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.