Silence Fallen (Mercy Thompson #10)(27)

Eventually, I found myself in the famous Old Town Square, with its fabulous clock tower that looked as though it had been transplanted from the Middle Ages. The rest of the buildings were, even to my relatively uneducated eyes, a mishmash of eras—that seemed to blend together in a . . . well, a Bohemian style. My favorite was a glorious old church or cathedral with Gothic (I think) towers whose spiky tops reached for the heavens—and promised impalement to any angel who happened to fall down upon them.

There were still a few people meandering about the open-air restaurants, though the actual commerce seemed to be finishing up. I moved slowly and stuck to the shadows, and no one stood up and pointed at the coyote in the middle of the city, so I was pretty sure that the “see what you expect to see and don’t be alarmed” part of the pack spell was working okay.

Narrow cobblestone streets led off from the square in a higgledy-piggledy fashion that had nothing to do with convenience and everything to do with their medieval origin. Charmed, I started down one at random.

Like the square, the street was cobblestone, the “road” barely wide enough to accommodate a single car or small delivery van. My feet, still sore from running from the werewolf, would have preferred a nice grassy verge to the granite cobbles. But the rest of me? The only thing that would have made my first exposure to medieval Prague better would have been if Adam were by my side.

I was in Prague, walking down cobblestones through a street that probably looked a lot like this a thousand years ago. Granted, it wouldn’t have smelled like this. Medieval cities had to cope with the waste of horses, cattle, sheep, and geese, not to mention people, and mostly, by modern standards, they failed. I was most content with this version of the Middle Ages. My tongue lolled out in pleasure not even sore feet or being hunted by vampires could impact.

Cobblestones had been necessary in the Middle Ages—a huge upgrade from dirt/waste/mud. Cobbles could be washed clean and swept. They didn’t get the nasty ruts that could deepen until they trapped any cart with the misfortune to fall into them.

I trotted past closed tourist shops filled with an unlikely mix of chandeliers and alcohol and T-shirts situated next to antique shops—Good heavens, was that an absinthe shop?—and jewelry stores that specialized in amber and garnets. The absinthe shop had a neon-green T-shirt in the window that read ABSINTHE MAKETH THE HEART GROW FONDER, which was a little too close to my situation to be comfortable. There was a lot of English around, from the T-shirt to the signs in the windows.

There was a lot of graffiti, too, which surprised me for some stupid reason. In the TriCities, we fight the good fight against graffiti. Most of it is gang-related, but some is just teenagers striving to make their mark in an indifferent world. I guess graffiti seemed like it was exclusively a New World problem—which was a stupid assumption. I knew that there was graffiti that dated back to the Romans and said largely the same kinds of things that our modern graffiti does: your sister sleeps with gladiators, I was here, Flavius is hot—that kind of thing.

Maybe the narrowness of the street had to do with defense. You wouldn’t have to do much to block such a narrow lane and keep armies trapped in small spaces, where hot grease or tar and arrows or rocks could be flung on their heads with very little work.

And right in the middle of envisioning medieval battles, I caught the scent of werewolf in the air, musk and mint and . . . yeast, which wasn’t a usual werewolf scent. I turned and trotted as silently as I could back down the street, but I wasn’t silent enough.

Someone trotted after me, a fit, young-looking man in baggy pants and a skintight muscle shirt. I was suddenly glad the pack magic that kept people from noticing me was as thin as it was, because though most werewolves can’t actually feel the magic that makes their lives so much easier, if I’d been covered with it as I might have been in the TriCities, he probably would have noticed.

As it was, he saw me plenty clearly. I hadn’t seen a single stray dog since I’d started my adventure tonight, though I could smell that there were a lot of dogs around. I think that’s what he thought I was. He was being a good citizen and helping the poor stray dog, nice werewolf that he was.

He sped up, and I didn’t dare do so. Never run from werewolves; it only makes them hungry. He said something soothing. It might have been in Czech or Slovak, but “Here, puppy” is a phrase that needs no translation.

A four-board-wide fence spanned a rare space between two buildings. I’d paid little attention to it when I’d passed it the first time except to note the dark green splatter of graffiti that was no more legible for being in Czech than the graffiti was at home. Now I was happy to note that the fence was level, top and bottom, but the ground had a little swell on one side. So there was a space just big enough for a coyote to slide underneath with enough panache that it looked like I’d done it before.

See? I am a dog going home, not the foreign mate of a foreign Alpha running away from a nice werewolf.

I found myself in a garden that was much bigger than the four-board fence had made it appear, because the garden extended along the space between the two buildings and into a back area that was pretty and green.

There was a dog in the garden—a very big dog who couldn’t have squeezed out the hole I’d squeezed in through. The large female mastiff came around the corner of the building just as my follower grabbed the top of the fence and chinned himself up to look over the fence.