Kitty’s Big Trouble (17 page)

Ben looked back at Cormac, nose tipped up, staring, but not doing anything further to threaten. The hunter pursed his lips, his expression closing down. I didn’t think he’d fully reconciled himself to the idea that Ben was a werewolf, even though he was there when it happened. It was hard to see the animal sitting in front of you and remember the man he usually was. Even when you looked him in the eyes.

“Come here, let me have a look at you,” said the man on the sofa. The three local vampires arranged on the chairs and sofas studied me with interest. Two were men, one a woman, and like Joe and Henry seemed to be hipsters, unassuming upscale urban types—but from the Jazz Age rather than the current era. They’d set up shop in the 1920s and stayed there. One of the men wore a double-breasted suit with a silk tie. His brown hair was slicked back, his smile was wry. The one on the sofa wore a suit without the jacket—red suspenders stood out against the white starched shirt. His gaze was inquisitive, and I had to work not to meet it. The woman wore a clinging gown, black, beaded, with spaghetti straps, and had her honey-colored hair in a perfect bob. Together, they looked fabulous, like something out of a movie. Exotic, even. Strange and intimidating all at once. I squeezed Ben’s coat for comfort.

Cormac returned to where he’d been standing. I limped over to join him, Ben stepping carefully at my side. He was watching the limp, along with Anastasia. I itched under their gazes, hating to show so much weakness. I was getting better, I really was. Ben stood tall and proud beside me, matching each of their gazes in turn as if to say,
I’m looking out for her, don’t get any ideas.
I leaned on him a little more, grateful for the support.

“What happened?” the hunter asked.

“I fell,” I said, my voice low, hidden. “I think I broke something.”

“But it’s healing.”

“Yeah, slowly.”

“Are you okay?”

It was the second time he’d asked in as many minutes. I still didn’t answer. “What happened to you guys? How’d you get out of the tunnels?”

“We followed Ben. His wolf side didn’t seem to have any trouble.”

“Why’d he shift?”

“You were gone.”

The door had shut, I’d shouted at him from the other side, he’d pounded on it, trying to get to me—and then I’d fallen. Vanished. Maybe they’d even gotten the door open but couldn’t find any sign of me on the other side. Or they’d kept shouting through the door and got no answer. And Ben had lost it. I stroked the thick fur along his back, and he turned his head back to give my hand a quick lick.

I couldn’t figure out the situation. Anastasia seemed unhappy but not nervous. Cormac was cautious, like he always was. His right hand rested in his pocket—clutching a cross, I’d bet. The stake would be hidden up a sleeve. Had the vampires even searched him for weapons? Joe and Henry stayed behind me, near the door, and seemed amused. I glanced over my shoulder trying to keep them in view. Then there were the three new vampires in front of me. One of them was no doubt the Master of San Francisco. Anastasia’s old ally, or her old nemesis? This felt like a tribunal of some kind, like we were being brought here to face some kind of reckoning. I couldn’t identify which one of them was in charge. All three seemed confident, and none showed deference to any other. I was used to seeing hierarchies among vampires, as much as I did among werewolves. Joe and Henry had talked about a boss—who was it?

“You’re Kitty Norville?” the one on the sofa, the suspenders-no-jacket guy, said. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, making him seem even more like a Prohibition-era gangster.

“Hi,” I said, waving my hand. “And you are?”

He waved the question away. “This is your mate?” He pointed at Ben, who growled.

I pressed his shoulder, quieting him. “Yeah.”

“Well. Thanks for joining us.”

“Did we have a choice?”

He smiled broadly, and the muscles across my shoulders twitched. “I have to ask, what are you doing in my territory?”

“Ask her.”

He glanced at Anastasia, his expression souring before he looked back at me. Maybe checking for confirmation, or fishing for a reaction. “Then you do serve a vampire? The gossip about you says you don’t serve anyone.”

I straightened, tipping my chin up in a show of pride, hoping to demonstrate that the gossip was right. And there was gossip about me? What gossip? What were people saying about me behind my back anyway?

“Actually, I’m really pissed off at her right now,” I said.

Everyone except me looked at her for a reaction; she didn’t oblige them, only spoke calmly in a cold, creamy voice, “She doesn’t serve me. She’s here as a favor. As an ally.”

“What the hell did you do for her to deserve a favor like this?” he said to her.

Anastasia and I glanced at each other, trying to egg each other on. For a moment I even thought, what
had
she done for me? But that wasn’t the issue. Favors weren’t currency you could line up and trade, one for one. At least, not to me. I was here because we both wanted to take down Roman.

I had to tell her about the figure in the alley, the imperious spy.

We were at some kind of stalemate. We’d answered questions, but the vampire—I had to assume the one in suspenders was the boss—wasn’t happy with the answers. They didn’t seem likely to let us go, but they were also treating Anastasia with kid gloves. Was this the Master who had taken power in the 1920s? It seemed likely. At any rate, this was Anastasia’s bailiwick, and I didn’t know the rules here. I ought to let her do all the talking. What were the odds?

When he didn’t get an answer, he shrugged. “Well then. Welcome to San Francisco. It would have been nice if you’d called first. You’re from Denver, right? Who’s running things there now? Rick, isn’t it? You could have asked him, gotten an introduction, made it all official—”

“He said you wouldn’t mind it if I just passed through.”

“Did he? He’s either getting senile in his old age or he has a lot of confidence in you. Which is it?”

I tilted my head. “How old is old? All of you,” I said, glancing at each of them, even Joe and Henry behind me. “Rick says you’ve been running San Francisco since the twenties, so that’s at least a hundred.”

The members of the vampire entourage wore crooked, amused smiles. The woman had blood-red lips.

“It’s rude, asking vampires about their age,” said Boss.

I shrugged. “Yeah. I keep doing it anyway.” I was getting my groove back. I came as close as I could to staring at him without looking him in his hypnotic eyes. He had a slight hook in his nose. “I have some questions. You’ve been running San Francisco for almost a century, so you were here during the sixties. Summer of Love and all that, right? You ever meet Janis Joplin? Jerry Garcia? Country Joe? Any of those psychedelic guys?”

“What if I said yes? What do you expect me to say about any of them that hasn’t already been said?”

“Maybe I just wanted to see if you had any concert bootlegs.”

Ben bumped my hip with his nose and whined a little. Yeah, maybe I was talking too much. But what if he’d said yes? And what if he’d actually given them to me? It never hurt to ask.

Boss raised an eyebrow. “You are definitely Kitty Norville.”

“So that’s a no?”

“You’ll have to ask Henry, that was more his scene.” Behind me, Henry gave a little wave.

The thing was, as long as we were all talking, nobody was fighting. If I got Boss to like me, or at least to not think I was a threat, he’d be more likely to let us all go. He might even help us. If he’d known we were all in town, maybe he knew that Roman was in town. Maybe when Henry said he’d been looking for rogue wolves, he’d been looking for Roman’s gang. Maybe they could tell us something.

He turned away from me. I’d been surveyed, and I wasn’t a threat, apparently. I was sorry I’d missed what he’d said to Cormac before we got here.

“Where were we? Right. Anastasia, you’re back after what, eighty, ninety years? I’d wondered what happened to you. You left so quickly after the coup.”

Anastasia said, “I didn’t see a need to stay. You didn’t need my help—at least not anymore.”

He opened his hands in agreement. “Begs the question, though—why are you back?”

“I’m here on an entirely unrelated matter.”

“Still, the last time you were in San Francisco, you helped stage a coup against the former Master.”

“That’s not what happened and you know it.”

“All I know is you do things to suit yourself and no one else. You could have put yourself in charge here. You could have made yourself Mistress of a dozen cities the world over, collected all that power, but what do you do instead? You meddle and move on. What’s the story now?”

What do you know—we had the same opinion about Anastasia.

“I wanted to see the old stomping grounds,” she said.

“You could have called me for a tour.”

“I didn’t want to trouble you.”

“You were in Chinatown with a mercenary.” He gestured at Cormac. “What were you looking for? Or what did you already find and are trying to hide from me?”

She strolled a quiet step forward on her heeled shoes. Her eyes narrowed, and she caught Boss’s gaze. “Nothing you need to bother with,” she said softly.

He straightened, leaning back to regard her, his brow furrowed. The other vampires were frowning now, looking back and forth between their Master and the stranger.

Maybe Ben and Cormac and I could get the hell out of here while they had their standoff.

“Anastasia,” Boss said, his voice low, threatening.

We were wasting time, so I dropped into the conversation to tip the balance. “Roman is here,” I said.

The mood snapped back. Boss blinked and looked away from Anastasia, at me. “Roman?” he said, much the way Henry had, as if I was muddying the waters on purpose.

“Dux Bellorum,” Anastasia murmured.

Well, that made the air go out of the room. Boss’s mouth opened—he even showed fangs. The male vampire companion gripped the arms of his chair and leaned forward. Joe stepped closer. All five of them looked shocked. Anastasia frowned at me.

“Really?” Boss said. He shifted his gaze from me to Anastasia. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“This isn’t your battle,” she said.

He raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “It isn’t? Because it’s
your
battle? Because you think you can handle him all by yourself?”

“I know him,” she said with conviction.

For once I wanted to keep quiet, because I wanted them to keep talking. I wanted to learn more. But nobody said anything.

“How?” I said. “How do you know him?”

She didn’t answer. What else wasn’t she telling me?

Boss settled back into his seat and donned an air of calm, but he also looked sad. As if he was facing the inevitable; as if he’d faced it many times before. His expression was at odds with the offhand manner he’d shown so far. I bumped up my estimation of his age another hundred years. This guy had been around.

When he spoke, he spoke to me. “My predecessor belonged to Dux Bellorum—Roman, I guess is as good a name as any. Some of us”—he gestured to his four colleagues—“didn’t like that she bound us to someone who wasn’t one of us. That she swore fealty to a Master outside the Family. We wanted our Family to be a family. Not some … platoon in someone else’s army.”

Dux Bellorum was how Roman named himself, when he wasn’t being sneaky: the leader of war. The general.

“We’re losing, Anastasia. In the last hundred years we’ve gained what, San Francisco? Denver? But how many cities have we lost? After you left I assumed you were out there, doing more of the same. Subverting his lieutenants, putting better Masters in their places. But I never heard a word. Meanwhile, Dux Bellorum has dozens of agents everywhere, all working to bring more cities in line.”

“Agents,” I said. “Like Mercedes Cook?”

“You know Mercedes?” Boss said.

“She came through Denver a few years ago.” And instigated the war that brought Rick to power. She had intended for Rick’s predecessor to destroy him, but Rick was better than she expected. He’d surprised a lot of people that night.

“Rick booted her out?”

“Yeah.”

“I always knew I liked that guy. You’re working for Rick?”

“Rick is my friend. I’ve met Roman. If there’s a war coming, I won’t be on his side,” I said.

“It’s been a long time since the werewolves had a leader step forward,” Boss said.

I rolled my eyes and sighed with frustration. “I’m not leading the werewolves, I’m not working for anybody, I’m just trying to do what’s right.”

“Then you’ve bitten off way more than you can chew, dear.”

I growled under my breath. I was ready to get out of here. Ben licked my hand, comforting me. As long as we stuck together, things couldn’t be so bad.

Boss turned to Anastasia. “So you’re here because Roman is here. Is my Family, is our place controlling San Francisco, in danger?”

“No,” Anastasia. “I’d have come straight to you if that were the case, I swear it.”