Carrie Vaughn - Kitty Raises Hell

We braced, waiting for the flames to overtake us. My heart hurt, it raced so hard, bruising my ribs from the inside. My skin prickled, my shoulders bunched, fur and hackles. Wolf snarled from my hindbrain. Adrenaline kicked the need to Change into overdrive.

Ben gripped my shoulder, his fingers like claws. I touched his hand.

“What’s happening?” Jules said, low and urgent, from the next room.

“It’s here,” Tina said. “It’s looking right at us.” We stared at the doorway, where the fire had followed me, but saw nothing.

I squared my shoulders, took a breath, and wondered if this was what bungee jumping felt like. You couldn’t think of all the things that could go wrong as you stood on the edge of the precipice and looked over; you just had to take that step and trust.

“Kitty,” Ben said, his voice low, almost a growl. His hand twitched on my shoulder.

Squeezing it, I pushed it away. “Just be ready with that fire extinguisher.”

I stepped over the dark line on the floor.

All remained still. I could look through the front door and see fires still burning outside, but the fire department had those under control. By all appearances, the thing had fled, but Tina said it was still here, and I believed her.

“Hey!” I called out, venting my anger at the flames for lack of a better target. “You son of a bitch, where the hell do you get off setting fire to my city? Not to mention killing people. I’d have thought some ancient fire demon like you would have better things to do than harass me. Don’t you have a lamp somewhere that needs redecorating?”

A voice spoke words I didn’t understand, and a furnace engulfed me. Like leaving an air-conditioned house and entering a summer desert. It was supposed to be autumn, but I’d never felt so hot. The heat rumbled like a furnace pumping full-force. I heard words in the noise, but I couldn’t understand them.

This was what was supposed to happen. This was what I wanted. I ran.

My clothes might have been on fire, but I couldn’t stop. Ben and the others might have been shouting at me, but I couldn’t concentrate to hear what they might have said. Any moment, I expected to fall, to be engulfed by the thing that chased me, to be smothered in foam from the fire extinguisher, or any other of a thousand things that could happen. But none of that did. I trusted that the thing followed me, keeping to the path we’d put in place. It had to be following me, because the air was so hot I couldn’t breathe. Or maybe I was burning up, like Mick had.

Ahead of me, Jules shouted, his eyes wide with panic, urging me on like I was running a race. I sprinted into the next room, crossed the dark line drawn on the floor, and slammed shoulder first into the opposite wall, because I didn’t bother slowing down. My clothes were smoking, my skin was red.

Jules leapt forward with a jar of the blood potion, splashing it across the floor in a messy arc that managed to close off the circle painted in the room.

Inside the circle drawn in blood, the floor caught fire, exploding up in a column of flame that reached the ceiling. No little flickering campfire, this. This was the inferno of a forest fire, right in front of us.

Jules and I fell back, curling up for protection while the fire merrily burned on the hardwood. Tina and Ben appeared at the doorway. Ben had his fire extinguisher in hand and sprayed the conflagration. The foam streamed, then sputtered, then died. Empty. He went to grab for another one.

Tina stared at the fire with an expression of awe. Shielding my eyes, I looked into the light.

A figure stood in the midst of the fire, wavering, like a distant shape lost in a heat mirage. Far from harming it, the flames seemed to give it form: indistinct limbs, definite torso, and a strange face that kept changing. Its body hunched over, arms bent and fists clenched, ready to launch into a fight. It hovered, snarling. This was the figure we’d seen in the video footage from the New Moon séance. The ifrit, manifesting to confront us properly.

The room filled with the scent of flaming disaster, we were surrounded with searing heat, but the floor, though scorched black, was no longer burning. We all just stood there looking at each other.

“Er, now what?” Ben said. He had a new extinguisher, but like the rest of us, when confronted with the humanoid figure, he could only stare.

The thing spoke, in Arabic I assumed, the same clipped language from the video. Though I couldn’t understand the words, I understood the emotion behind it: anger. The djinn raised a fist, gestured, its whole body lurching with the motion of its tirade. It ranted at all of us, looking back and forth between us. Like we’d kicked its dog or walked on its lawn.

The stories, the lore, said that djinn were like people in all ways but what they were made of. They had families, jobs, their own societies, all invisible to us. They felt all human emotions, love, grief, joy, anger. They prayed. This was a person standing before us. I may not have understood that until now, when it was yelling at me in rage.

I couldn’t go soft on it. This thing had killed Mick.

My job wasn’t over yet. This barrier wouldn’t hold it forever. If it didn’t burn down through the floor, it might go up through the ceiling. The whole house might burn down around us. We had to finish this, which meant I had to distract it while Tina and Jules worked.

I called, “Hey, shut up a minute! I’m not finished telling you off! God, what a jerk.” I didn’t know if it understood English. But the same way I recognized its anger, I was pretty sure it recognized mine. Sure enough, it turned. Were those yellow shadows within the orange flames its eyes? The spots flickered at me, as if blinking.

It may not have understood me. I was guessing not, since it fired back a stream of Arabic, probably with as much rudeness as I’d flung at it. We should have brought along a translator. I was a little sad that we couldn’t talk this out. Not that we ever had a chance of that.

I didn’t wait for it to finish before continuing. “I don’t understand why something as powerful as you would let yourself be controlled by a bunch of idiots like the Band of Tiamat. Even if they are run by a vampire.”

It chuckled. The light sound, like sparks crackling in a piece of wood, couldn’t be anything else. It was a condescending laugh, clearly suggesting I didn’t know what I was talking about. True enough.

I focused on it. To even let my gaze flicker to the others to check their progress would be to draw attention to them. But it wasn’t like I’d ever had a problem running my mouth off at someone before.

“I think you can’t possibly be such hot shit if you let yourself get trapped with a little bit of paint.”

It roared, starting softly and letting the sound grow. The sound turned into a word.

“Bitch.”

Note to self: Never assume a person speaking a foreign language can’t understand what you’re saying.

Tina started yelling, “Thus by a spark the power that binds you is destroyed. Be banished now and never bother us henceforth!”

It was a formal, archaic, and definitely mystical speech, exactly the sort of thing found in a magical grimoire, and I had no idea if Tina had found the chant in such a place, or if she made it up, or if she was channeling some other spirit, some other power that she’d called on to help us here.

She held a bottle—she’d finally decided on the kind used to hold powerful acids in a chemistry lab, pint-sized, made of thick brown glass with a heavy rubber cork—over the edge of the boundary, its mouth pointed toward the djinn . Jules put a lighter to a small bundle of hemp tied up with my hair, which he held over the mouth of the bottle with a pair of tongs. The fibers lit immediately, glowing hot red and sending up a tendril of black smoke.