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 slipped the device 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 and 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 and 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.

—

SOME PRETTY COOL PERSON PICKED MY POCKET while I was wandering around Old Town trying to find a bakery where there were lots of werewolves.

I’d found one bakery that a werewolf had gone into sometime that day, but the scent was no stronger in the building than it had been outside. Somewhere between that bakery and Wenceslas Square—a more modern city square than Old Town Square, where I found a McDonald’s—someone stole all the money I had in one of my pockets.

It was embarrassing.

My only excuse is that there were a lot of people wandering about, and most of them didn’t pay attention to personal space the way Americans do. It could have been any of twenty people who bumped into me.

If the person who’d stolen my money had been nervous about it, likely I could have caught them because I’d have smelled it. He or she had made off with roughly ten dollars, hardly worth their effort even if it was half of my resources. At least I’d been smart enough to split my money between pockets.

I hastily checked my mostly empty backpack, but they hadn’t gotten the food or the dead e-reader. I bought a small soda with my diminished funds and sat down on one side of a bench next to a statue of a horseman and ate the food before it was stolen, too.

The woman breast-feeding her baby on the other end of the bench paid me no attention. A man with two children in tow brought the young mother a sausage baked in a bun and an orange juice bottle.

I licked the last of my food from my fingers, gave the happy little family a grin, and wandered off. The sausage smelled good; it made me . . . I slowed my steps . . . made me think of home.

“Excuse me,” I said to the family. “Do any of you speak English?”

The oldest of the children, a boy of twelve, did. And he was able to tell me where they’d bought his mother’s lunch, a lunch that smelled, very faintly, of werewolf.

—

THE BAKERY WAS DOWN ONE OF THE NARROW STREETS in a building that looked like it had grown there beginning sometime in the first century. I don’t suppose it was that old—not even Prague, I think, was that old—but it had been there a long time. It had taken over the buildings to either side of the original one, growing like China had, taking over previous civilizations and replacing them with its own. The smell of yeast and wheat was warm and welcoming as I stepped through the old door to stand in line.

The bakery played up the age of the building to the tourist trade—though a lot of the people in line (from the scents they carried) seemed to be locals. I wasn’t any older than I looked, a well-preserved midthirties. My history-degree emphasis was skewed more to people and politics than it was to fashion and living conditions. All that meant I didn’t know for sure, but I thought that the bakery rocked a very sanitized medieval feel with all of its warm-yeast-smelling heart rather than looking as a bakery would have during the actual Middle Ages.

The people hustling behind the counter and carrying trays to tables all wore clothing that looked like something a set director had decided people wore in Prague when the building had been built. There was a costume feel that made them representative rather than authentic. They weren’t uniform, in the sense that no two outfits were exactly the same, but the color scheme and general style made it clear that anyone wearing the costumes worked there.

A hand-painted sign that hung on the wall behind the bar told English-speaking visitors that there had been a bakery here, in that spot, for over 450 years. The sign in German said the same thing, and I expected the four other signs that hung around the bakery followed suit in various other languages. Prague was a city that catered to visitors, and this bakery was no exception.

When it was my turn, a young-faced man in dark trousers and a white shirt with blousy sleeves sporting heavily embroidered ribbons greeted me warmly.

“Do you speak English?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said with a strong British accent. “What can I get for you? We have today cherry, apple, and peach kolache fresh this morning. If you are interested in lunch—”

“Moon Called,” I said very quietly, underneath his practiced patter. He would hear me just fine, but I didn’t need everyone in the busy bakery to overhear. I addressed him with that appellation because my nose told me he was a werewolf and because my words would tell him that I knew what he was. “I need to speak to Libor on business.”