Carrie Vaughn - Kitty in the Underworld

A few choice questions would help me figure this out. I cycled through them a dozen times and didn’t find answers. Was Tom here? I desperately hoped he was free, safe, and calling the cavalry. On the other hand, it would be nice to have an ally. I thought about calling his name, then thought better of it. If whoever had done this had missed him, I didn’t want them going back for him. Were my captors targeting werewolves in general, or me in particular? If the answer was me in particular, that opened a whole catalog of enemies who might have done this. Who said that having enemies was good, because it meant you’d stood up for something in your life? Ah, I remembered: Winston Churchill. The guy who also said, If you’re going through hell, keep going. Yes, sir.

Most of all, what I wanted to know was what did this have to do with Roman and his confrontation with Antony? Because whatever Colette said, sometimes all threads did lead back to a conspiracy.

The culprit might be any one of a number of antisupernatural groups that had sprung up over the last few years, as vampires and lycanthropes and other brands of magic became more visible and more accepted. I made an easy target because of my radio show. Any truly crazy activists would have just killed me outright—I’d gotten plenty of threats. But these guys wanted me for something. And antisupernatural activist didn’t mesh with the evidence that at least some of my captors seemed to be supernatural themselves. They could be working for the enemy, but why?

The possibilities I considered got more outlandish. A rabid fan had captured me, Misery style, and obsessive games of admiration and torture would soon ensue. Another werewolf pack—one that included a were-lion for some suitably dramatic reason—needed me for some in-person counseling. Flattering, but unlikely. Those folks usually approached me in restaurants, and without tranquilizer guns. Maybe I was being prepared as a hideous sacrifice to some ancient, chthonic god. That had actually already happened to me once, in Las Vegas of all places, so it wasn’t entirely outside the realm of reason. But then there should have been candles, burning incense, weird statuary, and chanting. Or maybe I was being collected for display in an alien zoo.

My imagination was getting away from me. My questions accumulated, growing more and more urgent: When would my enemy finally appear? Would there be food and water? Sooner or later, if the door stayed shut and locked, the need for water would drive me to try to break out, danger of silver poisoning or no.

The chill was getting to me, so I got up and paced. Three steps down the long side of the rocky cell, two steps across, three steps back. Not too cramped, as far as terrifying underground prison cells went. With thoughts like that pressing on me, the pacing didn’t do a thing to get rid of the gooseflesh pricking my arms. My head itched, and my lips had pulled back, unconsciously baring my teeth. I hadn’t realized I’d been doing it. I pressed my hands to my face, rubbed my cheeks, tried to get the muscles to relax. Appear calm. Not at all like a cornered wolf, no sir.

I had to find a way out of here.

I DIDN’T know much about old silver mines except in the most general historical sense. In the last half of the nineteenth century, prospectors discovered gold, silver, and a collection of other valuable minerals throughout the Rocky Mountains. Industry flooded in, dozens of fortunes were made, cities were built. Mining was still an important industry in the state, but hundreds of antique mines like this one had been abandoned and left to decay. They’d been built with nineteenth-century technology, tunnels blown out with primitive black powder and dynamite, men digging with shovels and pickaxes, hauling ore out with carts and donkeys.

I didn’t know how deep a mine like this ran, how many tunnels and chambers it might have, if there was a standard layout or if they twisted randomly depending on where the ore was. I didn’t know how stable the arcing stone rooms might be. Not very, was my feeling—hikers and travelers in the mountains were always getting warnings about not venturing into such tunnels. They collapsed a lot, I gathered. If I started worrying about the roof of the place caving in on me, on top of all the other anxieties, I’d freeze completely. So I just didn’t think about it.

The darkness was giving me a headache. The strain of trying to stare my way out of a near-lightless cave was telling. Not to mention the fear and anger, with no target to aim toward. I ended up sitting on the floor again and thinking of Ben. He’d find me. Somehow he’d figure out what had happened, come looking, and find me. It was just a matter of time. I could be patient.

I caught myself whispering hurry, hurry, hurry.

IF ONLY I knew how much time had passed. I didn’t know how long I’d been unconscious, and I couldn’t see outside to know if it was day or night. The timelessness gave me a feeling of mental seasickness, a nausea that crept into my gut. The ground didn’t feel firm.

Around the roaring in my own ears, I heard something new—something different outside, breaking the silence of the mine tunnel. Barely there—soft, careful, steady. Slippered footsteps, creeping close. I held my breath. The sound was no greater than that of snow falling. The bare whisper of breath that came with the steps I could hear a little better.

Whoever had approached the door paused just on the other side. I was torn between wanting to shout and wanting to remain as still as possible, straining with my ears and taking deep breaths through my nose, hoping to catch a scent and learn all I could.

The person waited, breathing softly. The smell—female, feline. The were-lion. She’d used some kind of herbal hand lotion recently, and wore clothing of washed cotton.

I rose to a crouch, leaning toward the door. “Who are you? What’s going on here?”

The seam I’d noticed in the bottom of the door revealed a panel that flipped open—quickly, loudly. A bottle of water rolled through the opening. I lunged to reach through, to get my hand out there to grab whoever was standing there. But the panel slammed shut on me, and a latch slotted back into place.

Soft footsteps ran away.

“Hey, wait a minute! Talk to me, will you just talk to me?” I shouted, slapped the door, rammed my shoulder into it. The board flexed some, but the hinges didn’t give, as if they’d bolted this thing into the solid wall with bands of iron. My shouts degenerated into growls of frustration.

Kneeling, I punched at the panel, tried to jam my fingers into the seam, anything I could to pry it open, break it, rip apart the door. Like the rest of the door, it was well made, solidly built and locked into place. It flexed, and with a lot of time and effort maybe I could rip through it. But it wasn’t going to give way just by punching it.

I scrabbled at it, until a sharp pain stabbed into my fingertip. I cried out and brought my finger to my mouth, sucking on the wound. Splinter. I could feel it. Wincing, I picked at it in the dark, felt the little fiber under the skin, pulled it out. The pain faded quickly—a wound like that would heal in no time. But the memory of it throbbed. Just a tiny splinter, but it brought tears to my eyes. The stress of it all brought tears to my eyes. Again, I curled up in the middle of the floor, hugging myself, feeling sorry for myself.

My leg brushed against the bottle of water my captor had thrown me. At least, it smelled like water. Just a normal, plastic, store-bought bottle of water. Warm—not refrigerated. It hadn’t even come from an ice-filled cooler. Strangely modern and out of place in this medieval dungeon they’d put me in. Like the tranquilizer gun. The paramilitary conspiracy seemed less likely. This wasn’t comforting, because it meant I was likely in the grips of some homespun, backwoods conspiracy. They knew what they were doing, and had access to just enough tech to make them really scary.