This one reminded me of Howard Amon Park at home. Huge old trees shaded graceful paths and lots and lots of grass—most of the parks I’d seen here had more flower gardens. The whole park was carefully tended until it wasn’t. As if there were an invisible fence, a sharp line marked where lawn mowers stopped, and beyond that line was a jungle of overgrown grass and brush.

In the center of the overgrown area was one of the ubiquitous off-white apartment buildings I’d been walking past. This building wouldn’t look at home in Paris, any more than it looked at home in the neat and tidy (with graffiti) streets of Prague: it was in terrible shape.

I stopped, standing on the tidy side of the demarcation line. I’d spent the better part of the hour with the coyote in charge of the human because the trail had not been an easy one. I was puzzled by the situation with the grass and a little uneasy, and that started to bring my human side out. I didn’t think that I was as dual-natured as the werewolves, but when I operated on instinct for a while—it sometimes took me a moment to think like a person again.

In the center of the wilder area, the ruined building was, as far as I could tell, something that should have been used for a horror film about vampires in Prague. And no one had checked here to see if, maybe, possibly, there were vampires tucked in here? And not just any vampires—these were filthy, degenerate vampires.

Marsilia’s seethe was clean enough that I’d feel comfortable eating off the floor. Even the freezer (serving as a jail cell) at Bonarata’s had been pristine. This place smelled like those photographs of people who were found to have two hundred dogs and forty-five cats living in their house in itty-bitty cages that no one ever cleaned. And Libor’s pack had no idea it was here?

I didn’t know if Prague had been bombed during World War II, but the building in the heart of the wild looked as though it had been bombed—and then simply left where it stood, including the broken bits of the apartment buildings whose walls it had once shared. Unbelievable that it had just been left here among the meticulously maintained streets of the Jewish Quarter. Maybe it was a war memorial, or something like, a memorial filled with vampires. Somehow, it didn’t seem likely.

I was just getting ready to change to human so I could ask Jitka and Martin what was wrong with the collective noses of their pack when something moved inside the building. It was just a glimpse, but it was enough to tip the balance back. The coyote had been hunting or hunted by vampires all night, and she stuffed my human reasoning aside because she could see our prey.

I crossed the invisible border from tended lawn to wilderness, instinctively trying to blend in, though the coyote’s coat, a mix of beiges and grays that served me well in the dry scrublands of the Tri-Cities, wasn’t as useful in the lush green of Prague.