Carrie Vaughn - Kitty Steals the Show

“Not all of them,” Ned said. “Some have been playing both sides against the middle for centuries. They’ll have to choose allegiances soon. Many of them don’t believe that time has come.”

“I think many of those will not take Roman’s coins in the end,” Marid said. “They’ve known their own power too long.”

“I hope you’re right, of course,” Ned said. “I’m not sure I’ll depend on that hope, however.”

They were like generals forming a battle plan. “Where do we fit into this?” I asked.

Ned said, “We, meaning you and your mate? Or all the werewolves?”

Taken aback, I had to think a moment. “I don’t know,” I said simply. Queen of the werewolves, huh? Was it too late to go home? “You were the only Master in there who didn’t have werewolf bodyguards. Why not? Do you have a relationship with the local wolves, or are you just not as cool as the other vampires?”

“Please,” he said, an attempt to brush me off. But there was a status thing involved. He hadn’t tried to present Ben and me as belonging to him.

“Does London even have an alpha wolf?”

“Yes. I’ll introduce you to him soon.”

“I may just go looking for him myself.”

“Kitty,” Ned said, hands flattened in a placating gesture. “Don’t interfere in situations you don’t fully understand—”

“Did you even try to stop that bloodbath in there?” I pointed at the door. “Or did you join in? And you want me to trust you?”

He opened his mouth to answer, but Marid got there first. “You should understand, this—this is playacting. Harmless, in our eyes. In the old days—” He smiled wistfully, shaking his head. “We built temples to ourselves, bought slaves by the wagonload—don’t look at me like that, Ms. Norville. Don’t judge. If you’d lived in those times you’d have felt the same. We slaughtered them in worship to our gods. We never worried about how we would feed ourselves, or how we would dispose of the bodies. Some of my colleagues would go back to those days, if they could. I think those are the ones most likely to follow Roman.”

“Do you know—is Roman here, in London, for the conference?” I asked.

“No, I don’t believe he is. Only his servants.”

“No chance to go after him directly then.”

“Only his servants,” Marid repeated.

Ned said, “I should remind you that I’ve declared London neutral territory for the duration of the conference. For either side to make an offensive would invite retribution.”

“We’ll see how long your truce lasts, Ned. We’ll talk further on this.” Marid tipped an invisible hat to the London Master and went to the front door, and out.

Ned drew a breath and sighed.

“If I get a chance to hurt Roman, I’ll take it,” I said.

“I suppose you will. Marid’s right, I suppose hoping a truce will last is wishful thinking. But I have to admit, I rather like wishful thinking. It doesn’t do to let the imagination stagnate.”

TOGETHER, EMMA and Ned talked me off the ceiling and convinced us to stay at the town house. They persuaded me we’d be safer there, especially now that Mercedes and her allies had seen me. I thought I’d been coming to London for a conference. I had hoped all my battles this week would be verbal and academic. Wishful thinking, indeed.

In our luxurious borrowed room, Ben and I curled up in bed, naked, holding each other. I pulled all the covers up to cocoon us, making us too warm, but the heat was comforting, and Ben didn’t complain. Just played with my hair and breathed against my scalp. I rambled.

“I just keep thinking of how much worse it could have been,” I said. “They had slaves, bodies, and blood, like it was all a big party, like it was normal . Like I shouldn’t complain because it used to be so much worse. Like I’m supposed to be happy that they didn’t go so far as to kill anyone. Am I deluded? Is this the way the world really is and I shouldn’t even fight it?”

Ben said, “You’re an idealist. And that’s okay. The world needs idealists to keep the rest of us out of the gutter.”

I tilted my head to look up at him in the darkness, the slope of his cheek and flop of brown hair over his ear. “Really? Or are you just trying to make me feel better?”

“Of course I’m trying to make you feel better.” He squeezed, settling me more firmly in his arms. “Is it working?”

“Hmm.”

“Was that yes?”

I had to think about it for a minute. If I focused on the moment, yes, it was working. But my mind kept drifting back to images I would never be able to erase from my memory. Right, then, time to stop that. At the moment, in the whole world, there was only me and Ben.

“Yes,” I said finally, and kissed him.

CORMAC GOT back to the town house even later than we did and was gone in the morning before I had a chance to ask him if he’d had any luck finding Amelia’s family. I hoped he was all right.

For my part, no matter what the vampires had said, or the implications of last night’s macabre presentation, the conference was important, did mean something, and I was going to treat it as such.

Dr. Elizabeth Shumacher and Joseph Tyler’s presentation on lycanthropes in the modern military focused on the case study of a group of werewolves who formed an Army Special Forces unit that had served in Afghanistan. The unit had been entirely unofficial—a captain and lone wolf took it upon himself to create other werewolves in order to form a squad uniquely suited to the challenges of battling extremists in the mountainous wilderness of Afghanistan. The experiment had started well—the unit had an impressive record of accomplishing its objectives—and ended disastrously. When the captain, the alpha of the pack, was killed in an explosion, the rest of the pack lost its moral compass and all control. They began fighting each other for dominance until only three remained. Those three returned to the U.S. damaged by post-traumatic stress and trapped by their wolf sides. It was assumed they’d never be able to leave their cages, much less rejoin human society. Shumacher called me in to help. I did what I could to teach them how to live with lycanthropy, the monster inside. Mostly, I failed, and two more died in a violent escape attempt. Sergeant Joseph Tyler was the only survivor of the original unit.

They’d gotten permission from the army to tell their story. Tyler was no longer active duty, and Shumacher’s scientific sensibilities wanted the information made public, so no one else would make the same mistakes. She felt that Captain Gordon couldn’t have been the first person who ever thought of using werewolves for combat.

I sat in back and listened to the story, told clinically and professionally, which made it seemed detached from my experience of it—it had all happened to someone else, and I’d never seen those men whose faces appeared in the photographs on the slide show.

The conclusion she left the audience with had been my own—taking soldiers and making them werewolves was ill-advised. They had training that made them excellent warriors, but none of the skills they needed to control the terrors that came with lycanthropy. A more successful project was taking werewolves, people who had already successfully adjusted to lycanthropy and had learned to deal with the drawbacks as well as the abilities, and training them to be soldiers.

Even that left something to be desired, I thought. Probably because I wished we didn’t need soldiers at all.

Tyler answered questions at the end.

Joseph Tyler was a solid black man, tall and broad, with a stern expression and distant gaze. He held himself apart, and his quiet strength was intimidating. At first, the questions came slowly, as people hesitated, unsure of him. He loomed over the podium. But he was articulate, and met the gazes of everyone who spoke to him. People were able to talk to Tyler the person and not Tyler the big scary werewolf. They asked personal questions about his choices, his emotions, the fallout, his recovery. He answered calmly—or politely declined to—and even said “yes, sir” or “no, ma’am.” I wondered how much of his military training was keeping him upright.