Kitty in the Underworld

by Carrie Vaughn

  The possibilities I considered got more outlandish. A rabid fan had captured me, Misery style, and obsessive games of admiration and torture would soon ensue. Another werewolf pack—one that included a were-lion for some suitably dramatic reason—needed me for some in-person counseling. Flattering, but unlikely. Those folks usually approached me in restaurants, and without tranquilizer guns. Maybe I was being prepared as a hideous sacrifice to some ancient, chthonic god. That had actually already happened to me once, in Las Vegas of all places, so it wasn’t entirely outside the realm of reason. But then there should have been candles, burning incense, weird statuary, and chanting. Or maybe I was being collected for display in an alien zoo.

  My imagination was getting away from me. My questions accumulated, growing more and more urgent: When would my enemy finally appear? Would there be food and water? Sooner or later, if the door stayed shut and locked, the need for water would drive me to try to break out, danger of silver poisoning or no.

  The chill was getting to me, so I got up and paced. Three steps down the long side of the rocky cell, two steps across, three steps back. Not too cramped, as far as terrifying underground prison cells went. With thoughts like that pressing on me, the pacing didn’t do a thing to get rid of the gooseflesh pricking my arms. My head itched, and my lips had pulled back, unconsciously baring my teeth. I hadn’t realized I’d been doing it. I pressed my hands to my face, rubbed my cheeks, tried to get the muscles to relax. Appear calm. Not at all like a cornered wolf, no sir.

  I had to find a way out of here.

  * * *

  I DIDN’T know much about old silver mines except in the most general historical sense. In the last half of the nineteenth century, prospectors discovered gold, silver, and a collection of other valuable minerals throughout the Rocky Mountains. Industry flooded in, dozens of fortunes were made, cities were built. Mining was still an important industry in the state, but hundreds of antique mines like this one had been abandoned and left to decay. They’d been built with nineteenth-century technology, tunnels blown out with primitive black powder and dynamite, men digging with shovels and pickaxes, hauling ore out with carts and donkeys.

  I didn’t know how deep a mine like this ran, how many tunnels and chambers it might have, if there was a standard layout or if they twisted randomly depending on where the ore was. I didn’t know how stable the arcing stone rooms might be. Not very, was my feeling—hikers and travelers in the mountains were always getting warnings about not venturing into such tunnels. They collapsed a lot, I gathered. If I started worrying about the roof of the place caving in on me, on top of all the other anxieties, I’d freeze completely. So I just didn’t think about it.

  The darkness was giving me a headache. The strain of trying to stare my way out of a near-lightless cave was telling. Not to mention the fear and anger, with no target to aim toward. I ended up sitting on the floor again and thinking of Ben. He’d find me. Somehow he’d figure out what had happened, come looking, and find me. It was just a matter of time. I could be patient.

  I caught myself whispering hurry, hurry, hurry.

  * * *

  IF ONLY I knew how much time had passed. I didn’t know how long I’d been unconscious, and I couldn’t see outside to know if it was day or night. The timelessness gave me a feeling of mental seasickness, a nausea that crept into my gut. The ground didn’t feel firm.

  Around the roaring in my own ears, I heard something new—something different outside, breaking the silence of the mine tunnel. Barely there—soft, careful, steady. Slippered footsteps, creeping close. I held my breath. The sound was no greater than that of snow falling. The bare whisper of breath that came with the steps I could hear a little better.

  Whoever had approached the door paused just on the other side. I was torn between wanting to shout and wanting to remain as still as possible, straining with my ears and taking deep breaths through my nose, hoping to catch a scent and learn all I could.

  The person waited, breathing softly. The smell—female, feline. The were-lion. She’d used some kind of herbal hand lotion recently, and wore clothing of washed cotton.

  I rose to a crouch, leaning toward the door. “Who are you? What’s going on here?”

  The seam I’d noticed in the bottom of the door revealed a panel that flipped open—quickly, loudly. A bottle of water rolled through the opening. I lunged to reach through, to get my hand out there to grab whoever was standing there. But the panel slammed shut on me, and a latch slotted back into place.

  Soft footsteps ran away.

  “Hey, wait a minute! Talk to me, will you just talk to me?” I shouted, slapped the door, rammed my shoulder into it. The board flexed some, but the hinges didn’t give, as if they’d bolted this thing into the solid wall with bands of iron. My shouts degenerated into growls of frustration.

  Kneeling, I punched at the panel, tried to jam my fingers into the seam, anything I could to pry it open, break it, rip apart the door. Like the rest of the door, it was well made, solidly built and locked into place. It flexed, and with a lot of time and effort maybe I could rip through it. But it wasn’t going to give way just by punching it.

  I scrabbled at it, until a sharp pain stabbed into my fingertip. I cried out and brought my finger to my mouth, sucking on the wound. Splinter. I could feel it. Wincing, I picked at it in the dark, felt the little fiber under the skin, pulled it out. The pain faded quickly—a wound like that would heal in no time. But the memory of it throbbed. Just a tiny splinter, but it brought tears to my eyes. The stress of it all brought tears to my eyes. Again, I curled up in the middle of the floor, hugging myself, feeling sorry for myself.

  My leg brushed against the bottle of water my captor had thrown me. At least, it smelled like water. Just a normal, plastic, store-bought bottle of water. Warm—not refrigerated. It hadn’t even come from an ice-filled cooler. Strangely modern and out of place in this medieval dungeon they’d put me in. Like the tranquilizer gun. The paramilitary conspiracy seemed less likely. This wasn’t comforting, because it meant I was likely in the grips of some homespun, backwoods conspiracy. They knew what they were doing, and had access to just enough tech to make them really scary.

  I wasn’t scared. I tried not to be scared.

  Vaguely, I thought of hunger strikes. How very nice of them to bring me water, because how terrible it would have been, to go through the trouble of drugging me and bringing me here, then letting me die of thirst. Could a werewolf die of thirst? Probably—it would just take a really long time. Not comforting.

  Just because they brought water didn’t mean I had to drink it. I could throw it back out—if I could only get that door panel open. Refusing to drink would likely spite nobody but myself. My mouth still tasted of drugs and sleep, my own sour anxiety, residual tranquilizer leaking out of my system. I twisted open the cap, which cracked, the seal breaking. A brand-new bottle, filled with plain water and not poison. They really did want me alive, after all.

  I drank a mouthful, swishing the water around to clean out the grime and bitterness. Closed the bottle and saved the rest for later. Then I settled back in the middle of the floor, huddled in on myself, and pondered.

  Chapter 6

  MY HEADACHE, spurred by darkness and stress, grew worse, working to pull me into exhaustion. I must have already slept for hours because of the tranquilizer, but I slept again, and more time slipped by. I jerked to wakefulness, scratching my hand on the stone floor, without realizing I’d even fallen asleep in the first place. With the cave’s darkness pressing down on me, I wondered if I’d woken up at all. My throbbing head lived in some weird, unconscious twilight state.

  I retrieved the bottle of water from where I’d set it by the stone wall—far from the panel in the door, so it couldn’t be taken away from me—and drank. The headache dimmed.

  The same faint lamplight seeped through the bottom of the door. They’d need some kind of lighting to find their way through the tunnels. With the weight of the a
ir pressing around me, we had to be pretty far underground. Based on the scents I could track, the same set of people had been passing by. Their scents were strong enough, even in the chill, unmoving air of the place, that I imagined them lingering. I wondered if they had some way of looking in here without me knowing. I stared at the door, imagining I was glaring at them with all the challenge I could muster. My Wolf’s gaze, amber and terrifying. My lips curled, baring teeth.

  Calm down. Heaving a sigh, I made myself relax, rubbed my shoulders to keep them from bunching up. I couldn’t afford to shape-shift here, not like this. I couldn’t lose control. When my captors finally showed themselves, I wanted to be able to talk to them. To yell at them.

  I took another drink of water. And wondered what I was going to do when I had to go to the bathroom, which was going to be soon.

  Lying on the floor, I put my feet up against the wood of the door. With my back braced, I pushed with all my strength. The wood flexed; I grew hopeful. Before the plywood bowed more than an inch, though, I slid back on the stone floor. I tried again, pushing until my muscles cramped, and slid on the stone. I could brace, but not well enough to make a difference. I didn’t have enough leverage to beat whatever bolted the door in place. I was only wearing myself out.

  A drumbeat started. No, a set of drumbeats, from relatively close by—down a tunnel outside the door. Hard to tell, because the sound echoed against the stone. As if rising up from the stone itself. The beat was gentle, steady—the thump of a heartbeat at rest. Not mechanical, though. I pressed my ear to the edge of the door and listened for clanking, clicking, the sound of metal on metal—had some mining equipment been set into motion? But no, this was skin against skin—a hand on the head of a drum. Two of them, just enough out of synch to be distracting.

  Something was happening. Something had to be happening. I crept back from the door and crouched, waiting. As soon as it opened, I’d be ready. Not exactly sure what I was going to be ready for, but there you go.

  I waited. The drumming continued. Nothing happened.

  Human hands definitely made these beats. Over time, the pair of drums grew more out of synch, then back into rhythm. A scattered hiccup of sound, a rumble of thunder put on an endless loop. I started counting beats. Stopped after two hundred. The drumming went on a long time, until my headache grew, my temples throbbing in time with the pounding, on and on.

  Yeah, something was happening—someone was trying to drive me crazy. On reflection, that was probably exactly what was going on. So I had to make sure I didn’t go crazy. I caught the burr of a growl in my throat. I could decide not to go crazy, but Wolf, I wasn’t sure about.

  The next hour or so I spent on my back, pounding my feet against the door, shoving into it as hard as I could until I was sweating, gasping for breath. The door must have been braced from the other side; however much the wood bowed, something held it fast. It would have just taken a couple of crossbeams. Those weren’t budging.

  The drumming continued. While I struggled with the door, it faded to background noise. I could almost forget about it, so much white noise. I had to admire the stamina of the drummers. They lost the rhythm, changed it, picking up a new one to replace the old as they maintained their noise.

  I was so preoccupied by the drumming, I almost didn’t hear footsteps approach—different footsteps from the ones who’d brought the water. Heavier ones, from a larger person. A scrape on stone that jarred against the drumbeats simply because it was different. My ears pricked, straining to learn more. Holding my breath, I listened to the shallow breathing on the other side of the door. Male—and wolf. He was trying not to draw attention to himself. The skin down my back prickled, fur and hackles stiffening at a potential threat. Strange wolf, strange territory, all of it strange, and we couldn’t see our enemy. He was watching us, but we couldn’t match his challenge—we could only stare at the blank door.

  I stayed still, crouched and frozen, not wanting to give him any kind of clue about my apprehensive state of mind. I kept my breathing calm, even though I felt like I wasn’t drawing in any oxygen at all. I didn’t shout, though I wanted to.

  What the hell did these people want with me?

  I waited for him to open the door, but he never did. He stood for a long time, no doubt smelling me, listening to me, studying me, the way I was trying to study him. I could stay quiet and calm, but he had to smell the anxiety on me.

  The longer he waited in silence, the more I wanted to scream. I wanted my captors to do something, anything. Well, not anything. But I couldn’t fight darkness and a barred door. Continually throwing myself against the barriers was only going to make me bruised and exhausted.

  I wanted to pace, just to be doing something. But I didn’t want him to know I was pacing, that the anxiety was getting to me; I didn’t want to give away anything.

  Then he walked away. Just like that, without a word, without a sign.

  This was some kind of test, wasn’t it?

  A moment later, the drumming stopped. The silence throbbed in my ears, a memory of noise that would take hours to fade. I sank to the floor, lay down, pressed a flushed cheek to the cool stone. Only felt a faint and distant itching from the pervasive trace of silver. Pressed my arm over my head to try to still the throbbing.

  So, I’d been kidnapped. Apparently for the express purpose of driving me crazy. Really, that didn’t bother me so much.

  But what happened if my captors really did manage to drive me crazy—that worried me.

  * * *

  ANYTIME THEY approached, their footsteps began to sound like thunder. I had nothing else to listen for, so when I heard them, they broke through my muddled awareness, sending shocks along my nerves. My now-constant headache throbbed with every hint of noise. I jerked into a crouch and watched the door, glaring at it as if I could challenge it.

  The woman, the were-lion who’d brought the water, returned, her steps soft and hesitating. She stopped outside the door and I clamped my mouth shut, to keep from shouting. I wanted to wait to see what she would do. As ridiculous as it seemed, given our respective situations, I didn’t want to scare her off by being belligerent. More belligerent. The bolt or latch or whatever it was on the panel clicked. The seam split open.

  I bolted. Dived forward, hands out toward the gap made by the open panel, reached through and made a grab. What did I have to lose?

  My hand closed on a wrist. I held tight, squeezing. The limb was solid, not particularly dainty. The muscles and tendons flexing under my touch were strong. Bracing against the doorway, I pulled, trying to drag that arm in with me.

  She grunted but didn’t scream, and yanked away from my grasp; I held on. A tug-of-war ensued. Both of us braced against the door and pulled against the other.

  I shouted through the door. “Please, just talk to me! What do you people want? Why are you doing this?”

  My nails dug into her skin in an effort to hold on. She scrabbled, kicking against the door and the stone; her voice wheezed with her panting breath as she struggled. She was gaining on me. My reach through the door was past my elbow. My fingers cramped. The sweat breaking out on her skin made her slippery.

  “Just say something, please,” I begged, my voice squeaking into a higher pitch, tightened by desperation. I just wanted one word.

  She won the tug-of-war, her sweat-dampened skin sliding out of my grasp. I shouted a growl, a jagged noise containing all my frustration over the last however many hours. Or days. I kept my hand through the slot in the door, waving, grappling, my fingers hooked like claws. I must have looked like a wild animal.

  I expected her to run in a panic, but I heard no footsteps. Her breath came in pants. She was still here, out of reach, watching me. I took a deeper breath and settled, stilling my voice, my body. But I kept my arm outstretched, reaching toward the outside with some kind of hope.

  We might have stayed like that for long minutes. I didn’t dare pull my arm back in, no matter that she could have stabbed
it or cut it off or anything while I held it out to her. This was the farthest I’d gotten in trying to get out of this hole they’d trapped me in. As soon as I pulled my arm back, she’d close the panel over the opening, and I’d be stuck again. I just wanted to hear a word, a single word, a shout or a curse, anything. I didn’t want to be the inhuman thing in a cage, not even worth a shred of sunlight. If she would just talk to me …

  Something touched my fingers. I lay as close to the floor as I could, pressing up to the opening trying to see out of it and into the darkness. I couldn’t see her, only her arm, edging into my vision as she nudged an object into my hand. Instinctively, I clutched at it. Plastic crinkled. A cellophane wrapper. At least it wasn’t a grenade. I’d kind of wondered. I took a deep breath, trying to smell it—food, it smelled like food. All this struggle over feeding time. Could this get any more ridiculous?

  She ducked away, out of my line of sight, and waited. The impasse was well and truly complete—I didn’t want to pull my hand in, because she would close the panel. But I wanted to see what she’d given me. She clearly wasn’t going to say anything. Since she didn’t so much as swear at me when I was clawing at her arm, she wasn’t going to speak now. Even with the panel open, I couldn’t escape. She could walk away, and I’d still be here, sprawled out on the floor, choking on dusty air, sweaty, chilled, exhausted.

  I didn’t want to give up. Pulling my hand inside felt like giving up. So did continuing to lie here, exposed and helpless.

  “Why won’t you people just talk to me?” I didn’t like the way my voice came out rough, like a growl.