Kitty Raises Hell

“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.

Tina repeated the chant, with variations but with the same meaning, commands of banishment, of release. The djinn turned to look, the flames surrounding it swaying in another direction, sparks licking out behind it. Jules blew on the smoke from the burning hair, so it drifted forward and mingled with the flames writhing around the djinn.

An odd thing happened.

The line of smoke from the burning hair shifted direction and began to move into the jar, as if sucked in by a tiny vacuum or draft of air. The flowing smoke began pulling the djinn with it.

Realizing what was happening, the figure inside the flames flinched back, flailing its arms, like a swimmer fighting against a riptide. It shouted with its furnace-and-flamethrower voice, begging while it gasped.

A burst of light threw me to the floor. I curled up, covered my face with my arms, convinced something had exploded and the house would now fall down around us, killing me, Ben, everyone. Our rapid healing wouldn’t help us if our whole bodies fried first. My nose was dead, unable to smell anything, unable to tell me where Ben had fallen. I thought I had seen him for a split second, holding the fire extinguisher up as a shield, flung away from the circle as I was, a silhouette against the atomic flare. The sound—this must be what the inside of a star sounded like, a constant nuclear explosion times a thousand.

At least, that was what it felt like to my senses. Like the world had ended, like the djinn was ending it with his final scream, with blasts of fire.

Then it all went away, and I sat up and looked.

I had a feeling the room had been still for some time, it was so quiet. No fires burned anywhere, not even on the floor, which had been roaring with flames. The acrid stench of soot and sulfur, which should have been overwhelming, had faded. I could almost taste a hint of freshness, as if someone had opened a window.

The circle drawn in blood on the floor was gone. The djinn was gone.

Jules and Ben were picking themselves up off the floor, brushing off their clothes, shaking their heads as if dazed. Tina, however, knelt at the edge of where the circle had been, one hand clutching the bottle, the other hand clamped tightly over the cork, locking it shut. Far from being dazed, she held the bottle straight-armed, tense before her, staring at it in a panic.

“You got it?” Jules asked finally. “It’s in there?”

She nodded quickly. She had it and was obviously afraid to let it go, in case it escaped.

“I can’t believe that actually worked,” Ben said.

We looked at each other across the room and didn’t need words. A month’s worth of anxiety, and an equal amount of relief, filled the silence. He pursed his lips, and I smiled, and cried a little, tears slipping free. We crossed to each other in a couple of steps, and I nestled in his arms. We rested like that a moment, heads bent together, taking in each other’s scent, reassuring ourselves that our pack, our mates, were safe now. We were safe.

He touched my hair, stroking lightly, and let out a sigh. So did I. He smelled like Ben. Maybe a little scorched, but still Ben.

“You look awful,” he said, and I suspected he was right. My arms stung like a bad sunburn, my face felt scorched and sooty. But none of that mattered. I’d heal soon enough.

“Funny,” I said. “ ’Cause I feel pretty good.”

Gary and Detective Hardin burst in and pounded into the parlor, looking flustered.

“Is everyone okay?” Gary demanded. Hardin had her hand on her belt, where she kept her gun holstered.

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so,” Jules said, his voice shaky. He rubbed a hand over his short-cropped hair. The hand was shaky, too. Soot smudged his glasses.

“The video cut out—everything went to static when you lit the hair,” Gary said. “What happened?”

None of us spoke. None of us could explain it.

“Tina, you got that cork in?” Jules asked, kneeling next to the woman.

The shocky look still gleamed in her eyes. Jules put his hands around hers and eased the jar to the floor. Together, they tested the lid. It was tight. Then they let it go. The jar sat by itself on the floor, inert, harmless. Opaque. I imagined the djinn inside, screaming in anger, beating fiery fists against the interior wall, trying to get out, sealed by magic, against all reason and the laws of physics. Or maybe it had been sucked into another dimension, a pocket universe, that the ritual had somehow opened. Maybe the ancients had understood the crazier notions of theoretical physics better than we did. I’d have to file that away to think about later.

Tina heaved a sigh—she’d been holding her breath—and slumped into Jules’s arms. They hugged each other.

“How am I supposed to charge a thing in a bottle with murder? How am I supposed to write this up?” Hardin said, looking lost. She said this sort of thing a lot.

“Can’t you close a case without actually arresting anyone?” I said.

“Say the suspect was killed in the course of arrest,” Ben said helpfully.

“No and hell no. The paperwork for that sort of thing is even worse than the paperwork for... this.” She gestured vaguely at the aftermath of our trap. The whole place was covered with soot, scorched like it had been flash fried.