Kitty in the Underworld (Kitty Norville) (26 page)

The pencil scratched a few more strokes, and then the artist turned the sketch pad around. “How is this?”

He’d drawn a square-faced woman with a crown of dark, curling hair, a slightly furrowed brow, and a hard look in her eyes. This wasn’t how she looked when I saw her, but it was undoubtedly her. Somehow, my description had come through. Fierce, determined. She would defend her cubs, her pack. Regina Luporum Prima, I supposed I could call her.

“It’s good,” I said. “Thanks.”

He tore the page from the pad and gave it to me. I studied it, awestruck. The picture made her more real, and also, somehow, more normal. Taken out of the cavern and the ritual, she was just a woman.

“What did she do?” Hardin asked. She wore a jacket over a tank top and dark trousers, and had her dark hair in a ponytail. She was overworked, tough as nails, and dogged. I’d rarely seen her smile. We’d been working together for years now, and I trusted her.

“She lived,” I said simply. “Probably twenty-five hundred years ago or so. Early Roman, probably.”

“So she’s a vampire?” Hardin asked.

“No,” I said, bemused, realizing this sounded crazy. Not caring. “She was a werewolf. I think. I thought she was just a story. But I saw her.”

“Do I want to know?” Hardin said, smirking.

“Probably not. It’s complicated.”

“What exactly happened to you up there?” she asked. She’d been one of the first people Ben and Cormac called when I turned up missing and had been part of the search. I really did have a lot of people looking out for me.

My smile went lopsided, because I didn’t know what to say. “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”

“Typical,” she huffed.

“Thanks for this,” I said, nodding at the sketch. She waved me off.

When I got home, I pinned the drawing next to the picture of the
Capitoline Wolf.
They seemed to match.

Ben and I talked about it. We lay in bed, all the lights out, and the darkness of the bedroom was nowhere near the absolute darkness of the mine. I understood absolute darkness now. Here, moon and ambient light from Denver seeped in around the curtains, and the bedside clock had a glow. Even without being able to identify the light source, the whole room shimmered with light. Ben glowed, with the heat and life of his body.

Our wolves didn’t fully believe that all was well, and they asserted themselves in the way we curled up together at one end of the bed. We were on our sides, nestled together, his body pressed protectively across my back, my head against his shoulder, noses to skin so we could smell each other and be comforted.

“I don’t even know if it was real,” I said. “Or if it was some hallucination Zora cooked up. It might have been a trick. But would I have felt it so strongly if it were? Would I have been able to remember it? Remember it well enough to get a sketch out of it?”

“Kitty, I don’t know.” He sighed into my hair, and I snuggled more firmly in his embrace. Skin to skin. I couldn’t get enough. “I know
something
happened to you. And seriously, after everything we’ve seen? Anything’s possible. These days I’m ready to believe in Santa Claus.”

St. Nicholas had been a real person, I almost said. “I want her to be real.”

“I know.”

“It’s like if she was real, a real woman with a real face, who was really alive—then maybe we’re not so different. Maybe I really can keep doing this.”

“I never doubted it.”

I chuckled, because of course he would say that. Turning, I brought my hand to his cheek and matched his gaze.

“Thanks. For listening,” I said.

Then my own Prince Reliable kissed me.

*   *   *

I
MISSED
a show over the course of my adventure. My captivity. My … I wasn’t sure anymore what to call it. In the end, I was there because I’d chosen to be. Didn’t make it any less messed up, and I spent most of the first few days afterward at home, asleep. Sleeping meant not thinking about it.

I’d never outright missed a show. I’d had plenty of planned absences, had aired prerecorded episodes and run “best of” episodes when I needed time off, on full-moon nights for example. My engineer, Matt, was able to piece together one of these, rerunning old interviews and splicing together intros, so the show itself went on without me. The only sense of failure was my own.

Ben and Ozzie both suggested I needed to take another week off, to recover from what they sympathetically called my ordeal, but I refused. I wasn’t going to miss another show, another week. The best way to get my head back on straight would be to go back to work, to do my job.

What to talk about, on that first show back? I could have told my audience about my adventure. About meeting the oldest vampire I’d yet encountered, about how practicing ceremonial magic seemed to me to be a lot like playing with dynamite and matches. I wanted to send a message to Samira, and to talk about Enkidu—Mohan—to get his story out. To memorialize him. And Zora. Kumarbis, not so much, even though he was the one people would want to hear about. But if I talked about one of them, I’d have to talk about all of them, and the demon, the rituals, the philosophies behind them, and I wasn’t ready to do that.

Another consideration: I didn’t flatter myself that Roman listened to my show. Then again, maybe he did, and I didn’t want to tell him what exactly had happened in that abandoned mine. Let him guess, if he didn’t already know.

My topic for the week: mythology. I called a couple of professors from CU Boulder to interview about historical precedents for characters like King Arthur, Robin Hood, and even Gilgamesh. I found some authors who’d written novels that combined history and mythology, and recorded interviews about their take on the likelihood that some of these old stories might have a seed of truth. Pretty good, considering how last-minute I was putting this together.

I took a few calls, and they ran the usual range from insightful to insane. That in itself was comforting. No matter what happened in the rest of the world, my callers would always be there for me, with their enthusiasm, their conspiracy theories about tunnel systems extending through the continental U.S., and rants about the Second Amendment not including silver bullets.

What conclusion, if any, could I draw from all this? Here were stories we were still telling after five hundred, a thousand, five thousand years. Maybe not a lot of time on the geologic scale, but unimaginable on the scale of human memory. That had to mean something. Stories were what lasted.

Stories, and vampires, some of whom didn’t just tell the stories, but remembered when the stories were new.

I finished writing the book. Finally. Part of what motivated the last big writing push: thinking about something happening to me before I finished. Thinking about how much I would leave behind, unfinished. The book was one thing I could wrap up, so I did.

Also, I’d found my thesis, the thread that would tie the book together: stories were important. Whether they were true or not, they held their own history of the world, and we kept telling them because they meant something. Before all this happened, I had a vague notion of why I was putting this book together. Now, I
knew.
I supposed I could say I now had faith in it.

*   *   *

W
HEN
C
ORMAC
called to ask me to meet him at New Moon, I knew he had information. After the dinner rush, Ben and I arrived at the restaurant, claimed a table in the back, ordered beers, and waited. Cormac arrived soon after and explained.

“The thumb drive you gave me—it isn’t just a book of spells, it’s a book of shadows.”

“What’s that mean?” I said.

“It’s everything. Everything she learned, her journey as a magician, her plans.”

“Her diary,” I said, amazed.

He winced. “Sort of. But more.” He cocked his head in a way I’d learned to recognize as him listening to an interior voice. Conversing with Amelia. “Something like … her magician’s soul.”

She’d given it to me there at the end because she knew she wasn’t going to make it. Closing the door on the demon meant collapsing the cave on herself. She couldn’t save her own life, but she’d given her soul to me. Another sacrifice. It was too much responsibility. What was I supposed to do with it?

“Did you find anything good?” Ben asked after a moment. The question seemed callous, and I almost said so, angrily. But he was only stating the obvious: what was I supposed to do with all of Zora’s spells and knowledge that she’d wanted to save? Use them, of course.

Cormac said, “Her name was Amy Scanlon. She was from Monterey, California, and dropped out of college to travel the world and learn what she could. Amelia sees a lot of herself in the kid. She had some talent as well, some natural psychic ability. Always seemed to know where to find the good stuff. The real deal.”

“Like Kumarbis.”

He gave an offhand shrug. “They seemed to feed into each others’ obsessions. If they’d kept going they’d have either taken over the world or destroyed it.”

Ben chuckled. “For real?”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

I huffed. “If magic was going to destroy the world, someone would have done it by now.”

Cormac gave me a look. A mustached frown, a calculating gaze. “If it hasn’t happened yet, it may be because there hasn’t ever been one person who’s gathered enough power to be able to do it. At least not yet.”

“Yet,” I said, staring. “And what about Dux Bellorum? The Long Game?”

He blew out a breath, looking thoughtful. “Hard to say. Her diary, the personal stuff, she wrote out, like she was just typing it in whenever she could. The meat of the thing—the spells, the lore—she wrote in a code. There’s probably a couple of hundred pages of information she learned about Roman and the Long Game, either from Kumarbis or from scrying or who the hell knows what else, but it’s all coded.”

“Are you kidding me?” I said, slouching back, feeling defeated all over again.

“It’s a common practice,” he said, although I had the feeling this was Amelia now, making the explanations like she often did. “In medieval times alchemists and mages were competitive and jealous, always trying to steal each other’s secrets while protecting their own. They’d invent their own arcane systems for encrypting their work. Very effective—some old books of shadows still haven’t been deciphered.”

“This doesn’t help us at all,” I complained.

The glass door swung open then, bringing in a blast of cold air and Angelo, light hair tousled, face ruddy with recently drunk blood, wool coat flapping. He only hesitated a moment, glancing around until he found me and marched to meet me.

As usual, Cormac stayed seated and calm, but his hand had disappeared into a jacket pocket and the stake he likely kept there. Angelo didn’t even notice.

He regarded me, and I raised a brow at him, prompting.

“What did you do?” he said finally.

“What do you mean, what did I do?”

“Marid called.
Marid.
He’s a legend, you know, and he doesn’t call
anyone.
He appears mysteriously, that’s it. But he called me. Roman has fled Split in something of an uproar, I gather. Left behind henchmen, odds and ends. But apparently he found what he was looking for right before being chased off. No idea where he’s gone next, but Marid is sure something spooked him. So of course I assume you did something, to answer for Antony. So does Marid. He asked me, I’m asking you.”

I hesitated, because my first thought was that I hadn’t done anything, not really. I was the victim here, right? I tilted my head, pursed my lips. “If he calls back, can you ask him if he’s ever heard of a vampire named Kumarbis?”

Angelo’s brow furrowed. “I’ve never heard of him.”

“I’m not asking if you’ve heard of him, but has Marid?”

“This one’s old, then, I take it?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And he’s the one responsible for making Dux Bellorum bolt?”

Credit where credit was due. “I think so, yes.”

“And where is this astonishing person now?”

I pressed my lips together and shook my head.

“Ah,” Angelo sighed with understanding, and finally sank into one of the empty chairs at the table. “So.
What happened?
”

“I’m not sure I even know anymore.”

“Is he coming here next?” Angelo said. “If Roman’s on the move, and he thinks you had something to do with flushing him out of his last hideout, will he be coming
here
? Do I need to worry?”

“If I could predict what Roman was going to do I’d have staked him a long time ago. How many times can I say it, I don’t know.”

“So the answer is—maybe,” he said.

Yeah, it was. Silence gave him his answer.

I expected him to whine. To wilt and moan about the unfairness of it all. To blame me for putting him this position, for driving Rick out when Rick was the one who should have been here, defending the city. But he didn’t do any of that. Straightening, he set his expression, put his hands on the table as if we’d been at a formal conference.

“Right, then,” he said. “Might not hurt to prepare. Call in favors and such. Kitty, Ben, I’ll be in touch.” He gave a decisive nod and swept out just as abruptly as he’d swept in.

We all stared after him. “Is it weird that I found that reassuring?” I said.

Ben rested his hand on my leg. A point of contact, a touch of comfort.

He said, “We need everything we can get on Roman. Cormac, do you think you can decipher the book?”

“I’ve got some leads. Not many, but it’s a start. In her diary, she lists some of her mentors, some of the people who got her started in magic. One of them’s a great-aunt who lives down in Manitou Springs. We could get in touch with her, find out if she knows Amy’s code or has any ideas about cracking it.”

Next of kin. I hadn’t even thought about trying to find Zora’s—Amy’s—family to tell them what happened to her. Not something I was looking forward to, but it looked like I might have to. I rubbed my eyes, suddenly tired. “Yeah, okay.”

“I can take care of that,” Cormac said. “I—we—know what to ask.”

“You and Amelia can talk to her, magician to magician like?” I said, trying to make light. He turned a hand in agreement. Didn’t say a word. Already making plans, and I wouldn’t have to worry about it.