Kitty in the Underworld

Chapter 5

CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED slowly.

I spent a lot of time in a half-dreaming fog, like what I felt the mornings after a full moon, waking up and trying to fit back in my human skin. I lay on something cold and hard, and thought that couldn’t be right, I was supposed to be home, there was supposed to be coffee, I needed a shower, but first I needed to brush my teeth, which tasted like milk-soaked cotton. My head pounded, my joints were stuck. Ben was supposed to be here, and I couldn’t smell him anywhere. My next exhale came out as a whine. I could call—

My phone, usually tucked into my jeans pocket, was gone. Of course it was. I slapped at my neck, pawing for a chain that wasn’t there—the chain that held my wedding ring. It was gone, too. So were my shoes and socks. I still had on the rest of my clothes.

I wondered: did my captor get Tom, or had he escaped? If they had caught him as well, where was he? At the moment, all I could smell was the drugged taint in my blood and my own sticky breath. I didn’t know where I was or who else might be here.

Who had done this to me? Was it Roman? If so, why hadn’t he just killed me?

My breathing, which grated roughly in my too-dry throat, echoed closely. When I opened my eyes, the world came back to me, piece by piece. I was in a small room, and it was dark. Black, really, only a sliver of light creeping in from somewhere. My werewolf eyes were good, even in the dark, and if I couldn’t see any details in the room, it was because there weren’t any. Bare, rough walls, a dusty floor. I breathed carefully, trying to sense anything through my drugged haze. The air was chilled, full of stone and age. Damp—not wet, but moisture tickled the inside of my nose. I was underground, maybe in a dirt cellar. Or maybe not—cellars didn’t normally have granite walls. These walls were solid stone, and I couldn’t sense any trace of a building to go with a cellar. No humming power cables or shushing water pipes. No smell of treated, painted wood. No wood at all, or trees, vegetation, people, mice, roaches, or anything. I smelled my own sick scent, the dusty air. A trace of … gunpowder? Faint, sulfurous, and old.

I started the process of unkinking my muscles and peeling myself from the floor. I ached all over, and the spot where the dart had hit me throbbed. Wincing, I rubbed it. Once I was upright, I sat, waiting for a wave of dizziness to pass, gaining a better sense of my bearings. Something about this place made my skin crawl. I scratched my arms through my sweater, trying to soothe an itch that wouldn’t go away.

I was still dressed, and I wasn’t tied up. So, things could be worse. Way to be positive.

Now, what to do? If I could sense a draft, I could follow it out. But the air was still. I wanted a long drink of water. I wanted to run, I wanted to howl. My options at the moment were limited. I wanted to know more about who had done this to me. One thing at a time.

Carefully I stood, arms outstretched, searching for the walls and ceiling, the confines of the room. Figure out where I was, then where I could go. I had to duck, turning my head because the ceiling was just a touch too low. I squinted into the darkness, and my hand touched gritty stone surface. Now, I ought to be able to follow the wall to … something.

Traveling step by careful step, I felt along the wall for any clue, and took slow breaths, trying to filter some meaning from this world. There was dead stillness—nothing for me to hear, no voices of evil kidnappers, not so much as water dripping. The walls were definitely solid—chilled, ancient, no give at all. I was in some kind of cave. However, I wasn’t sure it was natural—it seemed too uniform. Artificial, then. A carved tunnel.

My hands itched, and the annoying burn got worse, until I had to shake them, rubbing them together to get rid of the feeling. The more I thought about it, though, the more my whole body started feeling that itch, that slow burn that never got truly painful, but would drive me crazy before too long.

I knew that sensation—silver. There was silver here, low grade, scant quantities found in scattered flecks in the walls, and the more I touched them the worse the allergic reaction would become. Just as they’d known how much tranquilizer to use, my captors knew to paint the walls with silver, to keep me captive, quiet.

No—not a room, a cell, or a cave. This was a mine. They’d taken me to a silver mine, probably one of the hundreds scattered throughout the Colorado mountains, abandoned and forgotten. For some reason, the thought that I was still in Colorado—still relatively close to home—comforted me. I had to find a way out of here and get home.

I continued my circuit of the tiny cave, brushing the wall with only my fingertips, ignoring the building itch. It was just a little silver, it wouldn’t kill me unless it got in my bloodstream. This must have been some branch of a tunnel, excavated a short distance, blown out with explosives, then abandoned when it didn’t yield high-quality ore. The ceiling arced evenly overhead.

Finally, the stone ended. I touched wood, set perpendicular to the cave wall. I pressed my hands flat against it, felt all over, and didn’t feel the burn of silver. Just plain wood. I studied it. A sheet of wood reinforced with two-by-fours had been set across the cave’s opening—it might have been a door, but if there were hinges, they were bolted on the outside, into the rock. The inside, the side facing me, had no handle, no lock, no sign of a lock. The wood itself felt solid. I banged on it, gave it a shake, and it didn’t budge. There was a gap at the bottom of the door, enough to stick my fingers through, enough to let air in, and a faint sliver of white light, maybe from a lantern. I also found a seam, as if some kind of slot had been cut into the wood.

Bottom line, there was a door. A shut door could be opened and allow escape.

I pounded on the wood and yelled. “Hey! Wanna get the fuck over here and explain yourselves? Hey!” After one last, good hard pound, I pressed my ear to the gap near the floor, waited.

Nothing happened.

I lay on the floor, pressed my nose to the gap, and breathed several slow, deep breaths, hoping to catch a scent of someone, something, anything. Mostly what I smelled was stone and dusty air, and I swore I could smell the silver pervading everything, tickling the inside of my nose. I sneezed, scrubbed my nose on my sleeve, and tried again, determined not to think too hard about silver anymore. I just had to be careful not to get cut while I was here.

And there they were, the same scents Tom and I had tracked: the two lycanthropes, wolf and lion. They’d lured us out and gotten us. I wished I knew why.

Other scents mingled with the two I recognized. Those I wasn’t as clear on. One seemed human enough, but vague. I couldn’t even tell the person’s sex. The other—chilled. A corpselike cold. Vampire? Or was it just the pervasive cold of the stone masking something else?

That didn’t make any more sense than the rest of it.

I spent five minutes pounding on the door, shouting until my voice went hoarse. After the first minute I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get a response. But I kept doing it, just to be doing something.

No one answered. I might have been alone in the mine.

This was ridiculous. You didn’t drug and kidnap someone, then lock them into a dark room and leave them there for no reason. I wondered where the night-vision cameras were hidden.

This whole place made me itch, and I rubbed my arms. I went to the middle of the cave, as far from the walls and traces of ambient silver as I could get, and sat. Stared at the door that I very much wanted to be on the other side of.

I could claw my way through the wood, given time and motivation. I had the motivation, but I didn’t know how much time I had. I had another problem. I could turn Wolf, dig and chew through the door, and get cut up in the process. Being a werewolf didn’t mean I didn’t get hurt, it meant I could take a lot of damage and heal quickly. But if I really was in a silver mine, it didn’t matter how defunct it was, there could still be traces of silver all through this place, ore that was never excavated, a residue embedded in the walls and even scattered in the dust on the floor. If I cut open my paws, my hands, and if the silver got into my bloodstream, I’d be dead. The bullet half of the silver bullet didn’t kill werewolves; blood poisoning from the silver did. Silver-inlaid knives did as well. I didn’t know if there was a minimum amount of silver it took to poison a werewolf to death—maybe traces of powder on the floor wouldn’t be enough. But I didn’t want to be the one to test that threshold.

So any escape plan that might break skin was out.

Cold didn’t affect me as much as it did a normal human being, but I started to shiver. I pulled my hands into the sleeves of my sweater, hugged my knees to my chest, and tried to keep my breathing slow and steady. My mind spun, a hamster racing in a wheel that didn’t go anywhere.

The pieces of what was happening here didn’t fit together. The tranquilizer dart, the efficiency of the strike—I’d never even heard the gun fire, and whoever had the gun must have been downwind because I hadn’t smelled anyone that close—made me think military. At one point the army had werewolf soldiers serving in Afghanistan. I’d been called in as a consultant when a unit of werewolves had broken down, its members suffering from post-traumatic stress and unable to control themselves. Out of necessity, the military made excellent use of tranquilizer guns on werewolves in that situation. But if someone in the military had kidnapped me, I’d have ended up in a steel and Plexiglas cell in a hypercontrolled situation in some lab. I’d had a bit of experience with those settings, too. If this had been a military or even some wacky paramilitary situation, I’d have been exposed, plenty of one-way mirrors and closed-circuit cameras watching me. There’d be someone standing there with a clipboard. They’d have had a reason for taking me, even if they didn’t want to tell me what it was.

This setting—this was thrown together. This was making use of available resources. This said my captors might not have been working with a lot of time and money on their hands. They could probably get the tranquilizer gun and darts off the Internet, and they used a prison they had at hand rather than building one.

A few choice questions would help me figure this out. I cycled through them a dozen times and didn’t find answers. Was Tom here? I desperately hoped he was free, safe, and calling the cavalry. On the other hand, it would be nice to have an ally. I thought about calling his name, then thought better of it. If whoever had done this had missed him, I didn’t want them going back for him. Were my captors targeting werewolves in general, or me in particular? If the answer was me in particular, that opened a whole catalog of enemies who might have done this. Who said that having enemies was good, because it meant you’d stood up for something in your life? Ah, I remembered: Winston Churchill. The guy who also said, If you’re going through hell, keep going. Yes, sir.

Most of all, what I wanted to know was what did this have to do with Roman and his confrontation with Antony? Because whatever Colette said, sometimes all threads did lead back to a conspiracy.

The culprit might be any one of a number of antisupernatural groups that had sprung up over the last few years, as vampires and lycanthropes and other brands of magic became more visible and more accepted. I made an easy target because of my radio show. Any truly crazy activists would have just killed me outright—I’d gotten plenty of threats. But these guys wanted me for something. And antisupernatural activist didn’t mesh with the evidence that at least some of my captors seemed to be supernatural themselves. They could be working for the enemy, but why?

The possibilities I considered got more outlandish. A rabid fan had captured me, Misery style, and obsessive games of admiration and torture would soon ensue. Another werewolf pack—one that included a were-lion for some suitably dramatic reason—needed me for some in-person counseling. Flattering, but unlikely. Those folks usually approached me in restaurants, and without tranquilizer guns. Maybe I was being prepared as a hideous sacrifice to some ancient, chthonic god. That had actually already happened to me once, in Las Vegas of all places, so it wasn’t entirely outside the realm of reason. But then there should have been candles, burning incense, weird statuary, and chanting. Or maybe I was being collected for display in an alien zoo.

My imagination was getting away from me. My questions accumulated, growing more and more urgent: When would my enemy finally appear? Would there be food and water? Sooner or later, if the door stayed shut and locked, the need for water would drive me to try to break out, danger of silver poisoning or no.

The chill was getting to me, so I got up and paced. Three steps down the long side of the rocky cell, two steps across, three steps back. Not too cramped, as far as terrifying underground prison cells went. With thoughts like that pressing on me, the pacing didn’t do a thing to get rid of the gooseflesh pricking my arms. My head itched, and my lips had pulled back, unconsciously baring my teeth. I hadn’t realized I’d been doing it. I pressed my hands to my face, rubbed my cheeks, tried to get the muscles to relax. Appear calm. Not at all like a cornered wolf, no sir.

I had to find a way out of here.

I DIDN’T know much about old silver mines except in the most general historical sense. In the last half of the nineteenth century, prospectors discovered gold, silver, and a collection of other valuable minerals throughout the Rocky Mountains. Industry flooded in, dozens of fortunes were made, cities were built. Mining was still an important industry in the state, but hundreds of antique mines like this one had been abandoned and left to decay. They’d been built with nineteenth-century technology, tunnels blown out with primitive black powder and dynamite, men digging with shovels and pickaxes, hauling ore out with carts and donkeys.

I didn’t know how deep a mine like this ran, how many tunnels and chambers it might have, if there was a standard layout or if they twisted randomly depending on where the ore was. I didn’t know how stable the arcing stone rooms might be. Not very, was my feeling—hikers and travelers in the mountains were always getting warnings about not venturing into such tunnels. They collapsed a lot, I gathered. If I started worrying about the roof of the place caving in on me, on top of all the other anxieties, I’d freeze completely. So I just didn’t think about it.

The darkness was giving me a headache. The strain of trying to stare my way out of a near-lightless cave was telling. Not to mention the fear and anger, with no target to aim toward. I ended up sitting on the floor again and thinking of Ben. He’d find me. Somehow he’d figure out what had happened, come looking, and find me. It was just a matter of time. I could be patient.

I caught myself whispering hurry, hurry, hurry.

IF ONLY I knew how much time had passed. I didn’t know how long I’d been unconscious, and I couldn’t see outside to know if it was day or night. The timelessness gave me a feeling of mental seasickness, a nausea that crept into my gut. The ground didn’t feel firm.

Around the roaring in my own ears, I heard something new—something different outside, breaking the silence of the mine tunnel. Barely there—soft, careful, steady. Slippered footsteps, creeping close. I held my breath. The sound was no greater than that of snow falling. The bare whisper of breath that came with the steps I could hear a little better.

Whoever had approached the door paused just on the other side. I was torn between wanting to shout and wanting to remain as still as possible, straining with my ears and taking deep breaths through my nose, hoping to catch a scent and learn all I could.

The person waited, breathing softly. The smell—female, feline. The were-lion. She’d used some kind of herbal hand lotion recently, and wore clothing of washed cotton.

I rose to a crouch, leaning toward the door. “Who are you? What’s going on here?”

The seam I’d noticed in the bottom of the door revealed a panel that flipped open—quickly, loudly. A bottle of water rolled through the opening. I lunged to reach through, to get my hand out there to grab whoever was standing there. But the panel slammed shut on me, and a latch slotted back into place.

Soft footsteps ran away.

“Hey, wait a minute! Talk to me, will you just talk to me?” I shouted, slapped the door, rammed my shoulder into it. The board flexed some, but the hinges didn’t give, as if they’d bolted this thing into the solid wall with bands of iron. My shouts degenerated into growls of frustration.

Kneeling, I punched at the panel, tried to jam my fingers into the seam, anything I could to pry it open, break it, rip apart the door. Like the rest of the door, it was well made, solidly built and locked into place. It flexed, and with a lot of time and effort maybe I could rip through it. But it wasn’t going to give way just by punching it.

I scrabbled at it, until a sharp pain stabbed into my fingertip. I cried out and brought my finger to my mouth, sucking on the wound. Splinter. I could feel it. Wincing, I picked at it in the dark, felt the little fiber under the skin, pulled it out. The pain faded quickly—a wound like that would heal in no time. But the memory of it throbbed. Just a tiny splinter, but it brought tears to my eyes. The stress of it all brought tears to my eyes. Again, I curled up in the middle of the floor, hugging myself, feeling sorry for myself.

My leg brushed against the bottle of water my captor had thrown me. At least, it smelled like water. Just a normal, plastic, store-bought bottle of water. Warm—not refrigerated. It hadn’t even come from an ice-filled cooler. Strangely modern and out of place in this medieval dungeon they’d put me in. Like the tranquilizer gun. The paramilitary conspiracy seemed less likely. This wasn’t comforting, because it meant I was likely in the grips of some homespun, backwoods conspiracy. They knew what they were doing, and had access to just enough tech to make them really scary.

I wasn’t scared. I tried not to be scared.

Vaguely, I thought of hunger strikes. How very nice of them to bring me water, because how terrible it would have been, to go through the trouble of drugging me and bringing me here, then letting me die of thirst. Could a werewolf die of thirst? Probably—it would just take a really long time. Not comforting.

Just because they brought water didn’t mean I had to drink it. I could throw it back out—if I could only get that door panel open. Refusing to drink would likely spite nobody but myself. My mouth still tasted of drugs and sleep, my own sour anxiety, residual tranquilizer leaking out of my system. I twisted open the cap, which cracked, the seal breaking. A brand-new bottle, filled with plain water and not poison. They really did want me alive, after all.

I drank a mouthful, swishing the water around to clean out the grime and bitterness. Closed the bottle and saved the rest for later. Then I settled back in the middle of the floor, huddled in on myself, and pondered.