Kitty Takes a Holiday

by Carrie Vaughn

  “I should have done something,” Ben murmured. “I should have helped.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t. We’d both have ended up like this. That thing—I was frozen. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t do anything. Just like Cormac said.” Just like those cows. They couldn’t run, they couldn’t struggle. She’d slaughtered them at her leisure.

  “When does this rapid healing start?”

  “It should have started already.” All the wounds still oozed and hurt like hell.

  He shook his head absently, dabbing away fresh blood. “You have a first-aid kit? I think we’re going to have to tape some of this up. You have something you can wear?”

  “I think there’s a button-up shirt in the closet. I ought to be able to get that on without crying.” I was still propped up against the sink, afraid to move because I knew it would hurt.

  Ben regarded me a moment, and then had the gall to smile. “For someone who says she doesn’t like to get mixed up in the middle of things, you sure have a way of getting mixed up in the middle of things.” He kissed my lips and left on his errand. That made me feel better. Heck, it was almost like I’d planned it: Ben was doing great now that he had someone else to worry about. I’d have to keep that in mind.

  He came back with a flannel shirt, and I sent him back for something else. I didn’t want to think about bits of flannel mixed with cuts scabbing over.

  By the time we emerged back into the kitchen, Alice, Joe, and Tony were chatting. If not happily, at least cordially. Like they might actually come out of this as friends. Tony was pouring hot water from a kettle into mugs. His tea smelled rich, warm, soothing—just like he promised. I identified chamomile twined in with scents I didn’t recognize.

  Tony said, “You just don’t seem like the kind of person who’d be into animal sacrifice.”

  “Well… I’m not. It was all roadkill Joe and Avery picked up. We added blood from the butcher shop to make it look fresh. The only thing I did, really, was fix it so nobody saw or heard them placing the things.”

  Of all the… Before I could say something snotty, Tony continued. “That explains a lot. It didn’t work, she didn’t leave, because you weren’t willing to make the sacrifice yourself, to spill the blood. You weren’t willing to take that onto yourself to get what you wanted.”

  Softly, she said, “Not like that girl out there.”

  After a moment of silence, I took the opportunity to bust in on the group. “I spend all that money in your store, and you still didn’t want me sticking around?”

  Alice’s face puckered like she was going to start crying and I regretted my cattiness. She really hadn’t known what she was doing, had she?

  “Oh, Kitty, I was just scared. We all were. We didn’t know. You hear stories, and you think the worst. We were just trying to keep the town safe, surely you can understand that.”

  “So… the last couple full moons. Did you notice anything different? Could you tell that a werewolf was living in the neighborhood?” A law-abiding werewolf who made very, very sure that she didn’t cause trouble.

  “No, I didn’t notice.”

  Joe said, “That’s because we spent the night locked in the house with all the lights on.”

  “And the days I shape-shifted that weren’t on the full moon—you didn’t notice then, did you?”

  They both looked at me. Alice said, “You turn into a wolf on other days, too?”

  Even Ben looked at me sharply. I wasn’t supposed to shape-shift on other nights. He knew I wasn’t supposed to do that. Now what kind of role model was I?

  “Whenever I want.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Alice said softly.

  Tony straightened from where he’d parked by the counter. “Hey, Alice, you want to help me with something?”

  “What?”

  “That thing out there left a lot of bad feeling in the air. No reason we can’t try to clean it up a little, even if things didn’t go the way we planned.”

  “But the coroner, shouldn’t we wait—”

  “This won’t bother them. We won’t have to touch anything.”

  She brightened. Tony had offered a chance for redemption, and she seemed eager to take it. “All right.”

  The two left the cabin, and Tony flashed me a smile on the way out.

  Joe busily rinsed out mugs.

  I started toward him. “Don’t worry about that, I can get it.”

  Ben interceded. “No, you sit down and start healing.” He pointed at me until I sank into a kitchen chair. Funny—I hadn’t noticed I was dizzy until I sat down and the room stopped trembling. Ben put a mug of something steaming in front of me, then went to help Joe.

  Clutching the mug in both hands and sipping carefully, I watched Ben and Joe washing coffee and tea accoutrements at the sink, side by side. Joe, who wouldn’t let me, the werewolf, into his store without holding a gun on me, stood next to another werewolf and didn’t even know it.

  Over the next half hour, Sheriff Marks’s backup arrived, including a coroner’s van and a few deputies to take statements. While they worked, Tony and Alice walked around the clearing, each waving a smoking bundle of plant matter—some kind of incense. Some kind of blessing, or cleansing. I didn’t know if it would work. Alice seemed to feel better, at any rate. At least it worked for someone.

  One of the deputies took Joe and Alice home. The cops had taken statements from everyone, and Tony was the next to leave. Before that, he found me, sitting on the porch steps to watch the proceedings.

  He sat next to me.

  “Here. Take this.” He reached over his neck and pulled something from under his shirt: a small leather pouch on a long cord. Before I even had time to lean away in surprise, he put the cord over my head, so I was wearing the pouch around my neck. “It’s protected me through the years. It may help protect you.”

  I put my hand over it. Small enough to fit inside my fist, the brown leather was soft. Stuffed inside was something crunchy and fibrous. Dried herbs, maybe.

  “May?” I said.

  He shrugged, like we were talking about the weather. “I do what I can.”

  “Well. Thanks for trying.”

  “If I had known that’s what we were dealing with, I might have been able to do more.” He nodded to where the coroner’s people were loading the body onto a wheeled stretcher. Some forensics officers wrapped the wolf skin in a plastic bag and carried it away.

  “Any advice for what to do next?” I said.

  “Let it end here. Don’t go asking any more questions. Don’t look for any more trouble.”

  I hid a smile. Good advice, to be sure. Not sure it was the right advice. I had way too many questions, and this hadn’t ended because Cormac was still sitting in the back of Marks’s car, wearing handcuffs.

  “Ben told me about the silver,” I said. “I don’t usually keep that sort of thing around, but we could probably pay you with some of Cormac’s bullets.” I’d pay Cormac back later. He’d understand.

  “This one’s on the house,” he said. Then, as unobtrusively as he’d arrived, he disappeared into his truck and away.

  Finally, after the coroner’s crew and deputies were gone, the sheriff left with Cormac riding in the backseat, leaving the clearing suddenly empty and quiet. Ben and I stood on the porch, watching the chaos disperse. The night wasn’t over for us; we had to get in my car and go spring Cormac.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” Ben said, watching the cars leave.

  “Do what?”

  “Sit there and argue with those clowns. Not without… something happening. Losing my temper. You know.”

  “You’ve done it before, haven’t you?” They’d both acted like this was routine. Which was kind of scary.

  “Lost my temper? Sure.” He smiled a little. “Or do you mean representing Cormac? You keep saying you and I are a pack and we have to look out for each other. I feel like Cormac is part of my pack. I have to protect him. The wolf side would do anyth
ing to protect him.” He flexed his hands, like he could already feel that anger, that determination, waking up inside him.

  I touched his hand, to bring him back to himself. He let out a nervous breath.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  Looking away, he nodded. “I was hoping you would.”

  I hadn’t ever considered not going.

  The truth was, the thought of him leaving me here, of being alone after all that, made me ill. Between that and the queasy, injured feeling that still lingered after the fight, I wanted to throw up. I wasn’t okay at all, and I wasn’t going to sit around waiting for the next curse to arrive.

  chapter 13

  We took my car, and in forty minutes arrived at the sheriff’s department and county jail in Walsenburg. Marks had booked Cormac by the time we got into the building, and the hunter was ensconced in a back room, out of sight.

  Marks glared at us over the front desk. “He’s already asking for his lawyer. You want to get back here so we can take his statement?”

  Ben was tense. I knew him well enough by now that I could tell without touching him.

  “You’ll be fine,” I said. “Just breathe slow and think about keeping it in. Stay calm.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “Yup.” I tried to make my smile encouraging.

  He straightened his shoulders and stalked forward like a man preparing to go into battle.

  I’d seen him talk down cops before. I’d seen him face a panel of senators and hold them off. In those cases he’d had this hawk’s stare, the fierce-eyed glare of a hunter that had always instilled confidence in me, because he was always on my side.

  The hawk was gone. I should have seen it, but it wasn’t there. Instead, he looked like he’d been cornered.

  I watched him go, wringing my hands on his behalf. Then all I could do was wait in the lobby on a hard plastic chair, leafing through copies of news magazines a month out of date. I wanted to climb the walls. The place was clean, not terribly old or worn out. But it smelled of sweat and fatigue. It was not a good place. People ended up here when they’d hit bottom, or were about to hit bottom.

  My wounds still itched. They should have been almost healed. Cursed, Tony had said. I hadn’t realized how much I took the quick healing for granted. Then again, if I didn’t have rapid healing, I wouldn’t go around intercepting attacking wolves.

  I watched the clock. Hours later, after midnight, Ben came back to the lobby. He was pale, ill-looking, and sweat dampened his hair. He looked like he’d run a race, not talked with the cops. I stood and met him.

  He smelled musky, animal, like his wolf was rising to the surface. I took hold of his hand. “Keep it together, Ben. Take a deep breath.”

  He did, and it shuddered when he let it out. “I don’t know what Cormac did earlier, but Marks has it in for him. He already called the prosecutor. They want to file charges. Six eyewitnesses saw Cormac save your life, and they want to press charges. They won’t set bail until the advisement hearing tomorrow. And I just sat there and stared at them.”

  “How does this usually work? You make it sound like this isn’t the way things normally go for you guys.”

  “Usually I have plenty of evidence that Cormac had a good reason for doing whatever he did, and the charges don’t even get filed. But we have a couple of problems this time. Somebody around here wants to make a reputation for themselves.”

  “Marks?”

  “Marks and George Espinoza, a very earnest prosecutor who’s probably never encountered anything more serious than trespassing.” His tone was harsh.

  “And?” There was an “and” in there.

  “She was already dying when he killed her. It was excessive force, even for Cormac. That’s the argument Espinoza’s going to use.”

  This was going to be about splitting hairs. Cormac did what he had to—I could convince myself of that. A hundred horror movie climaxes said he did the right thing.

  But how would a judge see it?

  “How’s Cormac?”

  “Stoic. He’s Cormac. There’s something else. They’ve ID’d the body. The skinwalker. Miriam Wilson. She’s the twin sister of John Wilson, the werewolf that Cormac shot. The one that got me. A missing person report on her was filed three months ago.”

  As if we needed the situation to be any more complicated. I tried to imagine a state of affairs where a brother and sister would become the things they were, and wreak the havoc they had.

  “Brother and sister? One of them a werewolf and one of them a skinwalker. What’s the story behind that?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “And her family reported her disappearance to the police, but they hired Cormac to hunt down the brother?”

  He shrugged. “We don’t know that it was her family that filed the report. I’m guessing they didn’t send Cormac after her because she wasn’t a werewolf. We don’t know if they knew what she was. We don’t know anything. Christ, I’m going to have to go buy a suit. I left all my clothes in my car back in Farmington. I can’t go to court without a suit.” He was currently wearing his coat over jeans and a T-shirt, like he’d been wearing for the last week.

  “We’ll go buy you a suit in the morning. Is there anything else you need to do? Can we get out of here?” I wanted to get him out of this place, with its unhappy smells and atmosphere of confrontation.

  “Yeah, let’s go.”

  That started a very long night. Ben used my laptop and spent hours looking through online legal libraries for precedents and arguments that would spring Cormac. He scratched out notes on a notepad. I watched, lying on the sofa, wondering how I could help. He grew more agitated by the minute.

  “Ben, come to bed. Get some sleep.”

  “I can’t. Too much to do. All my work is back in my car, I have too much to review, I have to catch up.” He glared at the screen with a frantic intensity.

  “How much are you going to be able to help him if you’re falling asleep in the courtroom?”

  He took his hands away from the keyboard and bowed his head. I could see the fatigue radiating off him. When he came to the sofa, I sat up, made room for him, and pulled him into an embrace. My body was healing, finally, but still sore. I didn’t complain. He needed me to comfort him, however much I wanted someone to comfort me. We stayed like that a long time, his head pillowed on my shoulder, until the tension started to seep out of him. I got him out of his clothes, into bed, and held him close, curled up in my arms, until he finally fell asleep. He never fully relaxed.

  The next morning, we went to buy a suit. We weren’t going to find anything fancy in Walsenburg. This put Ben even further out of sorts. But we managed, somehow.

  He changed clothes in the car on the way to the Huerfano County Courthouse, where Cormac’s first hearing was scheduled to take place. The suit didn’t fit quite right, it didn’t make as slick a picture as he might have wanted. I brushed his hair back with my fingers, straightened his tie, smoothed his lapels. Like I was sending him to the prom or something.

  Ben looked like I was sending him to an execution. He was still holding himself tense, shoulders stiff, like the raised hackles on a nervous wolf.

  “You going to be okay?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, sure. This is just a formality. The judge will look over his statement, the witness statements, and throw out the case. That’s all there is to it.”

  He headed into the building alone to meet with Cormac before the hearing. I made my way to the courtroom. In other circumstances I might have admired the hundred-year-old building, made of functional gray stone and topped by a simple decorated tower. They built them to last in those days.

  I didn’t know what I expected—some kind of dramatic, busy scene like in a courtroom drama on TV. But the place was almost empty. Marks stood off to one side. A couple of people in business suits conversed quietly. Fluorescent lights glared. The whole place gave the impression of dull bureaucracy. I sat in the first row behi
nd the defense side. I was sure this would be educational if I weren’t so nervous on Ben and Cormac’s behalf.

  Without any preamble, a couple of bailiffs guided Cormac into the courtroom. He’d had a chance to shave, which made him look slightly less psychotic than he had last night. A point in his favor, and that was probably part of the strategy. It was a shock, though, to see him in an orange prison jumpsuit, short-sleeved, baggy, unflattering. It gave me a terrible sense of foreboding.

  Ben followed, and both of them positioned themselves behind one of the podiums before the bench.

  The whole procedure followed in a kind of haze. The judge, Heller, a middle-aged woman, brown hair pulled into a bun, wearing a no-nonsense expression, came into the room and took her place. Ben and Cormac remained standing before her. Across from them, one of the business suits, a surprisingly young man—no older than Ben and Cormac—shuffled papers on the desk in front of him. George Espinoza, the prosecutor. His suit was neat, his dark hair slicked back, his expression viperish. A crusader. No wonder Ben was worried.

  The prosecutor read the facts—and just the facts, ma’am. The time and place of Cormac’s arrest, the nature of the crime, the probable cause. The charge: murder. Not just murder, but first-degree murder. That was serious, way too serious.

  Espinoza explained: “The accused was heard to say that he had tracked the victim, had in fact been focused on her for quite some time with the intent to kill her. He was seen in the area of Shiprock, New Mexico—the victim’s hometown—on several dates over the last month. He was, in fact, lying in wait for the victim’s appearance. This presents a clear display of deliberation, meeting the requirement for a charge of first-degree murder.”

  Cormac had been tracking her. He had meant to kill her. Which made the whole thing murky. I was glad I wasn’t the lawyer.

  This wasn’t a TV show. Nobody shouted, nobody slammed their fists on the tables, nobody rushed in from the back with the crucial piece of information that would free the defendant, or pound the final nail in the prosecution’s case.

  They might have been lecturing on economic theory, as calmly and analytically as everyone spoke. It made it hard to concentrate on the words.