Carrie Vaughn - Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand

Then something moved. I sensed it rather than saw it, a shifting on the ground, a displacement of air that brought with it a wave of a new smell, of rotted flesh. To my right, a darker shadow moved, a surface that gleamed in an unseen source of light. Something wet and boneless, creeping toward me. I wanted to scream and run. But I couldn’t do anything.

Three steps forward would take me back to the place I’d come from. But ahead of me lay only shadow. No box at all, no cabinet, no stage, no magician. This was altogether a different kind of magic. No tricks, no mirrors.

Hugging myself tightly, I closed my eyes and stepped forward. One, two, three, exactly the way I’d come from. The air closed in around me, but I couldn’t smell the wood of the cabinet, the sweat of the stage, not like I expected. I didn’t dare open my eyes, in case I didn’t see darkness but those same half-seen shadows.

Something touched my arm, and I screamed.

A hand closed over my mouth, and another hand—the one holding my arm—pulled me forward, out of the cabinet onto the stage. Odysseus Grant looked at me, looked into my eyes. I blinked back at him, astonished, relieved, and confused. I was frozen. Even my Wolf was quiet.

Something like a smile tugged at his lips. “I told you not to move,” he said.

“What—” I stammered. Couldn’t get my voice to work, which was weird. I swallowed and tried again. “What is that place?”

“It’s just a box,” he said. “A magical cabinet.”

He guided me to a chair at the side of the stage, which was good, because I hadn’t realized how wobbly my knees were until I sat down.

“They’re gone,” he said. “They should stay off your trail for a while, but you might want to lie low.”

I wasn’t sure I could manage that. Stifling a smile, I shook my head.

“How’d you get mixed up with them, anyway?”

“This is what happens when a werewolf finds herself at a gun show,” I said. “It was bound to happen sometime this weekend. Apart from that, it’s a long story.”

“You look like you could use a drink of water. Wait here—”

“No—don’t go. I’m okay, really. I just need to sit a minute.”

“All right.” He leaned on the wall nearby and drew a pack of cards from his pocket and startled shuffling.

I needed a few moments to catch my breath, that was all. But as soon as I left here, I’d be alone again. Pack instinct had kicked in. I needed someone at my back, and right now, Grant was it.

I shouldn’t trust him. I didn’t know any more about him and his motives than I did about Balthasar. The door to the cabinet was still open. The prop loomed, but all I could see inside was darkness. That was all that was there, wasn’t it?

I said, “The box. It’s not perfectly safe inside, is it?”

“No. Not perfectly.”

“It’s not a cabinet. It’s a doorway.”

His expression didn’t change. He wore a wry, uncommunicative smile, and his gaze focused on his cards. He continued shuffling the deck, a different way each time, a dozen different methods that made the cards a blur.

“Who are you really?” I said.

“I suppose,” he said, “my act is exactly that—an act. You might say my real job is to be a gatekeeper. A guardian.”

“For what’s in there?” I took his silence as assent. Gateway, indeed. A doorway into yet another world, as if the current one hadn’t become complicated enough. I asked, “What’s in there?”

“Have you ever read Lovecraft?”

“No,” I said.

He made a wry face. “Never mind, then. Is there someone who can come get you? Someone you can stay with, in case those two come looking for you again?”

I had to shake myself from a spell. Reality was returning... slowly. I remembered: I’d been coming to see Grant anyway before the two bounty hunters waylaid me.

“Not at the moment. I was sort of coming to see you about that.”

He’d moved on to doing tricks with the deck of cards. He displayed a card—the three of spades—slid it back in the middle of the deck, shuffled, tapped the top of the deck, flipped the top card over. The three of spades. Shuffle, pick a card—ace of hearts this time—shuffled it back in, tap, and there it was. He did the sleight of hand another dozen times, producing a dozen cards on cue. His fingers seemed to move by instinct, as if they had minds of their own, working in a graceful, choreographed dance.

“I understand you can make people reappear after they’ve vanished,” I said.

“Given the right circumstances.”

“Trapdoors and hidden mirrors?”

“Something like that. You’re missing someone?”

“Friend of mine.” I paused, ducked my gaze. No need to be cagey, I supposed. “My fiancé. And don’t tell me he probably got cold feet and ditched me.”

“What happened?”

I told him.

Grant said, “It sounds like a perfectly mundane set of circumstances. I’m sure the mundane solutions—the police—will find him.”

He couldn’t help me. I wasn’t surprised. I’d just wanted to try everything. Leave no stone unturned. Time to hit the streets, then. But I didn’t want to leave. Somehow, even with his icy blue stare and the box that opened into a world of weirdness, I felt safe here. Feeling safe—that was a different kind of sexy. You got to a point where Prince Reliable was so much more attractive than Prince Charming. The thrill of living on the edge versus the warm glow of being cocooned and adored.

“Yeah, the cops’ll find him. But in one piece?” I sighed and looked away. “I’m sorry. I guess I believed those stories that there’s something... different about you a little too much. Box notwithstanding.”

“Do you know how wealthy I’d be if I could make people appear just by snapping my fingers?”

I snapped. “Poof, here’s Jimmy Hoffa?”

“Exactly. I’m not willing to pay the price for that kind of magic.”

I narrowed my gaze. “But that kind of magic exists?”

“What do you think?”

I thought that over the last few years I’d seen a lot of things that the rational mind said were impossible. A lot of magic. My whole life had become a mission to chronicle the impossible. It was how I kept myself anchored to some kind of reality, in a world where werewolves were real and I was one of them.

“I think there’s a whole lot of this world I still don’t understand,” I said.

He regarded me, a faint smile touching his lips, which gave him the most genuine—even warm—expression I’d ever seen on him. “You surprise me. Your kind tends to chaos. But not you.”

Kitty Norville, a force for order? Wild. I felt like I’d passed some kind of test with him.

“I like to pretend that everything’s going to be all right. That everything’s normal.”

“How is that working out for you?”

“Some days are better than others.”

Suddenly, he pulled himself from the wall, looking toward the theater door in the back of the house. Unconsciously, his hands straightened and re-straightened the deck of cards. He held them like I’d seen some people hold weapons. He looked like nothing so much as an animal who’d spotted danger.

I looked where he did, in the direction of the supposed danger, and didn’t see what he did, or what he sensed with whatever senses he had. But a moment later, I smelled it, the wild skin and musk of a lycanthrope.

Nick came sauntering in, hands in the pockets of his oh-so-tight jeans. A fitted T-shirt showed off his muscles. I tensed, wondering what he wanted. He barely glanced at me, just long enough to acknowledge me with a wink, before he stopped about halfway down the theater to regard Grant. The magician glared back with an icy gaze, his lips pressed in a line, hands tensed around his deck of cards.