“I have an offer for you,” I told them. “It will mean that you will cease to exist here. I do not know what that means, exactly, to you or for you.”

I explained what we needed and why, ignoring the golem’s impatience. I think about half of them understood me. The others were too fragmented to reason or communicate what they thought even if they could comprehend what I told them. Some of them were old, older than the apartment building. And they kept coming as I talked until the weight of their presence dropped the temperature in the basement, until I could see my breath and frost formed on the metal of the cage.

I explained everything twice. When I had finished, I waited. The weight of the dead was heavy on my chest.

Yes, they said as one. Those who could speak.

“Feed him,” I said, and the golem’s power gave my voice more authority somehow, both an order and a spellcrafting that was of the golem’s making.

They came to him. There were ghosts so lifelike, I could have mistaken them for the living. There were others who were reduced to an emotion or a single moment of time. Still more I could only sense and not see, even with the augmentation the golem provided.

The golem’s spirit surrounded them, sucked them into his darkness, until only one remained, the young woman who had stayed by my side through Mary’s visit. She hid her face from the golem.

That one, too, he said.

No, she whispered in my ear, sending a chill across my skin that raised goose bumps.

“No,” I told him. “Only those who were willing.”

I need them all, he thundered in a voice that made my bones ache.

I didn’t say anything more. Her tears were real enough now that I could feel them slide down the naked skin of my shoulder. The golem wasn’t solid, not yet, but his presence thickened the air as he leaned his will against mine—and lost.

Eventually, he left.

I told myself that I would not have given the dead to the golem had I not found that Mary was doing something even worse than I’d believed possible. I told myself that the evil in Prague was my business, because if word of what Mary had managed got out, it would affect everyone. Every human, every vampire, and every person in between.

The vampires, long subdued because of the difficulty of making more of themselves, would jump at the chance to increase the speed and effectiveness of their procreation. They would recruit witches.

I tried to imagine Elizaveta as a vampire and stopped myself because I really needed to think and not rock back and forth in the corner of my cage.

The newly created vampires apparently had a shelf life with an explosion at the end. So it wouldn’t be long before the humans noticed.

There would be war. I was old enough to remember the rampant paranoia about the fae when they came out. I remember mobs in small towns burning down the houses of their neighbors on suspicion that someone was fae. I remember people being torn apart. There was a reason that, when the fae proposed forming reservations, the government had no trouble making that happen. And the fae, especially the fae as they had represented themselves at the time, were not considered predators. They did not need to kill humans to live.