Silence Fallen (Mercy Thompson #10)(26)

And I lay there in the hard-packed dirt for maybe an hour next to the river. After ten minutes or so, I remembered it was the Vltava. Three unlikely consonants in a row. I still couldn’t remember the name the Germans called it. It was full dark, but there were lights all over the city that gave the river’s graceful flow a surreal beauty.

I knew that Stefan had given me good advice. I should just lie low and wait to be found. But I’d slept most of the day cramped up in the belly of the bus, and I was now too restless to sleep.

There were werewolves in Prague. I knew that. The mad and powerful Beast of Gévaudan, who’d ruled most of Europe for centuries, had seen to it that the packs were few and far between, as he did not brook competition. In Spain, where Asil the Moor had ruled, the Beast had left them alone. But he had stayed away from certain other places, too. Milan, where the Lord of Night reigned supreme, had been one of them. I was pretty sure that Prague had been another.

There was something about the werewolves in Prague I couldn’t remember. Something that urged me to caution. I hadn’t expected to find myself in Europe . . . well, ever, really. So I hadn’t paid much attention to them.

The werewolf who ruled here was very, very old—like Marrok or Asil old, I could remember that much. For some reason, I had the picture of a very hairy man in a medieval kitchen with his hirsute arms folded on the top of a rough-hewn wooden table in my head—it made me want to smile. Likely someone had been talking about him when I was a child, and I’d formed an idea of what he looked like. To have been Alpha enough to keep Gévaudan at bay, he was doubtless a scary man. But I’d grown up with werewolves, and being a werewolf was an insufficient reason to be frightened of him.

Even so, running around Prague was probably a bad idea until I could remember what I had heard about the local Alpha that had worried me. I should stay where I was.

I’d lived more than half my life essentially alone. Sometimes in the past few years, I had longed to be alone, just for an hour or two. And here I was. Alone. Sometimes getting your wish really sucks.

I still could not feel the pack bonds unless I was in a trance. My bond with Adam was faint, like a memory of the strong line of communication—or noncommunication, during its contrary moments. I tried not to notice the bond between Stefan and me, and since it, too, was faint, was mostly successful.

Adam had traveled to Washington, D.C., several times during our marriage, and our mating bond had been strong and true—or as strong and true as ever, because it was eccentric. Given the current evidence, the pack magic must have provided the power to keep our bond going over the distance.

Those dreams I’d had in the bus, I refused to believe they were only dreams. The first one . . . might have been, I admitted reluctantly. Though it had felt more real than most of my dreams. But the second one, the one with Stefan—that one was real. And if both Adam and Stefan said that they were on their way to Italy, I had to believe that was what was happening. To face Bonarata.

The Lord of Night had taken me from my mate, and now Adam was going to visit him. There was no way that was not going to be a disaster. Not at all.

What was everyone thinking to have allowed that to happen? Okay, granted that Adam made his own decisions. But Stefan had sounded so confident that as long as I remained at large, diplomacy could happen.

My husband was not overly diplomatic under the best of circumstances.

I had escaped the plans the Lord of Night had made for me. Neither he nor Adam was going to be in a good mood. I didn’t see how this was going to work out without one of them dead, no matter what Stefan said. I knew very well that my friend Stefan could lie like a carny on a bally stage. I wasn’t certain he couldn’t lie to me, too, in order to spare me from worry. My internal lie detector was very good but not infallible.

I popped up to my feet. I could not—could not—sit around all night with nothing for company but my thoughts, kept there by some vague worry about the Alpha of Prague and the probability that I was, at this very moment, the subject of a deadly hunt by the most powerful vampire in . . . well, anywhere, I supposed.

I left the backpack where it was because my nose told me that people didn’t come to that tiny forgotten corner of the restaurant grounds very often. My little bit of pack magic would have an easier time hiding me if I wasn’t doing something remarkable, like carrying a backpack around.

On four feet, I retraced my way back to the street and set out to explore nighttime Prague with the faint concealment that the remnants of pack magic wrapped around me. I was in Prague, in the Czech Republic, and I’d never traveled out of the country before—except for that one crazy trip to Mexico with Char, during which we had avoided jail by the hair of our chinny-chin-chins because of Char’s exquisitely horrible taste in men. So what if an old vampire was going to murder my husband, I was . . .

If I wasn’t going to let myself be distracted, I might as well go curl up in a miserable ball and wait for Adam (or maybe Bonarata or Whateverhisname the Alpha of Prague) to find me. Wait to be rescued, Stefan had told me—not very flattering in retrospect. I don’t follow orders, even kindly given, and I wasn’t going to wait around to be rescued like some helpless princess when there was exploring to do.

Just then, I passed a restaurant or pub or something that had a sign in the window that said FREE WI-FI in about ten languages. It would open at 11. I made note of it because my stolen e-reader and I needed free Wi-Fi. But it was a long time until 11 A.M., so I kept going.