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

Ben and the others followed a few paces behind. I could sense them, the sound of their footsteps and the odor of their sweat, their anxiety. Anastasia had returned to her usual composure—cool, detached. I couldn’t read her at all.

Ahead, the corridor branched. I stopped at the intersection and waited for the others to catch up. “Well?” I said. “Left or right?”

“We could toss a coin,” Ben said.

“It hardly matters,” Anastasia said.

“Left,” Cormac said.

I glanced back at him. “Is this some kind of magical hunch?”

“Just a hunch,” he said. “The regular kind.”

“Why not right?”

“Turn right if you want to, doesn’t make a difference to me,” he said, expressionless as always. He held the lantern low in his hand. The light shadowed his face so it looked like a skull.

I kind of wanted to keep poking him until he got angry. Just out of curiosity, to see what he would do. Instead, I turned right and kept walking. When I glanced over my shoulder to see if the others followed, Ben smirked at me, the expression he used when he thought I was being irrational. But if it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, right?

And how had I ended up in the lead?

These tunnels seemed to go on an awfully long time without turning, breaking, or revealing any features. We were under San Francisco, there ought to be underground cables, water pipes, sewer lines. As long as we’d been walking we should have been under the bay by now. I shouldn’t have felt like I was in the stone dungeon of a medieval castle. I caught a faint whiff of incense. I tried to follow the trace of the scent, thinking it would lead us to a door, a room, anything but the maze of tunnels.

A break in the stone wall revealed a smooth plywood door. It didn’t have a lock.

Like other doors we’d encountered, this one also had a sign on it, a vertical length of paper with Chinese characters.

“What’s it say?” I said, looking back at Anastasia.

She studied it a moment. “It’s a warning.” As if she hadn’t expected anything different.

I snorted a short laugh. Of course it was a warning.

It was a pocket door, the kind that slid sideways into the wall, but it seemed to be spring loaded, or stuck, because I couldn’t get it open. I grabbed the fingerhold carved into one side and shook—it rattled in its frame as if jammed. Maybe I could wrench it loose.

After figuring out what I thought was the side that opened, I worked my fingers into the gap until I found the edge of the door. The door frame scraped my skin, but I also felt a sense of hope. I could do this, get it open, and get us all out of this place. Standing back and leaning over, I braced my legs and put my weight into pulling back on the door, shaking it hard every now and then to try to loosen it. When it budged a quarter of an inch, I grinned and pulled harder, until it jumped another six inches.

“Ha!” I announced in victory.

“Where’s it go?” Ben asked.

“Dunno.” I put my face to the opening; the hallway appeared to continue on in darkness. Ahead, a faint white light glowed. An emergency light in a room, maybe, or the exterior light over a doorway? A streetlight and freedom?

I jammed my shoulder into the opening to force it wide enough for me to slip through.

“Are you sure you should be doing that?” Ben asked, hovering. He put his hand on the wall next to me and peered over my head through the gap. “I can’t see anything in there.”

Exhaling, I flattened myself as much as I could, pushed against the door, and popped on through. I stumbled away from the gap.

“There, see?” I said. “No problem—”

The door slammed shut behind me.

“Kitty!” Ben shouted through the wood. He banged on it; the sound was muted.

This side didn’t have any kind of indent to use as a handle. I pushed the door, rattled it, tried to get my fingers into the gap, but this time, the door didn’t budge, didn’t offer a centimeter of purchase.

“Kitty!”

“I’m okay, but I can’t see how to open it.”

The banging against the door became deeper, steadier. Ben was throwing his whole body against it; the vibrations pounded against my hands, which I’d been holding flat against the wood. When the door started to bow toward me, I backed away, expecting him to splinter through it at any moment.

I stumbled and fell before I realized that the floor behind me suddenly sloped downward. Even then I would have recovered, flailing a bit before regaining my balance, except that after a few feet of sloping, the floor dropped away entirely, and I fell into an open pit. I was too surprised to even scream.

Chapter 10

AFTER HITTING THE hard concrete bottom of the shaft, I lay on my back, blinking into darkness. My Wolf’s vision had adjusted to the distant, pale light that still shone and I made out shapes, sensing the closeness of the walls, the stuffiness of the subterranean room. The tunnel was a faint, glowing circle above me. That had been a hell of a fall. My heart was racing, my breaths came in gasps, but even Wolf was shocked and quiet.

When I finally tried to sit up, stabbing pain slashed down my right hip and thigh. I groaned and lay back again. I hoped this didn’t mean what I thought it meant—something was seriously broken. No matter how I tried to catch my breath, I couldn’t seem to slow it or my heart rate down. Panicking, I let out a groan.

I waited for Ben’s voice calling down to me. It didn’t happen. I couldn’t hear him banging on the door anymore, and I wondered if he managed to break through. I pulled my cell phone out of