Carrie Vaughn: Kitty's Greatest Hits

I won’t hurt you, she said, and he imagined the young woman in the meadow, proud and calm. If I tried to dominate you we’d both go mad. I see that now.

“I can’t trust you.”

You don’t trust anyone. He could see the scowl on her refined face.

He almost laughed because it was true. Mostly true.

You’re strong, Cormac. I’ll need that strength, to do what must be done. We both will.

He wasn’t strong. He just faked it real well. He saw his father’s blood on his hands and felt like a child.

Cormac—

Don’t use my name, he almost shouted at her. The noises outside grew louder, closer. The sound of the riot had changed, from defiance to triumph. A celebration, chaotic and fierce. It didn’t sound human anymore.

Then the lock on the door clicked and slid back with a metallic thunk . Cormac felt the vibration of it under his hand.

He thought of weapons, whether he could break off part of the bedframe, use the sheets as some kind of garrote, or find anything he could throw. Even a shoe. He had nothing but his hands.

Best to stay out of the way, then. Maybe he could get outside. Participating in a riot wasn’t going to get him anything but more years to his sentence. The door was unlocked, but he didn’t have to walk out. On the other hand, he sure as hell didn’t want to get stuck in this hole with no place to run if the mob came after him.

Carefully, he slid the door open, keeping his back to the wall. Waiting, he listened.

A man ran past, a young guy Cormac didn’t know. His orange jumpsuit was torn, hanging off his shoulder, one leg shredded, and he bled from a wound on his temple. He was trying to hold his jumpsuit up while looking over his shoulder as he ran. Not that he had any place to go but in circles.

A second later, a mob of about a dozen followed, screaming in fury. A few of the men held makeshift weapons—a broken two-by-four as a club; a toothbrush handle, melted and sharpened, as a shiv.

Cormac waited until they’d passed and the corridor was empty again.

The cells in solitary were in a long corridor off the main block. From there, the sounds of riot swelled. Bullies used the chaos to take advantage. A prison riot was a thousand angry men trying to show they couldn’t be kept down. It was all a big lie.

To get to a corridor that would take him to the yard, where he could hunker down to wait out the riot in relative safety, he had to go through the central bay of the main block. He crept along the wall, looking ahead and behind, trying not to move too quick, careful not to get noticed. This wasn’t hunting; this was stumbling across a mama bear with her cubs and hoping you didn’t catch her eye. It was the most nerve-racking thing he’d done in his life. Any minute now, the goon squad would arrive and the tear gas would start flying. He had to get out.

He’d meant to take a quick look, just to get the lay of the land, then slip out. But the scene froze him.

They’d killed at least two guards, it looked like. A mob of maybe a hundred or so was crowded together in the main block, passing the bodies overhead, ripping apart the blue uniforms—and more, when hands couldn’t get a grip on fabric. On the fringes of the crowd, inmates turned on each other, clawing and fighting. Others cheered them on. Another group of a dozen moved along the cells, slamming open doors and pulling out the few people who hadn’t rushed to take part. The established gangs had splintered. No longer organized by race, affiliation, or anything visible. They’d become opportunistic, chaotic.

Good God, Amelia said. This isn’t right.

“I thought you’d said you had seen prison riots,” Cormac whispered.

This is something else.

Rage, fear, a million emotions that made a guy crazy when he was lying in a prison cell at night and the quiet closed in on him. What did that taste like to a demon who gained its power from fear and blood?

There!

He could almost imagine the woman pointing. He liked to think he’d have seen it on his own, eventually, but he wasn’t sure. Human in shape but somehow otherworldly, the figure lurked, slinking across the edge of the ceiling, no brighter than a shadow, no more real than the phantom hints of movement anyone might catch in the corners of their vision and discount as imagination. The little voice that whispered sometimes, Take it, steal it, break it. Or, Kill him, you know you could kill him.

A lot of the guys in here probably listened to that voice more often than most people.

Cormac could not have said the thing had eyes, but somehow he knew that it looked at him. That it saw him and didn’t like him. The thing had clawed hands and feet that clicked on beams as it traversed the ceiling. The claws glinted like steel, sharp as knives. There must have been dozens of them, like the thing was holding bouquets of daggers.

Cormac stood at the end of the corridor, watching the creature run toward him, a figure made of oil, and wondered what to do. Running wouldn’t help. Doing so would only rile it. Like a gang of bullies. But he also couldn’t fight it.

It’s looking for me, she said. I told you, I’ve been hunting it for a century. It knows me.

“And you think you can kill it? Get rid of it?”

I can.

“I don’t believe you.” He believed in bullets. He believed in being stronger than anything else on the range.

Cormac, we must stop this.

He shook his head. He’d worked too hard to hold on to himself to let his identity—his soul—go now. He’d kept such fierce control, all so he wouldn’t lose it and do damage that he couldn’t recover from. Now, he nearly laughed, because it had all been for nothing. The thing drew power from blood, and it would kill them all, slicing them to pieces.

“I can’t let go,” he murmured.

You can. You can keep your core. I’ll keep you safe, I can do that, I promise you. But I need you!

He felt how easy it would be to let go. He understood how it was that a psychotic gunman could walk into a crowded room and open fire. It was because they had let go, given themselves over to something that wasn’t them.

Please trust me. He felt something, someone, take his hands and squeeze. Soft hands, but firm, as if he and a woman were about to jump off a cliff together. He suddenly wanted to kiss her. Not an abrogation, then. A merging. He wasn’t giving himself over. He was loaning. Sharing.

He hoped she was right.

He couldn’t feel his muscles suddenly. His nerves were fire, but he couldn’t move. Closed his eyes, tipped his head back, thought of a meadow, opened a door, and felt Amelia step into the place where he was—

—and she looked out of his eyes, living eyes, for the first time in over a hundred years. Her body flared—his body. It was powerful, brilliant. Already rangy and athletic, he had kept himself fit, even locked behind bars. She wanted to shout, to sing. Tipping her head back, she felt the smile on her face, and hair on her jaw, odd and tingly, scratchy. This anatomy was most certainly not her own, feeding her a confusing flood of sensations that must have been maleness .

Time for that later.

With a body came life, and with life came power, and that was what she had traveled all this way for, waited for all this time, so she could face down the darkness, raise her hand, curl her fingers into a fist as if holding a ball, and shout a word of Latin in a strange, deep, male voice that wasn’t hers.

A crackling purple sphere of light came to life in her hand.

He felt it, the power burning through him, and it was like dying, because he couldn’t move, react, or change the outcome, and he didn’t want to because he felt closer to the source. To God, maybe.