Kitty in the Underworld by Carrie Vaughn (red queen ebook .txt) 📕

silver here, low grade, scant quantities found in scattered flecks in the walls, and the more I touched them the worse the allergic reaction would become. Just as they’d known how much tranquilizer to use, my captors knew to paint the walls with silver, to keep me captive, quiet.

No—not a room, a cell, or a cave. This was a mine. They’d taken me to a silver mine, probably one of the hundreds scattered throughout the Colorado mountains, abandoned and forgotten. For some reason, the thought that I was still in Colorado—still relatively close to home—comforted me. I had to find a way out of here and get home.

I continued my circuit of the tiny cave, brushing the wall with only my fingertips, ignoring the building itch. It was just a little silver, it wouldn’t kill me unless it got in my bloodstream. This must have been some branch of a tunnel, excavated a short distance, blown out with explosives, then abandoned when it didn’t yield high-quality ore. The ceiling arced evenly overhead.

Finally, the stone ended. I touched wood, set perpendicular to the cave wall. I pressed my hands flat against it, felt all over, and didn’t feel the burn of silver. Just plain wood. I studied it. A sheet of wood reinforced with two-by-fours had been set across the cave’s opening—it might have been a door, but if there were hinges, they were bolted on the outside, into the rock. The inside, the side facing me, had no handle, no lock, no sign of a lock. The wood itself felt solid. I banged on it, gave it a shake, and it didn’t budge. There was a gap at the bottom of the door, enough to stick my fingers through, enough to let air in, and a faint sliver of white light, maybe from a lantern. I also found a seam, as if some kind of slot had been cut into the wood.

Bottom line, there was a door. A shut door could be opened and allow escape.

I pounded on the wood and yelled. “Hey! Wanna get the fuck over here and explain yourselves? Hey!” After one last, good hard pound, I pressed my ear to the gap near the floor, waited.

Nothing happened.

I lay on the floor, pressed my nose to the gap I recognized some of them in the most general sensed from , and breathed several slow, deep breaths, hoping to catch a scent of someone, something, anything. Mostly what I smelled was stone and dusty air, and I swore I could smell the silver pervading everything, tickling the inside of my nose. I sneezed, scrubbed my nose on my sleeve, and tried again, determined not to think too hard about silver anymore. I just had to be careful not to get cut while I was here.

And there they were, the same scents Tom and I had tracked: the two lycanthropes, wolf and lion. They’d lured us out and gotten us. I wished I knew why.

Other scents mingled with the two I recognized. Those I wasn’t as clear on. One seemed human enough, but vague. I couldn’t even tell the person’s sex. The other—chilled. A corpselike cold. Vampire? Or was it just the pervasive cold of the stone masking something else?

That didn’t make any more sense than the rest of it.

I spent five minutes pounding on the door, shouting until my voice went hoarse. After the first minute I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get a response. But I kept doing it, just to be doing something.

No one answered. I might have been alone in the mine.

This was ridiculous. You didn’t drug and kidnap someone, then lock them into a dark room and leave them there for no reason. I wondered where the night-vision cameras were hidden.

This whole place made me itch, and I rubbed my arms. I went to the middle of the cave, as far from the walls and traces of ambient silver as I could get, and sat. Stared at the door that I very much wanted to be on the other side of.

I could claw my way through the wood, given time and motivation. I had the motivation, but I didn’t know how much time I had. I had another problem. I could turn Wolf, dig and chew through the door, and get cut up in the process. Being a werewolf didn’t mean I didn’t get hurt, it meant I could take a lot of damage and heal quickly. But if I really was in a silver mine, it didn’t matter how defunct it was, there could still be traces of silver all through this place, ore that was never excavated, a residue embedded in the walls and even scattered in the dust on the floor. If I cut open my paws, my hands, and if the silver got into my bloodstream, I’d be dead. The bullet half of the silver bullet didn’t kill werewolves; blood poisoning from the silver did. Silver-inlaid knives did as well. I didn’t know if there was a minimum amount of silver it took to poison a werewolf to death—maybe traces of powder on the floor wouldn’t be enough. But I didn’t want to be the one to test that threshold.

So any escape plan that might break skin was out.

Cold didn’t affect me as much as it did a normal human being, but I started to shiver. I pulled my hands into the sleeves of my sweater, hugged my knees to my chest, and tried to keep my breathing slow and steady. My mind spun, a hamster racing in a wheel that didn’t go anywhere.

The pieces of what was happening here didn’t fit together. The tranquilizer dart, the efficiency of the strike—I’d never even heard the gun fire, and whoever had the gun must have been downwind because I hadn’t smelled anyone that close—made me think military. At one point the army had werewolf soldiers serving in Afghanistan. I’d been called in as a consultant when a unit of werewolves had