Carrie Vaughn - Kitty's Greatest Hits

“Why are you telling me this?” Cormac said.

“I’m asking for your advice. Do you have any idea what could have done this?”

Cormac’s first impulse was to blow him off. Olson was part of the establishment that locked him in here. Bureaucrats like him didn’t have room for the bizarre, couldn’t understand that the woman he’d killed was a wizard, powerful and evil, and he’d had no choice but to destroy her. As Frank had observed, Cormac could piss people off just by sitting in one place and looking at them funny. Olson couldn’t force him to help. Why should Cormac volunteer?

“There’s so much shit out there that could have done this,” Cormac said.

“Vampire? Werewolf?”

“Maybe. But you’ve got the same problem with them—how’d they get through the locked door?”

“So what can murder someone behind a locked door? What should we be looking for?”

“Something without a body,” Cormac said. “Some kind of curse or magic. Ghost, maybe. Demon.”

He could see Olson trying to process, trying to keep an open mind, his mouth pursed against arguments. Finally he said, smiling wryly, “You’re getting into issues of physics, now. A physical action requires a physical presence. Doesn’t it?”

Cormac couldn’t tell if he was being rhetorical or asking a genuine question. “There are more things in heaven and earth,” he murmured.

“Hamlet,” said Olson. “You like to read, don’t you? You have a friend who sends you books.”

“I thought this wasn’t about me. This is about your bogeyman.”

“Do you have any ideas?”

A werewolf had transformed on live TV late last year. Congress had acknowledged the existence of vampires, werewolves, and psychics and brought them to testify in Washington. Cormac had known his whole life that these beings were real, and now the rest of the world was catching up. That didn’t stop a lot of folks from pulling the shades down. If Olson were one of those, this whole thing could be a setup. A trap. Get him in here, get him talking crazy, giving them an excuse to pin the deaths on him and lock him up good and tight. No visitors, no parole. Then he really would go crazy.

Cormac said, “Are you serious about this? Are you serious about looking for something that a lot of people don’t even believe exists?”

“I wouldn’t be asking if we had a logical, mundane explanation for what’s happening here.”

Not that Cormac had a choice but to trust him. Like so much of his life right now, the decision was out of his hands. “This place has been around a long time. Has anything like this happened here before? Rumor, ghost story, anything.”

Olson glanced away briefly, nervously. “It’s hard to tell. There’ve been so many attacks over the prison’s history—”

“But have there been any cases of somebody getting their throat cut in a locked cell?” Any sightings of a dark-haired woman in Victorian clothing?

“In fact, there have,” Olson said. “A handful over the last hundred years. But they were isolated—never more than one at a time. In every case another inmate was charged with the murder. Are you saying they may be connected?”

Cormac was both shocked and thrilled at the news—he hadn’t expected Olson to answer. This meant there was a thread tying these deaths together. Which meant there was a way to hunt the thing doing it.

This thing had been killing here a long time, but that didn’t bother Cormac. He was even a little amused—even inside prison walls where he ought to be safe, this shit just kept following him around.

“Even if you don’t know what’s doing this, you can try to protect the place. Put up crosses above the doorways, at the ends of hallways. Get a priest in to throw some holy water around, do an exorcism.”

“Seriously?” Olson said. “That works?”

“It’s not a sure thing.”

“That’s the trouble with this, isn’t it? It’s never a sure thing.”

Cormac had to grin. “That’s why it never hurts to cover all your bases.”

When he arrived at the visiting room, he saw that Kitty had joined Ben this time. The joy—or relief—at seeing them both was a physical pain, a squeezing of his heart, though he kept his face a mask. He wanted to melt into the floor, but he only slumped into his chair and picked up the phone.

“Hey,” he said, like he always did.

“Hey,” Ben said back, and Kitty smiled. They sat close together so they could hold their phone between them. Cormac had gone to live with Ben’s family after his father died, and now he was the closest thing he had to a brother. Kitty was … something else entirely. The two of them had gotten married a month or so back. Ben had sucked her into the family. She couldn’t escape now.

Kitty was cute. Really cute, and not just the way she looked with her shoulder-length blond hair, big brown eyes, and slender body. She burst with optimism, constantly chatting, always moving, and usually smiling. She and Cormac never should have met much less become friends. She represented a lot of lost chances. A lot of things he should have done, and maybe some he shouldn’t have. But he wasn’t sure he’d want to change any of it. Better to have her as a friend than not at all.

She was better off with Ben. He was man enough to admit that.

Small talk got real small when he didn’t have anything new to say. What was he supposed to tell them, when the same thing happened every day? But this week was different, and he wondered: How much should he tell them? Wasn’t like they could do anything to help.

Then Kitty mentioned her own demon, derailing the whole routine of their usual visits. It seemed she was in the middle of an adventure, and he couldn’t do a thing about it. He didn’t know whether to throttle her or laugh. He ended up just shaking his head. He’d come to her rescue, all she had to do was say the word, any time. Except for now. He hoped they didn’t get themselves killed before he could get out of here to help them. He hoped whatever was haunting this place left him alone until then.

He’d developed an inner clock—they were running out of time, and he had a bad idea.

“Can I talk to Kitty alone for a minute?” he said to Ben. Ben wouldn’t understand—he’d try to fix everything, and he couldn’t, not this time. Kitty didn’t know him well enough to be suspicious.

Ben left, not looking happy about it.

Alone now, Kitty seemed almost accusing. “What is it? What can you say to me that you can’t say to him?”

His lip curled. “You really want me to answer that?” She looked away; so did he. “I don’t want him to worry. Kitty, do you believe in ghosts?”

He liked her because nothing ever seemed to shock her. “Of course I do.”

He leaned forward. “Can you do some of that research you’re so good at?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I need to know the names of any women who were executed here. Let’s say right around 1900, give or take a decade. And any history you can find on them.”

She narrowed her gaze, and he wondered if he’d said too much. Now they were both going to worry, because she wouldn’t keep this secret from Ben. “Are you being haunted or something?”

“I don’t know. It’s a hunch. It may be nothing.” That last was a lie.

“Is everything okay?”

He hoped she didn’t tell him to get some sleep, that she didn’t see the stress written on his face. He tried to smile, failed. “Hanging in there. Sometimes by my fingernails. But hanging in there.”

He played the visit over in his memory, like he did every time, even though he knew he shouldn’t. He made himself sick, worrying that maybe this was the last time they’d visit, maybe they’d skip next week, maybe they’d decide they didn’t need him—they wouldn’t do that, they weren’t like that. But he had a hard time not imagining it, so he dwelled, reflecting on every word they spoke, every loose strand of Kitty’s hair, just in case they didn’t come back.