Carrie Vaughn: Kitty in the Underworld

My smile went lopsided, because I didn’t know what to say. “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”

“Typical,” she huffed.

“Thanks for this,” I said, nodding at the sketch. She waved me off.

When I got home, I pinned the drawing next to the picture of the Capitoline Wolf. They seemed to match.

Ben and I talked about it. We lay in bed, all the lights out, and the darkness of the bedroom was nowhere near the absolute darkness of the mine. I understood absolute darkness now. Here, moon and ambient light from Denver seeped in around the curtains, and the bedside clock had a glow. Even without being able to identify the light source, the whole room shimmered with light. Ben glowed, with the heat and life of his body.

Our wolves didn’t fully believe that all was well, and they asserted themselves in the way we curled up together at one end of the bed. We were on our sides, nestled together, his body pressed protectively across my back, my head against his shoulder, noses to skin so we could smell each other and be comforted.

“I don’t even know if it was real,” I said. “Or if it was some hallucination Zora cooked up. It might have been a trick. But would I have felt it so strongly if it were? Would I have been able to remember it? Remember it well enough to get a sketch out of it?”

“Kitty, I don’t know.” He sighed into my hair, and I snuggled more firmly in his embrace. Skin to skin. I couldn’t get enough. “I know something happened to you. And seriously, after everything we’ve seen? Anything’s possible. These days I’m ready to believe in Santa Claus.”

St. Nicholas had been a real person, I almost said. “I want her to be real.”

“I know.”

“It’s like if she was real, a real woman with a real face, who was really alive—then maybe we’re not so different. Maybe I really can keep doing this.”

“I never doubted it.”

I chuckled, because of course he would say that. Turning, I brought my hand to his cheek and matched his gaze.

“Thanks. For listening,” I said.

Then my own Prince Reliable kissed me.

I MISSED a show over the course of my adventure. My captivity. My … I wasn’t sure anymore what to call it. In the end, I was there because I’d chosen to be. Didn’t make it any less messed up, and I spent most of the first few days afterward at home, asleep. Sleeping meant not thinking about it.

I’d never outright missed a show. I’d had plenty of planned absences, had aired prerecorded episodes and run “best of” episodes when I needed time off, on full-moon nights for example. My engineer, Matt, was able to piece together one of these, rerunning old interviews and splicing together intros, so the show itself went on without me. The only sense of failure was my own.

Ben and Ozzie both suggested I needed to take another week off, to recover from what they sympathetically called my ordeal, but I refused. I wasn’t going to miss another show, another week. The best way to get my head back on straight would be to go back to work, to do my job.

What to talk about, on that first show back? I could have told my audience about my adventure. About meeting the oldest vampire I’d yet encountered, about how practicing ceremonial magic seemed to me to be a lot like playing with dynamite and matches. I wanted to send a message to Samira, and to talk about Enkidu—Mohan—to get his story out. To memorialize him. And Zora. Kumarbis, not so much, even though he was the one people would want to hear about. But if I talked about one of them, I’d have to talk about all of them, and the demon, the rituals, the philosophies behind them, and I wasn’t ready to do that.

Another consideration: I didn’t flatter myself that Roman listened to my show. Then again, maybe he did, and I didn’t want to tell him what exactly had happened in that abandoned mine. Let him guess, if he didn’t already know.

My topic for the week: mythology. I called a couple of professors from CU Boulder to interview about historical precedents for characters like King Arthur, Robin Hood, and even Gilgamesh. I found some authors who’d written novels that combined history and mythology, and recorded interviews about their take on the likelihood that some of these old stories might have a seed of truth. Pretty good, considering how last-minute I was putting this together.

I took a few calls, and they ran the usual range from insightful to insane. That in itself was comforting. No matter what happened in the rest of the world, my callers would always be there for me, with their enthusiasm, their conspiracy theories about tunnel systems extending through the continental U.S., and rants about the Second Amendment not including silver bullets.

What conclusion, if any, could I draw from all this? Here were stories we were still telling after five hundred, a thousand, five thousand years. Maybe not a lot of time on the geologic scale, but unimaginable on the scale of human memory. That had to mean something. Stories were what lasted.

Stories, and vampires, some of whom didn’t just tell the stories, but remembered when the stories were new.

I finished writing the book. Finally. Part of what motivated the last big writing push: thinking about something happening to me before I finished. Thinking about how much I would leave behind, unfinished. The book was one thing I could wrap up, so I did.

Also, I’d found my thesis, the thread that would tie the book together: stories were important. Whether they were true or not, they held their own history of the world, and we kept telling them because they meant something. Before all this happened, I had a vague notion of why I was putting this book together. Now, I knew. I supposed I could say I now had faith in it.

WHEN CORMAC called to ask me to meet him at New Moon, I knew he had information. After the dinner rush, Ben and I arrived at the restaurant, claimed a table in the back, ordered beers, and waited. Cormac arrived soon after and explained.

“The thumb drive you gave me—it isn’t just a book of spells, it’s a book of shadows.”

“What’s that mean?” I said.

“It’s everything. Everything she learned, her journey as a magician, her plans.”

“Her diary,” I said, amazed.

He winced. “Sort of. But more.” He cocked his head in a way I’d learned to recognize as him listening to an interior voice. Conversing with Amelia. “Something like … her magician’s soul.”

She’d given it to me there at the end because she knew she wasn’t going to make it. Closing the door on the demon meant collapsing the cave on herself. She couldn’t save her own life, but she’d given her soul to me. Another sacrifice. It was too much responsibility. What was I supposed to do with it?

“Did you find anything good?” Ben asked after a moment. The question seemed callous, and I almost said so, angrily. But he was only stating the obvious: what was I supposed to do with all of Zora’s spells and knowledge that she’d wanted to save? Use them, of course.

Cormac said, “Her name was Amy Scanlon. She was from Monterey, California, and dropped out of college to travel the world and learn what she could. Amelia sees a lot of herself in the kid. She had some talent as well, some natural psychic ability. Always seemed to know where to find the good stuff. The real deal.”

“Like Kumarbis.”

He gave an offhand shrug. “They seemed to feed into each others’ obsessions. If they’d kept going they’d have either taken over the world or destroyed it.”

Ben chuckled. “For real?”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

I huffed. “If magic was going to destroy the world, someone would have done it by now.”