Kitty in the Underworld

by Carrie Vaughn

  “This is ridiculous,” Enkidu muttered.

  “You know what’s at stake,” the magician said. “If this doesn’t work, all is lost.”

  The dynamic here was strange. The vampire was obviously the one in charge. But during the day, when he was asleep, who among his followers was leader? That seemed to be up for debate.

  I didn’t want them tranquilizing me again. But I also didn’t want to just give in. My brain was starting to misfire over the dilemma. I was hungry, but even if I had food I didn’t think I’d be able to eat, I was so anxious. I might have whimpered a little.

  “Regina Luporum is awake,” said the were-lion, Sakhmet.

  They fell silent, listening. I imagined us, me on one side of the door, them on the other, listening close. Waiting for somebody to do something.

  I called, “My name’s Kitty.”

  “You see? She’s not ready,” hissed the magician, as if I couldn’t hear.

  “We can’t wait forever,” Enkidu hissed back. “She has friends, and she’ll be missed.”

  Damn straight. But if I could get out of here without dragging them into this mess, I’d do it. Just open that door …

  I heard movement, and Sakhmet stepped close to the door—I could smell her. Inches from me now, she said, “Regina Luporum, are you hungry?”

  “Kitty,” I murmured, on principle. I knew what this was—they’d keep calling me Regina Luporum until I answered. I wouldn’t play along.

  But I really needed some water.

  I backed away from the door. A bolt slid open, and the door pushed inward. I was a good girl and didn’t do anything crazy—all three of them were there, blocking the way out.

  Sakhmet crouched and offered me a bottle of water. I took it and smiled a thanks. Probably drank it down a little too eagerly and with less dignity than I would have liked. Dignity, ha. These people had all seen me naked, who was I kidding? My hair itched. I scratched it back, trying to brush it out with my fingers as well as I could.

  The three of them watched me apprehensively, waiting to see which way I would jump. So I didn’t jump. I sat quietly, clutching my bottle of water, and gazed up at them with big, harmless eyes.

  “You shouldn’t be here talking to her like this,” Zora muttered at Enkidu. “You’ll ruin everything.” He glared at her, but didn’t argue. Even in the faint light, I could see the lines of indecision marking his face.

  I focused on Sakhmet, who was closest to me, at my eye level, and regarding me with something like pity. She would talk to me, I bet.

  “How did you all meet?” I asked softly, nonthreateningly. I was doing the show, trying to coax a story from a reluctant interview subject. Invite her to tell me her story, assume that she secretly wanted to tell me her story. Most people only needed a sympathetic ear to start talking about themselves. “You and Enkidu—you’ve known each other awhile, I can tell. How did you two meet?”

  She didn’t talk, not right away, so I shrugged, played gee-whiz naïve. “It’s just you’re an interesting group of people, you know? People usually stick to their packs, but here you all are, working together.”

  Sakhmet gave a thin smile, glancing over her shoulder at the others. “I met … Enkidu, first. When we were younger. I was a college student in Cairo.” She seemed about thirty—my age. Enkidu was probably a few years older. So this might have been ten years ago, maybe less.

  “Were you already a lycanthrope?” I asked gently.

  “Yes, but not for long. I was attacked. It was stupid, being out by the river after dark,” she said, wincing at the memory. “I survived, and there were those who took care of me—”

  “Sakhmet, come away from her, we should not be talking to her!” Zora hissed.

  “We’re just talking, we’re not hurting anything,” Sakhmet shot back.

  “What about you, Zora? How’d you hook up with this crowd?” I asked.

  “It’s not important,” Zora said. “Our stories—irrelevant.” She stomped toward the door, sat on the floor with a huff, crossed her arms, and stared at us. Baby-sitting, it seemed like. Zora was a bit of a freak, wasn’t she?

  Sakhmet sat with her legs folded, graceful, her skirt splayed around her. Her smile was thin, serene. “What happened to me, what you call lycanthropy—it isn’t a curse, I came to realize. It’s a blessing. Thousands of years ago, my people worshipped gods and goddesses with the faces of animals. Those of us who are both human and animal—who is to say we’re not messengers of those gods? We share their images, we are part of them.”

  Easy to persuade her then that she was an avatar of the lion-headed goddess Sakhmet. She was Egyptian, and in ancient Egypt she might have been a priestess, draped in fine cloth and jewels. I wondered where those animal-headed gods had come from. Had the ancient Egyptians known about lycanthropes?

  Had everyone known, once upon a time, and then just forgotten? People stopped believing the stories were true.

  If Zora was baby-sitting, Enkidu was standing guard, lurking near Sakhmet, shoulders stiff like raised hackles. As if he expected me to leap at her, snarling, even though I was acting as unthreatening as I knew how, without going so far as to roll onto my back and show my belly. My gaze was lowered, I sat with my knees to my chest. Just people telling stories.

  “What about you?” I said, nodding at him. “Where are you from?”

  He wouldn’t stop staring at me, which made me nervous. But not any more nervous than I already was, so I ignored him. He waited so long I didn’t think he was going to answer, when he finally said, “Kashmir.”

  “And how did you two meet?”

  He glanced at Sakhmet sidelong, and she won a smile from him. Ah, that was a good memory, then. “I wandered for a long time,” he said. “Then I found her.”

  Even in the dire setting, they produced a glow of affection. Whose heart wouldn’t melt? If we’d been anywhere else—New Moon, maybe, sharing a pitcher of beer—I’d have basked in it. If I could just get these two away from everyone else …

  “How’d you meet her?” I said, nodding at Zora.

  No smiles for the magician. “Kumarbis found her,” Enkidu said. “Before he found us.”

  The vampire had recruited them all, then. What did he know that had started all this? Did he really have the power to stop Roman?

  From a certain point of view, I couldn’t fault them. They were allies banding together, just like me, Rick, Alette, and all the others. They just had a different set of tactics. I kept bugging Cormac to learn the secret of Dux Bellorum’s coins because I wanted a magical weapon. A silver bullet, if you will. If he’d come to me and said, “All we need to do is kidnap various avatars of various powerful mythological figures,” I’d have thought he was crazy. He would have thought he was crazy. But if that was what I’d have to do to stop Roman, could I do it? No. I would have called them all up on the phone and talked them into it. Why couldn’t they have just called me?

  They were gathered around me. If not relaxed, at least not in a fighting mood. I had an audience, and I’d warmed them up. Time to push a little.

  “What do you know about Dux Bellorum?” I asked.

  Some hesitation. Enkidu’s gaze darkened. Again, Sakhmet answered first. “He is old. Not one of the oldest vampires, but very old. He craves power, and many have flocked to him hoping to share in his power. But I—we—believe his intent isn’t to share power, but to enslave. His allies will be beholden to him and under his dominion. The rest of us…” She shook her head, making the implications clear: the fate of Dux Bellorum’s enemies would be unspeakable.

  “Dux Bellorum will not succeed,” Enkidu said. “It’s why we’re here. We cannot fail.”

  I could argue that, but this wasn’t the time to argue about the merits of their plan. It might have been a perfectly good plan. But I wasn’t at all impressed with their implementation of it.

  “Have you ever seen Dux Bellorum?”

  Enkidu said, “I did, once. I was … spying, I suppo
se you might say, among the werewolf pack outside of Mumbai. I suspected that they served Dux Bellorum, but I didn’t know. Until the night I saw him in a marketplace. A serious man, with short-cut hair, pale skin. Glaring like the world had insulted him. Very out of place, but he commanded the wolves. The whole pack had gathered, and they all bowed to him, submissive, groveling. He gave money to the alpha—the pack served him as mercenaries, but I don’t know what exactly they did for him. I was too new to share that information with. But I left them that night. The vampire saw me in the back of the alley where we had gathered, trying to stay out of sight. He saw me, saw through me, as if he could guess I was an enemy. As soon as he was gone, I ran. The alpha chased me, hunted me. I escaped, and I will never forget that night. Dux Bellorum—he frightened even me.”

  “You never told me that they hunted you,” Sakhmet said, touching his arm.

  “I didn’t want you to worry.”

  “I’ll always worry.” She frowned, chastising him, and he bowed his head.

  “You aren’t wrong about Roman. I’ve faced him down a couple of times,” I said.

  “We heard rumors that you had,” Enkidu said. “It’s how we know you are our Regina Luporum.”

  Somehow, I managed not to roll my eyes. The times I’d met Roman in person, I hadn’t had any more ambition than getting away from him alive. Much like Enkidu. That I’d succeeded had as much to do with luck—and incredibly good taste in friends—as anything. Moving on.

  “You’re targeting him. That’s the point of all this, right?” I gestured around the musty and unlikely setting. “To bring him down, destroy him.”

  He nodded once, with the confidence of a crusader going into battle.

  In the end, the success of their plan depended on how much they really knew about Roman. And I suspected that few of us knew as much about him as we thought we did.

  I said, “I’ve had some … I wouldn’t call it evidence. A hint, a suggestion. A credible implication that Roman didn’t start the Long Game. He isn’t really the one in charge. There’s someone else, another figure. A Caesar.”

  For a moment, they stared at me in apparent disbelief. Even Zora lifted her head from the sullen pout she’d been in. The very idea was ridiculous, of course. Except that it wasn’t.

  Enkidu furrowed his brow. “What proof do you have?”

  An offhand comment made by a trapped demon of uncertain and unlikely origin? She came to Denver on a mission to kill a vampire priest—I was still getting used to the idea of a vampire priest, of vampires working for the Vatican, but apparently it was all true. She succeeded in her mission and would have gotten Rick and me, too, if Cormac hadn’t stopped her. We all assumed that she was working for Roman. She laughed at this and claimed that Roman wasn’t the one pulling her strings, implying that someone else was, which opened a whole new world of paranoia, didn’t it?

  “I don’t have any proof,” I said. “It’s just something to think about.” Any uncertainty I could plant in them might be useful. Or might get me killed. Whatever. In the meantime, I had so many more questions. “Do you have any idea how Kumarbis knows—”

  A noise, the familiar sound of a wood door scraping on stone, echoed down the tunnel. The three of us lycanthropes started, raising our heads, pricking our ears.

  Zora noticed our alertness and brightened. “He’s awake.”

  He. Kumarbis, the vampire. Master of this little shindig. Could I get him to sit and talk with me?

  The others gathered themselves, straightening, turning away. We were done here, it seemed.

  “I’ll go to him,” Sakhmet said. As she passed Enkidu, he held her arm and leaned in. Their kiss was gentle, soft, full of obvious comfort passing between them. My heart ached, seeing it. Where was Ben, how freaked out was he, coming home to find me missing? At least two nights had passed. He’d be home now, never mind how many times he’d tried to call.

  The were-lion padded down the tunnel toward the noise, presumably the vampire’s lair, where he slept out his days. To feed him, I realized. He needed blood, and they provided.

  Enkidu must have seen the understanding in my expression. “We take turns,” he explained. Which made a twisted kind of sense, but I must have looked sour. Dismayed, even.

  “You’ll take your turn soon, when you join us,” Zora said.

  I shook my head in denial. Never, not in a billion years.

  The magician took hold of the door in order to close it. Desperate, irrational, angry, I leapt forward, grabbed the edge, and held on. I didn’t want them to close it, I didn’t want to be shut in, not anymore. I wanted to keep talking, and I wanted them to listen. I wanted to get out.

  If I’d been fighting over the door with just Zora, I’d have won. She was small, weak, and I was a werewolf. I could tear her to pieces. But Enkidu took hold of the door as well and hauled back. I scraped along the floor, trying to anchor the thing with my body. He caught my gaze, glared a challenge, and I snarled back. He wanted to fight, and we could fight this out.

  After one last mighty shove, he yanked the door, caught me off balance, and I let go just before it would have slammed on my fingers. Letting out a frustrated growl, I glared at the slab of wood, since I didn’t have anything better to glare at.

  On the plus side, I wasn’t any worse off than I was a few minutes ago.

  I had to come up with a plan. Any plan. I had to develop telepathy so I could call for help. Or—they had to have my cell phone stashed away somewhere, didn’t they? If I could get out from behind the locked door, find my cell phone, get to a place where I could get a signal—probably out of the mine, which I ought to be able to do if I made it that far. Then call the cavalry. Simple.

  Simple as stone.

  Chapter 11

  IF KUMARBIS was awake, night had fallen. Was this the second night I’d been here, or third? I didn’t know, but the number mattered to me. Counting time seemed important. I’d seen the vampire once, then he slept, and now he was awake. Call it the second night, then. I’d been here two full days, at least. Or was it three?

  Two.

  The tunnel system in the mine must have been complex. The group was living here, they had separate chambers, they’d built doors and created rooms. There was a place to lock me up, a place for the vampire to sleep. The others must have had rooms as well. They had to be storing food and water somewhere, and using something other than unobtrusive corners of various caves as toilets. Assuming I found a way to break out and avoid my captors, how long would it take me to search the place? How did I find my way out? With my nose. I just had to find the draft of fresh air and follow it. I hoped.

  First thing I had to do was figure out how to get past the door. Well, that was easy. Plan A: Wait until someone opened it, then start running, see how far I could get. Satisfying, but probably not effective. I wouldn’t have time to look for my phone in that scenario.

  Plan B: Win their trust so they’d let me out of the room and leave me alone to go exploring. On further thought, it might even be easy; I’d just have to start pretending to agree with them. Easy, maybe, but the idea left a sour taste in my mouth. I didn’t want them to think they’d convinced me. Brainwashed me. But if it meant getting out of here … I could turn my mind in circles for hours thinking of this. Hunger had become a dull ache, and lack of food was affecting my thinking. The next time Sakhmet appeared, I’d ask for food.

  Once again, steps approached, and the door scraped open. I backed away, because I wasn’t ready and didn’t think about charging until it was too late. Next time for sure, right?

  The vampire came in, alone. He shut the door behind him and stood, blocking the way, studying me. Him and me, all alone. I buried a growl.

  He might be able to pass for human in poor light, but people would look twice at him and maybe wonder what disease he was suffering from. He was stooped, wizened, his spine was hunched, and his joints were gnarled. Leathery wrinkles covered his face; in anyone else I would have called it s
un damage. His appearance wasn’t old so much as worn out. Even flush from his recent feeding, he appeared ashen. He’d seen some hard times. Periods of starvation maybe. Lack of blood wouldn’t kill a vampire right away, but it would cause something like decay. This vampire was decayed.

  I wouldn’t get any closer to him than I had to. He approached, and I backed away, keeping the same distance between us. Straightening, I squared my shoulders and lifted my chin. He could smell my anxiety, but I didn’t have to act scared.

  “You are strong,” he said, sounding pleased. “I knew you would be.”

  “Then why do you think you can force me to do what you want?”

  “When you understand, you won’t need to be forced.”

  The mangled coin around his neck kept drawing my eye. I wanted to know more, I had so many questions. “How old are you?” I asked on a whim.

  He narrowed his gaze, curled his lip. An expression of disdain. “We brought you here to make you understand. To show you—”

  “Understand what? Maybe I could understand if you’d actually explain to me what you’re doing.” I should have just shut up and listened. But I was angry. I didn’t like being lectured at.

  “You will understand.”

  “Yeah, all you have to do is keep saying that, over and over,” I muttered. We could keep this up all day. “Help me understand. You wear one of Roman’s coins. Why?”

  “I took it from him.”

  “It means you served him—”

  He scowled. “I never served him.” He actually sounded offended.

  I took a calming breath and tried again. “How do you know him, then?”

  “It’s enough that I know how dangerous he is. We must stop him.”

  “I agree,” I said. Kumarbis tilted his head as if startled. He must have thought I just argued on principle. “How are you going to do that?”

  “It is not your place to ask, only to join the battle.”

  That made me think of Antony, and all the other casualties. Kumarbis wasn’t wrong—this was a war, and maybe he’d been fighting it longer than the rest of us, but that didn’t put him in charge.