Kitty Goes to War (28 page)

“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.