Kitty Goes to War

by Carrie Vaughn

  “Somebody has to, I suppose,” Cormac said, calm as ever. I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

  Ben held out his hand. “Why don’t you give that to me, just in case your parole officer happens to wander by.” Cormac handed him the gun without arguing.

  “Were you really going to shoot me?” I said.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “You looked like you were going to shoot me.”

  His frown was long suffering. “I didn’t shoot you. Why are we even talking about this?”

  I didn’t know, so I turned away, still in a huff, still on edge. Ben was watching us, looking amused.

  “We need to find Becky,” I said to him.

  “Don’t you think you should clean up first?” He looked me over.

  I was still drenched in blood. The wounds had clotted and itched now rather than hurt; they were already healing. But yeah, I should probably change clothes.

  “Kitty, are you all right?” Shumacher marched toward us, away from where Stafford and his men were checking over the knots securing the wolves.

  “Do they have enough room to shift back?” I said, looking past her to the captured wolves. “Now that they’re asleep they’re going to start shifting back.”

  “We’ll have them out of the nets before then,” Shumacher assured me. “What about you?”

  Yeah, the covered-in-blood thing, right. “I’m fine,” I muttered.

  She seemed doubtful, wincing in sympathy but also curious. She wasn’t looking at me, but was studying the wounds, the rows of claw marks streaking my arm. If she watched long enough she’d see the skin close over as the wounds healed. I self-consciously tucked my arm in and held it protectively.

  Shumacher said, “Kitty, what happened here? What’s your assessment of them?”

  I didn’t want to say. I was worried. I’d dealt with some pretty messed-up werewolves before, but never ones this strong and this far gone. I wasn’t sure they’d be much more likely to talk once they were human. I wasn’t sure they wanted to be human. If they didn’t want to be human, but they couldn’t control their wolf sides, where did they belong?

  Finally I said, “I want to talk to them as people. See how much they really want help.”

  “Would you do that? Would you come to talk to them?”

  I couldn’t say no.

  A rhythmic thumping sounded in the distance. Ben and I heard it first and looked up and around.

  “Is that a helicopter?” Ben said.

  “Colonel Stafford called it in to carry the squad back to Fort Carson.”

  They really had this worked out, didn’t they?

  “Kitty, thank you,” Shumacher said, before the craft’s pounding engine made talking too difficult. “This has been a huge help. I’ll call you.” She went to join Stafford to help with the prisoner transport. I kept thinking of them as prisoners.

  Ben, Cormac, and I started the hike back to our car. I was glum and scratching at the blood on my arm. I’d have to stop off somewhere to get cleaned up. I thought I had a change of clothes in the car. That would help.

  “These are the kinds of werewolves I went after,” Cormac said. “They can’t control themselves. They’re monsters. You can’t argue with that.”

  I couldn’t. “You’d advocate just putting silver bullets in them and being done with it. That seems like a crappy homecoming after everything they’ve been through.”

  We walked a dozen more yards, picking our way through the woods.

  “I bet you Flemming knew,” Cormac said finally. “I bet you could look through his notes and find out that he expected this to happen. That you could use werewolves as soldiers and maybe they’d be great, invincible, bloodthirsty, whatever. But you’d ruin them for anything else. They’d never be human again. I’m guessing Flemming knew that and that getting rid of those soldiers was part of his plan.”

  And again, I couldn’t argue. Not just because I’d met Flemming and knew that his plans never took individual fates into account. But because the whole government bureaucracy was like that and Flemming had been, if nothing else, a government bureaucrat. “Well, Flemming sucks.”

  Back at the car, we didn’t talk much. I found a roll of paper towels and a bottle of water to wash off the worst of the mess. I made sure I had the backpack with Becky’s clothes, then we went in search of Becky.

  As I’d hoped, she was at our usual den, tucked into a hillside in the mountains west of Denver. She was still a wolf, curled up and asleep. She must have just gotten here. She didn’t seem to be hurt. I made Ben and Cormac wait back in the car.

  Approaching her from upwind, I moved slowly. She’d catch my scent, maybe even hear me, and I hoped she wouldn’t be startled. She’d stay asleep and slip back to her human form. Then we could all go home.

  When I was still a dozen feet away, she started awake, bracing on four legs like she was ready to run.

  “Shh, shh, it’s okay. It’s just me. I’m just going to hang out and keep watch, okay?” I said, staying low, staying calm. Becky eased, tension leaving her spine, the fur on her back flattening. She crept forward until she was next to me and nuzzled my shoulder, and I breathed into the fur of her neck. She smelled scared and tired. I couldn’t blame her. “It’s okay, we’re all okay,” I murmured.

  She circled once then curled up again, nose to tail, and went to sleep. I sat with her, my hand resting on her back, and waited.

  After a time, maybe half an hour or so, the flesh and muscle under my hand began to shift. I drew away, and almost couldn’t watch as her body seemed to melt, her bones losing shape, molding into something else. Bit by bit, fur vanished and skin emerged. This happened to me every month; I’d watched it happen to others often enough, but I still had a disconnect: I still had trouble imagining this happening to me. I didn’t like to picture it.

  At last, Becky was back, a human shape, naked and tucked into a fetal position. I looked her over—any wounds she had were already healed. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully enough.

  I let her sleep for another half hour before gently squeezing her shoulder. “Hey, Becky.”

  She moaned a little, then sat up all at once, fully alert, looking around as if she expected an attack.

  “It’s okay, we’re alone out here, everything’s fine,” I said, trying to sound calm.

  The memory must have come back to her, because she groaned in annoyance and ran hands through her hair. After looking around a moment, squinting sleepily into the trees above, she rubbed her arms and legs, and hugged herself. Feeling the shape of her own body, bringing herself to the here and now.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Don’t ever ask me to do something like that again,” she said, glaring. “Those guys were—” She shuddered, then just shook her head. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Carl wasn’t even that bad.”

  “Carl didn’t do tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan on top of being a pissed-off werewolf,” I said. Carl was the old alpha male of our pack. He’d had something of a temper.

  “So what’s going to happen to them?”

  “I don’t know. I’m afraid Colonel Stafford may just lock them up and throw away the key.”

  “You don’t think maybe that would be for the best?”

  It might end up being the best of a bunch of really bad solutions. But it didn’t seem fair. This wasn’t what they’d signed up for when Gordon recruited them for his little independent project. I kept forgetting that life wasn’t fair. I kept trying to make it fair. I said, “I guess I’d like them to at least have a chance.” A chance to decide, a chance to get their lives back, if they wanted them.

  That alpha. Vanderman. I wanted to look him in the eyes as a human—see if there was anything human left in there.

  “Do you have my clothes?” Becky said after a moment.

  I handed her my backpack, and she sighed gratefully.

  We didn’t say much on the drive back. Ben drove, Cormac sat in the passenger seat
, and from the backseat Becky kept giving him furtive glances. When we reached her apartment in Littleton, she fled the car quickly, barely saying good-bye.

  We drove on, and I leaned forward. “Do all the girls run from you like that?”

  Cormac just glared.

  “Is she okay?” Ben said, giving both me and Cormac long-suffering glances.

  “I think so,” I said. “She’s a little shaken up.”

  “And what about you?”

  I had to think about it a minute, which said something right there. I put on a good face. “It takes a little more than a couple of insane werewolves to scare me these days.”

  “So they’re insane,” Ben said.

  “Not really,” I said, at the same time Cormac said, “Yeah.” We glanced at each other.

  “But we’re done now, right? You did what they asked, our territory’s not being invaded anymore, and we don’t have to deal with those guys, right?” Ben said.

  That would be too easy. I looked out the window and grimaced.

  “You’re not agreeing with me,” Ben said.

  “I want to talk to them.”

  “Talking fixes everything,” Cormac grumbled.

  “Kitty,” Ben said, “this isn’t somebody calling in to your show because they have a hangnail. This, it’s too . . . too—”

  “Too big?” I said. “Think I can’t handle it?”

  “That’s not what I said,” he muttered. We looked at each other in the rearview mirror. “I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

  I didn’t want me to get hurt, either. “I have to try.”

  “I know.” His thin smile said, look, see, I’m trying to be supportive. Even though I was afraid that he was right, and that I’d be better off walking away and not worrying about the fates of the three men. But then I’d always wonder.

  Chapter 6

  THE NEXT morning I called Dr. Shumacher to set up an appointment to talk to her patients. That afternoon, I returned to the hospital at Fort Carson.

  Shumacher, clipboard in hand, led me to the elevator, and we descended to a basement level, all concrete and fluorescent lights. Flemming’s basement office and laboratory at the NIH in Washington, D.C. had looked a little like this, tucked away and secretive, promising dark secrets I’d rather not discover. The hospital smell, antiseptic and haunted, was pervasive and inspired anxiety. Intellectually, I could rationalize that hospitals were good places where people got better. But on a gut level, hospitals meant people were hurt. I braced for horrors.

  Several doors along the hallway were open, showing infirmaries, hospital beds, storage closets, laboratories. It was a little comforting; this was all normal, nothing to be frightened of here. Then we came to the closed door at the end of the hall. Shumacher put her hand on the knob and gave me a grim look. Maybe a look of warning. Or a look of despair—she was at the end of her options.

  She opened the door, and I followed her inside.

  The room was large, all off-white walls and tile, sterile government issue. The lights in the ceiling were dimmed. A few chairs were placed facing a Plexiglas wall that divided the room. The back of the space, maybe fifteen by twenty feet, was a specialized prison. I recognized the Flemming-designed werewolf holding cell: silver shavings embedded in the paint on the walls, giving them a dull patina. A silver-lined door was cut into the Plexiglas, along with a silver-lined slot to shove food through. Theoretically, a werewolf was strong enough to break down the walls, given time and patience. But most werewolves would stay as far away from the silver boundary as possible.

  The three men in the cell had, in fact, positioned themselves away from the walls. They’d been given clothes, fortunately. I was afraid they hadn’t been, that their keepers had entirely given up on thinking of them as human. More encouragingly, the men were bothering to wear the clothes. On the other hand, they had beards started, and their military crew cuts had turned shaggy.

  I recognized Joseph Tyler, who sat on the floor, hunched over, his back to the door, apparently asleep. Or maybe just indifferent. He wore fatigue pants and a T-shirt, like when I’d seen him before.

  In the middle of the cell, a smaller white guy lay on his side, curled up, definitely asleep. I recognized Sergeant Ethan Walters from his picture. I was used to seeing werewolves wake up after shifting looking just like that, in a shape that recalled a sleeping wolf, fetal, limbs tucked in. But he was wearing pants. So maybe he just slept like that all the time. I’d pegged him as the weakest of the three, at least as far as the pecking order went. It may have been that he was just the most vulnerable, the farthest gone, the one needing the most help. I tried to be sympathetic, even though he’d been the one to attack Becky. I still wanted to beat him up for that.

  The third soldier paced the window in front of me, back and forth. He kept his gaze outward, to the door, even as he changed direction. Back and forth, about five steps one way and five steps the other. The neurotic habit of a caged predator. He’d worn a clean streak on the tile floor with his pacing. I’d never seen him in this form, but I knew him by his movements, by the rage in his eyes, a focused burning. I could feel the force of it almost as soon as I entered the room. This was the alpha male, the huge shadow wolf. Sergeant Luke Vanderman. He was in his late twenties, over six feet tall and more than solid. Forged and tempered. He went shirtless, showing off a sculpted chest, shadowed with brown hair.

  He was more than a little impressive. I didn’t know whether to tremble in fear or in awe. Now there’s an alpha . . . Down, girl.

  When Dr. Shumacher moved aside and I came into sight, Vanderman lunged forward. He all but pressed himself to the glass, his teeth bared. His right hand slapped against the partition, his fingers bent into claws.

  If I had flinched, if I had stepped back, it would have been all over. I’d never have been able to talk to him. But somehow I held my ground. My heart was racing, and Vanderman would be able to hear it, be able to smell the anxiety in the sweat breaking out on me, the ventilation system drawing my scent into his cell. But I didn’t look away, I didn’t slouch, didn’t cringe. My tail, only imaginary at the moment, stayed up.

  I just kept thinking that I had faced worse than this. And there was that wall between us.

  When he hit the window, Tyler looked. Walters sat up, his gaze wary. Tyler turned to face me and his eyes widened. I gave him a thin smile. He seemed shocked to see me.

  “I know you,” the alpha sergeant said. His voice was low, threatening, as if he was talking through clenched teeth.

  “Yeah. We met.” I tried to stick to my soothing talk-radio-host voice. My NPR voice. “It’s nice to finally talk to you.”

  “What do you want?”

  “To help,” I said, but it sounded kind of vague and lame. Help how?

  “Maybe she’s a bribe,” said Walters. He crouched now, balanced on his fingertips, ready to spring. He watched me, his lips parted, and I’d have sworn he was drooling. “We get some ass, calm us down—”

  “Grow up, Walters,” Tyler said.

  “Is that why you’re here?” Vanderman said. Growled. He looked like he was going to burst out of his skin any minute.

  “Nobody is touching my ass,” I said.

  “Sounds like a dare,” he said, lips parting in a hungry smile. He leaned right up to the wall, his breath fogging the glass.

  “I’m just here to talk. Werewolf to werewolf.”

  “Bitch.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He snarled and returned to pacing. Back and forth, glaring at me the whole time.

  “Sergeant, we can’t release you until we’re sure you’re not going to be a threat to yourself and others,” Shumacher said, entirely scientific and rational.

  Vanderman slammed against the Plexiglas, pounding it with hands bent like claws, as if he could scratch his way through and get to her.

  Startled, she stepped back, fear rattling through her. Vanderman was the boss here and everyone knew it. He’d kill Shumacher
if the wall wasn’t there.

  Calmly, I stepped between Shumacher and Vanderman, blocking his view of her. Protecting her, showing that he’d have to go through me to get her. He was a bully, and I’d dealt with bullies before.

  “Could you leave us alone for a few minutes?” I said over my shoulder to Shumacher.

  “Are you sure?” She clung to her clipboard like it was a shield.

  “I’ll be fine, and I’m sure you have a million closed-circuit cameras in here, so you’re not going to miss anything, right?”

  “Call if you need anything,” she said. She pressed her lips in a frown and left, heels clicking on tile.

  The door closed behind her, and the air went out of the room, as if we were now vacuum sealed.

  For a second I panicked. What the hell did I say to these guys? What could I possibly say that they’d take seriously? But they weren’t just badass Green Berets who’d been through a hell I couldn’t imagine. They were baby wolves without their alpha. They’d been floundering since Gordon was killed.

  Tyler faced me now. “Captain Gordon didn’t tell us there were any female werewolves.”

  Vanderman pointed at him. “Don’t talk to her.”

  “I imagine Gordon didn’t tell you a lot of things,” I said. They were just babies. I’d talked down baby wolves before. That was how I’d have to approach them. “Sergeant Vanderman, what do you want?”

  “I want to rip out your throat after I fuck you hard,” he said.

  “Okay, that’s helpful,” I said, sarcastic. “Now I want to hear from your human side. Ignore your wolf for a minute and tell me what you really want.”

  “Maybe that is my human side,” he said, baring teeth. And yeah, maybe he was right. He wouldn’t be the world’s first misogynistic homicidal bastard. I couldn’t forget, he’d already killed three of his own teammates.

  I smiled. “Then I get to tell Colonel Stafford to pull the trigger on you guys.”

  They cringed. All of them. Even Vanderman, and I thought I knew why—at some level, their human sides were still observing the army chain of command. Stafford had power over them and they knew it.