Silence Fallen (Mercy Thompson #10)(30)

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.