Kitty Steals the Show

Chapter 18

THE CONTRAST between this neighborhood and Brixton couldn’t have been more profound. Even in the misty dawn, the rows of ornate town houses and well-groomed parks seemed picture-perfect. The low, wrought-iron fences had fresh coats of paint, the façades were clean and elegant. Not a smudge of graffiti in sight.

“His guards have staked out the next block,” Caleb said. “Same routine, I take it? Walk in until we flush ’em out?”

“Wait,” I said, focused out the window to a stray shape that had moved in the morning shadows. “Let me out here.”

“What are you on about?” He slowed the car.

“I saw something. They’ve spotted us, let me out.”

“Kitty—” Ben said. The car had stopped, and I was already out.

I breathed deep and caught only a hint of werewolf. The air moved wrong, and felt wet and heavy in my nose. But they were out there. Caleb had parked, and he and Ben moved in behind me. Cormac was around, I was sure, but again stayed out of sight. They wouldn’t interfere, but they had my back. I didn’t have to worry about anything but what lay in front of me.

The street narrowed, curved, funneling into a small square, hemmed in by town houses. Even narrower lanes led away. I wasn’t quite hemmed in without escape. The lair had to be nearby.

Several werewolves were watching me from sheltered places around the square. Only watching.

“I have a message,” I called out. “Once I’ve said what I need to, I’ll leave. No trouble.” Their scents were musky, tangy with adrenaline, with fear. Some of them were in wolf form, fur bristling, panting.

“Tonight’s battle was just the start. But this isn’t about us, it’s about the vampires. They should fight their own war, don’t you think? Instead of using us. That’s my message: our fight isn’t with you. You don’t have to stay. If you leave, trouble won’t follow you. Your Master’s already picked sides, and he’s already finished. But you don’t have to go down with him.” I felt a little ridiculous, calling platitudes in an empty street, unable to gauge my audience’s reaction. Couldn’t be too long before someone called the cops, in a neighborhood like this.

Nothing happened, no one answered.

“Like I said,” I added finally. “It’s just a message. Think about it.” I turned to leave.

“Where are we supposed to go?” a man called in accented English.

The same question, and that was the problem, wasn’t it? Did they only stay because they didn’t have anywhere else to go? If I could just get all these people together …

I shrugged, wishing I could produce a magical floating island where we could all live in peace. Yeah, right. “Where do you want to go?”

“No matter where we go, we are in someone’s territory. In someone’s reach.”

Europe was crowded, in other words. “Maybe someone would let you in. If you talked to them. Made a deal. It has to be better than this.”

The speaker emerged into the light, and my breath caught. He was the male wolf, the one in chains who had lain at Njal’s feet. He was dressed now, shockingly ordinary in jeans and a sweater. But he still wore a metal-trimmed collar around his neck.

So did the lean wolf who padded beside him. The woman, his mate. She lowered her head when I saw her, hanging back, pressing herself to her bipedal companion. His hand reached down to brush her fur. He was protecting her; everything he did was to protect her.

“I’m listening, because you wouldn’t fight,” he said. “You understand.”

My voice stretched thin with sympathy. “You have to get away from him. You know that, don’t you?”

“He cares for us. In his own way.”

“You’re not pets.”

He looked away, like he didn’t believe me. “You don’t fight. Why are you trying to start a war?”

My smile felt bitter. “Oh, I didn’t start this.”

Four others had emerged, arranging themselves in the square behind the man. Two were in wolf form. Their ears were up, listening. Their postures were wary. Even the humans had stiff shoulders and taut expressions.

“You’re a pack. If you left together, looked to yourselves for leadership instead of that jerk of a vampire—” I shook my head. It had taken me years to learn that lesson. I couldn’t just rant at them and expect the lightbulb to turn on.

I turned to walk away. Looking at them—at those collars—made me too sad.

“Wait!” he called. He’d stepped forward; his mate moved with him. “Could you—could you take us with you?”

How much courage did it take for him to ask that question?

“Harald, you can’t,” said one of the others, reaching. “He’ll find you.”

“She can protect us. Look at her.”

What exactly did he see in me? I felt tired, running on adrenaline. On desperation. I imagined metal rods down my neck holding my chin up. I looked to Ben for help. He gave a small shake of his head—not denying, but expressing confusion.

I suppressed a laugh. “You don’t get it. This is about taking care of yourselves.”

“You—” The man nodded over my shoulder; Caleb stood there, his glare still, neutral. “You are the alpha of this territory? You’ll let us stay, then. I ask for … for asylum.” He set his jaw.

“Harald,” his comrade called again. Harald didn’t look back. His fingers twined into his mate’s coat, and she whined softly.

Caleb’s expression didn’t change. I wanted to say he was angry, but I didn’t know him well enough to decide for certain. Silently I pleaded with him, wishing for telepathy, Say yes …

“I’m not in the habit of taking in strays,” he muttered. “But in the interests of the cause … You’ll behave? No double-crossing?”

Harald shook his head. “We are not so clever. I just want to keep her safe.” He rubbed a hand over the wolf’s head. The poor woman had her ears back, her tail between her legs. She was terrified. But she trusted her mate.

“Come on, then,” Caleb said with a sigh.

The defector inched forward carefully, obliquely, moving around us instead of toward us. His mate was even more tentative, hunched over and padding carefully. He had to urge her forward. Caleb didn’t look at them, didn’t make so much as an aggressive flinch—they might have fled at the least discouragement. But Caleb was thoroughly self-possessed. An alpha to admire.

“Anyone else?” I called to the others.

The remaining wolves fidgeted, gazes darting, but none moved forward. In fact, after a moment, they faded back to morning shadows. They weren’t going to try to steal back their pack mates, and they’d have to wait until nightfall to report to their Master. Good.

Ben moved beside me, regarding the two defectors who stood near Caleb. She was still cowering. Harald managed to look simultaneously miserable and resolute.

“I’m suddenly feeling grateful,” Ben said. I glanced at him, questioning. He shrugged. “For choices. For big open spaces. For you.”

I knew what he meant. There but for the grace of God … I squeezed his hand.

“Now, what am I going to do with you?” Caleb said, his tone as tired as it was annoyed.

Harald studied his feet. “If you have a place for her to sleep…”

“I think we can manage that,” Caleb said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Thank you,” I said as we walked back to the car. The two new wolves trailed us, wary and showing deference. I tried not to keep looking over my shoulder at them, which would only make them more nervous.

“Don’t tell anyone I’ve gone soft,” he muttered. “But maybe this’ll start some rumors, encourage some of the others to desert as well.”

“We can hope.”

Cormac joined us by the time we reached the car, and I didn’t look for where he’d appeared from. The way he moved was almost vampiric, but it was probably just a charm of Amelia’s. Harald and his mate jumped when they saw him, and Caleb murmured reassurances at them.

With the newcomers, the car didn’t have room for us all, and we agreed that the priority should be getting the defectors to safety. Caleb would take them to one of his pack’s safe houses, and the three of us would continue on our own. He gave me his list of contacts and locations, apparently more confident in my abilities now that he’d seen the plan in action.

“I have to give you some credit. This may work,” he said.

“There’s a vote of confidence,” I said.

He winked. “Never had a doubt, love. Now, off to play good Samaritan and check on my own wounded. Call me in an hour.”

“Yes, sir.”

Somehow, in the last half hour, daylight had arrived in force. The cloud cover made it impossible to spot the moment when a shadowy dawn had given way to full day. But the sky was bright now, if overcast. The vampires would be sleeping. And have no idea what we were up to.

Caleb’s scouts had tracked five vampires who’d moved their lairs. We assumed Mercedes didn’t have a lair of her own—she’d always traveled light and alone, not weighed down by a household. Able to manipulate others to get what she needed. We had three left, took a cab to the next one, and the last two were within walking distance of there. Morning traffic had begun to clog the roads; we moved carefully.

At one of the five lairs Caleb and his people had tracked—Petra’s, the woman in the glamorous gown, Mistress of Krakow—we couldn’t find the wolves standing guard. We spent half an hour wandering the neighborhood, making our presence known. No werewolf guards appeared, leaving me no one to talk to. They might have fled, or they might have decided to stay out of sight. Didn’t matter, because we didn’t have time to linger.

The last two visits went much like the first: we found the guards, they stopped long enough to listen to me—my actions at the convocation had earned me that. But I couldn’t tell if what I said made an impact. I was able to add rumors to what I’d said before: that I’d been able to rally some of the other werewolves, that Roman’s base of support was crumbling, and they had better consider our offer of amnesty—a chance to escape—while they still could. So only two wolves had defected for sure, and they were a special case. This whole escapade was about propaganda, wasn’t it? If I was wrong and my plan failed entirely, I’d have other problems to worry about.

By then, some of the clouds had burned off, blue sky broke through, and the morning blazed, maybe as sunny as this country ever got. Wandering on a hunch, I led Ben and Cormac out of the neighborhood of our last encounter, down a couple of curving streets, and stumbled on the astonishing vista of Trafalgar Square.

“I think I need to rest a minute,” I told them and wandered across the plaza in front of the National Gallery to sit on the steps at the top of the square. I resisted an urge to cower before the huge bronze lions looking out, guarding the base of the immense column that bore aloft a nautical statue of Admiral Nelson—indistinct from this distance. There were also fountains, neoclassical architecture on every corner, block after block of impressive façades stretching all the way down Whitehall. If I wandered that way, I’d eventually get to Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster Abbey … Never mind the column and statue, this one square—this whole city was a monument.

I’d been in old places—old by American standards at least—and had been in beautiful places that made me sigh with pleasure. But I had never felt the weight of history settle over a place the way I felt it here, solid and daunting. I shouldn’t have—this was a modern city, with traffic jams and crowds of people on their ways to jobs or events or important rendezvous. It smelled like a city, exhaust, concrete, asphalt, combining in a haze. But the buildings were all so old by my admittedly narrow American view. The columns and domes and plinths and everything were done unironically. Then came the layers. Behind a neoclassical theater was the preserved basement of a medieval church, and around the corner from that a row of houses that had been destroyed in the Blitz and replaced by a park, and yet another corner once held a statue placed by a king eight hundred years ago as a monument to his dead wife. Norman castles, Renaissance palaces, Victorian parks—they all lived here together.

This city had been a city for two thousand years, and I could feel that with every step I took. Bits of all that time were still here, alive, even if it was just in the form of collective memory.

I wondered if being in London was a little like being a vampire.

Ben settled on the step next to me, resting his elbows on his knees. Cormac stayed standing, keeping watch.

“You’re thinking very deep thoughts, I can tell,” Ben said. The sunlight exposed the exhausted shadows under his eyes, and a pallor to his skin. I wondered how bad I looked.

“Yes,” I said, and left it at that.

“Do we have any more conspiracies to initiate right at the moment?”

I had to think about it a moment. “I don’t think so. Not right at the moment.”

“Then can I vote that we try to get some sleep?”

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept. No wonder my brain felt like cotton. “I think that’s an excellent idea. Cormac?”

He stood a little ways off, sunglasses on, looking over the scene, frowning.

“Some days I think that nothing ever changes,” he said. Or Amelia said. The thought could have come from either one of them.

We caught a cab back to Ned’s house in Mayfair.