Kitty's House of Horrors (20 page)

Lee and Grant collected weapons. They went through the kitchen, the closets, the utility shed, equipment left behind from
the show, and the attic, gathering an arsenal that they spread on the living room floor. Along with the tear gas and motion
detectors from the secret stash, we had a set of mean-looking carving knives from the kitchen; vinegar, ammonia, bleach, and
other chemicals we could turn into some wicked cocktails; and from the toolshed, a shovel, an ax, and a set of surveying stakes.

Every minute they spent outside collecting the stuff, I had my heart in my throat, waiting for something to happen. Nothing
did. However much I’d have loved to entertain the thought that maybe this was over, and that what happened to Dorian and Jerome
were isolated and unrelated events and nothing else was going to happen, I couldn’t.

“I wouldn’t normally bother with the stakes, but considering the company, I thought we ought to keep an eye on them.” Grant
seemed pleased with the haul. I wasn’t so sure we weren’t just spitting into the wind.

“I don’t see how this crap is going to do us any good,” Lee said. Like me, he was looking over his shoulder. I wondered if
he felt the same weird vibes I did, like someone was watching us, even though the cameras following us around were long gone.

“If we have it all together and locked up, it means no one else can get to it, either,” I said. “How about that?”

He scowled and went away to look out the window. Making himself a target for someone outside, I observed. So how did we keep
a lookout without giving the bad guys a perfect view of us? You have an answer for that, Cormac?

Anastasia regarded the armory with about as much confidence as I did, her frown revealing contempt. “Stakes are overrated
as a weapon against vampires. You have to get close enough to use them, and that’s always problematic, isn’t it?”

“If you act stupid enough around vampires, they let their guard down,” I said. “Then you can get close. They tend to get this
look of shock on their faces, like getting staked was the last thing they expected even though they saw you coming at them
with the thing in your hand.”

“And you know this
how?
” Anastasia said, and I couldn’t tell if it was astonishment or a newfound respect in her startled tone of voice.

“Long story,” I said, blushing. “Never mind. Really.”

“What next?” Grant said, changing the subject, lucky for me. “I don’t relish sitting here waiting for this hunter to show
himself.”

“But how do we act without exposing ourselves?” I said.

“We may not have a choice,” he said. “We’ll just have to be careful.”

“I still think the answer is under our noses,” Anastasia said, glaring at Grant. “This is an inside job, it has to be. You—you’ve
barely flinched through all of this. Like none of this has surprised you.”

“He never flinches,” I said. “He sees a human sacrifice in a flaming pseudo-Babylonian temple and he doesn’t flinch, trust
me.”

“What are you talking about?” Anastasia said.

“Never mind. But you want to know who I want to talk to?” I had their attention then, which was good, because keeping us all
from arguing was going to be half the battle. “Conrad. He may be putting on a good act, but the minute the shit hit the fan,
he locked himself up and won’t have anything to do with the rest of us. Now, is he really having a nervous breakdown, or is
he keeping himself out of the way for whatever’s next?” I paused, then shook my head. “You know what? That’s paranoid even
for me, forget I said that.”

Grant said, “Kitty. Do you think you should try to get some sleep? You’ve had a busy day.”

By any sane reckoning, I did need some sleep. I hadn’t slept nearly enough to recover from shifting, not to mention all the
running I’d done. I was exhausted. My brain hurt. I couldn’t think straight. But I also couldn’t imagine trying to sleep.
I’d sit straight up every time someone in the house coughed.

“This doesn’t exactly seem like the best time to be sleeping.”

“This may be all the time you get,” Anastasia said. “I think he’s right.”

Anastasia and Grant agreeing on anything was enough to convince me that maybe I really should try to get some sleep. But I
wasn’t going to go to my room to do it. I wasn’t going to be alone. I may not have been with my pack, but I needed someone
around. I found a blanket and curled up on the sofa, thinking I’d at least rest my eyes, thinking no way would I ever fall
asleep when I was this keyed up.

But wonder of wonders, I did.

N
o. I’m sorry, I’m not doing this anymore. I’m not getting anything but nastiness. There’s something out there, and it doesn’t
like us. We knew that already.”

I opened my eyes in time to see Tina get up from the dining room table and walk away. Sitting up, I saw that she’d left behind
Jeffrey and the Ouija board. I could infer: they’d been trying another séance, and it wasn’t going well.

“Hey. You okay?” I said to Tina when she came within range.

She jumped, making me feel guilty. We were all on edge. Seeing me, she sighed. “Oh, yeah. We just thought we might find something
out. It’s not working.”

“I’m not surprised. We’re all really keyed up.”

We were all awake. Some of the others—Lee, Ariel—looked like they’d been trying to sleep, too, curled up in armchairs, sprawled
on a sofa. But no one was asleep. Everyone looked up at the sound of voices. Grant and Anastasia had been by the table, watching
the psychics. Now they watched me.

Tina was pacing in front of the fireplace. “They won’t have to do anything to get us. We’ll all go stir-crazy at this rate.
Then we’ll all go screaming into the woods—”

“They’re waiting for us to panic,” I said. “All we have to do is not panic.”

She rolled her eyes, evidently not too confident of our chances of doing that.

Thinking like Cormac again: he wouldn’t sit around waiting. I said, “We’re not going to find out anything about these guys
until we can draw them out. Get a look at them, see what their resources are.”

Grant said thoughtfully, “Actually go outside and take a look around.”

“Are you crazy?” Tina said. “They’re out there with arrows, guns probably—”

“So we’ll have to be careful. Stay out of sight,” Grant said. “Get the lay of the land, find out what’s really out there,
then formulate a strategy. Reconnaissance.”

“We’re in the army now,” Lee said, shaking his head.

“Yo Joe,” I muttered. “What do you say? Want to go hunt some bad guys?”

“I’ll go,” Ariel said.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “It’s my stupid idea. I’ll volunteer.”

Anastasia said, “I’ll go. Some of us are better equipped for this sort of situation.”

“But I want to help,” Ariel said. She sounded so earnest. She wasn’t a supernatural creature; she didn’t have otherworldly
powers. She was just a person with a few folk spells. And she wanted to help. I wanted to hug her.

“We’ll need someone to keep watch while the three of us search,” Grant said. “We can keep an eye on each other that way.”

He made it sound sinister.

So Grant, Anastasia, and I stepped out to the front porch, but I was sure they were watching each other as much as they looked
out to the dark, searching for an attack. Ariel, joined by Jeffrey, waited by the door, and their job was to look to the forest
for anything suspicious. Grant held a flashlight; Anastasia and I didn’t. A faint glow from candles leaked to the outside,
but otherwise, nothing intruded on my night vision. I could see individual trees and the stripe of sand along the lake shore.
Above, the Milky Way was a visible band, a cloud of stars. I had my ears and nose tuned to the air, listening for footsteps,
voices.

What I needed were a bunch of the guys from a police procedural TV show. Then I needed the world to act like the world in
a police procedural TV show so that they could actually figure out what was going on by the scraps of clues lying around.
They had to be lying around, right? A little piece of fabric that would light up under a UV light with a complete description
of what was happening?

Didn’t think so.

Anastasia ran her fingers along the wood post where the railing had broken off, studying the sabotage that had killed Dorian.

“Are you okay?” I said softly.

“Fine.” She turned her attention to the clearing in front of the porch and walked away.

We went along the porch, searching for anomalies. Then, reluctantly, I moved off the porch, to the steps. Every third second
I glanced to the trees, sure that something was watching us. Maybe it was the paranoia talking.

I stopped on the last step.

A stripe of gravel in front of the steps was different. I hadn’t noticed it before because I hadn’t been looking. The brain
glosses over a thousand anomalies a day—someone had been fixing the wiring or the pipes, or putting in a sprinkler system,
or making a repair. There were a hundred reasons why there’d be a stretch of off-color ground near a house like this. But
now, when I looked on everything with suspicion—what was the reason? A mound of dirt, raised fractionally, as if something
was buried.

Grant saw me staring and said, “I’ll get a shovel.”

Ariel shone the flashlight on the spot while we dug. We didn’t have to dig deep, only a few inches. There, just under the
surface, we found a steel rod sprouting a dozen spikes, maybe a couple inches each. Again, I could come up with a dozen reasons
why something like this might be here: some arcane piece of construction left over from a remodeling job and accidentally
buried, some unknown bit of landscaping. But digging out to either side, we found the rod was attached to a motor, and the
motor protruded above ground, just a little, in a spot sheltered by the porch steps. There, a tiny antenna suggested some
kind of radio transmitter or receiver.

Grant demonstrated: when the signal arrived, the motor would turn the rod, and the spikes would spring to vertical, emerging
from the ground like some parking lot tire-killing defense barrier.

“Oh, my God,” Ariel said, wincing.

The spikes were a razor-sharp steel and silver plate. If Lee, Jerome, or I had been standing here or passing over this spot
when the signal came, the spikes would have launched, torn through our shoes, and cut our feet. Silver poisoning would do
the rest. It would be slow and agonizing, as silver-poisoned blood climbed from the feet to the heart.

The trap was sneaky, clever, and cruel. Standing outside, my back suddenly felt exposed. There wasn’t any kind of trip wire.
It wasn’t automatic, which meant someone had to be watching to know the right moment to spring the trap. Maybe our hunter
was out there right now, watching us. Peering through the scope of some high-powered sniper rifle. With silver bullets. I
took a deep breath but couldn’t scent anything on the breeze, and the smells of the others around me were too strong. But
he was out there.

Grant completely excavated the trap, found where the motors on each side were anchored to the ground with stakes, and dug
them out. He shoved the whole thing under the porch, out of the way. My skin was still prickling with nerves.

When the crack came, I thought it was a tree branch breaking. I didn’t make the connection, because it didn’t sound like gunfire—it
was too small, sharp, and focused. A silencer, I realized. But stuff like that only happened in the movies, right? I waited
for the rip of pain that was sure to follow the gunshot.

Jeffrey caught Ariel as she fell. She dropped the flashlight.

“Inside! Now!” Grant hollered. I was already on the porch, opening the door and helping pull Ariel inside. We laid her down
on the floor, and I slammed the door shut. The big picture window in front didn’t have drapes. I wished I could draw drapes
and shut out the world.

“What is it? What’s going on?” Tina said.

“Oh, no,” Jeffrey breathed.

Ariel wasn’t moving. I dropped beside her, touched her forehead. Her eyes stared. “Ariel?”

I couldn’t hear her heart, but her skin was still warm. She was just standing there a second ago—

Kneeling beside me, Grant felt her neck, then turned her face. He smoothed back the hair over her ear and pointed to the bullet
hole. A tiny little thing, maybe the width of a pencil, with just a tiny trickle of blood leaking from it. But it went right
through the middle of her brain.

I bent over until my face was next to hers and tried not to scream. I held her, pressed my forehead to hers, and clenched
my hands. A howl was building in my throat, but if I let it go, I wouldn’t stop. I’d have to shift. I’d have to go running,
to find the person who did this and rip his throat out. And if I tried to do that in a fit of rage, I’d fail.

“Kitty,” Grant said. I expected to feel a hand on my shoulder, a comforting touch, but I didn’t, which was good. I’d snap
at anyone who offered such a meaningless, stupid gesture.

I took a long, snuffling breath and realized I was crying. My head was going to explode. My hands were going to turn into
claws. I wanted to know if the bullet was silver. I wanted to know if it had been meant for me. It should have been me.

Sitting back, I idly smoothed Ariel’s hair. I hadn’t gotten to know her well enough. She was too young and pretty for this.
That scream built up again. Despairing, I looked at Grant.

His expression was long, mournful. I’d never seen him look so sad.

“We have to get whoever did this,” I murmured. Grant nodded once.

Wolf was close to the surface. I felt myself walking around with a hooded gaze, my head low, watchful, my body stiff, my fingers
curled. Not just Wolf, but Wolf on the hunt. A Wolf who wanted blood.

I tried to relax and take a deep breath, because I didn’t want to shift right now. Because I had a feeling that was what the
hunter expected me to do. Grant watched me; he’d seen this before, and he knew the signs.

I shook my head. “I’m okay.” I wasn’t, not really, but I wasn’t going to shift. Not right now.