Silence Fallen (Mercy Thompson #10)(29)

It contemplated me for a moment more, then cried out hoarsely, a sound of rage and frustration and loneliness that should have shook the windows in the nearby buildings but didn’t. No one came to see what caused the noise.

Runnels of magic slid down my face, as if it had taken a swipe at me with claws. The sensation dug into my bones like hot metal—almost as shocking as the wrenching twist from warm delight to fear. Then the whole thing, magic and all, slowly dissipated. For one instant, I glimpsed something glowing on the center of its forehead, letters that disappeared before the last of the magic. Not letters in any alphabet I knew, though they resembled two oddly written “n”s and an “x.” It could have been Arabic or Russian, but I was pretty sure it was Hebrew and that the three letters together spelled emet, truth.

Because I had just met the Golem of Prague—or what was left of him, anyway.

What other giant ghost would be wandering the streets of Prague in the Jewish Quarter in the middle of the night radiating magic, but the most famous local legend?

In the sixteenth century, a revered and learned rabbi named Judah Loew ben Bezalel, disturbed by a series of attacks on the people living in the Jewish Quarter, created a golem, a giant creature made of clay. On the creature’s forehead he inscribed the word for truth. In so much all of the accounts agreed. The end of the story was another matter.

In some versions, the rabbi lost control of the golem and was forced to destroy it. In another, the creature fell in love—and nothing good ever comes (in stories) from a monster’s falling in love. In yet another variation, when the rabbi died, the golem retreated to the attic of the Old-New Synagogue and lay down to wait for his master to return. A lot of the stories end with the golem’s clay body remaining in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue, a room reachable only from the outside of the building. I thought it unlikely that it was still there (if it ever had been). Prague had been occupied by the Nazis, after all. Hitler, who had been obsessed with all things magical, must have looked for it there.

I stared into the night and shivered. I was very glad that I had not been in this city when the golem wandered the streets in its physical form.

—

IT WAS AS NEAR TO NOON AS I COULD RECKON BY THE sun when I strolled into the restaurant that had offered free Wi-Fi. I’d brushed my hair and braided it, securing it with the band I’d stolen from the person I’d taken the money from. I walked directly to the doors marked WC, having read just enough British mysteries to know that WC stood for water closet, which is a bathroom. The women’s restroom door had a doe-eyed woman in a pink dress painted on it by someone who was better than an amateur.

The bathroom was clean and bright and had plenty of soap and paper towels. I looked in the mirror and saw that I had a large bruise down my face on the opposite side from my scar. My eyes were shadowed, and my cheeks were hollow. Coyote me had helped herself to the mastiff’s food and a couple of rodents of unusual shape, but that was all I’d eaten since the vampires had taken me. I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious.

I looked like the victim of domestic abuse. I smiled experimentally—and to my surprise, that helped a lot.

—

IN PRAGUE, APPARENTLY, THEY DO NOT USE EUROS. They use something called koruna. Also in Prague—or at least in the little Wi-Fi restaurant in Prague—people are kind.

There were ten people in the restaurant, including the staff: five Czech women, three Czech men, and two Russian tourists, both women. We spoke roughly a dozen languages between us, though I might have missed one or two, but no one spoke English.

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.