Kitty and the Silver Bullet

'I had to borrow it.'

She considered me a moment, then shook her head. Her taut expression managed to convey both trepidation and annoyance. But she did get the chain tied around Mom's neck.

'The silver did that to you?'

Wincing, I nodded. 'With silver bullets, it's not the bullet that kills a werewolf. It's the silver poisoning the blood.'

'Not very pretty I bet.'

'No, I imagine not.'

Straightening, Hardin regarded me. The trepidation was fading, losing to a severe look of aggravation. 'You're going to have to explain what that bastard did to me.'

'The vampire hypnotic voodoo.'

'Uh. Yeah.'

'How do you think they get people to stay still while they drink their blood?'

She scowled. 'I hate it when this crap actually makes sense.'

'Don't look at his eyes next time, okay?'

'Let's get going.'

I touched Mom's hand one more time. She was sleeping, and the cross was visible, lying at the hollow of her throat. She was as safe as I could make her. Which wasn't very. I hated to leave.

'She'll be okay,' Hardin said, touching my arm. 'I'll make sure security is watching her room.'

Like that would help. Arturo would just work his wiles on them.

'I'll have them string garlic in the doorway.' She grinned, but it wasn't much of a joke.

We heard pounding footsteps ahead of us. Four cops, running down the corridor. Hardin's backup.

'Took you guys long enough!' she barked at them. 'Come on, we're heading out.'

They shrugged and mumbled excuses. But I looked at the clock—the whole exchange with Arturo had only taken a couple of minutes. We hadn't been here that long. Time had stretched to make it seem so.

After Hardin had a word with security, we walked out of the hospital together. 'Your boyfriend was going to this guy's home base. Where?'

'You know Obsidian? That art gallery on Fourteenth? He's in the basement.'

'How many people has he got with him?'

'I don't know. I've seen as many as twelve or fourteen. All vampires.'

'Well, this ought to be fun. Sawyer, you got that surveillance file on Mercedes Cook? She's a known associate. We might get some idea of what we'll find there.'

'Yeah, it's in the car.'

'Sawyer,' I muttered. 'Isn't that the guy who shot me?' The cop in question ducked and ran ahead of us. Avoiding me. Oh, it was him.

'Let it go, Kitty,' Hardin said. Then, 'Sunglasses.'

'What?'

'You think sunglasses would work against that hypnotic crap?' She pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of her pocket and went through the ritual of lighting up. Her gestures were manic, determined.

'I don't know.'

Officer Sawyer handed her a manila folder, which she handed to me. Then she gathered her people around her: four uniformed officers who looked ready for war. I was frankly dumbstruck.

Nodding at the four officers, all men, all tough-looking, she said, 'Tell them what you told me. Everything you know about what to expect from the vampires.'

I repeated it all, every bit of vampire lore I knew, everything I had seen with my own eyes. They were strong, they could drop grown men without effort, they could control your will simply by looking into your eyes. They were hard to kill. They had the experience of decades. Arturo had centuries behind him. How could I make them understand that?

The officers stared back at me, just as eager, just as ready. They'd heard what I'd said, but I wasn't sure they understood it. This must have looked like some kind of video game to them. I was sending them to their doom.

Hardin followed up with instructions. 'Don't get separated. Stick with your partner, keep your eyes on each other. You see someone in trouble, call for backup. I don't want big heroics on this. We're dealing with unknowns here.'

We'd go in three cars. Hardin directed one of the patrol cars to stop in front, while hers and another parked in back. No flashing lights or sirens. We'd sneak in.

'They'll know,' I said. 'Before we even get out of the car.'

'Then we'll be ready for them,' she said, confident.

We're all gonna die, a voice in me wailed. Not the Wolf. I could tell, because the Wolf was urging me on. We must destroy those who harm us. We must do battle.

I didn't know which instincts to listen to anymore.

Chapter 15

During the drive, I flipped through the file folder containing the information about Mercedes Cook. The police had managed to cull a handful of photos from the hotel's security cameras—digital images printed out on plain paper. They showed her in the hotel, mostly, interacting with the staff, entertaining visitors, many of them recognizable local celebrities. Some of the pictures were blurry —like the closed-circuit footage from the convenience store robberies. Vampires, not wanting to be seen. Maybe Arturo.

One of them stopped me cold. In it, I recognized the hallway outside Mercedes's suite at the Brown Palace. A man was entering the room, his head up, his face clear. He held himself with a confidence that showed he belonged there. He knew what he was doing, and he had a plan. The man was deeply tanned, with sun-burnished blond hair and rugged, windblown skin.

It was Dack. I remembered now what he'd said: It's a good thing, having a vampire owe you a favor. You want to be with the strongest. And he hadn't answered when I asked if that was Rick. Evidently, he didn't think so. With a sinking feeling, I realized that we'd found the spy in Rick's camp. And I had no way to reach Rick to tell him, not if he wasn't answering his phone. Dack was there, with him now, no doubt preparing to stab him in the back. And Ben was there, too.

The whole thing had fallen apart. I wondered if it was too late to grab Ben and run away.

'You recognize that guy,' Hardin said, glancing over.

'Yeah. I think we're all screwed.'

'We'll see about that. He a vampire, too?'

'No. He's a lycanthrope.'

'Everyone's got silver bullets this time. I checked.'

'Great. I'll make sure I'm standing behind you all.'

'Probably a good idea.'

This was insane.

I called Rick again, to tell him about Dack, but he still didn't answer. Then I called Ben. Who didn't answer.

Obsidian was in a nicer part of downtown, a street filled with chic restaurants and funky boutiques, halfway between artsy and gentrified. The art gallery was a front; the interesting bit was the basement. Stairs around back led to the heart of Arturo's empire.

I checked where Rick had told us to park, and Ben's car wasn't there. Ben wasn't there. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe it was all already over. Maybe they were okay.

Hardin distributed equipment from the trunk of her car to her people: crosses, stakes, hand crossbows with wooden bolts, spray bottles of what I assumed was holy water. I took a handful of stakes and a cross, steel, the size of my hand. I decided that if all else failed, I would depend on my ability to run like hell. I slung my backpack over my shoulders.

Thus armed and prepared, we approached the building. I couldn't imagine what this must look like from the outside. Five cops, stalking purposefully toward a dark building, carrying crossbows and crosses—they could only be hunting vampires.

The place was an isolated box surrounded by parking lots. I hesitated, hoping to smell something, sense something. But the street was silent, and the building looked dead.

Hardin pointed at her officers. 'You two, watch the front. Don't let anyone leave.'

The rest of us headed for the stairs in back.

She said, 'You're a civilian. I'm not going to ask you to do this if you don't want to. But if you think you can help—'

'Maybe I can, maybe I can't. But I'll go.' I'd started this thing, I had to see it through.

Rick's Beamer was parked in back. He was here, somewhere, fighting for his life or already dead. A couple of other cars were here. Not Ben's.

Hardin repeated instructions to the remaining officers. 'Don't let anyone down those stairs, don't let anyone leave.'

The last two cops—our rear guard as well as our backup—stayed behind, while Hardin and I made our way into the pit.

'You've been here before, right?' For all her efforts with the anti-vampire gear, she'd reverted to habit and held her gun at the ready. Shocking myself, I recognized the type—a nine-millimeter semiautomatic.

'Yeah,' I said. 'But it's been a while.'

'Tell me what to expect.'

'There's a metal door at the bottom of the stairs. It opens on a hallway. There's a closed door on each side. I don't know what's behind them. There's another door at the end of the hall. It leads to what I guess you'd call his living room.'

Actually, it was more like a throne room, or a receiving hall—a holdover from an age of palaces and courts. There wasn't a modern equivalent. This was where Arturo held court, and where Carl would come to pay his respects, negotiate a dispute, or do what he needed to do to keep peace between our kinds. Usually, Carl would bring his own retinue, enough of his pack to make a show