Carrie Vaughn - Kitty's House of Horrors

I kept holding the needle in my vein and waited.

After a minute, Anastasia pulled away and held Gemma’s face to look at her. “We must be strong. He would want us to fight, yes?” Gemma nodded but still looked forlorn. She watched as Anastasia returned to me and drew a second vial, staring at the blood spilling into the tube.

This one Anastasia drank quickly and without drama. Discreetly, she withdrew and capped the needle, wrapped up the equipment for disposal, and put it in a small vinyl pouch. It was all very clinical. Made it easier for me. Which might have been the point.

“That’s all we need for now,” Anastasia said. “You need your strength, as well. But I may ask for more later.”

I rubbed my elbow; the needle-sized hole in my arm was already healed.

I was still sitting there when Ariel brought me a glass of warm orange juice and a couple of cookies. “When people give blood they’re supposed to drink a lot of fluids, right?” She shrugged, looking sheepish.

“Thanks,” I said.

“So,” Anastasia said, standing at one end of the room, arms crossed, and gazing across it. Grant regarded her from the other side of the room. I couldn’t help but think: the two most powerful people here were facing off. “Now that that’s taken care of, do we have a plan?”

No one answered.

I stared at the picture window and to the big bad world outside, where someone was waiting to kill us. The first response was always: turn Wolf and run. But the hunter was waiting and had silver. Had to use brains, not instinct. The brain clicked.

I knew someone who would know exactly how to get out of this situation. Not that I could call him. Not that he could come and help even if I could call him.

So I had to figure out how to think like Cormac.

The first time I met Cormac Bennett he wanted to kill me, because that was what he did. He hunted monsters. I talked him out of it, and ever since then our friendship had the undertone of an ironic running joke. He’d introduced me to Ben, who was his cousin, and who I ended up marrying. Cormac had saved my life. He represented possibilities. Roads not taken. But that was another story.

He also gave me access to a perspective, to a way of thinking, that I otherwise never would have had experience with. I hunted under duress because I was a werewolf, and I limited myself to far wilderness where I wouldn’t hurt anyone. But people like Cormac, who did it on purpose, who made it a profession, who honed their skills—

That was the kind of person who was after us now.

I found myself asking, what would Cormac do? If it were Cormac out there, what could I expect? If I could call Cormac for help, what would he say?

The funny thing? I could hear the answer.

The hunter would try to draw us out. He’d try to separate us. Right now, we were a pack with our own territory, and we had a defensive advantage. Hunting other predators is different than hunting prey, Cormac said. We were predators.

If it were Cormac out there and he’d had time to prepare, he’d have trapped the house. He wouldn’t give us an escape route. He’d have studied us, he’d know our weaknesses. He’d use silver on the lycanthropes, stakes and sunlight on the vampires. He’d have a plan for each one of us.

We just had to figure out what those plans were, and how to turn them around. Use them against him. And even more importantly, we had to figure out how to get back in contact with the outside world. Get the power working, find a phone, call in the cavalry.

Our hunter had had time to prepare. We hadn’t. We’d have to move fast if we were going to make up the difference.

I turned from the window. Everyone was doing something different, all of them stuck in their own worlds. Jeffrey and Tina were on one sofa; Jeffrey looked like he was meditating, Tina was tapping a pen on a piece of paper but not writing. On the other sofa, Anastasia was still comforting Gemma, who through her grief was showing her youth, her inexperience as a vampire. She might never have lost anyone she loved before. Ariel was pacing, wringing her hands. Lee was on a chair, drinking a beer. Grant was staring at the window, searching the darkness, like me.

We were sitting ducks, waiting to be picked off. We all knew better than that.

“I think we should post a watch,” I said. Everyone looked toward me, a group of stark faces. I wanted to duck, apologetic for breaking the quiet, but I didn’t. I was an alpha wolf, and I could do this. “Probably from upstairs. It’ll be easier to stay out of sight of anyone with a rifle. Then we need to check the house. It might be rigged with explosives, traps. Anything like that. We should also look for weapons we can use.”

After a moment of stunned silence, Ariel said, voice wavering, “Are you serious? Explosives? ”

Lee chuckled. His face flushed, and I wondered if maybe that wasn’t his first beer of the evening. “What are you going to do, wage some kind of war?”

“Yes,” I said. “Damn straight.”

Anastasia stood, and all gazes turned to her. She drew the eye with her poise, her bearing, chin tipped up, gaze like iron. I suddenly felt like we couldn’t do half badly with her on our side.

“I’m less interested in the war than I am in the conspiracy,” she said. “I want to know how this happened. How it was possible for this… situation… to arise. I want to know who made it possible.” She looked at Odysseus Grant.

An epic stare-down between them began. I looked back and forth between the two.

“You want to explain what you’re talking about?” I said to Anastasia.

“You know what I’m talking about,” she said. “You know what he’s capable of.”

Grant hadn’t reacted. Not a muscle on his face twitched. Gazing at him, Anastasia looked like she could raise a hand and summon storms. At the moment, I was thinking they were both capable of a hell of a lot. I didn’t particularly want to see what.

“I do know,” I said, my voice low, steady. The talking-down-a-hostage-situation voice. “And I think that if he wanted to act against any of us, he’d do it a lot more elegantly and discreetly.”

Grant was near the top of my “people never to piss off” list. Because if he ever decided he had it in for me, I would just… vanish.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Grant said.

Anastasia scowled at me. “Then what do you think is happening here?”

I didn’t snap back like I wanted to, because I was still thinking like Cormac, and Anastasia didn’t have that benefit. Hell, for all her experience she might never have met anyone like Cormac. I explained carefully, thinking out loud, formulating my own hypothesis. “I think it’s pretty simple. There are people out there—bounty hunters, hit men, assassins—who want people like us dead. I think maybe one or more of them got wind of what was happening here. That they’d have a whole group of juicy targets in one place, just waiting to be picked off. They made plans, they camped out—maybe at that campsite Jerome and I found during the treasure hunt. They waited for the chance, got rid of witnesses. Now they can pick us off one by one, and that’s all they want to do. I think they hit Dorian first because they knew it would weaken you and Gemma. That means they’re smart. They know our weaknesses. So we have to pay attention. And I think we have to go after them before they get to us.”

The others took time absorbing all that. I studied them in turn, sizing them up, guessing how they’d do under pressure—assessing my pack, I realized. Most of them probably had never been hunted before. They might never have been in danger like this. Grant and Tina had, I knew. They could fight. Anastasia, probably. The old vampires didn’t survive so long without developing a few survival skills. Lee was a hunter, but he was used to being top of the food chain. Jeffrey, Ariel—I had no idea. I hated this, because Jeffrey and Ariel at least were too darned nice to be stuck in a situation like this.