10 tom w serii Mercy Thompson został wydany 7 marca. Zmienna kojotka zostaje uprowadzona i wywieziona do Europy przez nieznane jej wampiry. Zarówno jej partnerska więź z Adamem, jak i stadem wilkołaków z Tri-Cities zostaje zablokowana przez magiczne zaklęcie. Mercy pozostaje na łasce jednego z najsilniejszych i najbardziej niebezpiecznych wampirów na świecie - Mistrza Mediolanu - dawnego kochanka Marcylii (na szczęście na krótko). Tak rozpoczyna się porywająca przygoda, w której Mercy jak zwykle znajduje się w samym sercu chaosu. W tym samym czasie Adam walczy o odzyskanie partnerki. Niestety musi on stosować się do zasad dyplomacji, które wydają się być najskuteczniejsze w tym przypadku.
W tej części bardzo podobało mi się to, że kojotka nie była jedyną narratorką, ale mieliśmy też okazję poznać wydarzenia z perspektywy Adama oraz Pana Smitha (i tu radzę czytelnikom uważnie śledzić jego zachowanie - nie będziecie zawiedzieni).
Poniżej możecie przeczytać fragmenty powieści, jakie pojawiły się w internecie przed wydaniem Silence Fallen.
Poniżej możecie przeczytać fragmenty powieści, jakie pojawiły się w internecie przed wydaniem Silence Fallen.
FRAGMENTY
I died first so I made the cookies.
They were popular fare so I needed to make a lot. Darryl had gotten me a jumbo-sized antique mixing bowl last Christmas that probably could have held the water supply for an elephant for a day. I don’t know where he found it. If I ever filled it entirely, I’d have to have one of the werewolves move it. It ate the eighteen cups of flour I dumped into it with room for more, all the while piratical howls rose up the stairway from the bowels of the basement.
My smaller mixing bowl, the one that had been perfectly adequate until I married into a werewolf clan, I filled with softened butter, brown sugar and vanilla. As I mixed them together, I decided that it wasn’t that I was a bad pirate, it was that I had miscalculated. By baking sugar-and-chocolate laden food whenever I died first, I’d succeeded in turning myself into a target.
The stove was at temperature, I found all four cookie sheets in the narrow cabinet that they belonged in—a miracle. I wasn’t the only one who got KP duty in the house, but I seemed to be the only one who could put things in the same place (where they belonged) on a regular basis. The baking pans, in particular, got shoved all sorts of odd places. I had once found one of them in the downstairs bathroom. I didn’t ask—but I washed that motherhumper with bleach before I used it to bake on again.
I thought I was good to go when I found the baking pans. But when I opened the cupboard where there should have been ten bags of chocolate chips, there were only six. I searched the kitchen and came up with another one in the top cupboard behind the spaghetti noodles which made seven. Seven bags of chips was leaner than I liked for a double-quadruple batch, but it would do.
What would not do, was no eggs. And there were no eggs.
I scrounged through the fridge for the second time, checking out the back corners and behind the milk where things liked to hide. But even though I’d gotten four dozen eggs two days ago, there was not an egg to be had.
There were perils in living in the de facto clubhouse of a werewolf pack. Thawing roasts in the fridge required the hiding skills of a WWII French Underground spy working as a secretary in NAZI headquarters.
That same egg-and-roast-stealing werewolf pack was currently downstairs enthralled in games of piracy on the high seas of the computer screen. There was irony in how much they loved the pirate computer game—werewolves are too dense to swim. Coyotes, even coyote shifters like me, can swim just fine—except, apparently in an Instant Spoils: The Dread Pirate’s Booty scenario because I’d drowned four times this month.
I hadn’t drowned this time, though. This time, I’d died with my stepdaughter’s knife in my back.
“I’m headed to the Stop and Rob,” I called downstairs. “Does anyone need anything?”
It wasn’t really called that, of course, it had a perfectly normal name that I couldn’t remember. “Stop and Rob” was more of a general term for a 24-hour gas and convenience store, a sobriquet earned in the days when the night shift clerk had been left on his or her own with a till full of thousands of dollars. Technology—cameras, quick-drop safes that didn’t open until daylight, and silent alarms had made working the night shift safer, but they’d always be Stop and Robs to me.
“Ahrrrr,” said my husband Adam’s voice, traveling up the stairs. “Gold and women and grog!” He didn’t play often, but when he did, he played full-throttle and immersed.
“Gold and women and grog!” echoed a chorus of men’s voices.
“Ah, listen to them,” said Mary Jo scornfully. “Give me a man who knows what to do, instead of these scallywags who run at the first sight of a real woman.”
“Ahrrrr,” agreed Auriele while Jesse, my stepdaughter, giggled.
“Swab the decks, ye lubbers, lest you slide in the blood and crack your four-pounders,” I called. “And whate’er ye do, don’t trust Jesse at your back.”
There was a roar of general agreement and Jesse giggled again.
“And Adam,” I said, “you can have gold and you can have grog. You go after another woman and you’ll be pulling back a stub.”
There was a little silence.
“Argh,” said Adam. “I got me a woman. What do I need with more? The women are for my men!”
“Argh!” roared his men. “Bring us gold, grog and women!”
“Men!” said Auriele sweet-voiced. “Bring us a few good men.”
“Stupidheads,” growled Honey. “Die!”
There was a general outcry because, apparently, someone had.
I took Adam’s SUV. I was going to have to figure out what to do for a daily driver. My precious Vanagon Syncro was getting far too many miles put on her and her transmission was rare and more precious than gold on the secondary market. I’d been driving her ever since my poor Rabbit was totaled, and the van was starting to need more and more repairs. I’d looked at an ‘87 Jetta with a blown engine last week. They wanted too much for it, but maybe I’d just have to pony up.
The SUV purred the couple of miles to the convenience store that was ten miles closer to home than any other store that was open at this hour of the night. The clerk was restocking cigarettes and didn’t look up as I passed him.
I picked up two dozen over-priced eggs and an equally overpriced bag of chocolate chips and set them on the counter. The clerk turned away from the cigarettes, looked at me and froze. He swallowed hard and looked away—scanning the barcodes on the eggs with a hand that shook so much that he might save me the effort of cracking the shells myself.
“You must be new?” I suggested, running my ATM card in the reader.
He knew who I was without knowing anything important. I found the limelight disconcerting, but I was slowly getting used to it. My husband was Alpha of the local pack, he’d been a household name in the Tri-Cities since the werewolves first admitted their existence a few years ago. When we’d married, I’d gotten a little of his reflected glory, but after helping to fight a troll on the Cable Bridge a couple of months ago—I was at least as well known as Adam. People reacted differently to the reality of werewolves in the world. Sensible people stayed a certain length back. Others were stupidly friendly or not-so-stupidly afraid. The new guy obviously belonged to the latter group.
“Started last week,” the clerk muttered as he bagged the chocolate chips and eggs as if they might bite him.
“I’m not a werewolf,” I told him. “You don’t have anything to fear from me. And my husband has put a moratorium on killing gas station clerks this week.”
The clerk blinked at me.
“None of the pack will hurt you,” I clarified, reminding myself not to try to be funny around people who were too scared to know I was joking. “If there’s ever any trouble you can call us—” I found the card holder in my purse and gave him one of the pack’s cards, printed on off-white cardstock “—at this number. We’ll take care of it.”
We all carried the cards now that we’d (my fault) taken on the task of policing the supernatural community of the Tri-Cities, protecting the human citizens from things that go bump in the night. We’d also been called in to find lost children, dogs and, once, two calves and their guard llama. Zack had composed a song for that one. I hadn’t even known he could play guitar.
Sometimes the job of protecting the Tri-Cities was more glamorous than others. The livestock call, in addition to being musically commemorated, had actually been something of a PR coup, photos of werewolves herding small lost calves back home had gone viral on Facebook.
The clerk took the card as if it was going to bite him. “Okay,” he lied.
I couldn’t do any better than that, so I left with my cookie making ingredients. I hopped into the SUV and set the bag on the passenger seat as I backed out of the parking space. In retrospect, I wondered if his strong reaction might be due to something that had happened to him—a personal incident. I looked both ways before hopping out onto the road. Maybe I should go talk to him again.
I was still worrying about the clerk when there was a loud noise that robbed my breath. The bag with the eggs in it flew off the seat and hit me with a loud bang and foul smell—and then there was a sharp pain followed by…nothing.
*
I think I woke up several times, for no more than a few minutes that ended abruptly when I moved. I heard people talking, mostly men’s voices, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying.
When I finally opened my eyes, I couldn’t see anything. I might not have been a werewolf, but a shapeshifting coyote could still see okay in very dim light. Either I was blind or wherever I was had no light at all.
My head hurt, my nose hurt, and my right shoulder felt bruised. My mouth was dry and tasted bad, as if I’d gone for a week without brushing my teeth. It felt like I’d just been hit by a troll—though the right shoulder pain was more of a seat belt in a car thing. But I couldn’t remember…even as that thought registered, memories came trickling back.
The run to our local Stop and Rob—the same all-night gas station slash convenience store where I’d first met lone and gay werewolf Warren all those years ago. Warren had worked out rather well for the pack…I gathered my wandering thoughts and herded them down a track that might do some good. The difficulty I had doing that—and the nasty headache—made me think I might have a concussion.
I considered the loud bang and the eggs and realized that it hadn’t been the eggs that had exploded and smelled bad, but the SUV’s air bags. I was a mechanic. I knew what blown air bags smelled like, I don’t know what odd effect of shock made me think it might have been the eggs. The suddenness of the accident had combined the related events of the groceries hitting me and the air bag hitting me into a cause and effect that didn’t exist.
As my thoughts slowly achieved clearness, I realized that the SUV had been struck from the side. Struck at speed to have such a great effect.
I took stock of my situation without moving. My face was sore—a separate and lesser pain than the headache—and diagnosed the situation as with having been hit with an air bag or two that didn’t quite save me from a concussion or its near cousin. The sore right shoulder, was just where the seatbelt would have grabbed me.
Probably all of my pain was from the accident…car wreck, I supposed, because I was pretty sure it hadn’t been an accident. The vehicle that hit me hadn’t had its headlights on—and if it had been a real accident, I’d be in the hospital instead of wherever I was.
My body was convinced it was a room-sized space despite the pitch-darkness. The floor was…odd. Cool—almost cold—and smooth under my cheek. The coolness felt good on my face, but it was robbing my body of warmth. Metal. It didn’t smell familiar—didn’t smell strongly of anything or anybody, as if it had been a long time since it was put to use or it was new.
A door popped open while I was trying to figure out where I was. A light clicked on, making all of my speculations useless because illumination was suddenly effortless. I was in a room that looked like a walk-in freezer—all shiny silver surfaces. I’d jerked when the door opened so it was no good trying to pretend to be unconscious. The next best thing would be to face whoever it was on my own two feet.
I rolled over in preparation for doing that very thing, but before I could do more, I had a sudden and unexpected bout of dry heaves that did my head no good at all. When I lifted my head and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, I noted that there were two men standing in the doorway frowning at me. Neither had made any move to help—or, at least that I noticed, reacted at all.
I dry heaved a couple of extra times to give myself a chance to examine the invaders of my walk-in freezer cell.
The nearest man was tuxedo-model beautiful, with dark curling hair, liquid brown eyes and a thousand-dollar suit that managed to show off the muscles beneath without doing anything so crass as being tight anywhere. There was something predatory in his gaze and he had that spark that made one man more dominant than another without a word being said.
I’d been raised by werewolves, I knew an Alpha personality when I was in its presence.
The other man was at least fifty pounds heavier and three inches taller with a face that belonged to a boxer or a dockworker. His nose had been broken a few times and over his left eye was the sort of scar that you got when someone punched you in the eye and the skin around the socket split.
His eyes were brown, too, but they were ordinary eyes except for the expression in them. Something very cold and hungry looked out at me. He wore worn jeans and a tight-fitting Henley-style shirt.
Visually, I could have been dropped into a scene in some Italian gangster movie. There was no mistaking the Mediterranean origins of either one.
My nose told me the real story. Vampires.
They were popular fare so I needed to make a lot. Darryl had gotten me a jumbo-sized antique mixing bowl last Christmas that probably could have held the water supply for an elephant for a day. I don’t know where he found it. If I ever filled it entirely, I’d have to have one of the werewolves move it. It ate the eighteen cups of flour I dumped into it with room for more, all the while piratical howls rose up the stairway from the bowels of the basement.
My smaller mixing bowl, the one that had been perfectly adequate until I married into a werewolf clan, I filled with softened butter, brown sugar and vanilla. As I mixed them together, I decided that it wasn’t that I was a bad pirate, it was that I had miscalculated. By baking sugar-and-chocolate laden food whenever I died first, I’d succeeded in turning myself into a target.
The stove was at temperature, I found all four cookie sheets in the narrow cabinet that they belonged in—a miracle. I wasn’t the only one who got KP duty in the house, but I seemed to be the only one who could put things in the same place (where they belonged) on a regular basis. The baking pans, in particular, got shoved all sorts of odd places. I had once found one of them in the downstairs bathroom. I didn’t ask—but I washed that motherhumper with bleach before I used it to bake on again.
I thought I was good to go when I found the baking pans. But when I opened the cupboard where there should have been ten bags of chocolate chips, there were only six. I searched the kitchen and came up with another one in the top cupboard behind the spaghetti noodles which made seven. Seven bags of chips was leaner than I liked for a double-quadruple batch, but it would do.
What would not do, was no eggs. And there were no eggs.
I scrounged through the fridge for the second time, checking out the back corners and behind the milk where things liked to hide. But even though I’d gotten four dozen eggs two days ago, there was not an egg to be had.
There were perils in living in the de facto clubhouse of a werewolf pack. Thawing roasts in the fridge required the hiding skills of a WWII French Underground spy working as a secretary in NAZI headquarters.
That same egg-and-roast-stealing werewolf pack was currently downstairs enthralled in games of piracy on the high seas of the computer screen. There was irony in how much they loved the pirate computer game—werewolves are too dense to swim. Coyotes, even coyote shifters like me, can swim just fine—except, apparently in an Instant Spoils: The Dread Pirate’s Booty scenario because I’d drowned four times this month.
I hadn’t drowned this time, though. This time, I’d died with my stepdaughter’s knife in my back.
“I’m headed to the Stop and Rob,” I called downstairs. “Does anyone need anything?”
It wasn’t really called that, of course, it had a perfectly normal name that I couldn’t remember. “Stop and Rob” was more of a general term for a 24-hour gas and convenience store, a sobriquet earned in the days when the night shift clerk had been left on his or her own with a till full of thousands of dollars. Technology—cameras, quick-drop safes that didn’t open until daylight, and silent alarms had made working the night shift safer, but they’d always be Stop and Robs to me.
“Ahrrrr,” said my husband Adam’s voice, traveling up the stairs. “Gold and women and grog!” He didn’t play often, but when he did, he played full-throttle and immersed.
“Gold and women and grog!” echoed a chorus of men’s voices.
“Ah, listen to them,” said Mary Jo scornfully. “Give me a man who knows what to do, instead of these scallywags who run at the first sight of a real woman.”
“Ahrrrr,” agreed Auriele while Jesse, my stepdaughter, giggled.
“Swab the decks, ye lubbers, lest you slide in the blood and crack your four-pounders,” I called. “And whate’er ye do, don’t trust Jesse at your back.”
There was a roar of general agreement and Jesse giggled again.
“And Adam,” I said, “you can have gold and you can have grog. You go after another woman and you’ll be pulling back a stub.”
There was a little silence.
“Argh,” said Adam. “I got me a woman. What do I need with more? The women are for my men!”
“Argh!” roared his men. “Bring us gold, grog and women!”
“Men!” said Auriele sweet-voiced. “Bring us a few good men.”
“Stupidheads,” growled Honey. “Die!”
There was a general outcry because, apparently, someone had.
I took Adam’s SUV. I was going to have to figure out what to do for a daily driver. My precious Vanagon Syncro was getting far too many miles put on her and her transmission was rare and more precious than gold on the secondary market. I’d been driving her ever since my poor Rabbit was totaled, and the van was starting to need more and more repairs. I’d looked at an ‘87 Jetta with a blown engine last week. They wanted too much for it, but maybe I’d just have to pony up.
The SUV purred the couple of miles to the convenience store that was ten miles closer to home than any other store that was open at this hour of the night. The clerk was restocking cigarettes and didn’t look up as I passed him.
I picked up two dozen over-priced eggs and an equally overpriced bag of chocolate chips and set them on the counter. The clerk turned away from the cigarettes, looked at me and froze. He swallowed hard and looked away—scanning the barcodes on the eggs with a hand that shook so much that he might save me the effort of cracking the shells myself.
“You must be new?” I suggested, running my ATM card in the reader.
He knew who I was without knowing anything important. I found the limelight disconcerting, but I was slowly getting used to it. My husband was Alpha of the local pack, he’d been a household name in the Tri-Cities since the werewolves first admitted their existence a few years ago. When we’d married, I’d gotten a little of his reflected glory, but after helping to fight a troll on the Cable Bridge a couple of months ago—I was at least as well known as Adam. People reacted differently to the reality of werewolves in the world. Sensible people stayed a certain length back. Others were stupidly friendly or not-so-stupidly afraid. The new guy obviously belonged to the latter group.
“Started last week,” the clerk muttered as he bagged the chocolate chips and eggs as if they might bite him.
“I’m not a werewolf,” I told him. “You don’t have anything to fear from me. And my husband has put a moratorium on killing gas station clerks this week.”
The clerk blinked at me.
“None of the pack will hurt you,” I clarified, reminding myself not to try to be funny around people who were too scared to know I was joking. “If there’s ever any trouble you can call us—” I found the card holder in my purse and gave him one of the pack’s cards, printed on off-white cardstock “—at this number. We’ll take care of it.”
We all carried the cards now that we’d (my fault) taken on the task of policing the supernatural community of the Tri-Cities, protecting the human citizens from things that go bump in the night. We’d also been called in to find lost children, dogs and, once, two calves and their guard llama. Zack had composed a song for that one. I hadn’t even known he could play guitar.
Sometimes the job of protecting the Tri-Cities was more glamorous than others. The livestock call, in addition to being musically commemorated, had actually been something of a PR coup, photos of werewolves herding small lost calves back home had gone viral on Facebook.
The clerk took the card as if it was going to bite him. “Okay,” he lied.
I couldn’t do any better than that, so I left with my cookie making ingredients. I hopped into the SUV and set the bag on the passenger seat as I backed out of the parking space. In retrospect, I wondered if his strong reaction might be due to something that had happened to him—a personal incident. I looked both ways before hopping out onto the road. Maybe I should go talk to him again.
I was still worrying about the clerk when there was a loud noise that robbed my breath. The bag with the eggs in it flew off the seat and hit me with a loud bang and foul smell—and then there was a sharp pain followed by…nothing.
*
I think I woke up several times, for no more than a few minutes that ended abruptly when I moved. I heard people talking, mostly men’s voices, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying.
When I finally opened my eyes, I couldn’t see anything. I might not have been a werewolf, but a shapeshifting coyote could still see okay in very dim light. Either I was blind or wherever I was had no light at all.
My head hurt, my nose hurt, and my right shoulder felt bruised. My mouth was dry and tasted bad, as if I’d gone for a week without brushing my teeth. It felt like I’d just been hit by a troll—though the right shoulder pain was more of a seat belt in a car thing. But I couldn’t remember…even as that thought registered, memories came trickling back.
The run to our local Stop and Rob—the same all-night gas station slash convenience store where I’d first met lone and gay werewolf Warren all those years ago. Warren had worked out rather well for the pack…I gathered my wandering thoughts and herded them down a track that might do some good. The difficulty I had doing that—and the nasty headache—made me think I might have a concussion.
I considered the loud bang and the eggs and realized that it hadn’t been the eggs that had exploded and smelled bad, but the SUV’s air bags. I was a mechanic. I knew what blown air bags smelled like, I don’t know what odd effect of shock made me think it might have been the eggs. The suddenness of the accident had combined the related events of the groceries hitting me and the air bag hitting me into a cause and effect that didn’t exist.
As my thoughts slowly achieved clearness, I realized that the SUV had been struck from the side. Struck at speed to have such a great effect.
I took stock of my situation without moving. My face was sore—a separate and lesser pain than the headache—and diagnosed the situation as with having been hit with an air bag or two that didn’t quite save me from a concussion or its near cousin. The sore right shoulder, was just where the seatbelt would have grabbed me.
Probably all of my pain was from the accident…car wreck, I supposed, because I was pretty sure it hadn’t been an accident. The vehicle that hit me hadn’t had its headlights on—and if it had been a real accident, I’d be in the hospital instead of wherever I was.
My body was convinced it was a room-sized space despite the pitch-darkness. The floor was…odd. Cool—almost cold—and smooth under my cheek. The coolness felt good on my face, but it was robbing my body of warmth. Metal. It didn’t smell familiar—didn’t smell strongly of anything or anybody, as if it had been a long time since it was put to use or it was new.
A door popped open while I was trying to figure out where I was. A light clicked on, making all of my speculations useless because illumination was suddenly effortless. I was in a room that looked like a walk-in freezer—all shiny silver surfaces. I’d jerked when the door opened so it was no good trying to pretend to be unconscious. The next best thing would be to face whoever it was on my own two feet.
I rolled over in preparation for doing that very thing, but before I could do more, I had a sudden and unexpected bout of dry heaves that did my head no good at all. When I lifted my head and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, I noted that there were two men standing in the doorway frowning at me. Neither had made any move to help—or, at least that I noticed, reacted at all.
I dry heaved a couple of extra times to give myself a chance to examine the invaders of my walk-in freezer cell.
The nearest man was tuxedo-model beautiful, with dark curling hair, liquid brown eyes and a thousand-dollar suit that managed to show off the muscles beneath without doing anything so crass as being tight anywhere. There was something predatory in his gaze and he had that spark that made one man more dominant than another without a word being said.
I’d been raised by werewolves, I knew an Alpha personality when I was in its presence.
The other man was at least fifty pounds heavier and three inches taller with a face that belonged to a boxer or a dockworker. His nose had been broken a few times and over his left eye was the sort of scar that you got when someone punched you in the eye and the skin around the socket split.
His eyes were brown, too, but they were ordinary eyes except for the expression in them. Something very cold and hungry looked out at me. He wore worn jeans and a tight-fitting Henley-style shirt.
Visually, I could have been dropped into a scene in some Italian gangster movie. There was no mistaking the Mediterranean origins of either one.
My nose told me the real story. Vampires.
“You might as well come
out,” I said to Lenka the werewolf. That way I’d know where she was, and I
could head for the garden wall in a direction that gave me a head start. “I
know you’re there.”
She’d meant for me to scent her. She wanted
me afraid. A low growl filled the air‐ soft
enough not to be heard in the house. I think it was supposed to be scary,
too—which it was, but not because I was afraid of the sound of her voice.
I remembered her crazy eyes and was scared.
Fear was good. Fear would make my feet faster.
“I live with werewolves,” I reminded her.
“Hiding doesn’t make you more frightening.”
The wolf who rounded the corner of the walled
side of the roofed area was too thin, and her fur coat was patchy. But her
movement was easy, and the fangs she showed me as she snarled were plenty long.
I’d grown up hearing the old wolves talk
about how much more satisfying it was to eat something while its heart pumped
frantically from terror. Some of the old wolves who came to live out their last
years in the Marrok’s pack were not kind.
“Hi, there,” I told her casually—and then I
bolted for the wall surrounding the yard.
I smell mostly human to a werewolf’s nose,
especially if I haven’t recently been running around on coyote feet. Human is a
smell with enough variability that unless they know what I am, werewolves
mostly chalk up the bit of odd in my smell to that. Vampires, I don’t know as
well.
I was betting that the vampires here didn’t
know what I was. That they thought I was human. I’d very carefully left it out
of the mini biography I’d given Bonarata, and it wasn’t widely known. My
best-case scenario was that she would think I was a human woman trying to run
for her life, penned inside the yard because, outside of a few martial artists
and acrobats, the walls were enough to keep most people in.
I don’t get super strength or scary points.
But speed is my friend, and I caught her flat-footed because she thought one
thing was happening when it was really something else. She thought I was
running from her—and I was just trying to get up some speed.
I ran for the wall. I don’t know what she
thought I was doing, but she chased me hard for most of the distance. But as I
approached the giant stone wall that surrounded the grounds, she slowed,
anticipating that I would be stopped by it.
A few months ago, a bunch of the pack had
been at Warren’s house watching a Jackie Chan movie, I don’t remember which one
because we were having a marathon, and Jackie just ran up a wall like magic.
Warren had a wall around his backyard. Someone stopped the movie, and we’d all
gone out and tried it. A lot.
The werewolves had gotten moderately
proficient, but my light weight and speed had made me the grand champion. The
trick is to find a corner and have enough speed to make it to the top.
Instead of stopping at the wall, I
Jackie-Channed it up the stone surfaces and leaped over. I caught the werewolf
totally by surprise.
I don’t expect Bonarata and she watched old
martial arts movies together. It didn’t seem like that kind of relationship.
Her pause meant that the wolf, who could have
caught me because as agile as I’d learned to be imitating Jackie Chan, going up
was still slower than going forward, had missed her chance. I didn’t intend to
give her another.
I changed to coyote as I came off the top of
the wall. I’m not a were-anything. It takes them time to change from human to
wolf. I could do it—well, in this case I could do it in the time it took me to
drop off the wall.
I landed on four feet, running as fast as I
could down a narrow road that was walled on both sides. I had no idea where I
was, but out was a good direction, and I didn’t hesitate as I headed one way.
Nor did I slow or look behind me.
I didn’t need to. My ears told me when she
landed on the outside of the wall. I could hear her running behind me, her
claws giving her better purchase on the ground than mine did. Werewolves had
huge freaking claws, and she was using them to give herself traction like the
big cats do.
Experience had taught me that I was faster
than most were- wolves. Most, but not all. It was my bad luck that she wasn’t
one of the slower ones. She was closing in on me by inches.
I watched for a cross street, a change of
some sort that would allow me to use my small size to my advantage, but there
were only stone walls and stucco walls and cement walls and tall, solid gates.
So I ran as fast as I could and hoped that I had more endurance, that her
sprint would slow faster than mine.
I don’t know how long we ran through the
night streets. On a moon hunt, the pack would run for four or five hours at a
time, for the sheer joy of it—so, outside of a few lingering aches from the
wreck, I was in good shape. Better than she was, half-starved as she appeared.
Certainly in better shape than I would have
been after being Bonarata’s guest for weeks. I’d have to thank Charles if I
made it out of this alive.
Eventually, condition counted. I started to
pull away from her, very, very slowly. About that time, the walls on either
side of the road fell away, and I found myself running along a country lane
with vineyards rising on gentle hills on both sides. There were still fences,
but that was okay, I could deal with fences—vineyards were a godsend. There are
vineyards all over the Tri-Cities. I know about vineyards and werewolves and
coyotes.
I slipped through the bars of the ornate
steel gate and ran along the length of the first row of grapes. I think she
knew what I was planning—maybe she’d hunted smaller prey in this very vineyard
before—because she sped up and closed the distance I’d opened between us. But,
once again, she was too late.
I would have hated to face her if she’d been
in top condition, if she hadn’t been half-crazy. But if she hadn’t been
Bonarata’s pet . . . mistress . . . something, she wouldn’t be trying to kill
me. Grapes are grown in rows. The path between rows is kept clear, and it is
easy to run through the vineyard from that direction. But the grapevines are
trained to spread tidily on a wire or rope fence, so running through the vines
themselves is difficult—unless you are a coyote. The fence the vines are grown
along leaves plenty of space for a coyote to slip through between strands. I
turned into the vineyard.
After the second row, I got a feeling for the
spacing and didn’t have to slow or shorten my stride as I ran through the
gracefully draped vines.
The werewolf was a lot bigger than I was. She
had to jump every row. It wasn’t the additional effort that won the race for me—it
was just that every time she jumped was that much time she wasn’t propelling
herself forward. It slowed her down, and it required more energy.
She was moving roughly ten times as much mass
as I was, which hopefully would tire her out faster though that didn’t seem to
be happening with any appreciable speed, even given her poor condition. I kept
waiting for her to break down the row and run on the road beside the vineyard
instead, where her speed would be less hampered than mine was. But she just
kept following me as if she was incapable of more tactical thinking.
By the time I reached a road again, ducking
beneath the tall hedge-and-fence that the werewolf would have to vault over,
I’d gained nearly forty yards. This road traveled straight uphill for about a
half mile, then, from the sign beside the road, intersected with another road.
The last steep bit I managed by ignoring my
tiredness and occupying myself with the very important decision of whether to
continue straight or turn left or right. My life hung in the balance, but I had
nothing to draw upon to make the decision an informed one. The high hedge lined
both sides of the road I was traveling on, and I could not even see the new
road.
I hesitated a moment . . . one second and
two, right at the intersection. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the
satisfaction in her eyes. My indecision had given her the hunt. She was still
stronger than I was, and the long uphill stretch had eaten most of the lead
that the vineyard had given me.
She was so busy seeing me as her prize, she
didn’t pay attention to anything else. So when I bolted across the
intersection, she did, too—and the bus that I’d waited for hit her and rolled
over the top of her with both sets of wheels.
Mercy has escaped her captors, and is doing
her best to flee. She knows very little about her enemies, and has stolen a few
clothes and an e-reader with internet connectivity. Her panicked flight has
brought her to Prague. With some trepidation she enters a small internet cafe .
. .
In Prague, apparently, they do not use euros.
They use something called koruna. Also in Prague—or at least in the little
wifi restaurant in Prague—people are kind.
There were ten people in the restaurant,
including the staff: five Czech women, three Czech men, and two Russian
tourists, both women. We spoke roughly a dozen languages between us, though I
might have missed one or two, but no one spoke English.
One of the Russians spoke a little German.
She didn’t have quite as much as I did, though to be fair, my German tends to
be Zee German—what is not centered around cars and things mechanical is closer
to the language spoken in Iceland (which hasn’t changed in the last thousand
years) than anything spoken in modern Berlin. So maybe her German was fine, and
mine was the problem.
I think she understood that I had gotten
separated from my tour—which is the story I made up on the spot. My bus, I
explained, had gone on to Milan with my luggage and things. I was going to use
my e‑reader to get on the Internet and call home. Home would then relay
information for me.
It was actually useful that none of them
could speak to me because it reduced the lies I had to tell them. And also made
it harder for them to offer me a place to stay—which is what I think one of the
Czech men was offering. No one appeared worried, so I don’t think he was
offering me what it looked like he was trying to.
They (collectively, it felt like) took my
twenty-euro note and, after consulting a cell phone for the current exchange
rate, carefully counted out 550 koruna in various bills and coins. The waitress
brought me out a soft drink and a thick sandwich, waving away my attempts to
pay her.
I pulled out my e‑reader (stolen) and turned
it on. There had been no charging cable, or I’d have taken it, and the power
bar on the screen told me I’d have to be fast—which was interesting with an e‑reader
that probably had less than half the computing power of Adam’s watch. Setting
up a generic e‑mail account at one of the big anonymous servers—CoyoteGirl was
taken as were several variants—took up too much time. I needed something that
would cue the pack without attracting attention. I didn’t have to just worry
about the vampire, I was pretty sure that various government agencies were
doing their best to keep track of our correspondences.
1COYOTELOST worked.
1COYOTELOST worked.
I wrote a short e‑mail that said:
Dear People,
Prague is lovely this time of year. You
should visit.
M
I sent it to everyone in the pack (and a few out of it, like Zee’s son Tad and Tony) whose e‑mail addresses I remembered. Then I turned the e‑reader off to conserve its battery. I ate the sandwich and drank the soda.
Just before I turned it off, the e‑reader had
told me it had 20 percent power and I should plug it in or it might shut itself
off. I knew I should leave the café, wait a few hours, and come back. That’s
what I’d planned to do.
But the lure of contacting home was too
strong.
I told myself I needed to know about the
Prague werewolves. If I could round up some support from them, it could be
useful. If not, then I could hop a bus for somewhere else and try again.
Waiting until later might not be practical, I reasoned. I’d run across the
scent of three different werewolves on the way here. In a city the size of
Prague, with only one pack, that either meant that the pack was centered in Old
Town or that they were hunting me.
Even if they didn’t know about me, the
kidnapped by the Lord of Night but subsequently escaped mate of the Columbia
Basin Pack Alpha, coyotes don’t smell like dogs—not quite. Eventually, if I
kept running around on four feet, they’d get interested and track me down. I
had gotten lucky last night, and I didn’t like to rely on luck. I needed to
know if the Prague werewolves were tied to the Lord of Night right this minute.
Really.
I turned on the e‑reader and checked my e‑mail.
I had one response from
Benjamin.Shaw@IT.PNNL.gov, it said:
OMF**KING G*D*MN Flyingf**kingMonkeys. WHERE?
Are you safe? How did you get away? DID you get a f**king way?
The asterisks were his, apparently his work
had had a discussion about swear words in professional e‑mails with him. Being
Ben, he’d actually increased the swearwords, but added asterisks. It made me
laugh even as my eyes watered with relief. Of course Ben would be checking his
e‑mail—computers were his job.
Prague. As ever. As usual. Yes. What can you
tell me about our coworkers in Prague? Considering dropping in for consult.
Ben was from Great Britain originally, so he
might actually have more insight into the werewolves here than I did.
Hairyb*ttbunnies, girl. Good for you. Prague
boss is dangerous bast*rd. Has a real h**don for the boss at your first job. No
one but the two of them knows why that I ever heard—and there has been a lot of
discussion about it. So someone is suppressing information. It wasn’t helped
when we came out of the closet— something our colleague in Prague was
very unhappy about. Can you avoid?
Okay, so there was bad blood between the
Alpha here and . . . the boss at my first job. If I called the werewolves
coworkers, then my first job would be the werewolf pack I grew up in. So Bran.
Well, that could explain why I thought there was an issue with the Alpha here.
I might have overheard a conversation sometime. It wouldn’t have been important
to me at the time, but I’d filed some alert concerning the Prague Alpha.
Is he working with the Italians?
E‑mailing back and forth wasn’t as good as
texting. The anonymous e‑mail server took its own sweet time downloading.
No. But the next closest company, in Brno,
is. They were a part of Gévaudan and are now running scared of Prague. Am on
phone with Sam’s brother right now. Sam’s brother says that Prague CEO, Libor,
might get a kick out of helping you as a One‑Up‑Manship move on Sam’s
father—and because he hates Italians more than anyone. He owns bakery in Old
Town. Don’t know address. My boss is headed to Italy. Does he know you are
visiting Prague?
Ben was on the phone to Charles, the Marrok’s
son who was, among a lot of other things, an information guru. If he said Libor
was a good bet, I’d take it.
He knows I’m on my own, and he can find me
via GPS if he needs to find me.
He’d know that GPS was our mate bond because
that was one thing it was pretty consistently good at. The e‑reader gave me
another warning.
Out of battery on borrowed e‑reader, sorry.
I sent the e‑mail, then the e‑reader died. I
wasn’t sure if it had had time to upload my last message or not. I turned the
device off and slipped it back into my backpack. As I got ready to go, one of
the men—I think he was the restaurant manager—brought a bag of food to the
table and gave it to me.
He was an older man with kind eyes, a rumbly
voice, and he smelled of cigars and coffee. He said something solemnly as if he
were making a vow, reaching out and gently brushing my bruised cheek. Behind
him, the older woman who had brought out my free lunch wiped away a tear.
I had no idea what he said, but my nose could
smell the memory of his sorrow and his sincerity now. I felt like a fraud for a
moment, deluding these people into believing I needed help. And then I
remembered that I’d been violently kidnapped, hauled to Italy and was now
wandering Prague with one stolen set of clothes, 550 koruna, which translated
to a little more than twenty dollars, and a defunct e‑reader. Maybe I did need
their help.
I stood on my tiptoes and kissed his cheek.
The whole place burst into applause.
People are pretty cool.
