THE DRAGON OF BRNO
Kristýna Sněgoňová
The monster moved.
It took an interminable amount of time before it turned its head towards Lucie Jahodová, and she watched it, motionless, to not miss the right moment.
“NOW!”
Marek pressed the lever of the sprayer, and water hit the snail. The monster immediately retracted its eyestalks and remained motionless at the bottom of the aquarium.
“Was that all?” Marek asked in disappointment.
“It made him happy,” Lucie tried to hide that her expectations had not been met either. “He likes water.”
The boy put down the sprayer and looked around the room unenthusiastically, as if considering what to do for entertainment instead of playing with the ugly snail.
Lucie hated her afternoon shift. The children group closed at six, and the kids had to be picked up at least ten minutes early so the tutor could take out the trash, wash the tables, tidy up the learning materials, and do everything a paid cleaner should do, except the owner didn’t pay one. Instead, the owner incorporated taking care of the premises into the tutors’ job description, so that Lucie finished at 6:30 every afternoon, with everything after 6:00 being the unpaid consequence of not having time to clean up during the handover of the children to their parents. It was only made worse by Marek’s parents who, despite repeated reminders, pleas, and even threats, would pick up their son after six, sometimes after six-thirty, and whenever Lucie called them, would tell her do you understand how busy we are in a tone that made it clear she will never understand that with her working position.
“Shall we watch the moss ball for a while?” Lucie offered desperately, while trying for the fifth time to piss off Marek’s father. Probably literally, because he refused her call twice, so her attempts began to fall into voicemail. She mentally berated him all sorts of things, but that was little consolation.
The boy gave her a sad look.
She understood him, because the moss ball was even more boring than a snail, but she couldn’t say it out loud. There was definitely something educational about having these two creatures here, though she hadn’t figured out what yet. The green orb lay in the bowl, not moving. She watched it alone for a while, but when her head started to drop, she moved with Marek to the reading corner to a book about large machines.
Just as she got the impression that she knew more about the Bagger 288 wheeled excavator than any tutor in a children group would ever have, the bell rang. She got up, said Marek, Daddy’s here, and went out into the hallway, between the shoe racks, only one of which remained occupied. She opened the door with an expression that clearly announced to the newcomer that the school fees were not nearly enough to do what she had to do for their payer. Unfortunately, the newcomer couldn’t read that in Lucie’s face, because he wasn’t paying any tuition.
“Hello, Strawberry,” Petr Schiller greeted her with a smile.
One of the things Lucie appreciated about her current job was the fact that, unlike the previous one, she didn’t share it with him. “What do you want here?!”
Petr pushed off the door frame. “May I come in?”
“Only if you’re going to pick up the kid.”
Marek peeked out of the playroom. A long green string snot hung down to his lower lip, but he sucked it back up his nose in one expert pull.
Petr shivered. “We can talk in the hallway.”
“I don’t have the time and I don’t have anything to talk about, especially not with you.”
Lucie tried to slam the door, but Petr stuck his foot in it with swiftness that would have made any peddler of God’s Word envious. She ignored his pained groan and returned to the playroom.
She was just forcing Marek to use a handkerchief when Petr limped in.
“I got a call from Ostrava. They called you too.”
Lucie didn’t turn around. “I don’t have the time to pick up calls from unknown numbers.”
“If you hadn’t erased them, they wouldn’t be unknown,” Petr argued, carefully sitting down in the reading nook and opening a book about large machines. “They sent you an e-mail, too.”
“It must have fallen into spam.” Lucie finally stopped, handkerchief in hand. “And how do you know about that?”
“When they couldn’t get in touch with you, they asked me to come see you.”
“I thought you didn’t even know where I was working. I was hoping you didn’t know where I was working.”
Petr looked around critically and finally his gaze landed on Marek, who was smearing snot over his face with his sleeve. “No wonder.”
“It’s not bad at all,” Lucie argued firmly and began straightening the remaining books on the shelf. “And as I recall, we weren’t given a choice back then.”
“They offered us a transfer to Ostrava,” Petr reminded her.
Lucie folded her arms. The memory of the closing of the Brno branch of Fantom, a Czech monster hunting company, angered her even a year later. Monsters were dwindling all over the country, which was bittersweet for the Hunters, but she couldn’t forgive Fantom for firing the people from Brno. Though deep down, she knew it made sense—they’d been getting the least amount of contracts long before their cancellation, unless it was to help out elsewhere. If anything threatened Brno, it was burning stumps, not monsters. Most of the ones they didn’t hunt toed the line, so Fantom left them alone.
Perhaps the sad end of Jakub Holý, the third member of the Brno Fantom, contributed to their dissolution, because in his case, there were too many monsters for him. It took them a while to notice that his behavior was no longer just peculiar. All Hunters were a bit weird—if they weren’t, they would be working behind the cash register at a supermarket or at the Office for the Control of Political Parties’ Finances—but when Jakub started to claim that Voices were talking to him through electrical sockets, they realized they were not that weird. They had to send him to the Černovice asylum after he spent an entire night running away from them through Brno, removing license plates from random people’s cars because he believed the numbers on them were capable of summoning a demon. Luckily, running with the plates slowed him down so much that Petr took him down in a car park behind a supermarket just before dawn. It was actually the last hunt of the Brno Fantom branch.
Then came the sad months, during which Lucie cleaned the office twice a day to keep herself occupied until she thought of trying online English tutoring, and Petr was going to a pub called Glass Meadow to get drunk, and then slept at his desk until noon, because he lived in Jehnice and getting to the office in the city center was easier than driving home in the morning. Lucie was avoiding him at first, but then she got used to ignoring him and he stopped apologizing for the fact that the office constantly smelled of stale beer.
They lived in that depressing status quo for another month, and when Libor, the director of Fantom, arrived in Brno to personally thank them for all they had done not only for Fantom, but especially for the Czech Republic, presenting them with commemorative certificates and a voucher for a purchase at a bookstore in Ostrava, it took them both by surprise. They didn’t resist, because it wouldn’t have done them any good; the Hunters didn’t have a union, and even if they had, they could hardly hide the fact that they hadn’t had a job for a long time. But Lucie couldn’t shake the bitter aftertaste of the end of their collaboration. She hadn’t seen either of her colleagues for a year—she hadn’t heard from Jakub since winter, when he had called her excitedly to say that he was off the pills because he was feeling better and would call her again when he had finished collecting all the license plates, and she had no idea what Petr was doing.
“They did offer that,” she agreed. “But I was born here.”
“And I didn’t want to learn a new language,” Petr said, and when Lucie looked surprised, he added: “It was just a joke.”
“Haha,” Lucie didn’t appreciate it. “Why are you here, anyway?”
Petr checked Marek with a glance, then lowered his voice, “Ostrava offered us a job.”
Lucie squinted her eyes. In the past, Ostrava would call them in to help when monsters were causing too much trouble in another city, but this was not the case—the Brno branch was no more, she had become a tutor in a children group, and Petr . . .
“Where do you work?” she asked, kind of against her will.
“I’m a CNC operator.” Petr smiled, “but maybe not for long.”
Lucie shook her head. “Whatever Ostrava wants us to do, we’re not doing it anymore.”
“Maybe not now, but you don’t forget the hunt. It’s like . . . ”
“Riding a bike?”
“Sex.”
This time, Lucie was the one to shoot a glance at Marek. Then she grabbed Petr by the arm and pulled him out into the hallway. “I’m done with Fantom.”
“But they’re not done with you.”
“I’ll delete that spam and forget I saw you.”
“Aren’t you wondering why they called?” Petr asked. “You were born here, Strawberry, I’d think you’d want to know what’s going on.”
Lucie curled her lip. “If there was something going on, I’d know even without Fantom. I watch TV.”
“Someone’s killing monsters,” Petr said.
Silence fell down the corridor.
Lucie watched Petr for a few seconds, then laughed dryly. “Oh, no!”
“I’m serious.”
“That’s what we were paid for.”
“But now it’s done by someone who’s not being paid to do it. At least not by Fantom.”
“They should be happy to save money.”
“But they’re not. Bodies have started turning up, and the ways they’ve killed them . . . ” Petr shook his head. “It was brutal.”
“How . . . brutal?” Lucie asked reluctantly. She mentally berated herself for it, but Petr’s words intrigued her. Maybe she’d been reading Green Eggs and Ham for too many times.
“It looks like ritual murders. Something . . . about it seems familiar, but I can’t remember what.”
“Are you hoping I’ll remember?”
Petr smiled again. “We had a good time together, Strawberry.”
“That was a long time ago,” Lucie stopped him before he could get to their last big hunt, a success that had been talked about throughout Fantom, after which their little celebration had twisted in a way she didn’t want to think about because workplace relationships had always been taboo for her. Petr hadn’t stopped smiling, which meant that he remembered that evening very well too, and it was clear to him that she hadn’t forgotten either, so she decided to wipe that smile off his face. “We’re both different people. You literally, because I can see at least twenty pounds that I don’t remember.”
Petr shrugged. “You don’t exactly outdo yourself at CNC.”
A bell rang down the corridor.
“Thank goodness,” Lucie muttered and opened the door. A man in a suit stood on the threshold, his eyes fixed on his wristwatch.
“Well, finally!” he said without greeting, as if he wasn’t the one they’d been waiting for, and pushed past Lucie into the hallway.
“Hello, Mr. Jonáš,” Lucie restrained herself and closed the door. Then she gestured with her hand for Marek to come and get dressed. “I called you.”
“I don’t have time to answer the phone,” Jonáš snapped.
Perhaps because she couldn’t control her irritation from the previous conversation, she snapped too, “And I don’t have time to stay here until six-thirty just for you.”
Jonáš turned to her, surprised and annoyed at the same time, while Marek put on his sneakers, sucked in green snot and watched them with interest.
“This isn’t your leisure activity, it’s your work.”
“On the contrary. My work ended almost three quarters of an hour ago. I have no problem staying here if you call you will be late, but . . . ”
Jonáš pointed a thumb at Petr. “I’m not the last one here, so what’s the big deal?”
“But . . . That’s . . . ”
Petr didn’t wait to see what he’d come up with. He pulled a paper tissue out of the box on the shelf, gave it to the boy and said: “I’m her boyfriend. I waited for her at home, and then I came over to see if she was okay, because she’s really not getting paid to be your private nanny.”
Jonáš’s face stiffened. “We’ll see what your boss has to say about you bringing visitors here.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Lucie objected.
“Dad, what’s sex?” Marek asked loudly.
Jonáš paused, looked at Lucie, and barked, “I’ll complain about you!” and dragged Marek out.
Lucie only recovered when Petr closed the door again. “Are you normal!?”
“I am, but you must have a screw loose when you, out of all the possible jobs, chose this one,” he claimed, handing Lucie a piece of paper.
She took it and ran her eyes over it, but one side was blank and the other was just a number with a bunch of zeros on it.
“What’s this?” she asked angrily.
“The reward that Ostrava is offering. Either I get it all or we share it; that depends on you. And on whether you’d rather keep wiping snot for free or take a year’s worth of vacation.”
They stared at each other for a moment.
Lucie stood there, holding the note in her hand, Jonáš’s voice echoing in her ears. If he complained, the headmistress wouldn’t let her off the hook. It wasn’t in her job description to stand up for tutors in front of parents and their often impossible demands.
“If,” Lucie spoke slowly, “we can find out what’s going on.”
* * *
“Why kindergarten?” Petr asked as Lucie got into his blue Toyota and he headed down the main road to Řečkovice.
“I guess I needed to surround myself with someone intelligent for a change. And it’s a children group, not a kindergarten.”
“You wipe their asses differently in there?”
Lucie clenched her fingers, resting on the thighs of her jeans, and silently counted to ten. Petr had been getting on her nerves since they’d started working together, mostly because of how flippantly he approached monster hunting, and worse, how good he was at it, despite the fact that he was often plagued by hangovers while doing it. She barely kept pace with him, even though she was trying much harder than he was, and that drove her crazy. She didn’t think he could irritate her more, but it had gotten worse since the night they’d celebrated their successful vampire hunt at the Tech Museum, when Lucie had gotten carried away with her enthusiasm, a few glasses of gin and tonic, and, though she’d never admit it out loud, Petr’s scent. She just hoped that if he really wanted to cooperate, he wouldn’t start talking about it.
“Why exactly . . . ” Lucie paused. She had completely forgotten what Petr was doing. Even in the past, all she cared about was how good a Hunter he was. Unlike Jakub, who was a great analyst but a lousy operative. Even before he went insane.
“CNC operator?” Petr finished, shrugging. “I’m a machinist by trade, and this job is so easy, even you could do it. It lets me clear my head. Which I guess I needed after everything that happened.”
Lucie understood that. Switching from the “I know what lives among us and I kill it for money” mode to the normal world, living in the everyday and pretending to herself and others that nothing more ever happened, was hard even for her. For the first few months, at every unusual sound from outside, she would rush to the safe where she kept her cache, and in kindergarten she knew which kitchen drawer held the biggest and sharpest knives.
“You don’t mind coming back, though? Now that you have a new life?” she asked instead of coming up with some creative insult.
Petr shook his head without taking his eyes off the road ahead. “I don’t have a new life, just the same one as before. Maybe with a new job, but . . . ”
He hesitated, and Lucie narrowed her eyes. “You’re hoping they’ll take us back.”
“You think I want monsters running around again so I can kill them?”
“Yeah.”
Petr smiled wryly, but said nothing.
When they pulled up in front of his house, Lucie got out and looked around curiously. She didn’t know Jehnice too well, but she liked the house in front of her. The well-kept garden suggested that Petr didn’t live here alone, because they never even had a cactus in the office—every plant wilted around Lucie, even though she watered them regularly, and Petr certainly wouldn’t water anything.
“I’m taking care of my Grandma,” he said, as if he knew what she was thinking.
“Poor Grandma.”
But either he took better care of her than he did of everything else, or she was much tougher than expected, because when she came out of the house—attracted by the sound of the engine—she didn’t look like some poor thing.
“Oh, Petr.” She clapped her hands together and eyed Lucie happily. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to have a visitor? I’d have baked a cake for your girlfriend.”
“She’s just a friend, Grandma,” Petr stopped her, wincing when he caught Lucie’s amused expression out of the corner of his eye. “And with her figure, she shouldn’t eat anything sweet.”
“She’ll know you’re bullshitting,” Lucie whispered. “A man like you doesn’t have any friends.”
Grandma let them into the house and, despite their refusal, set about making coffee, tea and something good to go with it.
Petr sighed, but he didn’t comment on it.
He led Lucie upstairs, shoved her into his study, and she giggled the moment she crossed the threshold. She too had missed her time with Fantom, but here it felt like the last year hadn’t happened at all. She’d thought that when they were finished, the people from Ostrava had taken all the binders, either archived or shredded their contents, and erased former Hunters from their mind after the last paycheck, but here the Brno branch of Fantom was still alive.
There was a huge map of Brno on the wall. The first few cases they stuck pins into and connected them with red thread, but then they stopped being able to read it and the map became a rather unaesthetically pierced decoration. There were familiar binders on the shelf, and when Lucie pulled one out—she realized she was holding her breath with suspense—and opened it, she found paper folders, each labeled with the number of the hunt and the codename under which they’d spoken about it.
“Playing with fire,” she read half aloud.
She remembered that case—a plivnik had taken up residence in the newly built apartment building, and getting it out was a real pain in the ass. Maybe some of the tenants would have welcomed him, but since he demanded a soul in return for his services—at least according to the rules, although this one claimed he would help in exchange for booze and cigarettes, and Jakub insisted he remembered him from the bench on the main station, that he was not a plivnik, but a homeless man, and his offer to mop the hallways was nice, but the rent included cleaning service—Petr and Lucie had evicted him without mercy. They only got a couple of thousand from TEFLON for it, and when Alexandra called them, instead of congratulating them, she didn’t hide her suspicion that Jakub was right and they had just shamelessly taken money for evicting some bum from the basement.
“Wow,” Lucie muttered.
Petr glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, as if he wasn’t sure if she was appraising his office approvingly or derisively. She wasn’t really sure either, but in the end, nostalgia got the better of her. Those years under Fantom had been . . .
She put down the binder. “Why are we here? Other than to make your grandmother happy and give her the false impression that you have a girlfriend.”
“I certainly wouldn’t use you for that,” Petr objected, handing Lucie a paper folder. “I didn’t know if you were going to do it, so I didn’t want to carry it around with me.”
When Lucie opened the folder, the photos fell out onto the floor. “Ugh!”
The photographs showed a disfigured girl, definitely pretty in life, but in death her skin was grey, streaked with wounds and bloodstains. Her long hair was matted and thinning because someone had ripped some of it out—it hung around her dented head like silver decorations on a Christmas tree. A bluish tongue stuck out of the girl’s open mouth, one eye was bulging out, the other was cracked and only an empty socket stared into the lens. But the worst thing was that she was broken and braided in the Brno wheel hanging on the wall of the new City Hall. Unknown symbols were painted around it, in what appeared to be her blood.
“This is . . . ” Lucie bent down, picked up the top photo and looked at the dead woman closely, though that sight made her stomach churn. “A slibka?”
Petr nodded, as if waiting to see if Lucie would notice, among all the brutal violence, the unmistakable signs that the dead woman was not human, but a supernatural being, mistaken by people for a wraith. According to legends, a slibka was an unfaithful girl, but in reality it was a monster in human form, an ethereal woman with silver hair who liked to attack drunken students on their way to their nightly binge. She prowled around bus stops and side streets, and when she managed to drag a boy into a dark corner, she snapped his neck and ate his guts.
“Who did this to her?” Lucie asked.
Petr rolled his eyes. “If I’d known, I’d have found him and take your share from TEFLON for myself.”
There was a knock and Grandma stuck her head in the room. “Would you like some green, black or fruit tea, miss . . . ”
“Just Lucie,” Lucie smiled politely. “And I’d love to have . . . ”
“She won’t have any, Grandma.” Petr pushed his grandmother out into the hallway, then he leaned against the door. “What do you think?”
“You’re very rude to your Grandma. I’m not even talking about me.”
“I’m not talking about you either, I’m talking about that slibka.”
Lucie focused on the symbols on the wall.
They looked familiar to her too, but at the same time she was sure she didn’t know what they meant. “Something about them . . . But I’ve never seen them before.”
“Just like me,” Petr agreed. “It’s like I can’t remember the word, and yet it’s on my tongue. I don’t know the symbols, but at the same time it’s like . . . ”
“How come I haven’t heard of it? Something like that must have been all over the media.”
“The police are covering it up at the insistence of the SRS, with the explanation that it could be a serial killer.”
“Because of the symbols?”
“Because that slibka there is the third victim.”
Lucie was taken aback. “What?”
Petr tapped on the other two folders on the table.
Lucie skimmed through them. Different monsters, different places, same symbols around them. “City Hall, St. James Church, villa Tugendhat . . . ”
“The Tugendhat murder got out, but luckily the media accepted the suicide story. Though few could write such a litany with their guts.”
Lucie put down the files. “Obviously it’s a serial killer.”
“And the symbols are the same every time, so it’s hard to tell if they’re going to stop at five or twenty victims.”
“If they’re going to stop at all.”
“Until we know what they mean, we won’t know for sure . . . So time is of the essence at this point.”
“No one in Ostrava can read them?”
“Strangely enough, no.” Petr ruffled his hair. “I was thinking . . . ”
“No.” Lucie shook her head decisively. “I know what you want to say, and the answer is no.”
“She’s not a monster in the true sense of the word.”
“She’s an evil witch.”
“Every other woman is.”
“Maybe just to you. And no wonder. Consulting a striga about a serial killer . . . ”
“About black magic,” Petr interrupted Lucie. “Because this is obviously black magic.”
“She’ll want something for it,” Lucie reminded him.
Petr grimaced. “Yeah, money. She does tarot readings now. Normally, for a trade in Líšeň.”
“The striga?” Lucie frowned. “Where did she get her permit?”
“You can ask her yourself.” Petr put his ear to the door, and when he was sure his grandmother had given up, he grabbed all three files and opened the door to the hallway. “I booked us in for eight o’clock, so we’ve got to hurry.”
* * *
The striga not only lived, but also ran her business in a 2+1 apartment in a panel building in the Death Valley in Líšen. At least, that’s what Lucie’s mother called that place. She used to go there to visit a friend and was always stressed by the fact that after getting off the bus she was on the level of the last floor of the house below her.
Since the elevator didn’t work, Lucie and Petr climbed up to the fifth floor and stopped in front of a door with a name tag that read “Madame Black” and information that the person in question did horoscope and tarot, all surrounded by stickers with the symbols of the zodiac signs.
“Madame Black,” Lucie snorted. “Of course.”
Petr rang the doorbell. Unlike Lucie, he’d taken a shoulder holster with his favorite Glock 18, but he hadn’t offered any gun to her, though he certainly had more of them at home, and maybe that was why he wasn’t as nervous as she was.
It took about half a minute before there were shuffling footsteps heard in the hallway, the jangling of a safety chain, and finally a squeaky voice: “Welcome to my humble . . . ”
The words died on her parted lips as she recognized her visitors.
The striga hadn’t changed much in the two years Lucie hadn’t seen her—she was still morbidly obese, a wonder she could fit into the frame of the front door, her hair was disheveled around her head as if she’d just been electrocuted, and her long yellowed nails, the polish peeling off them, suggested she hadn’t quit smoking. The smell of cigarette smoke enveloped her more than the aura of mystery she must have been striving for with a good dozen necklaces, talismans and bracelets with the tree of life, the ankh, the hand of Fatima, the eye of Horus, the dharmachakra and a host of other symbols that were lost in the fat folds.
She placed one hand on the door frame, making it clear that she was definitely not inviting them in. “I’m clean. I have a deal with Fantom.”
Petr held up his hands. “We know that, we helped make that deal.”
“You helped,” Lucie reminded. “I disagreed.”
The striga flashed black eyes at her. “So what do you want here?”
Petr pointed to the sign on the door.
The striga paused. “To get a horoscope?”
“A tarot reading. We’re interested in what’s coming up in the near future,” Petr smiled.
“I can tell you myself. For free,” Lucie muttered, moving her hand involuntarily before remembering she didn’t have a gun on her. “Once we cross that threshold . . . ”
“You’ll only get what you pay for,” the striga objected. “I’ve been clean since the deal was made.”
They looked at each other for a moment, then Lucie sighed and shrugged.
“Come in,” the striga said curtly and hobbled off into the hall. “And take off your shoes, I cleaned the carpets yesterday.”
Lucie and Petr looked at each other and both shook their heads slightly.
If something went wrong, they didn’t want to face it barefoot. Plus, the carpet looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in a long time.
On her way through the hallway, Lucie didn’t notice any traces of the striga’s previous life—but that didn’t mean she had really left it all behind. She remembered all too well how she had fallen into their hands as part of another case, and since they hadn’t been able to prove that the black magic items they had found then had come from her, she had made a deal with Fantom. Lucie regretted to this day that during the last hunts, all of the Brno staff had gone half throttle, albeit each for different reasons, and hadn’t worked too hard when they could have proven that the striga wasn’t quite harmless.
They passed through a beaded curtain into a room that smelled of scented sticks so pervasive that they almost overpowered the ever-present smell of cigarette smoke. There was blue wallpaper with constellation symbols on the walls, and a Himalayan salt crystal lamp and a ritual cauldron with a chakra flower of life on a shelf full of books on the practical uses of the divining pendulum, magical numbers and angels. In the center of the room was a round table surrounded by chairs and a huge cushioned armchair, above which hung an almost equally huge decorative mandala. On the table was what else but a crystal ball and next to it a deck of tarot cards. On the windowsill, colored candles of varying heights burned.
The striga slumped into an armchair, steepled her meaty fingers, and gestured to the chairs. “Sit down.”
Lucie and Petr sat down. While Petr looked around the room curiously, Lucie squinted suspiciously at the giantess in front of her. The striga took the ball off the table and set it down on the floor, her back cracking so hard Lucie jerked. Then she picked up the deck, made herself comfortable in the chair, some of her body overflowing over the armrests, and slowly began to shuffle the cards.
“So you want to know about your future?”
Petr nodded. “Especially if it contains a lot of luck, wealth, and love.”
Lucie couldn’t help a contemptuous snort.
“Shuffle the deck,” the striga prompted Petr, and when he did as she told him, she turned to Lucie. “And you cut the deck.”
“Come on, cut the deck,” Petr supported the striga when Lucie didn’t move.
“If I’m gonna cut something, I’m gonna cut you,” Lucie said through her teeth, but when the silence in the room became almost as thick as incense smoke, she obeyed with a sigh.
Painfully slowly, the striga unfolded the cards in an intricate interpretive pattern. Even as her sharp black eyes flicked from card to card, Lucie felt like the whole thing had taken a good quarter of an hour.
She was about to protest that she didn’t have that much time, even though no one but Paclik the cat was waiting for her in the empty apartment in Kohoutovice, when the striga finally spoke, “I see . . . a lot of children.”
“That’s possible,” Petr concluded, pointing at Lucie. “She works at the kindergarten.”
Lucie kicked him hard in the ankle. The striga didn’t need to know more about her than was necessary, ideally nothing.
The old woman shook her head. “It’s not work-related.” Then she smiled wickedly. “These are your children. All five of them.”
“Whose? Mine?”
“No, yours. Both of you. Your children.”
Petr smirked. “I’ve been always thinking big.”
“Bullshit!” Lucie snapped, searching in her purse for the files. Then she opened the top one and threw it between her and the striga so violently that it swept most of her cards to the floor. “Have you ever seen this before?” The top photo had symbols written in blood, specifically those from the murder in the garden of Villa Tugendhat.
The striga transformed in front of their eyes. She had sunk into herself, but her black eyes had almost fallen out of their sockets. A stream of curses rolled from her parted lips in a language Lucie and Petr didn’t know. A sudden wind swept through the room, though the windows were closed, and blew out all the candles.
Lucie turned sharply to Petr, who, unlike her, was armed, but clearly didn’t see striga as a threat and stayed in his chair. She therefore walked over to the shelf and grabbed the ritual dagger that was leaning against the books.
The striga fell silent.
For a few seconds, she just breathed sharply, fleshy fingers gripping the edge of the table. Her massive breast rose and fell wildly beneath the black silk.
“Where did you . . . ” Her voice screeched like fingernails on a pane of glass. “Where did you get that?”
Petr reached out slowly and closed the folder again while Lucie stood behind him, knife ready so she could use it if the striga decided to attack them. “From the police.”
“These symbols . . . ”
“ . . . haven’t been deciphered yet, which is why we came here. You’ve seen them before, haven’t you?”
Shaken striga licked her lower lip, then shook her head.
“No.”
“Don’t lie to us,” Petr demanded. “For one thing, you’re on probation, so you are harming yourself, and for another, we’re not leaving until we know what you know, and neither you nor we want to spend any more time here than necessary.”
“I’ve already said what I know. Nothing.”
“That’s possible, at least as far as the tarot is concerned. But not when it comes to the symbols. And while you’re mumbling, I’m mentally calculating how much we’d get for catching someone who practices black magic . . . ”
Lucie realized that she used to be the voice of reason for the Brno branch of Fantom, and felt a stab of anger. Not only did Petr have a gun, unlike her, but he didn’t even need one, because working on the CNC obviously added +10 to his charisma and intelligence.
She slowly put the dagger down and asked the striga, “Is this black magic? At least you can tell us that.”
“That ritual. It is so horrible that it defies the usual division of magic. Was there a . . . body involved?”
Petr nodded. “A noonwraith. In this case.”
“How many . . . How many have . . . ”
Lucie shook her head. “Tell us what it means first.”
The striga opened and closed her mouth idly for a moment, then suddenly froze. “No.” With shaking hands, she arranged the rest of the cards in a deck. “I don’t want anything to do with this. After all, you’re the Hunters, I’m just the card reader.”
“If we don’t know who we’re hunting, it’s going to be harder.”
“You’ll do fine, as you always do. I can only tell you what’s in store for you.”
“Five children, and that’s not something I want to hear.”
“But that’s all I can tell you. I didn’t perform this ritual. You can try to pin it on me, but unless the other Hunters are completely stupid, they’ll know this is beyond my abilities.”
Lucie folded her hands. “We can make you talk, you know that.”
The striga grinned. She had managed to suppress her fear, and if she felt any sympathy, not for the Hunters, but for their money, it was gone. Petr sighed and looked reproachfully at Lucie. But she was fed up with it.
She pointed to the folder Petr had picked up from the table. “It’s obviously black magic and you’re the last evil witch in Brno.”
“Apparently you don’t go to town much, my dear,” the striga claimed bitingly. “Last time I was at the post office, some old hag ran over my leg with a shopping bag, and then . . . ”
“A real wicked witch,” Lucie corrected herself. “Maybe you really do read cards for a living now, though I doubt it after what I’ve heard, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t have gone off to braid a slibka in the wheel during the night.”
Striga stiffened. “Someone braided her in the wheel? And left behind similar symbols?”
Lucie nodded.
The striga pondered that for a few seconds, absently shuffling the deck of cards as she did so. Then she set it down and stared at Petr. “Go to the Central Cemetery. Talk to the deadlings. They know everything that’s going on in the city.”
Petr shuddered. “I hate them.”
The striga smiled vindictively. “So do I, but if anyone can tell you who’s responsible for the killings, it’s those little . . . ”
As a tutor in a children’s group, Lucie felt the need to stop next word before it was spoken. “Thank you. See you.”
“I would rather not,” the striga told her. “You know where the door is, I presume.”
“Sure,” Lucie replied, and she and Petr made their way down the hall, pursued by the muffled cursing of striga, who not only then realized that she hadn’t been paid for her service, but couldn’t get out of her chair fast enough to stop the leaving Hunters.
“It’s dark now,” Lucie said as they exited the apartment building. “We could check them out.”
“Deadlings only show up at noon and midnight,” Petr reminded her, and Lucie felt blood rush to her cheeks, because she should have known something like that. Reading nursery rhymes, wiping butts and scraping scabs off the walls didn’t do her brain any good. “But we could grab a dinner in the meantime, what do you say, Strawberry? Noodles?”
Lucie was about to argue that she didn’t have the time, or rather the inclination, but then she realized that if she was to be ready at midnight, there was no point in going home, and besides, she was really hungry. She knew which noodle store Petr meant, and was surprised to realize that she hadn’t gone there since she’d left Fantom.
She opened the car door and said, “Noodles.”
* * *
When they sat down by a plastic table in an Asian restaurant, Lucie felt more nostalgic than when she saw the wall map of Brno in Petr’s home. This was where they came after every closed case and hunt. They used to sit at a table next to a strip of running sushi, even though Jakub was the only one who ate sushi, and each time he’d talked them into trying it too, without success. Lucie and Petr were loyal to one dish, though—Lucie to Cantonese noodles with chicken and Petr to crispy duck—so the waiter never asked them what they wanted and just brought their food straight away. They once helped the owner when a basilisk took up residence in her warehouse, and since then they’ve kind of considered that restaurant their own.
Lucie was disappointed when a waiter she’d never seen before placed menus in front of them. She felt as if she’d come home after her first semester at college to find that they’d moved all her stuff out of her room because she didn’t need it anymore. She noted with exasperation that the menu contents had changed as well, and was almost afraid to order the Cantonese noodles, lest she accidentally discover that they didn’t even taste like she remembered, and that part of their charm was due to the simple fact that they symbolized a job well done and a bounty from TEFLON to her.
When the waiter left with the menus, Petr asked, “Don’t you miss it a bit, Strawberry?”
“What?” Lucie asked into her glass of soda.
Petr sat down on a chair. “Hunting.”
Lucie watched the popping bubbles and wondered. There was no easy answer to that question. “Even if . . . I couldn’t change it then. Except for moving, which I didn’t want to do. And maybe that was a sign . . . that it was time to quit. Find something normal, a job that doesn’t involve killing, a place they’ll keep for me when I get back after maternity leave . . . ” She remembered what the striga had told them and quickly set the glass down. “What about you? When we find whoever is responsible for all this, will you move to Ostrava?”
Petr run his index finger on the rim of his glass. “Maybe.”
“Or it was a good thing we quit before we ended up like Jakub,” Lucie reminded.
Petr shook his head. “Jakub was mentally ill.”
“And it probably didn’t help that he was doing what he was doing. I bet that wouldn’t have happened to him in some office.”
“Or it would have happened to him sooner.”
They started eating in silence.
The noodles tasted half like glutamate and half like memories. But neither was bad, and Lucie found herself enjoying it again—the silence between her and Petr was not oppressive, but soft as cotton wool. Time passed faster than she’d thought, so when the waiter warned them before eleven that they’d be closing soon, it took them both by surprise. Petr insisted on paying, not out of excessive gentlemanliness, but out of concern that one dinner would ruin Lucie’s finances for the rest of the month, which, while insulting, wasn’t that far from the truth. She concluded that she deserved at least a little compensation after all she’d had to endure with him during her time at Fantom, and didn’t resist for long.
They left the car in the parking lot across the cemetery, walked through the underpass and along the high cemetery wall. A red-faced drunk slept at the bus stop, a young man walked along the sidewalk opposite them, his hands in the pockets of his pulled-up sweatshirt, but anyone they met might have thought of them as lovers on a night walk, though they kept their distance and the surroundings of the Central cemetery weren’t exactly romantic.
They stopped by the wall, checked that the air was clear, and then Petr cupped his hands, Lucie put her arms around his neck, stepped into his clasped hands and he lifted her up. She caught the wall, swung her leg over to the other side, and before she could ask if he needed help, Petr jumped up behind her with a groan. Lucie smirked in the darkness—those extra pounds took a toll on him. They jumped down in sync like water jumpers and froze for a moment, though by this time the cemetery gate was long closed and no one was supposed to be among the graves. But of course, since they had gotten there so easily, they might not have been the only ones alive there.
“Do you know where we can find them?” Lucie whispered.
Petr shook his head and unholstered his pistol, just in case. Jakub had been the one to speak to the deadlings in the past—it drove Petr crazy that unless one spoke to them in reverse word order, they started to wail hysterically. “We’ll have to take a look around.”
They made their way side by side among the graves.
Places of remembrance never gave Lucie a sense of dread, quite the opposite. She seemed to encounter more monsters, supernatural or human, in the streets. These creatures weren’t even monsters in the true sense of the word, because if they harmed people, it was only by being annoying. As far as Lucie remembered from Jakub’s first encounter with them, rumor had it that the deadlings coveted a shirt made of flax sown at the new moon, but in reality they preferred begging for cigars and making inappropriate offers to women.
“Do you have a cigarette?” Lucie asked in a whisper.
“I can give you something much better, honey.”
The voice came from behind a time-worn tombstone to their right. They walked around it and stopped in front of an approximately sixteen-year-old kid sprawled on the tombstone. Lucie knew that the creatures liked to take on a form that was close to their behavior, even though they were often several centuries old. The second puberty was clearly never going to end for them, and it was even more annoying than the first. Out of the darkness behind the tombstone emerged a second deadling, a pimply young man with greasy hair and a sunken chest beneath an unbuttoned marijuana-patterned shirt.
Lucie elbowed Petr in the ribs. “Offer them a cigarette.”
“Maybe you should talk to them,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. “You’re good with kids.”
“What kids?” the deadling objected, rising from the marble tombstone. He hadn’t noticed that he’d swept away the lantern in the process.
Petr reached into the breast pocket of his jacket, pulled out a packet and stubbed out two cigarettes. “Would you like some, boys?”
“Boys, some like you would?” Lucie blurted out, and when Petr shot her an annoyed look, she stuck her chin out defiantly. She was determined to avoid the wailing.
The deadling’s eyes skipped from the offered cigarettes to Petr and then to Lucie. “Oh yeah, thanks.”
The teen reached for a smoke, stuck it in the corner of his mouth, and held up a thumb. Lucie thought he meant to acknowledge their generosity, so when a flame shot out of the end of the teenager’s finger, she yelped. The pimply deadling chuckled, took a second cigarette and let his thumb light his friend’s. Simultaneously, like gourmets, they both blew smoke into the darkness.
“Nice to have someone come visit us.”
“Yeah, we’re pretty lonely here.” The adolescent slid his gaze over Lucie’s breasts. Nervously, she pulled her jacket closer to her body, which he didn’t mind at all—maybe the creatures could see through the fabric. “If you know what I mean.”
“I’m sure she knows,” the pimply teenager reasoned. “Even if she is at least forty.”
“So? An old barn burns best.”
“Who’s an old barn, you brat? And I’m twenty-eight, even though it’s none of your business!” Lucie blurted out, but Petr stopped her immediately:
“Word order.”
As if it were a sign, the adolescent opened his mouth so wide that “his jaw dropped to his chest” took on a whole new meaning, and then let out a wail so horrifying that Lucie’s blood ran cold in her veins. She wrung her hands and covered her ears as Petr screamed into the scream: “Thank you so much!” The pimply teenager obviously couldn’t pass up the opportunity and joined in on the wailing. His unfinished cigarette landed on the tombstone and his chin almost did too. The sound penetrated to the marrow of her bones, ripping and tearing at everything he could reach. Lucie realized her nose was bleeding.
It was only when Petr reached into his holster, drew his pistol and pointed it at the teenager’s wide-open mouth that the wailing immediately stopped.
“Ordinary bullets won’t hurt us,” the teenager said nervously.
“If I were you, I’d hope I didn’t know that when I loaded the magazine this afternoon,” Petr said.
“Afternoon this magazine the loaded I . . . ,” Lucie began, but fell silent as Petr put his index finger on the trigger. She stomped the burning end of the lost cigarette with her heel and said, “You’re right, forget it.”
“Already did, I don’t have the patience to talk like a retard all night. We want to ask you some questions.”
The teenager stared down the barrel of Petr’s gun for a few seconds, then asked hesitantly, “What kind of questions?”
“Something’s going on,” Petr began.
The pimply deadling shrugged. “This is Brno, there’s always something going on.”
“Recently a group of nudists caught a bike thief near the Brno reservoir and kept him surrounded by their dicks until the police arrived.”
“Dude, that would make a great headline!”
As if forgetting about the gun for a moment, the two deadlings giggled.
Lucie didn’t find it amusing. Pulling a handkerchief from her pocket, she wiped the blood from under her nose and announced, “Someone’s killing monsters. And it’s not us.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
Petr grinned. “But you do know. The witch ratted you out.”
The teenager spat. “Bitch.”
The pimply deadling bristled. “Look, our turf is this graveyard. We don’t want to meddle in anything outside.”
“Whoever’s doing this probably won’t ask whether or not you want to have your guts used for scribbling on the walls. They’ll just take them.”
The deadlings looked at each other indecisively.
Then one of them smoothed his hair. “Could you put the gun away, buddy?”
“I could, but I don’t want to, buddy.”
“Come on, we’re not hurting anyone.”
Petr shrugged. “Maybe. But maybe you’re more than just dead teens pissing people by whining, and you’re behind all of this.”
The pimply teenager chuckled nervously. “No way. We couldn’t do something like that. And we wouldn’t want to.”
“Then who are we looking for?” Petr asked.
The teenager narrowed his eyes. “The Brno Dragon.”
“There’s supposedly only one dragon left in the world,” Lucie reminded Petr. “And I doubt he hid in Brno after that Vegas incident. Maybe he means a wyvern?”
“No, he probably keeps bullshitting,” Petr decided, moving his index finger on the trigger.
The teenager immediately raised his hands and the pimply deadling jumped so fast that he tripped over a tombstone and fell to the ground. His teeth clicked together, but instead of wailing, he just grunted, “Fucking hell!”
“I have no idea who or what he is, but he calls himself the Brno Dragon,” the adolescent muttered quickly. “Or maybe that’s what the others call him . . . Everybody knows it’s not a good idea to hang around the Giraffe on Moravian Square or to go see what time it is on Onderka’s penis.”[3]
“That is never a good idea.” Petr lowered his gun. “What is this Brno Dragon, a man, or a monster?”
The teenager took a breath, but then, as if changing his mind, just shook his head. “From what I’ve heard . . . he’s a bigger monster than any of us.”
What she saw in the files gave Lucie a similar impression, but she didn’t say anything out loud. Petr was pretty good at questioning without her. “What else do you know about him?”
The pimply teenager scratched under his chin. “Nothing you couldn’t find out for yourself if you went downtown. Two or three nights of sightseeing and I’ll bet, you’ll see him at work.”
“Shut up,” the second deadling advised him, and the other obediently fell silent.
Lucie knew that deadlings couldn’t get very far from the cemetery they were connected to, so even if they wanted to, they wouldn’t leave Brno. On the other hand, maybe being tied to a place with none of the Brno symbols nearby protected them from the unwanted attention of the Brno Dragon. Whoever that creature was.
“Thanks for your help,” Petr grinned, holstering his pistol and tossing the teenager a pack of cigarettes.
The creature quickly caught it and nodded, though Lucie could feel his suspicious gaze on her back until they disappeared behind the wall.
“Now what?” she asked as she wiped her palms on the thighs of her pants.
“Shall we look downtown?” Petr suggested.
Lucie had another afternoon shift tomorrow so she didn’t have to get up so early, but the idea of just stumbling upon the perpetrator of so many horrific murders didn’t seem very likely. “Do you think we’ll run into him trying to stuff that Svratka voden into the ball hole in the astronomical clock? That would be a real stroke of luck . . . ”
* * *
But maybe the reunion after a year brought them luck, because that’s exactly what happened.
This time they left the car on Moravian Square and went to Česká Street. After a few steps, Lucie realized how suddenly cold it had become.
The cold had penetrated her jacket and blouse, pinching her skin. She hadn’t experienced such a cold night at the end of September for a long time. She wrapped her arms around herself and rubbed them together, but it didn’t help warm her up.
“Can you feel it?” she gasped, surprised to notice her breath steamed in the icy air. Sand crunched under the soles of her boots—then she remembered which way they were going and realized there was no sand on the ground.
“Frost,” Petr whispered, reaching for his gun and speeding up.
Lucie felt like she was naked next to him—not because of the sudden chill, but because she didn’t even have a damn pepper spray on her—yet she stayed with him. She took krav maga classes for three years, after all. When she was coming back from a lesson, she’d been attacked by a werewolf, and she’d defended herself, and Fantom had offered her a job. Even though the Brno Dragon terrified her in a new way, she was driven forward by curiosity and desire, which she had almost forgotten in the last few months.
The hunt.
“Have you noticed . . . ”
“ . . . that no one is here?” she finished for Petr.
It was 00:30 a.m. and the center of Brno, at other times full of students looking for still open pubs, was empty. Something had turned it into a ghostly place, and Lucie wasn’t surprised when icy mist began to roll around her feet. She’d wager that none of the security cameras on the buildings or in the surrounding shops were working now.
“There,” she gritted her teeth as they walked out into Liberty Square.
“I see it,” Petr whispered. “Although I don’t know what it is . . . ”
Lucie knew that he wasn’t talking about the failed attempt at an artistic rendering of a clock with symbolic overtones, but about what was at its base. The dark outline of the Brno astronomical clock was rising out of a fog so thick it could be cut, and something seemed to disappear and reappear in front of it.
A sharp scream cut through the silence, and then it was as if the fog flowed into the mouth of whoever did it and silenced him again.
Petr started running, and Lucie followed him.
“Police, freeze!” Petr yelled, pointing his gun into the fog.
Something flickered in it—at first it seemed to have retreated behind the astronomical clock, then it swept past Petr. He promptly turned and began to chase it. For a moment, Lucie felt a whiff of something she couldn’t describe, and then she slid across the icy ground toward the astronomical clock, like she’d slid into home base in high school softball.
In front of the black stone sculpture, a voden, a representative of the Slovenian subspecies of European vodnik, lay moaning. He had moved to Brno shortly after Fantom established a branch there, and if he had known what awaited him, he might have changed his mind about immigrating. Neither Lucie nor Petr ever came into conflict with him—if he drowned people, he did it so skillfully that no one found out. But now he seemed half dead himself. Black veins shone through his otherwise greenish skin, his bulging frog eyes were sunken in their sockets; almost white blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. He was twitching as if he had a seizure, shirt torn and a long cut on his bare chest. The wound was deep, but then something—or rather someone—interrupted the perpetrator and he stopped what they were doing.
Lucie looked around, her gaze falling on the knife blade gleaming on the ground, drops of blood all around. She ripped the silk scarf from her neck, crumpled it and pressed it against the wound. It might have been too deep to heal on its own, but maybe water could help the voden. Footsteps echoed through the square—two sets of them, which meant that the Brno Dragon was not some intangible entity that had merged with the fog, making pursuit impossible. The perpetrator was running towards the Constitutional Court, with Petr hot on his heels.
“I’ll be right back,” Lucie whispered to the voden, but since only his whites continued to glisten in the mist, she had no idea if he could hear her.
She ran to the bronze fountain decorated with Jan Skácel’s verses. She hoped she wouldn’t miss it in the thick fog, and when she felt the metal grate beneath her feet, she breathed a sigh of relief. Bending down, she stretched her shawl between two rods and no sooner had it been soaked with water than she pulled it out and walked fast back to the voden. He was lying where she had left him, grunting and spurting white blood.
Lucie knelt down beside him and slowly wrung most of the water out of the scarf on the open wound. Then she let the rest drip into his open mouth. As the voden coughed and gasped, she looked back into the fog behind her. The sounds of running feet had long since died away, and the square was plunged into a silence disturbed only by grunts of the wounded monster.
Lucie wrung the scarf on the wound again, then took the voden’s hand and pressed it on it hard. “Hold on to it, I’ll be back in a minute.”
She didn’t wait to see if he would answer her, and headed in the direction Petr had disappeared.
Lucie kept her gaze fixed on the fog in front of her, straining her hearing. She reached blindly into her pocket for her cell phone. She allowed herself to blink at the display as she dialed Petr’s number. Thankfully, she never deleted it, though she had been tempted many times. Perhaps she knew this connection to her former life would come in handy. She listened to the silence, but the ringing of Petr’s phone came from neither near nor far, or maybe it did, but the fog engulfed it like quicksand, not letting a single tone reach Lucie.
She made it as far as to the Jošt statue, but there she just looked around helplessly. She saw no traces of the Brno Dragon that could help her guess which way they had gone, and she heard no sign that the pursuit was continuing. Her best option was to rescue the voden and hope he knew who had attacked him and could tell her. Petr had to fend for himself, at least for now.
She quickly returned to the clock. The ground beneath it was empty, leaving only blood and a knife that no one had picked up.
“Shit,” Lucie cursed.
Saying it out loud was a relief, though at the same time she felt a little guilty, since she had to watch her tongue constantly because of her job. But there was no one here now, let alone the kids, so she added a few more curses and then she walked around the stone sculpture. She shone her cell phone flashlight on the ground, and it was only through a beam of light that made the fog swirl like specks of dust in the summer sun that she noticed that the Brno Dragon had started writing after all.
Familiar symbols could be seen at the very base of the clock. They almost disappeared on the black surface, and yet, once she saw them, they drew her gaze to them in a strange way.
She squatted down and just watched them intently for a moment. Something about them struck her as familiar again, but it was as if two pages had been stuck together in the filing cabinet of her memories and she couldn’t see what was written on them. An insistent feeling came over her, like something itching under her skin that couldn’t be scratched.
“Come on . . . Come on . . . ,” she repeated to herself, forgetting for a moment that there was even something around, perhaps quite close, that could kill her.
And then she remembered.
The thought was unexpected and sudden, and it was the only thing that made everything fall into place.
“It’s not what is written,” Lucie breathed, “it’s how it is written.”
She reached for her phone again and found Petr’s number. But once again he didn’t pick up.
“Shit,” she huffed, but then straightened up.
She knew exactly where to go with her questions, and suddenly a horrible feeling came over her that she couldn’t wait another minute to get the answers. She gripped her phone a little tighter and started running.
* * *
Petr raced through the night, sounds of running steps echoing through the fog ahead of him, but he did not see the one he was chasing.
His heart was pounding wildly, blood was rushing in his ears, and a slow but insistent stabbing pain started in his side. He hadn’t chased anyone in a long time, and he’d been only talking about going to the gym for the last year rather than actually doing it more than twice—and it showed. He tripped over his own foot and caught a road sign in his fall. He didn’t fall, but he’d lost the seconds he’d needed—a moment ago he’d thought he could just reach out and grab the Brno Dragon by the shoulder, but now he couldn’t hear their breathing. He had a gun in his hand, only he didn’t dare fire lest he hit some innocent human, though the streets of Brno still looked empty.
He gritted his teeth and sped up.
He felt that he was running not on reserves but on the last of his strength, and he realized that if he didn’t catch the Brno Dragon in a minute, he wouldn’t catch them at all.
At the end of the street, he ran out of breath.
He slowed down, took two steps, then stopped. A chill ran down his back that couldn’t be blamed on the sweat sticking to his skin under the jacket. The chill in the air didn’t let up.
The surrounding silence was almost deafening. No voices, no car engines, as if the entirety of Brno was just a theater stage on which Petr acted out his role for a while. And his part wasn’t over yet.
Something crackled to his left. He turned slowly in that direction, but he couldn’t see through the thick fog. He squinted and slid his index finger to the trigger of his Glock. He couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching him, as he stood there surrounded by the fog, lost in his own city, confused by everything that had happened . . . And they were not about to attack him; they were just enjoying his helplessness.
He took a deep breath of the cold air, then held his breath so he wouldn’t miss the slightest sound. Only he heard nothing but the wild beating of his own heart.
Until . . .
“I met a friend of mine at the garbage this morning . . . ”
The call rang out through the silence like a shot from a starter’s pistol.
“Shit!” Petr began frantically searching his pockets for his cell phone.
“ . . . throwing an old jacket in the trash.”
He finally felt the phone and muted the sound with his thumb, not even looking to see who was calling.
Then he lifted his head sharply, but the feeling of being watched was gone.
He holstered his pistol, then braced his hands on his thighs and just breathed raspingly for a moment. Sweat stung in his eyes, his lungs burned, and his legs shook like jelly. He spat, disgusted at his own weakness. In front of Lucie, he’d acted as if the extra pounds weren’t a problem, but he felt his flabby muscles more now than ever.
He straightened up and stared into the fog. It was beginning to dissolve, but that was hardly good news—he had no doubt that the Brno Dragon was behind the unnatural fog, and the fact that it was dissipating before his eyes could only mean that they were well out of his reach.
He wiped his sweaty forehead, turned around and returned to the square. He had no idea which way he had followed the Brno Dragon until the fog parted enough for him to make out the back of the Brno City Theatre. Then he realized Lucie must have called him, and he pulled out his phone, only to find two missed calls from her.
When he called back, she didn’t answer.
Despite the stabbing pain in his side, he sped up again. There was no sign of the fog on Česká Street, but people had returned to it. There weren’t many, but he did see two young men staggering to a tram stop. He raced towards the astronomical clock, realizing with horror with each passing yard that Lucie was not there. He reached the knife that lay on the ground and the drops of blood that trailed from it . . .
He followed the bloody trail to the mouth of Kobližná Street and up Kozí Street. He walked through a passage, his eyes on the ground to make sure not a drop escaped.
And then he saw him in the park in front of Janáček Theatre.
He was sitting on the edge of a fountain, against the backdrop of the illuminated water scenery.
Petr walked up to him as quietly as he could, and then grabbed him firmly by his coat. The voden bent over in horror, but his injury was so serious that, though he was soaked, he was not yet at full strength. To leave the creature within reach of water would have been stupid, so Petr began to drag him into the park. The voden struggled, flailing his arms and kicking, but Petr threw him to the ground, knelt down and grabbed him by the flaps of his coat.
“Who did this to you?” he asked quietly.
The voden resisted for a moment longer, but when he realized that he couldn’t get out of Petr’s grasp, he went limp and just kept darting his eyes back and forth, as if wondering how to get out of the trap.
“Who was it?” Petr repeated.
The voden stopped looking for an escape route, bared his sharp teeth and stammered in a slight Slovenian accent, “If you’re here to finish me off, go ahead.”
“Why would I do that? I want to find out who attacked you.”
“As if you don’t know . . . ”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t have asked.”
“You should ask your friend.”
Petr frowned. “What are you talking about, you idiot?”
“You’re the idiot!” snapped the voden. “If you got paid for me . . . ”
“Enough!” Petr stopped the creature. “Are you telling me that a human did this to you?”
“The other fellow,” the voden grimaced hatefully. “So why don’t you stop playing dumb and do what you have to do?”
They stared at each other for a few more seconds, and then Petr let go of him and sat back down. “I don’t know which one of us is nuts.”
“I do . . . ”
The voden sat up with a grunt and pulled his coat to his bloodied shirt. He waited a moment to see if Petr would change his mind and finish what the Brno Dragon had started, then carefully stood up and began a slow retreat into the darkness. After a few yards he looked over his shoulder, and when Petr still didn’t get up, with a squeak of “You’re both nuts!” he ran into the darkness.
Petr let out a gasp, as if he’d been punched in the stomach by the voden as a parting shot. He understood what the voden was saying, but it didn’t make sense.
As if in a daze, he walked to his car, got behind the wheel and started it. Then he hit the gas and sped off down the night street. Even after a year since the end of his career as a Hunter, he hadn’t forgotten where the other members of the Brno branch of Fantom lived and how to get to them quickly by any means possible, so it didn’t take him long to stop in front of Jakub’s house in Žabovřesky.
Only a few windows were lit in the low brick house, but Petr couldn’t remember which ones belonged to his former colleague. For a moment he thought that if he had visited Jakub after he’d been released from the asylum for the second time, he might have known. He hadn’t called him once, and hadn’t even responded to his Christmas card—though perhaps that was because it was written in a clumsy verse and implied that Jakub would be happy if Petr invited him to his place to celebrate the end of the year. He didn’t; instead he celebrated New Year’s Eve by drinking beer tapped into a two-liter PET bottle in the beer store across the street and watching the New Year’s Eve show from 1975. Anything associated with Jakub reminded him that he and Lucie should have done more for him, but they were only thinking about themselves and the end of the Brno Hunters at the time. Then, when he could hear from him, the first months at his new job were consumed by remorse, and he cowardly decided it was best to forget about Jakub.
He paused with his finger over the bell with Jakub Holý listed on it, then pulled a set of lockpicks from his pocket. It took him longer than he expected to open the front door, but thankfully no one was coming home at this time of night. The light above the entrance did try to come on, but he made sure it wouldn’t anyway, and his actions remained shrouded in darkness.
When he pushed the door and it opened, Petr’s relief was almost palpable. He blinked to get the sweat out of his eyes and pushed his way into a cold hallway. The light didn’t automatically turn on in there, so he hid his flashlight in his hand, letting just a sliver of light pass between his fingers so he wouldn’t trip on the stairs. He vaguely remembered that Jakub lived on the second floor, and was relieved when he found his name on the door to his left.
He pressed his ear to the door for a moment.
It was as if he had been hit by lighting. He was seized by an uncontrollable urge to rush down the stairs, run out of the house, jump into his car and stop at the other end of Brno. But something had pinned him in place.
That whisper.
A monotonous mumbling, an indistinct stream of words, a hissing sound that seemed to suddenly surround him on all sides.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and goose bumps appeared on his arms. His stomach clenched, and for a moment he thought he couldn’t breathe, that he would suffocate in that corridor stinking of damp plaster. Whispered words rushed down his throat like ice water and flooded his lungs.
He took a step back.
Then another.
Two words pounded in his temples:
GO AWAY.
He stumbled over his own feet, and took two steps backwards and down. He’d never felt such fear before.
GO AWAY.
He put a sweaty hand on the railing and tried to grip it, but his fingers were cold and limp. Two more steps.
GO AWAY.
And then something unexpected appeared at the very edge of his perception.
It was just a glimpse, as if he’d seen something out of the corner of his eye, and before he could move his head, it was gone.
It was Lucie.
He remembered exactly when and where—one lazy Monday afternoon in their old office. They’d been filling out paperwork for the SRS and it seemed to Petr that it would never end, that the State Regulatory Service known for its adherence to bureaucracy would send in form after form just to see how long they could keep them entertained. While Jakub had already finished and was patiently explaining to them what belonged in which box, Lucie raised her head, looked at Petr and, aware that no one else could see her, began to silently parody Jakub. Usually she didn’t do anything like that; it was more often him clowning around and her letting him know how childish it was, and he was all the more surprised by the sudden harmony. In that moment, as sunlight bounced through Lucie’s hair and she mimicked Jakub’ serious expression perfectly, he realized that this was the girl he wanted to spend as much time with as possible. Not just hunting, actually, more like anything else, as long as it was with her. But there were just too many loose ends between them and he didn’t know which one to grasp, and when he finally did, of course he picked the wrong one, and rather than try to patch things up with Lucie, he was perhaps glad that the Brno branch of Fantom had been broken up and he could run away and tell himself that if they’d continued, they’d definitely have ended up together, but what the hell . . .
Pussy.
He rushed up the stairs, but instead of one, he ran up two flights. He reached the apartment above Jakub’s, hit the light switch, and leaned his full weight on the bell. After a moment, shuffling footsteps and muffled swearing sounded in the hallway, then the peephole cover moved. Petr used a trick he rarely resorted to, for many good reasons, and lifted his case with a fake police badge in front of the peephole.
“Police! Open up!” he demanded firmly.
There were a few seconds of silence, during which his mind whirled with all the horrible scenes he could imagine, but then came the sound of a door being unlocked and a shaky voice: “Jesus Christ, I hope nothing has happened to our Karel . . . ”
When the door opened, Petr wasted no time in kicking it open just enough to avoid hitting the pensioner in striped pajamas who was squinting at him with swollen eyes.
“Sorry, Karel is fine, but I have to use your balcony!” he shouted over his shoulder, raced through the living room where he knocked a lamp over, swore, and burst into the bedroom.
In the bed, he sensed rather than saw the outline of a human body—the woman screamed and pulled the covers up under her chin—but he didn’t stop, opened the balcony door and ran out. He swung himself over the metal railing and landed on the balcony below. His heart was pounding wildly, and for a moment he thanked God that despite a year of doing nothing, his muscle memory hadn’t let him down—but maybe it was mostly desperation and adrenaline that drove him.
He spun around and rammed his shoulder into the door with all his strength. It gave way, flew open and hit the wall so hard that the bottom half cracked and the glass spilled out onto the floor. But by that time Petr had already burst into the living room, pistol in hand.
The sight in front of him took his breath away for a moment.
Lucie was lying on the floor in the middle of a pentagram that was not painted on the worn parquet floor, but floated in the air like haze over a hot road in the middle of a hot summer. Lit candles hung at its points, dangling on invisible threads. The surrounding walls were coated with frost; the air in the room was icy. Although Jakub could not arrive long before Petr, he immediately set about the ritual.
“Are you mad?” Petr yelled.
His former colleague stood at the head of the pentagram, dagger in hand. He was no longer muttering, but an unnatural darkness seemed to continue to creep towards the drawing from the corners of the room. Jakub brushed overgrown hair out of his face—he was sickly pale and much thinner than before.
His eyes glittered feverishly as he pointed the dagger at Petr. “That’s what you thought! And you wanted to convince me of it! Only I’m fine, I’ve been fine the whole time!”
“Except for the fact that you’re the Brno Dragon.”
“No, it’s not just me. The Brno Dragon is so much more.”
“You tried to kill that voden and kidnapped Lucie,” Petr stated the obvious.
Jakub shook his head. His nostrils quivered and sweat trickled down his temples. “She came alone. Said I recognized your handwriting, the loop you make instead of an S. I’m surprised you noticed how I write. I’m surprised you noticed I ever existed!”
“Jakub . . . ,” Petr began, but Jakub stopped him.
“It’s true! You thought you didn’t need me. That I was just an accountant who once accidentally killed a rusalka and is now of no use to you! I know that very well! But the Voices that spoke to me knew the potential I had. They told me I had to show it to you. I must show it to everyone!”
“The voices are . . . ,” Petr tried again.
Lucie groaned in the pentagram and shook her head feebly. A trickle of blood ran down her temple; Jakub must have hit her with something, but she didn’t seem hurt otherwise.
“My friends, unlike you!” Jakub yelled. “You have no idea what’s really going on here. About all those who live here with us. But I do, I studied the books, I searched, I listened . . . The voices told me to kill all the monsters. And then you. And in the end . . . ”
Jakub waved his dagger towards Lucie, perhaps just to indicate that the whole world would be next.
But Petr didn’t wait for that.
He pulled the trigger.
The projectile left the barrel of his Glock and just before it could hit Jakub’s arm, it stopped mid-air and slowly began to rotate on its longer axis.
Jakub grinned. His teeth were suddenly inhumanly sharp, his pupils dilated like a cat’s.
“You think you can stop ME with a simple weapon?” he hissed, and the same feeling that had gripped Petr on the stairs took over.
The cold bit into him in full force, paralyzing his lungs, heart and brain. It was as if something had frozen him in time and he could only stand and watch helplessly . . .
“Yeah, that’s what I think,” Lucie grunted, rising from the floor in a daze and pressing a lit candle to Jakub’ ear.
Jakub screamed, the projectile fell on the floor and the grip Petr felt on him loosened.
“Now!” cried Lucie.
Petr pulled the trigger again.
Jakub only managed to widen his eyes in surprise when the bullet hit him in the heart. He stood for a moment, watching Petr in puzzlement, then gasped finally, silence and slowly collapsed to the ground. Blood bubbled in his mouth for a moment longer, but then he went limp and breathed his last with a barely noticeable, surprised smile.
Petr walked over to Lucie and helped her stand up. “Are you okay, Strawberry?”
“As okay as one can be when they try to ritually sacrifice you to the Voices . . . ”
“You think he was talking about . . . ,” Petr began, but despite the fact that Jakub was lying dead on the ground, he didn’t dare finish the question.
Lucie, however, understood what he was asking and shook her head gently. “I think they’re gone. At least for now.”
They just stood for a moment, looking at the body in front of them as the frost on the walls slowly crackled and faded. It wouldn’t be long before everything returned to normal, well, except for the dead Jakub.
“We’ll have to call Ostrava,” Lucie said. “Tell them what happened here. Jakub . . . he may have been babbling, but if any of it was true, it’s far from over.”
“Someone will have to find out what that Brno Dragon actually was,” Petr reminded her.
“That’s true.”
They looked at each other with an unspoken question in their eyes.
Maybe they’d solve the case, get paid, and get back to their jobs. But maybe they’d just opened the door to something much bigger, something they could do if Fantom gave them permission. And if they stayed together.
Petr took Lucie’s hand. “But now we have to get out of here fast, before that grandpa upstairs calls the real police.”
3) Brno astronomical clock, unveiled by Mayor Onderka in 2010. The six-meter-high block of black granite is cigar-shaped and regularly releases a commemorative glass ball at 11:00 a.m., which is why it took less than an hour before it gained several colorful nicknames.
KRISTÝNA SNĚGOŇOVÁ (* 1986)
One of the brightest stars in the sky of Czech fiction, a writer with a unique talent for telling fascinating stories from both her own and shared worlds. It is fitting that her literary career was launched by winning the Fallout fan fiction award The Brahmin Udder in 2009, where she excelled with her short story “Monsters Should Stick Together.” She subsequently developed her talents in genre anthologies, to name but a few: Fantasy 2014 (Klub Julese Vernea, 2015); the trio of unique anthologies In the Shadow of the Reich (Ve stínu říše, Epocha, 2017), In the Shadow of the Apocalypse (Ve stínu apokalypsy, Epocha, 2018) and In the Shadow of Magic (Ve stínu magie, Epocha, 2019).
From short stories, it was only a small step to more extensive texts. The first novel notch on her authorial belt was a noir urban fantasy Blood for the Rusalka (Krev pro rusalku, Epocha, 2018), one of the bestseller books of 2018, followed a year later by another urban fantasy The Sources (Zřídla, Epocha, 2019), where she tried a new take on her storytelling and style. Among Kristýna Sněgonová’s most notable projects is The Cities series, including the novels City in the Clouds (Město v oblacích, Epocha, 2020), Earth in Ruins (Země v troskách, Epocha, 2021) and World in Storm (Svět v bouři, Epocha, 2022), where she tackled the theme of post-apocalypse in her original way. From 2020 she has been venturing into space with František Kotleta in an action space opera series Legion, to which she has so far contributed books Amanda (Amanda, Epocha, 2020), Nerds and Hotshots (Šprti a frajeři, Epocha, 2021), Lord of the Mountains (Pán hor, Epocha, 2022) and Dead Drop (Mrtvá schránka, Epocha, 2022). In 2023 she also tried her hand as an editor (together with Lukáš Vavrečka) in the anthology Depths of the City (Hlubiny města, Epocha, 2023) focused on urban fantasy.
Given the number of monsters and beasts that have appeared in Kristýna’s stories so far, and the innovative ways in which they have been disposed of, she was an ideal candidate for MHF. The fact that she lives in Brno—the second biggest Czech city and the biggest Czech village where nothing ever happens, which is why only a local can write a believable action story set there—played a part in this too . . .