“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.