In my head and without real words, the golem had been following my thought process. I couldn’t tell if he agreed with my assessment or not, or even if he understood it, but something made him speak.

Neither spirit nor golem nor ghost, he told me, but at the same time all of them together, I kept watch over the streets of Prague. I was helpless to do anything against human evil or things like the vampires, those who could neither see nor sense me.

But I was driven to do this thing that I could not. Rabbi Loew gave me the task of keeping Josefov safe. So I drifted through the night streets of Prague, able neither to forsake my task nor accomplish it. And then I encountered you. Afterward, I frightened a thief away—I, who no one could perceive before. You did something to me, made me more real, real enough to rip a door off its hinges.

His interaction with me had lit up my magic until I’d been swamped (almost literally) by ghosts anywhere near me. That was another reason I thought the golem had been created from a manitou. If we weren’t as closely related as “a horse and a jackass,” then he probably wouldn’t have affected me that way. I hadn’t considered what it had done to him.

The golem returned to his original question. Can you destroy these demons?

I gave a disbelieving laugh. “Does it look like I am in a position to do anything to the vampires?”

The cage was coated with silver, which mattered not a whit to me, but the metal-welded mesh was strong. The holes were too fine to allow me to stick more than a pair of fingers through it. If someone handed me the key to the padlock, I couldn’t have unlocked it from inside.

I patted the cage door. “But even if I were out and free, I’d be no match for them. I’m not a power, golem.”

The golem made a rumbling sound that made the vampire on the wall flinch. You are one who walks the path of the dead, he told me. The dead must hear you and obey. These demons, these vampires, have swallowed death to stay on this earth. They are not exempt from your power.

In one brief statement, the golem had clarified something that I’d been working through my whole life: that my kind had a purpose, a reason, for existence.

I stared at the golem and sucked in a breath of air. I reminded myself that my kind originated on another continent. The golem could not have encountered someone like me.

I know what you are, the golem said. Mercy. Again it wasn’t my name; it was bigger than that. It fit better.

To him I said carefully, “My experience is that I might be able to make one vampire obey me, and only for a very short time. But there are a lot of vampires in this place.” I could feel the weight of them.