Kitty Goes to War

  Franklin stared up at the clearing sky with the rest of us. I couldn’t see his expression, but his shoulders sagged.

  He put the amulet in his coat pocket and turned back to Cormac. “It’s your fault, isn’t it?”

  “I guess so.”

  Cormac and Franklin faced each other down like a couple of Old West gunslingers. Cormac even stood ready, arms loose, hands at his hips, ready to yank pistols from holsters. He looked wrong without his guns. But he didn’t look worried.

  “What are you?” Franklin’s tone was both frightened and angry. He’d probably never been defeated. He was used to a world where few people knew anything about magic. “Who do you serve?”

  “No one. I’m just a guy,” Cormac said, a tilt to his head.

  That seemed to infuriate Franklin. He began chanting, not a one-phrase curse, a moment of power, and then done. He didn’t have an amulet this time. Above, clouds that had been clearing began to coalesce again, sinking low, as if drawn toward him. The temperature dropped—to even feel it at this point meant it was plummeting, going from freezing to arctic. And all the power gathered toward Franklin, who was pointing outstretched arms at Cormac.

  “Kitty, what’s he doing?” Ben said, standing close behind me, taking hold of my shoulder. “Does Cormac need help?” Nearby, Tyler was breathing deep, fogging breaths.

  “I don’t know,” I said, and my voice sounded thin, lost. I had seen magic at work before. I hadn’t seen anything like this.

  I had a professor in college who read Anglo-Saxon like he’d grown up with it. This was the language of Beowulf, a rolling, singsong way of speaking, full of portent. Like thunder, rumbling for miles over a windswept plain. After the passage of time, this professor explained, ancient languages become the language of magic, the meanings forgotten but the power of them remembered. The Catholic Church could chant Latin, and it didn’t matter that no one knew what the words meant a thousand years later. He’d been speaking metaphorically. But he was right.

  Franklin was drawing on that power now, gathering it to launch at and smash his enemy, and I couldn’t understand why Cormac was just standing there, why he didn’t look worried. But did he ever?

  A white glow was growing around Franklin, seeming to light him from within. His hair was standing on end, as if he were gathering a static charge. The whole area looked like an electrical experiment gone awry. His voice increased in volume and pitch, a sign that the spell was drawing to a close. Then, as the words broke down into a primal yell of power, a static discharge, a bolt of lightning, crashed from Franklin to Cormac.

  Cormac raised both hands, set his legs apart as if to brace, ducked his head—and a blue flare encased him. It was like someone lit a torch under him, and he was all flame—hot, intense, dangerous. Franklin’s lightning bolt disintegrated in a wave of sparks—which doubled back and caught him in the backwash.

  I shielded my face; Ben and I ducked together, sheltering each other. The crash of thunder seemed to last for minutes. Then, silence. I could hear my heart pounding. Even Wolf was quiet, trembling in my gut, waiting to see which way we had to jump.

  Finally, I looked around.

  Harold Franklin was lying flat on his back, half buried in snow, and not moving. Cormac stood exactly as he had before the light show started. He didn’t even look singed. He pursed his lips in a thin smile and appeared satisfied.

  “What the hell just happened?” Ben asked. His hand dug into my arm. He looked at Cormac, then looked at me. “Kitty?”

  I just blinked at him. Cormac brushed his hands together in a dismissive gesture, like he’d just taken out the trash.

  Overhead, stars shone. It was going to be a very cold night, the kind that froze eyelashes together and turned the snow into a glass-hard icy crust. Worst kind of weather. I still felt a lot better than I had a few hours ago.

  I checked on Tyler. The cut on his head had stopped bleeding and was healing, closed over with a pinkish scab. Otherwise, he seemed fine. A little startled and wide-eyed like the rest of us. But he wasn’t about to lose it.

  “Is he dead?” Tyler asked, looking at Franklin.

  The heat was leaching from Franklin’s body as if he was dead or dying—but he was also lying in the snow, in freezing weather. I started forward to check, but Ben slipped in front of me and got there first. Franklin didn’t stir when Ben crouched to touch his neck and said, “He’s just passed out, I think.”

  If I listened carefully, I could hear his heart beating slowly. So he was alive, but we had to get him out of the cold if we wanted him to stay that way. I could be forgiven for hesitating a moment on that one.

  “We should get him inside before he freezes to death,” I said with a sigh.

  “He’ll be fine,” Cormac said.

  I stared at Cormac: Mr. Mysterious, minding his own business, keeping to himself, didn’t need guns anymore badass. I thought I’d known him. Or rather I thought I had a pretty good interpretation of the face he presented to the world. Even after he got out of prison I thought I had a little bit of a bead on him. Not so much, it turned out. And after all I’d been through over the last few years, all the people I’d met—psychics and magicians among them—I thought I knew enough to make some guesses. Maybe not.

  “Right. No more dodging. Time for a straight answer. You’re a wizard. You learned how to be a wizard in prison.”

  In a moment of sheepishness he ducked, looking away. Scuffed a boot in the snow. Then he studied the sky as if we were discussing the weather, which we sort of were, but still. Tyler and Ben had gone to get Franklin out of the snow, and they stood by him now, watching Cormac, waiting for his answer.

  “Cormac?”

  “I’m not the wizard,” he said finally. “Amelia Parker is.”

  “Amelia Parker—”

  About a year before his release, halfway into his sentence, Cormac asked me to find some information on a woman who’d been executed a century earlier at the Colorado Territorial Correction Facility, where he was serving his time. I’d discovered Amelia Parker: an odd woman, British, a world traveler and collector of exotic knowledge, something out of a Victorian adventure story. This just got even more odd.

  “Amelia Parker is?” I said. “She’s not dead?”

  “Not all of her is,” Cormac said.

  “Just so we’re clear, we are talking about a woman who was hanged a hundred years ago,” I said. “She was a wizard. She had powers. And now she’s . . . possessing you? Is that it?”

  “I guess you could say I met her ghost while I was on the inside. She needed a body and I needed . . . I don’t know. Company, I guess.”

  “So, what, you guys just hooked up? So now you’re some kind of possessed zombie wizard?”

  He gave me a look. The “you talk too much” look.

  Ben had the most precious, adorable, totally confused look on his face I’d ever seen. His brow was furrowed, his mouth open, like he was trying to decide between screaming at Cormac, laughing him off, or asking if this Amelia woman was hot.

  “I think I need to sit down,” Ben said. He looked at the drifts of snow around him, growled a little, and looked back at Cormac. “Are you okay? It’s still you in there, right? You’re not possessed possessed, right?”

  “I’m fine,” Cormac said, sounding tired.

  “But you have her power? Her knowledge?” I asked, trying to understand. Not that the situation could ever be clear cut or described in a straightforward manner.

  “No,” Cormac said. “It’s all her. Sometimes, she’s in charge. That’s all. Don’t ask me to explain it. It’s just one of those things.”

  We stood in the cold, glaring at each other, uncertain how to move forward.

  Tyler cleared his throat and pointed at the unconscious man in the snow. “We really should get this guy out of here.”

  Tyler and Ben hauled Franklin up and brought him to the Humvee, covering him with blankets. He made a noise, so he was still with us.

 
“I guess we should take him to a hospital,” I said. I didn’t know how we were going to explain this at the emergency room. I couldn’t prove anything that happened. And after everything, I might still be sued for libel.

  “Are we done here?” Ben said to Cormac. “Spell broken, no more crazy weather?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s over.”

  “We’re not done with this conversation,” I said to him, pointing. “You still have explaining to do.”

  He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other.

  The Humvee was pretty smashed up, the whole driver’s side crunched in, but it was still drivable if you ignored the disturbing clacking noises in the engine. But that was what this vehicle was designed for, getting beat up and still going, right? I wasn’t looking forward to telling Colonel Stafford about it, though.

  Franklin’s Hummer started up, but the noises it made sounded pretty sickly as well. We pulled it over to the curb and left it.

  Cormac helped with that much. He also patted down Franklin and cleaned out all the charms and amulets from his pockets. He must have found a dozen of them. The look he gave me said he wasn’t going to explain what he found. But I couldn’t argue—Franklin was powerless now.

  “I’ll catch up with you later, then,” Cormac said, waving himself off. He went to his Jeep and drove away, just like that.

  “I don’t even know what to worry about anymore with him,” Ben said, watching him leave.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said, hooking my arm around his. “This is a new one for me, too.”

  He sighed. “Never a dull moment.”

  WE TOOK Harold Franklin to the emergency room at St. Joseph’s. The place looked understaffed—the waiting room was crowded, and the official-looking people in scrubs all wore exhausted, vacant stares. But there were a couple of orderlies with a gurney to help pull Franklin out of the Humvee. I gave them his name and the phone number for his office, and told them we’d found him in the snow, passed out and close to freezing. They didn’t ask us to stick around, and I didn’t offer.

  Then, finally, we went home. I remembered to call my mother. I wasn’t sure she believed me when I told her that everything was fine, but what could she do about it? “Mom, trust me, you don’t want to know,” I finally told her. That, she couldn’t argue with.

  I’d coped well enough with the cold of the last two nights and day. I’d been uncomfortable without being in outright pain. But as soon as we got inside, I changed out of my damp clothes into sweats and a big wool sweater. We still had power, and I really appreciated access to a hot shower and central heating.

  The next morning, the sun shone on a brilliantly crystalline world. A thick layer of snow covered everything—cars, buildings, trees, streets. Even power lines had fluffy, glittering strips of snow balanced on them. Cleanup began. Plows caught up with the backlog, power lines were repaired, tree branches cleared away, and the world came back to life. The talking heads on the news shows kept saying that this should have been so much worse, that the weather radars had been tracking a vast storm system that had suddenly coalesced over the city, but that it had somehow dissipated overnight, as abruptly as it had appeared. Not that anyone was complaining. Weather reporters gleefully described a rare case of thundersnow over downtown Denver and seemed very impressed. If only they knew.

  Cormac came over for coffee.

  Tyler was still asleep on the sofa. Last night, he’d seemed inordinately happy at the sight of a sofa in a real living room. He said this was the first time he’d had a chance to sleep in a normal house—not outside, not in barracks, not in Shumacher’s werewolf-proof cells—since before he left for Afghanistan. I’d wanted to hug him. Instead, I smiled and wished him sweet dreams.

  Ben, Cormac, and I sat at the dining room table nursing mugs of coffee. Maybe we could finally have a real conversation. The pack of three, I called us sometimes. These two knew me and my weird life better than anyone else. They’d been there for some of the more pivotal moments of it. They’d both pulled my ass out of the fire more than once.

  We waited for the explanation. Cormac drew a breath, held his mug in both hands, and got started.

  “Before she was hanged, Amelia worked a spell that moved her consciousness into the stones of the prison. And she wasn’t alone; there’s all kinds of freaky shit going on there. Hauntings, demons—I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. But to escape, she needed a living body. Once she discovered she couldn’t just replace the person already living there, she had to find someone who could put up with her.” He spread his hands as if to say, ta-da.

  “So you were the crazy one,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “It had to be the right kind of crazy, I’m betting,” Ben said, shaking his head in disbelief. But he was smiling. As though now that we had an explanation for why Cormac had been acting funny, we didn’t have to worry anymore. Except that where Cormac was concerned, we’d always worry, for one reason or another.

  “How does it work?” I said. “I mean, she’s there right now, right? Can you talk to her? Does she talk to you? Is she, like, listening right now?” Were there four of us around the table? I might never look at Cormac the same way again. At the same time, I was a little bit in awe. Oh, the questions I would ask a nineteenth-century wizard.

  “Yeah,” Cormac said. “She hears what I hear. Sees what I see.”

  “So she’s using you,” I said, ready to be defensive and huffy on Cormac’s behalf. Not that he wasn’t perfectly capable of defending himself, even from a disembodied Victorian wizard woman. And did that even make sense?

  “It’s not that simple,” he said, sighing, looking away, frustrated.

  “You wouldn’t have figured out what Franklin was doing without both of you working together,” Ben said. “Right?”

  Cormac pursed his lips and nodded. “I like to look at it as a partnership. That’s how she sees it.”

  I stared. “This is very weird. Even for me.”

  “Amelia likes you,” he said, leaning back in the chair. “She likes that you speak your mind.”

  Not sure what to say to that, I looked away. I didn’t want to ask any more questions just yet. I wasn’t sure I was ready to know more. I wanted to talk to Amelia Parker—but I didn’t want to hear her speaking with Cormac’s voice. Then I realized, I probably already had talked to her. The lecturing voice, when we were on the phone and he told me about Franklin, the spell, the thunder mark—that had been Amelia.

  I could deal with it later.

  “What now?” Ben asked.

  “Stay out of trouble, like you keep saying,” Cormac said. “Nothing’s changed. Not really.”

  “Have you considered a career in paranormal investigation?” Ben said. “You seem to have developed a talent for it.”

  He just smiled.

  I kept staring. In wonder, awe, confusion. It wasn’t a werewolf stare, the challenging stare, or the “trying to figure out what someone was going to do next” stare. It was like, if I didn’t turn away, I might figure it out. But all I saw was Cormac. I could have dismissed everything he’d just explained as impossible, unprovable. Except that it explained everything that had happened so well.

  “Kitty?” Ben prompted. It had been so long since I’d said anything.

  “I have so many questions,” I sighed. “For you. For her.”

  “I think that’s my cue.” Cormac pushed the mug away and stood, retrieving his leather jacket from the back of the chair. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  Oh, grrrr. He was still Cormac. Still dodging me.

  Ben just smirked. He was more patient than I was—he’d been putting up with Cormac his whole life. And he knew that Cormac would come back. He always did. He didn’t have any other family, and we were a pack.

  “Is he going to be okay?” I asked after he’d left, not for the first time, a little more desperately than the last.

  “Kitty. Are any of us going t
o be okay?” Ben said, spreading his arms to encompass him, me, the door Cormac had left through, Tyler lying on the sofa, the window, and the city outside.

  I knew what he meant. For the moment, we really were okay. But what about tomorrow? What about the day after that? Would we be okay then? I kept asking the question because the answer was never permanent. And that would be true even if we weren’t werewolves, ex-cons, traumatized war veterans, and possessed wizards.

  I reached for him, and he took my hand and kissed the inside of my wrist. We were going to be okay.

  Chapter 23

  THE SNOW melted faster than you’d expect, as it always does in Colorado. Temperatures the following week reached sixty. Rivers of melting snow flooded the streets. I went out without my coat, and the blazing sun felt like a treasure.

  A couple of days after the blizzard, we went back to Fort Carson to return the Humvee and retrieve Ben’s car, and for Colonel Stafford’s debriefing. I was worried about the damage, but the soldier at the motor pool seemed bemused by the condition of the vehicle rather than upset. “What the hell could do this to a Humvee?” he said.

  “Evil corporate Hummer,” I answered.

  “Huh,” he replied, and that was that.

  Originally, Stafford wanted to hold the meeting at the hospital. I had visions of him trying to get Tyler back into the cell. That probably would have broken Tyler. Broken him more, at least, past all repair. I suggested to Stafford that he find a more unassuming office or conference room in a different building. One with windows. I’ll never know why he didn’t argue. He could have, but maybe he suspected what I did about Tyler.

  The three of us entered the conference room, me in the middle, the men flanking. I could feel the tension that bound us, that made us a pack at least for now. We didn’t know what we were about to face, but we’d be ready, standing up for each other, protecting each other. Ready to fight if we needed to, or run if that was what the situation called for.