My death wouldn’t endear him to Adam, though. But neither would my kidnapping have. If he wanted to use our neutral zone, then my kidnapping didn’t make sense at all—but, I remembered, he’d been lying to me when he’d told me he was interested in a place where supernatural creatures and humans could interact safely.
The bus braked hard, then started up again, in a low gear that vibrated nastily in the luggage compartment, and I momentarily lost my train of thought. It wasn’t like I enjoyed picking apart the plans of supervillainous vampires. But the bus had been traveling for a long, long time, and it wasn’t like there was anything else going on. And there was the minor, inconsequential motivation that my life was in the balance.
No. Bran wouldn’t go after Bonarata without proof that left him clearly in the right. Adam might—but he didn’t have Bran’s resources. Bonarata wouldn’t be worried about Adam. He didn’t know Adam like I did.
For the moment, we had the upper hand. He’d underestimated me by a hairsbreadth, because that’s how close that chase with the werewolf had been. I’d escaped.
But he couldn’t allow me to stay free. He had to retake me to save face.
No.
He still needed me to die in order to save face—and to come out on top. He wouldn’t underestimate me again. I couldn’t afford to underestimate him, either.
I knew more about vampires than I’d ever wanted to. The old vampires operated like spiders—with webs strung all over their territory. A vampire like Bonarata probably had people all over Europe. It wouldn’t be hard to find me here. There weren’t a lot of coyotes in Europe, probably none outside a zoo. He’d have people looking for my coyote self.
I had to disappear.
I put my head down on my paws and tried to ignore the diesel fumes.
4
Mercy
Still somewhere in Europe, stuck in the luggage compartment of a bus. I’m just lucky I’m not prone to car sickness.
THE BUS CONTINUED MOVING FOR A VERY LONG TIME. Twice it stopped without opening the luggage doors—presumably to let people eat and take care of business. That I didn’t have to figure out how to get out to take care of business probably meant that I was dehydrated—I was certainly hungry—but it was convenient, and my coyote body was better at dealing with less regular food and drink than my human one.
When it stopped for a third time, I was ready to get out. Fortunately, this time the doors to my compartment opened with a screech of hinges. I pulled on pack magic, which answered my call sluggishly, but it was enough for me to scoot out of the luggage compartment and into the shadows of the twilight surrounding a tourist-friendly hotel.
The bus had traveled all day. That meant I was approximately five hundred miles from wherever in Italy I’d been to start with, give or take a couple of hundred miles. I could smell a freshwater river nearby but not an ocean. There were no large mountains, but there seemed to be some rise and fall to the land.
I found a place behind a pair of giant potted plants near the corner of the hotel that left me a dark shadow to hide in. With the pack magic to help, I didn’t think anyone would see me as long as I wasn’t moving. I took some time to examine my surroundings.
Buildings rose all around me. Not skyscrapers, but four-or five-story buildings, most of which dated back a few centuries. I saw a street sign and it had a few marks above the letters no Romance language had—but it wasn’t Cyrillic, either, at least not any version of Cyrillic I was familiar with.
After a few minutes of observation didn’t help me figure out where I was, I took a tighter hold of the threads of pack magic, faint because my pack was a very long way away, and ventured out into the growing darkness.
As I traveled through the city, heading for the origin of the scent of the river, the buildings got older—a lot older by centuries—and the streets turned to cobblestones. There were distinctive red-tile roofs and artwork on the outside of buildings. Probably not frescoes, though that’s what they looked like. My liberal arts education had given me enough of a basis in architecture that I could tell the difference between Gothic and Romanesque with about 70 percent accuracy. It did not tell me what it was called when there were designs all over the outer surface of a building.
The overall effect was an exuberant, almost boisterous, eclectically historical architecture. Here and there, aggressively plain buildings squatted between the beautiful, centuries-old masterpieces like defiant toads set between swans, hinting that this city had spent some time behind the Iron Curtain.
I had my suspicions about where I was. But it wasn’t until an hour later, when I’d found the river and looked down it to see the most famous and unmistakable of its many famous landmarks, the grand old medieval Charles Bridge, that I knew for certain where I was: Prague, the heart of Bohemia.
I knew a little bit about Prague. The first thing that came to mind was that Prague citizens had a habit of throwing powerful officials out of windows—the Second Defenestration of Prague began the Thirty Years War in 1618. There wasn’t another capital city with a First Defenestration that I knew of, let alone a second one. Prague was full of my kind of people.
By leaping a few low stone fences, I found a chunk of ground next to the riverbank (I couldn’t remember the name of the river except that it began with a V and that the Germans called it something else that reminded me of mold) tucked next to and around the edge of a restaurant that was hidden from the view of street, restaurant, and boats on the river. It was not particularly clean or lovely, but it was hidden—and that’s all I would ask for tonight.
And I lay there in the hard-packed dirt for maybe an hour next to the river. After ten minutes or so, I remembered it was the Vltava. Three unlikely consonants in a row. I still couldn’t remember the name the Germans called it. It was full dark, but there were lights all over the city that gave the river’s graceful flow a surreal beauty.
I knew that Stefan had given me good advice. I should just lie low and wait to be found. But I’d slept most of the day cramped up in the belly of the bus, and I was now too restless to sleep.
There were werewolves in Prague. I knew that. The mad and powerful Beast of Gévaudan, who’d ruled most of Europe for centuries, had seen to it that the packs were few and far between, as he did not brook competition. In Spain, where Asil the Moor had ruled, the Beast had left them alone. But he had stayed away from certain other places, too. Milan, where the Lord of Night reigned supreme, had been one of them. I was pretty sure that Prague had been another.
There was something about the werewolves in Prague I couldn’t remember. Something that urged me to caution. I hadn’t expected to find myself in Europe . . . well, ever, really. So I hadn’t paid much attention to them.
The werewolf who ruled here was very, very old—like Marrok or Asil old, I could remember that much. For some reason, I had the picture of a very hairy man in a medieval kitchen with his hirsute arms folded on the top of a rough-hewn wooden table in my head—it made me want to smile. Likely someone had been talking about him when I was a child, and I’d formed an idea of what he looked like. To have been Alpha enough to keep Gévaudan at bay, he was doubtless a scary man. But I’d grown up with werewolves, and being a werewolf was an insufficient reason to be frightened of him.
Even so, running around Prague was probably a bad idea until I could remember what I had heard about the local Alpha that had worried me. I should stay where I was.
I’d lived more than half my life essentially alone. Sometimes in the past few years, I had longed to be alone, just for an hour or two. And here I was. Alone. Sometimes getting your wish really sucks.