Impulsively, I took my human shape and stood before the ghost of Prague’s past with my hands open and outstretched. “I mean no harm to you or yours,” I told it—it did not feel male or female to me. To my human eyes, it was even less clearly defined.

There was no reason to suppose that it spoke English. But the words had come to my tongue by instinct—as a coyote shapeshifter, I trusted my instincts more than most people did. Ghosts generally could understand me no matter what language I spoke.

It contemplated me for a moment more, then cried out hoarsely, a sound of rage and frustration and loneliness that should have shook the windows in the nearby buildings but didn’t. No one came to see what caused the noise.

Runnels of magic slid down my face, as if it had taken a swipe at me with claws. The sensation dug into my bones like hot metal—almost as shocking as the wrenching twist from warm delight to fear. Then the whole thing, magic and all, slowly dissipated. For one instant, I glimpsed something glowing on the center of its forehead, letters that disappeared before the last of the magic. Not letters in any alphabet I knew, though they resembled two oddly written “n”s and an “x.” It could have been Arabic or Russian, but I was pretty sure it was Hebrew and that the three letters together spelled emet, truth.

Because I had just met the Golem of Prague—or what was left of him, anyway.

What other giant ghost would be wandering the streets of Prague in the Jewish Quarter in the middle of the night radiating magic, but the most famous local legend?

In the sixteenth century, a revered and learned rabbi named Judah Loew ben Bezalel, disturbed by a series of attacks on the people living in the Jewish Quarter, created a golem, a giant creature made of clay. On the creature’s forehead he inscribed the word for truth. In so much all of the accounts agreed. The end of the story was another matter.

In some versions, the rabbi lost control of the golem and was forced to destroy it. In another, the creature fell in love—and nothing good ever comes (in stories) from a monster’s falling in love. In yet another variation, when the rabbi died, the golem retreated to the attic of the Old-New Synagogue and lay down to wait for his master to return. A lot of the stories end with the golem’s clay body remaining in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue, a room reachable only from the outside of the building. I thought it unlikely that it was still there (if it ever had been). Prague had been occupied by the Nazis, after all. Hitler, who had been obsessed with all things magical, must have looked for it there.

I stared into the night and shivered. I was very glad that I had not been in this city when the golem wandered the streets in its physical form.