Silence Fallen

  “So what do you think, Martin?” she asked. “Are the two seethes working together?”

  “Excuse me,” I said. “You think that the vampires who attacked the bakery and the ones who attacked us here are two different groups of vampires?”

  “Yes,” said Jitka.

  “We know they are,” said Martin. “The thing is, having them fighting on the same team is like . . .”

  “Bosnians and Serbs,” suggested Jitka helpfully. “Russians and Germans—or cowboys and Indians.”

  “I get it,” I said. “Would they both follow orders from Bonarata? Cooperate by mistake because they are doing what Bonarata tells them to do?”

  Both shook their heads, and Martin added, “No.”

  “Kocourek is the Master of Praha,” said Martin.

  “Prague,” said Jitka. “Americans call her Prague.”

  “Prague,” agreed Martin. “Yes. He is the Master of Prague, and like all the Master Vampires in Europe, he obeys Bonarata. Otherwise, he is destroyed.”

  “Not like the Marrok,” Jitka said disapprovingly. “Bonarata protects no one. He just dictates, and they do or they die. Kocourek has been Master here for longer than I have been alive. Only Libor is older than Kocourek. Kocourek would not dream of disobeying Bonarata. Kocourek is a survivor. Vampires who defy Bonarata die.”

  “Ivan belongs to the other seethe in Prague,” Martin said. “The woman who rules it calls herself Mary.” He said the name with a decided English twist. “She’s been gathering the scum of the vampires to her for the last four or five decades. As best we can figure it, she must have come in at the close of World War II. But we only noticed her in the middle of the fifties, when Kocourek blew up an old factory trying to find her and kill her and her people. He’s been trying to run her down ever since.”

  “Someone is helping her,” said Jitka.

  “Yes, I know,” Martin returned in an exasperated tone. This, it seemed, was an old argument. “But we have no clue as to who it is, right?”

  “So what do we do now?” I asked. “I could go find a hotel—a hostel, something. I honestly didn’t expect to run into trouble here. Prague is a long way from Milan. I figured that I could hit up Libor—your pack—for room and board for a couple of nights. I didn’t intend to get anyone killed.”

  “No one’s been killed,” said Jitka.

  “Four vampires here,” I retorted, “who would have been running around free and clear if I hadn’t come to Prague.”

  “Didn’t sound like you had much choice,” said Martin.

  “That lot isn’t worth anyone’s time mourning,” said Jitka at the same time. “Mary’s vampires go out and harvest food wherever. They take more than they need because they have to replenish the vampires Kocourek’s people have destroyed. They are somehow tied up with the drug trade here, too. Most of their vampires are young, see. They haven’t accumulated wealth, and so they are going in some nasty directions to get it.” She looked at Martin.

  He sighed and shrugged. “I’ve told you before—Libor is letting the vampires feed on each other. Eventually, either Kocourek will find them all and eradicate them, or they’ll weaken his seethe, and Libor will finish them both off.”

  “Lots of folk dying and hurting in the meantime,” Jitka said.

  Martin nodded. “But Libor is old and slow to act when it is something outside of pack that is wrong. He doesn’t view humans as people, much. Like as not he’s right to sit this out. If Kocourek can’t find Mary’s people, there’s nothing saying we could, either. Let Kocourek do the work.”

  “He cared about people during the war,” she said. “During World War II.”

  “No,” Martin disagreed, his voice soft. “He just hated the Germans. Hated to see Prague under German control. It was when his wife died and Radim, his son, left.”

  Radim, I thought. Zack’s real name is Radim.

  “Look,” I said. “All this is well and good. But it appears that at least two groups of vampires are after me, here, in Prague. They are attacking your pack. I need to leave before someone else gets killed.”

  They both looked at me as though I was being ridiculous.

  Martin said, “Kocourek attacked the pack stronghold, Mercy. Whether you are here or in Germany, there will be more blood spilled between Kocourek and our pack. As for Mary’s seethe . . .” He shrugged. “They have been launching offensives at us ever since one of them seduced Pavel and tried to turn him into her servant. We think that somebody decided that the reason Bonarata was so scary was because he drinks werewolf blood.”

  Jitka shivered. “Bonarata is scary because he is scary. The werewolf thing . . . that he could do that to an Alpha and his mate is scary. But—” She looked at Martin.

  “It is also a weakness,” he said in a low voice. “I remember when no one thought he had any weaknesses. When the Lord of Night had his Blade and the Soldier and the Wizard . . . it was like the Avengers—except they were bad.”

  Vampires did the one-name thing before Madonna and Prince. The Soldier, I knew, was Stefan. The Wizard was Wulfe. The Blade had to be Marsilia.

  “I’m not that old,” said Jitka. “They left a hundred years before I was born. But I know that anyone who has an addiction as strong as Bonarata’s must have more weaknesses.”

  “At any rate,” Martin said briskly, “an idiot is born every minute, and someone in Mary’s seethe—possibly Mary herself—decided that werewolf blood would make vampires stronger. So they got a pretty little thing to seduce Pavel.”

  “Not difficult,” said Jitka. “He’s a good man, but”—she smiled wryly—“he has a weakness for women.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Libor happened,” said Jitka at the same time as Martin said, “Libor killed her and forbade sexual congress with vampires.” They spoke over the top of each other without really noticing it, so it must have been habitual.

  “And how does he enforce that?” I asked.

  They both looked at me incredulously. “He can tell through the pack bonds.”

  I blinked. “Libor knows if his wolves have sex with a vampire through the pack bonds?”

  Martin nodded. “It’s part of being the Alpha. And it’s not just sex—it’s anything very intense. Grief, joy, horror—he gets it.”

  I was pretty sure that Adam wasn’t that connected with his pack. Almost sure. Because . . . ick. Invasion of privacy didn’t even begin to cover it. Maybe he just hadn’t told me because he knew how I’d react.

  I was tired, and they must have been, too, because we kept wandering away from the point.

  “What do I do to keep your pack as safe as I can?” I asked.

  Jitka snorted. “Not your job, by my reckoning. Libor gave you three days of pack protection. Your job is to let us keep you safe.”

  Martin grinned at me. “But if you want to behead a few vampires with a scythe, that’s okay, too.”

  “It was only the one,” I said.

  But he was looking at Jitka. “She got one and a half. I got two halves, and you got one and a half.”

  Jitka shook her head. “No. I got one—I just finished off the one you’d already done.”

  “So one and a half vampires for the poor weakling who matched or beat the scorecard for the werewolves.” Martin gave me a look. “All luck, was it? Luck didn’t kill those vampires, did it?”

  “Martin,” Jitka said mildly. “We need to find all of us someplace safe to rest.” To me she said, “We didn’t think any of the vampires knew about this place. I only just moved out here, and Dobrichovice is pretty far out of their usual haunting ground.”

  “We need to find a safe place for Mercy to sleep the rest of the night,” Martin said.

  I don’t know why it bothered me so much. I mean, that’s what I’d been doing since I got to Prague, right? Finding a safe
place to wait for Adam.

  But we’d just killed four vampires. I wasn’t helpless. Helpless people get hurt.

  And just for a moment, I flashed back to the time when I had been rendered helpless by a fae artifact and a creep named Tim . . .

  “Mercy?” Jitka asked.

  I realized I was sitting on the floor in the corner of her room. Martin was as far from me as he could get, watching me with a concerned look. Jitka was crouching about three feet from me, careful to give me space.

  I met her eyes and said, “I hate PTSD, you know?” I remembered I was talking to a werewolf and turned my gaze to the floor. It was less humiliating talking to the floor, anyway. “It’s been years—and I killed that bastard. And it’s not like I was really hurt, right? I’ve been sent to the hospital by a volcano god, and that didn’t do anything but give my husband nightmares.”

  Jitka nodded like all this was making sense. “Hurt comes in all forms. I wake up at least once a year to a memory that makes me shake for hours—something that happened 122 years ago. I have seen and done so much worse since that thing, and it wasn’t even something that happened to me. And still.”

  She didn’t say what it was she dreamed of, and I didn’t ask. The whole room smelled like fear. My fear.

  I didn’t do this hardly at all anymore. Maybe once or twice a month as opposed to the three or four times a day it used to be. Most of the panic attacks weren’t this bad. I hadn’t had a real episode for a couple of months.

  And it had turned the respect in Martin’s face into compassion, into worry, into pity.

  I stood up. Went into the little bathroom and closed the door behind me. I washed my face and looked at myself in Jitka’s mirror. The big bruise on my left cheek had spread since I looked at it this morning. There were dark circles under my eyes from lack of sleep.

  I looked like a victim.

  I was done, really done, with being a victim.

  I opened the bathroom door and sat down where I’d started. “We cannot stay here because the vampires know where we are, right?” I knew, I knew that I shouldn’t do this. But the image of the victim remained in my mind.

  I was dog-tired, and when I moved again, I was going to be stiff from hitting the ground and from bruises I didn’t remember getting: this wasn’t my first fight. I knew all about the aftermath. I should go and let Libor’s pack pay for a hotel room for me until we could pay them back. I should wait for Adam.

  “Yes,” said Jitka.

  I didn’t want to get anyone into trouble. So I said, “At this point, even if I ship off to Port-au-Prince or Timbuktu, the violence is going to continue between your pack and the vampires.”

  Jitka said, “This attack and the one on our pack home make it quite clear that battle with the vampires is coming. It no longer matters if you are here or in China, Libor will not let this rest.”

  “Yes,” said Martin at the same time. Jitka was just talking, but Martin watched me. His shoulders tightened. Maybe it wasn’t just me who needed to do something.

  “And you would love to rid Prague of Mary’s seethe . . .” I said.

  “Yes,” said Jitka, frowning at me. “But we cannot find it. We track them, and the trails just fade into vampire magic.”

  “Okay, then,” I said. “I think I might be able to help you with that. What do you think the chances are that the vampires came here in a car with GPS?”

  In the US, the chances would be pretty good. GPS or a cell phone with GPS, which would be harder.

  Martin shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. The vampires tend to have expensive things—especially Mary’s people, who are trying to establish themselves with humans.”

  “If you can get me to the place the vampires got in their car in Prague, assuming they walked from their seethe, then I can find it,” I told them.

  Martin gave me a pitying look. “We have tried that many times, and we are werewolves.”

  “Vampire magic doesn’t work right on me,” I told him. “Sometimes not at all.”

  “Why not?” Jitka asked.

  “I have no idea,” I told her honestly. “But I can see ghosts, too. Maybe one has something to do with the other.” I didn’t say that I could do other things with the dead. If no one knew, then no one could force me to do something I didn’t want to.

  “What are you?” Martin asked.

  “Not a werewolf,” I said. “Would it be useful to know where Mary’s seethe is?”

  “We could go kill them,” said Jitka. She was all but vibrating with eagerness. “Kill them again, I mean, so they stay dead this time. Destroy Mary and her filthy followers in one shot.”

  Martin’s eyes brightened. “Yes,” he said.

  It wasn’t as stupid as it sounded. If Mary had been strong, she’d have already battled the Master of Prague. Instead, she’d been reduced to rebuilding her vampires, which was a slow and troublesome process, with failure rates higher than the werewolf Change. Most seethes, as I understood it, had a bare handful of strong vampires, then maybe as many as a dozen lesser vampires who depended upon their Master to sustain them.

  We’d just killed four of Mary’s seethe. All of them had been vampires for a long time or their bodies wouldn’t have gone to dust. That didn’t mean that they weren’t still lesser vampires, because that usually required a century at least and often more. But I bet she didn’t have a whole lot more at that level. Not if her seethe was only sixty or seventy years old.

  And, presumably, Jitka and Martin meant to gather the rest of their pack to destroy the seethe.

  But they didn’t know how many vampires they were facing. I’d been raised by a master strategist who taught me that you never go to battle with an unknown enemy.

  The werewolves probably knew that, too. Either they knew more about Mary’s seethe than it sounded like, or, more likely, the frustration of hunting her for so long was driving them into recklessness. Apparently it was going to be my job to be the cooler head.

  Adam would think that was pretty funny, but I was not a rash person. I did think things through—and then I tried to do the right thing. Just because the right thing and the safest or easiest thing weren’t usually the same didn’t make me rash.

  We planned and talked for maybe an hour. When Jitka couldn’t get through to Libor—something that didn’t seem to be unusual—we came up with an alternate plan to frontal assault, which, though satisfying to talk about, was (we decided) unlikely to result in anything useful, especially if we had to do it without help.

  It required a lot of tact for me to steer the wolves, since I wasn’t a member of their pack or a werewolf. Only because I was the one they were counting on being able to find the vampires did they listen to me at all.

  Martin suggested that we take a page out of Bonarata’s playbook and extract a single vampire. We’d question that one, then turn them over to Libor for further questioning.

  That made me pretty queasy. Killing an attacker is an entirely different thing than turning one over for torture. Happily, Jitka batted that one back, so I didn’t have to.

  “That is foolish,” she said. “We have tried that. They do not talk. After the third one, Libor said it was enough. That if they were not talking after what he did to them, it was because they could not, not because they would not. There are some witchcraft spells that will do that. Maybe there is vampire magic that stopped their tongues.”

  I tried not to think beyond the surface of her words.

  Torture was a lot further than I was prepared to go just to find out why they’d decided to work with the other Prague seethe. Maybe I’d feel differently if I lived in Prague, though I didn’t think so. There were probably circumstances that would make me reconsider, but this wasn’t one of those. Probably I should feel badly that Jitka and Martin seemed quite convinced that the endgame would be to destroy the seethe—but vampires are evil. I
might like one or two on a personal level—but they kill people in order to keep living.

  “So let’s just go find the seethe,” I said, “get what information we can get from watching them, then go back to Libor with that.”

  Safe enough, I thought. I’d already proved I could get away from the biggest, baddest vampire in Europe. This shouldn’t be so bad. And I would be going out and doing something.

  —

  WE STARTED BY BACKTRACKING THE FOUR WHO HAD attacked us to their car, parked a couple of miles away. Actually, I started by sifting through vampire ashes looking for a car key or fob or something. Jitka and Martin put together a pack of things they were sure would allow us to extract a single vampire and restrain it with minimum chances of having it break free and kill us all. Just in case, they said when I objected that we were only going in to observe and report back.

  The car was an expensive new model with a correspondingly expensive new guidance system on board. Jitka and Martin complained about how well financed Mary seemed to be getting. They seemed to take the luxury car as a personal insult, and I was reminded that not so long ago by the standards of long-lived creatures, the Czech Republic had been part of the Soviet bloc. Under the communist regime, personal wealth had been viewed as a moral failure.

  I wasn’t sure that wasn’t correct.

  We got lucky with the car key I’d found on the third ash pile I’d gone through. It was one of the keyless fobs and half-melted, but apparently the right half was undamaged, because the car unlocked when Martin held it next to the door.

  I did know how to start a car without a key—even a modern car—but I needed a few more supplies than I had at hand. It was a good thing the key had survived.

  Still commenting—presumably, because they’d switched back to Czech to continue their complaints—Martin started the car, switched on the nav system, and found, in the saved locations, one that was helpfully labeled with the “home” icon.

  If their car hadn’t had GPS, Martin knew of a few places where one of the dead vampires had been spotted a couple of days ago. I could have tried picking up his trail and following it. But, probably, we would have given the whole thing up and gotten a hotel room for the rest of the night. The GPS was a big break.