Carrie Vaughn - Kitty in the Underworld

“Why? What hold does he have over you all?”

“He is right,” Enkidu said. That simple.

“You’re all nuts, ” I said. To their credit, they didn’t argue with me. “Look, I can’t play your game if you don’t tell me the rules, and I can’t buy into your little cult if you don’t convince me you really have some kind of power. Beyond kidnapping radio personalities and cutting yourselves off from civilization. And those aren’t powers, they’re pathologies.” I had to stop and take several deep breaths. I’d winded myself with that speech. God, I was a wreck. I drank more water, but it didn’t help.

I tried to creep away from them without actually going anywhere. A sort of hopeful leaning. They were blocking the exit again.

Sakhmet said, “We’re here to explain. At nightfall, we’ll bring you to the ritual chamber. You must wait quietly—please tell me you’ll wait quietly.”

I rolled my eyes. “You couldn’t coerce me, so now you’re just asking me to be a nice little cooperative prisoner? You should have tried being reasonable in the first place.”

She leaned forward. “We never wanted you to be a prisoner at all. I wanted to come see you at your office, to explain everything—”

“She wouldn’t have cooperated then, either,” Enkidu said. “She would have written us off as crackpots.”

“We’ll never know, will we?” She glared at him.

“Well. Here’s your chance. Better late than never. Explain.”

Enkidu knelt, turning his gaze away from me. He was still stiff, anxious. If he’d been a wolf, his ears would have been flattened, his hackles up. But he was forcing his body language into a more peaceful stance. He was trying to set me at ease. Not possible, and though I probably should have appreciated the effort, I wasn’t feeling generous. I just kept staring at him.

“Sakhmet is right,” Enkidu said. “I believe if you understand what’s happening, you’ll cooperate. Kumarbis and Zora don’t need to know what we’ve told you. If you’re with us, it’s enough. So I’ll tell you, but you must let me speak, while we have time. No interrupting—just listen.”

He said it admonishingly. Even after a couple of days he knew me that well. Just to prove that I could listen quietly, I nodded and kept my mouth shut.

“What has happened so far,” he explained, “has been to bind you to the group. To align our powers, draw us together, so that when Zora performs the final rituals, we are as one. Our spirits will be united, and greater than the sum of our parts. This will make the rituals more powerful than anything Dux Bellorum has faced in all his years. This is why your cooperation is so important. If we are not united, we will fail.

“Tonight, we will gather and Zora will perform the first half of the ritual. The purpose is to locate Dux Bellorum. We cannot strike at him until we find him. But we will find him. This will prove to you that Kumarbis can do what he says he can do. Tomorrow night, the second part of the ritual, Zora will open a doorway to Dux Bellorum, and we will kill him.”

Just like that. A much more attractive plan of attack than the “wait and see” we’d decided on after Antony’s death.

“Defeat Dux Bellorum,” I said, only half sure. Do X, Y, Z, and all will be well. It couldn’t be that easy. Could it?

What if it was?

They lured me with the tantalizing bait they thought I’d be most interested in—defeating Dux Bellorum. Like that alone would make me trust them. How could I ever trust them, after all this? The enemy of my enemy … they hadn’t killed me yet …

He continued. “You must have an open mind. When we gather tonight, don’t argue, don’t fight. Once you see, you’ll believe.”

That had an ominous ring to it. “You all are on a schedule, aren’t you? There’s a time limit to this thing.” Zora must have been watching the stars, the turning of the planets—how long to the full moon? Four days? Three? I could feel the pull of the waxing moon. Was that the time limit? Lycanthropes were at their strongest on the full moon. Zora needed us at our strongest, without us actually shape-shifting. Playing it close as she could, using us at the peak of our power but not beyond it. It was a dangerous strategy. Would I still be here when the full moon forced me to Change? I desperately hoped not. “The full moon?”

They glanced at each other, and Sakhmet said, “I told you she’d understand.”

That this was making sense probably said something not very comforting about my state of mind. “There’s more,” I said. I thought carefully, marshalling my awareness, trying to get this right. “Kumarbis knows something—something specific, not just a general hunt-down-bad-vampires ritual. This is all built around that, isn’t it? He’s the one who can defeat Dux Bellorum because … why?”

Enkidu pursed his lips, and I waited very, very quietly, because he looked like someone who wanted to talk.

“Do you know who Dux Bellorum is?” he asked finally.

I furrowed my brow, confused at the question. “He’s a vampire, old. From ancient Rome. Calls himself Roman. What do you mean, who is he?”

“Where did he come from? What’s his origin?”

I shook my head.

He leaned in, his voice hushed to a paranoid whisper. “Kumarbis made Dux Bellorum. He’s the vampire who turned Gaius Albinus, two thousand years ago.”

A long, stretched silence followed this declaration. I turned the words around, not sure I made sense of them. It all started here. All my questions about Roman, Dux Bellorum, answered at last. The mystery, solved. Roman was so old I hadn’t considered that the question of where he came from—how he was made a vampire—might even be relevant. Apparently it was, and I couldn’t help but think this was all Kumarbis’s fault. All of it. Antony died because of him.

“How?” I asked, full of disbelief, maybe even horror. “What happened?”

“We don’t know all of the story,” Sakhmet said softly. As if we had to keep our voices from echoing. “But Dux Bellorum—before he became Dux Bellorum—betrayed Kumarbis. He, Roman, has done terrible things. Kumarbis feels responsible.”

“I can see why he might,” I murmured. “A few days ago, right before you … brought me here, I got word that a friend of mine died fighting Roman. Antony went after him, and Roman killed him.”

“That is what the battle has been for you, hasn’t it?” she said, her rich gaze full of sadness and understanding. “Like throwing yourself against a wall and never breaking through.”

Something in me deflated. My shoulders slumped; I rubbed my eyes, keeping back tears. My whole body felt like grit. If she’d offered to give me a hug then, I might have fallen into her arms.

“More like trying to beat up a storm cloud,” I said, and she smiled.

“Right here, we can finish Roman once and for all,” she said, and this time, the light gleaming in her eyes belonged to a warrior. To a goddess of war, a lion in battle. “You can avenge your friend. You can avenge everyone who Roman has hurt.”

What a tantalizing possibility.

We all looked over just before we heard the footsteps pad through the doorway, when we smelled Zora enter the tunnel. Like everyone else here, she smelled ripe; she hadn’t showered in days. But she also smelled of herbs, candle wax, and chalk. The tools of her trade. She appeared in the tunnel, holding up a battery-powered lantern, which gave her the appearance of a ghost in shadows.

“What are you doing? You shouldn’t be here!” Holding her cloak around her, she glared at us with wide, indignant eyes.

“We’re making sure our plans don’t fall apart,” Enkidu said.

“But—you know what he said. You’ll ruin everything! You don’t trust him, you never trusted him!”