Kitty in the Underworld Read online

  “Do you smell it?” he asked.

  Stepping away from him, I tipped my face up, found a faint, vagrant breeze, and turned my nose into it. The smells here were thick, layer upon layer of vivid life and wild. I had to filter them out, ignoring the omnipresent smell of trees, forest decay and detritus; the myriad trails of deer and skunk and fox and squirrel and grouse and sparrow, no matter how they piqued my appetite; and more distant scents of mountain snow, an icebound creek.

  And there it was, acrid and alien, standing out because it so obviously didn’t belong. Wolf and human, bound together, fur under the skin—and something else. There were two distinct scents. I recognized the second one, but I understood why Tom hadn’t. This scent also gave me the tangled mix of fur and skin that indicated lycanthrope, but with a feline edge to it, both tangy and musky, making me think of golden eyes and a smug demeanor. This one was female. The wolf was male.

  “That other one’s a were-lion,” I said. “They’ve been through here, but they didn’t stick around.”

  “Were-lion,” Tom said, furrowing a brow. “Really? And they’re together?”

  “Dogs and cats—sign of the apocalypse. They didn’t mark or anything, did they? Just walked on through, like they’re scouting without being threatening. You think?”

  “No clue,” he said. “But it’s making me nervous.”

  “That’ll teach you to go off Changing and running by yourself.”

  “Give me a break,” he muttered, but his body language was all apology: shoulders slouched, making him look small and sheepish. If he’d had a tail it would have been tucked between his legs.

  That was all I wanted, a little chagrin, a little embarrassment. I might have been the alpha around here but I wasn’t much into physical domination. Tom was a lot bigger than I was—he’d beat me in a straight fight. I had to be the leader of this gang without fighting. People usually knew when they’d done something wrong; they didn’t need me pointing it out. But I could make them feel guilty. I could rub it in a little.

  Now that I’d picked it out, the smell became intrusive, and the muscles across my shoulders tensed. “If they were friendly, they’d come out and show themselves, right?”

  “They’re probably looking for you,” he said. “To meet the famous werewolf queen.”

  I rolled my eyes. “So if I stand here long enough they’ll walk on up and introduce themselves? No. I want to find out what’s going on here.”

  I set off, following the trail the intruders had made. Tom fell into step behind me.

  This was one of those bright winter days in Colorado, when the temperature rose enough to thaw out the air and melt some of the snow. I grew warm as we walked, almost needing to take off my sweater, but my breath still fogged. Being outdoors on days like today was a pleasure.

  The trail didn’t follow a straight line. The two species I’d sensed, wolf and lion, walked together, circling back as if they were searching for something. The backtracking led us south and west. I paused often, thinking I could hear them ahead of us if I listened hard enough.

  We continued for over an hour, and the shadows grew longer. I didn’t want to be out here after dark, but I wanted the mystery solved. These lycanthropes had to come from somewhere, and had to be going somewhere.

  Tom had a worried, furrowed look on his face. He’d ranged off a dozen paces or so—following a different branch of the same trail.

  “Find anything?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t like it.”

  The strangers hadn’t been hunting, hadn’t been marking territory—they really did seem to want to get the pack’s attention rather than challenge us. But if that was the case, why not show themselves?

  We went on from where we had originally picked up the trail, and Tom’s path took him even farther away.

  “Hey, Tom, you still tracking both of them?” We were moving to opposite sides of the same slope; in a few more paces, he’d be out of sight.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  So was I. “Let’s back up some.”

  Sure enough, the trail split. They might have taken one path in and another path out. As if they’d arrived, circled around enough to confuse the hell out of us, then left again by another route.

  “You think the trails meet up on the other side of the hill?” Tom asked.

  “I don’t know what’s going on. Might as well check it out.”

  We went back to following the two trails, Tom taking one side and me the other.

  Being in the mountains, you couldn’t actually see the mountains, unless you got to a peak or open valley where the vistas become visible, big sky and horizon surrounded by hills and snowy peaks. In the mountain forests, the land was a series of slopes, clearings, meadows, creek-cut gullies and washes, and steep rockfalls. Often, you couldn’t see more than fifty feet in front of or behind you. The slope Tom and I circled was a rocky bulge on the side of a gentler hill that probably dropped off to a valley or ravine on the other side. I was climbing steadily uphill; he’d gotten farther downhill. We might not meet up exactly on the other side of the slope, but I expected to be able to see him once I cleared the pine trees and outcrops of this particular formation.

  He’d only been out of sight for half a minute. I could still hear him, soft breathing, quiet steady footsteps on hard ground. His scent was clear on the air.

  Something hit me. Fast and small, like a Ping-Pong ball ramming into my side from behind, accompanied by a sting. Hissing, I jumped a step and reached around to slap at myself—my hand touched something hard and plastic hanging from my side, under my rib cage. I yanked it out, stared.

  A dart, with a needle long enough to punch clear through my sweater and into my skin. The plastic syringe attached to it was as long as my hand. Enough stuff had been in there to knock out a bear, probably.

  My heart raced, exactly what I didn’t want it to do. When I tried to call out to Tom, to warn him, my throat closed up. The sound was a choke instead of the intended howl. I tried to run.

  Tranquilizer darts worked on werewolves, as long as they held enough of the drug. I’d seen it. I was guessing whoever had fired this one knew what they were doing, because the dart’s impact point started tingling, and numbness spread through my body. My breath caught—the air seemed to have turned thick, and my vision wavered, like I was looking through a fogged window. When I took a step, my legs trembled, and I couldn’t raise my arms to break my fall. Again, I tried to shout to Tom, to let out a howl. My voice squeaked like a mouse’s.

  I fell facedown on a snowbank, trying to get my limbs to move, trying to fill my lungs with enough air to call a warning, and failing. The edges of the world took on a red tinge, then collapsed to darkness.

  My last thought: my day was about to get truly awful.

  Chapter 5

  CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED slowly.

  I spent a lot of time in a half-dreaming fog, like what I felt the mornings after a full moon, waking up and trying to fit back in my human skin. I lay on something cold and hard, and thought that couldn’t be right, I was supposed to be home, there was supposed to be coffee, I needed a shower, but first I needed to brush my teeth, which tasted like milk-soaked cotton. My head pounded, my joints were stuck. Ben was supposed to be here, and I couldn’t smell him anywhere. My next exhale came out as a whine. I could call—

  My phone, usually tucked into my jeans pocket, was gone. Of course it was. I slapped at my neck, pawing for a chain that wasn’t there—the chain that held my wedding ring. It was gone, too. So were my shoes and socks. I still had on the rest of my clothes.

  I wondered: did my captor get Tom, or had he escaped? If they had caught him as well, where was he? At the moment, all I could smell was the drugged taint in my blood and my own sticky breath. I didn’t know where I was or who else might be here.

  Who had done this to me? Was it Roman? If so, why hadn’t he just killed me?

  My breathing, which grated roughly in my too-dry th
roat, echoed closely. When I opened my eyes, the world came back to me, piece by piece. I was in a small room, and it was dark. Black, really, only a sliver of light creeping in from somewhere. My werewolf eyes were good, even in the dark, and if I couldn’t see any details in the room, it was because there weren’t any. Bare, rough walls, a dusty floor. I breathed carefully, trying to sense anything through my drugged haze. The air was chilled, full of stone and age. Damp—not wet, but moisture tickled the inside of my nose. I was underground, maybe in a dirt cellar. Or maybe not—cellars didn’t normally have granite walls. These walls were solid stone, and I couldn’t sense any trace of a building to go with a cellar. No humming power cables or shushing water pipes. No smell of treated, painted wood. No wood at all, or trees, vegetation, people, mice, roaches, or anything. I smelled my own sick scent, the dusty air. A trace of … gunpowder? Faint, sulfurous, and old.

  I started the process of unkinking my muscles and peeling myself from the floor. I ached all over, and the spot where the dart had hit me throbbed. Wincing, I rubbed it. Once I was upright, I sat, waiting for a wave of dizziness to pass, gaining a better sense of my bearings. Something about this place made my skin crawl. I scratched my arms through my sweater, trying to soothe an itch that wouldn’t go away.

  I was still dressed, and I wasn’t tied up. So, things could be worse. Way to be positive.

  Now, what to do? If I could sense a draft, I could follow it out. But the air was still. I wanted a long drink of water. I wanted to run, I wanted to howl. My options at the moment were limited. I wanted to know more about who had done this to me. One thing at a time.

  Carefully I stood, arms outstretched, searching for the walls and ceiling, the confines of the room. Figure out where I was, then where I could go. I had to duck, turning my head because the ceiling was just a touch too low. I squinted into the darkness, and my hand touched gritty stone surface. Now, I ought to be able to follow the wall to … something.

  Traveling step by careful step, I felt along the wall for any clue, and took slow breaths, trying to filter some meaning from this world. There was dead stillness—nothing for me to hear, no voices of evil kidnappers, not so much as water dripping. The walls were definitely solid—chilled, ancient, no give at all. I was in some kind of cave. However, I wasn’t sure it was natural—it seemed too uniform. Artificial, then. A carved tunnel.

  My hands itched, and the annoying burn got worse, until I had to shake them, rubbing them together to get rid of the feeling. The more I thought about it, though, the more my whole body started feeling that itch, that slow burn that never got truly painful, but would drive me crazy before too long.

  I knew that sensation—silver. There was silver here, low grade, scant quantities found in scattered flecks in the walls, and the more I touched them the worse the allergic reaction would become. Just as they’d known how much tranquilizer to use, my captors knew to paint the walls with silver, to keep me captive, quiet.

  No—not a room, a cell, or a cave. This was a mine. They’d taken me to a silver mine, probably one of the hundreds scattered throughout the Colorado mountains, abandoned and forgotten. For some reason, the thought that I was still in Colorado—still relatively close to home—comforted me. I had to find a way out of here and get home.

  I continued my circuit of the tiny cave, brushing the wall with only my fingertips, ignoring the building itch. It was just a little silver, it wouldn’t kill me unless it got in my bloodstream. This must have been some branch of a tunnel, excavated a short distance, blown out with explosives, then abandoned when it didn’t yield high-quality ore. The ceiling arced evenly overhead.

  Finally, the stone ended. I touched wood, set perpendicular to the cave wall. I pressed my hands flat against it, felt all over, and didn’t feel the burn of silver. Just plain wood. I studied it. A sheet of wood reinforced with two-by-fours had been set across the cave’s opening—it might have been a door, but if there were hinges, they were bolted on the outside, into the rock. The inside, the side facing me, had no handle, no lock, no sign of a lock. The wood itself felt solid. I banged on it, gave it a shake, and it didn’t budge. There was a gap at the bottom of the door, enough to stick my fingers through, enough to let air in, and a faint sliver of white light, maybe from a lantern. I also found a seam, as if some kind of slot had been cut into the wood.

  Bottom line, there was a door. A shut door could be opened and allow escape.

  I pounded on the wood and yelled. “Hey! Wanna get the fuck over here and explain yourselves? Hey!” After one last, good hard pound, I pressed my ear to the gap near the floor, waited.

  Nothing happened.

  I lay on the floor, pressed my nose to the gap, and breathed several slow, deep breaths, hoping to catch a scent of someone, something, anything. Mostly what I smelled was stone and dusty air, and I swore I could smell the silver pervading everything, tickling the inside of my nose. I sneezed, scrubbed my nose on my sleeve, and tried again, determined not to think too hard about silver anymore. I just had to be careful not to get cut while I was here.

  And there they were, the same scents Tom and I had tracked: the two lycanthropes, wolf and lion. They’d lured us out and gotten us. I wished I knew why.

  Other scents mingled with the two I recognized. Those I wasn’t as clear on. One seemed human enough, but vague. I couldn’t even tell the person’s sex. The other—chilled. A corpselike cold. Vampire? Or was it just the pervasive cold of the stone masking something else?

  That didn’t make any more sense than the rest of it.

  I spent five minutes pounding on the door, shouting until my voice went hoarse. After the first minute I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get a response. But I kept doing it, just to be doing something.

  No one answered. I might have been alone in the mine.

  This was ridiculous. You didn’t drug and kidnap someone, then lock them into a dark room and leave them there for no reason. I wondered where the night-vision cameras were hidden.

  This whole place made me itch, and I rubbed my arms. I went to the middle of the cave, as far from the walls and traces of ambient silver as I could get, and sat. Stared at the door that I very much wanted to be on the other side of.

  I could claw my way through the wood, given time and motivation. I had the motivation, but I didn’t know how much time I had. I had another problem. I could turn Wolf, dig and chew through the door, and get cut up in the process. Being a werewolf didn’t mean I didn’t get hurt, it meant I could take a lot of damage and heal quickly. But if I really was in a silver mine, it didn’t matter how defunct it was, there could still be traces of silver all through this place, ore that was never excavated, a residue embedded in the walls and even scattered in the dust on the floor. If I cut open my paws, my hands, and if the silver got into my bloodstream, I’d be dead. The bullet half of the silver bullet didn’t kill werewolves; blood poisoning from the silver did. Silver-inlaid knives did as well. I didn’t know if there was a minimum amount of silver it took to poison a werewolf to death—maybe traces of powder on the floor wouldn’t be enough. But I didn’t want to be the one to test that threshold.

  So any escape plan that might break skin was out.

  Cold didn’t affect me as much as it did a normal human being, but I started to shiver. I pulled my hands into the sleeves of my sweater, hugged my knees to my chest, and tried to keep my breathing slow and steady. My mind spun, a hamster racing in a wheel that didn’t go anywhere.

  The pieces of what was happening here didn’t fit together. The tranquilizer dart, the efficiency of the strike—I’d never even heard the gun fire, and whoever had the gun must have been downwind because I hadn’t smelled anyone that close—made me think military. At one point the army had werewolf soldiers serving in Afghanistan. I’d been called in as a consultant when a unit of werewolves had broken down, its members suffering from post-traumatic stress and unable to control themselves. Out of necessity, the military made excellent use of tranquilizer gun
s on werewolves in that situation. But if someone in the military had kidnapped me, I’d have ended up in a steel and Plexiglas cell in a hypercontrolled situation in some lab. I’d had a bit of experience with those settings, too. If this had been a military or even some wacky paramilitary situation, I’d have been exposed, plenty of one-way mirrors and closed-circuit cameras watching me. There’d be someone standing there with a clipboard. They’d have had a reason for taking me, even if they didn’t want to tell me what it was.

  This setting—this was thrown together. This was making use of available resources. This said my captors might not have been working with a lot of time and money on their hands. They could probably get the tranquilizer gun and darts off the Internet, and they used a prison they had at hand rather than building one.

  A few choice questions would help me figure this out. I cycled through them a dozen times and didn’t find answers. Was Tom here? I desperately hoped he was free, safe, and calling the cavalry. On the other hand, it would be nice to have an ally. I thought about calling his name, then thought better of it. If whoever had done this had missed him, I didn’t want them going back for him. Were my captors targeting werewolves in general, or me in particular? If the answer was me in particular, that opened a whole catalog of enemies who might have done this. Who said that having enemies was good, because it meant you’d stood up for something in your life? Ah, I remembered: Winston Churchill. The guy who also said, If you’re going through hell, keep going. Yes, sir.

  Most of all, what I wanted to know was what did this have to do with Roman and his confrontation with Antony? Because whatever Colette said, sometimes all threads did lead back to a conspiracy.

  The culprit might be any one of a number of antisupernatural groups that had sprung up over the last few years, as vampires and lycanthropes and other brands of magic became more visible and more accepted. I made an easy target because of my radio show. Any truly crazy activists would have just killed me outright—I’d gotten plenty of threats. But these guys wanted me for something. And antisupernatural activist didn’t mesh with the evidence that at least some of my captors seemed to be supernatural themselves. They could be working for the enemy, but why?