Kitty Goes to War

“Yes,” I said. Of course I did.

“Sir,” Tyler said, stepping forward to interrupt. “If you have a Humvee with chains you can spare, I can drive it.”

Tyler was bigger than Stafford, who might have been that fit earlier in his life. So it was strange seeing Tyler defer to him—he still stood at military attention, but his shoulders slouched, just a little, and his gaze was down. I held my breath.

“Are you going to be okay, Sergeant?” Stafford asked.

Tyler glanced at me, and nodded. “Sir. For a little while, I think so, sir.”

So. Stafford let us go.

I CALLED Cormac while we waited for Tyler to find our Humvee with tire chains. We were in the glass-fronted lobby of the hospital. Ben was gri

“What?” I said while I waited for Cormac to pick up.

“You’re awesome, you know that?” he said. “You just talked an army colonel into loaning you a Humvee.”

“It was that or try to steal one, right?” I said. I tried to be happy, but I was getting tired. “And I couldn’t talk Vanderman into anything.”

Cormac answered before Ben could say anything to that.

“Hey,” I said. “What did I tell you? Ten minutes.”

“It’s been twenty,” he said.

“Whatever. We found a ride. We’re on our way. Now what’s going on at Speedy Mart? What do we have to do?”

He paused while he adjusted the phone. At least that was what it sounded like. “He’s using them to anchor power. Each one is a focal point in a ritual, and he strings them together in a kind of circuit. He can extend the effect of the ritual over an entire region that way—a hundred miles in every direction. But if we can neutralize each location, we can stop this.”

“Right, cool, and how do we do that?” I imagined it involved burning incense, sprinkling some sort of concoction, or chanting. The usual stuff.

“There’s a symbol, the gromoviti znaci, the thunder mark. People in Slavic countries used to carve it into their doorframes to protect against lightning strikes. Franklin’s power is associated with the weather because he’s invoking thunder gods, gods of storms. But that’s his problem—he’s not limiting himself to a particular magical tradition or set of symbols. He’s invoking as many as he can, thinking it will gain him more power. That’s why I had trouble identifying the magic, because it’s a mishmash of different systems. He’s using the power outside of its cultural contexts. The Norse god Thor doesn’t correspond exactly with the Slavic Perun, or the Hindu Indra, or the Yoruban Shango, or Sumerian Ishkur. They’re all thunder gods but they mean different things to their respective cultures. Some of these gods were meant to combat chaos, not cause it.”

He’d slipped into full-on lecture mode. I’d never heard him speak more than a couple of sentences together at a time. It almost freaked me out more than the blizzard. “Cormac, where the hell did you learn all this? You never used to talk like this.”

When he stayed silent, I was afraid I’d lost the co

“But what—”

“It’s complicated.”

I bit back a million questions. Cormac wasn’t right. Something had happened to him in prison, and it was beyond my ability to guess what. His stubbor

“What do we need to do?” I asked.

“We need to put the gromoviti znaci on the doorway of every Speedy Mart in the area. It should neutralize Franklin’s power.”

“Should?” I said, a little wild.

“This isn’t an exact science.”

I almost laughed.

Between tracking down Franklin and the research I’d done for the show the previous week, I knew where the Speedy Marts were located. In my mind, I tried to map an efficient route between them all. Denver was a sprawling city, its suburbs reaching out for miles. The southernmost location was in Parker, in the southeastern corner of the metro area. The northernmost was in Lafayette, closer to Boulder than to Denver. It would take an hour to drive straight from one to the other, without any detours, in the best of weather and with no traffic.

“We can’t do it,” I said, at a loss. “It would take all day, even if the weather was perfect. Maybe if we had a dozen or so people to help—”

What was I saying? I had resources. I had a wolf pack that lived all over the region.

“What is it?” Cormac asked.

“We can do this. Can you e-mail this symbol of yours? Or do you have a URL people can link to? We have to do this before the power goes out—or do it by phone.” I didn’t know if everyone had phones that could receive photos. Shaun did—he could help cover gaps, maybe.

“Yeah, I think I can send out a photo. Who am I sending it to?”

“Shaun. You remember Shaun, from New Moon?” He did, and I gave him the number. “Give me a minute to call him and warn him it’s coming.”

“What’s this going to accomplish?”

“I’m sending my pack out to do the legwork. I need to look at a map, but I should be able to get someone to every location within an hour.”

Cormac breathed a relieved sigh. “Good.”

“I gotta run for a sec.” I hung up. Tyler had just pulled up in a beige Humvee.

Ben said, “That sounded like a plan.”

“Yeah. I sure hope so. We need a map of the city, to mark down the addresses of all the Speedy Marts and figure out who in the pack is closest to each of them. We can hit the ones on the way into town.”

“I think I can handle that. Just a sec.” He went outside, ducking before the driving snow, and headed toward his car.

Tyler’s Humvee seemed to be going awfully fast as it rounded the corner. I braced, waiting for it to slide and spin out on the ice—but it didn’t. He brought it right up to the curb, where it stopped cold.

The vehicle was squat, low profile, low center of gravity. It had four doors, and I could see a stark interior through the windshield. The tires had chains on them. Maybe we could get to Denver after all.

Ben returned with supplies: phone, a blanket, road flares, a bottle of water, and a ragged city map. Tyler was waving to us from the cab of the Humvee.

“You ready for this?” Ben said.

I hadn’t stopped to consider whether I was ready for this. I took a deeper breath—my ribs still hurt, my stomach was sore. They hurt less if I didn’t think about it. So, time to power through.

“Yeah,” I said, brushing back his mussed-up hair.

Tyler drove, and Ben and I sat in back where we could plan. We got moving, heading east, back to state Highway 83 rather than the interstate, which we assumed would still be closed farther north. We were hoping to see little to no traffic. Tyler assured us that with the vehicle’s four-wheel drive and the chains, we ought to be able to make good time. The highway went straight to Parker.

The Humvee was rough and noisy. Between the rattle of the chains on the tires, roaring engine, the uninsulated steel cab, and wind beating against the windows, I couldn’t hear much of anything, and every little bump jostled us. But I had to make these calls.

“Hey, Shaun?” I shouted into my phone.

My werewolf hearing was the only way I heard his reply, a clear voice under all the rattling. “Kitty? What’s going on? What’s all that noise, I can barely hear you.”

“It’s a long story. I’m in a Humvee heading north. You feel like saving the city?”

“Does it involve stopping this snow?” he said.

“Yeah, actually.”

“Then I’m totally in.”

“Cool. This is going to take footwork and phone calls. Where are you?”

“I’m snowed in at the restaurant. They weren’t predicting this. I thought we were going to get the usual snowy day lunch crowd looking for coffee and a bowl of soup. This is epic.”

“Yeah, more than you know. Look, Cormac—you remember Cormac? He’s going to be sending you a photo of a symbol. We have to put that symbol over the door of every Speedy Mart in town.”