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

The group approaches and she backs away, keeping her distance. She can only back so far, and when they corner her, she’ll strike. She will not let them corner her.

Of the other two, one is cold. He smells of carrion without being rotten. She keeps her distance from him. The other, another female—this one smells of prey. Fear, sweat, trembling. Weak, she stands behind the others for protection.

She stares at the prey, and the curl in her lips feels almost like a smile.

“Here,” says the cold one. “We’ll start from here. No need to frighten her.”

For a moment, the door beyond the group stands open. A faint touch of mountain air seeps in, and her nose quivers, taking in the taste of freedom. But the door closes again before she can rally herself to escape.

Too slow, too late. Her muscles are stiff from standing rigid, from spending days locked in this cold, stone-filled space. Her mind burns. The blood of her meal coats her tongue; part of the haunch still remains, but she’s no longer hungry. Now, she wants only to escape. That, or devour the enemies standing before her.

She has to move. Circling back, she paces, following the wall, hoping it will run out, lead her to some wide open space where she can run, but it doesn’t. It loops back to the start, to the enemies and their droning voices. They stand their ground, don’t try to stop her from moving. But she has no path around them without going through them, which seems unwise. So she paces. She can still taste blood and wants more.

On the next loop, she ducks and charges, mouth open. Her claws scrape on the ground, her muscles pump—running feels good. She sees through a haze of anger. The cold one, whose voice has ice and smoke in it. She aims for him.

The wolf steps in her path. She plants her jaw on his raised arm. His skin rips, she tastes his blood. He shoves her back, redirects her, slams her into the cave wall. Pain stings her shoulder. Writhing, she twists out of his grip, falls, finds her feet again.

He braces, arms spread, standing between her and the others. He’s ready to fight. Blood drips down his arm; she tastes drops of it that smear on her tongue. There’s a tang of fear—from the lion, who comes forward and wraps cloth around his arm.

She remembers: traces of poison are everywhere here, imbedded in the walls. They wouldn’t have to rip out each others’ hearts, merely poison each others’ blood with traces of metallic stone.

His teeth are bared; so are hers. She won’t back down from the challenge. Softly, she growls.

Stop. We can’t win.

She stands, legs rigid, panting.

Calm, calm. We must stay calm. We have to wait them out.

The cold one speaks. “We have gathered to raise power, in order to do battle with great evil. We invite Regina Luporum to merge her power with ours. Now, in your truest form, see with your wolf spell book tc’s eyes what we do here, see the power we have already gathered…”

She glares a challenge at him; the cold one meets her gaze, and her focus tumbles. The world turns to fog, and she cannot look away.

His tone is like singing. This makes her think of howls, of her pack under the full moon’s light, surging pure and ever skyward. But the cold one’s singing is broken and grates on her nerves. At the start, she almost understands what he says. Her two-legged self strains to listen. But as the chant goes on, her head aches, and it becomes meaningless, like everything else about this place. She doesn’t understand, and her other self fades to a distant influence. A murmur in the bacdy what Enkidu

Chapter 12

  for a reason.it, you’re on the air.”

THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU is one of the more modern takes in a long line of stories about beings who cross the line between human and not. I’d always thought that Moreau himself was the least human creature in the story. A confession: I started reading the H. G. Wells novel thinking it would be quaint and cute, like a lot of Victorian literature that was meant to be startling and horrifying, but really wasn’t to our modern, jaded sensibilities.

What a lot of people don’t realize about the story because they’ve just seen the movies is that most film versions only cover the first two-thirds of the book. In the novel, Prendick is stranded on the island for another ten months, having to coexist with the horde of devolving man-beasts. Having to become like them in order to hold his own among them, while maintaining enough of his humanity to be able to build a raft and escape. The end of the novel—the part that’s meant to be truly horrifying to anybody who reads it, no matter where or when they live—shows Prendick rescued and back in London, among the teeming mass of humanity. And he can’t tell the difference between them and the tormented beasts he left behind. This was a common theme of H. G. Wells: the idea that humanity is just a very short step from utter, uncivilized chaos.

Some of the worst people I’d ever met didn’t have a lick of supernatural about them. Technically, they weren’t monsters. But they were, surely. You can only judge people by their actions.

*   *   *

I WOKE up on top of my clothes, which gave me a weird jolt of happiness. They hadn’t taken my clothes! Instead, I was nested in my own familiar unwashed body odor, which gave me a strange sense of well-being. They really didn’t mean me harm, they really weren’t going to hurt me, maybe they weren’t so bad …

I sat up and stewed, trying to remember everything that had happened after I’d turned Wolf. Trying to dredge from those fuzzy memories some solid nugget of information. Sometimes, my stretches as Wolf passed in a