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

with blood—the doctor let us stay with Grant for a little while. Anastasia and I waited at his bedside.

He was asleep and stable, his treated and newly bandaged hands resting over his middle. A machine beeped the steady rhythm of his heart. He had too many tubes hooked up to him—in his nose, in his arm, looping around and over him. He didn’t smell healthy. This whole place smelled like illness, making my nose wrinkle. Instinctively, Wolf wanted to run from the illness, the sick combination of blood and antiseptic, but I felt so much better just sitting here, watching him sleep. The crags and furrows in his face smoothed out a bit, and he looked younger, settled against the flat white hospital pillow, a sheet pulled over his chest, penned in by the rails of the bed. He looked asleep now, instead of the stony quiet of the trance.

I sat within reach of his hand, so I could hold it when he woke up. Not that he’d appreciate it, but I’d try anyway. Anastasia stood at the foot of the bed, arms crossed, still managing to look elegant in the T-shirt and sweatpants the police had given her. Her wounds were healing, the rashes on her skin fading, but she looked tired. Her shoulders slouched a little, which was almost shocking to see. Her gaze was cryptic, like she didn’t know what to make of this mere mortal who’d nearly given his life for her.

“That trance is an old escape-artist’s trick,” she said finally. “Those stunts when they stay buried for ten hours, or underwater for an impossible length of time—they’re controlling their own metabolism. It isn’t magic at all. Odysseus Grant is a very impressive man.”

“Yeah,” I said softly.

“If he were awake, I’d apologize. And thank him.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think he expects anything like that.”

“No,” she murmured. “He wouldn’t.” Then whatever maudlin mood she’d been in passed. She straightened, the old imperious—vampiric—stance returning. She would rebuild her life, her existence, starting now. As she’d no doubt done many times before. Eight hundred years, she’d said. “This isn’t over, Kitty. This is only the start.”

Not this again. “I thought we decided this wasn’t a conspiracy. This was crazies out in the woods—”

“I’m not talking about Provost and his compatriots. Not directly. But this is a symptom. There’s a war coming. And people like us can’t hide from it if we’re exposed, dragged into public. Even five years ago the police never would have considered entertaining the story we told them tonight. But now they must. This will continue. You’ve already attracted so much attention—”

“I’ll hide,” I said. “I can go back to hiding.”

She smiled, a sly, haunting turn of lips. She could see into the future, not because she was psychic, like Tina or Jeffrey, but because she had been watching the patterns for so long, she knew where they were leading.

“I’ve watched you for a week now. You won’t hide. You’ll lead.”

I didn’t want that responsibility. I didn’t want that label, and I didn’t want her cold, expectant gaze on me, demanding. But denying it didn’t make her wrong. People listened to me—I based my whole career on that. I’d worked for that. Now I had to face up to the consequences of it: People listened to me. What was I going to do with that power?

“Yeah,” I admitted. “If no one else will.”

“There are alliances. Some—like Roman’s—have spent a long time consolidating the wrong kind of power. Using it to tip people like Joey Provost and Eli Cabe into evil. It is far past time that people who would align against such powers form our own alliance.”

Grant’s monitor beeped steadily. I’d have expected a more portentous soundtrack to this kind of conversation. Something epic, to mark the shifting of my world.

“You make it sound so dramatic,” I said, my voice flat.

“If you learn anything more about the Long Game, about Roman. About people like Cabe and his ilk, anything working to bring that kind of darkness into the world—call me.” She drew a business card from an unseen pocket and held it to me until I took it. “If you need help, call me.”

“And you’ll do the same, I assume.”

“That’s what an alliance is. Tell Odysseus the same applies to him. Give him the number.” She nodded at the man on the bed, then glanced at the window. “I need to go. It’s nearly dawn.” She turned to the door, like she planned on slipping out, just like that. Vanishing into shadow as vampires were wont to do.

“Wait!” I said, standing, preparing to chase after her. Fortunately, she stopped. “Where? Where will you go? Where is it safe for you?”

She smiled indulgently. In any other situation it would have been patronizing, but we were too tired for that. “Kitty, you don’t get to be my age without having a few contingency plans. All I need is a dark place to spend the day. There are plenty of dark places around.” Her lips thinned.

“Be careful,” I said, which sounded stupid. Amid the million other things I could have said—thank you; was that even real; or help, because I can’t do this alone—it was the only one I could articulate.

“Give Rick my regards when you get back to Denver,” she said.

I watched her walk down the corridor, losing sight of her almost immediately even in the sparsely populated, early morning hospital. She blended in—she didn’t want to be seen, so just like that she was gone. Also, my view was distracted by another figure coming toward me down the same hallway. A scruffy-haired guy in khaki pants and an untucked shirt, a worried frown pulling at his features and a desperate, wolfish look in his eyes. And I knew that smell a mile away.

“Ben!” I called, not caring how the sound echoed.

He froze a moment when he spotted me leaving the doorway to Grant’s room. Like he didn’t believe it was me. Like he had to