Carrie Vaughn - Kitty Goes to War

Tyler’s Humvee seemed to be going awfully fast as it rounded the corner. I braced, waiting for it to slide and spin out on the ice—but it didn’t. He brought it right up to the curb, where it stopped cold.

The vehicle was squat, low profile, low center of gravity. It had four doors, and I could see a stark interior through the windshield. The tires had chains on them. Maybe we could get to Denver after all.

Ben returned with supplies: phone, a blanket, road flares, a bottle of water, and a ragged city map. Tyler was waving to us from the cab of the Humvee.

“You ready for this?” Ben said.

I hadn’t stopped to consider whether I was ready for this. I took a deeper breath—my ribs still hurt, my stomach was sore. They hurt less if I didn’t think about it. So, time to power through.

“Yeah,” I said, brushing back his mussed-up hair.

Tyler drove, and Ben and I sat in back where we could plan. We got moving, heading east, back to state Highway 83 rather than the interstate, which we assumed would still be closed farther north. We were hoping to see little to no traffic. Tyler assured us that with the vehicle’s four-wheel drive and the chains, we ought to be able to make good time. The highway went straight to Parker.

The Humvee was rough and noisy. Between the rattle of the chains on the tires, roaring engine, the uninsulated steel cab, and wind beating against the windows, I couldn’t hear much of anything, and every little bump jostled us. But I had to make these calls.

“Hey, Shaun?” I shouted into my phone.

My werewolf hearing was the only way I heard his reply, a clear voice under all the rattling. “Kitty? What’s going on? What’s all that noise, I can barely hear you.”

“It’s a long story. I’m in a Humvee heading north. You feel like saving the city?”

“Does it involve stopping this snow?” he said.

“Yeah, actually.”

“Then I’m totally in.”

“Cool. This is going to take footwork and phone calls. Where are you?”

“I’m snowed in at the restaurant. They weren’t predicting this. I thought we were going to get the usual snowy day lunch crowd looking for coffee and a bowl of soup. This is epic.”

“Yeah, more than you know. Look, Cormac—you remember Cormac? He’s going to be sending you a photo of a symbol. We have to put that symbol over the door of every Speedy Mart in town.”

“And that’ll stop the snow? That’s kind of crazy.” He chuckled.

“Shaun, we’re werewolves, we don’t get to judge crazy.”

Ben had the map spread out over his lap. We didn’t have anything to write with, so he’d poked holes in the Speedy Mart locations. “Here, I think I got them all.”

I double-checked his work and found a couple he missed. Now we had to figure out who lived closest to where and start making assignments.

A couple of members of the pack—such as Rachel, who lived in the foothills west of town—were too far away to be any help. With the weather like this, they were probably socked in under a couple of feet of snow by now. But with a few of the other locations, we were in luck—Becky lived a couple of blocks from the store in Littleton. Trey lived up north in Broomfield and ought to be able to reach the two northernmost locations. Shaun would cover the one downtown, after calling everyone and passing along the symbol.

“Have them call me if they argue. This isn’t a request, it’s an order from on high.” I rarely pulled rank in the pack. Instead, I usually cajoled and prodded. I was hoping the rarity of me issuing orders would get across how serious this was.

I was also hoping that Cormac was right, and that this would work.

“This isn’t going to be easy,” Shaun said.

“No,” I agreed. Even with help, we might not cover all the locations. But this seemed like the best chance. “Our other option is to call all of the Speedy Marts and see if we can talk the clerks into posting the symbol themselves.” What were the odds?

“It wouldn’t hurt to have someone on that as backup,” Ben said. “We just need someone with a phone book and a phone.”

“Okay, let’s get Rachel on that, since she’s probably snowed in anyway.”

Maybe we’d covered all the bases.

We raced on. Tyler sat straight, both hands on the wheel, focused ahead and concentrating. There wasn’t any traffic, not anymore, though we passed abandoned cars that had slid off the shoulder and gotten stuck. Every now and then I saw flashing lights through the driving snow—the yellow warning lights of snowplows, the red and blue of a police car once. I expected us to get pulled over by a cop wanting to know what the heck we were doing out here. But maybe you saw a military Humvee driving with purpose up the highway in a snowstorm, you figured it was on a mission.

I called Cormac. “Did you get ahold of Shaun?”

“I did. He’s got the picture. I’ll send it to you next.”

“You think this is really going to work?” I asked.

“I guess we’ll find out,” he said, his wry fatalism from the old days showing through. “I—I think it will. I have faith.”

I’d never known Cormac to have much faith in anything except the gun in his hand and his ability to shoot. Now that he’d lost the guns, what did he have faith in? And why did that make me worry? “Cormac. Seriously. Are you okay?” Frowning, Ben glanced at me.

“I’m fine. I’ll explain everything when this is all over.” He clicked off.

“That just means there really is something to explain,” I said, staring at my phone.

“He is okay, right?” Ben said. And I really didn’t know.

My phone beeped—photo coming through.

The gromoviti znaci , the thunder mark, looked like a wheel, or a very stylized flower. Six spokes radiated from a space, with a circle in the middle. On the wheel’s outer ring, between each spoke, was another circle. I knew enough about magic to know circles were powerful, often used as symbols of protection. This was one of the more intricate, beautiful versions of the pattern I’d seen.

Ben leaned over to look at the screen on my phone. “That’s it, huh?”

“Yup.”

“I’m trying to figure out if ‘saving the city’ would fly as a defense for vandalism charges,” he said.

“You’re always the practical one.” I kissed his cheek.

The storm around us was morphing from a pale gray to a dark gray—the sun was setting. I wondered if twilight or nightfall was part of Franklin’s spell, and if that was how much time we had to stop this.

“How’s it going, Tyler?” I said.

“It’s nice having a job to do,” he said, smiling a little. “A mission.”

I was glad someone was enjoying this. I’d have been happier at home, safe in our den.

We approached the lights of Parker.

INAVIGATED TYLER to the Speedy Mart, which was on the corner of a wide intersection between subdivisions. The snowplows had given up awhile ago, and the wind had blown drifts across the streets. We only made it through because Tyler gunned the Humvee, and the chains bit into the snow. The streetlights were on; sheets of huge snowflakes—golf-ball-size chunks of icy, clinging snow, really—fell through the orange beams. It would have been beautiful—if I’d been watching it from inside a heated room.

A single car, half covered by a drift of snow, was parked in the lot. A light was on inside the convenience store, but I didn’t see anyone behind the counter. The place might not have been open, but that was okay—we could put the symbol on the outside. I hoped.

Tyler swerved to a stop by the curb in front of the door.

“I don’t suppose anyone has a pen and paper? A can of spray paint?” I said.