Kitty Saves the World

by Carrie Vaughn

  Maybe he hadn’t been talking metaphorically.

  The doorbell rang, and I snarled. I about sprouted claws right there, because I was just so sick of dealing with crap.

  Ben made a calming gesture—I really must have looked like a crazy thing—and went to get the door. A moment later I heard, “Kitty? It’s for you.”

  He didn’t sound nervous, angry, or confrontational. Instead he sounded nonplussed. My nose flared, testing the air … Ben wasn’t angry because the smell was familiar.

  I arrived just as Ben stepped aside to let our new visitor in. He was either a weathered young man or a vibrant middle-aged one, with a craggy face, close-cropped hair, and gray eyes. He wore a trench coat over slacks and a dress shirt, making him look dapper and poised.

  Odysseus Grant.

  “Hello,” he said, with a hint of a smile.

  I hesitated just a moment before wrapping him in a hug, to give him a chance to escape, but he didn’t, handling my enthusiastic greeting with patience.

  “What are you doing here?” I exclaimed. I’d met Odysseus Grant in Las Vegas, where he was a stage magician. His show was self-consciously old-fashioned, keeping alive a host of Vaudeville-era stage tricks. If he mixed some real magic into the show, who would notice? Until Amelia came along, he was my main resource for magical questions and problems. One of my allies, one of the good guys.

  He tilted his head. “Would you think it odd if I said Anastasia sent me?” He’d also been a part of the nightmare reality show with me, Tina, and Anastasia. He’d taken a stake for the vampire and lived to tell the tale.

  Anastasia—what the hell was she up to? It really did start to feel like I had a guardian angel looking out for me. “Yes. But I wouldn’t be surprised. You’re not the first.”

  I led him to the kitchen, where Tina wrapped him in a more careful hug. Along with Anastasia, we were most of the survivors from that adventure.

  “This isn’t a coincidence, that we’ve all been brought together here and now,” he said.

  “It’s the earthquake, isn’t it?” Tina said. “It’s not natural.”

  “It’s natural,” Grant said. “But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t triggered. That’s what you’ve been saying, isn’t it? That Roman has some kind of spell to control such phenomena.”

  I said, “He has a spell that can ignite volcanoes. I don’t know about earthquakes. We’ve been trying to figure out where he’ll strike—”

  “Show me,” Grant said.

  I led him back to the office; the others followed.

  “Roman’s making his move. He’s sent people after me, my pack, my restaurant.” In the office, he stepped back to regard the map with its tangled pattern of active volcanoes wending around the world like lacework. I continued. “He was in New Mexico just a few days ago, but I have reason to think he’s in Denver now. Maybe he did cause the earthquake, but we were sure he’d try to trigger a volcano.”

  “Yes, that’s what Anastasia said.” He studied the map, then glanced around sharply, looking for something. “You’ve missed one.”

  He found the box of red thumbtacks, pulled one out, and stuck it into the map a mere five hundred miles north of Denver.

  “Right there. That’s your volcano,” he said.

  I stared, then sank into a chair as the breath went out of me.

  Chapter 14

  ROUGHLY EVERY six hundred thousand years, a certain hot spot under the Earth’s crust erupts in a massive explosion. This hot spot was currently located under Yellowstone National Park. Geologists had found evidence of past eruptions in a series of craters that tracked westward, as plate tectonics moved the North American continent over that location. In modern times, the hot spot created a region full of geysers and hot springs, more concentrated thermal activity than anywhere else on the planet. Yellowstone Lake, the large body of water in the middle of the park, filled up part of the caldera that resulted from the most recent eruption, which covered much of the continent in meters of ash and spread a toxic cloud over half the planet.

  The next eruption was about sixty thousand years overdue. The hot spot was ready to burst. A potential Yellowstone eruption was a favorite doomsday scenario with people who talked about that sort of thing. An eruption similar to the previous one would cause something like a nuclear winter, shrouding the planet in ash, raining dozens of feet of debris for hundreds of miles, blocking the sun, dropping global temperatures, resulting in the destruction of crops, mass starvation, and disease …

  If a guy who could trigger volcanic eruptions wanted to destroy Denver, or civilization, he couldn’t do much better than the Yellowstone caldera.

  I stared at that little red pin while Grant explained, and Ben supplemented with information from one of my volcano reference books. Grant was right, I’d totally missed this, because I’d been looking for volcanoes erupting right now. Not doomsday scenarios in my own backyard. I imagined the swath of destruction, painted a mental picture of ash sweeping away from that point in a big black smear. We wouldn’t even have time to run, if Yellowstone blew right now.

  Was that earthquake a sign of things to come? A warning?

  We moved back to the kitchen. The TV news was still running, with all its repetitive commentary and interviews with experts and video of reporters standing on street corners describing the destruction clearly visible right behind them. One was downtown, where a historic old Victorian house had lost part of its front porch, which had collapsed into its yard. Still didn’t look as bad as the ruins of New Moon.

  I’d given the magician our translated copy of Amy Scanlon’s book of shadows, with its tangle of clues and commentary. I said, “Everything we know about the Manus Herculei is in here. Roman apparently went to Split, Croatia, last year to retrieve the spell from where he’d hidden it two thousand years before, after using it at Pompeii—”

  “And Herculaneum, you said that’s where the name comes from,” Grant asked.

  “Yes. If Roman went to retrieve it, we assumed that meant he was getting ready to use it.”

  “Speaking as another magician, I make three assumptions: that he needs to be in the appropriate location in order to use the spell. He cannot cast from a distance. Second, the spell has a timed delay, since I assume Roman intends to survive the eruption. He’ll need time to flee.”

  The floor shook, like someone had installed a coin-operated vibrating bed under it. Dishes in the cupboard clinked, the ceiling fan in the living room swayed, the refrigerator made a disconcerting rattle. It only lasted a couple of seconds, but we all grabbed tables and counters and looked around, eyes wide, wondering if the house was going to fall on us, if maybe we should run.

  “Just an aftershock,” Tina said when everything went quiet. “Nothing to worry about.”

  “Yeah,” Ben said, lip curled. “Who’s worried?”

  “And third,” Grant said, not missing a beat, “this isn’t an easy spell to cast. He used it two thousand years ago to great effect, and presumably put it aside and didn’t use it again. Or used it rarely—half a dozen times, perhaps, if we blame every catastrophic volcanic eruption near a populated area over the last two millennia on him. He’ll need time, space, and resources. We can use that against him. We don’t know enough about the spell to counter the magic, so we must find him. The source of it all.”

  “We tried that last time. It didn’t work so well,” I said.

  The front door banged open, and we all jumped, again, because every loud banging noise was going to make us jump for weeks from here out.

  Cormac walked in a moment later. My first impulse was to hug him just as hard as I’d hugged Grant, but I resisted. Tina got as far as jumping up before restraining herself. Cormac looked even more prickly than usual at the moment, frowning, taking in the room at a glance as if confirming that everything was okay. His gaze finally rested on Grant.

  “You’re Odysseus Grant,” he said, then looked at me for explanation.

  “Yeah,” I said
. “Anastasia gave him a tip.”

  “Anastasia?” He didn’t sound confused so much as disbelieving.

  Grant stood. “And you must be Cormac Bennett … and Amelia Parker?”

  This time, Cormac scowled at me. I said, “Once I started calling him for advice about deciphering books of shadows, I sort of had to explain everything.”

  He waved me off. “Everybody okay?”

  “Yeah,” Ben said. “We’re just trying to figure out if this is Roman’s next move and what we’re going to do about it.”

  “Same as always, stake the bastard first chance we get.”

  “I think we’re on about our fifth chance,” I said. “It’s not working.”

  Grant said, “He’ll need to go to Yellowstone, and he’ll need help, a place to stay, minions—do you know any of the vampires in that area, who he might call on for help?”

  “There aren’t any,” Cormac said. “At least not any established Families. There might be a few loners, but the population up north isn’t big enough to support vampires. Denver’s the only city with a good-sized Family in the region.”

  I stepped back, hand on my head. Thoughts fell into place, rattled me—like an earthquake. “That’s why Roman’s been so interested in us, why he’s worked so hard to get the city under his control.” He’d sent minions, vampires, magicians, over and over again, to undermine me and Rick, to put his own people in place. And I thought he was just pissed off at me. “I guess it’s nice I don’t have to take it personally anymore.”

  “Well, he’s finally got Denver,” Cormac said. “At least, his enemies aren’t in charge anymore. He’s using Denver as his base, he’s got to be around somewhere. Kitty, you know all the vampire hideouts in town?”

  “Only some of them,” I said.

  “Then we start there. He’s bedded down in one of them. We’ll work in teams and cover more ground.” Cormac took charge of what was turning into a physical assault plan. That was his area of expertise anyway.

  We collected weapons, discussed tactics. Ben and Cormac shared what they knew about hunting vampires, and it turned out Grant knew something about it as well. I made a list of vampire-owned locations in town. Roman would never bed down in a place I knew about—he’d have a secret lair set up somewhere. We’d run all over the place—in a town that was in chaos from a natural disaster—and never find him. I was daunted.

  We were going to need help, so I called Detective Hardin. Her line was busy—of course it was, the police were probably stretched to the breaking point. But this—this was important.

  I shouldn’t have worried; a few minutes later, she called me. “We’re all on call, running around like chickens with our heads off. Please tell me you and the rest of the gang are okay.”

  “Angelo was killed last night.” And I killed him … “Roman’s probably in town. Want to help us go after him again?”

  She hesitated a moment. Probably going over her vast list of fires to stomp out. Which crisis would she move to the top of the list? “Hell yeah, I do. I’ll see who I can round up to help.”

  “Bring stakes.”

  “You know it.”

  I hung up the phone and beamed at the others. Maybe I couldn’t work a crossbow worth anything, but I had my own resources. “Hardin’s in,” I said.

  Half an hour later Hardin arrived in her sedan and brought a patrol car and two uniformed cops with her. Cormac, Tina, and Grant were going to look for Roman at Psalm 23, while Ben, Hardin, and I dropped by the lair at Obsidian and a couple of other downtown safe houses I knew about. If we found any of the Family’s human servants, we’d try to recruit them. We’d hope the aftershocks didn’t get worse.

  * * *

  THE GALLERY looked different in daylight hours. Plain, unassuming. Like a hundred other downtown storefronts and businesses that had been here forever. A little run down, a little lonely. Concrete and chipped paint. It seemed smaller. The earthquake hadn’t seemed to cause it any damage. I wondered if the tremor had affected the vampires downstairs at all. I supposed the building could collapse and bury them, and as long as they weren’t exposed to sunlight, they’d be all right.

  “I don’t think he’s here,” Ben said, after he and Hardin and I had made a circuit of the building. The door at the base of the stairs was locked.

  I didn’t smell Roman. I smelled generic vampire, but the place was saturated with their bloodless chill. In daylight hours, the scent was muted. If he’d come back here after the rest of us had left, we couldn’t tell with our noses.

  “I didn’t think he would be,” I said. “But we had to check.”

  “You said you had a couple of other places to try?”

  “Yeah. The Family owns property all over town. A lot of vampires make their money with property investments. The places I know about, it’s mostly by smell. But the guy’s got to spend daylight hours somewhere.”

  “Well, let’s check it out.”

  The first address was a small apartment building north of downtown. The upper floors were rented out to regular tenants, but the basement apartments were reserved for vampires. Again, we made a circuit of the building, smelling what little we could. Detective Hardin interviewed the on-site property manager to see if she’d seen anything strange, or what she knew about who lived in the basement.

  I hadn’t intended on getting separated from Ben. We weren’t, really—I was at the back of the building, and he was just around the corner—just around the corner—while we studied the blacked-out basement windows. I might have been out of his sight, but I wasn’t out of shouting distance. We weren’t really separated.

  I heard something, a snapping of fingers down the alley behind the building. Someone standing around being bored. I went to look, moving around the Dumpsters in the back of the lot to the alley fence.

  The last person I expected or wanted to see was there, one hand in a pocket. Charles Lightman snapped the fingers of his other hand, then studied them as if trying to figure out how they worked.

  I stared at him. “What are you doing here?”

  He squinted up at the sky, as if he wasn’t used to the sun, and smiled like this was a joke. “I was hoping we could chat. It won’t take long.”

  “This really isn’t a good time,” I said, trying to catch my breath, mind stumbling. “In fact, it’s a pretty damn awful time. I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s been an earthquake. And how did you know I was here—”

  “Yes, I see, I understand. But I can’t sit on this forever, Ms. Norville, Kitty. You knew it wasn’t a standing offer. But I’m here now, I’m willing to negotiate. Do we move forward? Think of it—expand your influence, your empire. You’ll have the kind of success that brings stability. No more guessing, no more taking chances. You’ll get away from all this. The very fact you’re stalling tells me you’re interested. It’s a hard choice, I know, but you’ve had time to think on it. I need an answer.”

  Was he serious? He’d followed me in the aftermath of an earthquake to demand an answer? I couldn’t believe it. “You know, right this minute, if you really want to make an offer I can’t refuse? You know what I really want? I want my pack back home safe, and I want Roman’s head on a platter.”

  This should have been nonsensical to him. He should have been confused. Asked who Roman was, what my pack was. But his smile didn’t waver. The light in his eyes turned hungry.

  “Ah, I’m afraid I can’t do that. I knew your pack would be a great bargaining chip, but my opponents got to them first. Protected them. And you, from being manipulated because of them. And Roman’s head? No, I need that right where it is.”

  My limbs went cold, and I stared. Something was about to go very sideways, I could feel it. “Who—”

  “The TV show offer—that was the standard rich-and-famous deal. I didn’t really expect you to say yes to it. Truth be told, I expected you to say no right away. The fact you were tempted at all—I find that interesting. Ah well. You can’t win them all. This just
makes it possible for me to move forward with the next plan. You know what they say about one door closing.”

  “Ben—” I called over my shoulder, recognizing the need for backup, but it was too late.

  A wind blasted me, like someone opened the bulkhead door of an airplane and sucked away the air. I smelled brimstone, fury, and darkness—

  “Ashtoreth!” I called out, right as she appeared, stepping through whatever invisible portal had opened. I snarled, braced to fight or run, but the wind pinned me down, hunched over. If I tried to move or straighten it would sweep me away.

  She hadn’t drawn any of her weapons. She stood before me, expressionless, the lenses of her goggles two depthless holes. Her arms reached for me, grabbed me, and everything vanished.

  Chapter 15

  I HAD A glimpse of something red hot, a powerful sun bearing down on me, and then darkness fell. We were flying, or falling. Ashtoreth had locked me in an iron embrace and I couldn’t catch my breath. A hurricane wind blew around us, sweeping us to somewhere. I might have tried to scream. I struggled, but I was trapped. Unable to make out any of the world around me, I shut my eyes. Even when I tried to open them again, I couldn’t see anything. Darkness, all in darkness.

  Then the wind stopped, and the demon let me go.

  I fell hard, like being dumped out of a fast-moving car. Rolled for a ways on rocky ground, scuffing my arms and face, and came to rest with a mouthful of dirt. I spat it out. Lashing out, I got ready for the fight I was sure was coming, a battle with the demon and her silver-tainted weapons. I swung, kicked, scrambled into a defensive crouch—but no one was there. Ashtoreth was gone; she’d thrown me away, then apparently vanished. I couldn’t see her, smell her. Then again, I couldn’t smell anything. A rotten egg stink overpowered me. I sneezed and tried to breathe through my mouth. Checked for anything worse than aches or bruises, and took stock of where I’d ended up.