Silence Fallen (Mercy Thompson #10)(62)

Martin suggested that we take a page out of Bonarata’s playbook and extract a single vampire. We’d question that one, then turn them over to Libor for further questioning.

That made me pretty queasy. Killing an attacker is an entirely different thing than turning one over for torture. Happily, Jitka batted that one back, so I didn’t have to.

“That is foolish,” she said. “We have tried that. They do not talk. After the third one, Libor said it was enough. That if they were not talking after what he did to them, it was because they could not, not because they would not. There are some witchcraft spells that will do that. Maybe there is vampire magic that stopped their tongues.”

I tried not to think beyond the surface of her words.

Torture was a lot further than I was prepared to go just to find out why they’d decided to work with the other Prague seethe. Maybe I’d feel differently if I lived in Prague, though I didn’t think so. There were probably circumstances that would make me reconsider, but this wasn’t one of those. Probably I should feel badly that Jitka and Martin seemed quite convinced that the endgame would be to destroy the seethe—but vampires are evil. I might like one or two on a personal level—but they kill people in order to keep living.

“So let’s just go find the seethe,” I said, “get what information we can get from watching them, then go back to Libor with that.”

Safe enough, I thought. I’d already proved I could get away from the biggest, baddest vampire in Europe. This shouldn’t be so bad. And I would be going out and doing something.

—

WE STARTED BY BACKTRACKING THE FOUR WHO HAD attacked us to their car, parked a couple of miles away. Actually, I started by sifting through vampire ashes looking for a car key or fob or something. Jitka and Martin put together a pack of things they were sure would allow us to extract a single vampire and restrain it with minimum chances of having it break free and kill us all. Just in case, they said when I objected that we were only going in to observe and report back.

The car was an expensive new model with a correspondingly expensive new guidance system on board. Jitka and Martin complained about how well financed Mary seemed to be getting. They seemed to take the luxury car as a personal insult, and I was reminded that not so long ago by the standards of long-lived creatures, the Czech Republic had been part of the Soviet bloc. Under the communist regime, personal wealth had been viewed as a moral failure.

I wasn’t sure that wasn’t correct.

We got lucky with the car key I’d found on the third ash pile I’d gone through. It was one of the keyless fobs and half-melted, but apparently the right half was undamaged, because the car unlocked when Martin held it next to the door.

I did know how to start a car without a key—even a modern car—but I needed a few more supplies than I had at hand. It was a good thing the key had survived.

Still commenting—presumably, because they’d switched back to Czech to continue their complaints—Martin started the car, switched on the nav system, and found, in the saved locations, one that was helpfully labeled with the “home” icon.

If their car hadn’t had GPS, Martin knew of a few places where one of the dead vampires had been spotted a couple of days ago. I could have tried picking up his trail and following it. But, probably, we would have given the whole thing up and gotten a hotel room for the rest of the night. The GPS was a big break.

“If they weren’t living like rich people,” said Jitka in satisfied tones, “then we would have had to give up. This is what living too well does. It makes you weak.”

We piled in, and Martin drove the car sedately back through the streets of Dobrichovice, past the castle, and back on the highway. Home got us to a parking garage in a section of Prague filled with older apartment complexes. In the TriCities, older would mean fifty or sixty years; here, older was two or three hundred years.

There were two spaces empty, and we pulled the car into one and parked. The smell of cars and city and lots and lots of people filled the garage. It was pretty easy to tell we’d hit gold because the cars on either side of the car we’d come in smelled of vampire, too.

Less happily, Jitka, who’d begun calling as soon as we started back toward the city, hadn’t been able to get through to Libor. She put her phone in her pocket.

“I left a message for him this time,” she said. “He does not text. I told him we were in Josefov, and we have a way to find where Mary and her vampires are. I told him we would go looking and call him if we find something.”

Martin nodded. “Can you trail anyone in this?” He waved his hands around to indicate the complex muddle of scents.

She took a deep breath, then shook her head. “I can smell vampire, but to track, I will need to be wolf.”

Martin nodded agreement. “Me as well. I have not changed for three days. I could do it as long as I could stay in wolf form for four or five hours.”

“Hold it,” I said. “We probably want both of you in human skins, assuming we can keep this from being an outright battle. Why don’t you let me do this?”

“What are you?” Jitka asked with an edge to her voice, as if she had already been anticipating the beginning of her change.

I stripped off my borrowed clothes and looked around helplessly for a moment. In any other circumstances, I’d have thrown them in the nearest garbage can, but I’d started to feel possessive of my meager wardrobe.