Silence Fallen (Mercy Thompson #10)(104)

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.

He wasn’t the biggest monster I’ve ever seen. He was maybe eight feet tall and looked like an animated suit of armor made of red clay. His face had no features, no eyes, no mouth. There were also no letters on his forehead for me to erase if I needed to.

His magic felt different than it had before, which was only to be expected. He was different now. I’d given him the power to become real again.

“Greetings to the Golem of Prague,” I said.

It paused on the stairs.

You do not belong here, he told me.

I couldn’t tell if he meant here in the basement or in his city. He clarified it for me without my having to ask, so I guess he was still in my head.

Your help was necessary. You should leave and not ever come back. I won’t be so lenient again.

“I’m trapped here,” I told him. “As you know very well. I will leave when I can.”

Acceptable, it said. And it started down the stairs again. It was an awkward-looking movement. Since the stairs weren’t wide enough for his feet, the golem leaned back to center his weight over his . . . over what would have been his heels had he been human.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

There are demons here. The last of the demons in my city.

The Jewish Quarter, I thought, not Prague. I hoped he didn’t mean Prague.

“You’ve done your job,” I told him. “The vampires left here are no villains. They mean no harm to the people here.”

Yeah. I had a hard time with that last one, too, after I said it. Vampires ate people. It was what they did. But they had brought all the humans here to shelter them, and they were still guarding them to the best of their abilities.

They are demons, said the golem. They must be destroyed.

“What about the humans?” I asked.

They are not my people, he said—and I felt a cold chill. Because I knew what he meant.

Vanje had said that not even being Jewish had been enough to save people from the golem.

I didn’t know what percentage of the people living in Josefov were still Jewish. But if Prague was like the rest of Europe, after the Nazis got through with the city, it was a far smaller percentage than it had been when this had been the only place in Prague the Jewish population could live. And if being Jewish wouldn’t save them anyway, it didn’t matter because the golem would kill them all. If Vanje was right.

“What will you do to the humans who are not Jewish?” I asked.

They are not my people, the golem said. None of the humans are my people. I have no people.