Silence Fallen (Mercy Thompson #10)(80)

Adam started to get it, but Harris waved him back.

“I believe that’s my job, sir,” he said deferentially, then flashed Adam a cheery grin.

He opened the door to a male and female vampire, each pushing a trolley.

“Good morning,” said the woman with a friendly smile and downcast eyes. “With my Master’s compliments, we have sustenance for your bloodborn. For the rest of your party, there is tea, coffee, and drinking chocolate. First meal will be served in an hour in the main dining room. It is generally less formal than last meal—no ties required. My Master requests that a half hour before the meal, you attend him again in the receiving room. If you would like a guide, one will be provided you.”

“The receiving room is the old library?” Adam asked.

She gave him a surprised look before dropping her eyes. “Yes, sir.”

“It still smells of books,” Harris explained, touching his nose. “The wolves pay more attention to the scents of things than most people do. We won’t need a guide.”

The servants withdrew. Adam claimed the cart that held a tea service with a large, elaborately fashioned black-and-gold teapot that did not, according to his nose, hold anything like tea.

“I’ll take it in to them,” he said. He trusted that Marsilia and Stefan had enough control not to attack anyone even with their hunger riding them, but he wouldn’t send anyone else in. Just in case.

He knocked once—they would have heard the exchange with Bonarata’s servants—and went in. Marsilia was dressed and putting a diamond drop earring on. Stefan was buttoning his white silk shirt.

“Thank you,” Marsilia said.

There was no trace of the Hunger in either of their faces, but Adam knew what he’d seen. He pushed the cart all the way into the room and turned to leave them to it.

Marsilia said, “Wait.”

He stopped and looked at her.

“Please,” she said. Then she nodded to Stefan, who closed the door.

As soon as the door shut, she approached him. “Did you meet with a vampire in this house between the time we retired and awakened?”

“Guccio,” he said. “Mercy contacted Ben via e-mail using a stolen e-reader. She’s alive in Prague and likely to stay that way until we get there. I went to talk to Harris to let him know we’d be wheels up tonight as soon as you figure out what a proper leave-taking of Bonarata consists of. Sooner rather than later if you can manage.”

Marsilia absorbed all of that. While she did, Stefan said, “Guccio? In the day?”

“He had some sort of magical bag. Witchcraft. I want to ask Elizaveta about it.”

Stefan considered that. Then he said, “Did he do anything odd?”

“No bite marks,” Adam said. “I checked.” And he had. He knew about vampire mind tricks—and his wolf was even more agitated than it had been when he found out about Mercy.

Stefan nodded slowly. “Okay. Okay. You should be okay, then. You just—” He glanced over at Marsilia, who sighed.

“Vampires have scent markers,” she told him. “It’s not quite a secret, but not something we tell everyone about. We leave them involuntarily when we feed off a human, but we can also do it deliberately—a touch, a brush of skin on skin. A way of marking someone as ours. As soon as you walked into the bedroom, Stefan and I could tell you’d been marked by someone. I didn’t know Guccio well enough to remember how his scent marker smells.”

Adam sniffed himself, but he couldn’t detect anything different. It made him uneasy that the vampires could smell something he couldn’t, but that might be why his wolf was so upset.

“I showered,” he said, “and it’s still here?”

Stefan grinned. “Don’t worry, Mercy won’t smell it, either. Some kind of vampire magic designed to keep some poor fool from taking a bite of a Master Vampire’s prey. Vampires can smell it from the newest hatchling to the oldest doddering geriatric.” His smile was real, but his eyes were solemn. “It’s considered rude, unless it’s one of your own . . . people, someone who has to go out and about among our kind, and you want to protect them from other vampires.”

“What an interesting thing to do to a guest of Bonarata,” said Marsilia. “I wonder what it means?”

Adam felt his mouth quirk up. “I guess we’ll find out.”

Marsilia narrowed her eyes at him.

“Come on out to the main room,” he said. “I have a few things to talk over with everyone.”

But when they made it to the main room, Honey was still getting dressed in Elizaveta’s room. Smith was in the suite, and from the wide-eyed look he gave Adam, he’d heard about the vampire scent-marking him. Adam was pretty sure there was a glint of something in Smith’s eyes, too, but the other wolf dropped his head like a good submissive, so Adam couldn’t be sure.

Given that there were no bite marks, Adam could see why they found it funny that he, a werewolf, had been marked as prey by the stupid vampire.

The two goblins were pointedly looking at the window, their backs to the room. Presumably so that Adam couldn’t see their wide grins.

Elizaveta looked from Adam to Smith to the goblins and said, in a voice with virtually no Russian accent at all so that Adam knew she was really angry, “Please tell me the joke so that I know what you and the vampires were conversing about. It seems that I am the only who did not hear what went on.”