Kitty in the Underworld

by Carrie Vaughn

  She pulled another spear from one of several strapped to a kind of bandolier across her back, hefted it in her left hand, and drew a sword from a scabbard at her belt. It seemed molten in the firelight, and I was absolutely sure it had some amount of silver in it. The wooden weapon might not hurt me, but the sword would.

  The wind tore through the space with the noise of rusty nails on steel. My hair, tangled mess that it was, whipped into my face, and I couldn’t keep it pulled back, I couldn’t see anything. The remaining tongues of flame from the torches seemed to be drawn into the spiraling debris that climbed up the mine shaft. It might have been beautiful, if I wasn’t in the middle of it.

  Zora said she’d cast some kind of protection over the place. Whatever she’d done hadn’t worked against this. And me—I’d seen magic, but I didn’t know the first thing about working it myself. My wounded back itched.

  The last time the demon appeared had been much like this one: a ritual to open doors or lower barriers gone awry, opposing forces gathered. Cormac had stopped her—he’d been ready with one of those inexplicable spells. But he hadn’t been able to finish her off; in the end, she’d just left, or been taken, or banished herself.

  Zora stood staring at her, mouth open, unmoving. Disbelieving. She didn’t have a clue.

  Kumarbis, however, was attempting to recover some of his dignity. He climbed to his feet, clutching at his cassock, which had become twisted in the fall. “How dare you?” Kumarbis said. “How dare you?”

  The demon laughed, openmouthed, full-lunged. Like she thought this was hysterical.

  “Kumarbis, get down!” I hissed at him. Her spear was a length of sharpened wood, an ideal vampire-slaying weapon. He had to see that. He had to get away from her, but this cave had no damn cover. Only the door on the far end of the antechamber. We had to get out of here.

  The vampire ignored me. “Who sent you?” he demanded of the thing. As if he were still in control here.

  “You of all people should have some clue,” she said. “Kumarbis, is that what you’re calling yourself? You’ve been around such a long time … I can smell it on you.” Her nostrils flared, taking in the scent. “But you are still a traitor. You are all traitors.”

  Kumarbis turned on the magician. “Zora, what is this, what’s happening?” She could only shake her head, her mouth working wordlessly.

  I grabbed the vampire and shoved him toward the tunnel. I had to put my shoulders into it. How did such a wizened old guy get to be so heavy? “We have to get out of here, right now!”

  He resisted. “No, we must finish the ceremony, we’re so close!”

  Not a chance. Couldn’t he see the circle was already broken, the spell had already failed? Backfired, rather. Zora had successfully opened a door, but Roman wasn’t on the other side of it. He’d sent a proxy, one who couldn’t be killed by a shaft of wood.

  The demon arced the silver-laced sword toward me, and I scrambled away, waiting for the cut to bite into me, sure the strike would land. The walls were in the way, I had no place to go, and Wolf’s claws dug inside my skin.

  Enkidu and Sakhmet jumped at her in a beautiful, coordinated attack, Sakhmet tackling low and Enkidu grabbing for the demon’s throat. They hit at the same time, and she stumbled but didn’t fall. She should have fallen, with two lycanthropes crashing into her like that. But her feet spread out, and she kept her balance.

  “Watch it, her weapons are silver!” I shouted, and they both sprang away, agile enough to reverse course almost in midair. When the demon stabbed a dagger toward them—and when had she had time to draw that?—they were scrambling backward, out of range.

  We were spread out around the chamber now, and the demon circled, not willing to turn her back on anyone. Taking time to choose her next target.

  “Who is she?” Enkidu called to me. “How did she get here?”

  “I told you, you open a door to them, they can come through it, too,” I said.

  “That’s not Dux Bellorum,” he said.

  “No. But she works for the same guy he does.” The conversation was rapid, breathless. I was backing away, staying out of range of those silver-alloy blades.

  “The ritual—” Kumarbis panted, trying to catch enough breath to speak. “Where is Dux Bellorum?”

  “You flushed him,” I said. “He’s gone. You failed.”

  “No, we haven’t, we mustn’t, he’s here, he must be here—”

  The demon picked her target, and accompanied by another blast of inky wind lunged forward, drawing the spear back for a strike. Kumarbis was present enough to notice and managed to pull out some slick vampire moves, dodging aside too quickly for the eye to follow, shoving the demon out of his way and into the cave wall, springing into the center of the chamber, giving himself more room to maneuver. He glared at the demon like he was finally ready to fight.

  He grabbed up the coin from its place in the middle of the pentagram. The mummified dove had blown away.

  “I defeated Dux Bellorum once before,” he called to the demon. “I will do it again! Again and for all time!”

  “I don’t care,” the demon muttered and hefted her wooden spear for another strike.

  We needed a weapon, but what would work against an only semicorporeal demon? We needed to banish her—did Zora know how to do that? Not that she could do anything in her current state. Fallen to her knees, she clutched the box around her neck. Hard to access a computerized book of spells when you didn’t have your laptop. Not that she would have had a chance to sit down and read anything at the moment anyway. She seemed catatonic, staring in awe, unmoving. She had seen the unknowable and it had broken her. So that was what that looked like.

  I ran to her side and grabbed her shoulder, trying to shake her out of it. I must have looked like a monster, my teeth bared, eyes red with smoke.

  “Zora, she’s a demon, like in the stories, Faust and crap. You have to banish her. Do you have a spell for that? Can you banish her?”

  She seemed to wake up a little. “I didn’t … I didn’t summon anything—”

  “I know you didn’t, but can you banish her?”

  Eyes still round and shocky, she pawed at the amulets on her chest, picked one—a Maltese cross—then went to find her bag of supplies, which she’d left lying against the cave wall.

  Maybe she really could do it. We just had to hold out until then. I stood guard between her and the demon, hoping I could protect her long enough for her to do something. Hoping I could keep out of the way of those blades. I was back to the problem of weapons. As in, I needed one. I swallowed; my mouth was dry.

  Weapons, what weapons did we have besides rocks and bad intentions? That plastic tub with the tranquilizer gun—suddenly, I was intensely curious about whether a tranquilizer dart would work on a demon. Too bad the demon was standing between me, the doorway to the passage, and access to the gun. Shouting across to Enkidu, “Hey, why don’t you go get the gun,” would not do us a lick of good. The demon would only redirect her attack at him. And start guarding the doorway.

  I wondered if we could wear her down with continual harassment, like a pack of wolves nipping after a deer until the animal simply couldn’t run anymore. I had a feeling demons didn’t really get exhausted. I could go Wolf and just rip her throat out—if it weren’t for those sharp silver weapons. In addition to the sword and dagger, along with the spear tucked under her arm, she had more knives nested in sheaths on her belt. Unless we could get rid of the metal, the three of us lycanthropes were useless.

  Kumarbis was holding his own against the testing attacks she made, sparring at him, searching for a weakness. He was dodging, batting back, using vampiric strength, speed, and experience. Eventually, though, the demon would find that opening.

  This was all up to Zora. I hated that our lives depended on the crazy woman.

  “Zora…” I couldn’t help but prompt. She was still rummaging.

  Meanwhile, Sakhmet had grabbed a torch out of one of the scon
ces and swung it at the demon. The boundary of fire, a swoop of sparks falling outward from the torch, made the demon pause. Fire, of course—magical protections based on fire to keep her out had worked the last time.

  Sakhmet was also speaking in what might have been Arabic, some kind of prayer or chant. Protection against demons, maybe. I couldn’t tell if it was working. She seemed to be making some progress with the fire, though. She advanced, slashing, and the demon retreated. Kumarbis dashed forward and yanked the spear from her hand, tossing it out of her reach. The demon stabbed at him with a sword while grabbing another spear from her back, but the vampire lunged away. Sakhmet drove forward again, and the demon hissed in annoyance.

  Enkidu took another one of the torches and joined the were-lion, so they came at the demon from two sides, harrying her while she slashed at the torches and growled at them. She succeeded in knocking the torch out of Enkidu’s hands, but he rolled away from the blow and retrieved it with little trouble.

  It wasn’t just the flames that slowed down the demon; it was the light. The goggles. Maybe I could make this all go away. Leaving Zora, I circled, softly as I could, not attracting attention, to the demon’s back. Our attacker was occupied by the fire and Kumarbis’s harassment, which at this point was mostly verbal. Declarations about how dare she and so forth. He was rather less effective than the lycanthropes.

  The demon’s back was to me now. I planned my strike carefully, and my limbs were all but vibrating with anticipation. This was supremely dangerous, but if it worked—it had to work, we didn’t have a choice.

  Two steps to reach her, then I jumped on her leather-clad back, grabbing the last pair of spears bound there to help me get leverage when I reached to her head and yanked on the strap that secured the goggles. I fell back, rolling. The strap slipped easily over her spiky dark hair, and I hit the ground and ran hard until I came up against the wall.

  The demon shouted in fury, curses and threats of violence. I was damned. Yes, probably. She hunched over as if she’d been injured, and she dropped her spear to hold her hand tight over her eyes. I was right—she was effectively blind without the protection.

  The goggles in my hand were just goggles, made of leather and dark glass, held together with metal rivets and buckles. I wasn’t sure what I had expected. Maybe that they would turn to ash in my hand once separated from their owner.

  She didn’t stay incapacitated for long. Pulling another spear from her back, she was again fully armed, and when she turned to me, she had her eyes squeezed shut.

  “I can hear you gasping for breath, wolf,” she muttered. “I’ll kill you yet.”

  Assured, she came toward me. She could hear my breathing, and the more I tried to keep my adrenaline-fueled breaths quiet, the louder they sounded. If I tried holding my breath entirely, I’d just end up gasping like a gulping fish. When I moved out of her way, no matter how quietly I tried to step, my feet scraped on the stone, and she tilted her head, listening.

  “Hey! You!” Enkidu shouted from the other side of the cave, then threw a rock that hit the demon’s thigh. From a few feet away, Sakhmet tossed another, hitting her in the back, and the demon was suddenly on the defensive. They weren’t big rocks, just stones small enough to wrap a hand around and heft. They weren’t going to hurt her. But they definitely caught her attention, and she flinched away from the attack, turning to growl at her attackers. Instinctively, her eyes opened—and she cried out as the faint torchlight struck them, wincing them shut again.

  I only caught the briefest glimpse, but they were black as onyx all the way through, hard and gleaming.

  Scowling, clearly frustrated, she pulled out a piece of cloth from under her leather armor—undershirt of some kind—ripped off a long length of it, and tied it around her eyes. Blindfolded, she was still scary as hell.

  Apt phrasing, there.

  “Zora…” I murmured.

  Back on her side of the circle, the magician looked like she’d unpacked a New Age shop. Where had she been keeping all those boxes, bags, cords, candlesticks, candles, figurines, and chunks of crystal? She was going to throw everything at the demon.

  “I’m trying,” she murmured. She revealed a few more items: crosses, rosaries, the implements of someone preparing to perform an exorcism. Finally, with a decisive nod, she raised her hands and called out, “By the name and power of the Primeumaton, the Tetragrammaton, I curse you! I deprive you of your power, and bind you in the depth of the bottomless pit! Two times I curse you, deprive you of your power, and bind you in the depth of the bottomless pit! Thrice I curse you, deprive you of your power, and bind you in the depth of the bottomless pit!”

  The demon tilted her head, listening. Were the chants and curses affecting her? How could you tell if a wizard was doing her spells right? Zora picked up a cross in each hand, and her voice rose to a shout.

  “Munde dues virtuti tuae, in the name of the spirit of the world, in the name of God and all His angels, I do abjure thee, I do abjure thee, I do abjure thee! In the name of Cassiel, Sachiel, Samael, Michael, Anael…”

  Pulling out the big guns now, was she? She approached the demon, repeating the curses, as if she really could battle her back with words.

  And the demon laughed, which probably wasn’t a good sign. Worse, though, she was still here. Zora might have been doing everything right—and the spell just didn’t work.

  Now what?

  I smelled blood—whose, and where did it come from? Enkidu—a slash on his thigh, skin flapped open, dripping in streaks down his leg. What had made it, the wood weapon or the silver? I glared until I caught his gaze and shrugged a question. He waved me off. Since he was still upright, maybe he was okay. Next I checked on the magician, trying to figure out how to tell her her exorcism wasn’t working. But she already knew. She sat on the cave floor, her soot-streaked white robes spread around her, one hand on her frizzed blond hair, as if she had a headache.

  The demon tsked, shaking her head.

  We were at a standoff—the others couldn’t advance because of her weapons, and as long as we didn’t make noise, she couldn’t find us.

  Run. Wolf had been tumbling inside me for hours, ready to go as soon as I let her off her leash. I wasn’t ready to do that. But she had the right idea about running. I had a plan. It wasn’t a very good one, but it was the one I had. Trouble was, I couldn’t communicate it to the others with the demon listening. Her hearing was too good. Which left the question: could I somehow pantomime what I was thinking to Enkidu and Sakhmet? Well, I could try.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Hey, you!” I stuck my hands on my hips and tried to act angry, and also coolheaded. Angry wasn’t hard. Avoiding panic, that was tough. I asked, “Do you even have a name?”

  She cocked her head, blind, listening.

  “Yeah, that’s right, I’m telling you where I am,” I continued. “Go ahead, track me down. But hear me out first, just for a minute.”

  While I talked, I caught Sakhmet’s gaze and gestured out the chamber and back up the tunnel. When she furrowed her brow and looked at me questioning, I gestured harder, a quick shooing motion—as softly as I could, while talking to the demon, holding her attention.

  Finally, Sakhmet understood. While I was making all the noise, they could get out. They had to understand we weren’t going to kill the demon, or destroy her, or whatever. We weren’t going to win this hunt. But they could run. The were-lion grabbed Enkidu’s arm and pulled him back. Enkidu was limping. I kept talking.

  “I’ve got your goggles,” I said, dangling them on a finger. “You want ’em back? I want some information. Where’s Dux Bellorum?”

  She hesitated, considering. I kept calling her a demon because she seemed so huge, taller even than Enkidu, with the strength of an army. She seemed to fill the chamber. But she was so human, appearing to be a white woman with a graceful jawline, her thin lips turned up now in a smile.

  “He’s safe,” she said.

  Evasive, devoid of in
formation. Except that they were connected, somehow. “Is he, now. Because you were sent to defend him?”

  “I was sent to destroy you.”

  “By whom?” I had to keep asking the question.

  “I’m not going to tell you.”

  “Then you don’t get your goggles back.”

  She chuckled. “You weren’t going to give them back anyway.”

  I actually hadn’t decided that. She was equally effective with or without the goggles; it didn’t make a difference. I was waving frantically at Zora, and some clarity seemed to settle on her gaze—she actually saw me, and nodded. She crept around the circle, carefully, without a sound, and took the hand that I stretched out to her.

  “I don’t want to fight,” I said, scattering meaningless words, spending them to buy time. My own ceremonial incantation. “Our ritual failed, we’re all very aware of that. Just let us go.”

  “You’ll try again unless I stop you.”

  I looked around at our bruised and soot-covered faces, Zora’s numb look of shock, Kumarbis’s stark, open-mouthed despair. “I don’t think we will.”

  “Then I will kill you all for being traitors.”

  She’d said that the last time I confronted her, she’d said it to Kumarbis. Her targets were vampires and lycanthropes, because they were traitors, but she hadn’t explained then, any more than she was likely to now.

  My confusion showed. “Traitors—to what? How?”

  “To your kind.”

  Which just frustrated me. She wanted to kill us because we weren’t the monsters we were supposed to be? Fuck that. Time to go.

  Sakhmet and Enkidu still hadn’t left—what was holding them up?

  Kumarbis. Enkidu was gesturing at Kumarbis, trying to get the vampire to look at him and follow him out of the cave. Kumarbis wasn’t having it, instead focusing on the demon with this look of blank fatalism. Like someone watching his longtime home burn to the ground.