One of the Russians spoke a little German. She didn’t have quite as much as I did, though to be fair, my German tends to be Zee German—what is not centered around cars and things mechanical is closer to the language spoken in Iceland (which hasn’t changed in the last thousand years) than anything spoken in modern Berlin. So maybe her German was fine, and mine was the problem.
I think she understood that I had gotten separated from my tour—which is the story I made up on the spot. My bus, I explained, had gone on to Milan with my luggage and things. I was going to use my e-reader to get on the Internet and call home. Home would then relay information for me.
It was actually useful that none of them could speak to me, because it reduced the number of lies I had to tell them. And also made it harder for them to offer me a place to stay—which is what I think one of the Czech men was offering. No one appeared worried, so I don’t think he was offering me what it looked like he was trying to.
They (collectively, it felt like) took my twenty-euro note and, after consulting a cell phone for the current exchange rate, carefully counted out 550 koruna in various bills and coins. The waitress brought me out a soft drink and a thick sandwich, waving away my attempts to pay her.
I pulled out my e-reader (stolen) and turned it on. There had been no charging cable, or I’d have taken it, and the power bar on the screen told me I’d have to be fast—which was interesting with an e-reader that probably had less than half the computing power of Adam’s watch. Setting up a generic e-mail account at one of the big anonymous servers—CoyoteGirl was taken, as were several variants—took up too much time. I needed something that would cue the pack without attracting attention. I didn’t have to just worry about the vampire; I was pretty sure that various government agencies were doing their best to keep track of our correspondences. 1COYOTELOST worked.
I wrote a short e-mail that said:
Dear People,
Prague is lovely this time of year. You should visit.
M
And then I sent it to everyone in the pack (and a few out of it, like Zee’s son Tad and Tony) whose e-mail addresses I remembered. Then I turned the e-reader off to conserve its battery. I ate the sandwich and drank the soda.
Just before I turned it off, the e-reader had told me it had 20 percent power and I should plug it in or it might shut itself off. I knew I should leave the café, wait a few hours, and come back. That’s what I’d planned to do.
But the lure of contacting home was too strong.
I told myself I needed to know about the Prague werewolves. If I could round up some support from them, it could be useful. If not, then I could hop a bus for somewhere else and try again. Waiting until later might not be practical, I reasoned. I’d run across the scent of three different werewolves on the way here. In a city the size of Prague, with only one pack, that either meant that the pack was centered in Old Town or that they were hunting me.
Even if they didn’t know about me, the kidnapped by the Lord of Night but subsequently escaped mate of the Columbia Basin Pack Alpha, coyotes don’t smell like dogs—not quite. Eventually, if I kept running around on four feet, they’d get interested and track me down. I had gotten lucky last night, and I didn’t like to rely on luck. I needed to know if the Prague werewolves were tied to the Lord of Night right this minute.
Really.
I turned on the e-reader and checked my e-mail.
I had one response from
[email protected]. It said:
OMF**KING G*D*MN Flyingf**kingmonkeys. WHERE? Are you safe? How did you get away? DID you get a f**king way?
The asterisks were his; apparently his work had had a discussion about swearwords in professional e-mails with him. Being Ben, he’d actually increased the swearwords, but added asterisks. It made me laugh even as my eyes watered with relief.
Of course Ben would be checking his e-mail—computers were his job.
Prague. As ever. As usual. Yes. What can you tell me about our coworkers in Prague? Considering dropping in for consult.
Ben was from Great Britain originally, so he might actually have more insight into the werewolves here than I did.
Hairyb*ttbunnies, girl. Good for you. Prague boss is dangerous bast*rd. Has a real h**don for the boss at your first job. No one but the two of them knows why that I ever heard—and there has been a lot of discussion about it. So someone is suppressing information. It wasn’t helped when we came out of the closet—something our colleague in Prague was very unhappy about. Can you avoid?
Okay, so there was bad blood between the Alpha here and . . . the boss at my first job. If I called the werewolves coworkers, then my first job would be the werewolf pack I grew up in. So Bran. Well, that could explain why I thought there was an issue with the Alpha here. I might have overheard a conversation sometime. It wouldn’t have been important to me at the time, but I’d filed some alert concerning the Prague Alpha.
Is he working with the Italians?
E-mailing back and forth wasn’t as good as texting. The anonymous e-mail server took its own sweet time downloading.
No. But the next closest company, in Brno, is. They were a part of Gévaudan and are now running scared of Prague. Am on phone with Sam’s brother right now. Sam’s brother says that Prague CEO, Libor, might get a kick out of helping you as a One-Upmanship move on Sam’s father—and because he hates Italians more than anyone. He owns bakery in Old Town. Don’t know address. My boss is headed to Italy. Does he know you are visiting Prague?
Ben was on the phone to Charles, the Marrok’s son who was, among a lot of other things, an information guru. If he said Libor was a good bet, I’d take it.
He knows I’m on my own, and he can find me via GPS if he needs to find me.
He’d know that GPS was our mate bond because that was one thing it was pretty consistently good at. The e-reader gave me another warning.
Out of battery on borrowed e-reader, sorry.
I sent the e-mail, then the e-reader died. I wasn’t sure if it had had time to upload my last message or not. I slipped the device back into my backpack. As I got ready to go, one of the men—I think he was the restaurant manager—brought a bag of food to the table and gave it to me.
He was an older man with kind eyes and a rumbly voice, and he smelled of cigars and coffee. He said something solemnly as if he were making a vow, reaching out and gently brushing my bruised cheek. Behind him, the older woman who had brought out my free lunch wiped away a tear.
I had no idea what he said, but my nose could smell the memory of his sorrow and his sincerity now. I felt like a fraud for a moment, deluding these people into believing I needed help. And then I remembered that I’d been violently kidnapped and hauled to Italy, and was now wandering Prague with one stolen set of clothes, 550 koruna, which translated to a little more than twenty dollars, and a defunct e-reader. Maybe I did need their help.
I stood on my tiptoes and kissed his cheek. The whole place burst into applause.
People are pretty cool.
—
SOME PRETTY COOL PERSON PICKED MY POCKET while I was wandering around Old Town trying to find a bakery where there were lots of werewolves.
I’d found one bakery that a werewolf had gone into sometime that day, but the scent was no stronger in the building than it had been outside. Somewhere between that bakery and Wenceslas Square—a more modern city square than Old Town Square, where I found a McDonald’s—someone stole all the money I had in one of my pockets.
It was embarrassing.
My only excuse is that there were a lot of people wandering about, and most of them didn’t pay attention to personal space the way Americans do. It could have been any of twenty people who bumped into me.
If the person who’d stolen my money had been nervous about it, likely I could have caught them because I’d have smelled it. He or she had made off with roughly ten dollars,
hardly worth their effort even if it was half of my resources. At least I’d been smart enough to split my money between pockets.
I hastily checked my mostly empty backpack, but they hadn’t gotten the food or the dead e-reader. I bought a small soda with my diminished funds and sat down on one side of a bench next to a statue of a horseman and ate the food before it was stolen, too.
The woman breast-feeding her baby on the other end of the bench paid me no attention. A man with two children in tow brought the young mother a sausage baked in a bun and an orange juice bottle.
I licked the last of my food from my fingers, gave the happy little family a grin, and wandered off. The sausage smelled good; it made me . . . I slowed my steps . . . made me think of home.
“Excuse me,” I said to the family. “Do any of you speak English?”
The oldest of the children, a boy of twelve, did. And he was able to tell me where they’d bought his mother’s lunch, a lunch that smelled, very faintly, of werewolf.
—
THE BAKERY WAS DOWN ONE OF THE NARROW STREETS in a building that looked like it had grown there beginning sometime in the first century. I don’t suppose it was that old—not even Prague, I think, was that old—but it had been there a long time. It had taken over the buildings to either side of the original one, growing like China had, taking over previous civilizations and replacing them with its own. The smell of yeast and wheat was warm and welcoming as I stepped through the old door to stand in line.
The bakery played up the age of the building to the tourist trade—though a lot of the people in line (from the scents they carried) seemed to be locals. I wasn’t any older than I looked, a well-preserved midthirties. My history-degree emphasis was skewed more to people and politics than it was to fashion and living conditions. All that meant I didn’t know for sure, but I thought that the bakery rocked a very sanitized medieval feel with all of its warm-yeast-smelling heart rather than looking as a bakery would have during the actual Middle Ages.
The people hustling behind the counter and carrying trays to tables all wore clothing that looked like something a set director had decided people wore in Prague when the building had been built. There was a costume feel that made them representative rather than authentic. They weren’t uniform, in the sense that no two outfits were exactly the same, but the color scheme and general style made it clear that anyone wearing the costumes worked there.
A hand-painted sign that hung on the wall behind the bar told English-speaking visitors that there had been a bakery here, in that spot, for over 450 years. The sign in German said the same thing, and I expected the four other signs that hung around the bakery followed suit in various other languages. Prague was a city that catered to visitors, and this bakery was no exception.
When it was my turn, a young-faced man in dark trousers and a white shirt with blousy sleeves sporting heavily embroidered ribbons greeted me warmly.
“Do you speak English?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said with a strong British accent. “What can I get for you? We have today cherry, apple, and peach kolache fresh this morning. If you are interested in lunch—”
“Moon Called,” I said very quietly, underneath his practiced patter. He would hear me just fine, but I didn’t need everyone in the busy bakery to overhear. I addressed him with that appellation because my nose told me he was a werewolf and because my words would tell him that I knew what he was. “I need to speak to Libor on business.”
The smile froze on his face, and he stopped midsentence.
“I’m from the United States, the Columbia Basin Pack,” I added.
His nostrils flared.
“Just tell him,” I said impatiently. “I can’t explain things properly here.”
He put a hand on the counter and easily hopped over it. It was a move within the abilities of a young human man of physical prowess—which is what he looked to be.
“Come with me,” he said. The words were peremptory, but his tone and manner were not. He led me through a narrow archway into a room filled with tables and chairs set up for people who wanted to eat their treats or lunches inside, and most of the tables were full.
He waded gracefully between the tables, and I followed him to a door in the back of the room. It led out to a garden area. Like the yard where the mastiff had lived, it was the center of the block surrounded by buildings, but open to the air. There were tables here, too, but none of them was occupied.
“You aren’t a werewolf,” said my guide.
“My mate is,” I told him.
“If you would be so kind as to wait here,” the werewolf told me, “I will let Libor know you want to see him.”
“He’ll not have a choice,” I told him, and he stiffened. “Curiosity, at the very least, will bring him out. Tell him I’m the mate of the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack and I’m on the run from the Lord of Night, who kidnapped me.”
“Bonarata?” exclaimed the werewolf, then he held up a hand when I started to explain further. “No need to talk to me. I’ll let Libor know. It might be a while.” He left.
A while was right. It soon became evident that if Libor wanted to see me, it wasn’t a priority. I waited on my feet for ten or fifteen minutes until one of the human waitstaff—and not one who spoke English—produced a tray with one of those baked-bread-wrapped sausages that had brought me here, three pastries that looked like a bagel filled with various fruit fillings, and a tall glass of lemonade.
The harried woman looked pointedly at her tray, then at the tables. I picked one with a comfortable-looking seat that backed up to one of the surrounding walls and sat so she could put the tray down. She smiled, then said something in a happy voice before whisking herself out of the garden and back into the bakery.
I was left alone to eat in the late-afternoon sun. Even though I’d just eaten a fairly large meal, I had no trouble eating a second one. I finished both food and drink and set the tray aside.
The sun warmed my back and birds sang in trees and my eyelids, stupid things, decided that the warmth, the gentle sounds, and the smell of werewolves meant that it was safe to sleep. I stood up and walked the little area, trying to stay awake.
I hadn’t gotten any sleep last night.
I knew, without acknowledging it, that when I started to talk to dead things, other ghosts seemed to sense it. A few months ago, after a rather violent encounter with a ghost, I’d spent days with ghosts following me.
Ghosts are mostly bits and pieces of people, of emotions, left behind—so it was like being followed by zombies. They want me to do something for them, but there isn’t enough of them left to communicate exactly what that is.
Mostly, when I did find out what they needed, it wasn’t anything I could do. I couldn’t fix the life they lived, the people they failed. I couldn’t give them their life back.
Anyway, I didn’t know exactly what the golem had been, except that it was complicated. But he had evidently powered up my ghost-attraction circuit to stun. Judging from the results, my meeting with the golem had lit me up like a target for any ghost in the area. The lingering effects made certain that my safe little corner next to the river had been invaded all night by ghosts. A city as old as Prague collects a lot of ghosts along the way. The worst of them had been a drowning victim.
I’d done my best to ignore it; however, it was true that drowned ghosts smell like the body of water they drown in. The Vltava smelled like any other river from the top, but evidently having been occupied by humans for better than a millennium meant that the bottom was full of rotting things. And I’d learned something new last night, too. Apparently some drowned ghosts were just like the stories—they could drip real water. Being dripped on by a foul-smelling ghost all night had not been conducive to sleep.
Though there’d been a few ghosts as I’d followed the werewolf through the bakery, they hadn’t bee
n drippy or smelly, just faded remembrances of people who’d once worked or lived in the buildings. They’d drifted past me and through the visitors. And whatever the golem had called up in me had faded enough that they had taken no notice of me at all. I’d returned the favor.
There were currently no ghosts in the little sunlit garden where I was. The sounds of the tourist-filled streets were muted. Whatever was going to happen to me, I wasn’t going to be attacked, robbed, or arrested in this little garden until the Alpha of Prague came to see me.
I sat back down at the table I’d claimed for my own. I put my head down and closed my eyes, letting the sweet scents of fruit filling and sugar frosting linger in my senses as I fell asleep.
5
Adam
While I traveled by bus, Adam made do with a luxurious private jet. That is kind of how my life goes.
“YOU CONTACTED HER?” ASKED ELIZAVETA IN RUSSIAN as she put Mercy’s repaired necklace into Adam’s hand.
Elizaveta usually spoke to him in Russian, and mostly that was fine. Adam’s mother had spoken Russian in their home throughout his childhood, leaving him almost as fluent in it as he was in English.
But leaving Mercy behind when he’d just found her was painful. And whatever the old witch had done to allow him to contact Mercy, now that their brief conversation was over, it had left the werewolf magic, both his pack ties and his mate bond, in a state of outrage—a painful state. The combination of loss and pain left him unable to speak in Russian or English.
He closed his fingers around the necklace and drew a deep breath. When that wasn’t enough, he shut his eyes and rested his head against the back of the airplane seat. His wolf was fighting for control in a way it hadn’t since he’d been very new—and had been pretty much since Mercy had gone missing.