Silence Fallen (Mercy Thompson #10)(61)

I didn’t do this hardly at all anymore. Maybe once or twice a month as opposed to the three or four times a day it used to be. Most of the panic attacks weren’t this bad. I hadn’t had a real episode for a couple of months.

And it had turned the respect in Martin’s face into compassion, into worry, into pity.

I stood up. Went into the little bathroom and closed the door behind me. I washed my face and looked at myself in Jitka’s mirror. The big bruise on my left cheek had spread since I looked at it this morning. There were dark circles under my eyes from lack of sleep.

I looked like a victim.

I was done, really done, with being a victim.

I opened the bathroom door and sat down where I’d started. “We cannot stay here because the vampires know where we are, right?” I knew, I knew that I shouldn’t do this. But the image of the victim remained in my mind.

I was dog-tired, and when I moved again, I was going to be stiff from hitting the ground and from bruises I didn’t remember getting: this wasn’t my first fight. I knew all about the aftermath. I should go and let Libor’s pack pay for a hotel room for me until we could pay them back. I should wait for Adam.

“Yes,” said Jitka.

I didn’t want to get anyone into trouble. So I said, “At this point, even if I ship off to Port-au-Prince or Timbuktu, the violence is going to continue between your pack and the vampires.”

Jitka said, “This attack and the one on our pack home make it quite clear that battle with the vampires is coming. It no longer matters if you are here or in China, Libor will not let this rest.”

“Yes,” said Martin at the same time. Jitka was just talking, but Martin watched me. His shoulders tightened. Maybe it wasn’t just me who needed to do something.

“And you would love to rid Prague of Mary’s seethe . . .” I said.

“Yes,” said Jitka, frowning at me. “But we cannot find it. We track them, and the trails just fade into vampire magic.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “I think I might be able to help you with that. What do you think the chances are that the vampires came here in a car with GPS?”

In the US, the chances would be pretty good. GPS or a cell phone with GPS, which would be harder.

Martin shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. The vampires tend to have expensive things—especially Mary’s people, who are trying to establish themselves with humans.”

“If you can get me to the place the vampires got in their car in Prague, assuming they walked from their seethe, then I can find it,” I told them.

Martin gave me a pitying look. “We have tried that many times, and we are werewolves.”

“Vampire magic doesn’t work right on me,” I told him. “Sometimes not at all.”

“Why not?” Jitka asked.

“I have no idea,” I told her honestly. “But I can see ghosts, too. Maybe one has something to do with the other.” I didn’t say that I could do other things with the dead. If no one knew, then no one could force me to do something I didn’t want to.

“What are you?” Martin asked.

“Not a werewolf,” I said. “Would it be useful to know where Mary’s seethe is?”

“We could go kill them,” said Jitka. She was all but vibrating with eagerness. “Kill them again, I mean, so they stay dead this time. Destroy Mary and her filthy followers in one shot.”

Martin’s eyes brightened. “Yes,” he said.

It wasn’t as stupid as it sounded. If Mary had been strong, she’d have already battled the Master of Prague. Instead, she’d been reduced to rebuilding her vampires, which was a slow and troublesome process, with failure rates higher than the werewolf Change. Most seethes, as I understood it, had a bare handful of strong vampires, then maybe as many as a dozen lesser vampires who depended upon their Master to sustain them.

We’d just killed four of Mary’s seethe. All of them had been vampires for a long time or their bodies wouldn’t have gone to dust. That didn’t mean that they weren’t still lesser vampires, because that usually required a century at least and often more. But I bet she didn’t have a whole lot more at that level. Not if her seethe was only sixty or seventy years old.

And, presumably, Jitka and Martin meant to gather the rest of their pack to destroy the seethe.

But they didn’t know how many vampires they were facing. I’d been raised by a master strategist who taught me that you never go to battle with an unknown enemy.

The werewolves probably knew that, too. Either they knew more about Mary’s seethe than it sounded like, or, more likely, the frustration of hunting her for so long was driving them into recklessness. Apparently it was going to be my job to be the cooler head.

Adam would think that was pretty funny, but I was not a rash person. I did think things through—and then I tried to do the right thing. Just because the right thing and the safest or easiest thing weren’t usually the same didn’t make me rash.

We planned and talked for maybe an hour. When Jitka couldn’t get through to Libor—something that didn’t seem to be unusual—we came up with an alternate plan to frontal assault, which, though satisfying to talk about, was (we decided) unlikely to result in anything useful, especially if we had to do it without help.

It required a lot of tact for me to steer the wolves, since I wasn’t a member of their pack or a werewolf. Only because I was the one they were counting on being able to find the vampires did they listen to me at all.