Carrie Vaughn: Kitty Goes to War

“Right. No more dodging. Time for a straight answer. You’re a wizard. You learned how to be a wizard in prison.”

In a moment of sheepishness he ducked, looking away. Scuffed a boot in the snow. Then he studied the sky as if we were discussing the weather, which we sort of were, but still. Tyler and Ben had gone to get Franklin out of the snow, and they stood by him now, watching Cormac, waiting for his answer.

“Cormac?”

“I’m not the wizard,” he said finally. “Amelia Parker is.”

“Amelia Parker—”

About a year before his release, halfway into his sentence, Cormac asked me to find some information on a woman who’d been executed a century earlier at the Colorado Territorial Correction Facility, where he was serving his time. I’d discovered Amelia Parker: an odd woman, British, a world traveler and collector of exotic knowledge, something out of a Victorian adventure story. This just got even more odd.

“Amelia Parker is?” I said. “She’s not dead?”

“Not all of her is,” Cormac said.

“Just so we’re clear, we are talking about a woman who was hanged a hundred years ago,” I said. “She was a wizard. She had powers. And now she’s . . . possessing you? Is that it?”

“I guess you could say I met her ghost while I was on the inside. She needed a body and I needed . . . I don’t know. Company, I guess.”

“So, what, you guys just hooked up? So now you’re some kind of possessed zombie wizard?”

He gave me a look. The “you talk too much” look.

Ben had the most precious, adorable, totally confused look on his face I’d ever seen. His brow was furrowed, his mouth open, like he was trying to decide between screaming at Cormac, laughing him off, or asking if this Amelia woman was hot.

“I think I need to sit down,” Ben said. He looked at the drifts of snow around him, growled a little, and looked back at Cormac. “Are you okay? It’s still you in there, right? You’re not possessed possessed, right?”

“I’m fine,” Cormac said, sounding tired.

“But you have her power? Her knowledge?” I asked, trying to understand. Not that the situation could ever be clear cut or described in a straightforward manner.

“No,” Cormac said. “It’s all her. Sometimes, she’s in charge. That’s all. Don’t ask me to explain it. It’s just one of those things.”

We stood in the cold, glaring at each other, uncertain how to move forward.

Tyler cleared his throat and pointed at the unconscious man in the snow. “We really should get this guy out of here.”

Tyler and Ben hauled Franklin up and brought him to the Humvee, covering him with blankets. He made a noise, so he was still with us.

“I guess we should take him to a hospital,” I said. I didn’t know how we were going to explain this at the emergency room. I couldn’t prove anything that happened. And after everything, I might still be sued for libel.

“Are we done here?” Ben said to Cormac. “Spell broken, no more crazy weather?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s over.”

“We’re not done with this conversation,” I said to him, pointing. “You still have explaining to do.”

He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other.

The Humvee was pretty smashed up, the whole driver’s side crunched in, but it was still drivable if you ignored the disturbing clacking noises in the engine. But that was what this vehicle was designed for, getting beat up and still going, right? I wasn’t looking forward to telling Colonel Stafford about it, though.

Franklin’s Hummer started up, but the noises it made sounded pretty sickly as well. We pulled it over to the curb and left it.

Cormac helped with that much. He also patted down Franklin and cleaned out all the charms and amulets from his pockets. He must have found a dozen of them. The look he gave me said he wasn’t going to explain what he found. But I couldn’t argue—Franklin was powerless now.

“I’ll catch up with you later, then,” Cormac said, waving himself off. He went to his Jeep and drove away, just like that.

“I don’t even know what to worry about anymore with him,” Ben said, watching him leave.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said, hooking my arm around his. “This is a new one for me, too.”

He sighed. “Never a dull moment.”

WE TOOK Harold Franklin to the emergency room at St. Joseph’s. The place looked understaffed—the waiting room was crowded, and the official-looking people in scrubs all wore exhausted, vacant stares. But there were a couple of orderlies with a gurney to help pull Franklin out of the Humvee. I gave them his name and the phone number for his office, and told them we’d found him in the snow, passed out and close to freezing. They didn’t ask us to stick around, and I didn’t offer.

Then, finally, we went home. I remembered to call my mother. I wasn’t sure she believed me when I told her that everything was fine, but what could she do about it? “Mom, trust me, you don’t want to know,” I finally told her. That, she couldn’t argue with.

I’d coped well enough with the cold of the last two nights and day. I’d been uncomfortable without being in outright pain. But as soon as we got inside, I changed out of my damp clothes into sweats and a big wool sweater. We still had power, and I really appreciated access to a hot shower and central heating.

The next morning, the sun shone on a brilliantly crystalline world. A thick layer of snow covered everything—cars, buildings, trees, streets. Even power lines had fluffy, glittering strips of snow balanced on them. Cleanup began. Plows caught up with the backlog, power lines were repaired, tree branches cleared away, and the world came back to life. The talking heads on the news shows kept saying that this should have been so much worse, that the weather radars had been tracking a vast storm system that had suddenly coalesced over the city, but that it had somehow dissipated overnight, as abruptly as it had appeared. Not that anyone was complaining. Weather reporters gleefully described a rare case of thundersnow over downtown Denver and seemed very impressed. If only they knew.

Cormac came over for coffee.

Tyler was still asleep on the sofa. Last night, he’d seemed inordinately happy at the sight of a sofa in a real living room. He said this was the first time he’d had a chance to sleep in a normal house—not outside, not in barracks, not in Shumacher’s werewolf-proof cells—since before he left for Afghanistan. I’d wanted to hug him. Instead, I smiled and wished him sweet dreams.

Ben, Cormac, and I sat at the dining room table nursing mugs of coffee. Maybe we could finally have a real conversation. The pack of three, I called us sometimes. These two knew me and my weird life better than anyone else. They’d been there for some of the more pivotal moments of it. They’d both pulled my ass out of the fire more than once.

We waited for the explanation. Cormac drew a breath, held his mug in both hands, and got started.

“Before she was hanged, Amelia worked a spell that moved her consciousness into the stones of the prison. And she wasn’t alone; there’s all kinds of freaky shit going on there. Hauntings, demons—I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. But to escape, she needed a living body. Once she discovered she couldn’t just replace the person already living there, she had to find someone who could put up with her.” He spread his hands as if to say, ta-da .

“So you were the crazy one,” I said.

He shrugged.

“It had to be the right kind of crazy, I’m betting,” Ben said, shaking his head in disbelief. But he was smiling. As though now that we had an explanation for why Cormac had been acting funny, we didn’t have to worry anymore. Except that where Cormac was concerned, we’d always worry, for one reason or another.