Kitty Saves the World

by Carrie Vaughn

  I’d blown all this up in public because I figured the more people were watching for him, who knew about him, the less likely he’d be able to pull off anything terrible. Turned out, a lot of people just stopped taking me seriously. I was just like the crackpots calling into my show.

  “I blame Dracula,” I said, deflecting the issue entirely, because I had a show to run. “All right, let’s take another call. Hello, you’re on the air.”

  An authoritative male voice came on the line and lectured. “I think you’re ignoring the real controversy here, which is how the World Health Organization is planning to start incarcerating werewolves in concentration camps to serve as food for vampires, to spare the human population…”

  And that was The Midnight Hour.

  * * *

  MY PHONE rang as I left the KNOB studios. Normally, after-midnight calls would be a cause for worry, except the caller ID said it was Cormac. He usually called at strange hours, so I wouldn’t know if this was an emergency until I actually talked to him.

  “Hey!” I said brightly, hopped up on postshow adrenaline.

  “You going to New Moon tonight?” he said, without any extraneous social preamble. Not his style.

  Many times after the show, I’d head to New Moon, the bar and restaurant my husband, Ben, and I owned, to burn off said adrenaline with a drink and company. Sometimes Cormac, Ben’s cousin and our friend, joined us. He rarely gave warning ahead of time.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Ben should already be there.”

  “I’ll meet you there,” he said.

  “Why? What—” He clicked off without explanation.

  Well, that was Cormac, man of mystery. He’d found something, obviously. And now my stomach was churning, wondering what it was and what can of worms it would open.

  Chapter 2

  WORRY ABOUT what trouble Cormac had gotten into squashed my postshow buzz, so I walked into New Moon distracted and frowning. After midnight on a Friday the place was busy, but past peak crowd. Seeing lots of people here ordering lots of food and drink usually gave me a warm fuzzy feeling—a busy restaurant was a successful restaurant. Tonight, I cut through the crowd without noticing, looking for a familiar face.

  First up was Shaun, the restaurant’s longtime manager and part of our werewolf pack. Family, practically. Early thirties, confident and sensible, he had close-cropped black hair, brown skin, a shining gaze, and a smile that lit up when he saw me. People he didn’t like never saw that smile; I was glad he was on my side.

  “Wild show tonight, Kitty.”

  “I don’t know how you listen to it with all this racket going on.”

  “You kidding? It’s one of our Friday night attractions. The Midnight Hour drinking game.”

  How did I not know about this? And why was I not surprised? This was what I got for never being at New Moon during my own show. “A drinking game? How long has that been going on?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe a couple months.”

  “So what, it’s like someone calls in asking how to get bit by a werewolf, take a drink. I hang up on a religious rant, take a drink.”

  “Exactly!”

  “How often does this result in cases of blood poisoning?” He just grinned. I should have been laughing, but I wasn’t. It was just one more thing.

  “What’s up?” he asked. “You’re nervous.”

  The muscles across my shoulders were tight. I must have walked in here looking like a wolf on the prowl. “Distracted. Hey, while I’m thinking of it—thanks. The reason this place works is you. So thanks.” Now I was sounding maudlin.

  Shaun shrugged, a way to brush past the sentimentality. “I love it here. Dream job, you know?”

  The bartender pushed over a glass of my favorite beer. Personalized service. I could hug the guy. “Cheers all around,” I said, and lifted the glass in a toast.

  Ben, suit jacket over the back of a chair and the first couple of buttons of his shirt undone, was waiting for me at the back table, “our” table, where we held court and seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time. Sometimes plotting, sometimes just hanging out. This was our den, our refuge, our tribe.

  Why did it all suddenly seem fragile?

  He stood when I approached, and I set the glass down so he could fold me in an all-encompassing hug, his arms tight around me. I leaned my face against his neck and breathed deep, taking in his scent, soap and skin and the sweat of the day, the wild and fur of his werewolf side, as familiar as my own self.

  “How’d it go tonight?”

  “So you weren’t here for the drinking game?”

  “No, I had a call from a client. There’s a drinking game?”

  “Apparently.” I tried to sum up tonight’s far-ranging show, and couldn’t. “The usual, I think. It’s so hard to tell from that side of the mike. And how are you?”

  His expression was drained. “It’s been one of those days.”

  Ben was a criminal defense lawyer. When he said “one of those days,” he meant it, and I likely couldn’t imagine how bad it could really get. Because of client confidentiality he didn’t go into details, but he spent a lot of his professional life with people who were hitting bottom or on the way there.

  I pulled back, tipped his chin toward me, and kissed him. I felt the tension leave him, and his arms settled more firmly around me. That only made my own tension more evident.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “That obvious?”

  His smile was kind, and he brushed a strand of loose hair back behind my ear. “Seems like a little more than your usual after-show jitters.”

  “Cormac’s on his way over. I think he found something.”

  Ben sighed, pursed his lips. All that tension returned. “Right. Good thing we have beer.”

  The man himself arrived maybe ten minutes later. I could smell him when the door opened, his distinct scent of leather jacket and close apartment living. Also, an undercurrent: herbs and lit candles—a magician’s tools. This, I associated with Amelia. His ghost, a Victorian wizard woman who’d died—or “died” rather—over a hundred years ago. And, I had to admit, his partner.

  He came straight to the back table, trusting we would be here. We had a chair waiting for him across from us.

  “Hey,” Ben said in greeting. “What’s up?”

  “You’re not going to like it,” Cormac said. Which was a hell of a greeting. I’d have asked, How bad could it be? But this was Cormac, and my imagination failed me.

  He pulled his laptop from a courier bag slung over his shoulder and opened the screen, turning it to face us. Ben and I leaned in close to look. I needed a few minutes to make out what I was looking at—an e-mail thread, maybe a dozen messages deep.

  Earlier this year, we’d posted online a mysterious coded book of shadows that potentially contained information about what Roman planned—and how to stop him. We hoped crowd sourcing might help us decode the writing when all else failed. Finally, Cormac managed to translate the book. That was where we got confirmation about the volcano thing. In the meantime, dozens of people had sent him messages. This thread of conversation didn’t seem to have much to do with the book, but the correspondent must have contacted Cormac with enough information to warrant a response.

  I read on. The unknown correspondent knew about Amy Scanlon—the author of the coded book of shadows—and asked a lot of questions about what Cormac knew about her: who she was, whom she was working with, what she was doing. The pointed interrogation was enough to raise the hairs on my neck and the hackles across my shoulders. This guy knew something, but what? Cormac’s replies were vague, leading without giving too much away. He kept his own identity safely hidden. Then the discussion got into really arcane details about some kind of dueling magic and spells.

  “What exactly have you been getting up to?” I said, accusing. He’d spent time in prison, and as an ex-con he wasn’t supposed to carry—or handle, or even think about—guns anymore. He’d been pursuing
magic as a replacement, which seemed to miss the point to my thinking.

  “Just keep reading.”

  I did, and got to the last few e-mails in the sequence. The unknown correspondent seemed to be offering Cormac—or whoever he thought was writing to him—a job. Cormac replied, “I don’t know anything about you. Who are you?”

  The answer came back: “I am called Roman.”

  I stopped breathing. That had to be a coincidence. It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. I checked the date on the e-mails—he’d been sitting on this for almost two weeks. I could murder the guy. But he’d done it. Somehow, he’d drawn Roman out of hiding. Now what did we do?

  Before I could say or do anything, either yelling at Cormac or fainting dead away, Ben said, “Shit. You’ve got to be kidding.”

  That seemed like a reasonable explanation. Cormac, suddenly developing a prankster sense of humor and having one over on us. We looked at him, waiting for the punch line.

  “Be nice if I was,” he said, and seemed amused. Or at least fatalistic to a dangerous degree. Not that he was ever one to freak out about something like this. “But I’m pretty sure it’s really him.”

  “What did you tell him?” I demanded, breathless. Truth was, I was in awe. We’d been looking for Roman all this time, I’d had friends die trying to go after him, and all we had to do was put out bait?

  Cormac leaned over, tapped a couple of keys, and brought up the reply: “My name is Amelia Parker. Let’s do meet.”

  Which wasn’t a lie. But it was such a complicated truth, the mind boggled. This felt like juggling dynamite. I waited for the inevitable explosion. But there wasn’t an explosion, just the three of us leaning over the computer screen, staring in wonder.

  “I have no idea what to do with this,” I murmured. “What are we going to do with this?”

  “I say we set up a meeting,” Cormac said, calm and steady. Discussing a battle plan and not freaking out. “Agree to meet with him and set a trap. Stake him while his guard is down.”

  “You make it sound simple,” I said. A million things could go wrong. Other people more powerful and more experienced than we were had tried setting traps for Roman, had tried staking him while his guard was down. They hadn’t succeeded. While we were setting a trap for Roman, he could just as easily be setting a trap for us. In fact, that seemed the most likely scenario. We were getting suckered into something.

  “No, this could work,” Ben said, studying the computer screen as if it might reveal more secrets. “Even if he picks the location, we’ll have time to scout it out and set up an ambush. It may be our only chance to physically confront him.”

  As if setting traps for two-thousand-year-old vampires was like setting up a drug bust. “Ben, you’re the one who’s supposed to be all skeptical and negative.”

  “When are we ever going to get another opening like this?” he replied.

  “There’s a problem,” Cormac said.

  “Only one?” I shot back.

  “I can’t go. Roman knows what I look like, he knows I’m with you and that I’m not anybody named Amelia Parker. The minute he sees me he’ll know it’s a trap.”

  A simple problem to put an end to a simple plan. Would it be wrong to be secretly relieved that Cormac was not going to be marching straight up to Roman to put a stake in his heart? “So what do you want to do?”

  “Find someone to be Amelia,” he said.

  “What, throw some poor innocent woman in Roman’s path?” I said.

  “Whatever it takes,” Cormac said. “Maybe someone from your pack—Becky, she’s pretty tough. Might not matter that she’s a werewolf.”

  “We’re not using Becky as bait.” I wanted to get up and pace.

  “Kitty, calm down,” Ben said, touching my hand. “I thought this was what we’ve been waiting for. Why so worked up?” From anyone else, the question would have sounded condescending, but his expression held only concern.

  I shivered, trying to work out the tension. “I just have a bad feeling about this. It can’t be that easy.”

  “I don’t expect it to be easy,” Cormac said. “But it’s a chance.”

  The front door opened, letting in a taste of the night air outside. Usually I ignored it—the scents that came with the breath of air were generic, anonymous, strangers coming and going, or familiar smells of people I knew and expected to be here.

  But I caught this scent and looked up, because I recognized it, and it was totally unexpected. My hand closed on Ben’s arm and I stood.

  “Tina!”

  A striking brunette, Tina McCannon was lean and photogenic, one of the stars of the TV show Paradox PI. We’d met when the show came to town a few years ago, and I roped her and her colleagues into an interview, which turned into a live ghost-hunting session and a Ouija board séance that set New Moon on fire. We fixed it. Turned out, Tina was good at ghost hunting because she really was psychic. A year later, we both participated in a cabin-in-the-woods reality TV show that went very south very quickly. We survived, when not many of the original participants did. Made for a tight-knit club. She’d been one of my go-to resources on psychic phenomena ever since.

  Tonight she was in jeans, T-shirt, and jacket. She paused at the doorway, searching. Her gaze lit up when she found me.

  “Kitty!”

  I squealed as we came together in a big, noisy hug there in the middle of the bar. I might have been a werewolf, but I had a monster-sized sentimental streak. The last time I saw Tina she was recovering from a gunshot wound in her gut. My friends and I, bound by our scars. And Ben and Cormac wondered why I worried so much.

  “This place looks so much better when it isn’t on fire, doesn’t it?” she said.

  Yes, yes it did. “I didn’t know you were going to be in town, why didn’t you call?”

  “I knew you’d be here. I am psychic,” she added, a twinkle in her eye.

  “Er. Right. Come in, sit. What’s up?”

  Over at our table, Tina and Ben shared a friendly hug and traded mutual well wishes. Cormac looked on expectantly, patiently. I had to think for a minute—he’d been in prison when she came through town, hadn’t he?

  “Um, Tina—this is Cormac.”

  She blinked at him, then donned a sunny smile. “Hi, I’m Tina,” she said redundantly.

  He smiled thinly, took a sip of beer.

  “Um,” Tina said, leaning toward me. “There’s something weird going on with his aura.”

  “There are two of them,” he said.

  “Cormac and Amelia,” I said.

  That weird subtle change came over Cormac as he spoke in a suddenly refined voice. “Hello, I’ve heard so much about you. Delighted to finally meet you. Um, Cormac would rather I step aside for the time being. But yes.”

  “Oh. Hi. Yes, nice to meet you, too.” She nodded sagely, like she encountered this sort of thing all the time. And maybe she did. “So, I take it he’s—they’re—in on everything.”

  Ah, how to explain Cormac and his role in all this in a dozen words or less? Without making him sound like a maniac?

  “You could say that,” Ben said. Nailed it.

  I made us all sit, and Tina asked a server for a glass of water.

  “How are you? What brings you to Denver?” I asked.

  “This was kind of last minute,” she said, wincing as if chagrined. “That’s why I didn’t call. I just got in my car and drove.”

  “From L.A.?” I said.

  “Yeah.” That wince again, like she knew it sounded crazy and couldn’t explain it to herself, much less me. “I need to talk to you.”

  “You couldn’t have called? Not that I’m not happy to see you—but what’s wrong?”

  “Would it be weird if I said I didn’t feel safe calling? I keep looking over my shoulder like someone’s following me. I just … I needed to see you, to make sure it was you, you know?”

  That made a scary amount of sense. I exchanged a concerned glance with Ben. Cormac stud
ied the inside of his beer glass. It was that feeling again, that something was about to happen. So, it wasn’t just me.

  “There’s something in the air, I think,” I said.

  “Kitty—when was the last time you heard from Anastasia?” she asked.

  “That’s … a long story,” I said. They were all getting to be long stories. Anastasia was a vampire, some eight hundred years old, from China. She was also a survivor of that terrible reality show.

  I’d last seen her in San Francisco’s Chinatown—the last time I confronted Roman, come to think of it. What happened to her after that … I wasn’t exactly sure. It involved Chinese gods and goddesses, ancient spells, and interdimensional tunnels. “Would it mean anything to you if I said I think she’s gone to another plane of existence?”

  “That … that makes sense. I keep feeling like I’m hearing her voice. At first I thought maybe something had happened to her. Can you call it dead when it happens to a vampire? They’re already dead—”

  “I call it dead,” Cormac said.

  “I usually have a really hard time sensing vampires because they’re in between, not dead or alive. I’ve never channeled one who was, you know, dead dead. This didn’t feel like any of that.”

  “Anastasia accepted an employment opportunity offered by a divine being,” Ben said helpfully.

  “Oh. Well, okay then.” Very little fazed Tina. “I think she’s been trying to tell me something. I’m just not sure exactly what. But coming here, seeing you—seemed like the right thing to do. I can’t get any more specific than that.” She looked back and forth between us, and at Cormac’s laptop—we’d obviously been in some kind of conference. “Something’s about to happen, isn’t it?”

  Worse yet, I was sure several somethings were about to happen. At once, and spectacularly. I just didn’t know what, and Tina’s sudden appearance with ominous messages didn’t help the feeling.

  Meanwhile, Cormac’s gaze had finally settled on Tina, and he was studying her thoughtfully. Like he was sizing up an elk he was about to shoot.