Kitty Goes to War

by Carrie Vaughn

“If you’re going to live in my territory, you need to live by my rules. We can give you a safe place to spend your full moons. We can help you cope. But you have to do your part to keep the peace. You must help when I call on you. Don’t cause trouble.”

  “I don’t want any trouble,” Tyler said. “I . . . I just want to come home.”

  “I know. Sometimes it doesn’t always work out that way.”

  “I need help,” he said. “Can you help?” His voice was bleak, tight with sadness, like he expected Christopher to say no and send him away. I would take him back to Denver, I would let him into my pack, he had to know that. But this was home to him, before he’d gone away and traveled through hell.

  Sarah looked up at Christopher, her lips pressed into a line, as if she wanted to say something but was waiting for him. We were all looking at him, waiting for a response. His expression was thoughtful.

  “I think we can,” Christopher said. Tyler bowed his head and sighed. I let out my breath, too.

  Ben took my hand and squeezed. “I think it’s time we go.”

  He was right. We’d done what we came here to do, delivered our charge to his new home, and done it peacefully. And now we were invading someone else’s territory. Christopher and Sarah probably would have let us stay for a visit, maybe even given us the tour of Seattle if we’d asked. But making a clean break seemed like the thing to do. Let Tyler join his new pack without us around to divide his loyalties.

  When Tyler looked at me, he had an expression I’d never seen on him—the tension was gone and he smiled. He was relieved. “Kitty. Thank you.”

  “I’m not sure I did all that much. I think you’d have been okay eventually.”

  “But it’s been nice having a cheerleader around telling me that,” he said.

  We hugged tight, cheeks to ears. And I let him go. After shaking hands with Ben, he moved forward to his new pack. Sarah took his arm, held his hand, and led him to the others. One at a time, they touched him, putting their scent on him, adding his scent to theirs. I heard names, introductions, and Tyler smiled through it all.

  I turned back to Christopher. “Be careful with him. He’s had a rough time.”

  “Is that a warning?”

  “No. I don’t know. I just don’t know what your next step is, and he’s not really ready to be on his own.” I didn’t want Tyler to ever think he was alone, to fall into that hopeless place again.

  Christopher shrugged. “A bunch of us will probably head to my place, grill some steaks, sit around and talk.”

  I brightened. “Hey, that’s how I’d handle it.”

  Ben put his hand on my back. “She’s always worried that she’s doing the pack alpha thing wrong.”

  “The way I look at it, if no one’s flying off the handle and getting killed, you’re doing it right,” he said. “If it makes you feel better, call me any time. If you want to check up on Joseph, or just to talk.”

  “Thanks.” And my network got a little bigger, which made me feel a little better. I turned to Ben. “Ready to go?”

  “Yeah, that sounds good.”

  Christopher offered his hand then, and we both shook it in turn, like normal human beings. We could pretend to be regular people.

  Ben and I drove south and east for a couple of hundred miles, until the knots in our shoulders faded, and we could step outside the car and not smell foreign wolves. We got a room at a motel near Boise, to sleep for a few hours.

  Ben and I lay on top of the bed, leaning against each other, still in our clothes, too tired to move, too wired to sleep. I was at that stage of exhaustion where closing my eyes hurt. My body still vibrated from the road. Ben must have felt the same; he stared at the TV, flipping channels slowly, rhythmically, without seeming to comprehend what he was looking at.

  I was thinking too much to really take in what was on TV. Settling more firmly against Ben’s shoulder, I started rambling.

  “I’ve been thinking about history,” I said. “Werewolf soldiers aren’t a new thing. So I’m wondering where else they’ve shown up. What other wars. If we peeled back the veneer, what else would we find?”

  “I sense a research project coming on,” Ben said. Flip, news show. Flip, sports channel. Flip, a twenty-year-old movie I couldn’t remember the name of.

  How would I even begin such a project? The evidence would be circumstantial: military units or individuals with a reputation for aggression, viciousness, and for possessing supernatural abilities. Bloody battles happening on nights of the full moon. How intriguing. There had to be a way to find out.

  “Do you think Tyler’s going to be okay?” I asked after another five minutes.

  “Eventually,” Ben said. “I think he’s going to be living one day at a time for a while.”

  Yeah. I knew how that went. I sighed. “I wonder if this is what it’s like to send a kid to college.”

  Not that I was ever going to find out what that was like for real. But I could imagine: a mix of pride and sadness. Was Tyler going to be all right? Would he write?

  I couldn’t have children—no female lycanthrope could because embryos didn’t survive shape-shifting. Some days, I thought I had no business even thinking of having kids, the way my life went. The late hours, the supernatural politics, the death-defying, injury-producing escapes. I could hear the phone call now: “Hi, Mom? Could you look after Junior while I chase a rogue werewolf across half the state?” And who would look after a baby on full-moon nights? So maybe it was just as well.

  It still made me sad. I could find a way. I could adopt, I could hire a baby-sitter. I’d made the rest of my life work pretty well, hadn’t I? I wiped my eyes before the tears could start.

  “Hey,” Ben said. “You okay?”

  I felt stupid. Whiney, needy, and stupid. I ought to be able to cope without dumping all this on Ben. And I knew what he’d say to that: who else could I talk to, if not him?

  “Do you think I’d be a good mother?” I said.

  He glanced at me. Then he shut off the TV and set the remote aside. “That’s a bigger question than you’re making it sound.” I must have frowned, because he put his arms around me. “I think you’d be an excellent mother. You’d drive your kids crazy, but you’d do it excellently.”

  “Really?” I said.

  He grabbed me, one hand lacing into my hair, the other settling on my hip, and pulled me into a long, startling kiss. And then some. And then some more, before we both came up gasping for air. I had on a silly grin.

  “Really,” he said.

  Suddenly, being too wired to sleep seemed like a good thing.

  Read on for a sneak peek at the all-new novel

  by Carrie Vaughn

  Discord’s Apple

  Available now in hardcover from Tor Books

  EVIE STAYED up late that night, tucked half under the covers of the guest bed, laptop perched on her lap, amazingly enough, and delved into the adventures of the Eagle Eye Commandos.

  A hard wind blew, rattling the window panes. The Eagle Eye story line turned back and forth in her head—there was always so much more than she could get into a script: thoughts, expression, the little pieces of the characters’ backgrounds that might come into play at certain moments. She wrote novels in her head and grew frustrated that she hadn’t yet found the patience to put a novel to paper.

  She couldn’t sleep.

  She went to the kitchen to find some tea or a glass of water and passed the doorway to the basement.

  When her grandparents lived in the house, the basement had been off-limits. She could play anywhere in the yard, read any of the books—fascinating fairy stories and ancient histories—on the dozens of shelves in the living room, but the basement was for grown-ups. When she was old enough to think about it, she assumed that meant power tools and cleaning solvents. By the time her father moved into the house, she was out of college and never spent more than a weekend at a time there and never took much interest in the basement.

  Now
she assumed that the prohibition no longer applied.

  A bare bulb hanging from the ceiling lit the stairs. The basement was unfinished, framework and heating ducts exposed, a second room blocked off with bare drywall. At the foot of the stairs was a workroom with a rack of tools, a table saw, and a nebulous unfinished woodworking project propped against a set of metal shelves.

  In the middle of the drywall at one end of the workroom was a closed door.

  Stocking-footed, robe wrapped around her T-shirt and bare legs, she crept down the stairs to that door and opened it.

  It was a storage room: shelves crammed with troves of objects, crates stacked as high as the ceiling, boxes piled to create the narrow walkways of a maze through a room whose edges were lost in darkness. The air smelled dusty, with a bite of cold seeping from the cracked concrete floor.

  She looked for a light switch or a cord dangling from a ceiling bulb, but couldn’t find anything. Back in the workroom, she retrieved a flashlight, then entered the storage area, feeling like she was spelunking.

  She couldn’t see much in the beam of light: the shadows and angles of boxes, tarps draped over a few corners, forming weird lurking shapes. She felt six years old again, on an adventure in her own house simply because she was sneaking around past midnight.

  Passing the flashlight beam back and forth, she identified some items: a thick hammer, like a sledgehammer, on a short handle, the wood shiny from use; an old-fashioned broom, brush stalks wrapped around a dark staff; a cup made of chipped clay; a sheepskin folded on a shelf. In the flashlight’s sickly glow, the fleece looked yellow, shiny almost. No dust dulled it, even though it must have lain there for years. She ran her hand over it. It felt soft, fresh, and sent a charge up her arm, a static shock.

  All the objects looked antique, archaic and out of place, but none of them looked old. On the next shelf over, she found a musical instrument, strings on a vertical frame. Not a harp, but a lyre. She plucked a string. It gave back a clear tone. She bet it was still in tune. The note seemed to echo. She shivered.

  This was a museum. The stuff here must have been worth a fortune. Her grandparents might have gathered such a collection over the course of their lives. But why hadn’t anyone told Evie about it?

  A stack of papers rested on the shelf by the door. Hoping it was some kind of inventory, something that might tell her what exactly all this was, she picked up the pages and leafed through them. The handwriting on them belonged to her mother, Emma. These were the loose-leaf pages she made her notes on. Emma Walker had been a travel writer, mostly articles for magazines. It was a hobby she’d maneuvered into a part-time career. Evie supposed she’d learned to write from her, though she’d taken the impulse in an entirely different direction.

  Emma had been in Seattle doing research when she died.

  The first page was a description of a garden. Evie couldn’t guess where or when; it didn’t have a label. It didn’t matter. The pages held her mother’s voice. Evie put them back on the shelf, where they looked out of place and lonely.

  She left the room, closing the door softly, as if an infant slept inside. It was precious, wondrous. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end.

  She made tea and sat at the kitchen table with a pen and sheet of paper to write longhand, which she hadn’t done in ages. It helped sometimes, making the words physical. Not much story happened. Mostly, she made lists, character sketches, snippets of description for if, when, she ever got around to writing the novel.

  She was asleep with her head on the kitchen table when her father emerged for breakfast in the morning.

  “Trouble sleeping?” he said, standing on the other side of the table, amused.

  Stretching the kinks out of her back and neck, she rubbed her face. “Yeah. No. I don’t know, I just meant to get some tea.” She didn’t remember falling asleep; her body still felt like it was midnight.

  “It was the wind blowing last night. Rattles the whole house. It kept me awake, too.” He didn’t act like it. He was already dressed for the day. He poured a glass of orange juice and drank it while he pulled his coat from the rack by the door.

  She wanted to ask him about the storeroom, but realized he was getting ready to go out. “Where are you going?”

  “I’ve got a Watch shift this morning.” He was on the local Citizens’ Watch, had been since her mother died. The local police didn’t have enough people to man the checkpoints and continue their usual workload. Citizens’ Watch took up the slack.

  “Are you sure—I mean, are you sure you should still be doing that? I didn’t think you’d still—”

  “I’m not dead yet,” he said cheerfully.

  “But what if something happens?”

  “Nothing’s going to happen.”

  “But—”

  “Evie, I plan to keep things as normal as possible for as long as I can. I like the Watch. It gets me out. I’ve got everyone in town looking out for me. I’ll be fine.”

  This was like when she was in high school, with her parents standing in the kitchen listing all the reasons she shouldn’t go out after the game, with all the drunks on the road, and her insisting that she’d be fine.

  He put the empty glass in the sink. He’d reached the door when he looked back and said, “You want to come along?”

  “I should try to get some work done. I don’t want to leave Bruce hanging.”

  “I’ll see you after lunch then.”

  “Dad?”

  He hesitated, hand on the doorknob.

  “I went downstairs last night.” She let that hang for a moment, waiting for him to offer a response, wondering what he would say without her prompting him.

  “Oh?” was all he said.

  She wet her lips and tried again. “The storeroom—has the stuff in there ever been catalogued? Do you have any idea what all is down there? What it’s worth? You could have your own antique show.”

  A slow, wry smile grew on his lips, and the look in his eye told her before he even spoke that he wasn’t going to answer her question.

  “I’ll see you this afternoon,” he said, then was gone.

  Figured. Though she wondered why a roomful of antiques demanded such deep, dark secrecy. Had someone in their family’s history been a master thief? Run a pawn shop in the last century and never bothered to sell off the assets? Was a budding museum curator? At least he hadn’t gotten angry at her for invading the forbidden storeroom.

  She set up her laptop in the living room, on the coffee table, and sat on the hardwood floor in her robe and stocking feet. She’d shower and change later. Who did she have to impress?

  Curled up in the middle of the carpet, napping politely, Mab kept her company. When Evie got up for a glass of water or to stretch her muscles, Mab always looked at her, ears cocked, alert. When Evie relaxed, so did Mab. Evie worked up the courage to scratch the dog’s ears; Mab acknowledged the attention with a couple of thumps of her tail. Her father must have kept the stray dog for company.

  Bruce had already e-mailed her sketches of the new pages. He must have been up all night, too. Once colored, the Cessna explosion was going to be spectacular. He had it covering a two-page spread.

  So, what to write next. They had a formula that demanded a certain number of shots fired each issue, and she was in danger of running short. She needed a battle scene.

  The crew barreled across the tundra in a stolen Jeep, racing against an execution order sent out for one of the men they were supposed to rescue. The Blackhawk was out of commission for now—sabotage in the fuel tank. The Russians were supposed to be helping them, but someone on the inside didn’t want them to succeed. A three-way battle ensued, no one was sure who was siding with whom.

  Usually, Evie wrote things like “chase scene” and “fight,” and let Bruce’s capable imagination construct the details in four-color panels that splashed across entire pages.

  But something about this battle tickled her story instincts. Throw out a clue, a hook
that could carry the plot to the next issue. An enemy chopper ran them down. Matchlock managed to steer them into a gully and under cover, but not before Talon saw a face he swore he knew, a man he thought he had left behind to die in the arctic years before. Talon had had to make a decision—stay to save his platoon-mate, or leave and ensure the success of the mission. Talon had abandoned him. The memory still haunted him.

  And there the issue ended, centered on the expression of stark disbelief on Talon’s face.

  Next issue: He’ll want to follow the enemy chopper. He’ll want to learn what had happened to his friend, how he’d survived. Tracker argues with him. Her mind is on the spy imprisoned in Siberia. On the mission. She’ll go alone if she has to, she’ll defy him—

  Someone knocked on the door.

  _______________________

  Copyright © 2010 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC