The Tri-Cities had no castles. I’d never felt the lack before.
My guardian-angel werewolf slowed, and we puttered very quietly through a sleepy residential area. If we’d been in the US, I’d have said it was a bedroom community for Prague. But, remembering that there was a castle, I was hesitant to apply New World labels to Old World places.
Some of the houses looked very Bohemian. Some of them were very modern. We passed a couple of apartment complexes, took a hard right just past the second one, and found ourselves in an area where, on one side of the road, houses had gardens, huge yards, and trees. On the other side of the road was open land. It was too dark to be sure, but I thought they might be growing hay. Though it could just as easily have been some other grassy plant. It was dark, and I wasn’t a farmer.
We pulled into the driveway of a mansion-sized house that could have been a well-preserved three or four hundred years old—or a run-down twenty years old. It was hard to tell in the darkness.
My werewolf driver barely slowed down as we passed the ornate building, a swimming pool, and a stable, to park next to a much smaller house that might once have been a carriage house. Unlike the big building, where all the lights were on the outside and the interior was dark, the smaller house had no exterior lights on. There were fixtures beside both of the doors I could see, but the bulbs had been removed.
The purr of the engine stopped, and my werewolf guard removed his helmet and braced his feet. I was wise to the invitation, and I hopped off and took my own helmet off, giving it to him when he held out his hands for it.
I could smell and hear horses nearby—the swish of a lazy tail and an occasional snort. Horses are prey, and they don’t sleep in long stretches.
In the pen nearest the house, someone was in the middle of planting a garden in a pen that had been set up for livestock. They weren’t there now, of course, but the area had been expertly scythed. The cut hay was piled to the side, presumably to feed to the horses I’d sensed. Turf had been cut and was partially rolled, exposing rich, dark soil. Packets of seeds and a couple of mesh bags of bulbs sat in a cardboard box for planting.
I only knew it had been scythed because the implement was leaning against a fence post. I knew it was expert because I’d scythed a very small pasture once—a punishment for the Easter bunny incident, I think. My field had looked nothing like the neatly trimmed grass in the pen.
While I’d been getting the lay of the land, my companion knocked at the door softly.
It popped open after a bit. A woman clothed in a man’s white shirt and nothing else said something in Czech that was both quiet and irritated. Her hair was dark and cut in an asymmetrical bob that flattered her cheekbones.
My escort responded in a voice that was conciliatory without being submissive. The woman was a werewolf, too, a pack mate from their body language. Near equal in status, too, if I was reading it right.
She turned from him to me. “You are English?” she asked.
“American,” I told her.
“So what are you doing here, and why are the vampires after you?” Her English was very good—smooth, as if she spoke it often. Her vowels were thick, though, and the consonants muted.
I rubbed my face wearily. “I got in the way of a murky vampire plot,” I told her.
She threw her hands up impatiently. “Vampire plots are always murky. What kind of murky?”
I said, “The Lord of Night hit me with a car and kidnapped me from Washington—the state—in the US and brought me to Milan. I escaped with nothing but my skin and hitched a ride on a couple of random buses and ended up in Prague. Is that murky enough?”
“You are not a werewolf,” she said suspiciously, “and still Libor helps you?”
The man who’d brought me here spoke, and whatever he said made her frown. Frown harder, anyway.
“Stop that” was what she said. “You are being rude, Martin. Speak English.” To me she said, “Why are we helping you?”
Martin was evidently my rescuer’s name.
“I’m the mate of the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack,” I said.
She stared at me for a moment, then said, a little incredulously, “You are Bran Cornick’s foster daughter?”
I nodded carefully, keeping my eyes up because her reaction was a little off. “Expecting someone better-looking?” I tried. “Smarter? Taller?”
The wind came up, rustling in the grassy fields and blowing her scent to me. In addition to the werewolf, I could tell she was the person who had most recently used the helmet I’d worn here, and, from the scent of rich earth and broken grass, she was the person responsible for the project of turning a horse run into a garden.
“Well,” she said after a silence that lingered a little too long to be comfortable, “you must be the Mercedes who goes by Mercy, then. I’m Jitka—” and she told me her last name, but the sounds in it had little to do with English, and I’m not sure I caught it all.
I looked at the man, who gave a little laugh. “Yes,” he agreed, “matters were a little fraught for introductions. I’m Martin Zajíc, Libor’s second. Jitka is—”
“A lowly woman,” she said with a little growl in her voice. “But after the Great War, Libor said that for me to be last because I would not take a mate was stupid. Clearly, I was more fierce than most of the pack and more clever than any. He set me third behind Martin. It was acceptable—and I buried the ones who objected with my own hands.”