I would have been better off, in retrospect, if Jitka had gotten her way and we had grabbed all the werewolves and charged the front door of Mary’s home base. Assuming my coyote wouldn’t have allowed herself to be separated from the pack the way she’d just done with Jitka and Martin.

—

I SHIVERED MISERABLY IN THE DOG CRATE IN THE BASEMENT of the apartment of the vampire seethe.

The basement, lit by two bare bulb fixtures in the high ceiling, had a dirt floor and rough-cast cement walls. The crate I was in sat next to the remains of an old furnace that was in the same state the rest of the building was in. It probably hadn’t functioned for fifty years.

The dog crate answered why the vampires would have had a catch pole. It was made from welded metal mesh that was probably steel underneath its coat of silver and was riddled with magic. It had held werewolves—I could distinguish five or six different scents and some too faded to assess. No one I’d met. The silver affected me not at all, nor did the magic, but I was exhausted. The dead and rotting corpses I shared the basement with were not reassuring. Worse was the vampire chained to the wall, not too far from me. He was wearing jeans and a short-sleeved shirt over a tank top. None of them looked dirty enough to have been on his body for more than a day or two, proof that he had recently had enough control he could put on clothes. He watched me with hungry-mad eyes while he screamed in inchoate rage at irregular intervals.

I reached out to Adam. Though I couldn’t actually communicate with him yet, I could feel the steady warmth of his presence. I clung to that as hard as I could.

And attracted the attention of something else.

—

PERHAPS AN HOUR LATER, MARY, THE MISTRESS OF the seethe, came down the stairs of the basement with the easy, definite movements and bearing of a career soldier. She didn’t introduce herself, but she came striding boldly into the darkness with an I’m-in-charge air—who else could she have been?

If she’d been in Prague since the late 1940s, then I didn’t see how she could have been a soldier. There are a lot of werewolves I’d known who’d served time in the military of one sort or another, though, so I’d seen a lot of soldiers. The posture was unmistakable. If she were German, she could have been one of the Hitler Mädchen, maybe. The Hitler Mädchen were sort of a paramilitary Girl Scouts trained to nark on their parents and neighbors.

Mary was not a lovely person. Her face was broad and flat, her eyes small, and her mouth wide but ungenerous. As a human, I thought she probably had tended toward heaviness. Her frame looked gaunt and wrong, with the model thinness that most vampires carried. Her hair was blond and pulled back into a bun, and even I could tell that was an unfortunate choice.