Kitty in the Underworld

by Carrie Vaughn

Bemused, Ben looked after him before offering his hand to me and helping me to my feet. Time to go, then. When I was upright, he put his arms around me, and I leaned against him. I might never leave him again.

  “The cops want a statement,” he said. “You ready to talk?”

  “Can we go home after?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.” Those were the only words that would have gotten me moving.

  “Paramedics are on the way—”

  “I don’t need paramedics.”

  He gave me a look, half frustrated and half pleading. “Humor me. They’ll check you over, and we’ll get documentation. Just let them treat you like a victim for the next couple of hours. Please?”

  He was in lawyer mode, and ultimately he was right. None of this was going to make sense from a legal standpoint anyway, might as well fill in as many blanks as we could. Such as an official medical exam stating that I’d gone through hell. The wound across my back was healing. Nobody would believe it had happened an hour or so ago.

  We trekked back to a service road a few miles from the mine, where they’d all gathered for the search, and where an ambulance was waiting. Turned out the paramedics decided I was suffering from dehydration and wanted to give me IV fluids. My supernatural healing meant my skin kept trying to grow over the needle. I finally convinced them to just give me a bottle of Gatorade.

  This was getting hilarious, and I hadn’t even explained everything that had happened. The state trooper in charge stopped taking notes halfway through and then stared at me like I was crazy. He looked as if he was thinking of arresting me for something when Ben stepped in, making noises about harassing the witness. Ben in lawyer mode was a beauty to behold.

  Finally, I said to the trooper, “Call Detective Jessi Hardin with the Denver Police Department. She heads up their paranatural unit. She can help.”

  “Help make sense of all this?” he said, brow furrowed, mouth crooked with confusion.

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But she knows what to put into the reports.”

  He scowled at his notebook and wandered off, cell phone pressed to his ear. Full morning had arrived. I was dozing, tucked under Ben’s arm, when the state trooper decided he’d had enough of us and let us go. Cormac was already waiting by his Jeep.

  Now, finally, I could go home.

  Epilogue

  She Changes before the sun sets, before the moon has fully risen, before the pack gathers, because she can’t wait any longer, because she is finally free, because the fear and anger still fill her. The memory of walls closing in, of brimstone attacks and otherworldly ceremonies, writhe in her hindbrain like living things, like parasites. She runs to escape, but she can’t escape, so she just runs, until her muscles feel loose, like water. She will run until dawn.

  Her mate is at her flank, stride for stride. At first, she runs to escape him as well. To escape everything. Soon, though, she’s glad he’s followed. Grateful. Her other self, the self that thinks too much, would cry, knowing that he stays by her.

  When the full, round moon has climbed overhead, she finally slows, stops. Stands panting, exhausted. Her mate is there, licking her face, rubbing himself against her, offering what comfort he can.

  When she catches a scent of something warm, fast, full of blood, her urge to hunt returns, and that simple need feels glorious. They hunt together, she chases a rabbit into his path, he grabs and twists its neck, and they feed, devouring the meat in a few bites. When they finish, they lick blood off each others’ muzzles. The world feels almost normal, with a full belly and a forest full of moonlit shadows.

  She ran for a long time, and they have a long journey back.

  The moon is sinking when her mate blocks her path. The fur on his back has stiffened, his ears pin flat to his head, and his tail sticks straight back. Danger—her own nerves spike with a feeling of exhaustion, because such anxiety, such readiness to fight, feels too familiar.

  She catches the scent that he does, that he’s now circling to examine—an intruder in their territory. But not wolf. This creature is strange and musky, female, and she isn’t hiding, not caring if she’s found. Feline, like a mountain lion—but not. This scent is foreign—and like them. Both beast and human.

  They lope, following the path until the creature appears, crouched down, flat to the ground, watching. Stockier than a mountain lion, with a broader snout, round ears, large eyes. A long, tufted tail flicks back and forth. The stranger waits.

  But not a stranger. Her smell is familiar, striking at those blazing memories. We know her.

  She bumps her mate’s flank, calming him, nipping his ear to tell him this is all right. She approaches the lion, head and tail low, sniffing, and finally settling to the ground in front of her. They regard each other.

  The lioness stands, approaches. Rubs her cheek along Wolf’s face and ruff. Stands for a moment, as if simply feeling her presence, taking in her scent. Looks over Wolf’s back to eye the mate. Then, she turns and runs, loping into the woods. She’s gone in seconds.

  Her mate has to prod her, pushing her with his snout, nipping at her flank, to finally get her to embark on the long run home.

  * * *

  I REMEMBERED meeting the lion on full-moon night. I could recall her smell, and my gladness at seeing her. Worry for what was going to happen to her. I would have brought her home with me and let her into our pack, if she wanted. Back in the daylight, the human world, a week passed, and Skahmet—Samira—didn’t call. Maybe she would, still, someday. But that meeting in the forest felt like a good-bye. Or, good-bye for now. I hoped. I wanted to talk to her. If I could just find out more.

  I had to be content with what I had.

  The mine where they’d found me ended up being near Leadville. Only about a hundred miles from Denver, but high in the mountains and far from any maintained roads. The place even showed up on a USGS map. But so did a dozen other abandoned mines in the area, and Mohan and Samira had covered their tracks well when they caught me. Eventually, I had to laugh about it—I’d been that close to home, but still five thousand miles and a couple of thousand years away.

  I looked up the name Kumarbis. It was the name of a Hittite god, by turns power hungry and tragic. Kumarbis, father of gods, was eventually deposed by a storm god—as many father-gods would be after him. In revenge, he decided to create a rival to the storm god, a creature who would depose him and return Kumarbis to his rightful place. But the creature, a giant made of stone, decided his true purpose was to destroy all of humanity. The other gods had to unite to stop him before he could destroy the world, and Kumarbis was no better off than he was before.

  Whatever his name had originally been, the vampire Kumarbis might very well have taken the name as self-inflicted punishment. A man who kept trying to exert his power on the world, out of the best intentions, but who instead just kept making things worse. The father aspect of the god probably appealed to him. The ambition to be caretaker of the world appealed to him. Not the character’s utter failure to do so. On the other hand, the vampire might not have meant to appeal to that part of the legend. Rather, the name might have meant something to him culturally, from some of the stories he might have heard when he was young and alive. If that was the case, if Kumarbis had been Hittite originally, it would have made him well over three thousand years old. That didn’t seem outrageous to me.

  I would never learn the truth. Unless I asked the one person who must have known Kumarbis better than anyone else: Roman. There was a thought. Since I wasn’t likely to ever have a face-to-face, civil conversation with Roman, I let the idea go. Another mystery to file away.

  * * *

  THE POLICE sketch artist scratched his pencil, and I had to stop myself from leaning over to look at what he was drawing.

  “Eyebrows?” he asked, the latest in a string of questions about eyes, mouth, cheeks, earlobes, all manner of details about someone’s face I’d barely seen over my shoulder during the ritual.

  “Dark. Thick. Kind o
f flat.”

  Detective Hardin sat nearby in the conference room at the downtown police station. I’d called in a favor, asking her to help me get a picture of the woman I’d glimpsed. I didn’t tell her why. Just that I’d seen a face, and I wanted a picture.

  The pencil scratched a few more strokes, and then the artist turned the sketch pad around. “How is this?”

  He’d drawn a square-faced woman with a crown of dark, curling hair, a slightly furrowed brow, and a hard look in her eyes. This wasn’t how she looked when I saw her, but it was undoubtedly her. Somehow, my description had come through. Fierce, determined. She would defend her cubs, her pack. Regina Luporum Prima, I supposed I could call her.

  “It’s good,” I said. “Thanks.”

  He tore the page from the pad and gave it to me. I studied it, awestruck. The picture made her more real, and also, somehow, more normal. Taken out of the cavern and the ritual, she was just a woman.

  “What did she do?” Hardin asked. She wore a jacket over a tank top and dark trousers, and had her dark hair in a ponytail. She was overworked, tough as nails, and dogged. I’d rarely seen her smile. We’d been working together for years now, and I trusted her.

  “She lived,” I said simply. “Probably twenty-five hundred years ago or so. Early Roman, probably.”

  “So she’s a vampire?” Hardin asked.

  “No,” I said, bemused, realizing this sounded crazy. Not caring. “She was a werewolf. I think. I thought she was just a story. But I saw her.”

  “Do I want to know?” Hardin said, smirking.

  “Probably not. It’s complicated.”

  “What exactly happened to you up there?” she asked. She’d been one of the first people Ben and Cormac called when I turned up missing and had been part of the search. I really did have a lot of people looking out for me.

  My smile went lopsided, because I didn’t know what to say. “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”

  “Typical,” she huffed.

  “Thanks for this,” I said, nodding at the sketch. She waved me off.

  When I got home, I pinned the drawing next to the picture of the Capitoline Wolf. They seemed to match.

  Ben and I talked about it. We lay in bed, all the lights out, and the darkness of the bedroom was nowhere near the absolute darkness of the mine. I understood absolute darkness now. Here, moon and ambient light from Denver seeped in around the curtains, and the bedside clock had a glow. Even without being able to identify the light source, the whole room shimmered with light. Ben glowed, with the heat and life of his body.

  Our wolves didn’t fully believe that all was well, and they asserted themselves in the way we curled up together at one end of the bed. We were on our sides, nestled together, his body pressed protectively across my back, my head against his shoulder, noses to skin so we could smell each other and be comforted.

  “I don’t even know if it was real,” I said. “Or if it was some hallucination Zora cooked up. It might have been a trick. But would I have felt it so strongly if it were? Would I have been able to remember it? Remember it well enough to get a sketch out of it?”

  “Kitty, I don’t know.” He sighed into my hair, and I snuggled more firmly in his embrace. Skin to skin. I couldn’t get enough. “I know something happened to you. And seriously, after everything we’ve seen? Anything’s possible. These days I’m ready to believe in Santa Claus.”

  St. Nicholas had been a real person, I almost said. “I want her to be real.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s like if she was real, a real woman with a real face, who was really alive—then maybe we’re not so different. Maybe I really can keep doing this.”

  “I never doubted it.”

  I chuckled, because of course he would say that. Turning, I brought my hand to his cheek and matched his gaze.

  “Thanks. For listening,” I said.

  Then my own Prince Reliable kissed me.

  * * *

  I MISSED a show over the course of my adventure. My captivity. My … I wasn’t sure anymore what to call it. In the end, I was there because I’d chosen to be. Didn’t make it any less messed up, and I spent most of the first few days afterward at home, asleep. Sleeping meant not thinking about it.

  I’d never outright missed a show. I’d had plenty of planned absences, had aired prerecorded episodes and run “best of” episodes when I needed time off, on full-moon nights for example. My engineer, Matt, was able to piece together one of these, rerunning old interviews and splicing together intros, so the show itself went on without me. The only sense of failure was my own.

  Ben and Ozzie both suggested I needed to take another week off, to recover from what they sympathetically called my ordeal, but I refused. I wasn’t going to miss another show, another week. The best way to get my head back on straight would be to go back to work, to do my job.

  What to talk about, on that first show back? I could have told my audience about my adventure. About meeting the oldest vampire I’d yet encountered, about how practicing ceremonial magic seemed to me to be a lot like playing with dynamite and matches. I wanted to send a message to Samira, and to talk about Enkidu—Mohan—to get his story out. To memorialize him. And Zora. Kumarbis, not so much, even though he was the one people would want to hear about. But if I talked about one of them, I’d have to talk about all of them, and the demon, the rituals, the philosophies behind them, and I wasn’t ready to do that.

  Another consideration: I didn’t flatter myself that Roman listened to my show. Then again, maybe he did, and I didn’t want to tell him what exactly had happened in that abandoned mine. Let him guess, if he didn’t already know.

  My topic for the week: mythology. I called a couple of professors from CU Boulder to interview about historical precedents for characters like King Arthur, Robin Hood, and even Gilgamesh. I found some authors who’d written novels that combined history and mythology, and recorded interviews about their take on the likelihood that some of these old stories might have a seed of truth. Pretty good, considering how last-minute I was putting this together.

  I took a few calls, and they ran the usual range from insightful to insane. That in itself was comforting. No matter what happened in the rest of the world, my callers would always be there for me, with their enthusiasm, their conspiracy theories about tunnel systems extending through the continental U.S., and rants about the Second Amendment not including silver bullets.

  What conclusion, if any, could I draw from all this? Here were stories we were still telling after five hundred, a thousand, five thousand years. Maybe not a lot of time on the geologic scale, but unimaginable on the scale of human memory. That had to mean something. Stories were what lasted.

  Stories, and vampires, some of whom didn’t just tell the stories, but remembered when the stories were new.

  I finished writing the book. Finally. Part of what motivated the last big writing push: thinking about something happening to me before I finished. Thinking about how much I would leave behind, unfinished. The book was one thing I could wrap up, so I did.

  Also, I’d found my thesis, the thread that would tie the book together: stories were important. Whether they were true or not, they held their own history of the world, and we kept telling them because they meant something. Before all this happened, I had a vague notion of why I was putting this book together. Now, I knew. I supposed I could say I now had faith in it.

  * * *

  WHEN CORMAC called to ask me to meet him at New Moon, I knew he had information. After the dinner rush, Ben and I arrived at the restaurant, claimed a table in the back, ordered beers, and waited. Cormac arrived soon after and explained.

  “The thumb drive you gave me—it isn’t just a book of spells, it’s a book of shadows.”

  “What’s that mean?” I said.

  “It’s everything. Everything she learned, her journey as a magician, her plans.”

  “Her diary,” I said, amazed.

 
He winced. “Sort of. But more.” He cocked his head in a way I’d learned to recognize as him listening to an interior voice. Conversing with Amelia. “Something like … her magician’s soul.”

  She’d given it to me there at the end because she knew she wasn’t going to make it. Closing the door on the demon meant collapsing the cave on herself. She couldn’t save her own life, but she’d given her soul to me. Another sacrifice. It was too much responsibility. What was I supposed to do with it?

  “Did you find anything good?” Ben asked after a moment. The question seemed callous, and I almost said so, angrily. But he was only stating the obvious: what was I supposed to do with all of Zora’s spells and knowledge that she’d wanted to save? Use them, of course.

  Cormac said, “Her name was Amy Scanlon. She was from Monterey, California, and dropped out of college to travel the world and learn what she could. Amelia sees a lot of herself in the kid. She had some talent as well, some natural psychic ability. Always seemed to know where to find the good stuff. The real deal.”

  “Like Kumarbis.”

  He gave an offhand shrug. “They seemed to feed into each others’ obsessions. If they’d kept going they’d have either taken over the world or destroyed it.”

  Ben chuckled. “For real?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  I huffed. “If magic was going to destroy the world, someone would have done it by now.”

  Cormac gave me a look. A mustached frown, a calculating gaze. “If it hasn’t happened yet, it may be because there hasn’t ever been one person who’s gathered enough power to be able to do it. At least not yet.”

  “Yet,” I said, staring. “And what about Dux Bellorum? The Long Game?”

  He blew out a breath, looking thoughtful. “Hard to say. Her diary, the personal stuff, she wrote out, like she was just typing it in whenever she could. The meat of the thing—the spells, the lore—she wrote in a code. There’s probably a couple of hundred pages of information she learned about Roman and the Long Game, either from Kumarbis or from scrying or who the hell knows what else, but it’s all coded.”