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

My topic for the week: mythology. I called a couple of professors from CU Boulder to interview about historical precedents for characters like King Arthur, Robin Hood, and even Gilgamesh. I found some authors who’d written novels that combined history and mythology, and recorded interviews about their take on the likelihood that some of these old stories might have a seed of truth. Pretty good, considering how last-minute I was putting this together.

I took a few calls, and they ran the usual range from insightful to insane. That in itself+ that tc was comforting. No matter what happened in the rest of the world, my callers would always be there for me, with their enthusiasm, their conspiracy theories about tunnel systems extending through the continental U.S., and rants about the Second Amendment not including silver bullets.

What conclusion, if any, could I draw from all this? Here were stories we were still telling after five hundred, a thousand, five thousand years. Maybe not a lot of time on the geologic scale, but unimaginable on the scale of human memory. That had to mean something. Stories were what lasted.

Stories, and vampires, some of whom didn’t just tell the stories, but remembered when the stories were new.

I finished writing the book. Finally. Part of what motivated the last big writing push: thinking about something happening to me before I finished. Thinking about how much I would leave behind, unfinished. The book was one thing I could wrap up, so I did.

Also, I’d found my thesis, the thread that would tie the book together: stories were important. Whether they were true or not, they held their own history of the world, and we kept telling them because they meant something. Before all this happened, I had a vague notion of why I was putting this book together. Now, I knew. I supposed I could say I now had faith in it.

*   *   *

WHEN CORMAC called to ask me to meet him at New Moon, I knew he had information. After the dinner rush, Ben and I arrived at the restaurant, claimed a table in the back, ordered beers, and waited. Cormac arrived soon after and explained.

“The thumb drive you gave me—it isn’t just a book of spells, it’s a book of shadows.”

“What’s that mean?” I said.

“It’s everything. Everything she learned, her journey as a magician, her plans.”

“Her diary,” I said, amazed.

He winced. “Sort of. But more.” He cocked his head in a way I’d learned to recognize as him listening to an interior voice. Conversing with Amelia. “Something like … her magician’s soul.”

She’d given it to me there at the end because she knew she wasn’t going to make it. Closing the door on the demon meant collapsing the cave on herself. She couldn’t save her own life, but she’d given her soul to me. Another sacrifice. It was too much responsibility. What was I supposed to do with it?

“Did you find anything good?” Ben asked after a moment. The question seemed callous, and I almost said so, angrily. But he was only stating the obvious: what was I supposed to do with all of Zora’s spells and knowledge that she’d wanted to save? Use them, of course.

Cormac said, “Her name was Amy Scanlon. She was from Monterey, California, and dropped out of college to travel the world and learn what she could. Amelia sees a lot of herself in the kid. She had some talent as well, some natural psychic ability. Always seemed to know where to find the good stuff. The real deal.”

“Like Kumarbis.”

He gave an offhand shrug. “They seemed to feed into each others’ obsessions. If they’d kept going they’d have either taken over the world or destroyed it.”

Ben chuckled. “For real?”

“Maybe and wrapped my arms around my headans power, maybe not.”

I huffed. “If magic was going to destroy the world, someone would have done it by now.”

Cormac gave me a look. A mustached frown, a calculating gaze. “If it hasn’t happened yet, it may be because there hasn’t ever been one person who’s gathered enough power to be able to do it. At least not yet.”

“Yet,” I said, staring. “And what about Dux Bellorum? The Long Game?”

He blew out a breath, looking thoughtful. “Hard to say. Her diary, the personal stuff, she wrote out, like she was just typing it in whenever she could. The meat of the thing—the spells, the lore—she wrote in a code. There’s probably a couple of hundred pages of information she learned about Roman and the Long Game, either from Kumarbis or from scrying or who the hell knows what else, but it’s all coded.”

“Are you kidding me?” I said, slouching back, feeling defeated all over again.

“It’s a common practice,” he said, although I had the feeling this was Amelia now, making the explanations like she often did. “In medieval times alchemists and mages were competitive and jealous, always trying to steal each other’s secrets while protecting their own. They’d invent their own arcane systems for encrypting their work. Very effective—some old books of shadows still haven’t been deciphered.”

“This doesn’t help us at all,” I complained.

The glass door swung open then, bringing in a blast of cold air and Angelo, light hair tousled, face ruddy with recently drunk blood, wool coat flapping. He only hesitated a moment, glancing around until he found me and marched to meet me.

As usual, Cormac stayed seated and calm, but his hand had disappeared into a jacket pocket and the stake he likely kept there. Angelo didn’t even notice.

He regarded me, and I raised a brow at him, prompting.

“What did you do?” he said finally.

“What do you mean, what did I do?”

“Marid called. Marid. He’s a legend, you know, and he doesn’t call anyone. He appears mysteriously, that’s it. But he called me. Roman has fled Split in something of an uproar, I gather. Left behind henchmen, odds and ends. But apparently he found what he was looking for right before being chased