Kitty Saves the World

by Carrie Vaughn

“What happened to New Moon?” I asked. “And where’s my pack?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I slammed my hands onto the table. “What happened to New Moon? What do you know?”

  The two women flinched at the noise, stared at me, and snuggled closer to Angelo, as if he’d protect them.

  His expression changed, donning smarm, an oily smile and a lazy, half-lidded gaze. Like cuddling babes was more important than my place burning down.

  As expected, he wrinkled his nose, presumably at my unshowered odor wafting across the table. “Are you well? You appear to be having a rough time of it.”

  “Angelo, talk to me, dammit.”

  He drawled, “I don’t know why you expect me to—”

  “Stop it. Just—” I put my hands to my eyes, squeezed, counted to ten while Wolf settled back under my ribs rather than jumping over the table to rip his throat out. Out of the corners of my eyes I saw the two women vampires approaching slowly, watching for another outburst. One of the suited vampires was coming up on the other side. I might be able to fight and duck my way past any one of them, but not all of them. “Can we just have a conversation? No posturing, no posing, no accusations. I just … I come home to find my bar burned to the ground and I kind of hoped you might know something about that.”

  He must have practiced that smile. “I’m afraid I don’t,” he said. One of the girls giggled.

  And that was that. What was I supposed to do now? I could whine—Rick would have talked to me, no problem. If Angelo knew something, I deserved to know. But he had all the power. Or he thought he did.

  I said, “Mercedes Cook is dead. Dux Bellorum isn’t.”

  His expression dropped, just like that. The arrogant dismissal turned to openmouthed terror. I couldn’t help being pleased about that.

  He took a long drink of blood from the glass, licked his lips, and shoved the women away from him. “Go, go.”

  Very inelegantly, for him, he scooted out of the booth after them. Not that there was an elegant way to scoot out of a booth—that was why these guys always made sure they were well situated before anyone saw them.

  He waved off his bodyguards. “You can’t be here,” he said, grabbing my arm.

  “Angelo, what’s the matter?”

  Wrenching my arm, he dragged me toward the front entrance. What was it with vampires manhandling me tonight?

  “Angelo, wait, stop—” Growling, I dug in my heels and jerked back. He didn’t let go, but he stopped.

  He brought his face close to mine. “You don’t understand. You’ve lost. I don’t know how to make it any clearer to you, but you’ve lost. You need to leave.”

  “Where’s my pack? What have you done with my wolves?”

  He was scared; his hand on my arm was trembling. “I can’t say.”

  I bared my teeth. I didn’t care how many vampires were here, I was going to go for his throat in a second. “Angelo—”

  “Leave Denver. Go to ground. You’re finished here.”

  I stared at him wonderingly. “No.” A simple, stupid word. My turn to use it as a brick wall.

  “Then I can’t help you.”

  “Will you please tell me—”

  He shoved me through the door and into the waiting arms of the bouncer outside. Braun was tight-lipped and avoided Angelo’s gaze. They would probably be having a conversation later about how I’d gotten past him. Sucks to be him.

  Angelo stalked back inside. So he didn’t want to talk. Fine. I’d figure this out without him.

  I spotted Ben trotting up the sidewalk, gaze narrowed and lips pulled back, ready for an attack. But Braun let me go, with an encouraging little shove toward the street. He crossed his arms and blocked the way back in. I headed Ben off, taking his hand to let him know everything was okay. But I wasn’t done with Braun.

  “What’s got Angelo so spooked?” I said to the bouncer. Because the worst he could tell me was nothing, and I was getting used to that.

  He turned to look at the door, after Angelo rather than at me. “I don’t think he knows what he’s doing,” he said. I bit my tongue, just in case he kept talking. “He never wanted to be in charge. He never wanted to be Master.” He gave a deep sigh, which for a vampire had to be purposeful and expressive. Normally, they didn’t have to breathe at all. “I miss Rick.”

  That was a hell of a confession.

  “Do you know what happened at New Moon? Who’s got their claws into him?”

  He glanced at me, startled. I carefully didn’t look back. Somebody did have their claws, fangs, whatever, in Angelo. I’d just made a guess.

  He gave a curt nod to the door where Angelo had been. “He ought to be asking, What did you do? New Moon—that was retribution.”

  “Yeah. Figured.” I started walking off before he could tell me to leave. “You be careful.”

  The line of pretty people out front didn’t look any different than when I’d come in. They all smelled like overpriced body spray and desperation.

  By the time we got back to the car, my hackles had settled and I didn’t want to sprout claws anymore. Much. I did slam the door after climbing into the passenger seat. On the driver’s side, Ben gripped the wheel like he wanted to break it.

  I growled and sank back against the seat. We sat for a long moment, catching our breath, holding on to our human sides.

  He lifted my arm, studied a bruise there—it was already fading to yellow with my werewolf healing, but I’d clearly been manhandled. Vampirehandled.

  “They’re done playing nice,” he said finally. “They’re not even pretending anymore.”

  “Angelo’s scared, Ben. He acted like someone with a gun held to his head. All the vampires are scared. He told me to leave Denver. I think … I think he thought he was looking out for me.”

  “Don’t go convincing yourself he’s a nice guy—he’s a vampire.”

  “That doesn’t make him a bad guy.” Rick and Alette were not bad guys.

  “It doesn’t make him a good guy,” Ben said pragmatically. “This is not the time to be giving anyone the benefit of the doubt.”

  “I think he knows where the pack is. He just wouldn’t tell me.”

  “We’ll find them, Kitty.”

  I scrubbed my face. I was so tired I could feel my pores.

  He started the car and headed out of downtown. “I think it’s time to sleep. We’re going home.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT day, Detective Hardin stopped by to check on Tina and the rest of us. Tina was up and about, still banged up. The bruises on her face had turned some amazing colors, and she expressed gratitude that the next season of Paradox PI wouldn’t start filming for another month.

  “I’ve filed a missing-person report for Shaun, to start with,” Detective Hardin said, pacing across the kitchen, arms crossed, right hand tapping—she was still on her plan to quit smoking, God bless her. “So it’s in the system, but until we get a lead I’m afraid there’s not much more we can do.”

  “So raiding Obsidian and arresting Angelo is out of the question?” I asked. Obsidian was a downtown art gallery that doubled as the Denver vampire Family’s main base of operations.

  Hardin glared. “No probable cause. Sorry.”

  Ben was at the back window, looking over the property and wild open space beyond, as if he could will Shaun and the others to appear, walking to the house like they’d just gone out for a stroll. We were all anxious, snappish.

  “I could try scrying for them,” Tina said. “But I’d need to get these painkillers out of my system first. They kind of muddle things up.”

  “Don’t push yourself,” I quickly reassured her. “I imagine trying to be all psychic while in pain isn’t any more effective than being psychic on painkillers.”

  She sighed in agreement.

  “What’s your next plan?” Hardin asked.

  Used to be, I avoided telling her things, because so much of the supernatural world fell in
gray areas as far as law enforcement was concerned. I’d killed people; Hardin knew I’d killed, but she didn’t know how many times. She didn’t know about Carl and Meg. Part of her wouldn’t see it as self-defense, and would insist that I should be arrested for murder. Usually, I felt the same, that if vampires and werewolves wanted to live in the civilized world, we had to follow civilized laws. But there were exceptions. There were situations that fell through the cracks, and the woman with the badge maybe didn’t need to know about those. But she was in this now as much as the rest of us. She’d bent rules for me. She was an ally.

  If I’d had a next plan, I would have told her.

  I said, “I want to find out what’s got Angelo and the vampires so jumpy, but we may have to wait for them to make the next move.”

  “Well, keep me in the loop,” she said, giving us all a thin smile before showing herself out.

  Tina managed to eat lunch before going back to bed, and I went to our home office. To think.

  For all our efforts, for all our attempts at prediction, we still didn’t know what Roman had planned. We assumed he was going to use the Manus Herculei, this spell that caused volcanoes to erupt, to create a massive disruption, and in the resulting chaos he’d collect his allies and enact some kind of global takeover. A massive volcanic eruption would create clouds of volcanic ash, a permanent overcast sky blocking the sun, creating a nuclear winter—a dark world, great for vampires. And demons with a sensitivity to sunlight.

  I kept what I called our volcano map pinned to the wall of the office. It was a spectacular geology lesson. The Ring of Fire around the Pacific Ocean was aptly named, an almost regular series of active and dormant volcanoes marking the boundaries between continents and oceans. Island archipelagoes formed by volcanoes stood out. The recent eruption in Iceland of the volcano that no one knew how to pronounce had made me wonder, is this it? Is this what we’ve been waiting for, the focus of Roman’s plans? It had certainly annoyed a lot of people, halting air travel in Europe and across the Atlantic for weeks. But it hadn’t been particularly destructive. Volcanoes did erupt on their own; not everything was Roman being a dick. I’d put a big X on that site on the map, just in case. I’d asked Tina to take a look at the map when she first came to the house, to see if she could pick up any particular insight from it. She’d passed her hand over it, and kept coming back to the North American continent, which had plenty of volcanoes, starting in Alaska and running all the way down the West Coast. “That could just mean it’s my home and I’m worried about it,” she explained.

  I couldn’t chase the man all over the world. We’d set a trap for him and failed. What now? Pull the blankets over our heads and hide?

  Ben joined me a few minutes later. I sat on the floor, hugging my knees to my chest, staring up at the map. I hadn’t slept well last night, even with his arms around me and his scent in my nose.

  “Figure anything out?” he said, leaning on the doorframe, arms crossed.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Hiding’s not going to do a bit of good.”

  He donned a wolfish grin. “Fair enough.”

  “Angelo wants us out of Denver. Whoever’s holding the metaphorical gun to his head wants us out. So we don’t leave. We wave a red cape at them. We show them Denver’s not theirs, it still belongs to us.”

  “How—ah, right. Got it. It’s going to be another long night, then.”

  Yes, it was.

  Chapter 10

  WE BEGAN at the house at dusk. I stood at the edge of the yard in nothing but a tank top and panties, dealing with a sense of déjà vu. This was how I’d started out, when I decided to take over the Denver pack. From a human perspective, it was a ridiculous way to provoke a response. But to Wolf’s way of thinking, there was no better way to announce ourselves.

  I looked over my shoulder. Ben stood on the back patio, shirtless, wearing sweatpants. Arms loose, hands clenched, he had a hooded, focused expression. His wolf, rising to the surface. Close to naked, out in the crisp twilight air—that only meant one thing. We were going running.

  Behind him, leaning up against the house, was Cormac. Our backup.

  Since the failed trap in Albuquerque, he’d received one e-mail from Roman on the anonymous account. “I applaud your attempt,” the vampire had written. “It’s a small world, isn’t it? Tell Katherine Norville that she cannot win this, and she’ll merely destroy herself and everything she loves trying. But I’m sure she already knows that.”

  Cormac had decided not to send any kind of response. And still, I wanted to poke this guy with a stick. I’d already gone too far to stop.

  “Ready?” I called back to Ben.

  Cormac said, “You two run into trouble out there, I might not be able to help.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Ben said, determined.

  “We need you to see what we flush out,” I said. “Keep track of what kind of reaction we get.”

  “You’re putting yourselves out there as bait,” he said.

  “Well, yeah.” I grinned. “Or swinging the first chair in the bar fight. Take your pick.”

  He frowned even harder than normal.

  “I’m almost ready to tell you to get your guns,” Ben said.

  “Naw. Not yet, anyway,” Cormac said, which sounded ominous. “You two be careful.”

  “Yeah,” Ben said. He might have been about to say more, but Cormac slipped inside the house, sliding the glass door firmly shut behind him. He didn’t want to see what came next. Understandable.

  “Ready?” I asked. Ben was looking past me to the foothills.

  “I think I’m only going to be happy about tonight if I get to kill something. Preferably a vampire. Preferably Roman.”

  Alas, werewolves couldn’t easily kill vampires. Not unless we chewed entirely through their necks to decapitate them. “Actually, that doesn’t sound very appetizing. Venison?”

  “That’ll do.”

  We only had to shift on full moon nights, but the monster was always there, ready to be called. The blood called to us. My mouth watered. “Hey,” I said, running my finger down his arm. I felt pressure in my hand, then pain, a claw waiting to break through skin. I reached up, kissed him lightly on the side of the mouth, whispered, “Race you.” Then turned and ran.

  He launched himself after me in the next breath.

  I’d had a lot of practice at this. My shirt came off, I shoved my panties down midstride, and my skin flushed against the air. A million needle pricks itched—fur, breaking through. My back bowed, my hips and shoulders wrenched, bone sliding into new shapes, the joints twisting into new angles. It hurt, but not so much if I didn’t fight against it. The roiling in my gut, Wolf breaking out of her cage, was power. I could be powerful if I let it flow through me, just close my eyes and let go—

  * * *

  She is running, four strong legs launching her into the wild, the wind of her passage brushing through her thick fur. Mouth open, she tastes the world, chill air from the mountains, a tang of spring, grass sprouting. Some prey. Not much, not yet. Time to hunt.

  Pack, where is the pack …

  Her mate runs alongside her, and her panic subsides. He nips at her shoulder, she bares her teeth in mock anger. They’re together, this is right. The two-legged half of her remembers: the pack is in danger, yes, but she must strike back another way. Marking territory, declaring their presence.

  She has the feeling that they’re being followed. She keeps stopping to look behind, her head up, ears pricked forward, nose flaring, but there’s nothing there. Nothing that she can sense.

  At the hills, the forest begins. She slows, trots along the edges of the trees, catches her breath. Her mate darts off, golden eyes burning and lips curled to show his teeth. He’s stretched out, his nose working. He spins back, circles—then pounces. Sleek and lean, he returns to her with rabbit dangling from bloodied jaws. He drops it at her feet, settles into a crouch. Not the biggest wolf she’s ever encountered, not the fiercest. But he is smar
t, capable, and he is hers. She gets close to him, wuffs breath over him, taking in his scent, rubbing against him, and licking the blood off his muzzle. They nip at each other, playful, a moment of joy.

  They share the rabbit, then they run.

  They must cover ground, as much as they can. They fan out, come back together, marking as they go, laying down their scent, sending the signal to any others who happen by: we are here, this place is ours, you can’t have it.

  She climbs a hill, a vantage point into the next valley. Sound carries here. She howls, singing. Her mate has gone ahead into the valley, and he answers her. Their songs make another mark that echoes to the heavens.

  He continues, and she races to join him.

  If there was danger here, she would smell it. She doesn’t, but that doesn’t change the feeling, bleeding over from her other side. Something’s wrong …

  She finds her mate and whines, bumping him shoulder to shoulder for comfort. It’s late—early. The sky pales. Still, there’s time to hunt again, and they’re still hungry. Deep in the hills they stalk a deer. She circles one way, flushes the prey into her mate’s waiting jaws. He drags down its throat, she hangs onto its haunches until it falls, twitches.

  A feast; they gorge. She keeps looking up, waiting for that thing she feels watching.

  Nothing there, again.

  He’s the one who decides it’s time to leave, nudging and nipping her until they both run. This is familiar territory, they know where they’re going, and soon find the den, a sheltered place where they curl up together, warm in their shared fur and shared breath.

  She should revel in this night. She rarely gets to run so far, so long, or feed so much. But the night feels empty without the pack.

  Nestling closer to her mate, she sleeps.

  * * *

  WE ENDED up at the den, just like we planned. I marveled at the amount of ground we’d covered. Through the night, our wolves had traveled miles, straight over the mountains from here to there, where no roads went. I felt the distance in my bones. Waking up after running as Wolf, I usually felt weird and tired. This time, I felt sore as well, through every limb, even around my rib cage. I’d never run so far.