“That is foolish,” she said. “We have tried that. They do not talk. After the third one, Libor said it was enough. That if they were not talking after what he did to them, it was because they could not, not because they would not. There are some witchcraft spells that will do that. Maybe there is vampire magic that stopped their tongues.”

I tried not to think beyond the surface of her words.

Torture was a lot further than I was prepared to go just to find out why they’d decided to work with the other Prague seethe. Maybe I’d feel differently if I lived in Prague, though I didn’t think so. There were probably circumstances that would make me reconsider, but this wasn’t one of those. Probably I should feel badly that Jitka and Martin seemed quite convinced that the endgame would be to destroy the seethe—but vampires are evil. I might like one or two on a personal level—but they kill people in order to keep living.

“So let’s just go find the seethe,” I said, “get what information we can get from watching them, then go back to Libor with that.”

Safe enough, I thought. I’d already proved I could get away from the biggest, baddest vampire in Europe. This shouldn’t be so bad. And I would be going out and doing something.

—

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.