Kitty's Big Trouble

  Cormac moved a couple of steps out, then a couple more, pulling away vegetation, uncovering more of the blackened timber. In a few minutes, he’d traced out a rectangle, maybe ten by twelve. A tiny little house, reduced to a charred foundation.

  There was history here. I could feel it. The place had probably belonged to some pioneer family scraping by. Nothing here would speak to the mystery I wanted to solve.

  Standing back, hands on hips, Cormac regarded the remains of the building. “Vampires would have dug down. Built themselves a cellar, out of the sun. The structure would have just been there to protect the entrance. Anything else was most likely buried. We won’t find anything unless we dig.”

  Digging would involve a lot more time and equipment, not to mention permits from the regional park service that owned the land and the involvement of any archaeology departments interested in mid-nineteenth-century settlements. I hadn’t really expected to find more than this. But the answers felt close, as if I could read them in a book if I could only find the right page.

  “Look at this,” Ben said. He’d parted a section of grass and scraped away a layer of dirt just outside the burned foundation to reveal a slender length of wood, blackened but not burned through like the rest. Giving a yank, he pulled it free of the dirt. About a foot long and a couple of inches in diameter, it tapered to a dull point.

  “Let me see that,” Cormac said, reaching. Ben handed it to him.

  Cormac ran his hand along the length of the aged wood, then hefted it as if testing its weight.

  “It’s a killing stake.” He gripped the end of it and made a quick stabbing motion. Kind of like you’d do to stab a vampire.

  “How do you know?” Ben said. “It may have marked out a garden or held down a tarp.”

  Cormac tossed Ben the stake, giving him a chance to heft its weight and test its peculiar suitability for stabbing. “It’s a nonnative hardwood. Somebody carved it and brought it here for a reason.”

  “I think we’re letting our imaginations get away from us,” Ben said.

  “You could say that about this whole trip,” Cormac answered.

  I scowled. “I wish we had a metal detector.”

  “Maybe see if we can find some silver bullets?” Ben said.

  Wouldn’t that be comforting?

  We walked over the immediate area, studying the ground for whatever else we might happen to stumble over. We found a few more burned timbers. Everything was old, weathered smooth, and I didn’t know enough to be able to guess the age of the buildings that had once stood here.

  We wouldn’t be able to stay out here much longer; the sun was below the horizon now, and the sky had turned a deep twilight blue. The first stars were flickering. We’d only stayed out this late because Ben and my werewolf eyes hardly noticed the change in light. Cormac had pulled a penlight out of a pocket.

  I was about to call off the hunt when Ben stopped, head cocked as if listening.

  “Assuming this was a vampire lair,” he said, “and that it really was burned down by Wyatt Earp, or whoever, a century ago—should I be able to still smell vampire here?”

  I took in a slow breath, nostrils flaring to scent what he’d noticed. Because no—smells on the landscape faded, washed away, scoured by wind in a matter of weeks. But he was right, a touch of cold lingered on the earth here. It wasn’t ice, it wasn’t rot, but a distinctive, living cold.

  “It’s recent,” I whispered.

  The three of us were statues, waiting for a sign.

  A scraping noise pattered against the earth about ten yards away. It might have been a nocturnal rodent emerging from its den. It didn’t matter—Ben and I moved next to each other, backs together in a defensive posture.

  The undead smell of vampire grew stronger.

  “I don’t believe it,” Ben muttered. I shushed him and looked for Cormac, who stood calmly, hands at his sides.

  The earth before us erupted, a fountain of dirt spraying as something forced its way up from underground. A trapdoor, covered with earth, had hidden a cellar. A gray-skinned being emerged, hissing, lips pulled back to show long fangs.

  It had been human. It had the shape—torso, thin legs meant to walk upright, slender arms, a hairless head and face with all the right details. But it had shriveled, mutated—drying flesh pulled taut over bones, every knobby joint visible. Under a hanging, threadbare shirt that had rotted away to clinging fibers, the shape of a rib cage stood out, and the concave belly couldn’t possibly have held organs. The teeth were yellow, and the eyes that stared at us were clouded, milky. Shredded trousers were even worse off than the shirt.

  It moved like a sprinter, straight toward us.

  I braced and shouted, hoping to startle it into stopping its charge. Ben was beside me, hands clenched into the shape of claws, teeth bared.

  A light flared, like a camera flash that didn’t fade, searing into my eyes. Ducking, I put up my arms to block the light, and Ben hunched over with me for protection. The creature stopped, cowering on the ground before us, sheltering under its raised arms, pale eyes squinting against the onslaught.

  Cormac held the source of light in his hand, raised above his head. It wasn’t the penlight—no penlight was this strong, this pervasive. Instead, he held some kind of stone—something magical. My vision adjusted to the glaring white light. The creature’s didn’t. It continued writhing, mewling, cowering away from an enemy that was everywhere. This gave us a chance to study it.

  “That’s not a vampire,” Ben said. “It can’t be.”

  The pair of slender fangs, visible when the being bared its teeth at us, said that it was. But I’d never seen anything like this. All the elegance, the arrogance I associated with long-lived vampires was gone. All the humanity was gone, stripped down to pure, undying hunger. A dry, graying tongue worked behind its teeth; the column of its throat trembled under its skin.

  It—He? She? I couldn’t tell—had to be one of the old group of vampires that had settled here. It had survived the destruction of the lair and remained here, buried, feeding on whatever chanced by. Starving, rather. For a hundred-plus years. How sad. I reached out for it.

  “Stay back.” Ben gripped my shoulder, and I lowered my arm. The vampire only looked weak, after all.

  “Who are you?” I asked. “How long have you been out here?”

  It hissed, its limbs reaching blindly. It kept trying to open its eyes, then ducking away from the light.

  “Cormac, you ever see anything like this?” Ben asked.

  “No,” Cormac answered.

  I said, “We—we can help you.”

  “Kitty—” Ben said warningly. Surely the vampire was beyond help.

  “We can try to help you,” I revised. “I know people who can help.” I had to call Rick; there had to be something we could do. “Please, what’s your name?”

  It—he, I thought, based on the square line of his jaw—closed his mouth. The flesh moved as he ran his tongue along his teeth. Then he inhaled, inflating his lungs—a preparation for speaking. The skin around the rib cage creaked and cracked. How long had it been since he had drawn breath?

  “Werewolves,” he said in a rasping whisper. “Filthy animals.”

  So that was how it was going to be. The creature’s vampiric elegance may have vanished. The arrogance was still healthy.

  “Excuse me, but you’re the one living in a hole in the ground,” I said.

  He hissed again, flailing under the light, but it seemed to be held at bay for the moment.

  “Why are you here?” I asked, crouching, moving as close as I dared. “Why not leave? Can you at least tell me your name?”

  He leaned toward my voice, blinking, mouth working. I wondered if he saw us as food. As if he was trying to figure out how to get at us. If I could just get him to talk …

  I tried again. “I want to find out about Wyatt Earp—”

  The ravaged vampire screeched the howl of a cat and held his hands over his ears as if t
he sound of the words pained him. Startled, I fell back—even Ben took a step back. Cormac didn’t move.

  Drawing a rattling breath, the vampire said, “Did he send you?”

  Victory. Earp had been here. He’d killed them. My secret history of the world gained another paragraph. Now if only I could get this guy into a studio to record an interview.

  “No,” I said. “Wyatt Earp died eighty years ago.”

  “Who killed him?” the vampire breathed.

  “No one. He died at home of old age.” The vampire had lost all sense of time—did he realize how long he’d been here, stuck? Maybe thinking Earp would return for a final showdown? Was that what he was waiting for? “It all happened a long time ago,” I said.

  The vampire shook his head, spreading his mouth wide to show his fangs, tipping back his head to bellow at the sky. Then he jumped at me.

  Arms reaching, he launched himself and grasped clawed hands around my neck. I fell back, and he knelt on me, pinning me. He surged toward me with an open mouth, teeth pressing against the skin of my face.

  I yelled and kicked. The vampire fell—he hardly weighed anything, but he was fast, and sprang back before I could sit up. This time I grabbed him, managing to hold him away from me, but it was like trying to hang onto an angry badger. An angry, skeletal badger. He clawed, kicked, snarled, and thrashed.

  Ben shouted, seemingly right in my ear. The vampire seized, back arcing, ribs straining, face frozen in an agonized grimace. And he disintegrated, ash falling around me like soft snow. So little had been holding him together, he was just gone. A hard, metallic object fell onto my chest.

  Ben crouched above me, still stabbing the old stake through the space that used to be the vampire’s heart. The point of it was centimeters from my own chest. We looked at each other and tried to catch our breath.

  “You okay?” he said finally.

  A fine powder of former vampire covered me. I coughed—it smelled like dirt and death. The thought of sucking that ash into my lungs made me cough harder. I wanted to howl. Ben threw away the stake and gripped my shoulders. “Kitty—”

  “Yeah. I’m okay.” I leaned against him and tried not to think about it. My breathing steadied, and my Wolf settled. “That was crazy.”

  “I think we’re a couple of steps past crazy on this one.” He was right, as usual. I tried brushing myself off. The stuff just smeared. I grimaced. My hand knocked off an object—the piece of metal that had dropped onto me. Holding it up, I studied it: round, blackened with age and strung on a length of braided leather, it held the worn lines of a design etched into it. It looked like a coin, heavily tarnished, the size of a nickel. The vampire must have been wearing it.

  In the meantime, the light that had flared over the twenty feet around us for the last few minutes faded.

  “What did you do?” Ben asked.

  Cormac showed us a clear quartz crystal the size of his thumb. Its luminescence was fading. Another trick of Cormac the wizard. I’d never get used to it.

  “You get what you needed here?” Cormac said.

  I chuckled, shaking my head. “I guess I did. I knew it. Wyatt Earp, vampire hunter. I just knew.”

  “You still can’t prove it,” Ben said.

  “Yeah, I know. But still.” I’d take what little victories I could get. “So what do you guys make of this?” I said, offering the ancient pendant.

  Ben took it, ran a thumb over it. “What is that, bronze? Was that thing wearing it? What’s it say?”

  Cormac took his turn with it, squinting at it. “I don’t know. But I’m thinking we should get moving.”

  Ben held his hand out to me and pulled me to my feet. I brushed myself off, then searched the ground—I had to get back on my knees and feel around for the stake that Ben had tossed aside. It took a few minutes, with Ben and Cormac standing on, impatient.

  Ben said, “Kitty—”

  “Just a sec.” Then I found it, and held it out to study it. A killing stake, Cormac had called it. Over a century old, belonging to Wyatt Earp once. I didn’t know that for sure, all the evidence was circumstantial, but this was all the proof I had that vampires had been here. I’d take what I could get.

  “Okay, let’s go,” I said.

  “Good,” Cormac said.

  “If you didn’t want to come along you could have just said so,” I said.

  “Somebody’s got to look after you two.”

  “We were doing fine,” I said.

  “Then why did you even drag me out here?”

  Ben said, “Everybody shut up.”

  The three of us trekked back to the car. The sun had set; the sky was dark. Every rustle in the breeze made me jump. I needed a shower. I kept scratching my hair and having ash fall out.

  We were in sight of the car when I smelled werewolf. Ben stopped me, his hand on my arm, the same time I muttered, “Oh, not now.”

  “What is it?” Cormac said.

  My shoulders tensed in place of hackles rising. Ben and I stood arm to arm, both of us looking outward, tracking the intrusive scent—skin and fur, that distinctive mix of human and wild, neither one nor the other, and something more. Like us, but strangers. Enemies, even. Werewolves were territorial, and this wasn’t our territory. I had in fact considered that we’d be invading someone else’s territory on this trip. I also figured the chances of doing so in the middle of Kansas were pretty low. So much for that.

  A nondescript SUV was parked near Ben’s sedan. There were two of them waiting at the car, one leaning on the hood, his arms crossed, the other standing a few feet away, watching our approach. Both were male, midtwenties, wearing T-shirts and jeans. The one by the car was average height, on the stout side, with a shaggy beard. The other was taller, a square-jawed frat-boy type, straight out of a beer commercial.

  “What’s the plan?” Ben whispered.

  “We talk. What else?” I said.

  “There’s only two. We can take ’em,” he said. Cormac had stepped a little ways to the side, to flank them. I shook my head at him.

  “Hi,” I said when we reached spitting distance.

  “You mind telling us what you’re doing here?” said the tall one. He curled his lip and bared his teeth. Not a happy camper.

  I pointed over my shoulder. “You know you had a starving vampire living in a hole back there? Took care of that for you.”

  “Wait a minute,” said his companion. “That voice—I know you. You’re Kitty Norville.”

  I straightened and beamed at him. “Yeah, that’s me. You listen to the show?”

  Bearded guy glanced at tall guy and looked chagrined, ducking his gaze. “Oh, you know. Once in a while.”

  Tall guy frowned even harder. “It’s a dumb show. And it doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.”

  “C’mon, Dan. Give her a break.”

  The tall guy—Dan—just glared at me. I glared right back. Ben and Cormac had taken up tough-guy poses, like bodyguards. I almost yelled at them to just chill out, I could handle it.

  “I’m doing some research,” I said. “I didn’t expect to be here long enough to ruffle any fur.”

  “What’s this about a vampire?”

  This wasn’t going to make any more sense when I explained it to him. “Is there a restaurant or diner or something where we can maybe grab a cup of coffee and talk about this like human beings?”

  Dan squinted, apparently confused. “What?”

  His buddy tapped his arm. “I told you, it’s Kitty Norville. That’s her thing. You’d know if you listened to her show.” Dan glared at him, and his compatriot’s shoulders slouched, cowering.

  I crossed my arms and regarded them. Bearded guy was a fan, which was cool. But Dan was the more dominant werewolf and had decided I sucked. If I appealed to the weaker wolf, that would piss off Dan even more. But Dan didn’t seem inclined to be sympathetic.

  “I really don’t want to step on toes,” I said. “We can just get out of here—”

&nbs
p; “Tell me about the vampire,” he said, stepping in front of the driver’s-side door.

  Ben tensed up and approached the guy—about as aggressive a move as he could make. Cormac looked relaxed, but he held his hands in the pockets of his jacket, probably holding onto something weaponish.

  I went to stand in front of Ben, holding his arm, willing him to relax. I didn’t want a fight to start—not because I thought we’d lose, but because I was pretty sure we wouldn’t, and I didn’t want to leave any messes.

  “Short version,” I said. “I got some information that a den of vampires settled here about a hundred and fifty years ago, and that Wyatt Earp might have been the vampire hunter to finish them off. Cool, huh? So I came out here looking for evidence. And, well, it turns out Deputy Marshal Earp didn’t get them all, you know?” I held up the stake, as if that explained it all, as if it looked like something other than a stray twig we’d found. “I’d have called to ask for permission first, but werewolf alphas aren’t exactly listed in the phone book.” But maybe they should be. There was an idea …

  Dan’s stare had changed from a werewolf’s stare of challenge to a purely human stare of bafflement. “Huh?”

  “Oh my gosh, really?” said his friend. “Wyatt Earp hunted vampires?”

  “Mike, shut up, let me handle this,” Dan said.

  “Yeah,” I said, talking around Dan to Mike. “I want to do a whole show on it if I can get enough information.”

  “Both of you, shut up!” Dan said.

  “She’s telling the truth. You can smell the damn thing all over her,” Ben said. Their noses wrinkled. Clearly, they could.

  “So,” I went on. “Are you guys part of a big pack around here or is it just the two of you?” I tried to look innocent.

  Dan put his hands to his temples and made a noise like a growl.

  “Dan—hey Dan,” Mike said, reaching for his friend, tentative. “You okay?”

  Taking a deep breath, getting ahold of himself, Dan straightened. “One more time. What are you doing here?”

  “I already told you,” I said, quiet and straightforward this time. I didn’t want to push him any further.

  “You’re not here to take over?” Dan said.