Carrie Vaughn - Kitty Rocks the House

Pacing away from us, Cormac muttered under his breath, almost to himself, “I want to know what we’re dealing with. What kind of magic. How he made it, what he hopes to accomplish. The nature of his enemy—is it magical or demonic, can it be reasoned with? The shield, it feels different somehow, as if it recognizes me from the last time. Or as if it’s waiting for something.”

Following him, I narrowed my gaze and said, hushed so Hardin wouldn’t hear, “Am I talking to Cormac or Amelia now?”

“Yeah,” he murmured, not really paying attention to me.

“Taking this kind of personal, aren’t you?”

“Something wrong with that?”

“Well, yeah. You’ve already broken your arm over it.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“I assume you were being careful when you broke your arm.”

“Ms. Norville,” Hardin called after us, using her official cop voice. “It might be a good idea for you to leave the area for the time being.”

“Yeah, probably.” I started at a slow pace, a few steps along the sidewalk between Cormac and the church’s pink walls, stepping purposefully across the invisible line he’d marked out the last time I was here. I went all the way to the stucco wall, pressed my hand against it, looked up along its length. I didn’t expect firebolts from heaven to strike me, but I thought I might feel something. I didn’t, not even a tingle on my skin. But why should I? Hundreds of people walked by here every day, used the auditorium and offices that the church had been converted to, and didn’t sense anything wrong. Even now, lights shone through the windows, indicating activity inside.

I turned away and rejoined the pair. “Just for the record, I think this is a bad idea.”

“Noted,” Hardin said.

Cormac had pulled a length of red yarn from his pocket and began tying knots in it—awkwardly, anchoring with the fingers of his broken arm, manipulating with his good hand. I itched to take the yarn from him and do it myself, in the name of helping. Not that I would have known what I was doing with the knots. It was painful, watching him struggle with the yarn. Sweat dampened the skin along his hairline, either from effort or pain. He had a two-day-old broken arm, he had to be in pain, not that he was going to admit it.

Hardin stood politely out of the way—giving her hired expert the space to work. And if that wasn’t bizarre—just a few years ago she’d wanted to put him in jail herself. I wondered what Ben was going to say about their partnership.

Dusk fell, which meant the vampires inside—assuming they were still there—would be waking up any minute now. Fewer and fewer people passed by the church.

“Has anybody tried asking the guy to come out?”

“I don’t ask murder suspects,” Hardin said.

We were going to look back on this and realize it was all a big misunderstanding. “How about I just poke my head in,” I said and started toward the front steps.

“Kitty—” Hardin said, but I ignored her. Cormac was busy tying knots.

At dusk, after classes and meetings, I figured the front would be locked, but the door I tried opened. Stepping into an unassuming lobby, I almost shouted Rick’s name, but a sound stopped me—the voice of a lecturing professor, coming from the next room. Late classes. Right. I poked around as much as I thought I could without drawing too much attention, turning down a couple of side hallways, peeking into a few equipment closets. I didn’t even smell much vampire—just a trace of a corpse-like chill, as if one had passed by recently. Too faint of a trail to follow.

I returned to the front of the church and shut the door quietly behind me on my way out. Back outside, Cormac’s spell, counterspell, whatever, seemed to be progressing. He was still managing to tie lengths of yarn into patterns. I’d kind of hoped that whatever he was planning really did need two working arms, and he’d get frustrated and give up.

“There are people inside,” I said. “Living people, not vampires. You’re not going to do anything that’ll get anyone hurt, will you?”

He gave me a look, kept tying knots. I heaved a frustrated sigh.

“Don’t worry, I’m keeping an eye on things,” Hardin said, which didn’t give me any more confidence. She had a hungry expression, a hunter on the prowl, waiting for her chance to strike.

Cormac walked clockwise around the church, making his knotted charms and dropping them at the cardinal and ordinal points, eight in all. His plan probably took twice as long as it would have if he’d been able to use both hands to full capacity.

Maybe this wouldn’t work.

Both Hardin and I stood with our arms crossed, to keep from reaching to help him.

I tried to make conversation. “You talk to Rick yet?” Not that I thought she had. I would have been offended if she had, that Rick would talk to her and not me.

“He doesn’t seem to be answering his phone. You?”

I shrugged, noncommittal.

“So what’s his deal?” she said.

“He’s five hundred years old,” I said. “He doesn’t owe us anything.”

Rick had spent much of his time as a vampire being nomadic, wandering throughout the West, from Mexico to San Francisco to Albuquerque and who knew where else. People who’d known him for a long time—other vampires—expressed surprise that he’d settled down and become Master of a city. Maybe … maybe Rick wasn’t cut out for the settled life after all. Maybe he really had left town, taken up his wandering ways again. And why should he tell any of us? We were mortal, we’d be dead soon anyway, from his point of view. I didn’t think Rick was like that, but what did I know, really?

If Rick was with Columban, he was here. Maybe in one of those square bell towers, looking down on us from the shadows, suitably mysterious and vampiric. I didn’t sense more than a trace of vampire on the air. If they were here, they were keeping themselves inside, and they hadn’t left the building in the last few days. Finding food would be easy enough for them to do, after dark on a college campus. Use their powers to draw in prey who’d be none the wiser. They only needed a few sips, and didn’t need to kill.

After half an hour or so, Cormac arrived back at his starting point.

We waited. Full twilight had fallen; thin strings of clouds were black against a dark blue sky. Streetlights had come on around us. The pink on the walls of the church had faded, so the building now loomed, a dark, hulking object.

“What is this supposed to do?” I said.

“Just giving the door a kick,” he said. “See what happens.”

I gave him a look. “And what happens if something actually, you know—kicks back?”

“I’ve got some backup,” he said. Despite the broken arm, despite Hardin standing right there, he seemed to be enjoying himself. His moustache showed his lips pressed in a thin, satisfied smile. Another hunter on the hunt.

“How long until something happens?” Hardin said.

“Just wait.”

“If nothing happens, I might think twice about paying you.”

He didn’t say anything to that.

Cormac was patient. He could stand here all night, waiting for something to happen, sure that something would. The spell that Amelia had woven made sense to him. I couldn’t guess what would come next. If nothing else, I stayed to make sure I could talk Hardin out of arresting Cormac for something that might be interpreted as breaking his parole.

About twenty minutes into the vigil, my nose wrinkled, catching a scent before I was entirely aware of what I was smelling. I cocked my head as if listening, focusing on my nose, and the acrid tickling that now caught my attention. A burning, like the ozone that tinged the air during a bad thunderstorm. Lightning was brewing somewhere, but no clouds hung overhead, no thunderheads were blowing in from the mountains like they sometimes did, a late spring storm.