Carrie Vaughn - Kitty Goes to War

“What the—” one of Stafford’s soldiers exclaimed, peering over our shoulders.

Tyler stared down at him, lips pursed. Ben let out a sigh. I looked around. Wind had altered the tracks, making it harder to decipher what had happened. But I didn’t smell Vanderman. And the snow was only disturbed in one direction. I could almost see it: this poor guy had been walking by on some other duty. He spotted a crazed maniac, probably naked in freezing weather, running across the sidewalk. He’d yelled at the guy to stop. Threatened, his target had run at him. The soldier may not even have had time to fire the handgun now lying in its own bed of snow nearby.

Tyler retrieved the pistol, slid back the chamber, then threw the gun away.

“He got shots off,” Tyler said. “But the bullets aren’t silver.”

I crouched in the snow and rested my hand gently on the soldier’s body, as if it mattered. Taking a careful, searching breath, I learned what I needed to and quickly moved away.

“It was him?” Tyler said. He must have been hoping for a different outcome.

I nodded. Walters’s scent was all over the body.

WALTERS, TRAILING blood across the snow, had gone inside. No one else had come back out. He and Vanderman were still in the building.

“Where is he? Where is he now?” one of the escorts said swinging his rifle around.

Tyler glared at them. “You two—go back and tell Colonel Stafford that Walters is here, at the hospital.”

The pair hesitated. One was searching wildly for the unseen killer. The other was staring at the bloody body. Tyler touched this one on the arm. “Go on. Tell Stafford.” He spoke it like an order.

The soldier nodded, grabbed the other, and they ran back to the Humvee.

“Thanks,” I said, relieved. I’d started to worry that they would either shoot us—or that we’d have to rescue them.

“They’re safer this way,” Tyler said.

The three of us went inside the hospital and locked the door behind us.

The building was quiet. The cars in the lot meant that people must have been there, and while I could smell them, none were out and about. I hoped that meant they were safely locked away in rooms and offices. A heater vented somewhere, a distant hissing. We found stairs leading to the basement—I didn’t want us getting stuck in an elevator. Ben was at my side, face tight with concentration, looking all around us. He kept flexing his hands, as if feeling claws instead of fingers. Tyler walked behind us, turning to scan all directions, above and below in the stairwell.

Before we reached the downstairs level where Vanderman was being kept, a noise began to echo. The crunch of something metal breaking, the scuffle of a fight. Of a body smacking against tile. Then more quiet.

“Hoo, boy,” I muttered.

Slowly, I opened the metal door and emerged into the corridor.

Tyler stepped in front of me— taking point, the term was. He and Ben kept me between them, a protective shield, which was sweet, but made me growly because I couldn’t see past them very well.

“I don’t need bodyguards,” I said, stepping away from them to get some breathing room.

A tangy-sweet smell cut sharply through the chilled air, stabbing from my nose to my brain, and lingering on the back of my tongue as a familiar taste. More blood, freshly spilled. The second time in ten minutes—we were too late.

Part of me wanted to leave—this was army business. Not our territory, not our fight. But it was—I’d promised to protect Walters, and he’d seriously overstepped his bounds. That meant he was also my responsibility. I should have stopped him, I should have stopped this .

Ben and I stood back to back, a natural defensive posture, as we scanned the area, looking for the body. Or bodies. Tyler ranged a couple of yards ahead, glancing down the hallway and back at us—scanning for danger, and looking to us for cues about what to do next.

The smell came from an intersection ahead. I approached it slowly, breathing deeply and listening, and turned right to follow the scent of blood.

We found the body a few feet in, hidden around the corner. In a white uniform, he might have been a nurse or an orderly. His blood streaked across the linoleum floor. I knelt beside him, started to turn him over, and got as far as seeing his ruined neck and face before letting him be. The muscles on my back twitched, Wolf growing in my awareness, listening for enemies, waiting for an attack. This time, I smelled both Walters and Vanderman among the blood.

“I assume that’s Vanderman,” Ben said. “Walters got him out.” He looked in the opposite direction I did, and his breathing quickened. The two rogues could be anywhere now.

“I’m assuming,” I said.

“I could have stopped this,” Tyler said. “I should have kept better track of Walters. I should have made sure none of us got out. We shouldn’t have—”

“Stop it,” I said. He lowered his gaze. But I knew how he felt—I was the one who argued to let Walters out in the first place.

“Kitty,” Ben said, whispering. “Can you really talk them down?”

A couple of Special Forces–trained werewolves on the loose? I had to shake my head. I didn’t think I could, not with blood spilled. I remembered Vanderman in his cell, endlessly pacing, glaring out at me, murderous and unrepentant.

“We’ve got the gun,” Tyler said. “We can take them.” He sounded bitter, but determined.

That somehow didn’t make me feel any better.

“Come on,” I said, and retreated back around the corner from the direction Walters and Vanderman were likely to come at us. I hoped it gave us a more defensible position. It would at least give us some warning before the two werewolves launched an attack. “We need backup for this.”

The soldiers should have contacted Colonel Stafford, who would be here any minute now, but I wanted to make sure. Then I realized I didn’t have the first idea how to get ahold of Colonel Stafford. So I pulled out my cell phone and called Dr. Shumacher.

She answered before the phone had finished ringing. “Hello? Kitty?”

“Hi, Dr. Schumacher. I was wondering, could you give me Colonel Stafford’s phone number? I mean, if he even has a cell phone. Or if he has a secretary who has one. Or whatever.” My phone voice sounded like my radio voice, I realized—I came across far peppier than I was really feeling.

“Kitty, where are you, what’s happening, what’s going on?”

I hesitated a beat. “I expected Colonel Stafford would have called you the minute I showed up.”

“No, he didn’t,” she said, sounding frustrated. I couldn’t blame her for being put out. She probably thought she and Stafford were partners on equal footing. Stafford probably wasn’t thinking about her at all.

I sighed. “Fort Carson’s under lockdown. I managed to talk Stafford into letting us through because I thought I knew where to find Walters, and I was right.”

“He’s at the hospital,” Schumacher said. “He’s trying to release Vanderman.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He already has.”

“I should be there, I should have found a way there, this never should have happened.”

“Are you snowed in in Denver?”

“The news says it’s a storm of the century.”

“Hey, we usually get those every ten years or so,” I said. Ben was watching me, smirking—so I was still being too chipper. Tyler was braced like he was going to pounce on the first thing that came around the corner. He hadn’t drawn the gun yet. Maybe he wanted to do this with his bare claws. “Doctor, I need to get ahold of Stafford. I need to tell him what’s happening here.”