“It won’t hurt you,” I told him. “You’re the good guys.”

Vanje looked at me. “We are vampire, Mercy. Not even when the rabbi first gave it life would it have tolerated vampires in its territory. At its end point, not even being Jewish and a decent person was good enough. It will kill us all if it can.”

“Dawn is coming,” said Lars, who had at last risen to his feet.

“How long do you have?” I asked.

“Not long enough to fight off the golem,” said Kocourek. “Assuming we could. Less than five minutes.”

“Get under the stairs with your people,” I told them. “That will keep you out of sight. I’ll do my best to keep the golem off you.”

“You are in a cage,” said Lars. “How is it that you will stop the golem?”

“Can you open it?” I asked, rattling the door a little.

Kocourek shook his head. “Mary spelled that box shut. She was the only one who could open it.”

“The golem is only after the bad guys,” I said, trying not to hear the screams. “I’ll tell him you are the good guys.”

Kocourek sighed, gave the other vampires a wry smile. “It has been an adventure, people. I am glad to have served with you.”

While he spoke, his vampires had been following my advice.

Dagmar said something to him in a language I didn’t understand, presumably Czech, but it could have been Serbian. Kocourek laughed, shook his head, and crawled under the stairs with them. They arranged the humans so that they were on the inside, protected by the vampires still.

I’d expected them to put the humans on the outside to shield the vampires from the light. But these were the good guys, right? Right.

The cries upstairs stopped at the same time the vampires under the stairs died in the dawn. As if in response, the destruction upstairs redoubled. The floor on the side of the basement where Dagmar had carried the girl’s body collapsed with a roar of brick, stone, and rubble.

Coughing and choking in the resultant dust, I realized that it might all be over even if the golem didn’t find us down here. Light broke through the rubble on the far side of the room in dim rays that illuminated the dust in the air.

The dust settled. The sunlight seemed out of place—and I was glad the vampires were under the stairway, or my saving them from the golem would have been a moot point. After a while, I wondered if the golem, like the vampires, was only active at night—or if it would leave me alone down here.

Galina seemed unaffected by the light, which was my experience with ghosts. Most people encountered ghosts at night more often than during the day. I suspected it was because if they see a ghost in the day, they don’t recognize what they are seeing.

The golem came at last. It ducked through the doorway and started down the stairs. The stairs were sturdy, and they didn’t even creak under his weight.