Carrie Vaughn - Kitty's House of Horrors

“I’ll go,” Ariel said.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “It’s my stupid idea. I’ll volunteer.”

Anastasia said, “I’ll go. Some of us are better equipped for this sort of situation.”

“But I want to help,” Ariel said. She sounded so earnest. She wasn’t a supernatural creature; she didn’t have otherworldly powers. She was just a person with a few folk spells. And she wanted to help. I wanted to hug her.

“We’ll need someone to keep watch while the three of us search,” Grant said. “We can keep an eye on each other that way.”

He made it sound sinister.

So Grant, Anastasia, and I stepped out to the front porch, but I was sure they were watching each other as much as they looked out to the dark, searching for an attack. Ariel, joined by Jeffrey, waited by the door, and their job was to look to the forest for anything suspicious. Grant held a flashlight; Anastasia and I didn’t. A faint glow from candles leaked to the outside, but otherwise, nothing intruded on my night vision. I could see individual trees and the stripe of sand along the lake shore. Above, the Milky Way was a visible band, a cloud of stars. I had my ears and nose tuned to the air, listening for footsteps, voices.

What I needed were a bunch of the guys from a police procedural TV show. Then I needed the world to act like the world in a police procedural TV show so that they could actually figure out what was going on by the scraps of clues lying around. They had to be lying around, right? A little piece of fabric that would light up under a UV light with a complete description of what was happening?

Didn’t think so.

Anastasia ran her fingers along the wood post where the railing had broken off, studying the sabotage that had killed Dorian.

“Are you okay?” I said softly.

“Fine.” She turned her attention to the clearing in front of the porch and walked away.

We went along the porch, searching for anomalies. Then, reluctantly, I moved off the porch, to the steps. Every third second I glanced to the trees, sure that something was watching us. Maybe it was the paranoia talking.

I stopped on the last step.

A stripe of gravel in front of the steps was different. I hadn’t noticed it before because I hadn’t been looking. The brain glosses over a thousand anomalies a day—someone had been fixing the wiring or the pipes, or putting in a sprinkler system, or making a repair. There were a hundred reasons why there’d be a stretch of off-color ground near a house like this. But now, when I looked on everything with suspicion—what was the reason? A mound of dirt, raised fractionally, as if something was buried.

Grant saw me staring and said, “I’ll get a shovel.”

Ariel shone the flashlight on the spot while we dug. We didn’t have to dig deep, only a few inches. There, just under the surface, we found a steel rod sprouting a dozen spikes, maybe a couple inches each. Again, I could come up with a dozen reasons why something like this might be here: some arcane piece of construction left over from a remodeling job and accidentally buried, some unknown bit of landscaping. But digging out to either side, we found the rod was attached to a motor, and the motor protruded above ground, just a little, in a spot sheltered by the porch steps. There, a tiny antenna suggested some kind of radio transmitter or receiver.

Grant demonstrated: when the signal arrived, the motor would turn the rod, and the spikes would spring to vertical, emerging from the ground like some parking lot tire-killing defense barrier.

“Oh, my God,” Ariel said, wincing.

The spikes were a razor-sharp steel and silver plate. If Lee, Jerome, or I had been standing here or passing over this spot when the signal came, the spikes would have launched, torn through our shoes, and cut our feet. Silver poisoning would do the rest. It would be slow and agonizing, as silver-poisoned blood climbed from the feet to the heart.

The trap was sneaky, clever, and cruel. Standing outside, my back suddenly felt exposed. There wasn’t any kind of trip wire. It wasn’t automatic, which meant someone had to be watching to know the right moment to spring the trap. Maybe our hunter was out there right now, watching us. Peering through the scope of some high-powered sniper rifle. With silver bullets. I took a deep breath but couldn’t scent anything on the breeze, and the smells of the others around me were too strong. But he was out there.

Grant completely excavated the trap, found where the motors on each side were anchored to the ground with stakes, and dug them out. He shoved the whole thing under the porch, out of the way. My skin was still prickling with nerves.

When the crack came, I thought it was a tree branch breaking. I didn’t make the connection, because it didn’t sound like gunfire—it was too small, sharp, and focused. A silencer, I realized. But stuff like that only happened in the movies, right? I waited for the rip of pain that was sure to follow the gunshot.

Jeffrey caught Ariel as she fell. She dropped the flashlight.

“Inside! Now!” Grant hollered. I was already on the porch, opening the door and helping pull Ariel inside. We laid her down on the floor, and I slammed the door shut. The big picture window in front didn’t have drapes. I wished I could draw drapes and shut out the world.

“What is it? What’s going on?” Tina said.

“Oh, no,” Jeffrey breathed.

Ariel wasn’t moving. I dropped beside her, touched her forehead. Her eyes stared. “Ariel?”

I couldn’t hear her heart, but her skin was still warm. She was just standing there a second ago—

Kneeling beside me, Grant felt her neck, then turned her face. He smoothed back the hair over her ear and pointed to the bullet hole. A tiny little thing, maybe the width of a pencil, with just a tiny trickle of blood leaking from it. But it went right through the middle of her brain.

I bent over until my face was next to hers and tried not to scream. I held her, pressed my forehead to hers, and clenched my hands. A howl was building in my throat, but if I let it go, I wouldn’t stop. I’d have to shift. I’d have to go running, to find the person who did this and rip his throat out. And if I tried to do that in a fit of rage, I’d fail.

“Kitty,” Grant said. I expected to feel a hand on my shoulder, a comforting touch, but I didn’t, which was good. I’d snap at anyone who offered such a meaningless, stupid gesture.

I took a long, snuffling breath and realized I was crying. My head was going to explode. My hands were going to turn into claws. I wanted to know if the bullet was silver. I wanted to know if it had been meant for me. It should have been me.

Sitting back, I idly smoothed Ariel’s hair. I hadn’t gotten to know her well enough. She was too young and pretty for this. That scream built up again. Despairing, I looked at Grant.

His expression was long, mournful. I’d never seen him look so sad.

“We have to get whoever did this,” I murmured. Grant nodded once.

Wolf was close to the surface. I felt myself walking around with a hooded gaze, my head low, watchful, my body stiff, my fingers curled. Not just Wolf, but Wolf on the hunt. A Wolf who wanted blood.

I tried to relax and take a deep breath, because I didn’t want to shift right now. Because I had a feeling that was what the hunter expected me to do. Grant watched me; he’d seen this before, and he knew the signs.

I shook my head. “I’m okay.” I wasn’t, not really, but I wasn’t going to shift. Not right now.

The others watched us: Gemma with her hand over her face, like she couldn’t believe it; Tina looking away, holding Jeffrey’s arm. Jeffrey facing us, but with his eyes closed. Lee, staring out the window, hands clenched by his sides.