Carrie Vaughn: Kitty in the Underworld

Finally, Sakhmet understood. While I was making all the noise, they could get out. They had to understand we weren’t going to kill the demon, or destroy her, or whatever. We weren’t going to win this hunt. But they could run. The were-lion grabbed Enkidu’s arm and pulled him back. Enkidu was limping. I kept talking.

“I’ve got your goggles,” I said, dangling them on a finger. “You want ’em back? I want some information. Where’s Dux Bellorum?”

She hesitated, considering. I kept calling her a demon because she seemed so huge, taller even than Enkidu, with the strength of an army. She seemed to fill the chamber. But she was so human, appearing to be a white woman with a graceful jawline, her thin lips turned up now in a smile.

“He’s safe,” she said.

Evasive, devoid of information. Except that they were connected, somehow. “Is he, now. Because you were sent to defend him?”

“I was sent to destroy you. ”

“By whom ?” I had to keep asking the question.

“I’m not going to tell you.”

“Then you don’t get your goggles back.”

She chuckled. “You weren’t going to give them back anyway.”

I actually hadn’t decided that. She was equally effective with or without the goggles; it didn’t make a difference. I was waving frantically at Zora, and some clarity seemed to settle on her gaze—she actually saw me, and nodded. She crept around the circle, carefully, without a sound, and took the hand that I stretched out to her.

“I don’t want to fight,” I said, scattering meaningless words, spending them to buy time. My own ceremonial incantation. “Our ritual failed, we’re all very aware of that. Just let us go.”

“You’ll try again unless I stop you.”

I looked around at our bruised and soot-covered faces, Zora’s numb look of shock, Kumarbis’s stark, open-mouthed despair. “I don’t think we will.”

“Then I will kill you all for being traitors.”

She’d said that the last time I confronted her, she’d said it to Kumarbis. Her targets were vampires and lycanthropes, because they were traitors, but she hadn’t explained then, any more than she was likely to now.

My confusion showed. “Traitors—to what? How?”

“To your kind.”

Which just frustrated me. She wanted to kill us because we weren’t the monsters we were supposed to be? Fuck that. Time to go.

Sakhmet and Enkidu still hadn’t left—what was holding them up?

Kumarbis. Enkidu was gesturing at Kumarbis, trying to get the vampire to look at him and follow him out of the cave. Kumarbis wasn’t having it, instead focusing on the demon with this look of blank fatalism. Like someone watching his longtime home burn to the ground.

Enkidu hissed in a futile attempt to keep his words from being heard. “My lord Kumarbis, we must go.”

The vampire clenched his fists, flexed his arms, roared. And charged.

The demon turned at the sound and raised her spear, homing in on her target like an arrow on a bull’s-eye. I ran, thinking I could tackle her, block her, take the hit like I had the last time, knock Kumarbis’s head against the floor until he came to his senses, if he had any senses to come to.

The demon braced, and Kumarbis ran himself on her spear. The wooden shaft passed through his heart.

I couldn’t stop her. I couldn’t save him. And I wasn’t even sad about it.

The round-eyed shock on his face meant he knew what had happened. How many thousands of years of life, just gone. And wasn’t that the way for most people facing death? Vampires weren’t any different from the rest of us. They maybe had to cope with more denial. His expression remained stark and disbelieving while his body, every bit of undead flesh, turned to ash, and the ash crumbled further and was carried off by the wind that rose up again. If he’d lain in a grave all those centuries, he could not have decayed any more thoroughly. The spear clattered to the stone.

Along with it, the coin he’d been holding fell and lay in the dust, the scant remains of the vampire. I picked it up—still on its cord of cracked, ancient leather. Another one of these things, another death, another thread to Dux Bellorum cut. With too many remaining to count, much less fight against.

Enkidu wrestled with the demon now. Inside her guard, where I hoped she couldn’t turn her blades on him. Clawing, hitting, snapping at her with teeth that had grown sharp and a jaw that had grown thick and powerful, he kept her away from the rest of us, at least for the moment.

“Sakhmet, Zora, go! Enkidu! Run!”

Sakhmet was also yelling at Enkidu, pacing outside the range of the demon’s weapons, waiting for an opening she could use to strike. Zora was kneeling, pawing through her bag of gear. Nobody was running. Worse than herding cats, this was.

“Zora!”

More calmly than she done or said anything since I’d met her, she said, “Get the others out. I have to close the door so nothing else gets through.”

More could get through? Come after us? Oh …

I punched Sakhmet in the arm; she snapped at me, new catlike fangs showing, and I growled back. “Get him and go !”

I grabbed up the spear the demon had used to kill Kumarbis, swung it around, thrust at her back. The weapon connected, penetrated, but I couldn’t tell if it actually went all the way through her leather armor. She felt something —she flinched, pivoting back to strike at my assault. I dodged away, looked over—and yes, Sakhmet and Enkidu had broken off and scrambled back, out of the chamber and into the tunnel. Out, away, safe.

Striking again, I shoved harder, and this time got the spear to stick in the demon’s back, lodged in her flesh. My nostrils flared, searching for the scent of her blood—I didn’t see any flow from the wound—but the only blood I smelled was my own, clotted on my back, and Enkidu’s, dripping on the ground.

Distracted, the demon twisted back to grasp at the spear and pull it free. I’d bought us a few more seconds.

“Zora?”

She knelt at the edge of the pentagram, preparing another spell.

She looked up and held her hand out. “Kitty. Take this. Keep it safe. Use it.”

Kitty, not Regina Luporum. I grabbed on to what she offered before I could think or respond, and found myself holding the tin box that held her USB spell book.

“Run,” she said. “Run, don’t look back.”

And Zora—Zora stayed behind. She raised her arms over her head—each hand held an item, amulets tied up with stems of herbs—and shouted, words or commands, their meaning lost in the wind and chaos. The demon turned toward the sound, raised her weapon, let loose a battle cry.

That was all I saw. I might have stayed to watch, fascinated, but Wolf carried me out. Now, it is time to run. I ran. I did not look back.

My legs moved, loping in long strides, night vision guiding me surely through the antechamber and past the door. The bright figures of Sakhmet and Enkidu appeared ahead of me, and I followed the long, sloping tunnel that led to the surface.

An explosion rumbled through the caves behind me. A ghost of the ancient dynamite blasts that had excavated the mine in the first place. I stumbled, the ground under my feet uncertain. I put my hand on the wall for balance, then yanked it away when my skin burned. Was my skin broken? Had silver entered the wound?

Go. Wolf kept running. She gazed through my eyes, and I wouldn’t have made it out without her.

The mine kept trembling, an earthquake growing in intensity rather than fading away. Debris rained, dust clogging the air, bits of stone pelting me. My steps didn’t land where’d I aimed them, because the ground under me was moving. Up ahead, Sakhmet gasped as Enkidu fell and she struggled to hold him up while keeping her own balance.