Kitty Goes to War

Chapter 21

“WHAT’S GOING on? What’s happening?” I pressed my hand to my opposite ear and walked a few feet away to get some privacy.

“Franklin found himself some very weird ancient magic. He finished casting his spell and this blizzard is just getting started.”

I had stopped questioning this sort of thing a long time ago. Weird ancient magic, check. Even worse blizzard, check. I wanted to go home and take a hot bath.

“Right. But can we stop him?”

“We can neutralize the spell, but we have to hit every Speedy Mart in town to do it. I can’t do it alone.”

That was a pretty big thing for him to admit.

Denver and the surrounding suburbs had thirteen Speedy Marts. Cormac had visited them all over the last week. Normally, getting to all of them would sound doable. Crazy, but doable. But now?

“Cormac, we’re in Colorado Springs in the middle of a blizzard. How the hell are we supposed to get to Denver?”

“I don’t know. Hijack a snowplow or something.”

“Not helpful,” I said. “How much time do we have?”

“A couple of hours before it’s too late to break the spell.”

“Let me call you back in ten minutes,” I said.

“I’m serious, Kitty. We don’t have time to screw around.”

A snarl burred at the back of my throat. “Ten minutes.” I hung up.

Cormac wouldn’t exaggerate. He was talking the worst blizzard ever. A Katrina level of destruction blizzard. I couldn’t imagine. That was the point. Hundred-mile-an-hour winds, subzero temperatures, a dozen feet of snow crashing through roofs, no power, no heat, and having it last for a week or more.

“What’s wrong?” Ben said when I rejoined the group.

“The Franklin situation’s blowing up. Cormac needs us back in Denver.”

Ben blinked in disbelief. “He knows there’s a blizzard on, right?”

“He suggested stealing a snowplow.”

Another moment passed while Ben considered. “He’s not doing anything that’s going to break his parole, is he?”

That question wasn’t highest on my list of current concerns.

“Can I help? What can I do to help?” Tyler asked. Guy needed a mission.

“Think you can get the army to issue us a Humvee?” I said, mostly joking.

Tyler glanced at Stafford, who was down the hall, conversing with a medical crew that had arrived to help clean up the mess. They were loading Walters and Vanderman into body bags. The place was becoming crowded, lots of people in uniform taking orders from the colonel, ducking in and out of rooms, clearing debris. Someone should call Dr. Shumacher to let her know what happened.

“The base is still under lockdown,” Tyler said. “He may not let us out at all.”

Who was I kidding? He probably wouldn’t even let us out of the building, much less out of Fort Carson. But I’d never know unless I asked. The worst he could do was say no.

I walked over to the colonel, hands laced behind my back, trying to look harmless. The slight limp probably didn’t hurt.

“Colonel Stafford?”

He turned and glared, but didn’t tell me to go away.

“I know you want us to stick around, but I really have to get back to Denver. I’ve got a friend who needs help. I’ll come right back as soon as I can, but Tyler says that with the base under lockdown nobody can leave. I really need to leave.”

If possible, his frown deepened. More than stern, though, he looked tired. He disguised the shadows under his eyes with sheer willpower. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in keeping the lockdown in effect. But you can’t drive to Denver in this weather. You might as well stay.”

He was right. We’d barely gotten here in Ben’s sedan as it was. I had no other argument, except to clasp my hands to my chest and look up at him with my big brown eyes while begging, Please?

Even my dignity had bounds.

I crossed my arms. “What if I told you that this blizzard isn’t natural? That it’s the product of a magical spell designed to cause millions of dollars in damage and plunge the region into chaos. I know how to stop it, but I have to get to Denver to do it.”

He crossed his arms back at me, and stared at me down his nose. “I’d say you were crazy.” But the thing was—he was still listening.

“You know that werewolves exist, right?” I said. “You ever think about what else is out there? If werewolves are real, what else must be real?”

“Actually, Ms. Norville, I’ve been trying not to think too hard about that.”

I hid a smile. I understood the impulse. “I really have to get to Denver. You can talk to my friend and he’ll explain the whole deal, if you want. Dr. Shumacher could probably back us up.”

He considered me for an even longer moment. In my mind, a clock was ticking—I needed to call Cormac back. By this time, Ben and Tyler had inched over to listen in. Tyler’s brow was arched, possibly in amazement. Ben was just smiling.

Then Stafford said, “So you came down here to try and help my men before chasing down this other situation?”

“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 grinning wide enough to split his face.

“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 connection. Then he took a breath, and his voice sounded calm, but there was tension—temper—held in check. “I’ll explain it all later. I promise.”

“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 stubbornness hadn’t changed—he wouldn’t explain until he was ready to.

“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.”

“And that’ll stop the snow? That’s kind of crazy.” He chuckled.

“Shaun, we’re werewolves, we don’t get to judge crazy.”

Ben had the map spread out over his lap. We didn’t have anything to write with, so he’d poked holes in the Speedy Mart locations. “Here, I think I got them all.”

I double-checked his work and found a couple he missed. Now we had to figure out who lived closest to where and start making assignments.

A couple of members of the pack—such as Rachel, who lived in the foothills west of town—were too far away to be any help. With the weather like this, they were probably socked in under a couple of feet of snow by now. But with a few of the other locations, we were in luck—Becky lived a couple of blocks from the store in Littleton. Trey lived up north in Broomfield and ought to be able to reach the two northernmost locations. Shaun would cover the one downtown, after calling everyone and passing along the symbol.

“Have them call me if they argue. This isn’t a request, it’s an order from on high.” I rarely pulled rank in the pack. Instead, I usually cajoled and prodded. I was hoping the rarity of me issuing orders would get across how serious this was.

I was also hoping that Cormac was right, and that this would work.

“This isn’t going to be easy,” Shaun said.

“No,” I agreed. Even with help, we might not cover all the locations. But this seemed like the best chance. “Our other option is to call all of the Speedy Marts and see if we can talk the clerks into posting the symbol themselves.” What were the odds?

“It wouldn’t hurt to have someone on that as backup,” Ben said. “We just need someone with a phone book and a phone.”

“Okay, let’s get Rachel on that, since she’s probably snowed in anyway.”

Maybe we’d covered all the bases.

We raced on. Tyler sat straight, both hands on the wheel, focused ahead and concentrating. There wasn’t any traffic, not anymore, though we passed abandoned cars that had slid off the shoulder and gotten stuck. Every now and then I saw flashing lights through the driving snow—the yellow warning lights of snowplows, the red and blue of a police car once. I expected us to get pulled over by a cop wanting to know what the heck we were doing out here. But maybe you saw a military Humvee driving with purpose up the highway in a snowstorm, you figured it was on a mission.

I called Cormac. “Did you get ahold of Shaun?”

“I did. He’s got the picture. I’ll send it to you next.”

“You think this is really going to work?” I asked.

“I guess we’ll find out,” he said, his wry fatalism from the old days showing through. “I—I think it will. I have faith.”

I’d never known Cormac to have much faith in anything except the gun in his hand and his ability to shoot. Now that he’d lost the guns, what did he have faith in? And why did that make me worry? “Cormac. Seriously. Are you okay?” Frowning, Ben glanced at me.

“I’m fine. I’ll explain everything when this is all over.” He clicked off.

“That just means there really is something to explain,” I said, staring at my phone.

“He is okay, right?” Ben said. And I really didn’t know.

My phone beeped—photo coming through.

The gromoviti znaci, the thunder mark, looked like a wheel, or a very stylized flower. Six spokes radiated from a space, with a circle in the middle. On the wheel’s outer ring, between each spoke, was another circle. I knew enough about magic to know circles were powerful, often used as symbols of protection. This was one of the more intricate, beautiful versions of the pattern I’d seen.

Ben leaned over to look at the screen on my phone. “That’s it, huh?”

“Yup.”

“I’m trying to figure out if ‘saving the city’ would fly as a defense for vandalism charges,” he said.

“You’re always the practical one.” I kissed his cheek.

The storm around us was morphing from a pale gray to a dark gray—the sun was setting. I wondered if twilight or nightfall was part of Franklin’s spell, and if that was how much time we had to stop this.

“How’s it going, Tyler?” I said.

“It’s nice having a job to do,” he said, smiling a little. “A mission.”

I was glad someone was enjoying this. I’d have been happier at home, safe in our den.

We approached the lights of Parker.