Vampires did.

Lots and lots of people, all kinds of people, would die if the human population decided to believe that vampires were real the way that the fae and the werewolves were real. I think one of the reasons that Bran had held out so long before allowing the werewolves to come out was that he knew that people who believed in werewolves would have less trouble believing in vampires.

So there was a very good reason to loose the golem on the vampires and hope he did not continue on to the unsuspecting inhabitants of Prague. Rabbi Loew had tried to kill the golem in the end. I remembered the rake of the golem’s fingers across my face and the burning pain he’d left behind.

I was very much afraid that the real reason I had done as the golem asked was because I could not bear what would happen to Adam if I died here. My faith was strong enough to believe with confidence that death was not the end. Torture was nothing I looked forward to—we had a wolf in the pack who’d been tortured by witches—but there would be an end to it. But Adam . . .

Adam, I worried about. I had promised him once that I would do everything I could do to live, to survive for his sake. I was still bound by that promise.

Yes, I would have asked the ghosts to sacrifice themselves, would have given the golem the means to remake himself, all for Adam’s sake. That there were other, very good reasons for it only made it easier, but it didn’t make me a better person.

Rats scurried around the edges of the cellar. Confused, I think, by me. They might not know what a coyote was, but they knew all about dogs—and I worried them despite the call of freshly bleeding corpses.

I put my muzzle down on my front paws and closed my eyes. After all the energy I’d expended, I was hungry. But behind the mesh of the cage, I wasn’t going to go hunting rats, and they weren’t going to be nibbling on me, either.

I waited for the golem and hoped. Hoped I’d done the right thing. Hoped that it worked as the golem expected it would. Hoped that, burdened with a physical body, he could still find his way through the witchcraft to find this place. Hoped that he would be a match for the vampires in this place. Hoped that something good would come of this.

But mostly? I worried.

10

Adam

Adam’s story continues, at daybreak of the first morning he spent in Milan. At about this time, I got to my feet, put on my clothes, and went out to find the café that had free Wi-Fi so I could try to contact someone. Adam and his people have retreated to their assigned rooms.

ADAM KNEW A DOZEN WAYS TO DEAL WITH A TIME-ZONE shift, but mostly he’d found that staying up when he had to stay up and sleeping whenever he could took care of fatigue eventually. He hoped not to be in Europe long enough to adjust.