Silence Fallen (Mercy Thompson #10)(79)

He trotted back up the stairs he’d just come down. Unlike the other man, Adam made no sound. He timed his approach so that he stepped into the hallway about five feet in front of the other man.

In front of the vampire.

Guccio’s pretty face broke into a pretty smile that didn’t show his teeth. “Adam,” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

Were they on a first-name basis? Adam’s wolf said no, but Adam swallowed it because all he knew was the vampire’s first name.

He managed a casual raised eyebrow when the wolf wanted to eliminate the threat to his people.

“Vampire,” Adam said, tipping his head toward Guccio in something that the vampire was welcome to read as greeting. “Should you be out in the day?”

There were vampires who could move about in dusk or twilight, but Adam reckoned they were close upon midafternoon.

Even though the inner halls of the villa were windowless and lit by artificial lights, it was the sun that mattered. When the sun rose, a vampire’s spirit or soul or whatever left their body and no longer animated it. The corpse left behind smelled and felt like a corpse. Vampires were dead every day; wolf noses don’t lie.

Guccio’s smile widened. “The Lord of Night once had a very powerful witch.” He held up a hand-stitched cloth bag tied around his neck.

It appeared, to Adam’s Southern-bred eyes and nose, like a gris-gris bag. He smelled a number of herbs, but the main scent was something organic decaying. Maybe Bonarata’s witch followed voodoo or hoodoo practices. Or maybe she (because strong witches were mostly women) was African, which was where the practice of making gris-gris originated.

Adam had never heard of a witch who could let a vampire walk in the daytime. Maybe because there weren’t any witches who would want to do so.

“It only allows me to walk when otherwise I would have to rest,” Guccio said, letting the bag settle back against the hollow of his throat. “It cannot protect me from sunlight.”

Adam wondered if Guccio knew how much longing was in his voice when he said “sunlight.” The vampires called it “sun-sickness” when their kind became obsessed with the sun. Without intervention, vampires affected by sun-sickness died within a year or two—walking out into the dawn of their own volition. Suicide of sorts. If they hadn’t already been dead.

Guccio was one of those people who liked hearing his own voice so much that he thought everyone felt the same way. He kept talking, but all Adam paid attention to was the threat he represented. Adam made answers that Guccio probably took as polite and wondered if he was going to have to kill Guccio before going to Prague.

And Adam waited at the top of the stairs until Guccio turned back the way he’d come and kept going, following the hall as it took a sharp turn. He had never said what he was doing over by Adam’s pilots’ room.

His wolf furiously disturbed, Adam knocked on Harris and Smith’s door for a second time.

“Get your things,” he said shortly when Harris finally opened the door. “There are vampires wandering around in the daytime here. I’m not leaving you here alone.”

—

HE GAVE THE PILOTS THE COUCHES. HE AND HONEY, both in wolf form, curled up on the throw rug in front of the cold fireplace. Honey slept, but Adam only managed to doze off and on, his wolf restless.

He found himself checking the bond with Mercy over and over. All he could tell was that she was there, but for a few minutes it would quiet the wolf. He hoped it was just the wolf’s reaction to the meeting with Guccio and not something about Mercy that the wolf could feel and the man could not.

No one in the bedrooms stirred, not even to his wolf ears. Smith slept like the dead. Harris . . . Harris snored. Just enough that it made Adam worry that it would cover a noise that might warn him of an attack.

People started stirring out in the hallways as the light outside bloomed into a glorious sunset. Adam shifted into his human shape, gathered his luggage, and went into the vampires’ room to use their bathroom to shower, shave, and change.

By the time he was done, both vampires were awake. They didn’t speak—maybe they couldn’t. Adam could see their hunger—just as they could see his wolf.

They had better get things tied up here tonight, or Bonarata might not be the one they had to worry about. He hadn’t thought about the vampires’ need to feed. He didn’t know much about it. It was a touchy subject for Stefan, though maybe not for all vampires. Should he have suggested that they bring one of their willing donors—what did Mercy call them?—one of their sheep with them?

But he didn’t think he could have stood back and watched, not knowing that the human’s willingness might not be anything more than a strange and strong addiction.

They were adults. More than adults, they were powers in their own right, he decided as he nodded to them and kept going out the door to the main room of the suite. He would do his best to keep them safe, but they could find their own food.

In the common room, Harris and Larry were up, dressed in keeping with their differing roles in this play. Elizaveta was wearing a slate-gray suit with a diamond brooch. She looked like someone’s sweet and expensive grandmother. Soft. He wondered whom she was planning on blindsiding.

There were two people showering. By process of elimination, that would have to be Honey and Smith.

A polite knock sounded at the door.