“Sounds like a plan!”

I waved casually to the receptionist and pretended to be interested in a newspaper while Oberon got himself stretched out on the floor, out of sight. Once the receptionist lost interest in me and dropped his eyes, I dispelled the camouflage on Oberon and cast it on myself instead.

Nap well, I told him. But guard my jacket. I kind of liked it and it was sure to get messy in a few minutes. I took it off and laid it on the ottoman. As soon as it left my hands I dropped its camouflage, but the receptionist didn’t notice its sudden appearance. I took Luchta’s stake out of the inside pocket.

“I can nap and guard at the same time. If somebody comes around here, they will see me and decide to let that sleeping dog and your jacket lie.”

I returned my sight to the magical spectrum and crossed the lobby to the lounge on the other side. Through the open doorway, the lounge continued quite far back to a bar and then to an area with restaurant seating, where the hotel served its breakfast. In the lounge, round tables rested in front of couches built into the wall, and on the opposite side of those tables were a few modern armless chairs right out of a Copenhagen design haus. Ten tables, seating three or four each, and they were all full. Thirty vampires and one very nervous human serving them drinks they did not touch—though I had serious doubts that she knew who or what she was serving. She only knew that something about this group seemed wrong.

Up to this point I had slain very few vampires myself; most of the war had been conducted for me by the yewmen or the Hammers of God. Unless these vampires were all very old, they had yet to see why vampires of early days had cause to fear Druids. Except perhaps for Theophilus. I did hope that he was there; I had no idea what he looked like, and their auras all appeared the same to me—so I had no way to identify which one was measurably older or more powerful than another.

I shifted my grip on the stake, carved with the unbinding that would undo the vampires’ magic and then forcibly separate their component elements. I was anxious to try it out here, since it never got a test run in Prague. I’d examined the bindings earlier, and it was a clever execution. If there was no vampirism to unbind, it would do nothing to a human but hurt every bit as much as a normal stabbing would. But for a vampire, stabbing it anywhere with this stake would end its undead existence.

Murmuring the bindings to increase my strength and speed, drawing all the energy from the pool stored in my bear charm, I hoped I’d be able to either end this quickly or else lure them outside, where I could tap into more power from the earth. But I had my semi-effective unbinding charm, my ability to verbally unbind them, my stake, and at least a temporary visual advantage.

I really wished I knew how to tell the older vampires from the younger ones. Cosmetically, they were all frozen at the age they were when they died, and their clothing didn’t give any clues either: They all wore bespoke Italian suits and expensive shoes. I would not be surprised if each vampire’s ensemble was worth a year’s salary to the average worker. And “younger” was a relative term. I thought of it as “younger than Theophilus and myself,” but I had no doubt that every one of those vampires was a few hundred years old. Age equaled prestige in the vampire world, and truly young vampires would not be allowed to accompany Theophilus.

They spoke Italian too—a good clue that this crew had spent at least some time near the vampire power center of Rome, from which the campaign against the Druids had originated millennia ago. So when one vampire seated against the wall and facing the door lifted his nose and said, “Sentite l’odore di quel sangue? E veramente strano,” that was my cue to get the slaughter started, because they had smelled me.

I mentally targeted that vampire and surged forward, coming up behind the seated vamp and plunging the stake down over the back of the chair and into his right shoulder, puncturing the suit and his flesh. He made a short gurgling noise before his body liquefied and squirted in five directions—out his pant legs, his shirtsleeves, and his collar. I repeated the exercise with the vampire next to him and then completed the verbal unbinding on the third, taking out three vampires in a little more than three seconds.

And then, while the rest of the room was figuring out that, hey, maybe something ugly was going on, I staked another two and unbound three more verbally, using a macro-binding and simply changing the target. It was six or seven seconds, therefore, before the back of the room figured out that something was taking them apart and the champion lounging session was over. They all sprang to their feet, in some cases knocking over tables and chairs, and in one specific case throwing a chair in my general direction. It moved fast and I wasn’t expecting it and it took me down, though it did no real damage apart from giving them more time to set themselves in defense. I gave zero fucks about that: Vampires had no true defense against Druidry, and I was going to thunderdome every single one of them.

I kept re-targeting and unbinding the vampires closest to me. The nearest two lunged in my direction, came apart, and showered me in blood. My camouflage was then useless, because I was silhouetted in red, so I dispelled it and kept unbinding as I climbed to my feet. I’d ended ten vampires in fifteen seconds; perhaps I could get the rest in under a minute.

A whole furniture set sailed through the air at my head, the vampires figuring that if it had worked once, perhaps it would work again. And it did, because dodging that many chairs and tables is impossible.

I crumpled underneath them, making sure to hold on to the stake, and the twenty remaining vampires charged for the exit. Most of them flowed around me, but a pair landed on top of the chairs, pinning me to the floor and allowing the others time to escape. Or at least that was their plan. I targeted each one in turn and unbound them; the weight lifted off me, and their entrails glopped onto the floor. I threw off the chairs just in time to see that there were only five or so vampires remaining in the room: The rest had scarpered off, but one landed on me with his knee in my gut, one hand around my throat and the other pinning down my stake hand. He was strong and would crush my larynx if I let him get comfortable; his nails were already drawing blood. I triggered the unbinding charm on my necklace, imperfect as it was, and let it do its thing: It affected the vampire like a punch to the solar plexus and he wheezed, the strength temporarily gone from his limbs. I wrenched the stake hand free and slammed it into his side beneath the ribs as his buddies scrambled past. He turned into something like melted raspberry gelato right on top of me, and I was so glad that I’d left my jacket with Oberon.

I gasped and coughed to get my breath back, then scrambled to my feet, even though without oxygen my muscles felt like Jell-O. The time I’d spent on the ground had let the vampires crash through the front floor-to-ceiling windows—they didn’t bother with the revolving door—meaning that almost half of them were getting away.

A faintly heard “Sheiße” from behind the bar was my only clue that the human server had survived.

“Atticus? You all right?” Oberon’s voice asked in my head.

Yep! I’ll be back. Take your nap.

Jumping through the jagged portal of glass, I saw that the vampires had split into two groups. One had gone left at a diagonal angle toward the S-Bahn station at Hackescher Markt, and another had gone right toward Monbijou Park and the Spree River.