Kitty in the Underworld

Epilogue

She Changes before the sun sets, before the moon has fully risen, before the pack gathers, because she can’t wait any longer, because she is finally free, because the fear and anger still fill her. The memory of walls closing in, of brimstone attacks and otherworldly ceremonies, writhe in her hindbrain like living things, like parasites. She runs to escape, but she can’t escape, so she just runs, until her muscles feel loose, like water. She will run until dawn.

Her mate is at her flank, stride for stride. At first, she runs to escape him as well. To escape everything. Soon, though, she’s glad he’s followed. Grateful. Her other self, the self that thinks too much, would cry, knowing that he stays by her.

When the full, round moon has climbed overhead, she finally slows, stops. Stands panting, exhausted. Her mate is there, licking her face, rubbing himself against her, offering what comfort he can.

When she catches a scent of something warm, fast, full of blood, her urge to hunt returns, and that simple need feels glorious. They hunt together, she chases a rabbit into his path, he grabs and twists its neck, and they feed, devouring the meat in a few bites. When they finish, they lick blood off each others’ muzzles. The world feels almost normal, with a full belly and a forest full of moonlit shadows.

She ran for a long time, and they have a long journey back.

The moon is sinking when her mate blocks her path. The fur on his back has stiffened, his ears pin flat to his head, and his tail sticks straight back. Danger—her own nerves spike with a feeling of exhaustion, because such anxiety, such readiness to fight, feels too familiar.

She catches the scent that he does, that he’s now circling to examine—an intruder in their territory. But not wolf. This creature is strange and musky, female, and she isn’t hiding, not caring if she’s found. Feline, like a mountain lion—but not. This scent is foreign—and like them. Both beast and human.

They lope, following the path until the creature appears, crouched down, flat to the ground, watching. Stockier than a mountain lion, with a broader snout, round ears, large eyes. A long, tufted tail flicks back and forth. The stranger waits.

But not a stranger. Her smell is familiar, striking at those blazing memories. We know her.

She bumps her mate’s flank, calming him, nipping his ear to tell him this is all right. She approaches the lion, head and tail low, sniffing, and finally settling to the ground in front of her. They regard each other.

The lioness stands, approaches. Rubs her cheek along Wolf’s face and ruff. Stands for a moment, as if simply feeling her presence, taking in her scent. Looks over Wolf’s back to eye the mate. Then, she turns and runs, loping into the woods. She’s gone in seconds.

Her mate has to prod her, pushing her with his snout, nipping at her flank, to finally get her to embark on the long run home.

I REMEMBERED meeting the lion on full-moon night. I could recall her smell, and my gladness at seeing her. Worry for what was going to happen to her. I would have brought her home with me and let her into our pack, if she wanted. Back in the daylight, the human world, a week passed, and Skahmet—Samira—didn’t call. Maybe she would, still, someday. But that meeting in the forest felt like a good-bye. Or, good-bye for now. I hoped. I wanted to talk to her. If I could just find out more.

I had to be content with what I had.

The mine where they’d found me ended up being near Leadville. Only about a hundred miles from Denver, but high in the mountains and far from any maintained roads. The place even showed up on a USGS map. But so did a dozen other abandoned mines in the area, and Mohan and Samira had covered their tracks well when they caught me. Eventually, I had to laugh about it—I’d been that close to home, but still five thousand miles and a couple of thousand years away.

I looked up the name Kumarbis. It was the name of a Hittite god, by turns power hungry and tragic. Kumarbis, father of gods, was eventually deposed by a storm god—as many father-gods would be after him. In revenge, he decided to create a rival to the storm god, a creature who would depose him and return Kumarbis to his rightful place. But the creature, a giant made of stone, decided his true purpose was to destroy all of humanity. The other gods had to unite to stop him before he could destroy the world, and Kumarbis was no better off than he was before.

Whatever his name had originally been, the vampire Kumarbis might very well have taken the name as self-inflicted punishment. A man who kept trying to exert his power on the world, out of the best intentions, but who instead just kept making things worse. The father aspect of the god probably appealed to him. The ambition to be caretaker of the world appealed to him. Not the character’s utter failure to do so. On the other hand, the vampire might not have meant to appeal to that part of the legend. Rather, the name might have meant something to him culturally, from some of the stories he might have heard when he was young and alive. If that was the case, if Kumarbis had been Hittite originally, it would have made him well over three thousand years old. That didn’t seem outrageous to me.

I would never learn the truth. Unless I asked the one person who must have known Kumarbis better than anyone else: Roman. There was a thought. Since I wasn’t likely to ever have a face-to-face, civil conversation with Roman, I let the idea go. Another mystery to file away.

THE POLICE sketch artist scratched his pencil, and I had to stop myself from leaning over to look at what he was drawing.

“Eyebrows?” he asked, the latest in a string of questions about eyes, mouth, cheeks, earlobes, all manner of details about someone’s face I’d barely seen over my shoulder during the ritual.

“Dark. Thick. Kind of flat.”

Detective Hardin sat nearby in the conference room at the downtown police station. I’d called in a favor, asking her to help me get a picture of the woman I’d glimpsed. I didn’t tell her why. Just that I’d seen a face, and I wanted a picture.

The pencil scratched a few more strokes, and then the artist turned the sketch pad around. “How is this?”

He’d drawn a square-faced woman with a crown of dark, curling hair, a slightly furrowed brow, and a hard look in her eyes. This wasn’t how she looked when I saw her, but it was undoubtedly her. Somehow, my description had come through. Fierce, determined. She would defend her cubs, her pack. Regina Luporum Prima, I supposed I could call her.

“It’s good,” I said. “Thanks.”

He tore the page from the pad and gave it to me. I studied it, awestruck. The picture made her more real, and also, somehow, more normal. Taken out of the cavern and the ritual, she was just a woman.

“What did she do?” Hardin asked. She wore a jacket over a tank top and dark trousers, and had her dark hair in a ponytail. She was overworked, tough as nails, and dogged. I’d rarely seen her smile. We’d been working together for years now, and I trusted her.

“She lived,” I said simply. “Probably twenty-five hundred years ago or so. Early Roman, probably.”

“So she’s a vampire?” Hardin asked.

“No,” I said, bemused, realizing this sounded crazy. Not caring. “She was a werewolf. I think. I thought she was just a story. But I saw her.”

“Do I want to know?” Hardin said, smirking.

“Probably not. It’s complicated.”

“What exactly happened to you up there?” she asked. She’d been one of the first people Ben and Cormac called when I turned up missing and had been part of the search. I really did have a lot of people looking out for me.

My smile went lopsided, because I didn’t know what to say. “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”

“Typical,” she huffed.

“Thanks for this,” I said, nodding at the sketch. She waved me off.

When I got home, I pinned the drawing next to the picture of the Capitoline Wolf. They seemed to match.

Ben and I talked about it. We lay in bed, all the lights out, and the darkness of the bedroom was nowhere near the absolute darkness of the mine. I understood absolute darkness now. Here, moon and ambient light from Denver seeped in around the curtains, and the bedside clock had a glow. Even without being able to identify the light source, the whole room shimmered with light. Ben glowed, with the heat and life of his body.

Our wolves didn’t fully believe that all was well, and they asserted themselves in the way we curled up together at one end of the bed. We were on our sides, nestled together, his body pressed protectively across my back, my head against his shoulder, noses to skin so we could smell each other and be comforted.

“I don’t even know if it was real,” I said. “Or if it was some hallucination Zora cooked up. It might have been a trick. But would I have felt it so strongly if it were? Would I have been able to remember it? Remember it well enough to get a sketch out of it?”

“Kitty, I don’t know.” He sighed into my hair, and I snuggled more firmly in his embrace. Skin to skin. I couldn’t get enough. “I know something happened to you. And seriously, after everything we’ve seen? Anything’s possible. These days I’m ready to believe in Santa Claus.”

St. Nicholas had been a real person, I almost said. “I want her to be real.”

“I know.”

“It’s like if she was real, a real woman with a real face, who was really alive—then maybe we’re not so different. Maybe I really can keep doing this.”

“I never doubted it.”

I chuckled, because of course he would say that. Turning, I brought my hand to his cheek and matched his gaze.

“Thanks. For listening,” I said.

Then my own Prince Reliable kissed me.

I MISSED a show over the course of my adventure. My captivity. My … I wasn’t sure anymore what to call it. In the end, I was there because I’d chosen to be. Didn’t make it any less messed up, and I spent most of the first few days afterward at home, asleep. Sleeping meant not thinking about it.

I’d never outright missed a show. I’d had plenty of planned absences, had aired prerecorded episodes and run “best of” episodes when I needed time off, on full-moon nights for example. My engineer, Matt, was able to piece together one of these, rerunning old interviews and splicing together intros, so the show itself went on without me. The only sense of failure was my own.

Ben and Ozzie both suggested I needed to take another week off, to recover from what they sympathetically called my ordeal, but I refused. I wasn’t going to miss another show, another week. The best way to get my head back on straight would be to go back to work, to do my job.

What to talk about, on that first show back? I could have told my audience about my adventure. About meeting the oldest vampire I’d yet encountered, about how practicing ceremonial magic seemed to me to be a lot like playing with dynamite and matches. I wanted to send a message to Samira, and to talk about Enkidu—Mohan—to get his story out. To memorialize him. And Zora. Kumarbis, not so much, even though he was the one people would want to hear about. But if I talked about one of them, I’d have to talk about all of them, and the demon, the rituals, the philosophies behind them, and I wasn’t ready to do that.

Another consideration: I didn’t flatter myself that Roman listened to my show. Then again, maybe he did, and I didn’t want to tell him what exactly had happened in that abandoned mine. Let him guess, if he didn’t already know.

My topic for the week: mythology. I called a couple of professors from CU Boulder to interview about historical precedents for characters like King Arthur, Robin Hood, and even Gilgamesh. I found some authors who’d written novels that combined history and mythology, and recorded interviews about their take on the likelihood that some of these old stories might have a seed of truth. Pretty good, considering how last-minute I was putting this together.

I took a few calls, and they ran the usual range from insightful to insane. That in itself was comforting. No matter what happened in the rest of the world, my callers would always be there for me, with their enthusiasm, their conspiracy theories about tunnel systems extending through the continental U.S., and rants about the Second Amendment not including silver bullets.

What conclusion, if any, could I draw from all this? Here were stories we were still telling after five hundred, a thousand, five thousand years. Maybe not a lot of time on the geologic scale, but unimaginable on the scale of human memory. That had to mean something. Stories were what lasted.

Stories, and vampires, some of whom didn’t just tell the stories, but remembered when the stories were new.

I finished writing the book. Finally. Part of what motivated the last big writing push: thinking about something happening to me before I finished. Thinking about how much I would leave behind, unfinished. The book was one thing I could wrap up, so I did.

Also, I’d found my thesis, the thread that would tie the book together: stories were important. Whether they were true or not, they held their own history of the world, and we kept telling them because they meant something. Before all this happened, I had a vague notion of why I was putting this book together. Now, I knew. I supposed I could say I now had faith in it.

WHEN CORMAC called to ask me to meet him at New Moon, I knew he had information. After the dinner rush, Ben and I arrived at the restaurant, claimed a table in the back, ordered beers, and waited. Cormac arrived soon after and explained.

“The thumb drive you gave me—it isn’t just a book of spells, it’s a book of shadows.”

“What’s that mean?” I said.

“It’s everything. Everything she learned, her journey as a magician, her plans.”

“Her diary,” I said, amazed.

He winced. “Sort of. But more.” He cocked his head in a way I’d learned to recognize as him listening to an interior voice. Conversing with Amelia. “Something like … her magician’s soul.”

She’d given it to me there at the end because she knew she wasn’t going to make it. Closing the door on the demon meant collapsing the cave on herself. She couldn’t save her own life, but she’d given her soul to me. Another sacrifice. It was too much responsibility. What was I supposed to do with it?

“Did you find anything good?” Ben asked after a moment. The question seemed callous, and I almost said so, angrily. But he was only stating the obvious: what was I supposed to do with all of Zora’s spells and knowledge that she’d wanted to save? Use them, of course.

Cormac said, “Her name was Amy Scanlon. She was from Monterey, California, and dropped out of college to travel the world and learn what she could. Amelia sees a lot of herself in the kid. She had some talent as well, some natural psychic ability. Always seemed to know where to find the good stuff. The real deal.”

“Like Kumarbis.”

He gave an offhand shrug. “They seemed to feed into each others’ obsessions. If they’d kept going they’d have either taken over the world or destroyed it.”

Ben chuckled. “For real?”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

I huffed. “If magic was going to destroy the world, someone would have done it by now.”

Cormac gave me a look. A mustached frown, a calculating gaze. “If it hasn’t happened yet, it may be because there hasn’t ever been one person who’s gathered enough power to be able to do it. At least not yet.”

“Yet,” I said, staring. “And what about Dux Bellorum? The Long Game?”

He blew out a breath, looking thoughtful. “Hard to say. Her diary, the personal stuff, she wrote out, like she was just typing it in whenever she could. The meat of the thing—the spells, the lore—she wrote in a code. There’s probably a couple of hundred pages of information she learned about Roman and the Long Game, either from Kumarbis or from scrying or who the hell knows what else, but it’s all coded.”

“Are you kidding me?” I said, slouching back, feeling defeated all over again.

“It’s a common practice,” he said, although I had the feeling this was Amelia now, making the explanations like she often did. “In medieval times alchemists and mages were competitive and jealous, always trying to steal each other’s secrets while protecting their own. They’d invent their own arcane systems for encrypting their work. Very effective—some old books of shadows still haven’t been deciphered.”

“This doesn’t help us at all,” I complained.

The glass door swung open then, bringing in a blast of cold air and Angelo, light hair tousled, face ruddy with recently drunk blood, wool coat flapping. He only hesitated a moment, glancing around until he found me and marched to meet me.

As usual, Cormac stayed seated and calm, but his hand had disappeared into a jacket pocket and the stake he likely kept there. Angelo didn’t even notice.

He regarded me, and I raised a brow at him, prompting.

“What did you do?” he said finally.

“What do you mean, what did I do?”

“Marid called. Marid. He’s a legend, you know, and he doesn’t call anyone. He appears mysteriously, that’s it. But he called me. Roman has fled Split in something of an uproar, I gather. Left behind henchmen, odds and ends. But apparently he found what he was looking for right before being chased off. No idea where he’s gone next, but Marid is sure something spooked him. So of course I assume you did something, to answer for Antony. So does Marid. He asked me, I’m asking you.”

I hesitated, because my first thought was that I hadn’t done anything, not really. I was the victim here, right? I tilted my head, pursed my lips. “If he calls back, can you ask him if he’s ever heard of a vampire named Kumarbis?”

Angelo’s brow furrowed. “I’ve never heard of him.”

“I’m not asking if you’ve heard of him, but has Marid?”

“This one’s old, then, I take it?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And he’s the one responsible for making Dux Bellorum bolt?”

Credit where credit was due. “I think so, yes.”

“And where is this astonishing person now?”

I pressed my lips together and shook my head.

“Ah,” Angelo sighed with understanding, and finally sank into one of the empty chairs at the table. “So. What happened?”

“I’m not sure I even know anymore.”

“Is he coming here next?” Angelo said. “If Roman’s on the move, and he thinks you had something to do with flushing him out of his last hideout, will he be coming here? Do I need to worry?”

“If I could predict what Roman was going to do I’d have staked him a long time ago. How many times can I say it, I don’t know.”

“So the answer is—maybe,” he said.

Yeah, it was. Silence gave him his answer.

I expected him to whine. To wilt and moan about the unfairness of it all. To blame me for putting him this position, for driving Rick out when Rick was the one who should have been here, defending the city. But he didn’t do any of that. Straightening, he set his expression, put his hands on the table as if we’d been at a formal conference.

“Right, then,” he said. “Might not hurt to prepare. Call in favors and such. Kitty, Ben, I’ll be in touch.” He gave a decisive nod and swept out just as abruptly as he’d swept in.

We all stared after him. “Is it weird that I found that reassuring?” I said.

Ben rested his hand on my leg. A point of contact, a touch of comfort.

He said, “We need everything we can get on Roman. Cormac, do you think you can decipher the book?”

“I’ve got some leads. Not many, but it’s a start. In her diary, she lists some of her mentors, some of the people who got her started in magic. One of them’s a great-aunt who lives down in Manitou Springs. We could get in touch with her, find out if she knows Amy’s code or has any ideas about cracking it.”

Next of kin. I hadn’t even thought about trying to find Zora’s—Amy’s—family to tell them what happened to her. Not something I was looking forward to, but it looked like I might have to. I rubbed my eyes, suddenly tired. “Yeah, okay.”

“I can take care of that,” Cormac said. “I—we—know what to ask.”

“You and Amelia can talk to her, magician to magician like?” I said, trying to make light. He turned a hand in agreement. Didn’t say a word. Already making plans, and I wouldn’t have to worry about it.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Ben asked, like he had a dozen times a day since rescuing me from the mountain.

I squeezed his hand. He’d be able to feel the lingering stress, not so much about what had happened in the mine, but about what would happen next. He’d know I wasn’t quite telling the truth when I said, “I’m okay.” But as long as he kept asking, I would be. “I wish I could talk to Rick.”

“You don’t have any way of getting in touch with him?” Ben said.

I imagined trying to send a letter to Rick, of the Order of Saint Lazarus of the Shadows, care of the Vatican, but I didn’t imagine him actually receiving said letter. I couldn’t consult the people I most wanted to, Rick and Anastasia, who had departed on their own personal crusades. I had to be satisfied knowing that they were out there, somewhere.

Ben added, “Not even an e-mail address?”

“Nope. Though I suppose we could do something crazy like post Amy’s book of shadows online with a big header saying, ‘Rick, please read this,’ and see what happens.”

As soon as I said it, I suddenly wanted to do it. Just to see who else it pulled out of the woodwork. Because it didn’t seem any less crazy than anything else we could do. Roman had his Hand of Hercules, the demon bounty hunter—he had everything, now, and we had nothing to lose.

I waited for either Cormac or Ben to tell me it was a crazy idea, and under no circumstances should we post a powerful magician’s book of shadows on the Internet where everyone could see it. But they didn’t. Ben donned a thoughtful look, brow furrowed and lips pursed. Probably thinking about whether posting the book would get me sued. But he didn’t say anything. Cormac just raised an eyebrow. Right, if they weren’t telling me it was a bad idea—what were we all missing?

Then I thought, this kind of knowledge had been kept secret by arcane practitioners for hundreds of years. Maybe it was time to see what crowd sourcing could do with it.

“I mean,” I said, thinking out loud now. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

“You really want an answer to that?” Ben said.

“It might be like reading out loud from the Necronomicon,” Cormac said. “But shit, I’m game.”

That should have been a warning right there.

“You might be showing your hand,” Ben said. “Telling Roman how much we really know about him.”

And how much did we know, really? Didn’t seem like much. But if we could make him think we knew more than we really did—I’d love to see his reaction. Yeah, Kumarbis and company had poked him with a big old stick. I wanted to keep poking.

I said, “Maybe now’s exactly the time to show him how much we have. Keep him nervous.”

Neither one of them tried to argue against it. So we made a plan.

I TALKED to the webmaster at KNOB about what we needed, and she referred me to a friend of hers who knew more about the security aspects involved in the project. Anonymous servers, untraceable IP addresses, jargon that I sort of knew about in the abstract, but not really. We needed a level of protection between us and the big wide world of the Internet, so that it looked like the book of shadows just appeared online and couldn’t be immediately traced back to me. Not foolproof, but it was something. For a while now, I’d been trying to get the word out about Roman. Telling people what I knew about him, not just so he couldn’t work anonymously anymore, but also so I wouldn’t feel alone. Could be, the book of shadows would languish online, one of those weird backwater websites that haven’t been updated in a decade and no one ever visits except to admire the wackiness. Could be, the thing would do exactly what we wanted, and attract the attention of people who could help. Not just warn the world that Roman was out there, but raise an army to stand against him.

We edited, leaving out most of Amy’s personal diary. I’d only met her at the very end of her road, when she’d been overwhelmed by her quest, a crusader with one central purpose. I hadn’t met the real Amy, I decided, and reading her diary made me wish I had. She’d been a true explorer, fascinated by every culture and locale she encountered. She’d loved learning, but she’d also been searching for meaning. For a purpose for everything she was learning. Kumarbis had provided something, and she’d embraced his quest. That part of her journey didn’t need to go on the website.

But her raw knowledge and the extensive, encrypted notes she’d made, we uploaded directly. It took a few weeks to prepare it all, but at last, the website went live.

Then we waited.