Carrie Vaughn - Kitty's Greatest Hits

Wearing a disappointed scowl, she put the photos back in her attaché. “Well, this was worth a try. Sorry for wasting your time.”

“I’ve got nothing but time.”

“If you think of anything, if you get any bright ideas, call me.” She looked up at the guard who had arrived to escort Cormac back to his cell. Hardin had a parting shot. “And get some sleep. You look awful.”

It was almost nice that she cared.

He could have sworn he heard banging on the bars of the cell, as if someone was hanging on the door, rattling it, trying to get his attention.

You have to let me in! You have to trust me!

Not even bothering to tell her no, he put his hands over his ears, squeezed shut his eyes, ignoring her. That didn’t stop the noise.

I know what it is! Listen to me! I’ll prove it to you. Those photographs—I know what did it!

He woke up, covered in sweat, a foreign word on his lips and knowledge he didn’t know he had flitting at the edge of his mind. He’d had a nightmare—another one, but this one was different. Images of a tropical country full of brown-skinned people. A village wailing in despair because so many women had suffered miscarriages over the last few months, losing babies before they were even born. The vampire has taken them, the vampire has drunk them. Which didn’t make sense to Cormac. Vampires drank blood, not babies.

This one takes babies. It travels by separating from its legs and can be destroyed by salt.

He knew what it was. She’d told him. The word was on the tip of his tongue.

When he asked for an extra phone call that week in order to talk to a cop in Denver, the warden gave it to him. Apparently Hardin had left the request in advance, like she had a hunch that he’d get a sudden attack of memory. But this wasn’t memory, it was—

He didn’t want to think about it.

He called collect and waited for the operator to put him through. She answered, sounding surly and frustrated, then rushed to accept the charges when she heard his name.

“Hello? Bennett?”

“Manananggal,” he said. “Don’t ask me how to spell it.”

“Okay, but what is it?”

“Filipino version of the vampire.”

“Hot damn,” she said, as happy as he’d ever heard her. “The victim was from the Philippines. It fits. So the suspect was Filipino, too? Do Filipino vampires eat entire torsos or what?”

“No. That body is the vampire, the manananggal . You’re looking for a vampire hunter.”

“Excuse me?” she said flatly.

“These creatures, these vampires—they detach the top halves of their bodies to hunt. They’re killed when someone sprinkles salt on the bottom half. They can’t return to reattach to their legs, and they die at sunrise. If they’re anything like European vampires, the top half disintegrates. You’re never going to find the rest of the body.”

She stayed silent for a long time, so he prompted her. “Detective?”

“Yeah, I’m here. This fits all the pieces we have. Looks like I have some reading to do to figure out what really happened.”

She was really not going to like the next part. “Detective, you might check to see if there’ve been a higher than usual number of miscarriages in the neighborhood.”

“Why?”

“I used the term ‘vampire’ kind of loosely. This thing eats fetuses. Sucks them through the mother’s navel while she sleeps.”

“You’re kidding.” She sighed, because he clearly wasn’t. “So, what—this may have been a revenge killing? Who’s the victim here?”

“You’ll have to figure that one out yourself.” He could hear a pen scratching on paper, making notes.

“Isn’t that always the way? Hey—now that we know you really were holding out on me, what made you decide to remember?”

“Look, I got my own shit going on and I’m not going to try to explain it to you.”

“Fine, okay. But thanks for the tip, anyway.”

“Maybe you could put in a good word for me,” he said.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Maybe she even would.

He was curious. Itchingly curious. But if he let her in, he’d never get her out again. She already had her foot in the door, and now she was pushing. The bars of the cage rattled, claws scraped the inside his skull, worse than ever, a coarse rasp working on him, over and over. He could beat his head against a wall to make it stop.

Kitty came through. He could tell by the smug, triumphant look on her face when she put a manila folder on the desk in front of her, before she and Ben even sat down on their next visit.

“You found something,” he said.

“I did.” She grinned.

He tried not to laugh; it would annoy her. “Which means, I assume, that the demon problem is all fixed and everything’s okay.”

“Would I be smiling if it weren’t?” she said.

“Sorry,” Ben said. His cousin leaned back in his chair, smirking at Kitty just as much as Cormac was. “We forgot to tell you. The genie is bottled and everything’s okay.”

Cormac pointed. “See, I know when the problems are solved even when you don’t tell me, because you just stop talking about them. And did you say genie ?”

“Can I tell you about your executions now?” Kitty said quickly, clearly not wanting to explain the adventures they’d been having without him. She opened the folder, and he leaned forward, trying to see. “If you take in the twenty or so years before and after 1900, there were about a half-dozen women executed. There was only one woman executed in 1900.”

“What was her name?” Cormac said.

“Amelia Parker. Her story’s a little different.” The pages looked like photocopies, text from books, a couple of old newspaper articles. She lectured. “Lady Amelia Parker. British, born 1877, the daughter of a minor nobleman. By all accounts, she was a bit of a firebrand. Traveled the world by herself, which just wasn’t done in those days. She was a self-taught archeologist, linguist, folklorist. She collected knowledge, everything from local folk cures to lost languages. She has her own page in a book about Victorian women adventurers. She came to Colorado to follow an interest in Native American culture and lore but was convicted of murdering a young woman in Manitou Springs. The newspaper report was pretty sensationalist, even for 1900. Said something about blood sacrifice. There were patterns on the floor, candles, incense, the works. Like something out of Faust . The newspaper’s words, not mine. She was convicted of murder and hanged. Right here, in fact. Or at least, in this area, at the prison that was standing here at the time.”

Bingo. He hadn’t expected Kitty to hit the jackpot like this. The fuzzy, old-fashioned photo of the young woman on one of the photocopies even looked like his ghost—black hair, serious frown. Everything fit. Cormac leaned forward. “The victim. How did she die? Did it say what happened to her?”

“Her throat was cut.”

They were connected. The murders and his ghost were connected. It was a revelation, she’d been a murderer in life, and kept murdering in death—but no. Hunted. He remembered the words, the thoughts she’d flung at him. She was hunting. And she’d been wrongly executed. No wonder she was still around.

“What is it?” Kitty asked, probably seeing the stark shock on his face. The wonder in his eyes. “You know something. This all makes sense to you. Why? How?”

Finally, he shook his head. “I’m not sure. May be nothing. But she’s got a name. It’s not all in my head.”

“What isn’t?”