THE APARTMENT BUILDINGS THAT LINED THE STREETS were probably not old by Prague standards, since they certainly didn’t date back to the Middle Ages. But they weren’t built in this century, either. They were stacked six or seven floors high and shoulder to shoulder, leaving no room for a mouse to squeeze through between them.

They also looked vaguely familiar. We were close enough to Old Town that the streets and sidewalks were cobbled, so at first I assumed that it was because I’d passed this way when I had traveled the streets alone last night, and that was sort of true.

I looked down a cross street and suddenly got it. Someone, a century or more ago, had been trying to make this neighborhood look like Paris—which is why all the buildings had appeared so familiar. I hadn’t been to Paris, either, or I’d have figured it out sooner.

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.

When we passed by the Old-New Synagogue, I realized we were in the Jewish Quarter, near where I’d had my run-in with the golem—so that probably had added to the feeling of familiarity. Jitka had said we were in Josefov, and that name had thrown me. I’d heard it called Josefstadt, which would be German for Josef’s city. Presumably, Josefov meant the same in Czech.

This seemed awfully . . . in the middle of things, for a seethe that had been evading the Master of Prague for half a century or more. I’d expected someplace less densely populated with a few more hidden places and a thousand or so fewer people.

But scents generally don’t lie, and the female vampire’s scent was definitely leading me through the Jewish Quarter. I was starting to pick up more of her trails, too, as if she’d passed this way many, many times. And she wasn’t the only vampire who’d been down this sidewalk, either.

The scents of vampires gradually coalesced into something much worse. Someone wasn’t good at housekeeping, either, because the smell of blood and rot and old death wafted thickly around my nose. It was so obvious that I glanced at the werewolves, but both of them were paying attention to me rather than looking around for the building housing a couple of dozen vampires.

Given the stench of vampire, I thought the werewolves’ focus on me was weird, but I couldn’t ask them about it. I rounded a corner, and there it was, just across the street.

There was a huge park. Any open land I had seen in Prague was covered in lush green, whether tended park or wild riverbank. It wasn’t as overwhelming as the greenery in Seattle or Portland, where they fight a losing battle against the blackberry bushes that threaten to take over any spot with more than an inch of exposed soil. But it was very green.