Silence Fallen (Mercy Thompson #10)(73)

ADAM KNEW A DOZEN WAYS TO DEAL WITH A TIME-ZONE shift, but mostly he’d found that staying up when he had to stay up and sleeping whenever he could took care of fatigue eventually. He hoped not to be in Europe long enough to adjust.

Since their host was a vampire, that meant they went to bed at dawn. The good news was that since his inner clock was already screwed up from the time change to Europe, adding the whole switch from functioning in the night rather than the day was just a blip.

He didn’t like that their party was split up, but there had been no way to include Harris and Smith without indicating that he didn’t trust Bonarata’s ability to keep his people safe. Adam was pretty sure Bonarata could keep his vampires under control if he wanted to. He just didn’t trust that Bonarata wanted to keep Adam’s people safe.

He also wasn’t sure that letting Bonarata think they were all one big traveling sex orgy was helping their cause. The meal they’d spent with the vampires made him suspicious that Marsilia’s act was mostly because of matters between her and Bonarata and had nothing to do with consolidating the sleeping space for defensive reasons.

He was pretty sure that Bonarata—for all that he was as jealous as a cat whose owner had two dogs—knew they weren’t sleeping together in any but the most mundane sense of the word. Any werewolf worth his salt could have figured it out. There was something about body language and scent that made such things obvious.

At least her machinations had reduced his patrol area to two. His two outliers were only down a short hall and up a staircase from them. Adam wasn’t happy; it was too far for tactical safety. Smith’s victim-like demeanor made him a target in this house of predators.

If something happened in Harris’s room, Adam was pretty sure he’d hear the screams from the big suite. It didn’t make the beast who lived in his heart content—or Adam, either—but it was the hand he had been dealt.

“Dawn is coming,” said Marsilia as Stefan closed the door of the suite. The two vampires had volunteered to escort the pilots to their room. “There isn’t much time.”

“Rest well,” Adam said, though he knew that it wasn’t a rest at all—the vampires died with the rising of the sun.

Stefan, who had followed Marsilia as she walked rapidly toward their room, paused to give Adam a wry smile. “Stay safe,” he said, then disappeared through the doorway behind Marsilia.

Larry rubbed his hands together thoughtfully, staring at the door that had just closed behind their vampires. But when he spoke, it wasn’t—directly—about Marsilia or Stefan.

“I think that went about as well as could be expected,” he said. Then he said what Adam had just been thinking. “I’m not sure anyone but a love-struck fool, which Bonarata isn’t quite, would think there was anything between you and Marsilia. But the Lord of Night was plenty jealous anyway, for what it’s worth. I heard you open Bonarata’s eyes about the relationship between the Marrok and your wife. Is it true? Would the Marrok still go to war for her?”

If the goblin had heard all of that, he not only could hear as well as any werewolf Adam had ever met, he also had a larger capacity to sort through data than Adam had. The conversations in the dinner hall had blurred to incomprehensible for Adam.

He nodded in response to the goblin’s question. “Bran would not be pleased if something happened to Mercy. Very not pleased.”

Larry tilted his head in a way that was neither human nor quite wolflike. “Bran was Grendel?”

He thought about Larry the goblin king and how everyone underestimated goblins. He decided it would be a good thing if the goblin king knew something of what the Marrok was.

“Not quite,” Adam said. “As I understand it, Beowulf was written down a long time after the events it purports to tell. The purpose of the story as it was recorded was to recite the final deeds of Beowulf, a great hero. Somewhere along the way, someone put him up against the scariest monsters they’d ever heard of instead of the terrible monsters who did kill him. That tale then blended back to the original.”

On one remarkable night, not long after Adam had been Changed, the Marrok’s son Samuel had sung (then translated) several versions of the tale of Beowulf.

“Beowulf,” Adam told the goblin, “isn’t any more accurate than any story told by mouth for centuries before it was written down, which is not very. Bran’s story is that a long time ago, he was broken. It had something to do with protecting his son. For a very long time afterward—decades and maybe longer—Bran was a mindless monster who killed every living thing in his territory.”

“When you were talking to Jacob, you said Bran’s mother was a witch,” said Elizaveta.

He hadn’t. She was fishing. So he said, “Bran has never said so. I’ve heard the rumors, though. So has Bonarata.”

Samuel had told him that Bran’s mother was a witch, and Adam figured that, being Bran’s son, Samuel had been in a position to know. But he didn’t have to tell Elizaveta who his source was. If Bran had wanted it to be known that he was witchborn, he’d have told everyone himself. Since he hadn’t, Adam wasn’t going to do it for him. But everyone had heard the rumors, and those Bran encouraged. Adam just didn’t need to confirm them.

“Interesting,” she said thoughtfully. “It would explain some things if it were true.” She smiled wickedly at Adam. “Some things that others have tried to do to Bran Cornick and failed miserably.”