Kitty's Big Trouble

  “I don’t like this,” I said. “Too many ways to sneak up on us.”

  “No, we can use this,” Cormac said. He produced tools and items, the ones he’d used for the compass spell earlier. He drew the chalk circle and design on the floor, set the mangled coins—both Anastasia’s and the one from Dodge City—within the circle, then set a silver dagger in the middle.

  Holding my breath, I watched.

  The dagger scraped on the stone floor as it began to turn. It inched clockwise, then slipped counterclockwise, more confidently, turning until it stopped—pointing solidly at one of the doorways.

  “So he’s there?” I said.

  “Yes,” Anastasia said. “He’s coming.”

  Oh. Well then.

  “Let’s go, then,” Cormac said, scooping up the objects and scuffing out the chalk markings. He then went to one of the corners, set down his bundle of stakes, and worked to draw the crossbow.

  Ben squeezed my hand. We stood in the center of the room, side by side, facing the doorway the dagger had marked. The tunnel beyond looked like a black throat.

  Grace was laying strings of firecrackers around all four walls. If she had to set those things off, it was going to get real loud in here. My ears hurt just thinking about it.

  Anastasia waited in the middle of the room, placing herself in the line of fire as bait. Sun Wukong stationed himself in the opposite corner as Cormac, where he smiled over the proceedings, leaning on his staff, which had reappeared as inexplicably as it had vanished. His otherworldly sense of amusement was starting to wear thin.

  Finished with the firecrackers, Grace lit four sticks of incense and set them in each corner. After that, I couldn’t smell much from the tunnels, just the spicy-sweet reek of the burning sticks.

  “Is that really necessary?” Ben said. She’d blinded us, scent-wise.

  “Yes,” she snapped back.

  My shoulders were bunched, my hackles raised. I had to wonder, had we set this trap for Roman, or had he set it for us?

  “Keep it together,” Ben whispered, pressing his shoulder to mine. Funny, I’d been just about to tell him the same thing.

  “He may not even come, this close to dawn,” Anastasia said. This had to be nerve racking for her—she wasn’t any safer this close to dawn than Roman was. Her last apprentice—a gorgeous woman, very young in terms of both her age and the length of time she’d been a vampire—died when she was exposed to sunlight. Anastasia had to be thinking about her. I certainly was—I’d watched it happen, and I never wanted to see that again.

  “It’ll be all right,” I said to her. Somehow, it would. We were underground—she’d be safe, surely.

  “Heads up,” Ben said, leaning toward the doorway, his head cocked, listening.

  The room fell so quiet I could hear the muted fizzle of the smoldering incense sticks. From the doorway to Cormac’s right, a set of shuffling footsteps sounded—heavy, clumsy. Like someone big and drunk was dragging himself along the wall. It certainly wasn’t Roman. We’d never hear Roman coming, which was a big part of the problem with setting a manually operated trap for him.

  Right then, Roman didn’t matter: something was coming toward us.

  I kept my breathing steady and settled myself more firmly into my body, my legs, my muscles—ready to spring in any direction, to leap in an instant, and fight.

  Henry stumbled through the doorway, as though the darkness had spat him out. Swaying for a moment, he blinked in confusion. He looked unhurt physically—only his expression was odd, dazed. He wore a bronze coin on a chain around his neck—one of Roman’s binding coins.

  He looked at me, opened his hands, and scattered a few dozen small objects on the floor between us. They flashed in the light and tinkled like bells when they hit the stone. Then he collapsed on his side.

  I started to run to him, but Ben held me back. “Kitty, look.”

  The objects Henry had thrown looked like jacks, a children’s toy. Studying them revealed their sharpened points, like twisted knives—caltrops. And they were silver. If one of them even scratched us, we were done. Clinging to each other, we moved back. Roman had immobilized us without even touching us.

  “I hate this!” I growled.

  Grace went to check on Henry, touching his face, his arm. How did you tell if a vampire was okay? Feel for a pulse? Make sure he was breathing? No and no. He looked dead—pale and cold, unmoving. Of course he looked dead, he was a vampire.

  “Grace?” I said. “How is he?”

  Grace rolled him onto his back, smoothed the hair away from his face, and pulled back an eyelid to check his eye. He seemed to be sleeping—except for the not-breathing part. He had to be alive, or whatever the vampire equivalent of alive was. He was still here, he hadn’t disintegrated. So that was something. His clothes hadn’t been mussed or altered—even his shirt was still in place. He’d just appeared. Or rather, he’d been shoved in here as a distraction.

  “I think he’s okay,” she said, but sounded uncertain.

  “Anastasia, what’s wrong with him?”

  “Incoming,” Cormac called before she could answer. He held the crossbow ready, aiming at the opposite doorway from where Henry had appeared. He had a clear shot through the middle of the room.

  Grace pulled Henry into a corner, and I reflected on the irony of trying to protect an undead guy who was essentially immortal. If said undead guy was unconscious and possibly injured, how would we ever know? Was there a vampire doctor we could take him to?

  I was constantly astonished by the absurdity of it all.

  “What are we going to do about this?” Ben said, nodding at the silver knives scattered on the floor. We braced, wolflike and ready to pounce—but away from danger, away from the silver.

  All I could smell was the stupid incense, and the hallway appeared darker than it should have—my wolf eyes should have been able to make out something. Something had caught Cormac’s attention. Movement flickered in the shadows, or in my own imagination.

  The thing that crept in through the doorway made no sound. At first glance, he was a man, incredibly tall, as tall as the doorway, and bulky, stout and full of muscles. He wore nothing but worn trousers and went barefoot. At second glance, however, the details became uncertain and impossible. The figure moved hunched and low, like a wrestler approaching an opponent. As if he was sizing us up. Except his eyes were sewn shut. Two rows of vertical, swollen stitches marked where eyes should have been. Black stitches also marked his nostrils, mouth, and even his ears—he didn’t really have ears, just crusted stitches crisscrossing holes on the sides of his bald head.

  I didn’t know how he could sense anything—I didn’t know how he could breathe. Yet he kept on, stepping carefully, flexing his hands as if preparing to strike.

  If he didn’t breathe, could we stop him?

  Grace gasped as if she recognized the creature, which would have been great, because then she knew what it was and would know how to stop it. But she didn’t say anything. Maybe he was mortal, human. Maybe we could just beat him up. But that didn’t explain the ruin of his face or how he could function without four of his five senses.

  The crossbow fired and a bolt whistled past me, smacking into the monster’s neck. The shaft stuck out of sickly grayish skin, quivering. Behind me, Cormac cranked back the crossbow for reloading.

  Not that it would help, because the monster didn’t much notice. He grunted, swiped at the bolt, pulled it out, and tossed it away. A bare trickle of blood ran from the wound. So, he was a near-invincible kind of otherworldly monster. Check.

  Cormac slung the crossbow over his shoulder and began rummaging in his coat pockets.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Not going to waste ammo I’m going to need for the vampire,” he said.

  Anastasia stared at it with awe and doubt.

  “What is it? Who is it?” I shot at her.

  “Hundun,” she murmured. “God of chaos.”

 
Of course he was; we had to get one of those in the mix.

  “I don’t know—I thought the guy was dead,” Sun said.

  “Wait a minute—if he’s a god how could he be dead?” I called out.

  “Oh, gods die all the time.”

  I would have to parse that later. “That means we can kill him, right?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Common sense—Wolf’s common sense—told me that I didn’t know enough about this enemy to be able to fight him. He wasn’t prey, and this wasn’t a hunt. We weren’t cornered—we could escape through the doorway behind us, avoiding the silver caltrops. We could run. We ought to run. That was common sense. But I couldn’t leave the others. And I couldn’t help.

  The creature had paused a moment, seeming to look at each of us in turn, noting us, marking us. Then he almost nodded, a single tip of his head, which he swung around to focus on Sun Wukong as if identifying him as the most dangerous among us.

  With what seemed to be a sense of a joy, Sun took a running start and leapt forward, meeting the blinded monster head-on. Holding his staff with both hands, he jabbed upward, aiming for the creature’s chin—but the thing, this strange god of chaos, sidestepped and whirled to slam his fists into Sun’s back. The creature’s speed belied his size and apparent lack of senses. Maybe the thing really could see, somehow, and all the stitches were there for horrifying effect.

  My common sense was failing me.

  Struck hard, Sun stumbled forward, but was able to quickly spin to once again face his opponent, and in the same movement he struck again, cracking his staff against the monster’s head. The being shook off the blow and swung a punch at Sun, who dodged it by jumping over it. It all happened in a blur.

  “Sun, you must break him!” Anastasia called. “Break through, remember the story.”

  “I can handle it!” he called, and she hissed as if she didn’t believe him.

  “Cormac, the crossbow, you must aim for his eyes, open his eyes!” Anastasia yelled.

  The creature lunged again, punching with both fists.

  “I’m feeling so useless,” Ben said. We were still on the sidelines, watching a fight that would have been amazing if it had been in a kung fu epic. Being able to smell the sweat in the room made it too real.

  Cormac hadn’t heard the vampire. He—Amelia—was still rummaging for whatever protective or defensive spells they had. I was furious that Ben and I had been sidelined by toy-size hardware.

  Then I saw him, in the shadows of the same doorway Henry had come through, aiming a crossbow of his own at Anastasia.

  I didn’t think. I took a running leap and sprang over the stretch of spilled caltrops, hoping, reaching, praying I’d make it.

  “Kitty!” Ben snarled after me. Then he called, “Cormac!”

  I crashed onto clear floor and kept going, straight into Roman, tackling him. We both slammed into the wall. He growled and shoved me aside.

  Wolf kicked and I let her come to the surface, allowed her instincts to fill me. Curling my fingers, I dug them into the vampire’s arm, raking, kneading, gouging. I might not be able to kill him, but I could keep him from using his weapon.

  He swung me against the wall, cracking my head against brick. I saw stars, and Wolf bared her teeth at him.

  “Kitty, the bag!” Anastasia called to me. “The bag!”

  The words sunk in through the fighting haze. Roman was wearing Sun’s cloth bag over his shoulder, the strap repaired with a simple knot.

  He wouldn’t drop the crossbow, which meant he couldn’t effectively get rid of me. I was hanging on him, tearing at him. The stitches in his silk shirt tore. I put my hand on the strap of the bag. I could rip it, take it away from him—

  Air whistled past my ear. A crossbow bolt.

  Roman made a noise, like the air going out of him. But he was still here—the bolt had landed in his left shoulder, inches from his heart. Inches from my face. But hey, I’d heal, Cormac had probably been thinking. In the center of the room, he was loading a bolt for another shot.

  I’d found a tear in the strap and was breaking through the cloth.

  Roman had had enough of all of it, because he spun into the room and swung me down to the floor, toward the pool of silver caltrops. It happened too fast. I would hit them, they would bite into me in a dozen places, and the poison would burn through my blood to my heart.

  Then came wind. A fierce, fast wind, like the kind that blasted the plains in Colorado, scoured the room and swept the caltrops away, into the opposite wall.

  Sun Wukong stood in a fighting pose, sweeping his staff along the floor, bringing the wind with it, until the silver was all gone. Hundun batted him in the head and he went flying.

  I landed on the floor, Roman landed on me, and I rested, unhurt but for bruises.

  Roman scrambled to his feet and fled back to the hallway because Cormac was pointing his crossbow at him. He fired; I didn’t see if he hit or not.

  I was holding the bag, weighed down with what I hoped was the Dragon’s Pearl.

  “I’ve got it,” I breathed around panting breaths. Wolf was clawing at my gut. Can we run now? Yes. Yes we could. “I’ve got it!”

  “Then go!” Sun said, picking himself up, readying his staff. “I’ll take care of this one!” He went back to fighting Hundun, blocking the creature with his staff while he dodged blows.

  I’d have been worried about Sun and his ability to keep fighting, except he was wearing this big silly grin like he’d never had so much fun in his life. In fact, his blows seemed particularly nonfatal. He’d knock the monster on the side of the head to rattle him, trip up his feet with the staff, make him hop and dance as he avoided the hits, and Sun jumped out of the way in time to avoid the monster’s blows. The creature didn’t look any more frustrated or angry than he had when he entered the room. He simply kept going, his head low, jaw set, determined. They were two actors playing their roles.

  Then the room blew up.

  It began with a few pops and white sparks, then turned into an explosion that raced around the edges of the room—fire traveling along the strings of firecrackers, igniting them all within seconds. Grace must have set hundreds of them. They cracked, banged, bounced, flew, threw multicolored sparks, and trailed clouds of acrid gray smoke behind them, until the room filled with the stench of the stuff, stinging my eyes and burning my nose. Not to mention the noise, which turned my head to cotton.

  The eyeless, earless creature moaned in agony, the sound muffled by his sealed mouth. How could he even tell what was going on?

  Someone grabbed my arm. I almost whirled and took a swipe at the person, my fingers bent like claws. Then Ben came close, bringing himself nose to nose with me. Even that close I couldn’t smell him for all the smoke and burning. My lack of senses put me on the edge of panic. The firecrackers were still going off, like sporadic pops of popcorn. Still loud, still producing smoke and fire. Something pounded against the walls hard enough to shake them and make the floor tremble. Mortar and dust shook from the ceiling.

  I grabbed Ben’s hand; he’d be my anchor.

  “Where’s Roman?” I hollered.

  “Ran,” Cormac said. “Let’s go that way.” He pointed to the opposite doorway from where Roman had been.

  The smoke cleared some, drifting out of the doorways. The monster held his wounded head in his hands, groaning as he crashed into the walls, looking for a doorway, trying to escape. Again and again, he slammed against the stone, rattling the room. Sun Wukong stood back, holding his staff defensively in front of him, watching.

  “Go,” he said. “I’ll be fine, really!”

  Who was I to argue?

  More debris rained on us.

  Coughing through the dust and smoke, Ben and I made our way to Grace and Anastasia. Henry still lay near the wall. His clothing seemed scorched by the fireworks, but he seemed otherwise okay. I pulled the chain with Roman’s coin over his head and threw it away.

  “We’re goin
g,” I called, and Ben and I took charge of Henry, grabbing his arms and pulling them over our shoulders. He seemed much lighter than he should have. We hauled him across the room after Cormac, who led the way, jacket and stakes in hand. Grace and Anastasia were right behind us. The vampire was looking ashen. Like the sky outside, if we had a window to look out.

  As the room cleared, the blinded monster’s senses seemed to come to focus, and he turned to Sun and roared. The Monkey King faced him, staff in hand.

  We fled down yet another brick and stone corridor. I had Henry on one arm and the bag with the Dragon’s Pearl on the other.

  Chapter 16

  WE KEPT MOVING.

  Henry didn’t twitch a muscle. I was hoping he’d wake up after Ben and I bounced him around in our efforts to keep from dropping him. But no, he was dead weight. No pun intended. Since I was a little shorter than Ben, Henry’s head kept flopping toward me. He smelled like himself—not any more ill or damaged than I would have expected. Maybe charred from smoke and firecrackers.

  Behind me, Anastasia stumbled. She recovered quickly, putting a hand on the wall to steady herself. But she should never have stumbled in the first place.

  “Anastasia?” I said, trying to glance over my shoulder at her. “How close to dawn is it?”

  “Very,” she said, with astonishing calm. “The sun is rising.”

  “At least that means Roman’s not likely to come back,” Ben said. He had a point.

  “Grace,” I said. “We need to get back to Xiwangmu.”

  “There’s no time,” Anastasia said.

  “Okay, then we have to get to a room, someplace with just one door and no windows, no access to sunlight.”

  “And defensible,” Cormac added.

  “I can’t just find a room like that instantly,” she said. “I’m not Sun Wukong.”

  Anastasia slumped against the wall. “I need to rest, just for a moment.”

  “Just a few more steps,” I said blithely, staving off panic.

  If she collapsed here, we could stop and try to protect her. At least there wouldn’t be any sunlight—I hoped. I didn’t see any vents or storm drains. But in the open corridor, anything could find us. We’d already been awake all night, and we hadn’t been completely rested when we started. I wasn’t looking forward to trying to guard anything for another eight-plus hours. The monster’s grumbles still echoed down the corridor.