Kitty Saves the World

by Carrie Vaughn

  This one early section of Paradise Lost is a whole list of demons, line after line of poetry describing all the fallen angels, all of Lucifer’s followers who’d plunged into hell with him after the fall. I wondered how many of them were here. I bet if I had the book with me I could figure out some of their names.

  Not that we had time for that.

  Ben was at my side, like he’d been blown right along with me, and pulled me to my feet so we could run. Didn’t matter where. Ashtoreth came toward us; her companions waited.

  “Nice to have you both in one place,” she said, giving a swoop with each hand so her weapons sang through the air. “This is so overdue.” She picked up a run, hitting the last step with a giant leap that carried her right toward us. She aimed her weapons down, preparing to stab.

  “Hey!” Hardin yelled, turning her full-spectrum light on the demon. Sighting along the beam of light, she fired her gun half a dozen times, probably most of what she had in the magazine. Ashtoreth didn’t even flinch at the bullets. But she ducked at the light, raising an arm to block her eyes. I imagined her squinting behind her smoky goggles.

  Grant joined Hardin, bringing his magic to bear, hand raised, chanting words I couldn’t hear. Whatever it was only seemed to make the demon angry, because she swung her sword, a wide attack meant to disrupt rather than injure. Hardin and Grant dodged out of her range.

  The other demons rushed in. Tina shouted the warning, and suddenly we had too many targets. We might have been able to stand up to Ashtoreth, but a dozen like her?

  Grant turned back to Tina, who was weaponless, and put himself between her and a rushing attack, two demons with swords out. He held his arm straight up, and an object in his hand blazed a white light—I’d seen Amelia use a similar spell.

  Like Hardin, Cormac had a full-spectrum light—neat trick, there. The two of them kept a space open around us, but that space was shrinking as demons guarded their vision and pushed closer.

  Cormac arrived at my side, grabbing my arm and hauling me back. Reflexively, I turned and snarled at him—he was being so forceful, and I was so surprised. Just as reflexively, he raised his loaded crossbow and aimed at me, even though it wouldn’t have done him any good.

  It was all reflexive. I calmed down and he lowered the weapon in the next moment.

  He turned to Ben, shoving the park map into his hands. He must have grabbed it from Tina. And where was Tina? I couldn’t see her—a wall of demons was in the way.

  Hardin shouted; I thought it was in anger, but I looked—a spear stuck out of her thigh. Ashtoreth was drawing another from her bandolier. Hardin, grimacing with pain, didn’t fall. She gritted her teeth, pulling at the spear while focusing the light at the demon.

  “The goggles,” I tried to call out. My voice was choking. “Get the goggles off, they’re blind without them.” Cormac heard me, I thought.

  Behind us, Cormac held up an amulet of some kind, shouted words of a spell. A light flashed, like Grant’s, and a demon who’d been charging toward us fell. My vision throbbed with afterimages.

  Bright light was buying us time. But it wouldn’t drive them off.

  Cormac shoved me again, and Ben took my arm.

  “Ben, get her out of here. Go after Roman.”

  Nodding, Ben pulled me toward the tree line. I started to argue, but Cormac had already turned away, and somehow my feet had decided to run with Ben. I took a look over my shoulder to see Grant and Tina surrounded by demons, and Hardin and Cormac back to back, facing several more, including Ashtoreth. Hard to count how many demons there really were. Ashtoreth raised her spear. Tina had somehow acquired one of her own. I smelled blood on the air.

  Sun Wukong had slipped behind Ashtoreth and took a running leap, preparing to drive down with his staff in some blunt-force attack that couldn’t possibly work. I choked back a cry of denial, because there was nothing I could do. Cormac was right: we had the location, Roman was working his spell right now, and we had to stop him.

  I wasn’t okay with this, the others sacrificing themselves to give me a chance to escape.

  But something else was happening: not all the demons were attacking my people, because some others had joined the battle. I’d missed them at first—they were cloaked, shadowy. Hard to see, like the demons. There were only a couple of them, but they moved lightning fast, engaging the demons with long metallic spears that sparked in the waxing moonlight. I managed to take a deep breath, to see if I could catch a scent around the brimstone and blood. There was a chill on the air, a cold scent of death. Vampire—

  One of the shadowy cloaked figures drove a weapon into a demon’s chest, and the demon screamed, some prehistoric sound of pain. A second one stabbed another, rushing in, launching over, and away to face the next one.

  “Ben, who are those—”

  “We have to go, now!”

  We ran.

  Ben was very focused, going straight to Cormac’s Jeep—Cormac must have handed over the keys when I wasn’t paying attention—getting in, starting the engine, without a pause. I barged into the passenger side and closed the door as we peeled off the shoulder and onto the road, heading south.

  Yellowstone Park was big. It was a long drive from Norris Basin to the lake. Now that I had a chance to open the map and study it, the distances seemed immense. The whole place would blow up before we found Roman.

  Ben was driving very fast. I decided not to look at the speedometer to see how fast. It seemed moot. He hunched over, gripping the steering wheel with stiff hands, bent like claws. His teeth were bared, his eyes gleaming gold. I couldn’t tell if it was the engine growling that hard, or him.

  He was close to shifting. In the face of danger, his wolf fought to break free. Our wolves were stronger. My own Wolf responded, kicking, digging claws into my gut, ready to tear through.

  I doubled over. If one of us lost it, we’d both lose it, which would be a disaster, speeding down the road. We couldn’t afford to lose it. The original Regina Luporum must have gone through something like this, maybe even worse than this. She kept it together. We could.

  Steadying my breathing, I straightened. I had to be calm when I touched Ben—our nerves and anger would only feed on each other. I put my hand on his arm, spoke softly, “Keep it together. We have to keep it together.”

  He slammed a fist on the steering wheel and gave a shuddering sigh. “I know. I know.”

  The fury in his gaze faded. His grip on the wheel finally relaxed. He put his hand on mine and squeezed. We drove like that for a mile, two, feeding calm to each other, trying not to think about the madness we’d left behind.

  “Kitty,” he said. “Where are we going? You have to tell me where we’re going.”

  I scrubbed my face, tried to focus. So much depended on what we did in the next few minutes. I turned on the domelight and held up the map.

  The place where the bear spirit had pointed showed on the map as a blackened smudge—a noseprint—on the western spur of the lake. This was a region, not the pinpoint location that would have been most useful. But a region of a couple of hundred yards or so was a million times better than trying to search the entire park. I looked for the nearest road, for a label that would help us navigate to the spot.

  “West Thumb,” I said. “A place called West Thumb. It’ll be a left turn.”

  “Okay, okay, I think I saw that on the sign marker back there. We can do this.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  We drove for five, ten minutes.

  “They’ll be okay,” Ben said. “Those five are the strongest people I know, they’ll be okay.”

  We didn’t know that. The strongest might not be enough for this. But I said, “Yes, they will, they’ll be fine, we just have to do our part now.”

  It’s not like we had a choice.

  A dozen miles later he glanced at the rearview mirror, glanced again, then took a brief look over his shoulder to the road behind. I turned to see what he was looking at.

&nb
sp; Some distance behind us, visible on the straightaways, I made out a car, a big, dark SUV, driving without its headlights on.

  “We’re being followed?” I said, disbelieving.

  “Apparently.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Frankly, I’m more worried about what’s in front of us.” What the others had set us to do, and what they were fighting Ashtoreth to give us time to do.

  I didn’t want to think about what was happening with them right now.

  Ben bent over the steering wheel, his focus ahead.

  The big SUV kept following us. Another henchman of Roman’s? The Men in Black? Who was it? Maybe just a coincidence? Not bloody likely. We kept ahead of them, so maybe Ben was right. We didn’t have worry to spare.

  Ben saw the sign for the turnoff to the West Thumb basin before I did, so he was already yanking the wheel hard, tires squealing on pavement, before I had a chance to call a warning.

  West Thumb was another cluster of geysers like the Norris Basin, but this one butted right up against the shore of the lake. There must have been something about it that made casting the spell easier for Roman. Or it might have offered the easiest access, with paved roads and convenient parking. Nice.

  After dark, the lot was empty, and Ben screeched the Jeep to a stop, not bothering with something as prosaic as parking between the painted lines. In a second he was out of the driver’s seat and had the back open, digging through Cormac’s stash of weapons for stakes and spray bottles of holy water. I looked behind us for that black SUV, but didn’t see it. It had followed us all the way down the road, but didn’t come into the parking lot behind us.

  “Whatever he’s doing, it’ll be by the shore, I think,” I said.

  “Then we’ll follow it until we find him,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said, out of the blue.

  “We’re in this together. All the way.” Pure statement of fact. His expression was open and unastonished. Very practical. Ben the lawyer, doing what needed to be done.

  We trotted to the boardwalk and dirt paths that led past a collection of hot springs to the shore of the lake. Like at Norris, these springs were quiet; no geysers boiled or sprayed. Our wolves were close, feeding strength to our legs, our long strides. Our senses pushed out, taking in the air, listening for the least little sound, anything that would give a clue as to what might happen next. We were hunting. We were also being hunted. It was a strange feeling. Exhilarating, too. This was for everything. Couldn’t rest, couldn’t slack off, not for a second.

  We moved a few paces away from each other, covering more ground, Ben looking right, me looking left, toward the water. No Roman, but no other bad guys, either. I pulled ahead and turned all my attention forward, looking for Roman, determined to find him before it was too late.

  The trees gave way to an open plain of chalky white dust and sand, a scoured area where mineral-laden geysers and hot springs had washed over the earth and into the lake. The lake was pewter colored, stretching to a blur of hills on the opposite side. The shore curved and bent in the shape of an inlet. Bits of forest survived, and we continued into the next clump of trees. As far as I could tell, we were still within the range of the marked spot on the map. Still no Roman.

  “Anything?” Ben called. We were loping together, the way it should be, me and my mate on the hunt.

  It didn’t last.

  At first, I thought the wind came off the water. It blasted hard enough to make me stumble, and my reflexes recognized it before I did. A moment later the smell of brimstone came.

  “Ben!” I screamed in warning.

  He pulled up short and turned on his flashlight. The beam of light blazed around him. She appeared in a whirlwind of choking white dust. The light stopped her briefly, which was good, because she had a spear in hand and had been reared back in the start of an attack. She dropped to both feet—between us, separating us—and took stock.

  If Ashtoreth was here, what had happened back at the Norris Basin? Did this mean she had finished there? What had happened to my friends? I almost called out to her, demanding to know what she had done to Cormac and the others.

  Instead, Ben yelled at me. “Go! Kitty, go, keep looking!” He had his Glock in hand. I hadn’t even known he’d had it.

  “Ben!” I screamed again, because I had to. He didn’t spare me a glance. He couldn’t. All his attention was on the demon and her next attack. He aimed and fired; she stumbled back. But a bullet wouldn’t kill her.

  “Run!” he called again. I did, because I had a job to do. My ears closed against the noises of the battle behind me, I kept running up the shore, into the next stand of pines, around the next inlet. Roman had to be here. All of this—it had to be worth it.

  Chapter 20

  I RAN, LOPING, unthinking, for maybe a quarter of a mile into the next stand of trees, losing sight of the shore and water. I must have been right on the edge of the marked-out region on the map. Pausing, I steadied my breathing and took a breath of air. And smelled vampire, a chill that was more than just the weather, more than the temperature dropping at night.

  That wind roared again, then came that stench, and the shout of a warrior about to make a kill. Ashtoreth pounded into the ground in front of me, landing in a three-point crouch before swinging back in a ready stance. It was like she’d leapt from there to here, wasting no time with something so mundane as running.

  She was here, and just like before I wondered, did that mean Ben was safe now, or was he gone?

  “Did you kill him?” I said, my voice choking. Her wicked smile seemed answer enough.

  I didn’t expect an answer, just an attack, but she said, “You’ll never know. You can’t win this, you had to know that from the start.”

  “Yeah, that’s why I’m still here I guess.”

  I dodged, thinking to avoid her, but she moved to block me. I went sideways—I could get to the water and swim to Roman if I had to. But she was there again. No matter how fast I was, no matter which way I tried to sprint, she barred the way.

  I tried to double back, but when I broke from the trees she was there, stabbing downward with her spear, slashing with her sword. Wolfish instincts saved me. I pulled up, spun around, launched in the other direction—fast, supernaturally fast. Just fast enough to get away. Dirt pelted me from where the spear hit the ground, right behind my heel. The wind from the sword’s sweep tickled my neck.

  She was behind me again. She was always right there, and she never got tired.

  This was it, then. This realization that I probably wasn’t going to make it this time settled over me and lent me a strange sense of resolve. My body felt lighter, my running steps felt longer. I wasn’t going to survive this. That was okay, as long as I saved the world first. I just had to get the mirrored cross in front of Roman. Whatever happened after that didn’t matter. With only one goal to focus on instead of two—just getting to the water, not doing that and surviving—a new burst of energy filled me.

  But I still had to get to the shore, and Ashtoreth was in front of me. I was long past thinking, I was only looking ahead and around for a new path, the next route, a possible solution.

  A wind blew past me, a racing breeze—and a dark figure smacked Ashtoreth across the face with a staff. She fell back, dropped her spear, and snarled.

  I stopped and blinked, confused.

  Then it happened again.

  Another shadow emerged from the woods and struck another blow while the demon was off balance, a jab to her lower back that made her grimace in pain. Her attention was entirely off me now.

  The two figures moved with astonishing grace, slipping around Ashtoreth, always out of her reach, while smacking her with long black staves—not badly enough to drive her off, but enough to distract her. It was fascinating. The two were human, or at least human shaped, but they wore hoods and scarves around their faces, and their clothing was dark and shrouding.

  What I could tell about them: they had the chill scen
t of vampires, they moved with the shadowy stealth of vampires, and they were warriors. Vampire ninjas. I stood in awe.

  Then something happened. The attack changed. They stopped simply harassing the demon and moved on to what must have been the next step. Clearly they had a plan, a finely tuned and well-practiced one.

  The first one produced a new weapon, or tool, or something. A hook with a wire line attached. The vampire got close, made a leap, stuck this hook into the leather of Ashtoreth’s vest, and pushed off to escape her counterblow. The wire trailed out—the other end was attached to a metal stake, which he—she? whatever?—drove into the ground. The second vampire did the same, hooking another line into her other side, pulling it taut, securing the stake.

  Then they both did it again, and again. Hooks—big, iron-looking things with jagged barbs—dug into her belt, her back, her sleeves. Some of them might have dug into her skin. It was hard to tell, the vampires moved so fast, and Ashtoreth jerked and thrashed, trying to break free. Quick and efficient, the vampires staked down each of the wires until the demon was stuck. Tied down like a tent, with no give to her bonds and nowhere to go. She looked like a marionette, immobilized by her strings, pulled tight in all directions.

  A third figure appeared. This one stepped into view, facing Ashtoreth, regarding her calmly. He didn’t attack, but somehow gave off every impression that he was just as dangerous as his companions. In a gloved hand he held a gold spear as tall as he was, with a wicked-looking point, barbed and filigreed. It looked like a harpoon.

  The demon bared her teeth, closed her hands into fists, strained to break free and strike. But she flailed, a fish in a net.

  The third figure slipped his hood back.

  It was Rick.

  I gasped, and clamped my hand over my mouth to keep from interrupting.

  I didn’t think it had been that long since I’d seen him; then again, it felt like it had been years. Now he looked like someone who had stepped out of another world, gloved and cloaked, a character from a medieval epic, a burning determination in his eyes. He had a conquistador’s beard.