Staked (Iron Druid Chronicles) (27 page)

“I’ve been here many times, but this is a first for you.”

“I think you’d like the beef goulash. Slow-roasted, tender beef in a thick, spicy gravy.” I began to pick my way downhill toward the Charles Bridge, and Oberon trotted alongside.

“Not normally, but now that you say it, I think it should be.”

“We’ll see if we can arrange it. We have to be vampire hunters first.”

We crossed the river by way of the Charles Bridge, a wonderful structure graced on both sides by baroque sculptures and handy lights for night walks, and I paused at the statue of St. John of Nepomuk to point out something to Oberon.

“See these plaques at the base?” I said, where there were bronze bas-reliefs of St. John’s death. “Notice how parts of them are shiny?”

“Because people keep touching them, and all those hands have polished those parts to a golden glow. The legend is that if you touch the image on the right side—the one depicting the priest being thrown into the river—you’ll have good luck and return to Prague soon.”

“Yep! People touch the image on the right for luck, but then they also pet the hound on the left, because hounds are so awesome. That hound has been petted by millions of people over the centuries. That’s why he’s so shiny.”

I leaned forward and gave the hound on the statue a quick scratch behind the ears. Then I touched the priest on the right. I’m not a Catholic, but I could use all the luck I could get, and in theory, at least, the Big Guy in the Sky was rooting for me, along with the gods of several other pantheons, thanks to Rebecca Dane. The least he deserved from me was a courtesy greeting.

“All right, let’s move on. But keep your nose open for dead guys instead of goulash. I’m counting on you to give me a heads-up before they attack.”

Once we got to the eastern shore we plowed down the cobbled Karlova Ulice, past innumerable shops hawking expensive crystal, amber necklaces, or cheap souvenirs, and barkers trying to get us to eat at one of the many restaurants or take in a theatre show. I admired the astronomical clock in the Old Town Square, lit up at night, and people either admired or shied away from Oberon as we passed. Tourists enjoyed beers or dinner at one of the many outdoor seating areas there, and the locals enjoyed the money the tourists spent.

After crossing the square we continued down Celetná Ulice, and once we reached the Grand Café Orient we took a left up Králodvorská Ulice, which would bring us to the Grand Hotel Bohemia from behind. It loomed above us on the narrow street, six stories of a yellow cream, its façade curved around the corner it occupied.

We stopped before rounding the corner to the entrance.

“All right, Oberon,
Star Wars
pop quiz: Which phrase is used most often in the movies?”

“Correct! And that’s my feeling right now. I don’t trust Leif. Or any vampire, really. So I’d like you to be my ace in the hole here in case something goes sideways.”

“That’s somewhat encouraging. If the vampires are here, maybe one of them is Theophilus. I can pull a Julie d’Aubigny and end it.”

“But in case something goes wrong, I’m going to camouflage you and leave you here. If I have to retreat I will come back this way, and I want you to knock down the first person who’s following me. Don’t bite or engage them, just knock them over, and then catch up with me.”

With Oberon kept safe—which was truly my intention in leaving him there, not that he protect my retreat—I proceeded to the double doors of the Grand Bohemia and cast camouflage to give me some time to scope out the place, unobserved.

The outer doors opened into an unusual glass-enclosed foyer, with five angled panels, two of which were doors leading to the left and right of the center panel. The reception desk and staircase waited straight ahead across a tiled floor, and flush with the front of the building to either side were carpeted sitting areas with little cocktail tables. The furniture was upholstered in rich red and gold frilly patterns, with matching heavy drapes framing the large arched windows. A huge portrait of Karl IV, the 14th-century Holy Roman Emperor who ruled from Bohemia, gazed benevolently upon the hotel guests and reminded them that Prague had once been the capital of the Western world. In the back of the room, to the left of reception and the staircase, a doorway with
CAFÉ/BAR
emblazoned above it announced that potables could be had, and I glimpsed a bored bartender behind the taps.

The seating areas on either side of the lobby were occupied by six individuals each, and once I switched my vision to the magical spectrum, I saw that every single one of them was a vampire. I pulled out the stake and wondered where to begin. Which, if any of them, was Theophilus?

I didn’t get a chance to find out. One of the vampires on the right was wearing slightly odd glasses that I first dismissed as pretentious fashion, but they were modern infrared goggles. He couldn’t see through my camouflage binding, but he could sure see my heat signature standing there and not actually entering the lobby. He could no doubt smell me too. I caught this as he pulled out a phone, thumbed a speed-dial number, and then said in German,
“Er ist am Eingang. Ja. Machen wir.”
He rang off, nodded at the others on his right, and they rose together. A quick glance at the left side of the lobby confirmed that the vampires there were doing the same, and my bad feeling got infinitely worse. German Goggle Vamp shouted,
“Schießt auf die Tür!”
and the guns came out from under jackets and I ducked just in time to avoid the worst of the fire. They wound up shooting each other more than me, but I still took a bullet in the left hamstring as I threw myself at the door and crawled out to the sidewalk. Once there, I realized I couldn’t stand up—not only because of the bullet in my leg but because if I did, the goggles guy would see me in infrared and have a clear shot as I ran by the front windows to where Oberon was. My scent would help them find me too, so the best option was to stop being human for a bit until I could ditch them. I triggered the charm that changed my shape to a sea otter and wriggled out of my clothes on three limbs instead of four, leaving them on the sidewalk for the vampires to smell, then I scampered as quickly as I could manage, hobbled as I was, along the base of the building so that my heat signature could not be seen through the windows, carrying the stake in my mouth. I hoped no one but vampires had been hurt. Just as I reached the corner, vampires burst out of the hotel entrance accompanied by a human—one whose voice I knew too well.

“O’Sullivan!” he called, and I peeked back around the corner to confirm it was him. Werner Drasche stood among his vampire entourage, looking up and down the intersection, plainly not in custody in Toronto anymore. And while he was no longer an arcane lifeleech, he was still a gigantic thorn in my side and showed a disturbing talent for outfoxing me. He must have been waiting out of sight, perhaps in the bar somewhere, and that was who the goggled vampire had called when he spotted me. I really should have killed him when I had the chance.

Well, Drasche could have this round; I was so extremely outgunned that there was no use in trying to tilt a lopsided battleground in my favor. I should count avoiding the ambush as a win.

Oberon, let’s go,
I said to him through our mental link.
Don’t wait to stop anyone. I’m going to fly out of here, and you follow along on the streets, okay? Try not to knock any tourists over.

I shifted directly from otter to owl, since my arms were in good shape and I wouldn’t have to depend on that damaged left leg. I’d worry about healing it later. As I took wing in the direction of the Vltava River, I heard Drasche launch into a series of taunts.

“You can’t win this war, O’Sullivan! One way or another, we’ll get to you!”

He made a good point: My goal was still a good one, but I couldn’t win using current methods. I’d have to try another way to get to Theophilus, because they had been waiting for me at the Grand Hotel Bohemia with guns and infrared and Drasche’s personal force of undead Austrian muscle. Which meant that Leif had betrayed me again.

T
here is a certain freedom granted in privacy—a sense of fulfillment and ease that comes with the simple knowledge that no one is watching. It’s why we feel all right about singing in the shower. And in this modern world, where we are constantly under surveillance of one kind or another, I suppose a compelling argument could be made that both our privacy and our freedom are illusions. Atticus and I don’t worry about conventional surveillance too much; stay off the Internet, use burner phones, and pay cash for everything you can, and that will at least make them
work
to find you. Using assumed identities is a huge help as well. But I haven’t had true privacy—true freedom—until now, with a divination cloak shielding me from the prying eyes of gods and seers of all kinds. And I know just how I want to celebrate that freedom.

I want to pluck out the metaphorical thorn that’s been embedded in my psyche for years and then see if I can’t find my way back to a happy place. Laksha’s question about where I am on my own spiritual journey has lingered in my mind, and I’ve been thinking about it—there was a rebuke there, and a well-deserved one. It put me in mind of Whitman’s rhetorical question about judgment in
I Sing the Body Electric:
Do you know so much yourself that you call the meanest ignorant?

Nope. I certainly do not. And the primary problem is that I do not know enough
of
myself. I have old wounds that have never fully healed, and I need to address them before I can move to help others. And in truth there is no balance that I can achieve but my own.

I have long delayed seeking that balance, in favor of more-pressing business, but I feel that it’s finally time to take care of it. Being able to take care of it was one of the primary reasons I became a Druid, but I have purposely waited since becoming bound to Gaia, to ensure that I would not act rashly. Instead, I have coolly planned a course of action that will serve Gaia and also serve my personal need to give my stepfather the finger.

As a child, when I came to live at his place in Kansas—the slightly smaller one, not the sprawling monstrosity he bought my senior year—I quickly saw that my mother was a prize instead of a person to him, and I was a burden he had to tolerate if he wanted the prize. He never laid a finger on me—I’m more fortunate than so many others in that regard—but the most love I was able to ever wring out of his face was a look of mild disgust. Never a kind word. Maybe it was because I was a tangible reminder that he had not always possessed my mother. Any interest he gave me was feigned, and that was only in the presence of others. I know my mom must have seen something good in him besides his bank account; her regard for him, at least, wasn’t feigned. I think she admires single-minded determination. My real dad had it and so does Beau—and I suppose I possess a fair measure of it myself.

The only time I think I ever saw him smile at me was when he was waving goodbye as I left Kansas for Arizona State.

So, yes: I have hurt feelings, which I probably should have sought to address long ago. His aggressive disdain, heaped on my real father’s distracted abandonment, did nothing good for my psyche. It’s why I took to playing alone outside as much as possible, enjoying an area that wasn’t so firmly under Beau’s control. Later it wasn’t playing but reading in a tree house that my mother had hired someone to build for me—Beau certainly wouldn’t do it. I stayed out past dark and burned through a whole lot of batteries for my flashlight. I felt more at home there than in the bedroom he allowed me to sleep in.

But there again, Beau Thatcher found a way to be hurtful. He has long regarded the whole world, including the people on it, as resources that exist for him and his cronies to exploit so that they may have their sprawling estates and luxury cars and congressmen in their pockets. His moral compass always points to himself; he is his own true north. He helped fund three or four corrupt scientists who denied the reality of climate change, giving his company a thin shield of shady science to protect his short-term profits.

And now that the world is racked by freakish storms, convulsing from drought and floods and rising sea levels, with massive die-offs in the oceans and extinctions continuing on land, he still refuses to own up to his share of the responsibility for it, and his money gives him the privilege to ignore the troubles that most people face. The world will never make him pay for his company’s oil spills and carbon pollution, because American laws are written to protect men like him. But Druidic law allows the punishment of despoilers, and I’m a Druid. The application of those laws is up to me.