CHAPTER 15

T he sunrise was coloring the horizon when Captain Le Pen dropped me off. I took a quick shower and was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. My dreams were not pleasant. Queen City had been rough at times, but the dangers in Zürich were on a whole other level.

It was noon when I woke up and found my way downstairs to get breakfast. Frau Buckner set a cup of coffee and a glass of orange juice on the table as I sat down.

“What would you like for breakfast?” she asked.

“Pancakes, an egg, and sausage?”

“Right away,” she said and trundled her way back to the kitchen. She had no sooner disappeared than Master Adolphus came down the stairs and sat across from me.

“Rough night?”

“Very rough. I ran into six Knights on my way home and ended up running for my life. Then that call for a tracker as soon as I got to sleep.” I didn’t mention the cat. I wasn’t sure anyone would believe me.

“Did you find the girls?”

“Yes, but we were too late. One of them was dead, and the other is in hospital now. It was massively screwed up. The girls lied about where they were going, and by the time we figured it out, two strigoi had captured them and hauled them off to the Langstrasse . Master, I thought that mages couldn’t be entranced.”

He sighed. “Kaitlyn, it depends on the mage’s strength, but we do a poor job of training our young people. And just because a child’s parents are mages doesn’t mean the children are strong enough to defend themselves.”

I shook my head. “In Queen City, children are tested at puberty, and then sent to the Farm—essentially a boarding school outside the city. They go home on weekends. In addition to normal school subjects, they are taught to use their magic.”

“Yes, I know. The current parenting paradigm in Zürich is to raise children in such a way that they fit in with mundane society. They live at home and go to school at the Guild, but much of their early magical training is left to the parents.”

“That seems silly, considering the dangers here.”

“I know. Are you all right?”

I gave him a wan smile. “It’s not the first time I’ve seen people killed by the strigoi—or killed a couple of bloodsuckers myself. But it’s frustrating. In Queen City, most of my tracking of missing kids was to rescue them from pedophiles. The rogues we tracked were mostly identified after we found the people who had been attacked. I’m just starting to come to grips with living in a war zone. In Queen City, even the rogue vamps didn’t usually kill their prey. That was more likely with newly turned lycans.”

Frau Buckner set my breakfast on the table, along with the Master’s lunch. The dining room was about half full, mostly with older mages there for brunch.

“There’s one thing,” I said between bites. I told him about looking into the injured girl’s body and pinching off her jugular vein.

He listened until I finished, then said, “So, how did you look into her body? What did you do to trigger that sight?”

I shook my head. “I just wanted to do it, so I tried to do it, and I could see into her wound. I mean there was quite a bit of superficial damage, but most of the bleeding was coming from one large vein. I could see a large artery—the carotid—and it was intact. But I’m really not sure how I pinched off the bleeding vein.”

He smiled. “I told you that it’s almost impossible to teach someone to do that. It seems to be a matter of will.” He sort of cocked his head. “Who taught you anatomy?”

“Amelia gave me a book.”

“It sounds like you’ve read a lot of books.”

“For years, the library was the only entertainment I could afford. It was free.”

He leaned back in his chair and nodded his head.

After I ate, the Master said he was going up to the Guild Hall, and I took myself out to sit by the fountain and soak up some sun. I had been there for about twenty minutes when someone sat down beside me. I looked over and discovered my companion was Nikolas Müller.

“Good afternoon. I hear that you had an eventful night.”

“Just a little spontaneous Zürich excitement,” I replied. I assumed that the girls’ fate was common knowledge at the Guild Hall that morning.

“That is the sort of thing we need to eliminate,” Müller said. “When the monsters refuse to abide by the Compact, we can’t ignore it.”

I wondered why he was there, and if he was stalking me for some reason. I did occasionally go out to sit by the fountain and read, but it wasn’t something regular, or at any particular time.

“Have you read the history of the Witch Wars?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“And what did you learn from it? Or did you just think it was an interesting story?”

I knew I was being rude, but I had shed most of my concern about offending older people years ago. Being gaslit was so common when I was a young tracker living hand to mouth that I was almost suspicious of sincerity.

I had lived for more than two years with Master Greenwood in Queen City. He was a historian who had written three books on the Witch Wars, a fourth on the evolution of mundane-magic-user society in the twentieth century, and another specifically on the role of magic users in the Second World War. I had read them all and spent many long evenings discussing them with him in his study.

“We gave up too soon,” Müller said. “We should have continued until we achieved victory instead of settling for an untenable peace. We had established order in some places, and instead of expanding that, we gave control back to the mundanes.”

“It had settled into a war of attrition,” I said, “and both sides were exhausted. They agreed to leave us alone, and in exchange, we agreed not to destroy their cities and slaughter their livestock. You forget, we fought back because we were attacked. We didn’t fight to conquer them, but for self-preservation. Now it’s even more lopsided. There are billions of them, while we constitute a tiny minority.”

“And you think maintaining the Compact while the strigoi and lycans rampage through both the mages and the mundanes is a system we should accept?”

“They are people, although different from us. Here in Zürich, they are under attack and fighting back. I see it as a guerilla war on their part. But so far, it’s not planned or coordinated. If you want to see thousands dying instead of a few here and there, the kind of genocide the Knights seem to be pushing for will accomplish that. The carnage on both sides would be indescribable.”

“They aren’t people. They’re monsters.”

I turned to face him. “I haven’t been here very long, but I have looked up the statistics. More mundanes and magic users die by their own hands than by those of your monsters. More people die in domestic squabbles than the strigoi kill. That is true worldwide.”

Müller shook his head. “You’re young and believe the propaganda of those currently in power. If the mundanes had their way, we would all be exterminated—mages, the strigoi, and the lycans.”

“And in some countries, those with different skin color or a different religion are murdered or enslaved. Just because mages assume political power doesn’t mean humanity’s basic nature would change. We’re apex predators, and there will always be conflict—it’s built into our DNA. Totalitarian regimes always struggle to maintain order.”

He checked his watch, then said, “I would love to continue this conversation, but I have an appointment. Perhaps dinner sometime?”

If he hadn’t checked my boobs while making that offer, I might have considered it. But I doubted I could change his mind about anything.

“I don’t think so. My social calendar is rather full at the moment, but thanks, anyway.”

I stood, walked back to the house, and glanced over my shoulder before going inside. He was still sitting there, watching me. It seemed that my ass was at least as interesting as my boobs. I didn’t think my opinions were of any interest to him at all.