Silence Fallen (Mercy Thompson #10)(100)

Then Libor looked at Adam and said, “Your mate brought trouble on her tail.”

“She usually does,” he agreed gravely.

A pair of people came into the garden then.

“Let me introduce you to my wolves,” Libor said heavily. “This is Martin, my second, and Jitka, my third. I’ll let them tell you how they lost your mate.”





13





Mercy


I am pretty sure that philosophy was first developed by prisoners. Being stuck in a cage, unable to do anything more about my situation, left nothing for me to do but think.



ONE OF THE THINGS I’D LEARNED ON MY IMPROMPTU trip to Europe was that it didn’t matter how frightened I was. If the bad guys didn’t show up in a timely manner, eventually boredom set in. There was a kind of special-hell dimension that existed only when boredom and terror combined, because numbness never quite settles. I supposed I might die of terror just waiting for something bad to happen if my wait lasted a few hours more.

On the other hand, I wasn’t alone. The weeping young woman had achieved near mortal solidity to me. I was studiously trying not to pay attention to her so matters didn’t get worse. She didn’t seem to mind if I was watching her or not. She spent a lot of time wandering around the room—then I’d blink, and she’d be right back with me. It took me a while not to be startled when she did that, but eventually I can apparently get used to anything.

I felt it when Adam set foot in Prague. He’d been growing closer for a while. I closed my eyes, resting my head on my dead companion’s knee. Adam was here. Adam would find me. I could feel the fear and the horror just slide out of me.

And then the whole building shook.

I sucked in a breath and hopped to my feet before I realized it wasn’t really the building, it was the witchcraft surrounding it that had taken the hit. A second vibration had me panting because it wasn’t a good sensation, for all that it wasn’t really physical. The ghost let out a gasping moan and plastered herself against me and dug her fingers into the ruff of fur around my neck, half choking me.

We both waited, motionless, for something else to happen.

There were about ten minutes during which nothing happened except that I could hear running footsteps overhead. Then another and another wave. That time the second attack—because it felt like an attack—sent agony shivering through my joints and muscles like a Taser.

About five minutes after that, the door to the basement opened, and seven people, humans, including the young man who had been down here with Mary, came stumbling and staggering down the stairs.

Three vampires shepherded them down, two men and a woman. They steadied the humans when they wobbled, crooning to them to keep them moving. But the people staggered to a stop at the sight of the girl’s dead body.

Someone hissed impatiently from the top in Czech. So there was a fourth person up there, someone I couldn’t see. One of the shepherding vampires, the woman, vaulted off the side of the stairs (rather than pushing through the unwilling sheep). She picked the corpse up gently and carried her past the body of the vampire still chained to the wall, and set her in the shadows, where other corpses, mostly bones, were piled.

The she returned to the stairs, crooning soft words to the humans, standing between them and the corner where she’d put the body. The light wasn’t that good. Likely, someone who was purely human wouldn’t be able to see that corner well enough to know that the girl’s body wasn’t the only one there. Possibly—because I don’t know exactly what humans see in the dark—even the dead vampire on the wall was beyond what they could sense. I could have been blindfolded and known there were bodies down here by the smell, but humans don’t always pay attention to their noses. And most of the corpses were either done rotting or hadn’t yet gotten a good start on it.

A skinny and worn-looking middle-aged man tentatively started down the stairs. As he did so, the female vampire said, in heavily accented English, “Are you sure this is the best place for them?”

“It will take her a while to look for any of us down here,” said the voice of the man who’d translated for me earlier. Kocourek. I couldn’t see him; he was still at the top of the stairs.

“See if you can get them to settle in under the stairs, then put them to sleep,” he continued. “Smells so bad in here, I don’t think she’ll know the difference.”

I had to agree. It was foul here, and the humans didn’t help matters. Hygiene was apparently not something that this seethe valued in their sheep.

“Should we just kill them?” the female asked, her voice shaking with stress, I thought, though her accent made it difficult to tell. She changed the angle of her face, and I realized she was crying.

“It might come to that,” said Kocourek grimly. “Anything would be better—Lars.”

One of the other two vampires stepped over and caught a middle-aged woman who had turned to run back up the stairs. He caught her, stared into her eyes a moment. The terror and tension in her body relaxed.

He said something soft and sweet to her, turned her, and kept his hand on her shoulder as he took up the rear position.

The third vampire sighed.

“Let’s get them as safe as we can, people. Dagmar?”

“Yes,” the first vampire said.