Kitty Rocks the House kn-11 Page 11

  Something inside me—coiled fur and muscle, sharp teeth—wanted to kill Darren right then. But whatever he was telling Trey, he really did look like he was helping the other man.

  Deciding I just couldn’t face either one of them right now, I turned right back around, left my restaurant, and went home to sleep.

  Chapter 11

  I HAD TO figure out what to do about Darren. He was causing trouble in the pack. No, if I had to be honest, I was the one having the trouble. He kept rubbing me the wrong way, and I didn’t want him here anymore. But was that fair to him? Ben offered to run the guy out of town with the help of his silver bullet–loaded Glock. As much fun as that sounded, I didn’t want to admit failure on bringing him into the pack just yet. He wasn’t a bad guy, I was sure. He kept challenging our authority without apparently meaning to, and I didn’t know how to convince Darren that what he was doing was bad form. If he’d been belligerent, I could have challenged him and run him out like Ben said. But he wasn’t being mean; he was just being rude.

  When Darren called me the next morning to see if I wanted to go out for coffee with him, I was surprised. I’d been thinking of suggesting exactly the same thing. He’d picked up on my favorite method of diplomacy; maybe there was hope for him yet.

  We met at a little coffee shop a couple of blocks from the radio station. He bought me a cup and brought it to me at one of the café tables out on the sidewalk.

  “The cub learns,” I said as he sat across from me.

  He actually looked chagrined. “I know I screwed up, and I can tell you don’t like me—”

  “It’s not that,” I said, while thinking that yeah, no, I didn’t much. I let the white lie stand. “You’re very charming. But I’m not sure I understand you. There are times I wonder if you’re really a werewolf, or if you’re just not used to dealing with authority.”

  He bit his lip, lowered his gaze. “I was like this even before becoming a werewolf. Arrogant, I think some people call it. Have to be the center of attention. Add that to the werewolf posturing—I either get along with everybody, or nobody. I’m trying, Kitty, I really am. But it’s hard for me not to treat it like a game sometimes.”

  “It’s not a game, but you know that,” I said. “I’ve watched people die, trying to get into or out of a pack. Why do you want a pack, really? You must have done just fine as a lone wolf.”

  “Lone wolf gets lonely. I want friends at my back. I’ve always imagined meeting someone like Becky—” He blushed at that, and his voice caught. Wetting his lips, he tried again. “I figured if I could fit in with a pack anywhere, it’d be yours.” And then with the puppy-dog eyes.

  “You’re working really hard to sell yourself to me,” I said.

  “What is it you’re always saying? Civilization is worth fighting for. I like civilization, and around here that means a pack.”

  Smiling in spite of myself, I said, “You listen to the show. Brownie points for you.”

  “What a relief.” I glared, and he had the good sense to drop his gaze, avoiding the barest hint of a challenge. “I really want to make this work, Kitty. Please give me another chance.”

  God, he was begging. How could I say no? “I’ll give you another chance, for Becky’s sake. And for her sake, don’t fuck it up. All right?”

  He agreed, thanking me profusely, then bought me another cup of coffee. I felt like I was being bribed.

  I hoped he’d succeed at integrating into the pack more than I believed he would.

  * * *

  CORMAC SLEPT on and off a whole other day, which was good, because it meant we didn’t have to argue with him about lying down and keeping his arm still. He woke every couple of hours for soup and painkillers and the bathroom, but that was it. He must have been exhausted. Ben worked at home to keep an eye on him.

  It couldn’t last.

  The next morning, noise woke us half an hour or so before we usually dragged ourselves out of bed. A coat dropping; a hard object scraping on the table.

  Ben and I tensed, lifting heads, listening. “What’s that?” I whispered.

  He thought a minute, then blew out a breath. “It’s Cormac sneaking out.”

  I rolled out of bed, pulled on sweats and a T-shirt. Ben was right behind me. I got to the living room in time to see Cormac struggling to ease his broken arm into its sling, dropping the keys to his Jeep, his jacket tucked under his good arm. I’d never seen him so physically awkward.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Getting out of your hair. Heading back to my place. I’m fine, I can take care of myself.”

  He hadn’t changed clothes since the hospital; we’d all figured rest was more important. He also hadn’t showered, and was starting to smell ripe, of illness and bandages. But if he was having this much trouble getting himself together, how was he actually going to function on his own?

  “You can’t,” I said. “You can’t even put your coat on.”

  “I haven’t taken any pills since last night, I want to get home while I’m still lucid. I’ll get back to bed then.” And how long would that last?

  “How much pain are you in? Don’t lie.” He didn’t answer, and I let out an exasperated sigh. “You’re in no shape to be driving anywhere! What are you thinking?”

  He gave me a look, like he’d be happier if I just kept my mouth shut.

  “I’ll drive you,” Ben said.

  “I can drive myself—”

  “Stick shift with a broken arm, yeah right,” Ben said. He grabbed the Jeep’s keys off the table where Cormac had dropped them, then took his jacket from him. With his good hand free, Cormac could finish shrugging on the sling, resting his broken arm more comfortably. How lucid was he, really, if he couldn’t figure out how to get his sling on? Pointing that out would have made him more surly than he already was. “Kitty, you want to follow in the car?”

  Seemed as good a compromise as any. I was still glaring at Cormac. “Only if you promise to call if you need anything. Anything.”

  “I promise I’ll call if I need anything,” he said dutifully, to the opposite wall, his shoulders in a defensive slouch.

  Not sure I believed him, I continued glaring.

  “Amelia will make sure I call if I need anything,” he said.

  That, I believed. I found my bag and car keys and followed them out of the condo.

  Cormac lived in a studio apartment north of town, along the Boulder Turnpike. Not a great neighborhood, but I usually didn’t worry. Cormac could take care of himself, and he didn’t exactly give off the vibe of someone who could be taken advantage of. But that was when he didn’t have a broken arm. Over the last couple of years he’d worked a series of warehouse jobs he’d gotten through his parole officer. Point of pride—he wanted to be self-sufficient. I didn’t know how he’d manage work with a broken arm, but he didn’t seem bothered.

  I parked in front of the building next to the Jeep and helped Ben help Cormac up the stairs. Mostly by hovering. Cormac winced when the arm got jostled, turning a corner and bumping into the wall. For him to show even that much pain meant he was in bad shape. Good thing I’d made sure the bottle of pills was tucked in his jacket pocket. I’d sit on him to get him to take a dose, if I had to.

  The apartment’s interior belonged to both Cormac and Amelia. The sparse furnishings—table, chair, futon—and bare walls were Cormac’s. The books piled everywhere—table, floor, kitchen counter; basket full of dried herbs; skein of yarn; locked and weathered mahogany box; and various maps and diagrams drawn on rolls of paper, held down by candles, statuettes, and other various weighted items—those were Amelia’s, the tools of the wizard’s trade. I could have pawed through it for hours, looking for meaning.

  Ben guided his cousin to bed, while I went to the kitchenette for a glass of water and ice packs. We watched him until he took a painkiller. In the end, I had a suspicion it was Amelia who made him do it.

  Pulling a chair near the bed, Ben sat and glanced around
the apartment. “I think you’ve checked out more books in the last year than most people do in a lifetime.”

  Cormac chuckled. “I guess I like to read. Who knew?”

  I’d taken to sending him books during his stint in prison. It started as a joke, but turned earnest. He really seemed to have read everything I’d sent him.

  “I think he’s reading for two, now,” I said, noting some of the titles. Churchill’s multivolume history of World War II; Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men; Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. I wondered what Victorian Amelia was making of that one.

  “Think about it,” Cormac said. “If you went to sleep and woke up a hundred years later, what would you do?”

  This wasn’t a hypothetical question—Amelia really had been out of the world for that long. “I suppose I’d freak out for a little while. Everything I knew would be gone. But then—I’d want to find out what I’d missed. I’d want to explore everything.”

  He said, “These last couple years—I’m seeing the world in a whole new way. She’s never seen anything like it, and all she wants to do is … take it all in.”

  I sat in another chair while we kept watch. Just when we thought he was drifting off, he sat up, propping himself on his good elbow, wincing yet again. He still wasn’t used to favoring the hurt arm. He adjusted the pillow he’d propped the cast on, trying to get comfortable. “You get ahold of Rick yet?” he said.

  I leaned back. “No. His Family won’t admit it, but they don’t know where he is, either. He’s not at Obsidian, so I’m pretty sure that means he’s with Columban.”

  “At St. Cajetan’s?”

  “If they haven’t already left on some crusade.”

  “Rick wouldn’t leave town without telling you,” Ben said.

  “I hope he wouldn’t,” I said, my uncertainty plain.

  “I’m going to figure it out,” Cormac said.

  Ben looked at him. “Figure what out?”

  “Those protections he’s got up. If we get to the thing that’s after him, we can get to him. Can’t be that hard.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Really. Just get some rest.”

  “You want to know what he’s really up to, I’ll figure it out.” With that, he closed his eyes, snugged down into his pillow, and sighed. In another minute he was asleep.

  Ben and I left him to it. I considered taking the keys to the Jeep with us, so he wouldn’t be tempted to run off on some epic scheme, but Ben talked me out of it.

  “Are you sure he’ll be okay?” I said as we got in my car.

  “Yeah. I think so. Probably. Seriously, he survived two years in prison, and we’re worried about this?”

  He had a point.

  * * *

  STILL, I had a feeling. At dusk, on the way home from work, I took a detour to the Auraria campus and swung by St. Cajetan’s. Just to see.

  I found the Jeep before I found Cormac. Parked on the street at a meter, a block or two away from the church, it was definitely his Jeep, with dried mud on the wheel wells, chips in the windshield, scratches in the paint that might have been normal wear and tear, or might have been, with enough imagination, claw marks. Thing had been around the block a few times. A few dozen times. He’d managed to drive the stick shift, broken arm or no. I parked in a spot nearby and went in search of the man himself, letting my nose guide me. He’d managed a shower sometime during the day, but he still smelled like Cormac, like his leather jacket and the muddy Jeep. He’d left a faint trail through the air he traveled through, and the steps his rough boots tracked on the pavement.

  I found him on the church’s north side, and Detective Hardin was with him. Her smell was touched with the stale scents of nicotine and breath mint. They stood side by side, looking up at the roofline. His broken arm was held close to his body by the sling; otherwise, he looked normal. He wasn’t lighting candles or drawing Greek letters on the sidewalk. I supposed that would have looked suspicious with people still walking around.

  “This isn’t resting,” I said. Hardin glanced over. Neither seemed surprised to see me, and neither said anything. I tried to sound polite, but it came out frustrated. “What are you guys doing?”

  Hardin wore a satisfied smile. “I think Mr. Bennett is right. My suspect is hiding out here, and I have a warrant for his arrest and extradition. A couple of officers and I scoured the building earlier today and didn’t find anything—”

  “And you’re not going to,” Cormac said. “He’s a vampire, using magic to hide himself. You could walk right past him and all the holy water in the world isn’t going to flush him out.”

  “Which is why we’re here,” Hardin said. She was definitely pleased with herself.

  “And why are you here?” I said, trying again to make sense out of this.

  Cormac said, “Figure the best way to get a reaction out of the guy is to break his protections.”

  “I’ve hired Mr. Bennett as an independent contractor,” Hardin said. “He’s going to help me nail my suspect.”

  What happened to hell, no? “When Ben said you should go into business for yourself, I don’t think this is what he meant,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, he should have thought of that.” Cormac pointed along the roof. “The protection spell forms a sphere, not just a circle,” he said. “Or maybe a dome. I haven’t been able to get into the basement yet, to see if it extends underground.”

  “Maybe you should check out the dinosaur museum?” I pointed around the corner where I’d seen the door.

  “It’s closed,” he said.

  Well then. “This still isn’t resting.”

  “I’ll rest better once I’ve figured this thing out.”

  “Are you sure that’s such a good idea?” I appealed to both of them. “If your information is right, Columban burned buildings fighting this thing in Europe. People died.”

  “And that’s why we want him in custody and out of Denver,” Hardin said.

  Pacing away from us, Cormac muttered under his breath, almost to himself, “I want to know what we’re dealing with. What kind of magic. How he made it, what he hopes to accomplish. The nature of his enemy—is it magical or demonic, can it be reasoned with? The shield, it feels different somehow, as if it recognizes me from the last time. Or as if it’s waiting for something.”

  Following him, I narrowed my gaze and said, hushed so Hardin wouldn’t hear, “Am I talking to Cormac or Amelia now?”

  “Yeah,” he murmured, not really paying attention to me.

  “Taking this kind of personal, aren’t you?”

  “Something wrong with that?”

  “Well, yeah. You’ve already broken your arm over it.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “I assume you were being careful when you broke your arm.”

  “Ms. Norville,” Hardin called after us, using her official cop voice. “It might be a good idea for you to leave the area for the time being.”

  “Yeah, probably.” I started at a slow pace, a few steps along the sidewalk between Cormac and the church’s pink walls, stepping purposefully across the invisible line he’d marked out the last time I was here. I went all the way to the stucco wall, pressed my hand against it, looked up along its length. I didn’t expect firebolts from heaven to strike me, but I thought I might feel something. I didn’t, not even a tingle on my skin. But why should I? Hundreds of people walked by here every day, used the auditorium and offices that the church had been converted to, and didn’t sense anything wrong. Even now, lights shone through the windows, indicating activity inside.

  I turned away and rejoined the pair. “Just for the record, I think this is a bad idea.”

  “Noted,” Hardin said.

  Cormac had pulled a length of red yarn from his pocket and began tying knots in it—awkwardly, anchoring with the fingers of his broken arm, manipulating with his good hand. I itched to take the yarn from him and do it myself, in the name of helping. Not that I wou
ld have known what I was doing with the knots. It was painful, watching him struggle with the yarn. Sweat dampened the skin along his hairline, either from effort or pain. He had a two-day-old broken arm, he had to be in pain, not that he was going to admit it.

  Hardin stood politely out of the way—giving her hired expert the space to work. And if that wasn’t bizarre—just a few years ago she’d wanted to put him in jail herself. I wondered what Ben was going to say about their partnership.

  Dusk fell, which meant the vampires inside—assuming they were still there—would be waking up any minute now. Fewer and fewer people passed by the church.

  “Has anybody tried asking the guy to come out?”

  “I don’t ask murder suspects,” Hardin said.

  We were going to look back on this and realize it was all a big misunderstanding. “How about I just poke my head in,” I said and started toward the front steps.

  “Kitty—” Hardin said, but I ignored her. Cormac was busy tying knots.

  At dusk, after classes and meetings, I figured the front would be locked, but the door I tried opened. Stepping into an unassuming lobby, I almost shouted Rick’s name, but a sound stopped me—the voice of a lecturing professor, coming from the next room. Late classes. Right. I poked around as much as I thought I could without drawing too much attention, turning down a couple of side hallways, peeking into a few equipment closets. I didn’t even smell much vampire—just a trace of a corpse-like chill, as if one had passed by recently. Too faint of a trail to follow.

  I returned to the front of the church and shut the door quietly behind me on my way out. Back outside, Cormac’s spell, counterspell, whatever, seemed to be progressing. He was still managing to tie lengths of yarn into patterns. I’d kind of hoped that whatever he was planning really did need two working arms, and he’d get frustrated and give up.