Silence Fallen (Mercy Thompson #10)(63)

I rolled the shirt and pants into a bundle as quickly as I could manage—it wasn’t likely that there would be visitors to the garage this late at night. Still, I preferred not to moon people who didn’t deserve it.

I gave my clothes to Jitka because that was slightly less embarrassing than handing them over to Martin.

“You aren’t a werewolf,” said Jitka positively, and not for the first time.

“There are supposed to be other kinds of shapeshifters.” Martin’s voice was hushed. “I’ve read stories. Weretigers. Dragons. That sort of thing.”

“If you are expecting a dragon, you’re going to be disappointed,” I told him.

And I changed into my coyote shape. When I was a teenager, I changed back and forth in front of a mirror, trying to see what it looked like. But one of the things that changes dramatically for me while shifting is my vision, so things get blurry. I’ve never seen much, but Adam told me there isn’t a lot to see—one moment I’m human, the next a coyote.

I might not get to see myself change, but I’d seen a lot of werewolf changes, and I’m very glad that mine is both quick and painless.

Martin’s jaw dropped open.

“What are you?” Jitka asked. “Some sort of dog?”

I flattened my ears at her and gave an impatient yip.

“You aren’t a wolf,” said Martin. “Something native to the US?”

“Coyote?” Jitka said. “Like in the cartoons with the Road Runner.”

I let my ears pop back up and smiled at them both.

“Well.” Jitka dragged the word out as she inspected me. “I thought coyotes were bigger.”

“Maybe roadrunners are smaller,” speculated Martin. “I guess the question is, how is your sense of smell?”

I yipped once, put my nose to the ground, and began casting about.

Scent trails are something that training makes better. The real trouble I’ve always had is that the information my canine nose gives me is overwhelming. When I was a teenager, Charles spent a lot of time and effort teaching me how to sort things out. I’d gotten a good sniff of our attackers, but the scent of the woman I’d killed with the scythe was strongest in my memory, so I focused on her.

I caught her scent right away, but I didn’t start following immediately. I let my mind relax and walked back and forth for a while until I was sure that I’d found the freshest scent. It was the one with a hint of absinthe, as though she’d been intimate with someone who was drinking or maybe someone spilled some on her. Maybe she’d been drinking it herself, though that was fairly unusual for vampires.

In any case, the absinthe edge distinguished that trail from all the others. It was the trail that contained the most nuanced complex of odors, which meant it was freshest, because those fade with time.

She had used the steps instead of the elevator. I focused on my prey and let the werewolves take care of keeping up with me.





9





Mercy


I seemed to be spending a lot of time wandering the streets of Prague at night. Not the best way to see Prague, but at least we weren’t running into very many tourists.



THE APARTMENT BUILDINGS THAT LINED THE STREETS were probably not old by Prague standards, since they certainly didn’t date back to the Middle Ages. But they weren’t built in this century, either. They were stacked six or seven floors high and shoulder to shoulder, leaving no room for a mouse to squeeze through between them.

They also looked vaguely familiar. We were close enough to Old Town that the streets and sidewalks were cobbled, so at first I assumed that it was because I’d passed this way when I had traveled the streets alone last night, and that was sort of true.

I looked down a cross street and suddenly got it. Someone, a century or more ago, had been trying to make this neighborhood look like Paris—which is why all the buildings had appeared so familiar. I hadn’t been to Paris, either, or I’d have figured it out sooner.

The cobbles were very picturesque, but my feet were looking forward to going home, where I could run in the fields. Even the cheatgrass and the tackweed didn’t seem so bad in retrospect, because I could avoid them. The cobbles were everywhere, hard and sharp-edged, and they dug into the pads of my feet.

When we passed by the Old-New Synagogue, I realized we were in the Jewish Quarter, near where I’d had my run-in with the golem—so that probably had added to the feeling of familiarity. Jitka had said we were in Josefov, and that name had thrown me. I’d heard it called Josefstadt, which would be German for Josef’s city. Presumably, Josefov meant the same in Czech.

This seemed awfully . . . in the middle of things, for a seethe that had been evading the Master of Prague for half a century or more. I’d expected someplace less densely populated with a few more hidden places and a thousand or so fewer people.

But scents generally don’t lie, and the female vampire’s scent was definitely leading me through the Jewish Quarter. I was starting to pick up more of her trails, too, as if she’d passed this way many, many times. And she wasn’t the only vampire who’d been down this sidewalk, either.

The scents of vampires gradually coalesced into something much worse. Someone wasn’t good at housekeeping, either, because the smell of blood and rot and old death wafted thickly around my nose. It was so obvious that I glanced at the werewolves, but both of them were paying attention to me rather than looking around for the building housing a couple of dozen vampires.