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February 19 - February 21, 2025
“Don’t tell him,” said the ghost, still sounding like she’d grown up in Aspen Creek, Montana, like I had. Some of the stronger spirits did that—they communicated so forcefully that I heard them without any distortion, as if death granted them a universal language, a quick conduit to my brain without language at all, maybe. I found it very disturbing when they did that. “It would hurt him to know that I watch over him still.”
I didn’t know why some ghosts stayed fresh and strong while most others faded—though sometimes it was because the living paid too much attention to the dead. But that didn’t make the ghosts into the person whose face they wore; it just made them stronger ghosts. I’d seen souls tied to their ghosts once, and I’d never again made the mistake of thinking of a normal ghost as a real person. This woman’s soul had gone on a long, long time ago. I was coming to believe that ghosts were something, though, something that could think and plan and do. Not living, precisely, but not inert, either.
“It isn’t safe to pay too much attention to ghosts. They start to linger, and they pull you in the wrong direction.” My half brother had told me that it was less safe for someone of our lineage to pay attention to the dead than it was for regular people. Too much attention tended to strengthen ghosts and anchor them in the world of the living. Attention from one of our kind was apparently even more energizing.
If she could get into my head enough to talk to me without an accent, then she was powerful enough to affect things in the real world. And if I gave her more power while he was still here loving her, I might never be able to get rid of her.
People tied too closely to ghosts tended to do things like drive their cars into trees, shoot themselves, or drink themselves to death. The dead want to be closer to the living.
Libor was one of those people who liked to tell others how the world worked and not listen to anyone who thought differently.
“He was a coward,” said Libor. “And he feared the wrong monsters.” The war was over, Danek said. We won. My side won, then they killed me. I died anyway. It wasn’t fair. They didn’t even allow me a funeral. No marker for my grave. No mourners.
“I only get weirder the longer you know me,” I told him, quoting one of the T-shirts I’d gotten for my last birthday.
“The ones who bear grudges or are extremely attached to someone who is still living seem to be the most independent of thought.”
“You can hardly expect vampires to eat in the day,” said Marsilia. “Or to eat at all,” offered Honey. “Are we going to be dinner?” “They always have last meal at 5 A.M. here,” answered Stefan. “‘Dinner’ is a word used for guests—think of it as a very early breakfast if you’d like. There are usually guests who aren’t vampires. Bonarata uses it as a gathering for the seethe. There will be fresh blood for all the vampires and good food for everyone else.”
“Trimmed toenails get eaten, I know.” Honey made a sound, and the goblin flashed a grin at her. “Of course, you can flush them if you’d like. I prefer to be certain. Witches are bitches and they’ll burn your britches sure as kittens have itches if you give ’em half a chance.” Elizaveta was in one of the bedrooms. She might not have heard Larry. But Honey was standing right next to him. “I’m a bitch,” said Honey in a smooth voice. The goblin laughed. “That you are, dearie. Don’t
“You aren’t used to dealing with bad guys who are this much more powerful than you are,” he said. “No offense meant. One-on-one, if you and Bonarata got into it, the betting would be pretty even. But Bonarata isn’t just an old vampire. He’s the head of a collective of vampires—just as your Marrok is the head of a collective of werewolves. And it is the collective that is most important to the choice you are making tonight.”
“So what happens to the collective when Bonarata dies is this. Every Master Vampire in Europe and a fair number of them back home think that they should step into Bonarata’s place. Most of ’em because of ambition, because vampires, present company excepted, I’m sure, are ambitious. But there will be some of them who are interested because they don’t want to be bowing and scraping to a vampire who might be stupider or more horrid than Bonarata.” “You have a point?” Adam said. “So how do you think that they will make their first bid to step under Bonarata’s empty crown, eh?” “Kill the dumb
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The best way to keep your people safe is to make Bonarata believe that it is in his best interests that your wife and daughter—as well as everyone in this room and their loved ones—stay alive.”
The blue room should be adequate for the goblin king.” “We don’t call ourselves that,” said Larry dryly. “That was just that one movie. I mean, ‘Larry the Goblin King’ just doesn’t have the right ring to it.
Adam wasn’t interested in fashion as an art form, but he understood how he could use it as a weapon in the business world against men and women who used wealth to judge power. That meant he knew men’s fashions, but also that he didn’t pay any attention to women’s clothing except to note whether it looked good on Mercy or not—which put him one up on Mercy, who didn’t pay attention to fashion at all.
She did not dress to minimize her age—she didn’t dress to minimize anything. She didn’t need to. She looked exactly like what she was: beautiful and deadly.
All this drama was in keeping with the vampires and with Marsilia, anyway. Adam was an old soldier who, like good boots, could be polished up and given a shine—but in the end he was happier being a weapon than an art piece.
Sherwood Post, one of the last werewolves Bran had sent to join Adam’s pack, said he’d discovered that even a werewolf could get drunk by drinking Everclear, the 190-proof version, fast enough. He’d stayed that way by drinking steadily for two days before Bran took away his alcohol and told him to grow up.
Honey, who had taken it upon herself to play guard for the copilot, fell in beside Adam. “What is his name?” Adam asked, tilting his head toward Harris’s man. He’d been given it when he met the two pilots at the airport, but he’d been struggling with the wolf, and it had gone in one ear and out the other—something not usual for him. But if the copilot was going to be among the people Adam was responsible for, Adam needed a name. “Matthew Smith,” said the man himself in a meek voice, though he didn’t turn back. “You can call me Matt, sir.” Then he gave Honey and Adam both a shy smile over his
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“Mercy makes me watch it,” Adam said defensively. “She says it’s for my own good.” Matt the copilot huffed a little laugh under his breath,
“Matt, here’s your seat,” he said, keeping his voice kind because the other wolf didn’t deserve the sharpness of the sudden, possessive bite of an Alpha wolf who feels like someone is trying to take his pack away from him. It wasn’t just that Bonarata had known Matthew Smith’s name—it was that he had surrounded the vulnerable wolf with the people Adam would have put around him: Stefan for strength, Harris for familiarity, and Larry because no one would expect him to be as dangerous as he was.
The copilot sat down in the chair Adam had indicated for him. He put a hand on Adam’s knee and asked, “Trouble?” in a low voice that wouldn’t carry, even to the ears in the room. This wolf was the only person besides Honey in the room whom Adam’s wolf did not view as prey or possible threat. The touch on his knee steadied him as nothing else could have in that moment. Adam had a job to do—and that job did not include playing stupid games with an ancient vampire. He took a breath and nodded to the other wolf. “Thank you,” he said. The copilot dropped his eyes and bowed his shoulders to look
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Honey ignored her table companions, who were not only vampires but also women. Instead, she kept watch on the table where Matthew Smith and Harris were.
“She would not have disobeyed me. Mercedes was safe until she tried to run.” Adam understood what he was hearing. Mercy had not been what Bonarata was prepared to deal with, so he’d set her up to die. A very practical thing, really. If there was only one person telling the story, there could be no debate about what had happened.
“People who stand in the way of my mate’s ability to get herself out of trouble often feel like they were hit by buses. I think this might be the first time it is literally true, though.”
“At least she never hit one of mine with a bus. I wonder if it was a mark of respect—or the opposite. It doesn’t do to underestimate Mercedes, Jacob, something that I had to learn, too. Did she give you the spiel she likes to bring out now and again about how she’s mostly no more powerful than the average human? It is a most effective speech, because I think she actually believes it.”
We drove past a castle—because it was the Czech Republic, and apparently castles were required by all the best villages. The Tri-Cities had no castles. I’d never felt the lack before.
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.”
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.
Without a guillotine or, evidently, a scythe, beheading someone isn’t as easy as the werewolves made it look, which is why most human-strength people are better off hammering a wooden stake into a sleeping vampire’s heart.
“Ivan belongs to the other seethe in Prague,” Martin said. “The woman who rules it calls herself Mary.” He said the name with a decided English twist. “She’s been gathering the scum of the vampires to her for the last four or five decades. As best we can figure it, she must have come in at the close of World War II. But we only noticed her in the middle of the fifties, when Kocourek blew up an old factory trying to find her and kill her and her people. He’s been trying to run her down ever since.”
“Mary’s vampires go out and harvest food wherever. They take more than they need because they have to replenish the vampires Kocourek’s people have destroyed. They are somehow tied up with the drug trade here, too. Most of their vampires are young, see. They haven’t accumulated wealth, and so they are going in some nasty directions to get it.”
Libor is letting the vampires feed on each other. Eventually, either Kocourek will find them all and eradicate them, or they’ll weaken his seethe, and Libor will finish them both off.”
Libor is old and slow to act when it is something outside of pack that is wrong. He doesn’t view humans as people, much.
Radim, I thought. Zack’s real name is Radim.
“Kocourek attacked the pack stronghold, Mercy. Whether you are here or in Germany, there will be more blood spilled between Kocourek and our pack.
“I remember when no one thought he had any weaknesses. When the Lord of Night had his Blade and the Soldier and the Wizard . . . it was like the Avengers—except they were bad.”
“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.”
“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.”
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.
The cobbles were very picturesque, but my feet were looking forward to going home, where I could run in the fields. Even the cheatgrass and the tackweed didn’t seem so bad in retrospect, because I could avoid them. The cobbles were everywhere, hard and sharp-edged, and they dug into the pads of my feet.
About that time, I realized that I was alone in the middle of vampire territory. Impossible that I’d lost two werewolves while I was doing nothing more taxing than following a trail at walking speed or a little less. Impossible that they hadn’t known about the seethe. Impossible, unless . . . A cold chill slid across my spine as I realized what had happened and how much trouble I was in right now. Stupid, imprudent coyote had gotten me into the vampire seethe without backup.
A spell that affected anyone in the area, that kept them from realizing they were sensing the vampires, was much less magic intensive than an actual barrier of the type the Gray Lords of the fae had placed around the Walla Walla reservation. Anyone who ventured into the area wouldn’t sense vampires, wouldn’t pay attention to anything the witch who set the spell didn’t want them to notice. Passersby probably saw the battered apartment building—they just didn’t notice it. I’d heard about witchcraft spells like this.
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.
“Mercy, the weakest of all the virtues. I find your name ironically appropriate.”
She took a step forward and dropped to her heels, so her face and mine were even. “He said you were ugly and fat. He said he prefers me.” Yippee. She was welcome to him. Even if I wasn’t married, I don’t date the dead.
Heaven save me from jealous vampires. I’d always thought that vampires were cold-blooded, and, if they thought about another creature at all, it came with thoughts of food.
“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.”
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.
