Her gaze fell upon the chained vampire.
“Why is he still here?” she said. “I told you that experiment was a failure.”
Someone said something.
“Not him?”
Apparently my translator was only translating Mary, so I was getting half the conversation.
She looked at the vampire on the wall and frowned. “This is Weis? He was doing well, I thought.”
The translating vampire looked up and met my eyes and broke protocol while Mary’s attention was elsewhere.
He spoke to me very quickly in a low tone. “She has been using witchcraft to try to make humans into vampires more quickly. Recently, she has been successful. That one took her two weeks to make, and he functioned for three months. But they devolve with suddenness and without warning.” He paused. “If you escaped the Master of Milan, then perhaps you will survive this. Someone should know what she has done, so that they are prepared for the problems this will cause. They should destroy any vampire who belonged to her, so that news of this does not get out.”
Two weeks to make a vampire, something that could take years by the standard manner. He was absolutely right. If the other vampires knew there was a way to make vampires so quickly, we’d be armpit deep in them before we knew what we were doing. Armpit deep in vampires who could switch to mindless monsters.
I nodded to show him I heard what he was saying.
Mary, meanwhile, walked up to the vampire chained to the wall. At her approach, he quieted. She held her wrist to him, and he lunged forward violently, digging his fangs into her as if he were afraid she would pull away.
But, though her body stiffened a little, she did not move away. The smell of witchcraft grew stronger, and I remembered that witches turned pain into power, even their own pain. She reached up with her free hand and petted his hair.
She said something to him, but my translator fell silent, so I don’t know what it was. It sounded tender, something a mother would say to a sick child.
The feeding took a long time, and no one but Mary made a move of any kind. I don’t think they were performing for me, so I upped my assessment of how scary Mary was, and she was already pretty far up there.
I put my head down and tried to look small and innocuous, and at the same time keep an eye on everyone. The only good thing about the cage, from my perspective, was that for any of them to touch me skin to skin, they’d have to open the cage door.
Murmuring softly, Mary pulled her ravaged wrist away from the feeding vampire. He stood for a moment in a daze, blinked, then looked around.
He said something.
“Why am I in this place?” translated my ally—if he was an ally. “Why am I here, Mistress? Did I displease you?”
Mary patted his cheek with her good hand while the human girl wrapped her wrist with a cleanish once-white cloth. She said something to him, and he smiled.
In a blink of an eye, his face changed and he lunged forward. This time he buried his fangs in the neck of the girl, whom Mary jerked in front of her as a shield against the attack. Mary stepped back out of range. She reached out, grabbed the girl’s arm, and pulled her away from the crazed vampire without any care for how much more damage she was doing to her pet. The human girl stood where Mary had set her for a moment, her mouth open in pain or astonishment. Blood gushed out of her torn throat, a black arterial flow that covered her tan skin and slid downward. The girl brought her hand to her throat, then fell, face forward. She hit the dirt floor with a thump, dead, I judged, as she fell, though her body kept moving for a few moments more.
Mary turned her attention to the vampire, who was now hanging limply from his chains. She raised her hand toward him—a hand covered liberally with blood, both hers and the dead girl’s and probably the other vampire’s as well. And she began chanting.
Witchcraft.
For a moment, hers was the only voice in the room. I could feel the draw of it. It crawled over me like a wet mouth looking for something good to eat, but it slid off me, leaving only a residue of magic behind.
Just about then the vampire in the chains began screaming again, but it was a different kind of scream. His body jerked and shook as if he were hooked up to electric prods. After a few minutes, his voice broke under the strain—and still he screamed.
Witches feed on pain.
Eventually, he fell silent and I knew—because I could feel it through the residual bits of her magic—that he was gone. He didn’t rot or turn to dust. He must have been very new, though, because he didn’t even smell like a rotten corpse. He just smelled dead.
“So you see,” said the English-speaking vampire very quietly. “Abomination.”
This time Mary heard him. She turned to him, her eyes cool. She said something.
“Why are you whispering to her, Kocourek?” she asked, and he translated her words for me.
Kocourek. Kocourek was the Master of the primary seethe of Prague. So what was he doing on his knees in front of Mary? I wondered how long he’d been under her thumb.
Libor should have paid more attention to the vampires in his city.
Kocourek said something to her.
Mary considered the kneeling vampire. She looked around and said something to the rest of the room.
“Who else speaks English here?” she asked, and again he translated.
No one volunteered.
She said a word and closed her fingers briefly next to her mouth. He bowed his head and rose. When she walked up the old wooden stairs, he followed without looking back at me. Her train was a little lopsided, without the human girl, but no one seemed to notice except for me.
She stopped at the top of the landing. “He says that your mate convinced the Lord of Night that your death will cause a war between the Werewolf King and Bonarata’s people. He asked me not to kill you just yet until he can check it out.” She smiled, and this time it was the kind of joyous smile that made her plain face beautiful. “But he will let me know shortly. And in the meantime, I am welcome to enjoy myself. I am busy just now, but look for me in a few hours. I’ve never gotten to play with one of your kind before.”
They left the two bodies where they were. They weren’t the only dead in that basement. A city as old as Prague, a place as old as this building, has a lot of ghosts. And the dead of this part of Prague had witnessed Mary’s visit. Now they, like me, turned their attention to the other monster who had waited while those who could not see the dead conducted their business.
—
ALMOST AN HOUR EARLIER, WHEN I’D REACHED FOR Adam, hoping that somehow our link would function as it should, that somehow I could find him, let him know that I needed him, that I loved him, that I was scared and alone . . . I’d felt something touch my bond with Adam and slide away, unable to penetrate, to get inside of me or my bond. Instead, whoever it was used our bond to slide through the witch’s spells and into the basement where I was held.
It was different than it had been before. Its presence was even bigger. I could feel its magic, unfamiliar and familiar at the same time, and it flowed through me like an electric current as all around us, ghosts stirred. There were a lot of ghosts.
The vampire on the wall had drawn a breath to scream again, but instead he fell silent, as if he could sense the golem’s presence. He flattened against the wall and turned his face away from us.
The biggest difference between the first time I met the golem and this time was that it spoke to me.
Mercy, said the golem in my head. It didn’t really use my name, not as such, but an identifier that was more who I was than my own name could convey.