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

who actually made you think of werewolves when you saw him. That he could sound sheepish talking to me usually made me smile.

I settled down. I had so many questions

“Actually … we may have a problem.”

I straightened, a shadow of fur prickling on my skin and hackles rising. “What is it?”

“I’m up in the mountains, out past Georgetown, and I caught a weird scent. Might be werewolf or some other kind of lycanthrope. Definitely not one of ours.”

A stranger, in our territory. We’d had invaders before. Just recently a strange werewolf had arrived for the express purpose of trying to take the pack away from us. I took this sort of thing seriously. With the news about Roman and Antony, my worry pressed on me like a boulder.

“Is it just one person or a group? Did they seem lost? Are they looking for something?”

Tom said, “It wasn’t enough to make a trail, not anything I could track. It was almost like they circled around for a while. Maybe they were looking for something.”

“And it was fresh?”

“Couldn’t be more than a day old,” he said. “It was pretty strong—I wouldn’t have called if it was just a trace.”

I blew out a breath. This could be nothing—someone passing through, getting lost. Or it could be someone with bad intentions. A scouting mission for an attack at some later date?

Either way, I couldn’t ignore it. If things went well, we might have a new friend to talk to. If not … I had a territory to defend. I started cleaning up in preparation for leaving. I wanted to go there to take a look.

“Just out of curiosity,” I said. “What were you doing out that way?”

He paused a moment, then said, nervous, “Um … just going for a hike…”

“You shifted, didn’t you? Went out for a run?” “Going for a run” was a euphemism among werewolves. Tom grumbled a perfunctory, unenthusiastic denial. “Why exactly did you do this? Full moon’s not for a week.” Six days, actually. I kept count. We all did.

“I’m not hurting anything,” he said, and I could almost see him pouting. “I didn’t get in any kind of trouble.”

We had to shape-shift on the night of a full moon, but we had the ability to shift anytime we wanted. Or we shifted when we were stressed, angry, frightened, in danger … yeah. Part of why we formed packs was so we could watch out for each other. We could gather on nights of the full moon, shape-shift together, make sure we stayed safe—and didn’t do anything that might get us in trouble, like hunting people. We could take care of each other, so we didn’t shift uncontrollably at other times. Solo shifting kind of defeated the purpose.

“Tom. You know better than that.”

“Seriously, I’m not hurting anything. I can handle it.”

If I sounded like an irate parent, he sounded like a teenager. I trusted Tom; he was smart enough to go to a remote spot if he was going to do recreational shape-shifting. Of everyone in the pack, he was probably the one who most enjoyed being a werewolf—who reveled in the power and exhilaration of running on four legs, feeling the wind in your fur, hunting for the taste of fresh meat …

Most of us tried to ignore how good being wolf made us feel.

“Why don’t you just tell me that you had a suspici to make a difference. is someoneon something was wrong and went out to patrol under your own initiative?”

“Okay, then. I went out to patrol because I thought something might be wrong.”

“Fine. Okay. Good work, then. I want to check it out. I can be out there in about an hour. Can you wait for me and show me what you found?”

“I’ll be here.”

We hung up and I looked around at my paper-strewn, chaotic office. This could wait another day. Going to see what Tom had found was more important.

*   *   *

I CALLED Ben. His phone went straight to voice mail, which I expected. He was probably in a meeting. I left a message explaining what was happening and that Tom was with me, because Ben would worry if I was on my own. He’d worry anyway, but he’d be reassured that I wasn’t running off alone. Then I drove into the mountains to meet Tom.

Denver lay near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains—the Front Range, which rose from the Great Plains like a wall of sandstone and granite. I turned the car onto I-70. The freeway climbed, curving around hills, until I was in the mountains proper. Within half an hour, pine-covered slopes surrounded me. In the dead of winter, I rolled down the window so I could smell the sharp, icy air, laden with the scent of snow and forest. The wind whipped strands of my blond hair out of my ponytail and into my face. South-facing slopes and hillsides were bare of snow, green with conifers rising tall. North-facing slopes had a carpet of white. I’d managed to miss ski traffic heading to the resorts farther west.

Soon enough, I reached the Georgetown exit and pulled off onto the frontage road, and from there to the road that wound into the mountains. Then came a couple of narrow drives, then dirt roads. I felt like I was traveling through time, from the height of civilization to some nineteenth-century village, to wilderness. I ran into patches of ice and snow, but my little car with its snow tires handled the road okay.

On full-moon nights, we rotated between half a dozen semiremote spots in national forest land in the Rockies, or out east on the plains. They had to be close enough to Denver that we could drive there in an hour or two, but far enough away from people that we weren’t likely to draw attention or cause trouble. A set of USGS topographic maps marking service roads helped us pick our spots. The best ones had sheltered areas where we could bed down for the rest of the night, open