Kitty's House of Horrors

Chapter 14

The first time I met Cormac Bennett he wanted to kill me, because that was what he did. He hunted monsters. I talked him out of it, and ever since then our friendship had the undertone of an ironic running joke. He’d introduced me to Ben, who was his cousin, and who I ended up marrying. Cormac had saved my life. He represented possibilities. Roads not taken. But that was another story.

He also gave me access to a perspective, to a way of thinking, that I otherwise never would have had experience with. I hunted under duress because I was a werewolf, and I limited myself to far wilderness where I wouldn’t hurt anyone. But people like Cormac, who did it on purpose, who made it a profession, who honed their skills—

That was the kind of person who was after us now.

I found myself asking, what would Cormac do? If it were Cormac out there, what could I expect? If I could call Cormac for help, what would he say?

The funny thing? I could hear the answer.

The hunter would try to draw us out. He’d try to separate us. Right now, we were a pack with our own territory, and we had a defensive advantage. Hunting other predators is different than hunting prey, Cormac said. We were predators.

If it were Cormac out there and he’d had time to prepare, he’d have trapped the house. He wouldn’t give us an escape route. He’d have studied us, he’d know our weaknesses. He’d use silver on the lycanthropes, stakes and sunlight on the vampires. He’d have a plan for each one of us.

We just had to figure out what those plans were, and how to turn them around. Use them against him. And even more importantly, we had to figure out how to get back in contact with the outside world. Get the power working, find a phone, call in the cavalry.

Our hunter had had time to prepare. We hadn’t. We’d have to move fast if we were going to make up the difference.

I turned from the window. Everyone was doing something different, all of them stuck in their own worlds. Jeffrey and Tina were on one sofa; Jeffrey looked like he was meditating, Tina was tapping a pen on a piece of paper but not writing. On the other sofa, Anastasia was still comforting Gemma, who through her grief was showing her youth, her inexperience as a vampire. She might never have lost anyone she loved before. Ariel was pacing, wringing her hands. Lee was on a chair, drinking a beer. Grant was staring at the window, searching the darkness, like me.

We were sitting ducks, waiting to be picked off. We all knew better than that.

“I think we should post a watch,” I said. Everyone looked toward me, a group of stark faces. I wanted to duck, apologetic for breaking the quiet, but I didn’t. I was an alpha wolf, and I could do this. “Probably from upstairs. It’ll be easier to stay out of sight of anyone with a rifle. Then we need to check the house. It might be rigged with explosives, traps. Anything like that. We should also look for weapons we can use.”

After a moment of stunned silence, Ariel said, voice wavering, “Are you serious? Explosives?”

Lee chuckled. His face flushed, and I wondered if maybe that wasn’t his first beer of the evening. “What are you going to do, wage some kind of war?”

“Yes,” I said. “Damn straight.”

Anastasia stood, and all gazes turned to her. She drew the eye with her poise, her bearing, chin tipped up, gaze like iron. I suddenly felt like we couldn’t do half badly with her on our side.

“I’m less interested in the war than I am in the conspiracy,” she said. “I want to know how this happened. How it was possible for this… situation… to arise. I want to know who made it possible.” She looked at Odysseus Grant.

An epic stare-down between them began. I looked back and forth between the two.

“You want to explain what you’re talking about?” I said to Anastasia.

“You know what I’m talking about,” she said. “You know what he’s capable of.”

Grant hadn’t reacted. Not a muscle on his face twitched. Gazing at him, Anastasia looked like she could raise a hand and summon storms. At the moment, I was thinking they were both capable of a hell of a lot. I didn’t particularly want to see what.

“I do know,” I said, my voice low, steady. The talking-down-a-hostage-situation voice. “And I think that if he wanted to act against any of us, he’d do it a lot more elegantly and discreetly.”

Grant was near the top of my “people never to piss off” list. Because if he ever decided he had it in for me, I would just… vanish.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Grant said.

Anastasia scowled at me. “Then what do you think is happening here?”

I didn’t snap back like I wanted to, because I was still thinking like Cormac, and Anastasia didn’t have that benefit. Hell, for all her experience she might never have met anyone like Cormac. I explained carefully, thinking out loud, formulating my own hypothesis. “I think it’s pretty simple. There are people out there—bounty hunters, hit men, assassins—who want people like us dead. I think maybe one or more of them got wind of what was happening here. That they’d have a whole group of juicy targets in one place, just waiting to be picked off. They made plans, they camped out—maybe at that campsite Jerome and I found during the treasure hunt. They waited for the chance, got rid of witnesses. Now they can pick us off one by one, and that’s all they want to do. I think they hit Dorian first because they knew it would weaken you and Gemma. That means they’re smart. They know our weaknesses. So we have to pay attention. And I think we have to go after them before they get to us.”

The others took time absorbing all that. I studied them in turn, sizing them up, guessing how they’d do under pressure—assessing my pack, I realized. Most of them probably had never been hunted before. They might never have been in danger like this. Grant and Tina had, I knew. They could fight. Anastasia, probably. The old vampires didn’t survive so long without developing a few survival skills. Lee was a hunter, but he was used to being top of the food chain. Jeffrey, Ariel—I had no idea. I hated this, because Jeffrey and Ariel at least were too darned nice to be stuck in a situation like this.

That was why I was starting to throw down the alpha attitude: I felt like I had to protect them.

Lee finally broke the silence. “How do you do that? How do you just put yourself inside their heads like that?”

I looked away, trying not to laugh, because this wasn’t funny. But God, I wished Cormac could hear this.

“I have this friend,” I said. “He’s good at this sort of thing.”

“Any chance you could get him to come out here and help?”

My throat tightened, and I shook my head. “No chance at all, even if we had a working phone.”

“Too bad,” he said.

Yeah. Too bad.

Straightening, I pulled from the window. Reminded myself I was supposed to be badass. “Tell you what. There’s a locked room upstairs. Anyone else want to check it out? See what Provost decided to keep out of sight?”

I trooped upstairs, leading the others.

“Maybe this is all some kind of mistake,” Lee said. “Dorian was an accident, Jerome was the only target—he had enemies, right? Maybe from his boxing days?”

“Except there’s still that prickling on the back of my neck,” I said.

“What do you think we’ll find in there?” Tina said.

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t need to look.”

Ariel split off to knock on Conrad’s door. “Hey, Conrad. You okay?”

“I’m not coming out, so don’t ask,” came the muffled voice from within. Ariel stepped back, a startled look on her face.

“I’d have thought he’d start adjusting by now,” she said.

I gave her a wry grin. “The trouble is, there’s no way he can save face. He looks like an idiot, and he knows it.”

The door to the mystery room was still locked. I rattled the knob again and wondered if I was strong enough to kick it in. That always worked so well in the movies, right? “Maybe there’s an ax in the toolshed,” I said.

“May I try?” Grant stepped forward, holding a couple of small, thin tools. Lock picks. The magician had everything.

“Be my guest,” I said, stepping aside. I liked having Grant on my team, which made me even crankier when Anastasia whispered to me, “He has us all where he wants us.”

I didn’t want to have that argument right now. I didn’t want to have that argument at all.

Grant got to work on the lock, using the pick smoothly, making minute adjustments. In a moment, the lock clicked and the door cracked open. Grant pushed inside the room.

I could see pretty well in the dark. So could Anastasia, and she was at my shoulder, looking in. The room had been cleared of furniture, and a dozen or so plastic storage crates were shoved up against walls, among other random bits of equipment. A storage room, as I’d suspected. I took a deep breath and tried to sort out the tangle of smells. Lots of metal, plastic, rubber, along with the smells inherent in the lodge. Familiar smells of technology and civilization. It didn’t mean anything.

Grant was studying the room by the glow from a cigarette lighter. Tina and Jeffrey carried flashlights and panned the beams over the interior. I started looking in boxes.

One held a few extra remote cameras nestled among coils of coaxial cable. Microphones, wire, electrical tape, packing foam, forms listing inventory. All the odds and ends I’d have expected to find tucked away on a film production like this.

Then I found the box with stuff in it I couldn’t identify.

“Grant?” I said. He and Anastasia came to look over my shoulder.

In this box we found coils of very thin wire, an almost clear filament that certainly wasn’t meant for anything electrical. Sleek black boxes with tiny lenses. Batteries. Gun cases—empty.

“Trip wire,” Grant said. “Motion detectors.”

“Stuff you’d use for a security system?” I said.

“Or for a trap,” he said.

I was almost afraid to dig looking for more, but I did, and found the canisters, steel and heavy, the size of grenades. Not that I’d ever seen a grenade. But I could tell. My skin was prickling. When I lifted it, my hand seemed to tingle at the feel of it. The sheer sinister aura leaking from it. I smelled it, a quick sniff, and quickly turned away because it smelled sour, chemical. Just a faint odor, suggestive of pain. My eyes watered from it.

“Tear gas,” Grant said.

“Are you kidding?” I said, quickly setting the thing down. “What’s a film crew need with tear gas?” And I knew. Cormac’s voice whispering. All I had to do was think of what he would do with tear gas. “They could get us to panic. To scatter, if they wanted to separate us.”

Jeffrey stared at the box, encompassed by his flashlight beam. “What does this mean? That Provost and the production company are in on it?”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “I’d love to find out who owns the lodge. It might be that someone was able to get in here ahead of time and set up shop. We still don’t know enough to go pointing fingers.”

“But we can assume there may be some kind of booby trap out there rigged with tear gas?” Lee said. “This is fucked up.”

“Yeah,” I breathed.

“We need to check over the house. Carefully,” Grant said.

“I’ll search with you,” Anastasia said to Grant.

“Don’t want to let me out of your sight?” he said.

“That’s right.”

We scoured the house top to bottom. I wasn’t even sure what we were looking for, but we brainstormed and made up a list: wires, cameras, or other bits of electronics in odd places. Places where recent construction might have been done: odd seams in the walls, sawdust on the floor. Any trace of anything that didn’t belong. We checked windows, doors, roof beams, vents. Lee and I hunted by smell, though he said that out of the water he wasn’t much good.

Just because we didn’t find anything didn’t mean nothing was there. That was the worst part. It felt futile.

I slumped into the kitchen, looking for something to eat and drink, and found Ariel. She’d taken a drawer full of butter knives and was lashing them together with a coil of wire from the secret stash upstairs. She’d made a half-dozen crosses.

“It’s curandera magic,” she said. “I was never very good at it. I tried, but I didn’t have the patience like I should have. Grandma was always telling me to slow down, not to try to learn everything at once, that there’d be time. Then she was gone, and I wished I’d learned better. I don’t have her talent, but this should work.”

“I know,” I said softly. “I’ve seen something like this work before.”

“I had to do something,” she said. “It’s not much. But… it’s something.”

I helped her start hanging them above the doors and windows. It was protective magic, supposed to keep evil outside. It certainly couldn’t hurt, could it?

Except when Anastasia and Gemma returned from searching the basement. Anastasia stopped in the doorway and glared. Not looking scared, but angry.

“Kitty?” she called. “What are those?”

I was standing on a chair, using duct tape to secure one of the impromptu crosses above the kitchen window. Crosses. Vampires. Oops.

“Crosses. Protective magic,” I explained. Ariel held another cross to her chest and looked stricken.

“Was this Grant’s idea?” she said. If I’d looked at her eyes, they would be flashing with rage, but I knew better than to look at her eyes. Grant wasn’t around at the moment—Anastasia wouldn’t let him accompany her into their basement lair.

“No,” Ariel said, quickly—bravely—stepping forward. “It was my idea. It’s something my grandmother did. I thought—I thought it might help. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking, we’ll take them down.”

Anastasia couldn’t say anything to that, and my estimation of her went up a bit when she didn’t try. She could see that Ariel was only trying to help.

“Can I ask a stupid question?” I said to Anastasia.

“I don’t know why you bother asking permission,” she said.

I ignored that. “What were vampires afraid of before Christianity and crosses and all that?”

“Crosses have been around in one form or another since before Christianity. It’s a powerful symbol.”

“And?”

She didn’t continue. Ah well.

The vampires waited in the doorway until we’d removed the several crosses we’d put up. Ariel kept them, though, stashing them out of sight in an old grocery bag.

“They may not have worked anyway,” I told her. “They’re magical. I’m afraid we may be up against something entirely mundane.”

“It’s okay,” Ariel said. Out of the blue, she gave me a hug. Quick, spontaneous. More comfort. “I’m glad you’re here. I mean, I’m not glad you’re stuck. But I’m glad you’re here, because I know you’ll figure this out.”

“I elect you morale officer,” I said. That got her to smile. My work here is done.

Lee and Grant collected weapons. They went through the kitchen, the closets, the utility shed, equipment left behind from the show, and the attic, gathering an arsenal that they spread on the living room floor. Along with the tear gas and motion detectors from the secret stash, we had a set of mean-looking carving knives from the kitchen; vinegar, ammonia, bleach, and other chemicals we could turn into some wicked cocktails; and from the toolshed, a shovel, an ax, and a set of surveying stakes.

Every minute they spent outside collecting the stuff, I had my heart in my throat, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. However much I’d have loved to entertain the thought that maybe this was over, and that what happened to Dorian and Jerome were isolated and unrelated events and nothing else was going to happen, I couldn’t.

“I wouldn’t normally bother with the stakes, but considering the company, I thought we ought to keep an eye on them.” Grant seemed pleased with the haul. I wasn’t so sure we weren’t just spitting into the wind.

“I don’t see how this crap is going to do us any good,” Lee said. Like me, he was looking over his shoulder. I wondered if he felt the same weird vibes I did, like someone was watching us, even though the cameras following us around were long gone.

“If we have it all together and locked up, it means no one else can get to it, either,” I said. “How about that?”

He scowled and went away to look out the window. Making himself a target for someone outside, I observed. So how did we keep a lookout without giving the bad guys a perfect view of us? You have an answer for that, Cormac?

Anastasia regarded the armory with about as much confidence as I did, her frown revealing contempt. “Stakes are overrated as a weapon against vampires. You have to get close enough to use them, and that’s always problematic, isn’t it?”

“If you act stupid enough around vampires, they let their guard down,” I said. “Then you can get close. They tend to get this look of shock on their faces, like getting staked was the last thing they expected even though they saw you coming at them with the thing in your hand.”

“And you know this how?” Anastasia said, and I couldn’t tell if it was astonishment or a newfound respect in her startled tone of voice.

“Long story,” I said, blushing. “Never mind. Really.”

“What next?” Grant said, changing the subject, lucky for me. “I don’t relish sitting here waiting for this hunter to show himself.”

“But how do we act without exposing ourselves?” I said.

“We may not have a choice,” he said. “We’ll just have to be careful.”

“I still think the answer is under our noses,” Anastasia said, glaring at Grant. “This is an inside job, it has to be. You—you’ve barely flinched through all of this. Like none of this has surprised you.”

“He never flinches,” I said. “He sees a human sacrifice in a flaming pseudo-Babylonian temple and he doesn’t flinch, trust me.”

“What are you talking about?” Anastasia said.

“Never mind. But you want to know who I want to talk to?” I had their attention then, which was good, because keeping us all from arguing was going to be half the battle. “Conrad. He may be putting on a good act, but the minute the shit hit the fan, he locked himself up and won’t have anything to do with the rest of us. Now, is he really having a nervous breakdown, or is he keeping himself out of the way for whatever’s next?” I paused, then shook my head. “You know what? That’s paranoid even for me, forget I said that.”

Grant said, “Kitty. Do you think you should try to get some sleep? You’ve had a busy day.”

By any sane reckoning, I did need some sleep. I hadn’t slept nearly enough to recover from shifting, not to mention all the running I’d done. I was exhausted. My brain hurt. I couldn’t think straight. But I also couldn’t imagine trying to sleep. I’d sit straight up every time someone in the house coughed.

“This doesn’t exactly seem like the best time to be sleeping.”

“This may be all the time you get,” Anastasia said. “I think he’s right.”

Anastasia and Grant agreeing on anything was enough to convince me that maybe I really should try to get some sleep. But I wasn’t going to go to my room to do it. I wasn’t going to be alone. I may not have been with my pack, but I needed someone around. I found a blanket and curled up on the sofa, thinking I’d at least rest my eyes, thinking no way would I ever fall asleep when I was this keyed up.

But wonder of wonders, I did.