Kitty Goes to War

Chapter 22

I NAVIGATED TYLER to the Speedy Mart, which was on the corner of a wide intersection between subdivisions. The snowplows had given up awhile ago, and the wind had blown drifts across the streets. We only made it through because Tyler gunned the Humvee, and the chains bit into the snow. The streetlights were on; sheets of huge snowflakes—golf-ball-size chunks of icy, clinging snow, really—fell through the orange beams. It would have been beautiful—if I’d been watching it from inside a heated room.

A single car, half covered by a drift of snow, was parked in the lot. A light was on inside the convenience store, but I didn’t see anyone behind the counter. The place might not have been open, but that was okay—we could put the symbol on the outside. I hoped.

Tyler swerved to a stop by the curb in front of the door.

“I don’t suppose anyone has a pen and paper? A can of spray paint?” I said.

“Why don’t we ask him?” Ben said, nodded through the window.

A scruffy-looking guy in his early twenties was pulling himself to his feet. He looked like he’d been lying down behind the counter.

Ben and I piled out. Tyler waited, keeping the motor running.

The door was unlocked, and a tinny bell rang as we pushed in. The guy behind the counter, fully upright now, stared at us. Ben and I must have been a sight: still in jeans and T-shirts, we’d been soaked wet and dried off a couple of times over. My hair felt like a nest and my eyes had shadows under them. I might have had a fading bruise or two left over from the fight with Vanderman.

“Hi,” I said. “I wondered if you had a marker that we could borrow, or for sale, or something.” I smiled in a way that I hoped was cheerful rather than crazed.

He pointed down one of the aisles. “We have a few office supplies there.”

“Thanks.” I ran. Sure enough, I found a package of Sharpies. The nice, thick, stinky kind. I picked up three and brought them to the counter. Ben got out his wallet to pay.

“That’s it?” he said. He sounded numb.

“No, wait.” I made a quick tour of the store, grabbing sodas, a package of beef jerky, a box of cookies. This ought to get us through. “Anything else?” I asked Ben.

“Permission?” he said.

“Ah. Not just yet.”

The clerk dutifully scanned our items. “Would you like a bag?”

This was getting kind of surreal. A gust of wind rattled the door and snow pelted the glass. “Yes, please.”

The transaction completed, the clerk, still blinking dazedly, said, “Thank you for choosing Speedy Mart.”

I grinned, teeth showing. “I didn’t choose Speedy Mart. Speedy Mart chose me. Oh, and I’m really sorry about this.”

I ripped one of the markers out of the packaging before handing the bag back to Ben. We both looked at the door, and the clear space of wall—a clean white canvas—above it. There didn’t seem to be any convenient footstools or chairs around.

“Can you lift me up?” I said.

“I think so,” Ben answered.

First, though, I flipped open the phone so I could look at the picture. I’d never taken an art class in my life. I hoped the thunder gods were forgiving of my lack of talent.

Kneeling, Ben held my legs while I sat on his shoulder, and he stood. Werewolf strength meant he didn’t even wobble, but I had to grab his other shoulder to keep my balance.

“You okay?” he said.

“Yup.” I started drawing.

“Hey, what are you doing?” the kid said, rushing around the counter. He didn’t get closer than about ten feet. He just stopped, hand outstretched, watching with an expression that resembled hopelessness.

“Breaking a spell. I hope,” I said.

“Huh? But—you can’t—I mean—”

“The blizzard? Not normal. We’re here to save the city.”

The guy started laughing, hysterical. “This sucks! I mean, who are you? What the hell—” He sat down and put his head in his hands.

I was almost finished drawing the thunder mark, just adding the circles.

“Hey, are you okay?” Ben asked him.

“No. I was supposed to be off my shift six hours ago, but I can’t get home, and no one else can get here. The manager said I should just stay open as long as I was here. I’ve been here for fourteen hours!”

What could I say? That really did suck.

“Okay, I’m done,” I said to Ben, and he let me slide to the floor. We regarded my artwork, comparing it to the image on my phone. It looked like it was supposed to—the distinct wheel-like symbol, as big as my face. And if I wasn’t mistaken, the wind seemed to have died down a little. It may have been my imagination.

“It just seems way too easy,” Ben said.

I stared at him. “We just drove eighty miles through a blizzard in a Humvee—you call that easy?”

Ben made an offhand shrug, and he had a point—that was actually one of the easier things we’d done today.

“Who are you people?” the clerk shrieked. “What am I supposed to do about that?”

“Please don’t paint it or wash it off or anything. At least for a couple of days,” I said.

“But—”

“Seriously.”

He clenched his hands and drew himself up with new resolve. “I’m calling my manager.” He marched to a phone behind the counter.

We both ran to beat him to it. Ben lunged over the counter to grab the base and pull out the cord. I went right for the receiver in his hand and snatched it away. The clerk yelled and scrambled away from me to press himself against the wall, panting for breath. We must have looked pretty aggressive—a couple of wolves on the run. And he’d acted a lot like prey. Smiling, I glared at him and resisted licking my lips.

“How about we give you a ride home?” I said. “We’ve got a Humvee with chains.”

He only took about five seconds to say yes. Ten more minutes ticked off the clock while we waited for him to get his things, shut off the lights, switch on the alarm, and lock up. We waited in the Humvee.

“What’s up with that?” Ben asked, looking at me. “Giving him a ride?”

“It’s the only thing I could think of,” I said.

“Oh, I’m not complaining, it’s not a bad idea. It’s not a great idea. Especially if the kid finds out we’re all werewolves.”

“What’s going on?” Tyler asked.

The kid hauled open the front passenger door, which creaked on its hinges, and climbed it. He needed a couple of tries to make it up to the seat. When he had to lean way over to close the door again, I was afraid he was going to fall out, but he managed the stunt.

“Whoa, I’ve never ridden in one of these before. This is, like, a real one. Not a Hummer. Right?” He looked around. We were all glaring at him. He leaned away from the large and intimidating presence of Tyler and looked like he was maybe reconsidering the ride.

“Uh, hi.” The clerk said. “I live just a couple miles away. A block or so off Keystone. Um, thanks for the ride, I guess.”

Tyler shifted into gear and the Humvee crunched forward on a new layer of snow.

“You think it’s getting better?” Ben said, craning his neck to look up out the window.

It would be easy to fool ourselves into thinking so. The snow was still falling in giant flakes. But it was falling straight down in lazy drifting patterns now, instead of driving horizontally.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Um, turn left here.” The clerk pointed to an intersection, and Tyler drove through. The streetlights might have been red, but we couldn’t tell because they were covered with a layer of white.

Away from the store, the wind started blowing again, kicking up eddies and whirlwinds of snow around us. It could have been my imagination.

We stayed quiet; we didn’t want to talk in front of the kid. I didn’t even want to call Cormac until he was out of here. Ben was right. What had I been thinking? But it meant he wouldn’t mess with the thunder mark.

“This thing doesn’t have a heater, does it?” the kid said.

“It’s pretty stripped down,” Tyler answered. I swore the kid flinched at the sound of his voice. Tyler sounded like a movie badass, which was pretty cool unless you thought he was maybe going to kill you.

Tyler followed the kid’s directions until he turned onto a side street in an unassuming neighborhood of tract housing. It hadn’t been plowed, and the Humvee barged into a three-foot drift. Snow flew everywhere.

“Here’s fine. It’s just a couple of houses up.” He probably lived with his parents.

“You sure?” Tyler asked.

“Yeah, yeah.” The door was already open, and the kid fell out and into a drift. He probably would have run away, but he sunk to his knees with every step and had to shuffle. We waited until he reached the front door of his house—two up, like he said. We could barely see him through the whiteout.

“There,” I said when the door closed behind him. “Good deed accomplished.”

“I thought it was a bribe,” Ben said.

“Hey. Win win all around.” I grinned.

Tyler backed out of the drift he’d driven into. I got out my phone and called Cormac.

“Hey,” I said. “One down. We’re headed to our second stop. How are we doing?”

I heard a noise in the background, like he was rearranging the phone, or like I’d caught him in the middle of something. “You did it? You got the symbol up? What happened?”

“Uh . . . nothing?” I winced. “Was something supposed to happen?”

“I don’t know,” he said, sighing with frustration. “Becky got the one in Littleton, Shaun hit downtown. I’m still waiting for the others. I’m thinking we ought to know by now if it’s working.”

And if it didn’t work, what then? “Where’s Franklin? He’s got to be masterminding this from somewhere.”

“I’m tracking him down right now. I’ll be in touch.” He hung up.

Ben was navigating Tyler to the Tech Center location. The world outside was getting darker as night fell. Buildings were shadows in a fog, and the glow from streetlights shone strangely, diffused by the snow. We might have been barreling across an alien world.

“Any progress?” Ben said.

“I can’t tell. He seems distracted. But he says two other locations are done.”

“That’s good, right?” he said.

I couldn’t say.

Our visit to the Speedy Mart at the Tech Center went better than our first stop had. Mostly because the store was closed and locked up, with no one to hassle us. Once again, Ben held me up while I marked on the painted concrete above the door. The overhang sheltered us a little. Once again, I imagined that the wind diminished when we were done.

Then we were off again. After sunset, it was hard to tell if the weather was changing. The sky could be clearing and we’d never know.

“Back in Afghanistan,” Tyler said, thoughtful, distracted, “patrols would head out sometimes and get ambushed. They’d lose one or two guys, but we wouldn’t find any sign of attack—no explosions, no gunfire. Not even footprints. The captain and I went out once to try to find out what was happening. I smelled it—and it wasn’t human. But we didn’t know what it was. It shouldn’t have surprised us—we aren’t really human, right? But it’s hard knowing how to fight something when you don’t know what it is. The guys got real superstitious about it, saying it was some kind of magical curse. Some of them started carrying around charms—four-leaf clovers, St. Christopher medals, things like that. Who knew if it did any good? Kind of like this. But if it makes you feel better, is it really so bad?”

We drove for another mile, tires crunching on ice, before I figured out how to ask, “Did you ever find out what happened?”

He shook his head. “Not really. Not officially. But some of the locals told stories—they said there was a demon that lived in the desert. The ghul. It could change its shape, turn into a deer, or a wounded dog, or whatever it needed to lure people into the canyons. Then it would attack. Maybe it was a person, some kind of lycanthrope. But we could have tracked it down then. This thing—we never saw a sign. Just the bodies it left.” He looked over his shoulder at me. “You ever hear of anything like that?”

I shook my head, and once again felt daunted about how much I didn’t know.

We arrived at the South Broadway location, the one we’d trailed Franklin to, which seemed appropriate. Like we’d come full circle. The clerks had bailed here as well, which left the parking lot empty. We put the thunder mark over the door, same as the others. I thought I was getting better at it—faster, anyway. Had to stay positive, right?

Back in the Humvee, Tyler was holding my phone out to me. “It’s your friend.”

I grabbed it and said, “Hello? Cormac? Where are you?”

“Just a sec—there’s four more down,” Cormac said. He told me the locations—Trey and Dan had teamed up to hit two stores up north—and I crossed them off on the map with the Sharpie. They made bold, satisfying X’s across the region. This was like marking territory. I was so proud of my pack.

“That’s great,” I said. “We’re halfway there.”

“Not quite. Franklin’s leaving town.”

“In this weather? How?”

“That Hummer he rented. This follows his pattern—he sets the storms in motion and leaves before he gets caught up in it.”

“So . . . we’re stopping his spell, right? What else do we need to do?”

“I want to get him,” Cormac said.

Yeah. So did I. “What do you need?”

“Meet me outside the Brown Palace.” And he hung up. No plan of attack, no clue about what we were actually going to do when we confronted Franklin. We’d get to that point soon enough.

“We’re heading downtown,” I told Ben and Tyler.

“The interstate’s closed,” Ben said. “We’ll have to take surface streets.”

“That just keeps the adventure going,” I said with false cheer. My nerves were vibrating—what if we went through all this and it didn’t work?

My phone rang again. Shaun this time. “Hey,” I said. “How’s it going?”

“I was going to ask you that,” he said. “Is this actually working? It’s stopped snowing here.”

“It has?” I looked outside, peering at the odd streetlight to catch a hint of movement. I couldn’t see snow falling. Maybe it really had stopped.

The line clicked. “I have another call coming in,” Shaun said. “Lance, it looks like. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Awesome.” I closed the phone and looked at Ben. “I think this is working.”

“It ain’t over yet,” he said.

We drove on, Tyler leaning forward to navigate the snowdrifted street, with stalled and abandoned cars left as obstacles every block or so.

“How are you doing?” I asked him.

“Good,” he said. “As long as I have something else to think about, I’m good.”

I patted his shoulder, and he flashed a smile.

The phone rang again—another Speedy Mart marked, I assumed. Excited, I answered and waited for Cormac’s voice.

“Change of plans—he’s heading east on Colfax. We’ve got to stop him.”

Not exactly what I was expecting. “Stop him how?”

“I don’t know. But we can’t let him leave town.”

“You’re following him, I take it?”

“Yeah. You think you can cut him off?”

Well. We could certainly try. “Sure. Why not? See you in a minute.”

This was going to get ugly. I slipped the phone into my pocket.

“I heard that,” Ben said.

“Where are we?”

“Broadway,” he said.

“We have to hustle,” I said, shaking my head. “We’ll never make it.”

“Just tell me how to get there,” Tyler said, and gunned the motor. I fell against the backseat and grabbed the door to steady myself.

“Head east on Alameda,” Ben said, grinning. “Two lights up.”

Tyler ran the next red light. But we were the only vehicle in sight. Tyler sped through the next three red lights, which was kind of cool. Racing on, we managed to approach Colfax without sliding out of control. I kept expecting to see flashing red and blue lights reflecting off the snow and fog—the one time you don’t expect any cops around, Murphy’s Law said they ought to be here.

Ben navigated until Tyler swung the wheel and fishtailed onto Colfax. I studied the way ahead of us for a black Hummer barreling along. It was hard to see anything through the snow, which was still falling here.

“There he is,” Tyler said, shifting hard and swinging the steering wheel. The Humvee lurched sideways, the chains biting into the ice covering the street. We blocked most of the road, now, and could move forward or back as needed to stop Franklin. The Hummer was a black hole moving through the mist, getting closer. We all expected him to stop.

“Guy’s not slowing down,” Tyler said.

“Maybe he can’t stop on the ice,” I said, doubtful.

“He’s speeding up.” Tyler’s hands kneaded the steering wheel. He bared his teeth. “This is just like a roadblock. He ain’t slowing down.”

Roadblock, car bomb—Tyler was in another place at the moment. I squeezed his shoulder.

“Asshole,” Ben muttered. “Thinks a monster car like that makes him invincible.”

“We can still stop him,” I said. “It won’t hurt us.”

Tyler’s breathing steadied. “Permanently, rather. It’s still gonna hurt. You sure?”

We didn’t have any time for further discussion. Tyler hunched over, bracing. In the backseat, Ben and I curled up on the floorboards, hanging on to each other.

Then came the crash.

Near as I could figure before I shut my eyes, Franklin’s Hummer T-boned us. Steel crunched and tore. A shockwave slammed through us and we skidded, even with the tire chains. I flew, bounced—hands grabbed me. My vision went upside down for a minute. Then, silence.

I’d been holding my breath. Wolf was shrieking through my gut, claustrophobic and crying to get out. I pulled her in, locked her down tight, made my breathing slow and calm. Only then could I assess. Sore—lots and lots of sore. I had a bruise on my head where I’d run into something hard. But no shooting pains. No blood or broken bones. All in all, I didn’t feel much more beat up than I had after Vanderman worked me over.

Ben’s hand closed on my arm. I grabbed it and squeezed back. We’d ended up on the seat, him pressed up against the door and me sprawled in his lap. I peered through the window and got a look at the hood of Franklin’s Hummer, which was only slightly rumpled. The engine had smoke coming out of it.

We took a moment to stretch our limbs and extricate ourselves.

“Everyone okay? Still human?”

“Barely,” Ben said, voice tense. “You?”

“Shaken. Fine,” I said.

“That sucked.” Rolling a shoulder, he winced. He opened and closed his hand as if he expected it not to work.

“Tyler?” I asked. I could hear him breathing in the front seat, but he hadn’t spoken yet, which worried me. If he shifted, this would get messy. Messier. I straightened, feeling a muscle in my back spasm. Yeah, if I’d been fully human this would have hurt. Leaning over the front seat, I got a look at Tyler.

Hunched over, muscles trembling, he was still gripping the steering wheel, like it was a life preserver. I took a breath—full of wild, full of wolf. I also smelled blood. He was on the edge. He’d been hurt, and his wolf would blaze forth to protect him.

I pulled myself into the front, grunting when my battered muscles complained. Moving close so he could smell me, so he would have to listen to me, I put my arms around him. My embrace seemed small, unable to contain his powerful frame.

His eyes were clamped shut. Blood dripped from a cut on his forehead.

“Tyler, listen to me. Keep it together. Pull it back in. You don’t have to shift, we’re fine, we’re going to be fine. Stay with me. Breathe . . .” The litany went on. Stay human. Stay with us. Breathe slowly, in and out.

I could usually get wolves to listen to me when they were on the edge like this. Just hold them, wrap them up, keep talking to them so they would remember human voices. But those were wolves I knew. How well did I know Tyler, really? “Please,” I begged.

And his breathing slowed. The muscles in his back relaxed, some of the tension going out of them.

“There’s Franklin,” Ben said, looking out the window at the man stumbling out of the other crashed car. His own voice was sounding low and rough, and I wondered how close he was to losing it. He shoved open the door and stalked out like he was on the prowl.

“Tyler, you okay? I gotta go back him up,” I said.

The soldier shuddered through the shoulders and straightened, like a dog shaking itself out. “Let’s go,” he said.

Ben had paused outside the Humvee, waiting for us. Together, we moved around to Franklin’s Hummer, to face the man himself.

He wasn’t dressed for the weather. His trench coat would be more at home on the streets of New York City or London. He probably wore his usual suit underneath. The maroon wool scarf wrapped once around his neck didn’t seem to do much to hold back the cold. The snow came up well over his dress shoes. He was tense, shivering.

When he saw us, he backed away, stumbling. He must have seen something inhuman in us. Something ferocious, animal. A pack of beings who wanted to tear him apart, and very much could if they got to him. One wonders if he saw anything but the threat. He knew what I was—my identity as a werewolf was very public—and could guess that Ben and Tyler were also werewolves.

He raised a hand over his head; he was holding something, a metal artifact as big as his fist. “Stay back! I have defense against your kind! Stay back!”

The object he held was made of silver and shaped like some kind of hammer—a broad T with rounded edges. A Scandinavian charm, with an intricate design stamped into it. Gleaming, it threw back what little light shone on it, and almost writhed in his grip, like it was a living thing trying to break free. Some twisting force of nature—lightning, maybe.

“Stay away from me!” he shouted again.

I smelled blood on him—such a sharp, sweet scent. My mouth watered. He’d skinned his cheek in the crash, and the red dripped along his jaw to his chin. He may not even have noticed. Ben curled a lip and growled, teeth showing. “Wait,” I murmured. Yeah, Franklin was asking for it. That didn’t mean we were going to give it to him. Guy wasn’t in his right mind.

Still, I wanted to get in his face. Not to do anything to him. Just to scare him a little. “Who hired you?” I shouted. “Who are you working for? Who wants to destroy my city?”

“This is bigger than you, little girl!”

I stepped forward, imagining I was stalking on wolf’s paws, snow and ice crunching lightly under my feet. I held his gaze, staring hard, and wondered if he understood the challenge.

“Back!” he shouted, waving his little charm. Then he said something in a language I didn’t understand. Couldn’t even guess what.

Thunder bellowed, the ear-shattering crack of a powerful summer thunderhead striking right overhead, along with an atomic flash of light. The sound was wrong in the middle of a snowstorm. I ducked, arms wrapped around my head. We’d all dropped to the ground—except for Franklin, who grinned at me. The talisman in his hand seemed to glow.

I straightened, angry that he’d made me put myself lower than him. Lightning had struck, right on top of us—maybe one of the vehicles or a streetlamp. I couldn’t tell where, but smelled sulfur and burning.

“You think that makes you tough?” I said. “You’re all powerful and stuff because you can destroy entire cities?”

“You wouldn’t understand. You have no faith! You’re an animal!”

Oh, why did I bother? I put my hands on my hips. “We’ll stop you. We’ve already stopped you.” I didn’t know if that was true. Shaun and the others had five more stores to mark. I hoped they were doing that now.

Franklin wore the triumphant expression of a conqueror. “You can’t stop us!”

From the darkness up the street, another vehicle appeared and skidded to a stop, enough behind Franklin’s Hummer that there was no danger of a collision. Cormac’s Jeep, hunched like a creature in the fog. Cormac slid out of the front seat and strode forward without a pause, until he stood about ten yards behind Franklin.

“Hey,” Cormac said. “If you’re done with them, you come deal with me.”

Franklin turned and slipped, nearly toppling over. He windmilled his arms to recover and then stood unsteadily, legs braced, arms outstretched. Straightening quickly, he faced down Cormac with his former air of superiority.

That he turned his back to me—that he thought I wasn’t a threat—made me angry. I wanted to snarl and pounce on him. But I also wanted to see what Cormac was going to do to the guy. I still wasn’t sure we had him cornered; he could call the cops on us and it would be just like the libel suit. Sure, I was right that he was a bad guy, and he really was using his Speedy Mart franchise to work magic, and he really was working on a spell to put Denver under ten feet of snow. And I would prove all that, how?

“You’re too late!” Franklin said, right out of the bad-guy handbook, as if there were any remaining doubt. “The divine power lives on, through me!”

“We’ll just see about that,” Cormac said.

Franklin thrust his amulet at Cormac, as though brandishing a cross at a vampire, and repeated the phrase he’d used before. I cringed, ducking, expecting a crack of thunder to crash over our heads. It didn’t. Franklin also seemed surprised, and he tried the gesture again.

Cormac seemed amused when he pulled his own amulet, a metal disk, out of the pocket of his leather coat. He studied it a moment, then threw it at Franklin, underhanded, as if he expected the guy to catch it.

Franklin didn’t catch it. He flinched in a panic, and the amulet hit him, then fell into the snow. Maybe we all expected an explosion, for flames to burst forth and devour him, but nothing happened. Franklin pawed in the snow for the object. When he found it, lying it flat on his hand, he stared at it with as much terror as if it really had rained physical destruction on him.

It showed the gromoviti znaci, wanna bet?

“Told you,” I said at him. I’d about decided we had to take him down and damn the consequences, if he didn’t just admit defeat and crawl away.

Then clouds parted. It seemed to happen suddenly, but more likely it had come upon us gradually, the clouds thinning, fading from gray to nothing, until fissures appeared, and a dark sky showed through, edged by lingering curls of mist. I felt as if a blanket lifted off me, like I could breathe freely again. Which meant that Shaun and the others had succeeded, and the spell was broken. While the blizzard had caused havoc, it wasn’t any worse now than the usual impressive winter storms that struck Denver every couple of years. People wouldn’t be talking about this one as the storm of the century.

Franklin stared up at the clearing sky with the rest of us. I couldn’t see his expression, but his shoulders sagged.

He put the amulet in his coat pocket and turned back to Cormac. “It’s your fault, isn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

Cormac and Franklin faced each other down like a couple of Old West gunslingers. Cormac even stood ready, arms loose, hands at his hips, ready to yank pistols from holsters. He looked wrong without his guns. But he didn’t look worried.

“What are you?” Franklin’s tone was both frightened and angry. He’d probably never been defeated. He was used to a world where few people knew anything about magic. “Who do you serve?”

“No one. I’m just a guy,” Cormac said, a tilt to his head.

That seemed to infuriate Franklin. He began chanting, not a one-phrase curse, a moment of power, and then done. He didn’t have an amulet this time. Above, clouds that had been clearing began to coalesce again, sinking low, as if drawn toward him. The temperature dropped—to even feel it at this point meant it was plummeting, going from freezing to arctic. And all the power gathered toward Franklin, who was pointing outstretched arms at Cormac.

“Kitty, what’s he doing?” Ben said, standing close behind me, taking hold of my shoulder. “Does Cormac need help?” Nearby, Tyler was breathing deep, fogging breaths.

“I don’t know,” I said, and my voice sounded thin, lost. I had seen magic at work before. I hadn’t seen anything like this.

I had a professor in college who read Anglo-Saxon like he’d grown up with it. This was the language of Beowulf, a rolling, singsong way of speaking, full of portent. Like thunder, rumbling for miles over a windswept plain. After the passage of time, this professor explained, ancient languages become the language of magic, the meanings forgotten but the power of them remembered. The Catholic Church could chant Latin, and it didn’t matter that no one knew what the words meant a thousand years later. He’d been speaking metaphorically. But he was right.

Franklin was drawing on that power now, gathering it to launch at and smash his enemy, and I couldn’t understand why Cormac was just standing there, why he didn’t look worried. But did he ever?

A white glow was growing around Franklin, seeming to light him from within. His hair was standing on end, as if he were gathering a static charge. The whole area looked like an electrical experiment gone awry. His voice increased in volume and pitch, a sign that the spell was drawing to a close. Then, as the words broke down into a primal yell of power, a static discharge, a bolt of lightning, crashed from Franklin to Cormac.

Cormac raised both hands, set his legs apart as if to brace, ducked his head—and a blue flare encased him. It was like someone lit a torch under him, and he was all flame—hot, intense, dangerous. Franklin’s lightning bolt disintegrated in a wave of sparks—which doubled back and caught him in the backwash.

I shielded my face; Ben and I ducked together, sheltering each other. The crash of thunder seemed to last for minutes. Then, silence. I could hear my heart pounding. Even Wolf was quiet, trembling in my gut, waiting to see which way we had to jump.

Finally, I looked around.

Harold Franklin was lying flat on his back, half buried in snow, and not moving. Cormac stood exactly as he had before the light show started. He didn’t even look singed. He pursed his lips in a thin smile and appeared satisfied.

“What the hell just happened?” Ben asked. His hand dug into my arm. He looked at Cormac, then looked at me. “Kitty?”

I just blinked at him. Cormac brushed his hands together in a dismissive gesture, like he’d just taken out the trash.

Overhead, stars shone. It was going to be a very cold night, the kind that froze eyelashes together and turned the snow into a glass-hard icy crust. Worst kind of weather. I still felt a lot better than I had a few hours ago.

I checked on Tyler. The cut on his head had stopped bleeding and was healing, closed over with a pinkish scab. Otherwise, he seemed fine. A little startled and wide-eyed like the rest of us. But he wasn’t about to lose it.

“Is he dead?” Tyler asked, looking at Franklin.

The heat was leaching from Franklin’s body as if he was dead or dying—but he was also lying in the snow, in freezing weather. I started forward to check, but Ben slipped in front of me and got there first. Franklin didn’t stir when Ben crouched to touch his neck and said, “He’s just passed out, I think.”

If I listened carefully, I could hear his heart beating slowly. So he was alive, but we had to get him out of the cold if we wanted him to stay that way. I could be forgiven for hesitating a moment on that one.

“We should get him inside before he freezes to death,” I said with a sigh.

“He’ll be fine,” Cormac said.

I stared at Cormac: Mr. Mysterious, minding his own business, keeping to himself, didn’t need guns anymore badass. I thought I’d known him. Or rather I thought I had a pretty good interpretation of the face he presented to the world. Even after he got out of prison I thought I had a little bit of a bead on him. Not so much, it turned out. And after all I’d been through over the last few years, all the people I’d met—psychics and magicians among them—I thought I knew enough to make some guesses. Maybe not.

“Right. No more dodging. Time for a straight answer. You’re a wizard. You learned how to be a wizard in prison.”

In a moment of sheepishness he ducked, looking away. Scuffed a boot in the snow. Then he studied the sky as if we were discussing the weather, which we sort of were, but still. Tyler and Ben had gone to get Franklin out of the snow, and they stood by him now, watching Cormac, waiting for his answer.

“Cormac?”

“I’m not the wizard,” he said finally. “Amelia Parker is.”

“Amelia Parker—”

About a year before his release, halfway into his sentence, Cormac asked me to find some information on a woman who’d been executed a century earlier at the Colorado Territorial Correction Facility, where he was serving his time. I’d discovered Amelia Parker: an odd woman, British, a world traveler and collector of exotic knowledge, something out of a Victorian adventure story. This just got even more odd.

“Amelia Parker is?” I said. “She’s not dead?”

“Not all of her is,” Cormac said.

“Just so we’re clear, we are talking about a woman who was hanged a hundred years ago,” I said. “She was a wizard. She had powers. And now she’s . . . possessing you? Is that it?”

“I guess you could say I met her ghost while I was on the inside. She needed a body and I needed . . . I don’t know. Company, I guess.”

“So, what, you guys just hooked up? So now you’re some kind of possessed zombie wizard?”

He gave me a look. The “you talk too much” look.

Ben had the most precious, adorable, totally confused look on his face I’d ever seen. His brow was furrowed, his mouth open, like he was trying to decide between screaming at Cormac, laughing him off, or asking if this Amelia woman was hot.

“I think I need to sit down,” Ben said. He looked at the drifts of snow around him, growled a little, and looked back at Cormac. “Are you okay? It’s still you in there, right? You’re not possessed possessed, right?”

“I’m fine,” Cormac said, sounding tired.

“But you have her power? Her knowledge?” I asked, trying to understand. Not that the situation could ever be clear cut or described in a straightforward manner.

“No,” Cormac said. “It’s all her. Sometimes, she’s in charge. That’s all. Don’t ask me to explain it. It’s just one of those things.”

We stood in the cold, glaring at each other, uncertain how to move forward.

Tyler cleared his throat and pointed at the unconscious man in the snow. “We really should get this guy out of here.”

Tyler and Ben hauled Franklin up and brought him to the Humvee, covering him with blankets. He made a noise, so he was still with us.

“I guess we should take him to a hospital,” I said. I didn’t know how we were going to explain this at the emergency room. I couldn’t prove anything that happened. And after everything, I might still be sued for libel.

“Are we done here?” Ben said to Cormac. “Spell broken, no more crazy weather?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s over.”

“We’re not done with this conversation,” I said to him, pointing. “You still have explaining to do.”

He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other.

The Humvee was pretty smashed up, the whole driver’s side crunched in, but it was still drivable if you ignored the disturbing clacking noises in the engine. But that was what this vehicle was designed for, getting beat up and still going, right? I wasn’t looking forward to telling Colonel Stafford about it, though.

Franklin’s Hummer started up, but the noises it made sounded pretty sickly as well. We pulled it over to the curb and left it.

Cormac helped with that much. He also patted down Franklin and cleaned out all the charms and amulets from his pockets. He must have found a dozen of them. The look he gave me said he wasn’t going to explain what he found. But I couldn’t argue—Franklin was powerless now.

“I’ll catch up with you later, then,” Cormac said, waving himself off. He went to his Jeep and drove away, just like that.

“I don’t even know what to worry about anymore with him,” Ben said, watching him leave.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said, hooking my arm around his. “This is a new one for me, too.”

He sighed. “Never a dull moment.”

WE TOOK Harold Franklin to the emergency room at St. Joseph’s. The place looked understaffed—the waiting room was crowded, and the official-looking people in scrubs all wore exhausted, vacant stares. But there were a couple of orderlies with a gurney to help pull Franklin out of the Humvee. I gave them his name and the phone number for his office, and told them we’d found him in the snow, passed out and close to freezing. They didn’t ask us to stick around, and I didn’t offer.

Then, finally, we went home. I remembered to call my mother. I wasn’t sure she believed me when I told her that everything was fine, but what could she do about it? “Mom, trust me, you don’t want to know,” I finally told her. That, she couldn’t argue with.

I’d coped well enough with the cold of the last two nights and day. I’d been uncomfortable without being in outright pain. But as soon as we got inside, I changed out of my damp clothes into sweats and a big wool sweater. We still had power, and I really appreciated access to a hot shower and central heating.

The next morning, the sun shone on a brilliantly crystalline world. A thick layer of snow covered everything—cars, buildings, trees, streets. Even power lines had fluffy, glittering strips of snow balanced on them. Cleanup began. Plows caught up with the backlog, power lines were repaired, tree branches cleared away, and the world came back to life. The talking heads on the news shows kept saying that this should have been so much worse, that the weather radars had been tracking a vast storm system that had suddenly coalesced over the city, but that it had somehow dissipated overnight, as abruptly as it had appeared. Not that anyone was complaining. Weather reporters gleefully described a rare case of thundersnow over downtown Denver and seemed very impressed. If only they knew.

Cormac came over for coffee.

Tyler was still asleep on the sofa. Last night, he’d seemed inordinately happy at the sight of a sofa in a real living room. He said this was the first time he’d had a chance to sleep in a normal house—not outside, not in barracks, not in Shumacher’s werewolf-proof cells—since before he left for Afghanistan. I’d wanted to hug him. Instead, I smiled and wished him sweet dreams.

Ben, Cormac, and I sat at the dining room table nursing mugs of coffee. Maybe we could finally have a real conversation. The pack of three, I called us sometimes. These two knew me and my weird life better than anyone else. They’d been there for some of the more pivotal moments of it. They’d both pulled my ass out of the fire more than once.

We waited for the explanation. Cormac drew a breath, held his mug in both hands, and got started.

“Before she was hanged, Amelia worked a spell that moved her consciousness into the stones of the prison. And she wasn’t alone; there’s all kinds of freaky shit going on there. Hauntings, demons—I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. But to escape, she needed a living body. Once she discovered she couldn’t just replace the person already living there, she had to find someone who could put up with her.” He spread his hands as if to say, ta-da.

“So you were the crazy one,” I said.

He shrugged.

“It had to be the right kind of crazy, I’m betting,” Ben said, shaking his head in disbelief. But he was smiling. As though now that we had an explanation for why Cormac had been acting funny, we didn’t have to worry anymore. Except that where Cormac was concerned, we’d always worry, for one reason or another.

“How does it work?” I said. “I mean, she’s there right now, right? Can you talk to her? Does she talk to you? Is she, like, listening right now?” Were there four of us around the table? I might never look at Cormac the same way again. At the same time, I was a little bit in awe. Oh, the questions I would ask a nineteenth-century wizard.

“Yeah,” Cormac said. “She hears what I hear. Sees what I see.”

“So she’s using you,” I said, ready to be defensive and huffy on Cormac’s behalf. Not that he wasn’t perfectly capable of defending himself, even from a disembodied Victorian wizard woman. And did that even make sense?

“It’s not that simple,” he said, sighing, looking away, frustrated.

“You wouldn’t have figured out what Franklin was doing without both of you working together,” Ben said. “Right?”

Cormac pursed his lips and nodded. “I like to look at it as a partnership. That’s how she sees it.”

I stared. “This is very weird. Even for me.”

“Amelia likes you,” he said, leaning back in the chair. “She likes that you speak your mind.”

Not sure what to say to that, I looked away. I didn’t want to ask any more questions just yet. I wasn’t sure I was ready to know more. I wanted to talk to Amelia Parker—but I didn’t want to hear her speaking with Cormac’s voice. Then I realized, I probably already had talked to her. The lecturing voice, when we were on the phone and he told me about Franklin, the spell, the thunder mark—that had been Amelia.

I could deal with it later.

“What now?” Ben asked.

“Stay out of trouble, like you keep saying,” Cormac said. “Nothing’s changed. Not really.”

“Have you considered a career in paranormal investigation?” Ben said. “You seem to have developed a talent for it.”

He just smiled.

I kept staring. In wonder, awe, confusion. It wasn’t a werewolf stare, the challenging stare, or the “trying to figure out what someone was going to do next” stare. It was like, if I didn’t turn away, I might figure it out. But all I saw was Cormac. I could have dismissed everything he’d just explained as impossible, unprovable. Except that it explained everything that had happened so well.

“Kitty?” Ben prompted. It had been so long since I’d said anything.

“I have so many questions,” I sighed. “For you. For her.”

“I think that’s my cue.” Cormac pushed the mug away and stood, retrieving his leather jacket from the back of the chair. “Thanks for the coffee.”

Oh, grrrr. He was still Cormac. Still dodging me.

Ben just smirked. He was more patient than I was—he’d been putting up with Cormac his whole life. And he knew that Cormac would come back. He always did. He didn’t have any other family, and we were a pack.

“Is he going to be okay?” I asked after he’d left, not for the first time, a little more desperately than the last.

“Kitty. Are any of us going to be okay?” Ben said, spreading his arms to encompass him, me, the door Cormac had left through, Tyler lying on the sofa, the window, and the city outside.

I knew what he meant. For the moment, we really were okay. But what about tomorrow? What about the day after that? Would we be okay then? I kept asking the question because the answer was never permanent. And that would be true even if we weren’t werewolves, ex-cons, traumatized war veterans, and possessed wizards.

I reached for him, and he took my hand and kissed the inside of my wrist. We were going to be okay.