Kitty Goes to War (29 page)

“Maybe he can’t stop on the ice,” I said, doubtful.

“He’s speeding up.” Tyler’s hands kneaded the steering wheel. He bared his teeth. “This is just like a roadblock. He ain’t slowing down.”

Roadblock, car bomb—Tyler was in another place at the moment. I squeezed his shoulder.

“Asshole,” Ben muttered. “Thinks a monster car like that makes him invincible.”

“We can still stop him,” I said. “It won’t hurt us.”

Tyler’s breathing steadied. “Permanently, rather. It’s still gonna hurt. You sure?”

We didn’t have any time for further discussion. Tyler hunched over, bracing. In the backseat, Ben and I curled up on the floorboards, hanging on to each other.

Then came the crash.

Near as I could figure before I shut my eyes, Franklin’s Hummer T-boned us. Steel crunched and tore. A shockwave slammed through us and we skidded, even with the tire chains. I flew, bounced—hands grabbed me. My vision went upside down for a minute. Then, silence.

I’d been holding my breath. Wolf was shrieking through my gut, claustrophobic and crying to get out. I pulled her in, locked her down tight, made my breathing slow and calm. Only then could I assess. Sore—lots and lots of sore. I had a bruise on my head where I’d run into something hard. But no shooting pains. No blood or broken bones. All in all, I didn’t feel much more beat up than I had after Vanderman worked me over.

Ben’s hand closed on my arm. I grabbed it and squeezed back. We’d ended up on the seat, him pressed up against the door and me sprawled in his lap. I peered through the window and got a look at the hood of Franklin’s Hummer, which was only slightly rumpled. The engine had smoke coming out of it.

We took a moment to stretch our limbs and extricate ourselves.

“Everyone okay? Still human?”

“Barely,” Ben said, voice tense. “You?”

“Shaken. Fine,” I said.

“That sucked.” Rolling a shoulder, he winced. He opened and closed his hand as if he expected it not to work.

“Tyler?” I asked. I could hear him breathing in the front seat, but he hadn’t spoken yet, which worried me. If he shifted, this would get messy. Messier. I straightened, feeling a muscle in my back spasm. Yeah, if I’d been fully human this would have hurt. Leaning over the front seat, I got a look at Tyler.

Hunched over, muscles trembling, he was still gripping the steering wheel, like it was a life preserver. I took a breath—full of wild, full of wolf. I also smelled blood. He was on the edge. He’d been hurt, and his wolf would blaze forth to protect him.

I pulled myself into the front, grunting when my battered muscles complained. Moving close so he could smell me, so he would have to listen to me, I put my arms around him. My embrace seemed small, unable to contain his powerful frame.

His eyes were clamped shut. Blood dripped from a cut on his forehead.

“Tyler, listen to me. Keep it together. Pull it back in. You don’t have to shift, we’re fine, we’re going to be fine. Stay with me. Breathe . . .” The litany went on. Stay human. Stay with us. Breathe slowly, in and out.

I could usually get wolves to listen to me when they were on the edge like this. Just hold them, wrap them up, keep talking to them so they would remember human voices. But those were wolves I knew. How well did I know Tyler, really? “Please,” I begged.

And his breathing slowed. The muscles in his back relaxed, some of the tension going out of them.

“There’s Franklin,” Ben said, looking out the window at the man stumbling out of the other crashed car. His own voice was sounding low and rough, and I wondered how close he was to losing it. He shoved open the door and stalked out like he was on the prowl.

“Tyler, you okay? I gotta go back him up,” I said.

The soldier shuddered through the shoulders and straightened, like a dog shaking itself out. “Let’s go,” he said.

Ben had paused outside the Humvee, waiting for us. Together, we moved around to Franklin’s Hummer, to face the man himself.

He wasn’t dressed for the weather. His trench coat would be more at home on the streets of New York City or London. He probably wore his usual suit underneath. The maroon wool scarf wrapped once around his neck didn’t seem to do much to hold back the cold. The snow came up well over his dress shoes. He was tense, shivering.

When he saw us, he backed away, stumbling. He must have seen something inhuman in us. Something ferocious, animal. A pack of beings who wanted to tear him apart, and very much could if they got to him. One wonders if he saw anything but
the threat. He knew what I was—my identity as a werewolf was very public—and could guess that Ben and Tyler were also werewolves.

He raised a hand over his head; he was holding something, a metal artifact as big as his fist. “Stay back! I have defense against your kind!
Stay back!”

The object he held was made of silver and shaped like some kind of hammer—a broad T with rounded edges. A Scandinavian charm, with an intricate design stamped into it. Gleaming, it threw back what little light shone on it, and almost writhed in his grip, like it was a living thing trying to break free. Some twisting force of nature—lightning, maybe.

“Stay away from me!” he shouted again.

I smelled blood on him—such a sharp, sweet scent. My mouth watered. He’d skinned his cheek in the crash, and the red dripped along his jaw to his chin. He may not even have noticed. Ben curled a lip and growled, teeth showing. “Wait,” I murmured. Yeah, Franklin was asking for it. That didn’t mean we were going to give it to him. Guy wasn’t in his right mind.

Still, I wanted to get in his face. Not to do anything to him. Just to scare him a little. “Who hired you?” I shouted. “Who are you working for? Who wants to destroy my city?”

“This is bigger than you, little girl!”

I stepped forward, imagining I was stalking on
wolf’s paws, snow and ice crunching lightly under my feet. I held his gaze, staring hard, and wondered if he understood the challenge.

“Back!” he shouted, waving his little charm. Then he said something in a language I didn’t understand. Couldn’t even guess what.

Thunder bellowed, the ear-shattering crack of a powerful summer thunderhead striking right overhead, along with an atomic flash of light. The sound was wrong in the middle of a snowstorm. I ducked, arms wrapped around my head. We’d all dropped to the ground—except for Franklin, who grinned at me. The talisman in his hand seemed to glow.

I straightened, angry that he’d made me put myself lower than him. Lightning had struck, right on top of us—maybe one of the vehicles or a streetlamp. I couldn’t tell where, but smelled sulfur and burning.

“You think that makes you tough?” I said. “You’re all powerful and stuff because you can destroy entire cities?”

“You wouldn’t understand. You have no faith! You’re an
animal
!”

Oh, why did I bother? I put my hands on my hips. “We’ll stop you. We’ve already stopped you.” I didn’t know if that was true. Shaun and the others had five more stores to mark. I hoped they were doing that now.

Franklin wore the triumphant expression of a conqueror. “You can’t stop us!”

From the darkness up the street, another vehicle appeared and skidded to a stop, enough behind Franklin’s Hummer that there was no danger of a collision. Cormac’s Jeep, hunched like a creature in the fog. Cormac slid out of the front seat and strode forward without a pause, until he stood about ten yards behind Franklin.

“Hey,” Cormac said. “If you’re done with them, you come deal with me.”

Franklin turned and slipped, nearly toppling over. He windmilled his arms to recover and then stood unsteadily, legs braced, arms outstretched. Straightening quickly, he faced down Cormac with his former air of superiority.

That he turned his back to me—that he thought I wasn’t a threat—made me angry. I wanted to snarl and pounce on him. But I also wanted to see what Cormac was going to do to the guy. I still wasn’t sure we had him cornered; he could call the cops on us and it would be just like the libel suit. Sure, I was right that he was a bad guy, and he really was using his Speedy Mart franchise to work magic, and he really was working on a spell to put Denver under ten feet of snow. And I would prove all that, how?

“You’re too late!” Franklin said, right out of the bad-guy handbook, as if there were any remaining doubt. “The divine power lives on, through me!”

“We’ll just see about that,” Cormac said.

Franklin thrust his amulet at Cormac, as though
brandishing a cross at a vampire, and repeated the phrase he’d used before. I cringed, ducking, expecting a crack of thunder to crash over our heads. It didn’t. Franklin also seemed surprised, and he tried the gesture again.

Cormac seemed amused when he pulled his own amulet, a metal disk, out of the pocket of his leather coat. He studied it a moment, then threw it at Franklin, underhanded, as if he expected the guy to catch it.

Franklin didn’t catch it. He flinched in a panic, and the amulet hit him, then fell into the snow. Maybe we all expected an explosion, for flames to burst forth and devour him, but nothing happened. Franklin pawed in the snow for the object. When he found it, lying it flat on his hand, he stared at it with as much terror as if it really had rained physical destruction on him.

It showed the
gromoviti znaci
, wanna bet?

“Told you,” I said at him. I’d about decided we had to take him down and damn the consequences, if he didn’t just admit defeat and crawl away.

Then clouds parted. It seemed to happen suddenly, but more likely it had come upon us gradually, the clouds thinning, fading from gray to nothing, until fissures appeared, and a dark sky showed through, edged by lingering curls of mist. I felt as if a blanket lifted off me, like I could breathe freely again. Which meant that Shaun and the others had succeeded, and the spell was broken. While the blizzard had caused
havoc, it wasn’t any worse now than the usual impressive winter storms that struck Denver every couple of years. People wouldn’t be talking about this one as the storm of the century.

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.