Kitty Goes to War

“You think that makes you tough?” I said. “You’re all powerful and stuff because you can destroy entire cities?”

“You wouldn’t understand. You have no faith! You’re an animal!”

Oh, why did I bother? I put my hands on my hips. “We’ll stop you. We’ve already stopped you.” I didn’t know if that was true. Shaun and the others had five more stores to mark. I hoped they were doing that now.

Franklin wore the triumphant expression of a conqueror. “You can’t stop us!”

From the darkness up the street, another vehicle appeared and skidded to a stop, enough behind Franklin’s Hummer that there was no danger of a collision. Cormac’s Jeep, hunched like a creature in the fog. Cormac slid out of the front seat and strode forward without a pause, until he stood about ten yards behind Franklin.

“Hey,” Cormac said. “If you’re done with them, you come deal with me.”

Franklin turned and slipped, nearly toppling over. He windmilled his arms to recover and then stood unsteadily, legs braced, arms outstretched. Straightening quickly, he faced down Cormac with his former air of superiority.

That he turned his back to me—that he thought I wasn’t a threat—made me angry. I wanted to snarl and pounce on him. But I also wanted to see what Cormac was going to do to the guy. I still wasn’t sure we had him cornered; he could call the cops on us and it would be just like the libel suit. Sure, I was right that he was a bad guy, and he really was using his Speedy Mart franchise to work magic, and he really was working on a spell to put Denver under ten feet of snow. And I would prove all that, how?

“You’re too late!” Franklin said, right out of the bad-guy handbook, as if there were any remaining doubt. “The divine power lives on, through me!”

“We’ll just see about that,” Cormac said.

Franklin thrust his amulet at Cormac, as though brandishing a cross at a vampire, and repeated the phrase he’d used before. I cringed, ducking, expecting a crack of thunder to crash over our heads. It didn’t. Franklin also seemed surprised, and he tried the gesture again.

Cormac seemed amused when he pulled his own amulet, a metal disk, out of the pocket of his leather coat. He studied it a moment, then threw it at Franklin, underhanded, as if he expected the guy to catch it.

Franklin didn’t catch it. He flinched in a panic, and the amulet hit him, then fell into the snow. Maybe we all expected an explosion, for flames to burst forth and devour him, but nothing happened. Franklin pawed in the snow for the object. When he found it, lying it flat on his hand, he stared at it with as much terror as if it really had rained physical destruction on him.

It showed the gromoviti znaci, wanna bet?

“Told you,” I said at him. I’d about decided we had to take him down and damn the consequences, if he didn’t just admit defeat and crawl away.

Then clouds parted. It seemed to happen suddenly, but more likely it had come upon us gradually, the clouds thinning, fading from gray to nothing, until fissures appeared, and a dark sky showed through, edged by lingering curls of mist. I felt as if a blanket lifted off me, like I could breathe freely again. Which meant that Shaun and the others had succeeded, and the spell was broken. While the blizzard had caused havoc, it wasn’t any worse now than the usual impressive winter storms that struck Denver every couple of years. People wouldn’t be talking about this one as the storm of the century.

Franklin stared up at the clearing sky with the rest of us. I couldn’t see his expression, but his shoulders sagged.

He put the amulet in his coat pocket and turned back to Cormac. “It’s your fault, isn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

Cormac and Franklin faced each other down like a couple of Old West gunslingers. Cormac even stood ready, arms loose, hands at his hips, ready to yank pistols from holsters. He looked wrong without his guns. But he didn’t look worried.

“What are you?” Franklin’s tone was both frightened and angry. He’d probably never been defeated. He was used to a world where few people knew anything about magic. “Who do you serve?”

“No one. I’m just a guy,” Cormac said, a tilt to his head.

That seemed to infuriate Franklin. He began chanting, not a one-phrase curse, a moment of power, and then done. He didn’t have an amulet this time. Above, clouds that had been clearing began to coalesce again, sinking low, as if drawn toward him. The temperature dropped—to even feel it at this point meant it was plummeting, going from freezing to arctic. And all the power gathered toward Franklin, who was pointing outstretched arms at Cormac.

“Kitty, what’s he doing?” Ben said, standing close behind me, taking hold of my shoulder. “Does Cormac need help?” Nearby, Tyler was breathing deep, fogging breaths.

“I don’t know,” I said, and my voice sounded thin, lost. I had seen magic at work before. I hadn’t seen anything like this.

I had a professor in college who read Anglo-Saxon like he’d grown up with it. This was the language of Beowulf, a rolling, singsong way of speaking, full of portent. Like thunder, rumbling for miles over a windswept plain. After the passage of time, this professor explained, ancient languages become the language of magic, the meanings forgotten but the power of them remembered. The Catholic Church could chant Latin, and it didn’t matter that no one knew what the words meant a thousand years later. He’d been speaking metaphorically. But he was right.

Franklin was drawing on that power now, gathering it to launch at and smash his enemy, and I couldn’t understand why Cormac was just standing there, why he didn’t look worried. But did he ever?

A white glow was growing around Franklin, seeming to light him from within. His hair was standing on end, as if he were gathering a static charge. The whole area looked like an electrical experiment gone awry. His voice increased in volume and pitch, a sign that the spell was drawing to a close. Then, as the words broke down into a primal yell of power, a static discharge, a bolt of lightning, crashed from Franklin to Cormac.

Cormac raised both hands, set his legs apart as if to brace, ducked his head—and a blue flare encased him. It was like someone lit a torch under him, and he was all flame—hot, intense, dangerous. Franklin’s lightning bolt disintegrated in a wave of sparks—which doubled back and caught him in the backwash.

I shielded my face; Ben and I ducked together, sheltering each other. The crash of thunder seemed to last for minutes. Then, silence. I could hear my heart pounding. Even Wolf was quiet, trembling in my gut, waiting to see which way we had to jump.

Finally, I looked around.

Harold Franklin was lying flat on his back, half buried in snow, and not moving. Cormac stood exactly as he had before the light show started. He didn’t even look singed. He pursed his lips in a thin smile and appeared satisfied.

“What the hell just happened?” Ben asked. His hand dug into my arm. He looked at Cormac, then looked at me. “Kitty?”

I just blinked at him. Cormac brushed his hands together in a dismissive gesture, like he’d just taken out the trash.

Overhead, stars shone. It was going to be a very cold night, the kind that froze eyelashes together and turned the snow into a glass-hard icy crust. Worst kind of weather. I still felt a lot better than I had a few hours ago.

I checked on Tyler. The cut on his head had stopped bleeding and was healing, closed over with a pinkish scab. Otherwise, he seemed fine. A little startled and wide-eyed like the rest of us. But he wasn’t about to lose it.

“Is he dead?” Tyler asked, looking at Franklin.

The heat was leaching from Franklin’s body as if he was dead or dying—but he was also lying in the snow, in freezing weather. I started forward to check, but Ben slipped in front of me and got there first. Franklin didn’t stir when Ben crouched to touch his neck and said, “He’s just passed out, I think.”

If I listened carefully, I could hear his heart beating slowly. So he was alive, but we had to get him out of the cold if we wanted him to stay that way. I could be forgiven for hesitating a moment on that one.

“We should get him inside before he freezes to death,” I said with a sigh.

“He’ll be fine,” Cormac said.

I stared at Cormac: Mr. Mysterious, minding his own business, keeping to himself, didn’t need guns anymore