The vampire on the wall screamed at me again, as he been doing off and on since the vampires who’d caught me had stuck me in the cage. This time it made me jump, because he’d been quiet awhile and I’d been paying attention to the golem.

I turned to him and, pulling on the authority I’d been learning use in the pack, said, “Quiet.”

He screamed louder and with more feeling.

I said it again. As I did, the golem reached through the cage and touched my chest. Power flooded me, and the vampire shut his mouth.

“Quit looking at me,” I whispered, pushed by the golem’s wishes rather than my own, and the vampire turned his head away.

I clamped my mouth shut. It was wrong to do that, to have that kind of power over someone, even a vampire, and to use it as if they weren’t a thinking being. To give them no choice but to listen to me.

A cold hand stroked my shoulder. One of the ghosts had crawled in beside me and touched me. I shivered, but I didn’t give it any orders. Cooperation is one thing; enslavement is another. I knew better than Rabbi Loew, so there was no excuse for me when I did it.

Not that I had never forced a ghost to obey me. Ghosts weren’t the humans whose death had birthed them. But I was increasingly uncomfortable with the assumption that that meant they weren’t alive anymore. And that meant that other than for my own defense or in defense of someone else, I could not bind them to my will again.

If my whisper could influence the vampire as strongly as it had, no ghost had a chance of resisting me.

The vampire, not looking at me, began to jerk on his chains. Clank, clank, clank. He kept going with the steady reliability of a drum major. Clank. Clank. Clank.

“See?” I said to the golem. “He’s working his way out of it. Imagine if I were trying to control a dozen of them. And he’s crazy—I don’t think that helps him resist me.”

The golem looked back at me. He didn’t have eyes—I saw him more with my other senses than I saw him with my eyes. But I could feel his regard.

I have a counterproposal, he said. I have had a very long time to think about what I could manage. My master worked his magic in front of me and taught his students in front of me. I have knowledge but no power.

“I can’t help you there,” I said. “I have no power to give you.”

Do you not?

The golem turned his attention to the ghost beside me. She shrank away from him, huddled against my side as if she thought I might help her. I don’t know how long she’d been a ghost, maybe a day, maybe a century. She could have been a victim of the vampires or the Nazis or one of the pogroms that had inspired Rabbi Loew to protect the Jewish Quarter with a golem.