Silence Fallen (Mercy Thompson, #10)

by Patricia Briggs

“If they weren’t living like rich people,” said Jitka in satisfied tones, “then we would have had to give up. This is what living too well does. It makes you weak.”

Martin’s jaw dropped open. “What are you?” Jitka asked. “Some sort of dog?” I flattened my ears at her and gave an impatient yip. “You aren’t a wolf,” said Martin. “Something native to the US?” “Coyote?” Jitka said. “Like in the cartoons with the Road Runner.” I let my ears pop back up and smiled at them both.

I seemed to be spending a lot of time wandering the streets of Prague at night. Not the best way to see Prague, but at least we weren’t running into very many tourists.

I stopped, standing on the tidy side of the demarcation line. I’d spent the better part of the hour with the coyote in charge of the human because the trail had not been an easy one. I was puzzled by the situation with the grass and a little uneasy, and that started to bring my human side out. I didn’t think that I was as dual-natured as the werewolves, but when I operated on instinct for a while—it sometimes took me a moment to think like a person again.

“He said you were ugly and fat. He said he prefers me.” Yippee. She was welcome to him. Even if I wasn’t married, I don’t date the dead.

“He told me he thought about taking her, too, since I worked out so well for him. But she was old—and while vampires don’t age, they don’t get younger-looking, either.” She leaned close to the cage and murmured sweetly, “And it looked as though she had her claws into your mate anyway. They are sleeping together.” My mate. Adam

Mary made a disappointed sound. I guess I was supposed to be jealous over the comment about Elizaveta and Adam sleeping together. If there was one constant in my life, it was my mate. Pyramids would roll down the desert before Adam would break his word or betray anyone, let alone me.

He spoke to me very quickly in a low tone. “She has been using witchcraft to try to make humans into vampires more quickly. Recently, she has been successful. That one took her two weeks to make, and he functioned for three months. But they devolve with suddenness and without warning.” He paused. “If you escaped the Master of Milan, then perhaps you will survive this. Someone should know what she has done, so that they are prepared for the problems this will cause. They should destroy any vampire who belonged to her, so that news of this does not get out.”

“Why are you whispering to her, Kocourek?” she asked, and he translated her words for me. Kocourek. Kocourek was the Master of the primary seethe of Prague. So what was he doing on his knees in front of Mary? I wondered how long he’d been under her thumb.

. I’d felt something touch my bond with Adam and slide away, unable to penetrate, to get inside of me or my bond. Instead, whoever it was used our bond to slide through the witch’s spells and into the basement where I was held.

We are like, the golem said. We guard against evil. You found what magic has hidden from me, a canker, a cancer, a rot at the heart of my territory and lit me the path here also. Can you destroy these demons?

Whatever it was now, based on the feel of the magic that surrounded him, I was pretty sure that the golem had started out as a manitou. Manitou, according to Coyote (yes, that Coyote), are the bits of the spirit of the earth. The whole earth has an enormous manitou, it can stir as one spirit, but it is too large to be concerned with minor things. Mostly the earth’s manitou sleeps, and all of us should thank our lucky stars that is true. Each dandelion or pebble has a bit of that manitou, a bit that is fully independent of the whole. But the manitou of a dandelion is very small and does not have much power to affect things around it. The mountains and lakes also have manitou; theirs are powerful and tend, like Mother Earth’s greater manitou, to be dangerous when roused. Mostly, that doesn’t happen a lot. As he explained it, Coyote and his fellow avatars are very closely related to manitou—like a horse and a jackass. He’d flashed me a wicked grin as I lay in a hospital bed—put there by Guayota, who was, again according to Coyote, the manitou of a great volcano. I might not be an expert on kabbalistic magic, but I was pretty sure that Rabbi Loew, who had created the golem, had found a manitou from something in between a mountain and a pebble. It had been strong enough to become the golem but small enough to be controlled by a man who worked kabbalistic magic. It had probably not been the manitou of the Vltava, which would be huge and powerful. Maybe it was from some long-buri...

When the rabbi had, to go with the robot analogy, turned the golem off, he’d locked the manitou in an artificial and uncomfortable existence. Dead but not dead. Partially, I thought, by the way the off switch had worked.

Neither spirit nor golem nor ghost, he told me, but at the same time all of them together, I kept watch over the streets of Prague. I was helpless to do anything against human evil or things like the vampires, those who could neither see nor sense me. But I was driven to do this thing that I could not. Rabbi Loew gave me the task of keeping Josefov safe. So I drifted through the night streets of Prague, able neither to forsake my task nor accomplish it. And then I encountered you. Afterward, I frightened a thief away—I, who no one could perceive before. You did something to me, made me more real, real enough to rip a door off its hinges. His interaction with me had lit up my magic until I’d been swamped (almost literally) by ghosts anywhere near me. That was another reason I thought the golem had been created from a manitou. If we weren’t as closely related as “a horse and a jackass,” then he probably wouldn’t have affected me that way. I hadn’t considered what it had done to him.

You are one who walks the path of the dead, he told me. The dead must hear you and obey. These demons, these vampires, have swallowed death to stay on this earth. They are not exempt from your power.

I know what you are, the golem said. Mercy. Again it wasn’t my name; it was bigger than that. It fit better. To him I said carefully, “My experience is that I might be able to make one vampire obey me, and only for a very short time. But there are a lot of vampires in this place.” I could feel the weight of them.

“Quit looking at me,” I whispered, pushed by the golem’s wishes rather than my own, and the vampire turned his head away. I clamped my mouth shut. It was wrong to do that, to have that kind of power over someone, even a vampire, and to use it as if they weren’t a thinking being. To give them no choice but to listen to me.

A cold hand stroked my shoulder. One of the ghosts had crawled in beside me and touched me. I shivered, but I didn’t give it any orders. Cooperation is one thing; enslavement is another. I knew better than Rabbi Loew, so there was no excuse for me when I did it.

Adam’s story continues, at daybreak of the first morning he spent in Milan. At about this time, I got to my feet, put on my clothes, and went out to find the café that had free Wi-Fi so I could try to contact someone. Adam and his people have retreated to their assigned rooms.

“I’m not sure anyone but a love-struck fool, which Bonarata isn’t quite, would think there was anything between you and Marsilia. But the Lord of Night was plenty jealous anyway, for what it’s worth. I heard you open Bonarata’s eyes about the relationship between the Marrok and your wife. Is it true? Would the Marrok still go to war for her?”

“Bran was Grendel?” He thought about Larry the goblin king and how everyone underestimated goblins. He decided it would be a good thing if the goblin king knew something of what the Marrok was. “Not quite,” Adam said. “As I understand it, Beowulf was written down a long time after the events it purports to tell. The purpose of the story as it was recorded was to recite the final deeds of Beowulf, a great hero. Somewhere along the way, someone put him up against the scariest monsters they’d ever heard of instead of the terrible monsters who did kill him. That tale then blended back to the original.”

Bran’s story is that a long time ago, he was broken. It had something to do with protecting his son. For a very long time afterward—decades and maybe longer—Bran was a mindless monster who killed every living thing in his territory.”

Samuel had told him that Bran’s mother was a witch, and Adam figured that, being Bran’s son, Samuel had been in a position to know. But he didn’t have to tell Elizaveta who his source was. If Bran had wanted it to be known that he was witchborn, he’d have told everyone himself. Since he hadn’t, Adam wasn’t going to do it for him. But everyone had heard the rumors, and those Bran encouraged. Adam just didn’t need to confirm them.

“Your mate is good at finding friends wherever she goes,” Elizaveta said with a little acid. Elizaveta was not herself a friend of his mate.

So he could breathe, but worry still hung on. A host of possibly urgent things popped into his mind. Maybe something had happened to the children. And when had Aiden become one of his children? Aiden, who was older than . . . well, probably older than Bran for all that he looked like he belonged in elementary school.

As the other wolf got back to matters at hand, Adam filtered out the expletives that were Ben’s attempt to shrug off an upper-crust but hellish upbringing—Adam was able to assume from Ben’s casual attitude that various people weren’t really pedophiles nor did they do interesting and unlikely things with animals and/or machinery.

“Libor has a legendary grudge against Bran,” Adam said slowly. “Charles doesn’t know what it was about. Did you try Samuel?” Surely one of the two would have the story. “Sorry,” Ben said regretfully. “I did try. Since it was I sending Mercy into the mouth of the monster, I decided I was on the need-to-know list. Took an act of God to get in touch. Samuel doesn’t know. Charles says he doesn’t know what it was. All he has is a couple of comments Bran made once upon a time—and Bran won’t say anything more. Apparently there was an oath involved, and you know how Bran is about that.”

Adam cursed under his breath. “How many years in the army, and that’s all you’ve got?” Ben said. “I thought the army guys really know how to swear.” Despite everything, Adam grinned at the phone. “We didn’t swear in my day,” ...

It took a while to negotiate a language to speak in. Libor pretended not to speak English because English was Adam’s native tongue. They both spoke Russian, but Libor still held a grudge against the Russians. German was out of the question for the same reason—for which Adam was grateful because his German wasn’t good enough for delicate negotiations.

“My mate hit Bonarata’s pet werewolf with a bus. I wonder what she’ll do to your territory on her own?”

David Christiansen, the werewolf on the other side of the conversation, was a mercenary with contacts all over the world. He was also one of Adam’s oldest friends.

Harris gave his copilot a sharp look. Adam smiled at the goblin’s surprise. “Remember that werewolves can live a long time, and just because one is submissive doesn’t make them stupid. My experience has suggested the opposite. We have a saying, ‘Listen when the soft ones speak.’”

“Mercy can take care of herself,” Adam growled, because it was his privilege to take care of her anyway.

“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.”

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.

Honey came out, her short hair a little damp and her face freshly made up. She smelled, just a little, of rose petals. A human might not catch it, but the vampires would. She wore a rose-colored tank top without a bra and jeans that looked as though she wouldn’t be able to draw a deep breath. Around her neck was a gold chain with a small wolf charm. He knew that Peter, her dead mate, had gotten her the necklace, because Adam had gone with him to pick it out for her birthday.

She looked like bait.

He told them about Mercy. Told them that Guccio had been walking around the villa with a spell bag that allowed him to roam during the day. And he told them that he’d been marked so that all the vampires would think that he was Guccio’s food. Honey stepped closer and sniffed him. “I don’t smell anything?” She gave the vampires a suspicious look. “I don’t, either,” said Larry. “But I know that vampires have a way of marking their prey. It’s seen as crude, because usually, unless it’s a Master Vampire, it’s an accident. Proof that a vampire lost control when he”—he glanced at Marsilia and said—“or she found some food that appealed to her. Sort of like spitting into a drink that isn’t yours.” Adam smiled grimly at the goblin. “Thank you. I’ll store that image.”

“It would really suck eggs if Bonarata has access to something that allows him to run around in the sunlight.” He’d gotten that “suck eggs” expression from Mercy.

“A gris-gris such as the one he carried can affect people adversely,” Elizaveta observed. “That is true black magic, and it tends to stain the user as well as the one who casts it.” She glanced at her watch. “If we are to meet with Bonarata at the time specified, we should leave.”

I could wish that Adam were more concerned with his own life than with saving everyone else’s. Since it is a wish Adam has expressed (often) about me, I suppose I have no grounds to complain. I do anyway, of course.

Bonarata smiled. “It is of no matter. You were accommodating our guest.” And then Bonarata made a mistake. He turned to say something to Honey. Distracted by Marsilia, Bonarata had not paid much attention to Honey the day before, and he hadn’t paid any attention at all to her while indulging himself trying to get one up on Adam. Honey was worth looking at normally—dressed as she was to attract attention, she could stop traffic. “You—” said Bonarata, and that’s as far as he got, because as well as traffic, she apparently was pretty good at stopping speech. But mostly because Bonarata was an addict—and Honey fit his craving like a bespoke suit.

Kill that one, said Adam’s wolf as clearly as he’d ever heard anything. He’d heard other werewolves say that sometimes their wolf spoke to them—and a couple of those he respected too much to discount their word. But in the nearly five decades he’d been a werewolf, he’d never had it happen to him. She is broken. Kill her.

“She is beautiful,” Bonarata said, mesmerized, his desire scenting the room. “Like a tigress. All muscle and speed.” Lust had changed his eyes, and not even the most mundane human would have looked into that feral face and thought anything but vampire. Even though vampires didn’t need to breathe, he was sucking in great gulps of air, air now scented with blood and sweat and need. His need. Across the room, Marsilia was watching Bonarata with sad eyes. Not hurt or brokenhearted or anything like that, just sad. The way someone would look at a fallen Ajax or Hercules. She was wrong. Bonarata wasn’t even down yet, let alone out. But there was no question that his hunger for Honey—for any female werewolf’s blood—was driving him now.

As it turned out, Bonarata had had other things to occupy himself with. The Lord of Night was staring at Lenka’s body with an expression Adam had seen on junkies looking at a dime bag, a deep need that overwhelmed any other thought or emotion. But the expression faded as Lenka’s blood died with her. Leaving Bonarata with an expression that looked very much like regret and relief on his face.

“Lenka was a wolf I’d have hunted the moon with. Not a friend. But she was smart and tough. Peter had stories . . .” Her voice trailed off.

Adam didn’t think that Bonarata would have been so sanguine if he’d been looking at Smith at that moment. But maybe he was wrong. People discount submissive wolves.

Bonarata dragged his eyes from Marsilia, and the look he gave Adam was almost grateful. It was a guy thing. He, too, knew whatever he had been about to say to Marsilia wouldn’t have been useful. It had just been beyond his power to not say it. Adam was happy to help.

He knew what he was looking at. This child was the single reason Bonarata’s machinations hadn’t killed Mercy. She blushed and clasped her hands together, pressed close to her stomach. But the smile she gave Adam was pure delight. “She says that you belong to the pretty lady she healed,” Bonarata said. “She thinks that you should go find her and give her a hug.”

“You were bitten,” he said. “Without the pack here to anchor you, a powerful enough vampire can make you remember whatever he wants you to remember. You have to fight it, Adam. Listen to your wolf and fight it.” Adam held his gaze and broke out in a sweat as the brown lightened to gold. The wolf inside Adam, in another place and time, might have objected to another wolf holding his eyes. But this was not a dominance fight. Matt’s status, instead of making this a fight, made it an offer of help acceptable to Adam’s wolf.