It was different than it had been before. Its presence was even bigger. I could feel its magic, unfamiliar and familiar at the same time, and it flowed through me like an electric current as all around us, ghosts stirred. There were a lot of ghosts.

The vampire on the wall had drawn a breath to scream again, but instead he fell silent, as if he could sense the golem’s presence. He flattened against the wall and turned his face away from us.

The biggest difference between the first time I met the golem and this time was that it spoke to me.

Mercy, said the golem in my head. It didn’t really use my name, not as such, but an identifier that was more who I was than my own name could convey.

Its magic felt like . . . I swallowed when I figured out why some of it felt familiar. It felt like Guayota, the volcano god who had almost killed me not so long ago. My ankle still ached before storms.

I’d lived with magic my whole life—and not in a happy Harry Potter sort of way, either. Sure, magic worked by rules, but those rules were flexible, and different kinds of magic worked differently, and there were lots of different kinds of people and creatures who could access certain aspects of it. So there was pack magic, vampire magic. Witch magic. Wizard magic. Fae magic. Sorcerer magic.

Me? I had a bare thread of magic. I could shift into a coyote. I was a walker, descendant of the avatars who represented the animals to the native peoples of the American continents. Among other things, our jobs—back before the European invasion and their attendant diseases nearly wiped the native peoples off the planet—had been to attend the spirits of the dead. For that reason, as best as I could piece it together, the magic of the dead did not affect me, and the influence worked the other way around.

But the dead golem’s presence had amped my attraction for ghosts up to maximum, until I’d been swimming in ghosts. If there was any question that it had been my encounter with the spirit of the golem that had been responsible, the effect of its presence here answered that.

With it in the cellar, ghosts were flooding in despite the presence of vampires. Ghosts didn’t like vampires. I’d once thought it was because the vampires had killed them. But then I learned that there are some vampire gifts that allow vampires to command ghosts and other gifts that allow a vampire to consume them and use their substance for power.

Or it might be something as simple as the instinctive revulsion that cats (my own cat is an exception) feel for vampires.

The dead gathered around the golem and me like we were a campfire in a Montana winter. The air grew thick with that not-substance that seems to make up their immaterial bodies, and the feel of it vibrated my bones.