Carrie Vaughn: Kitty Goes to War

It was a true answer. Christopher nodded.

“If you’re going to live in my territory, you need to live by my rules. We can give you a safe place to spend your full moons. We can help you cope. But you have to do your part to keep the peace. You must help when I call on you. Don’t cause trouble.”

“I don’t want any trouble,” Tyler said. “I . . . I just want to come home.”

“I know. Sometimes it doesn’t always work out that way.”

“I need help,” he said. “Can you help?” His voice was bleak, tight with sadness, like he expected Christopher to say no and send him away. I would take him back to Denver, I would let him into my pack, he had to know that. But this was home to him, before he’d gone away and traveled through hell.

Sarah looked up at Christopher, her lips pressed into a line, as if she wanted to say something but was waiting for him. We were all looking at him, waiting for a response. His expression was thoughtful.

“I think we can,” Christopher said. Tyler bowed his head and sighed. I let out my breath, too.

Ben took my hand and squeezed. “I think it’s time we go.”

He was right. We’d done what we came here to do, delivered our charge to his new home, and done it peacefully. And now we were invading someone else’s territory. Christopher and Sarah probably would have let us stay for a visit, maybe even given us the tour of Seattle if we’d asked. But making a clean break seemed like the thing to do. Let Tyler join his new pack without us around to divide his loyalties.

When Tyler looked at me, he had an expression I’d never seen on him—the tension was gone and he smiled. He was relieved. “Kitty. Thank you.”

“I’m not sure I did all that much. I think you’d have been okay eventually.”

“But it’s been nice having a cheerleader around telling me that,” he said.

We hugged tight, cheeks to ears. And I let him go. After shaking hands with Ben, he moved forward to his new pack. Sarah took his arm, held his hand, and led him to the others. One at a time, they touched him, putting their scent on him, adding his scent to theirs. I heard names, introductions, and Tyler smiled through it all.

I turned back to Christopher. “Be careful with him. He’s had a rough time.”

“Is that a warning?”

“No. I don’t know. I just don’t know what your next step is, and he’s not really ready to be on his own.” I didn’t want Tyler to ever think he was alone, to fall into that hopeless place again.

Christopher shrugged. “A bunch of us will probably head to my place, grill some steaks, sit around and talk.”

I brightened. “Hey, that’s how I’d handle it.”

Ben put his hand on my back. “She’s always worried that she’s doing the pack alpha thing wrong.”

“The way I look at it, if no one’s flying off the handle and getting killed, you’re doing it right,” he said. “If it makes you feel better, call me any time. If you want to check up on Joseph, or just to talk.”

“Thanks.” And my network got a little bigger, which made me feel a little better. I turned to Ben. “Ready to go?”

“Yeah, that sounds good.”

Christopher offered his hand then, and we both shook it in turn, like normal human beings. We could pretend to be regular people.

Ben and I drove south and east for a couple of hundred miles, until the knots in our shoulders faded, and we could step outside the car and not smell foreign wolves. We got a room at a motel near Boise, to sleep for a few hours.

Ben and I lay on top of the bed, leaning against each other, still in our clothes, too tired to move, too wired to sleep. I was at that stage of exhaustion where closing my eyes hurt. My body still vibrated from the road. Ben must have felt the same; he stared at the TV, flipping channels slowly, rhythmically, without seeming to comprehend what he was looking at.

I was thinking too much to really take in what was on TV. Settling more firmly against Ben’s shoulder, I started rambling.

“I’ve been thinking about history,” I said. “Werewolf soldiers aren’t a new thing. So I’m wondering where else they’ve shown up. What other wars. If we peeled back the veneer, what else would we find?”

“I sense a research project coming on,” Ben said. Flip, news show. Flip, sports channel. Flip, a twenty-year-old movie I couldn’t remember the name of.

How would I even begin such a project? The evidence would be circumstantial: military units or individuals with a reputation for aggression, viciousness, and for possessing supernatural abilities. Bloody battles happening on nights of the full moon. How intriguing. There had to be a way to find out.

“Do you think Tyler’s going to be okay?” I asked after another five minutes.

“Eventually,” Ben said. “I think he’s going to be living one day at a time for a while.”

Yeah. I knew how that went. I sighed. “I wonder if this is what it’s like to send a kid to college.”

Not that I was ever going to find out what that was like for real. But I could imagine: a mix of pride and sadness. Was Tyler going to be all right? Would he write?

I couldn’t have children—no female lycanthrope could because embryos didn’t survive shape-shifting. Some days, I thought I had no business even thinking of having kids, the way my life went. The late hours, the supernatural politics, the death-defying, injury-producing escapes. I could hear the phone call now: “Hi, Mom? Could you look after Junior while I chase a rogue werewolf across half the state?” And who would look after a baby on full-moon nights? So maybe it was just as well.

It still made me sad. I could find a way. I could adopt, I could hire a baby-sitter. I’d made the rest of my life work pretty well, hadn’t I? I wiped my eyes before the tears could start.

“Hey,” Ben said. “You okay?”

I felt stupid. Whiney, needy, and stupid. I ought to be able to cope without dumping all this on Ben. And I knew what he’d say to that: who else could I talk to, if not him?

“Do you think I’d be a good mother?” I said.

He glanced at me. Then he shut off the TV and set the remote aside. “That’s a bigger question than you’re making it sound.” I must have frowned, because he put his arms around me. “I think you’d be an excellent mother. You’d drive your kids crazy, but you’d do it excellently.”

“Really?” I said.

He grabbed me, one hand lacing into my hair, the other settling on my hip, and pulled me into a long, startling kiss. And then some. And then some more, before we both came up gasping for air. I had on a silly grin.

“Really,” he said.

Suddenly, being too wired to sleep seemed like a good thing.