongest in my memory, so I focused on her.
I caught her scent right away, but I didn’t start following immediately. I let my mind relax and walked back and forth for a while until I was sure that I’d found the freshest scent. It was the one with a hint of absinthe, as though she’d been intimate with someone who was drinking or maybe someone spilled some on her. Maybe she’d been drinking it herself, though that was fairly unusual for vampires.
In any case, the absinthe edge distinguished that trail from all the others. It was the trail that contained the most nuanced complex of odors, which meant it was freshest, because those fade with time.
She had used the steps instead of the elevator. I focused on my prey and let the werewolves take care of keeping up with me.
9
Mercy
I seemed to be spending a lot of time wandering the streets of Prague at night. Not the best way to see Prague, but at least we weren’t running into very many tourists.
THE APARTMENT BUILDINGS THAT LINED THE STREETS were probably not old by Prague standards, since they certainly didn’t date back to the Middle Ages. But they weren’t built in this century, either. They were stacked six or seven floors high and shoulder to shoulder, leaving no room for a mouse to squeeze through between them.
They also looked vaguely familiar. We were close enough to Old Town that the streets and sidewalks were cobbled, so at first I assumed that it was because I’d passed this way when I had traveled the streets alone last night, and that was sort of true.