Carrie Vaughn - Kitty's Greatest Hits

Part of the general population, he was allowed out of his cell for meals, showers, time in the yard, and his work detail washing dishes. He’d put in for a better job, but that would take time, a review. He had to prove that he wasn’t going to cause trouble. He was trying to do just that. The days ticked on, hour by hour. Best not to count the time, but there it was.

His half of the cell was starting to look like it belonged to him—his small shelf displayed a growing collection of books, a small stack of letters he’d gotten, a couple of magazines. Frank had been here longer and had a radio and pictures of his two kids on display. None of those details could disguise the bars, or the fact that their bedroom was also a bathroom, with a stainless steel toilet and sink mounted in the corner. This was a cage in a zoo.

Yet another night after lights out he lay on the top bunk, staring at the shadowed ceiling, waiting for sleep to pull him under. He could almost hear the shadows shifting across the walls, moving through the building, claws scratching on concrete. The place was old, haunted. A prison had been on this spot for almost a hundred fifty years. If any ghosts had taken up residence during that time, he was stuck with them.

“Hey,” said Frank from the bottom bunk. Cormac didn’t answer, but Frank continued. “You got a girl waiting for you on the outside, don’t you?”

It was an odd question. Cormac kept staring up. “What makes you say that?”

“The way you stare, like you’re looking somewhere else. Guys only stare like that when they’re thinking about a girl. Not just a hot piece of ass, but someone they really like.”

Cormac’s thoughts flashed on a face and a name. The girl he liked. The one who wasn’t waiting for him on the outside.

He rolled over on his side and didn’t say a word.

Ghosts haunted the place. She built up her walls and they left her alone. She waited.

The first one who went mad was a veteran of the Great War who’d returned home to few prospects and been caught stealing an automobile. She had thought perhaps the chaotic visions swirling in his mind would prepare him for her. She was wrong. She slipped in quietly, tentatively, like dipping fingers in the surface of a pool of water to test the temperature. She whispered words, told him what would happen, that it wouldn’t hurt—she didn’t think it would. She hoped it wouldn’t. But it did. Her presence pushed an already disturbed mind past breaking. He woke from sleep screaming and wouldn’t stop. Said he heard voices.

Madmen who speak of the voices they hear was such an awful cliché. And yet.

She tried to be more careful. Her second attempt was a family man convicted of fraud. A stable, quiet man who’d committed a nonviolent crime and had much to keep him levelheaded. When he heard the voice, the whisper, and felt her tendrils in his mind, the spirit that wasn’t his own moving through his flesh, he split his skull trying to fight his way out of the cell.

And so it went. No matter how carefully she chose her targets, how gently she pressed against their thoughts, she broke minds, searching for one that would fit her. She was waiting for a certain quality of mind: intelligent, astute, observant, patient. So many of the minds that passed through here were troubled, ill, wracked by demons of their own making that had nothing to do with the supernatural. Weak, prone to violence, which was what brought many of them here in the first place. She waited a long time.

She might have given up entirely, let what was left of her fade to shadow, but the murders followed her. The curse of the demon should have ended with her death. But she hadn’t really died, had she?

She needed a body to resume the hunt, to finally destroy the curse. So she kept trying, kept making morbid sacrifices.

If she’d had any fear in her state, any feeling beyond the instinct to seek out what she needed, she’d have been afraid. She would lose herself in this place. The spell would never work to completion. She’d never find the vessel. She would fade, become simply another voice calling purposelessly to madmen. Another shade to the miasma seeping from the stones.

Then, one of the minds recognized her.

He’d been primed, and he had the instincts. He recognized the irregular, the uncanny. Magic. He didn’t even know it. He’d lived with it so long, he only noticed it as a tickling in his mind.

He was violent, here for killing. But it was a controlled, chilled violence of necessity and will. In some ways, his ability to kill was less understandable than the ones who lashed out in the heat of violence and caused mayhem. They lost control and that was reason enough.

This man approached it like a job, with no more passion than he might mend a shirt or dig a hole. She was drawn to him and horrified—her, horrified! What was he?

Human, nothing more. She could see by the glow of him.

Most of all, though, she felt he was a hard mind. Resilient. He might hear a voice, but wouldn’t break from it like the dozen before him had. She was sure of it.

After breakfast the next day, an alarm sounded. Lockdown. Cormac lay on his bunk, waiting for news. The grapevine would start feeding rumors soon enough. Probably it was just someone trying to get out. It happened more often than he would have thought, inmates packing themselves into crates to be shipped out or squeezing through barbed wire. He didn’t understand how that could look like a good idea to anyone, even someone who spent twenty-three hours a day in a ten-by-ten cell. People succeeded more often than he would have thought, but seldom for very long. The guy who packed himself into a crate was found when they unloaded the truck at its destination. He was hauled back with a few more years added to his sentence.

The gamble wasn’t worth it. Just a few years, keep his nose clean, get out. That was the plan. He’d still have a life when he got out of here. Maybe even more of one than when he arrived. He could stare at the ceiling for a few years and not go crazy.

Moe, the flighty guy in the next cell over, said, “They found Brewster.”

Frank stood by the bars in the corner to talk to him. “Found him where?”

“Dead, throat cut, blood everywhere. Right in his cell.”

“So Gus did it?”

Cormac listened, almost amused. Gus must have snapped. The guy was half Brewster’s size, but he could have managed it.

“No, that’s the thing, Gus’s pissing his pants. They don’t think he did it.”

That piqued Cormac’s attention.

“They were locked in together, what else could have happened?” Frank said.

“All I know is he got cut up, but they didn’t find a knife, and Gus is pissing himself. Says he didn’t even see what happened.”

Frank chuckled. “Yeah, that’s a good story. That’ll get him off the hook for sure.”

“It’s just like what happened with that serial killer, the one from the thirties, remember?”

“I thought that happened in the sixties,” Frank said.

“Maybe it was a vampire,” Cormac said. “Turned to mist, come in through the bars.”

Frank stared at him. He was young but worn down, a stout white guy with a dozen tattoos scattered piecemeal across his back and arms. He’d spent more of his adult life in prison than out of it.

From the other cell Moe said, “What’d he say?”

“You’re not serious,” Frank said. “Can they do that?”

One thing was for sure, the world had gotten a whole lot more interesting over the last year, since the NIH went public with data proving that vampires and lycanthropes were real. Cormac loved throwing out bombshells like that. He loved that people acknowledged the existence of monsters without knowing anything about them. It made terrifying them so easy.