I sometimes wondered at the control that it took for Bran, a musician born and bred, to listen to an unhappy eleven-year-old (me) fight the piano through a Beethoven piece that would not have been one of the great man’s better melodies even had it been played well.
For two years, I played the same piece, as badly as I could manage without looking like that was what I was trying to do, at about half the speed it was meant to be played. I still hear it in my nightmares sometimes, and I imagine Bran does, too. Eventually, to my immense satisfaction, he quit calling upon me to play.
Usually Bran closed out those evenings by singing something himself, sometimes alone or with Charles or Samuel, his sons. But sometimes he’d tell us stories instead. His stories had the cadence of a fairy tale—something passed along and recited so often their words remained almost the same each time they were told. But most of his stories I’d never found anywhere else.
One of those stories that he’d told a couple of times talked about a castle bespelled by a wicked witch. Witches were always wicked in Bran’s stories. This story’s witch cast a spell that made people avoid looking at the castle, talking about it, or thinking about it until it was as well hidden in plain sight as it would have been surrounded by walls and a thicket of brambles. After a few generations, no one lived who knew there was a castle in the town though it sat upon the top of the hill in the center of town.
I wondered if Bran and this vampire had happened upon the same trove of stories and the vampire had found a witch to hire. No vampire who could do this, or who controlled a witch who could do this, was someone I wanted to trifle with. Especially not on a whim of curiosity. Whatever had caused Mary to take an interest in me was better discussed when I stood next to Adam in the center of the local werewolf den surrounded by werewolves. Or, better yet, over the phone, while I sat beside Adam in our own living room.
Being mostly unaffected by vampire magic had its upside and its downside. It meant that the mind tricks that most vampires could pull on their victims didn’t work well on me. But it also meant that I’d walked into the middle of a vampire’s stronghold by myself without meaning to.
I took another step, and something fell around my neck with brutal swiftness. In my misspent past, I’ve been picked up by a dog catcher or two, and I know what a catch pole feels like. I froze. Why would a vampire seethe have a catch pole?
A voice purred behind me in Czech. I had no idea what she was saying. She gave the pole a jerk, half strangling me, and I coughed.
Jitka and Martin were only fifty yards away, but they were on the other side of the barrier. They were no good to me at all. As I watched, they exchanged a few quiet words, shook their heads, and walked with brisk energy out of the park. The spell probably encouraged people to go away. That’s what I would have done if I could set a spell like that.
I would have been better off, in retrospect, if Jitka had gotten her way and we had grabbed all the werewolves and charged the front door of Mary’s home base. Assuming my coyote wouldn’t have allowed herself to be separated from the pack the way she’d just done with Jitka and Martin.
—
I SHIVERED MISERABLY IN THE DOG CRATE IN THE BASEMENT of the apartment of the vampire seethe.
The basement, lit by two bare bulb fixtures in the high ceiling, had a dirt floor and rough-cast cement walls. The crate I was in sat next to the remains of an old furnace that was in the same state the rest of the building was in. It probably hadn’t functioned for fifty years.
The dog crate answered why the vampires would have had a catch pole. It was made from welded metal mesh that was probably steel underneath its coat of silver and was riddled with magic. It had held werewolves—I could distinguish five or six different scents and some too faded to assess. No one I’d met. The silver affected me not at all, nor did the magic, but I was exhausted. The dead and rotting corpses I shared the basement with were not reassuring. Worse was the vampire chained to the wall, not too far from me. He was wearing jeans and a short-sleeved shirt over a tank top. None of them looked dirty enough to have been on his body for more than a day or two, proof that he had recently had enough control he could put on clothes. He watched me with hungry-mad eyes while he screamed in inchoate rage at irregular intervals.
I reached out to Adam. Though I couldn’t actually communicate with him yet, I could feel the steady warmth of his presence. I clung to that as hard as I could.
And attracted the attention of something else.
—
PERHAPS AN HOUR LATER, MARY, THE MISTRESS OF the seethe, came down the stairs of the basement with the easy, definite movements and bearing of a career soldier. She didn’t introduce herself, but she came striding boldly into the darkness with an I’m-in-charge air—who else could she have been?
If she’d been in Prague since the late 1940s, then I didn’t see how she could have been a soldier. There are a lot of werewolves I’d known who’d served time in the military of one sort or another, though, so I’d seen a lot of soldiers. The posture was unmistakable. If she were German, she could have been one of the Hitler M?dchen, maybe. The Hitler M?dchen were sort of a paramilitary Girl Scouts trained to nark on their parents and neighbors.
Mary was not a lovely person. Her face was broad and flat, her eyes small, and her mouth wide but ungenerous. As a human, I thought she probably had tended toward heaviness. Her frame looked gaunt and wrong, with the model thinness that most vampires carried. Her hair was blond and pulled back into a bun, and even I could tell that was an unfortunate choice.
She trailed followers behind her as though she were a bride and they the attendants assigned the task of carrying her veil off the ground. The attendants closest to her were human, one pretty blank-faced man and a pretty blank-faced woman.
Both humans were naked and covered with bite marks on all of their pulse points and lots of other points, too. The girl had suntan lines, and some jokester had drawn along the bikini top with a black Sharpie. The boy was very dark-skinned, and in the shadows of the basement, he was harder to see.
I tried not to look at their faces, because it was unlikely I could do anything to protect them. Unlikely I could do anything to protect myself from what was coming tonight. They’d been here long enough that some of the bite marks were scars, so there might not be a lot left of them to save.
A vampire like Stefan, who took care of the humans he fed from, could keep them mostly unaffected by his bite for decades. But most vampires were too impatient for that. I was betting that Mary’s seethe was full of vampires who didn’t care about the humans they fed from. The Sharpie bikini was a dead giveaway.
The rest of Mary’s attendants were vampires of both sexes and various appearances. None of them was the woman who had caught me and stuffed me down here. When they quit coming down the stairs, there were ten of them, not including the humans.
I wondered that she thought I was so dangerous. Surely she didn’t always travel around her own home with twelve minions? Maybe she was trying to impress me. Maybe she was simply making a statement of some sort.
Or possibly she trailed minions wherever she went. Just as she trailed the stench of a black witch. What idiot vampire had decided it was a good idea to change a witch into a vampire? She must be able to hide her scent—or she never went out on her own—because any werewolf with a nose would otherwise understand immediately what she was. I supposed that a witch who could hide her seethe in the middle of Prague for over half a century could probably manage to hide what she was if she wanted to.