Prague was the most beautiful thing Magnus had ever seen, and it was full of the dead.
He felt them the moment they crossed the river.
It was like walking into a room where a dozen conversations had stopped at once.
Not sound.
Something underneath sound.
A pressure, faint and cold, coming from everywhere: from under the cobbles, from behind shuttered windows, from the dark mouths of alleys and the crypts of churches and the high, steep, red-tiled roofs.
A hundred tiny threads of attention, turning toward him, the way he had felt the ghouls’ threads turn toward him in the Ashen Court.
Not bound to him.
Just aware.
Noticing.
Ours, said the voice in his blood, very softly, almost fondly.
Our kind.
This city has always been full of our kind.
He did not know how it knew that.
He was beginning to stop asking.
They left the van in a multistory car park in Žižkov, near the great ugly needle of the television tower, and walked down into the old city on foot, after midnight, in the rain.
Silas led, with his stick, peering at street names.
Irina held on to Petra’s arm and stared at everything: the trams, the neon, the drunk English stag parties singing in the street, the gold clock on the Old Town Hall with its little moving figures of Death and the apostles.
She had seen Prague once, she said, as a girl, with her father, in the time of the old emperor.
She said it had smelled better then.
And Petra walked beside Magnus, with her hands in her pockets, quiet.
She had been quiet since Plzeň.
Not sad, exactly.
Settled.
As though something had been decided in her when she buried the nail, and she was still getting used to the shape of it.
“Can I ask you something?” she said, as they crossed the Old Town Square, under the black spires of the Týn church.
“You always do.” “When you’ve done it.
Found that doctor.
Found the little girl in Wales.
When you’ve done all of it.” She looked up at him.
“What then?” Magnus didn’t answer for a long time.
He had not let himself think that far.
He had not let himself think about anything past the next night, the next meal, the next road.
“I don’t know,” he said at last.
Petra nodded, as if she had expected that.
“I think you should find somewhere,” she said.
“Somewhere for people like us.
Like Silas.
Like Irina.
Like the Quiet Ones would’ve been if anybody’d ever given them a chance.
Somewhere nobody owns anybody.” She shrugged, a little embarrassed.
“I don’t know.
That’s what I’d do.
If I were you.” He would remember that, afterward.
He would remember the rain on the cobbles, and the black spires, and her face under the streetlight, and the exact words.
Somewhere nobody owns anybody.
He would remember that it was the last real conversation they ever had.
The place Silas had heard about was called U Černé Růže.
The Black Rose.
It was in a cellar in the Lesser Town, under the castle, at the end of a crooked alley so narrow that Silas’s shoulders brushed both walls.
There was no sign.
There was a heavy wooden door studded with iron, and a small grille in it at eye level, and when Silas knocked, three times and then twice, the way he’d been told seventy years ago, the grille slid open, and a pair of red eyes looked out.
“Closed,” said a voice.
“We’re looking for sanctuary,” Silas said, in Czech.
“The old kind.
The Black Rose kind.” The red eyes looked at him.
Then at Petra, and Irina.
Then, for a long time, at Magnus.
The grille slid shut.
There was a pause.
Then the sound of bolts drawing back, one after another, and the door swung open onto a steep flight of stone steps going down into warm red light.
The Black Rose had been a tavern for six hundred years, and for most of those years it had belonged to no one.
That was its whole reason for existing.
Silas explained it to Magnus in a low voice as they went down the steps.
In the old days, before the Fall, the King’s law had declared certain places neutral ground.
Sanctuaries, where any vampire or ghoul might come without a court or a master and be safe for a night.
Where Lords’ feuds could not follow.
Where a stray could find food, and shelter, and someone to tell him what he was.
There had been a sanctuary in every great city in Europe, once.
Paris, Vienna, Venice, Kraków.
After the King fell, one by one, they had been closed, or burned, or bought.
The Black Rose was one of the last.
Or it had been, the last time Silas heard anything about it.
That had been 1979.
The cellar at the bottom of the stairs was long and low and vaulted, like the cellar at the Ashen Court, but warm, and lit with red lamps, and full of people.
Or things that looked like people.
Magnus felt them all at once: twenty, thirty cold presences, scattered through the room at wooden tables and in shadowy booths.
Vampires, most of them.
Young ones, mostly.
Fledglings and commons, nobody old, nobody strong.
A few ghouls with their flat glassy eyes, serving drinks from behind a long wooden bar.
And a handful of humans, too, with dazed, contented faces and bandages on their wrists, sitting with the vampires, laughing at their jokes.
The drinks were in tall glasses, dark red.
They did not smell like wine.
As Magnus came down the last step, the room went quiet.
Every head turned.
Thirty pairs of eyes, red and gray and glassy, looked at him.
And then, all at once, every one of them looked away.
It was the strangest thing he had ever felt.
Like being in a field of wheat when the wind passed over.
They bent away from him.
Every vampire in the room.
Not deliberately.
Not even, he thought, consciously.
Their bodies did it on their own, turning their faces down and to the side, the way dogs do in front of a bigger dog.
Some of them shivered.
One young woman at a table near the bar put her glass down very carefully and folded her hands in her lap and stared at them, and her lips were moving.
“What are they doing?” Petra whispered.
Silas was staring around the room with an expression of slow, dawning horror.
“Bowing,” he said.
The owner of the Black Rose was an old ghoul named Havel, with a bald head and a white apron and a face like a sad potato, and he took them into a back room and shut the door and stood with his back against it, sweating.
“You can’t stay here,” he said, in German.
“I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
You can have a drink, the girl and the old man and the lady, a drink and some blood, on the house.
But then you have to go.” “This is a sanctuary,” said Silas.
“It was a sanctuary.” Havel wiped his face with the corner of the apron.
“It hasn’t been a sanctuary since 2009.
Since the Duchess.” “What Duchess?” Havel looked at him as if he were insane.
“Isabella Moretti.
The Blood Duchy.
She doesn’t hold Prague, not officially; nobody holds Prague, that’s the law, but she owns it.
She owns everything.
The blood trade, the nightclubs, the clinics where the humans sell their plasma, the ghoul markets.
She owns this place.
She bought it from my old master’s widow for forty thousand euros and a promise.” He laughed, without humor.
“Everybody who comes through that door, Moretti knows about it.
Every fledgling, every stray, every ghoul without a master.
She takes a tithe off the strays.
She sells the ghouls.
And anything interesting,” he looked at Magnus, “anything at all interesting, she takes for herself.” Magnus felt the cold come up through his feet.
“And we’re interesting,” he said.
Havel looked at him for a long time.
His sad potato face was full of a strange, frightened wonder.
“You walked into my cellar,” he said softly, “and every vampire in the room bowed to you.
Without knowing why.
I have been in this place for eighty years, sir, and I have seen Lords come down those stairs.
Veyr came down those stairs, once, in 1961.
Moretti herself came down them, the night she bought it.
Nobody bowed.” He swallowed.
“I don’t know what you are.
I don’t want to know.
But I’ve already had to telephone her.
I’m sorry.
It’s in my contract.
Any guest of special interest.
I telephoned her people as soon as you came through the door.” He shut his eyes.
“They’re already here.
They’ve been following you since Slovakia.
Some trafficker you put to sleep at the border.
He was hers.” They went out through the back, through a tunnel Havel showed them that ran under the alley and came up in the crypt of a deconsecrated church two streets away.
It did not matter.
They came up the crypt stairs into the nave of the empty church, among the stacked pews and the dust sheets, and found the enforcers already waiting.
There were six.
Four men and two women, in long dark coats, beautifully cut.
Italian, from the look of them; from the sound of them, when they spoke.
They stood in a loose half circle across the aisle between Magnus and the church doors, and they did not have rifles, like the Northerners.
They did not need them.
They were old.
Not as old as Veyr.
But old enough, all of them, that Magnus could feel it on them like heat off a stove.
And in the middle of them, sitting on the altar steps with one leg crossed over the other, smoking a thin black cigarette, was a man who was very much older.
He was slender and elegant and dark, with a long, clever, sorrowful face and silver at his temples and a beautiful gray suit that had not come off any rack.
He had the kind of handsomeness that seemed designed to be painted.
He looked, Magnus thought, like a cardinal.
Like a Borgia.
Like something that had stepped out of a portrait in the long gallery of a palace where people were poisoned at dinner.
He smiled at them as they came up the crypt stairs, and stood, and put out his cigarette carefully on the altar.
“Ah,” he said, in English, with a soft Roman accent.
“Good evening.
You must be the one who killed Cassian Veyr.” Magnus stopped at the top of the stairs.
Behind him, he felt Petra and Irina and Silas stop too.
He felt the threads between him and the three of them pull tight, humming like wires in the wind.
“Who are you?” he said.
“Luca Ferrante.
I have the honor to serve the Duchess of the Blood, Isabella Moretti, in matters of commerce and,” a small graceful wave of his hand, “acquisition.” He tilted his head.
His eyes were dark brown, almost black, and there was no red in them at all.
That frightened Magnus more than any red eyes had.
“I have been very much looking forward to meeting you.
It’s not every century a ghoul kills a Lord.
And it is never, in my experience, that a ghoul then becomes,” he paused, delicately, searching for the word, “something else.” He walked down the aisle toward them, unhurried, his shoes clicking on the stone.
The six enforcers fanned out behind him.
“The Duchess would like to meet you,” said Ferrante.
“She is in Venice at present, but she would be delighted to send a plane.
She is generous to her friends.
Very generous.
Whatever Veyr was to you, she can be more.
Blood, money, protection, a court.
A title, perhaps, in time.” He smiled.
“I would accept, if I were you.
It is the best offer you will ever receive, and the last.” “And them?” Magnus said.
He did not have to say who.
Ferrante glanced at Silas, Irina, Petra, with polite disinterest, the way a man glances at the furniture in a hotel room.
“Ghouls without masters are property of whoever finds them,” he said.
“That is the custom.
The old one is too old to be worth much.
The young one might fetch a good price in Naples.
The other one,” he looked at Irina, and something in his face sharpened, “is very old, I think.
Older than I am.
Interesting.
The Duchess collects old things.” He looked back at Magnus.
“Of course, if you come with us, they will be yours, and you may keep them.
A gift.
To show our good faith.” Magnus felt something go still and cold inside him.
The same stillness he had felt on the floor of the great hall with the Northerner’s silver bullet in his chest.
“They’re not mine,” he said quietly.
“They’re not anyone’s.” Ferrante looked at him for a long moment.
Then, slowly, regretfully, he sighed.
“Oh dear,” he said.
“You’re one of those.” The first two enforcers came at him together, the way the Quiet Ones had.
They were faster than the Quiet Ones.
Faster than the Northerners.
They had been fighting for two hundred years, and they fought like it: smooth, precise, efficient, a pair of dancers who had practiced the steps a thousand times.
But Magnus had the shadows now.
He stepped into the dark under the pews, and out of the dark behind the pulpit, and the first enforcer’s claws closed on empty air.
He came out of the shadow of a pillar behind the second one and broke her arm and threw her into the wall so hard that the old plaster saints fell off their brackets and shattered.
He went for the first one again before she hit the floor.
He was faster than he had been with the Northerners.
Stronger.
Every night on the road had made him stronger, and he had not even known how much.
He got his teeth into the first enforcer’s throat, and drank.
It was like nothing before.
Not lightning, like Veyr.
Not ice, like the Northerner.
Wine.
Dark red Italian wine, rich and heady and complex, full of sun and old stone and centuries of careful, patient, ruthless hunger.
It went down into him and he felt it go to work at once.
He felt his own wounds, the cuts the enforcers’ claws had left on his arms and face, close in an instant, so fast they never had time to bleed.
And he felt something else, something new, wake up in his veins: a sense.
A sense of blood.
Not the smell of it.
The feel of it.
He could feel the blood in the enforcer under his teeth, all of it, every vein, every artery, the whole branching red tree of it inside her.
He could feel the blood in the enforcer on the floor by the wall.
In the four still standing in the aisle.
In Ferrante.
In Silas, and Petra, and Irina, behind him, warm and quick and frightened.
He could feel it all, the way a spider feels its web.
And he could feel, very faintly, that he could move it.
He let the enforcer drop.
She hit the stone floor and lay there, white and still, alive but barely.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and turned around, and the remaining four enforcers took a step back.
Ferrante did not step back.
He stood in the center of the aisle and looked at Magnus with an expression of total, delighted fascination.
“Oh,” he said softly.
“Oh, you’re drinking them.
You’re growing.
Every one, you’re growing.” He smiled, a long, slow, beautiful smile.
“Do you know, I think I understand now why every vampire in the Black Rose bowed to you.
The Duchess is going to want you very, very much.” He raised one long elegant hand.
And the blood came out of it.
It came out through his skin, through his palm, a thin dark stream, as if he had opened a vein, but he hadn’t.
It came out and did not fall.
It hung in the air above his hand, writhing, twisting, alive, and then it stretched, and hardened, and became a whip.
A long, thin, glistening whip of red, ten feet long, as fine as a wire and as sharp as a razor, rippling in the air like a snake.
“Three hundred and forty years,” said Ferrante, conversationally.
“That’s how long it took me to learn to do this.
I wonder how long it would take you.” The whip moved.
Magnus never saw it.
One instant it was in the air beside Ferrante, and the next it was across the church, and he felt something cold slice across his chest and his left arm went numb.
He looked down.
His shirt was open from shoulder to hip and so was he.
The wound was deep, deeper than anything Veyr had given him, so deep he could see the white of bone, and it was not closing.
The blood in it, his own blood, was writhing, refusing to clot, refusing to heal, as if something were holding the edges of the wound apart from inside.
“Blood answers blood,” said Ferrante.
“Mine is older than yours, little one.
Much, much older.
It tells yours what to do.” The whip came again.
This time Magnus stepped into the shadows.
But the shadows were not fast enough.
The whip followed him into the dark, as if it could see there, and caught him across the back as he came out behind the font, and he went down onto his knees on the stone.
The enforcers moved in.
He fought.
He would never be able to say afterward that he had not fought.
He got one more of them, a big man with a shaved head, and broke his neck, and drank from him on the floor of the church while the others tore at him, and felt the wine-dark blood go into him and close a few of his wounds.
But not the one across his chest.
That one stayed open, and the blood in it writhed, and every time Ferrante moved his hand, it opened wider.
He heard Silas shouting.
He heard the old ghoul’s stick crack across someone’s skull.
He heard Irina, Irina who had barely spoken in a hundred years, scream something in Hungarian and throw herself onto an enforcer’s back like a wildcat.
And he heard Petra say his name.
He looked up.
Ferrante had her.
He was standing in front of the altar, perfectly calm, with one arm around Petra’s shoulders, almost tenderly, like a father with a daughter.
The other hand was at her throat.
Not holding it.
Just resting there, lightly, the long fingers spread against her skin.
Above his hand, in the air, the blood whip had changed.
It was not a whip anymore.
It was a spike.
A single long, slender, gleaming spike of red, a foot long, hanging in the air an inch from Petra’s temple.
“Enough,” said Ferrante pleasantly.
“Enough, I think.
Kneel, please, and put your hands behind your head, and we can all go to Venice, and nobody else needs to be hurt.” The two remaining enforcers had Silas pinned against a pillar, and Irina flat on the floor with a knee in her back.
Magnus was on his knees in a pool of his own blood with the wound across his chest gaping open like a mouth.
He could feel the threads between him and the three ghouls, humming.
He could feel Petra’s fear through hers, sharp and bright as tinfoil.
And under the fear, something else.
Something calm and settled.
The thing that had been decided in her when she buried the nail.
He looked at her.
She looked back at him.
And she shook her head.
Very slightly.
Just once.
Don’t, she was saying.
Don’t kneel.
Not to them.
Not to anyone.
Somewhere nobody owns anybody.
“I’ll come,” Magnus said.
His voice was a ruin.
“I’ll come with you.
Let them go.
Let all three of them go, and I’ll come.
I’ll kneel.
I’ll do whatever you want.” Ferrante tilted his head.
“No,” he said thoughtfully.
“No, I don’t think you will.
Not really.
Not in your heart.
I can see it in you.
You’re one of those.
You’ll come to Venice and you’ll smile at the Duchess and you’ll wait.
And one night, when you’re strong enough, you’ll do to her what you did to Veyr.” He sighed.
“You need a lesson, I think.
Before we go.
Something to remember.
So that when you’re tempted, later, you’ll know what it costs.” “No,” said Magnus.
“No, please.
Please.
Please—” The spike moved.
It was very fast, and very small, and almost silent.
A little sound, like a nail going into soft wood.
Petra’s eyes went wide.
And then, slowly, they went still.
Through the thread between them, Magnus felt her go.
He felt it the way Silas had said you feel it when a master dies.
Like somebody cut a string.
A bright, warm, frightened, hopeful line of light running from the center of his chest to hers, and then, between one heartbeat and the next, nothing.
A severed end, whipping loose in the dark.
Ferrante let her fall.
She crumpled onto the altar steps like a coat dropped from a hanger, and lay there, and did not move.
“There,” said Ferrante gently.
“Now.
Kneel.” The second heart in Magnus’s chest stopped.
For one whole second, it was silent.
One whole second of nothing at all.
The church was silent.
The world was silent.
Magnus knelt in his own blood and stared at Petra’s body on the altar steps, at her open eyes, at the tiny, neat, red hole in her temple, and felt nothing.
Nothing at all.
As if everything in him had been switched off at once.
Then the second heart beat.
It was not a tap.
It was not a thud.
It was a sound like a cathedral bell being struck with a hammer.
It went out of him in every direction at once, through the stone and the air and the blood, and every window in the deconsecrated church blew outward in a shower of colored glass.
The candles that the enforcers had lit went out.
The dark came down.
And in the dark, every drop of blood in the building moved.
Magnus felt it.
All of it.
His own blood, pouring from the wound across his chest, stopped pouring, and turned, and rose.
The blood of the two enforcers he had drunk, still spattered across the floor, rose.
The blood in Ferrante’s whip, Ferrante’s spike, Ferrante’s veins.
He felt it all.
He felt it all and he took hold of it, the way he had taken hold of the threads in the armory, and he pulled.
Ferrante screamed.
It was not a dignified scream.
It was not the scream of a Borgia cardinal in a fine gray suit.
It was the scream of something that had lived for three hundred and forty years and had just, for the first time, felt its own blood turn against it.
The red spike in the air beside him exploded into spray.
The veins in his outstretched hand, the hand that had held Petra’s throat, bulged, and blackened, and burst.
He staggered back against the altar, clutching his wrist, staring at Magnus with his dark eyes wide and, for the first time, afraid.
Magnus stood up.
The wound across his chest was closing.
Not healing.
Closing.
The blood that had been pouring out of it was pouring back in, rising off the floor, off his clothes, out of the air, in a hundred thin dark threads, back into him.
And as it went, it pulled at Ferrante’s blood too.
Pulled it out of him, through the burst skin of his hand, through his pores, through his eyes, in a thin red mist that streamed across the church toward Magnus like smoke toward a chimney.
And Magnus breathed it in.
Three hundred and forty years.
Rome and Venice and Naples.
Poisoned cardinals.
A plague year.
A woman in a mask at a carnival ball.
A long, dark, patient, intricate knowledge of blood: how it moved, how it listened, how it could be shaped.
It went into Magnus like ink into water and spread through him and he understood.
Not all of it.
Not most of it.
But enough.
He held up his own hand, and the blood came out of his palm and hung in the air above it, writhing, and stretched, and hardened into a blade.
A long, straight, gleaming blade of dark red, black almost, with a sheen in it like blood under skin.
He looked at it.
He had seen a sword like this before.
In a winter valley, in a dead man’s memory.
In the hand of a man on a black horse.
Yes, said the voice in his blood.
It was not calm anymore.
It was not patient.
It was exultant.
Yes.
Yes.
Now.
Take him.
Take all of them.
Ferrante was backing away up the altar steps, cradling his ruined hand.
The two enforcers holding Silas and Irina had let go of them, and were backing away too, toward the doors.
Magnus walked toward Ferrante, slowly, through the glittering broken glass, with the blood-blade in his hand.
Every vampire in the church bent away from him the way the wheat had bent in the Black Rose.
He could feel their blood.
All of it.
He could take it.
He could take it all.
He stopped at the foot of the altar steps, where Petra lay.
He looked down at her.
And the blade in his hand wavered, and the voice in his blood howled, and Magnus Williams, nineteen years old in a bus shelter on Oxford Road, twenty-four years old and a hundred years old and nobody at all, knelt down beside the body of the girl who had told him to find somewhere nobody owned anybody, and closed her eyes.
That was all the time Ferrante needed.
He was through the vestry door and gone before Magnus looked up.
The two enforcers went with him.
The one Magnus had drunk from first, the woman, crawled after them on her hands and knees, white as paper.
The man with the broken neck lay still.
And from outside, from the narrow streets of the Lesser Town all around the church, Magnus heard them coming.
Engines, a lot of them.
Doors slamming.
Feet running on cobbles.
Ferrante’s voice, high and ragged, shouting in Italian into a phone.
And under it all, through the new sense in his blood, he felt them: cold, quick presences converging on the church from every direction.
Ten.
Twenty.
More.
Old ones, some of them.
Very old.
The Duchess’s people.
All of Prague’s dead, rising up out of their cellars and their crypts and their beautiful old houses and coming for him.
The blood-blade in his hand flickered, and went thin, and collapsed back into his palm.
He had nothing left.
Ferrante’s blood had healed him and lit him up like a firework, and the firework was burning out.
He could feel himself guttering.
He could feel the second heart slowing, sullen, exhausted, falling back into its long slow tap…
tap…
tap.
Silas limped up beside him, bleeding from a long gash across his forehead.
Irina was behind him, shaking, holding on to his coat with both hands.
“Kid,” Silas said.
“We have to go.
Now.” Magnus didn’t move.
He was looking at Petra.
“Kid.
Now.
There’s twenty of them.
At least.
We can’t—” “I know.” He lifted her, carefully, in his arms.
She weighed almost nothing.
Her head fell against his shoulder, the way it had in Plzeň, on the pavement, in the cold.
Then he turned toward the broken windows of the church, toward the cold, quick, converging presences in the dark outside, toward the engines and the running feet and the voice of the man who had killed her.
He did not know where to go.
He did not know how to get out.
He knew only that he was outnumbered, and cornered, and empty, and that he was not going to kneel.
“Stay close to me,” he said.