“He showed up at court drunk.”
I winced. “Ouch. What did you do?”
He slumped onto the sofa next to me. “Let the bailiff throw him in the drunk tank, waited for him to sober up, and told him to get a different lawyer. I think they threw the book at him.”
“Don’t you sometimes wish they could just try people for stupidity?”
“Then I’d never run out of work.” He leaned toward me, and I put my arms around him as he zeroed in for a kiss. And another, and more kissing. This was the best part.
He nuzzled my neck and rested his head on my shoulder. “I think I turned into a workaholic because I didn’t have this to come home to.”
My phone rang. Ben groaned. “Ignore it,” he said.
Probably should have, but since Mom got sick I tended to get jumpy about the phone ringing. Shifting Ben aside, I grabbed the phone off the coffee table.
Caller ID showed Shaun on his personal phone.
I answered. “Yeah?”
“Hey, Kitty.” I sensed tension in his voice, confusion maybe. I could hear street sounds in the background, cars driving by. It sounded like the intersection where New Moon was.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m at New Moon,” he said. “I was about to open up for the afternoon, but. . . well. I think maybe you should come down here.”
“What is it?”
“Just. . . can you get over here and take a look?” There was a note of pleading. Like this wasn’t just a bar manager calling the owner about a little problem. Something of the wolf pack had entered into the conversation—he was asking his alpha for help. That meant weirdness, and it meant danger. The hair on the back of my neck tingled.
“Yeah, yeah. Okay. I’ll be right over.” I hung up.
“What is it?” Ben asked, straightening.
“Shaun. Something’s up at New Moon.”
We both got into my car and drove downtown. Fifteen minutes later we pulled into the parking lot of the boxy brick building, where a big sign in blue and silver announced the bar. Shaun was pacing out front, arms crossed, shoulders hunched over, like stiffened hackles, for all the world like a nervous wolf. When he saw us, he seemed relieved.
“What is it?” I asked. Nothing seemed obviously wrong. I had braced myself to expect smoke and fire pouring out of the roof, or a roving militant biker gang camped in the parking lot.
“Does this mean anything to you?”
He drew me to the front door.
Burned into the wood, as if with a blow torch, a single word:
About the Author
Carrie Vaughn had a happy and relatively uneventful childhood, which means she had to turn to science fiction and fantasy for material to write about. An Air Force brat, she grew up all over the U.S. and managed to put down roots in Colorado , though she still has ambitions of being a world traveler. Learn more about Carrie’s novels, her short stories, her dog Lily, and her fascination with costumes and stick figure cartoons at www.carrievaughn.com.
MORE KITTY!
Here is a special sneak preview of Carrie Vaughn’s next novel.
Available in March 2009
Chapter 1
I had to admit, this was pretty cool.
Rick had gotten us onto the roof of the Pepsi Center in downtown Denver . We sat near the edge, by a railing on a catwalk near the exclusive upper-story clubhouse. From here, we had a view of this whole side of downtown: the amusement park to the west, the interstate beyond that, Coors Field to the north, and to the south, Mile High Stadium. It felt like the center of the universe—at least, this little part of it. We could look downtown and see into the maze of skyscrapers. At night, the sky of stars, washed out in an evening haze of lights, seemed inverted, appearing around us in the lights of the city, in trails of moving cars.
When Rick had escorted me through the Pepsi Center ’s lobby and to the elevator, the security guards didn’t look twice at us. He had a pass key for the elevator. I’d asked him how he got that kind of access, the key and security codes—who he knew or what kind of favors he’d pulled in—but he only smiled. It wouldn’t have surprised me to find out he owned a share in the place. Vampires were like that, at least the powerful ones were: prone to quiet, conservative investing, working through layers of holding companies. They had time.
A constant breeze blew up here. I tucked the blond strands of my hair behind my ears yet again. I should have pinned it up. The air had its own scent, particular to this place and nowhere else: oil, gas, concrete, steel, rust, decay—usual city smells. But under it was the dry tint of prairie, a taste of air that had blown across tall grasses and cottonwoods. And under
“I thought you’d like it up here,” Rick said. I opened my eyes to find him watching me.
I sighed. Back to reality, back to the world. We weren’t here sightseeing. City sounds drifted to me, car engines, a distant siren, music from a bar somewhere. We had a view, but I was afraid that what we were looking for was too small and too good at hiding for us to find from here.
“We’re not going to see anything,” I said, crossing my arms.
“We’ll see patterns,” he said. Rick appeared to be in his late twenties, confident yet casual. He tended to walk tall, with his hands in his pockets, and look out at the world with a thoughtful, vaguely amused detachment; even now, when Denver was possibly under assault, he seemed laid-back. “Traffic on I-25’s thinning out. Downtown’s a mess, as usual. It’s like a tide. In an hour, when the theaters and concerts get out, the cars’ll all move back to the freeway. You watch for things moving against the tide. Pockets of motion where there shouldn’t be anything. Or pockets of unusual quiet.”
He pointed to a hidden corner of the parking lot, tucked near Elitch’s security fence. Two cars had stopped, facing each other, the drivers’ windows pulled alongside each other. The headlights were off, but the motors were running. Hands reached out, traded handfuls of something. One car pulled away, tires crunching quietly. A moment later, the other pulled away, as well.
I had a few ideas about what that might have been. It still didn’t seem relevant to our problem. “And what does that have to do with Tiamat?” I asked.
Not really Tiamat, which was an ancient Babylonian goddess of chaos. According to myth, newer gods, the forces of reason and order, rose up against her in an epic battle and destroyed her and her band of demons—the Band of Tiamat—and thereby created civilization. Really, I was talking about the whacked-out cult of her worshippers that I had pissed off on my recent trip to Las Vegas . Last week, I found the word
But nothing had happened yet. Rick, the Master vampire of Denver , and I had been keeping watch. I was getting more anxious, not less.
“That? Nothing. I’m just showing you how much can happen under our noses.”
I scanned all the way around, searching buildings, skyscrapers, parking lots, roads filled with cars, people walking to dinner, concerts, shopping. Someone laughed; it sounded like distant birdsong.
I didn’t have much room to pace, but I tried. A couple of steps along the catwalk, turn around, step back. I couldn’t stand the waiting. The modern Band of Tiamat was trying to kill me with anxiety.
“You know what the problem with this is? Wolves hunt by moving. I want to be out there
“And vampires are like spiders,” Rick said. “We draw our quarry in and trap it.”
I suddenly pictured Rick as a creature at the center of his web, patiently waiting, watching, ready to strike. A chill ran down my spine, and I shook the image away.
“What do you really expect to see up here?”
Absently, he shook his head. It wasn’t really an expression of denial. More like thoughtfulness. “If anything else out there is hunting, I’ll see it.”
