Kitty’s Big Trouble by Carrie Vaughn (books to read as a couple .TXT) 📕

I shook my head. “No. Something else is going on here. Maybe they locked up the nine-tails, but they don’t have the pearl—they were still looking for it. Which means Roman doesn’t have it. Someone else took it. There’s a third party.”

Ben chuckled. “That’s the good news, isn’t it?” He hunted around the floor for the gun he’d tossed aside, found it shored up against the wall, and covered in blood. Picking it up with two fingers by the very end of the grip, he said, “I’m really getting tired of this. Why’d I bring this again?” Cormac tossed him another scrap of shirt, and he started wiping it down. The scene was looking increasingly ghoulish. We needed to get out of here.

“Do we need to clean up the bodies?” Cormac asked.

“No,” Anastasia said. “The tunnels take care of themselves.”

Now I really wanted to get out of here. “Who else wants this pearl?” I said to the vampire.

“Anyone who knows about it would want it. Any magician, wizard, any other vampires. The gods.”

“Gods? Seriously? Let’s not make this more complicated than it has to be. What’s our next step then? Go looking for the pearl?”

“Take a shower?” Ben said. “Go home?”

“That gets my vote,” Cormac said. “This isn’t our fight.”

Anastasia didn’t say anything to that. I expected her to argue. She didn’t, maybe because Cormac was right. But that wasn’t how I felt. Roman was my enemy, too. Here or somewhere else, he’d come after me and mine again.

I tried to acquire some veneer of dignity despite the fact that I was still too close to turning Wolf for comfort. And that I was spattered with blood. Rounding my shoulders, I went the few steps down the hall to the closet with the safe. Both the room and the safe were still open.

I held myself still and began breathing softly, taking air through my nose, smelling the space and what had been here.

Mostly, I sensed what I expected: old stone and grime, a century’s worth of salt air lingering, the cold steel of the safe, smoke and wax from Grace’s candle. Werewolves, humans, and vampires. We’d been walking around on top of each other’s scents, which blurred together. I heard a distant pattering, like raindrops or the footsteps of mice, always at the edge of hearing. Mysterious gazes, always at the edge of seeing. I listened for the sound of a crying baby, and didn’t hear it. I hoped Grace was safe.

I knelt closer to the safe, putting my nose right up to the steel. A trace of Grace’s human scent lingered on the handle and combination dial. I even stuck my head inside the safe and took a few deep breaths, hoping to catch a trace of the artifact itself. I only smelled more steel, more dust. If I’d had to guess what had been here, I’d have said it had always been empty. Scary magical items should smell like something, shouldn’t they?

“Find anything?” Ben said.

I shook my head. “You want to try?”

I stepped aside and let him go through the same routine. After a moment of searching he muttered, “I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”

“Let me,” Cormac said, moving toward us around the bodies. He carried the hurricane lamp and its golden halo of light from the storage room with him. We got out of the way and watched.

He took some kind of stone from his pocket, keeping it partially hidden in his hand. It had something magical to it, no doubt. Since his release from prison, he’d replaced his collection of guns with amulets and talismans.

If he was using magic, it meant Amelia was probably in charge now, which made me bristle. It didn’t matter if Cormac seemed all right with the arrangement. I didn’t like the idea of him being used.

He passed the amulet over the safe as if it were some kind of Geiger counter.

“What’s he doing?” Anastasia asked, moving next to me.

“He’s kind of a wizard, I guess,” I said.

“Kind of?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

She glared unhappily.

Straightening, Cormac pocketed the stone amulet. “Something magical was there but it’s gone now.”

“I don’t suppose it left a trail?” I asked. He shook his head.

“It’s a trap,” Anastasia said. “This has all been a trick, and I fell for it—”

“I’d just like to point out that we’re not the ones lying dead on the floor,” I said. “If this is a trap we’re not the only ones who got stuck.”

The silence drew on as we contemplated that unpleasant thought. Once again I started pacing, as if that would make the corridor larger, as if a way out would appear before my eyes. My shoes, coated with blood, started sticking to the floor. The stench of blood was making it hard for me to think.

“We need to get out of here,” I said. “Find Grace and start over.”

We moved forward, back the way we’d come until we reached the intersection.

“Left,” Cormac said, before I could ask if anyone remembered which way we’d come.

“I knew that,” I muttered.

We turned and went on, strung out in single file in the narrow hallway, which my imagination was making narrower, and darker. This section seemed to go on a lot longer than I remembered.

“Aren’t there supposed to be stairs here?” I said. “I remember there being stairs.”

“Did we take a wrong turn back there?” Ben said.

“It wasn’t wrong,” Cormac said.

“But there were definitely stairs.”

Finally, we came to the next intersection. But this one didn’t branch off at right angles as the others had. Instead, the hallway split in a Y. It may have been my imagination, but the stone seemed to give way to dank earth, as if the passage left the city and continued on in wild, underground tunnels. I smelled dirt and mulch coming from the way ahead.

I stated the obvious. “We haven’t been here before.”

“So we took a wrong turn,” Ben said.

“This is much, much more than a wrong