I still could not feel the pack bonds unless I was in a trance. My bond with Adam was faint, like a memory of the strong line of communication—or noncommunication, during its contrary moments. I tried not to notice the bond between Stefan and me, and since it, too, was faint, was mostly successful.
Adam had traveled to Washington, D.C., several times during our marriage, and our mating bond had been strong and true—or as strong and true as ever, because it was eccentric. Given the current evidence, the pack magic must have provided the power to keep our bond going over the distance.
Those dreams I’d had in the bus, I refused to believe they were only dreams. The first one . . . might have been, I admitted reluctantly. Though it had felt more real than most of my dreams. But the second one, the one with Stefan—that one was real. And if both Adam and Stefan said that they were on their way to Italy, I had to believe that was what was happening. To face Bonarata.
The Lord of Night had taken me from my mate, and now Adam was going to visit him. There was no way that was not going to be a disaster. Not at all.
What was everyone thinking to have allowed that to happen? Okay, granted that Adam made his own decisions. But Stefan had sounded so confident that as long as I remained at large, diplomacy could happen.
My husband was not overly diplomatic under the best of circumstances.
I had escaped the plans the Lord of Night had made for me. Neither he nor Adam was going to be in a good mood. I didn’t see how this was going to work out without one of them dead, no matter what Stefan said. I knew very well that my friend Stefan could lie like a carny on a bally stage. I wasn’t certain he couldn’t lie to me, too, in order to spare me from worry. My internal lie detector was very good but not infallible.
I popped up to my feet. I could not—could not—sit around all night with nothing for company but my thoughts, kept there by some vague worry about the Alpha of Prague and the probability that I was, at this very moment, the subject of a deadly hunt by the most powerful vampire in . . . well, anywhere, I supposed.
I left the backpack where it was because my nose told me that people didn’t come to that tiny forgotten corner of the restaurant grounds very often. My little bit of pack magic would have an easier time hiding me if I wasn’t doing something remarkable, like carrying a backpack around.
On four feet, I retraced my way back to the street and set out to explore nighttime Prague with the faint concealment that the remnants of pack magic wrapped around me. I was in Prague, in the Czech Republic, and I’d never traveled out of the country before—except for that one crazy trip to Mexico with Char, during which we had avoided jail by the hair of our chinny-chin-chins because of Char’s exquisitely horrible taste in men. So what if an old vampire was going to murder my husband, I was . . .
If I wasn’t going to let myself be distracted, I might as well go curl up in a miserable ball and wait for Adam (or maybe Bonarata or Whateverhisname the Alpha of Prague) to find me. Wait to be rescued, Stefan had told me—not very flattering in retrospect. I don’t follow orders, even kindly given, and I wasn’t going to wait around to be rescued like some helpless princess when there was exploring to do.
Just then, I passed a restaurant or pub or something that had a sign in the window that said FREE WI-FI in about ten languages. It would open at 11. I made note of it because my stolen e-reader and I needed free Wi-Fi. But it was a long time until 11 A.M., so I kept going.
Eventually, I found myself in the famous Old Town Square, with its fabulous clock tower that looked as though it had been transplanted from the Middle Ages. The rest of the buildings were, even to my relatively uneducated eyes, a mishmash of eras—that seemed to blend together in a . . . well, a Bohemian style. My favorite was a glorious old church or cathedral with Gothic (I think) towers whose spiky tops reached for the heavens—and promised impalement to any angel who happened to fall down upon them.
There were still a few people meandering about the open-air restaurants, though the actual commerce seemed to be finishing up. I moved slowly and stuck to the shadows, and no one stood up and pointed at the coyote in the middle of the city, so I was pretty sure that the “see what you expect to see and don’t be alarmed” part of the pack spell was working okay.
Narrow cobblestone streets led off from the square in a higgledy-piggledy fashion that had nothing to do with convenience and everything to do with their medieval origin. Charmed, I started down one at random.
Like the square, the street was cobblestone, the “road” barely wide enough to accommodate a single car or small delivery van. My feet, still sore from running from the werewolf, would have preferred a nice grassy verge to the granite cobbles. But the rest of me? The only thing that would have made my first exposure to medieval Prague better would have been if Adam were by my side.
I was in Prague, walking down cobblestones through a street that probably looked a lot like this a thousand years ago. Granted, it wouldn’t have smelled like this. Medieval cities had to cope with the waste of horses, cattle, sheep, and geese, not to mention people, and mostly, by modern standards, they failed. I was most content with this version of the Middle Ages. My tongue lolled out in pleasure not even sore feet or being hunted by vampires could impact.
Cobblestones had been necessary in the Middle Ages—a huge upgrade from dirt/waste/mud. Cobbles could be washed clean and swept. They didn’t get the nasty ruts that could deepen until they trapped any cart with the misfortune to fall into them.
I trotted past closed tourist shops filled with an unlikely mix of chandeliers and alcohol and T-shirts situated next to antique shops—Good heavens, was that an absinthe shop?—and jewelry stores that specialized in amber and garnets. The absinthe shop had a neon-green T-shirt in the window that read ABSINTHE MAKETH THE HEART GROW FONDER, which was a little too close to my situation to be comfortable. There was a lot of English around, from the T-shirt to the signs in the windows.
There was a lot of graffiti, too, which surprised me for some stupid reason. In the TriCities, we fight the good fight against graffiti. Most of it is gang-related, but some is just teenagers striving to make their mark in an indifferent world. I guess graffiti seemed like it was exclusively a New World problem—which was a stupid assumption. I knew that there was graffiti that dated back to the Romans and said largely the same kinds of things that our modern graffiti does: your sister sleeps with gladiators, I was here, Flavius is hot—that kind of thing.
Maybe the narrowness of the street had to do with defense. You wouldn’t have to do much to block such a narrow lane and keep armies trapped in small spaces, where hot grease or tar and arrows or rocks could be flung on their heads with very little work.
And right in the middle of envisioning medieval battles, I caught the scent of werewolf in the air, musk and mint and . . . yeast, which wasn’t a usual werewolf scent. I turned and trotted as silently as I could back down the street, but I wasn’t silent enough.
Someone trotted after me, a fit, young-looking man in baggy pants and a skintight muscle shirt. I was suddenly glad the pack magic that kept people from noticing me was as thin as it was, because though most werewolves can’t actually feel the magic that makes their lives so much easier, if I’d been covered with it as I might have been in the TriCities, he probably would have noticed.
As it was, he saw me plenty clearly. I hadn’t seen a single stray dog since I’d started my adventure tonight, though I could smell that there were a lot of dogs around. I think that’s what he thought I was. He was being a good citizen and helping the poor stray dog, nice werewolf that he was.