Carrie Vaughn - Kitty's Big Trouble

I crept closer for a better look; the white lines of the chalk drawing stood out in the semidarkness, almost as if they glowed.

“Stay back,” he said, and I stopped. He had drawn a quick design, arrows and arcs, a couple of letters. It looked like scribbling.

“Will that help us find Grace?” I said.

“I don’t much care about Grace. I’m just trying to find a way out of here.”

“How long is this going to take?”

He ignored me and kept working. I started pacing because what else could I do? I looked back and forth down the corridor, wondering what was going to jump out at us. Ben was doing the same thing nearby. Our anxiety sparked across the space to each other, feeding each other. We were caged wolves.

“Kitty, calm down,” Anastasia said.

“We’re not safe here.”

“We killed them. They’re not coming back.”

“But what else is down here? Another one of those nine-tailed foxes? Or those guys could come back as zombie werewolves. What’ll we do then?”

“I hadn’t thought of zombie werewolves,” Ben muttered.

“There’s no such thing as zombie werewolves,” Anastasia said, and if you couldn’t believe an eight-hundred-year-old vampire about something like that, who could you believe?

“Says you,” Cormac said. I stopped and looked.

He set one of his silver daggers in the middle of the chalk design, stood back, and waited. After a breath or two, it trembled, all on its own, metal scraping against concrete. Slowly it turned, like a compass needle. The dagger’s tip passed one marking, then another. We gathered closer, watching to see where it rested—and if that would point to the way out. But it never rested. It rotated a full circle, wavered, reversed course and did the same in the opposite direction. Almost as if confused, it turned one way and the other, rattling harder, making more noise as it skittered on the hard floor. It seemed sentient, the way it searched and grew more erratic when it didn’t find its goal.

Corman finally stepped on it, trapping it. “It’s not working.”

I paced again. Cormac picked up the knife, dusted it off, and scuffed out the chalk marking with his boot.

“Now what?” Anastasia said.

“This was supposed to be your party, why don’t you come up with something?” Ben said.

“I just wanted the pearl. Chen was supposed to be here, the pearl was supposed to be here, I didn’t count on any of this .” She shook her head, squaring her shoulders and resettling her dignity. “We should wait for Chen. She’ll return to find us.”

“Not if she’s smart.” I stalked away from them, down the straightaway. “Even if we can’t find the same door there’s got to be another way out of here. We can’t just sit still and be targets.”

Ben and the others followed a few paces behind. I could sense them, the sound of their footsteps and the odor of their sweat, their anxiety. Anastasia had returned to her usual composure—cool, detached. I couldn’t read her at all.

Ahead, the corridor branched. I stopped at the intersection and waited for the others to catch up. “Well?” I said. “Left or right?”

“We could toss a coin,” Ben said.

“It hardly matters,” Anastasia said.

“Left,” Cormac said.

I glanced back at him. “Is this some kind of magical hunch?”

“Just a hunch,” he said. “The regular kind.”

“Why not right?”

“Turn right if you want to, doesn’t make a difference to me,” he said, expressionless as always. He held the lantern low in his hand. The light shadowed his face so it looked like a skull.

I kind of wanted to keep poking him until he got angry. Just out of curiosity, to see what he would do. Instead, I turned right and kept walking. When I glanced over my shoulder to see if the others followed, Ben smirked at me, the expression he used when he thought I was being irrational. But if it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, right?

And how had I ended up in the lead?

These tunnels seemed to go on an awfully long time without turning, breaking, or revealing any features. We were under San Francisco, there ought to be underground cables, water pipes, sewer lines. As long as we’d been walking we should have been under the bay by now. I shouldn’t have felt like I was in the stone dungeon of a medieval castle. I caught a faint whiff of incense. I tried to follow the trace of the scent, thinking it would lead us to a door, a room, anything but the maze of tunnels.

A break in the stone wall revealed a smooth plywood door. It didn’t have a lock.

Like other doors we’d encountered, this one also had a sign on it, a vertical length of paper with Chinese characters.

“What’s it say?” I said, looking back at Anastasia.

She studied it a moment. “It’s a warning.” As if she hadn’t expected anything different.

I snorted a short laugh. Of course it was a warning.

It was a pocket door, the kind that slid sideways into the wall, but it seemed to be spring loaded, or stuck, because I couldn’t get it open. I grabbed the fingerhold carved into one side and shook—it rattled in its frame as if jammed. Maybe I could wrench it loose.

After figuring out what I thought was the side that opened, I worked my fingers into the gap until I found the edge of the door. The door frame scraped my skin, but I also felt a sense of hope. I could do this, get it open, and get us all out of this place. Standing back and leaning over, I braced my legs and put my weight into pulling back on the door, shaking it hard every now and then to try to loosen it. When it budged a quarter of an inch, I grinned and pulled harder, until it jumped another six inches.

“Ha!” I announced in victory.

“Where’s it go?” Ben asked.

“Dunno.” I put my face to the opening; the hallway appeared to continue on in darkness. Ahead, a faint white light glowed. An emergency light in a room, maybe, or the exterior light over a doorway? A streetlight and freedom?

I jammed my shoulder into the opening to force it wide enough for me to slip through.

“Are you sure you should be doing that?” Ben asked, hovering. He put his hand on the wall next to me and peered over my head through the gap. “I can’t see anything in there.”

Exhaling, I flattened myself as much as I could, pushed against the door, and popped on through. I stumbled away from the gap.

“There, see?” I said. “No problem—”

The door slammed shut behind me.

“Kitty!” Ben shouted through the wood. He banged on it; the sound was muted.

This side didn’t have any kind of indent to use as a handle. I pushed the door, rattled it, tried to get my fingers into the gap, but this time, the door didn’t budge, didn’t offer a centimeter of purchase.

“Kitty!”

“I’m okay, but I can’t see how to open it.”

The banging against the door became deeper, steadier. Ben was throwing his whole body against it; the vibrations pounded against my hands, which I’d been holding flat against the wood. When the door started to bow toward me, I backed away, expecting him to splinter through it at any moment.

I stumbled and fell before I realized that the floor behind me suddenly sloped downward. Even then I would have recovered, flailing a bit before regaining my balance, except that after a few feet of sloping, the floor dropped away entirely, and I fell into an open pit. I was too surprised to even scream.

AFTER HITTING THE hard concrete bottom of the shaft, I lay on my back, blinking into darkness. My Wolf’s vision had adjusted to the distant, pale light that still shone and I made out shapes, sensing the closeness of the walls, the stuffiness of the subterranean room. The tunnel was a faint, glowing circle above me. That had been a hell of a fall. My heart was racing, my breaths came in gasps, but even Wolf was shocked and quiet.