Kitty's House of Horrors (kn-7) by Carrie Vaughn (christmas read aloud txt) 📕

I said. Everyone looked toward me, a group of stark faces. I wanted to duck, apologetic for breaking the quiet, but I didn’t. I was an alpha wolf, and I could do this. “Probably from upstairs. It’ll be easier to stay out of sight of anyone with a rifle. Then we need to check the house. It might be rigged with explosives, traps. Anything like that. We should also look for weapons we can use.”

After a moment of stunned silence, Ariel said, voice wavering, “Are you serious? Explosives?”

Lee chuckled. His face flushed, and I wondered if maybe that wasn’t his first beer of the evening. “What are you going to do, wage some kind of war?”

“Yes,” I said. “Damn straight.”

Anastasia stood, and all gazes turned to her. She drew the eye with her poise, her bearing, chin tipped up, gaze like iron. I suddenly felt like we couldn’t do half badly with her on our side.

“I’m less interested in the war than I am in the conspiracy,” she said. “I want to know how this happened. How it was possible for this… situation… to arise. I want to know who made it possible.” She looked at Odysseus Grant.

An epic stare-down between them began. I looked back and forth between the two.

“You want to explain what you’re talking about?” I said to Anastasia.

“You know what I’m talking about,” she said. “You know what he’s capable of.”

Grant hadn’t reacted. Not a muscle on his face twitched. Gazing at him, Anastasia looked like she could raise a hand and summon storms. At the moment, I was thinking they were both capable of a hell of a lot. I didn’t particularly want to see what.

“I do know,” I said, my voice low, steady. The talking-down-a-hostage-situation voice. “And I think that if he wanted to act against any of us, he’d do it a lot more elegantly and discreetly.”

Grant was near the top of my “people never to piss off” list. Because if he ever decided he had it in for me, I would just… vanish.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Grant said.

Anastasia scowled at me. “Then what do you think is happening here?”

I didn’t snap back like I wanted to, because I was still thinking like Cormac, and Anastasia didn’t have that benefit. Hell, for all her experience she might never have met anyone like Cormac. I explained carefully, thinking out loud, formulating my own hypothesis. “I think it’s pretty simple. There are people out there—bounty hunters, hit men, assassins—who want people like us dead. I think maybe one or more of them got wind of what was happening here. That they’d have a whole group of juicy targets in one place, just waiting to be picked off. They made plans, they camped out—maybe at that campsite Jerome and I found during the treasure hunt. They waited for the chance, got rid of witnesses. Now they can pick us off one by one, and that’s all they want to do. I think they hit Dorian first because they knew it would weaken you and Gemma. That means they’re smart. They know our weaknesses. So we have to pay attention. And I think we have to go after them before they get to us.”

The others took time absorbing all that. I studied them in turn, sizing them up, guessing how they’d do under pressure—assessing my pack, I realized. Most of them probably had never been hunted before. They might never have been in danger like this. Grant and Tina had, I knew. They could fight. Anastasia, probably. The old vampires didn’t survive so long without developing a few survival skills. Lee was a hunter, but he was used to being top of the food chain. Jeffrey, Ariel—I had no idea. I hated this, because Jeffrey and Ariel at least were too darned nice to be stuck in a situation like this.

That was why I was starting to throw down the alpha attitude: I felt like I had to protect them.

Lee finally broke the silence. “How do you do that? How do you just put yourself inside their heads like that?”

I looked away, trying not to laugh, because this wasn’t funny. But God, I wished Cormac could hear this.

“I have this friend,” I said. “He’s good at this sort of thing.”

“Any chance you could get him to come out here and help?”

My throat tightened, and I shook my head. “No chance at all, even if we had a working phone.”

“Too bad,” he said.

Yeah. Too bad.

Straightening, I pulled from the window. Reminded myself I was supposed to be badass. “Tell you what. There’s a locked room upstairs. Anyone else want to check it out? See what Provost decided to keep out of sight?”

I trooped upstairs, leading the others.

“Maybe this is all some kind of mistake,” Lee said. “Dorian was an accident, Jerome was the only target—he had enemies, right? Maybe from his boxing days?”

“Except there’s still that prickling on the back of my neck,” I said.

“What do you think we’ll find in there?” Tina said.

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t need to look.”

Ariel split off to knock on Conrad’s door. “Hey, Conrad. You okay?”

“I’m not coming out, so don’t ask,” came the muffled voice from within. Ariel stepped back, a startled look on her face.

“I’d have thought he’d start adjusting by now,” she said.

I gave her a wry grin. “The trouble is, there’s no way he can save face. He looks like an idiot, and he knows it.”

The door to the mystery room was still locked. I rattled the knob again and wondered if I was strong enough to kick it in. That always worked so well in the movies, right? “Maybe there’s an ax in the toolshed,” I said.

“May I try?” Grant stepped forward, holding a couple of small, thin tools. Lock picks. The magician had everything.

“Be my guest,” I said, stepping aside. I liked having Grant on my team, which made me even crankier when Anastasia whispered to me, “He has us all