Carrie Vaughn - Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand

“So Balthasar re-created the Band of Tiamat.”

“Or the priestess recruited them to re-create it, to preside over her own cult tucked away where no one would notice.”

“Except for you. You’ve been watching them all along.”

“Yes.”

“But—what does it all mean? ”

“Tiamat is a goddess of chaos.”

“Is? I thought she died. Her body is heaven and earth, all that jazz.”

“Those stories are metaphors. You know that, yes?”

“I majored in English. I’m all over metaphor. But what does a four-thousand-year-old metaphor have to do with a freaky retro cult in modern Las Vegas?”

He gave me another of those “that’s a silly question” looks. Grim-faced, he watched traffic sliding along the Strip. Even at this hour, there was traffic.

“Chaos is everywhere,” he said. “It would swallow us all, if it could.”

We passed the Hanging Gardens on our way to the Olympus. Police cars, four or five of them, lights flashing, blocked most of the entrance. Investigating gunshots in the theater, no doubt. I felt sorry for the cop who had to write up that report.

We pulled into the drive in front of the entrance of the Olympus. I opened the door and started to thank Grant, when he said, “I didn’t see any sign of your friend in that place. But I’m sure he’s all right.”

I stared at my hands. My bare hands. “I lost my ring. When I shifted, probably. It’s probably still at that temple.” It was almost the last straw. Almost, I wanted to simply curl up under the covers of my bed and never come out again.

“Check your left pocket,” Grant said.

I did. All the way at the bottom, my fingers brushed something metal. Something small. When I pulled it out, I had my engagement ring, safe and sound. A diamond on a white gold band. White gold that looked like silver because Ben thought it was funny. I almost cried.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Everything will work out.” He smiled and glanced in the rearview mirror.

Someone was walking up the sidewalk, scruffy and lanky, looking even worse than I did. But I knew him. I’d know him anywhere.

I could only flash Grant a grin before leaping out of his car and running.

Ben and I stopped with about three paces left between us. Not quite falling-into-his-arms distance. He wore what I last saw him in yesterday morning, but a bloody splotch covered the left side of the shirt. It was mostly dried and crusty now, but it smelled ripe.

I stared. “You’ve been shot.”

He smiled tiredly. “And you should have seen the look on the guy’s face when I didn’t fall down.”

“Oh my God, Ben.” I fell into his arms, bloody shirt and all. His arms closed tightly around me. We stood like that for a long time, resting in each other’s embrace, smelling each other’s scent. I couldn’t guess where he’d been, he gave off such a mixed-up mess of smells, like a gangster movie if you could smell a gangster movie: sweat in a closed, hot room; blood; cigar smoke; booze. Women—other women. Hmm...

After a moment he looked at me, his brow furrowed. “You smell like you’ve been running around with a bunch of were-somethings. You smell like you just shifted. Where have you been?”

We must have been looking at each other with exactly the same befuddled expression. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

“You first.”

I sighed. “It’s a long story. And you?”

“Same. You know what?”

“What?”

“I hate this town.”

It was true. Something about the adrenaline spike of extreme danger and a near-death experience could give a mega-boost to a person’s sex drive. Ben and I retreated to our hotel room with the intention of cleaning up and changing clothes, and ended up tangled in bed together, enthusiastically reasserting our identities as a mated alpha pair.

It didn’t make the rest of the world go away.

I lay half on top of him, my head pillowed on his chest, clinging to him with arms and legs, catching my breath. He held me close, one hand woven in my hair, the other braced around my hips. I could feel his own heavy breathing against my scalp.

Then he said, “Okay. Tell me again how you ended up smelling like the King of Beasts show and wearing Odysseus Grant’s shirt.”

“That does seem pretty compromising when you put it that way.”

“I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation.”

Well, there was an explanation, at any rate. Lycanthropic sacrifice to an ancient Mesopotamian goddess was off the scale even for my usual explanations. But I explained, in detail this time.

I finished, and after a pause Ben said, “That’s fucked up.”

“Yeah.”

“But nothing happened. Between you and that guy.”

“What do you mean, nothing happened? He wanted to rape me.”

“But... never mind.” He settled his arms more firmly around me.

He wasn’t getting out of it that easy. I propped myself on my elbows so I was looking down on him, into his sparkling hazel eyes.

“Are you asking if I liked it?”

He smirked. “Clearly you didn’t. Even if he was hot.”

I glared at him. “What about you? What happened to you? And why do you smell like... like...” It hit me, all those smells, all those women. “Were you in a strip club or something?”

Was that a guilty look in his eyes?

“Actually, it was... I guess you’d call it a brothel. That’s where Faber was holding me.”

We did have a lot to talk about, didn’t we? “But nothing happened,” I said. “You didn’t... do anything.”

He brushed hair out of my face; his touch tingled on my skin. We lay together, heartbeat to heartbeat. “Nothing happened,” he said. “Do you trust me?”

I could smell him, and the faint trace of otherness I’d sensed on him before was gone. All I smelled on him now was him, the pack, and me.

“Yes,” I said. “I can smell that nothing happened.”

“Me, too.”

I kissed him, happy to have him close to me again. “You’re going to have to stop doing that, running off and getting in trouble and making me worry about you. What the hell happened? Why did those guys kidnap you at all?”

He closed his eyes and sighed. “Well—”

His cell phone rang. He reached for it, and I flopped aside, face into a pillow.

“Yeah? Oh, really? Give us ten minutes.” He shook my shoulder. “That was Evan. He wants us to meet him at the patio bar at the Hanging Gardens. He says we don’t want to miss this.”

“I need a vacation from my vacation,” I said, moaning into the pillow.

“If Evan says this is going to be good, it’s going to be good. Come on, sunshine.” He kissed my shoulder. He was kind of hard to resist, in the end.

So ten minutes later, still looking rather the worse for wear in our disheveled shirts and jeans and mussed hair—like it wouldn’t be obvious we’d been interrupted—we arrived at the patio bar overlooking the front entrance of the Hanging Gardens.

Evan and Brenda had claimed a table with a full view of the hotel drive, including the half a dozen police cars and vans lined up. The flashing blue and red lights were hypnotic. Brenda had her club soda with lime, Evan had a tumbler of whiskey. Wasn’t it a little early in the morning for this? Actually, my brain had been left somewhere behind last night. And it wasn’t tomorrow until the sun rose. I could sure use a drink.

“Thought you’d want to see this,” Evan said, gesturing us to the empty chairs.

We sat, and Brenda pushed a second whiskey to Ben and a margarita to me. Suddenly, she was my best friend. I beamed and took a sip. Maybe everything would turn out all right, after all.