Carrie Vaughn - Kitty's Greatest Hits

“She was trying to kill my friends.”

“Ah.” She paced a few more steps; her fingers were no longer wringing, but her expression had turned thoughtful, almost resigned. “The friends who come to visit you?”

“That’s none of your business,” he said.

“I’m sorry—it’s hard not to pry. I can tell they’re good people.”

“Don’t touch them.”

“I won’t,” she said and paced a few more steps. “So you hunt monsters.”

“Yes. I do.”

“Then you understand. You must let me in, you must let me do battle with this thing.”

“Do battle yourself,” he said.

“I need physical form to work my spells.”

“Then tell me what to do. I’ll do it, I’ll get rid of it.”

“I spent a decade learning what I know, I can’t just tell you.”

“Then I guess that’s it.”

“Is it because I’m female? You don’t think I’m capable?”

He chuckled. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Then why are you being so stubborn?”

She’d keep picking away at him, like a swarm of gnats. “Look. My mind, this place—it’s all I have in here. It’s all that’s left until I get out. You can’t have it.”

“You would sacrifice everyone here because of that?”

The situation wasn’t that bad. Couldn’t be that bad. Somebody would notice before the whole cell block was wiped out. Somebody would do something. Except for a tiny suspicion he had that maybe she was right.

He started awake. Aching from his shoulders to his hips, he straightened from where he’d slumped against the painted cinderblock wall and stretched out the kinks. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep. He hadn’t meant to even talk to her.

A wave of shouting echoed down the corridor. Hundreds of angry male voices raised in frustration, turned fierce, animal.

He was blind and stupid inside this box. He could look out the window—to the opposite wall, more institutional cinderblock. He couldn’t talk to anyone—he didn’t even know the time of day. His stomach told him it was late. Somebody should be bringing a meal soon. But the shouting told him that the whole place had been turned upside down. This wasn’t right.

Standing, he rammed his shoulder into the door, pounded it a couple of times, hit the intercom button, called for a guard. The shouting outside was like an ocean, like a war.

No one would come to his call. No one would be bringing food. Of all the things that could have happened here, of all the things that could make serving time harder than it already was, he hadn’t expected this. If it wasn’t a riot, it was close to it. A cold knot grew in his gut, something he thought he’d built walls against a long time ago, so he’d never have to feel it again. He hadn’t felt like this since his father died.

He was afraid.

His father taught Cormac as much as he could before he died, because that was what their family did. Cormac’s grandfather, his father, and his father, who’d fought in the Civil War and then come west, part of the great migration of fortune seekers. At least that far back. The family didn’t have any stories for how they’d learned about werewolves, vampires, and the rest of it. Maybe the line stretched farther back than that. Cormac had always known that monsters were real. When he was twelve, his father started taking him hunting. At first it was the normal kind, deer and elk, living off the land, all that crap. Then they’d tracked and killed a werewolf. His father trailed a wolf where there shouldn’t have been any—wild wolves had been hunted to extinction south of Montana fifty years before Cormac was born. More than that, the creature was bigger than any wolf had a right being. They’d tracked it, baited it, Douglas Bennett had shot it dead, and brought his son to watch the body transform. It turned into a naked, bloodied human as they watched, a scruffy guy maybe thirty years old, rangy and dangerous looking even as a corpse. They weren’t like us, Douglas had said, and it was us or them. That had been the order of the universe, laid out by the center of his universe.

When he was sixteen, they tracked another werewolf. This one turned the hunt back on them.

They’d gotten word a month before—wolf kill in Grand County, a couple of head slaughtered out of a herd of cattle. A lot of ranchers would have written off the loss and not thought about it again. Maybe set traps or poison. But too much about this didn’t sit right—the care with which the prey had been chosen specifically not to draw too much attention, stragglers that weren’t as likely to be missed. The fact that wolves hadn’t been seen in the area in seventy years. There’d been a light snow and the prints were clear in the damp earth. Douglas Bennett had a reputation for being able to handle problems like this.

Douglas and Cormac spent the week before the full moon checking the lay of the land, where the lycanthrope had struck last time, where it might be likely to strike this time. There was always a chance that it would head out for new hunting grounds before then and they wouldn’t find anything. But the creatures were territorial—it’d probably stick around. They asked the ranchers in the area to keep their cattle penned for the full moon and the nights on either side. Except for one fat cow, which they slaughtered as the sun was setting. Then they hunkered down to wait.

The blind, made up of deadwood and laid over with sap-drenched scrub oak, was twenty paces downwind from the carcass. Cormac’s father sat on a piece of decayed log, his rifle resting across his lap. His hand lay across the stock, the finger on the trigger guard. He could fire a shot in half a second from that position. Cormac copied him, sitting behind him and a little to the side. Studied the way he held his rifle and tried to do the same. Admired the quiet way he sat, not fidgeting even a little. He barely seemed to breathe. Cormac struggled to stay quiet, though his heart was racing. His breath fogged in the chill air. This prey wasn’t like any other, his father said over and over. It had the mind of a person under all that fur and monstrous instinct. You could see it, when you looked into its eyes. His father told him he could fire the killing shot this time. If he sat quietly.

The carcass smelled of blood and rot. The blood had poured out and soaked most of the clearing where it lay. The moon blazed down and painted it black and silver. Cormac caught himself bouncing his foot and stopped it, glancing at his father to see if he’d noticed. He hadn’t seemed to. Cormac blushed, wanting so badly not to make a mistake. He hunched inside his army surplus jacket, thankful for his layers of clothing. He adjusted the sleeves, pulling them over his bare hands. He didn’t wear gloves; neither did his father. Gloves interfered with the trigger.

A werewolf’s natural instinct was to hunt people. A smart werewolf might avoid attention by keeping away from people; but eventually he’d drift back to civilization. He might have a pack to keep a rein on him, but if that pack ever fell apart, then it would scatter and a dozen werewolves, without leadership, would wreak destruction. Best to get them before that happened.

Nobody knew about the threats that lurked not just in the wild, but in cities, everywhere. Wild and inhuman, all the old nightmare stories grew out of truths that most people had forgotten. Didn’t want to remember. Folk didn’t want to consider that there was something modern technology couldn’t solve. It was up to people like the Bennetts and all who’d come before them to protect, to stand guard, with silver bullets and wooden stakes, protecting humanity against evils they didn’t know they needed protecting from.

Cormac had learned all of this from his father, as his father had learned from his. He felt proud, part of an unbroken tradition. They were warriors, and no one even knew.