Kitty Steals the Show

Chapter 19

IF I managed a couple of hours of sleep, it was because I curled up with Ben. Lying with his warmth around me and his scent in my nose made me feel like I was home and safe. The feeling didn’t last, and I woke up with a start, remembering what we’d done during the dawn, and wondering how it would turn out.

First thing, I pulled out my phone and called Tyler. “Hey—are you okay?”

When he answered, his voice held laughter. “Even my mom isn’t this worried about me.”

“Yeah, well, your mom isn’t here dealing with vampire and werewolf politics. Some of these guys have their eye on you.”

“Yeah, I’ve spotted them lurking around. I get to feeling like I’m in a spy movie.”

“Tell me about it. But they haven’t approached you—haven’t tried to draw you in?”

“No—just the straight-up human government people have been doing that.”

“Good. Okay.”

“I’ll be careful, Kitty. I promise,” he said, and we signed off.

If anybody could take care of himself, it was Tyler.

I still had to deliver my keynote address at the conference tomorrow. I had a million things I could say—that was part of the problem. I wasn’t sure it mattered anymore. On the other hand, part of me wanted to run straight to the conference, get on a PA system, and tell everyone to stay in their rooms and lock their doors. That might have been an overreaction. Then again … I felt like I had to warn people. We fought a battle last night, I spent the morning sowing chaos …

I returned to the conference at noon, after an argument with Ben and Cormac. I was too visible, they said. I shouldn’t go because the conference made me too much of a target. I argued back, that going would prove that we hadn’t been scared off. When that didn’t work, I said if I went to the conference—on my own, even—we could use me as bait to draw out our enemies. That suggestion didn’t go over so well.

Then one of the werewolves from last night—one of Solomon’s, not the one who spoke but the one who’d kept to the shadows—showed up at Ned’s gate asking for help. We called Caleb, Ben waited with him, and Cormac and I went back to the conference because I wondered how many werewolves—who didn’t know where we were staying, for example—might show up there hoping to find me. Not because they wanted to hurt me, but because they needed help.

We let Andy drive us this time, for speed. The protestors were still out front, loud as ever, their voices like the crashing of waves. Andy dropped us off at the side entrance to avoid them. I didn’t even want to look at them.

Side by side, Cormac and I marched to the lobby. My nerves felt like they trembled; I wanted to growl.

“You should have stayed back at Ned’s,” I said. “All these lycanthropes, and you don’t have any way to defend yourself—you’d be safer.”

“Didn’t know you cared,” he said.

I stopped. “I care.”

He wouldn’t look at me, and I didn’t know what to say after that. I sighed. “I know you hate it when we get all overprotective, but—”

“No.” He shook his head, gaze downturned. “It’s just I’m used to being the one taking care of everyone else. I—sometimes I think I’d be better off if I moved away. Different city, different state. If I wasn’t around anymore and you didn’t have to worry. But … that would be worse, wouldn’t it? We’d all still worry but we wouldn’t be there to check up on each other.”

“Yeah,” I said.

He gave a curt nod and continued down the hallway. I hurried to follow.

The first person I saw in the lobby was Luis. As nice as he was on the eyes, I didn’t want to deal with his flirting right now. I had to get the first word in, warn him what was happening—and convince him to take it seriously—before he could start batting his eyes and kissing my hand.

“Luis, I need to talk to you—”

“Kitty! I need your help,” he said. He wasn’t smiling.

“What is it?”

“It’s Essi—Esperanza. She’s in the middle of it, and I can’t get her to let it be. The protestors—they know who she is because of her work with the conference. If she gets stuck—I don’t know if she has a way out. She won’t listen to her crabby little brother but maybe she’ll listen to you.”

That wasn’t even the disaster I was expecting. “Let’s go,” I said, taking his arm to push him forward, leading the way.

We couldn’t see a way out of the lobby’s front doors—a crowd of people was blocking them. The local fire marshal was going to get involved if this kept up. We’d have a hard time even getting to the front doors—the crowd was getting larger.

“Back around,” I said, and took off in a run, back for the side entrance.

“Kitty!” Cormac called.

The two of us outran him. Instinct took over; I didn’t even think about it.

Hundreds of people gathered, running down the street as if drawn by the noise, the sheer energy of it. A police siren sounded nearby. Once outside, we stayed close to the building and eased toward the street in front, pressing past people, working along the wall. We rounded the corner.

Wolf bristled, snarling behind the bars of her cage, and I had to stop to catch my breath, to quell the instinct to simply turn and run away. Too many people, all pushing together, shouting. And Esperanza was in the middle of it? What must she be feeling?

Ahead of me, Luis looked back. “You okay?”

“I hate this, but yeah,” I grumbled.

Frowning, he’d hunched, his shoulders tense, grimly pressing forward into the crowd. I grabbed his elbow in an effort to keep close to him, to be sure we weren’t separated. He clamped his arm to his side to keep me there.

The crowd surged like a live thing. We were making progress until something happened in front, and a wave of flesh and angry attitude pressed back. We had nowhere to go because people had closed in behind us. Luis shouted for his sister. I was just barely tall enough to see to the tops of people’s heads, but no farther, even standing on my toes. But we kept moving forward, Luis pushing on, a cat on the hunt. I kept my gaze on his back, ignoring the hordes pressing on every side. I was trapped. I wanted to howl.

The people around us were all ages, male and female, shapes, sizes, and builds. The words they shouted came out muddled, blurring into one another, and I couldn’t read any signs—most of them were up front, where it was easier to hoist them. I couldn’t tell which side of the debate we’d ended up on. Somebody, or several somebodies, reeked of garlic, like they’d bathed in it. Maybe they had. No one recognized me at least.

Ahead, a space opened, a place on the street where the crowd ended. Striped police barricades kept people corralled. I heard a voice shouted through a bullhorn—authoritative, a police officer maybe. Cars with flashing lights parked on the other side of the street, also keeping the crowd corralled. Luis called Esperanza’s name again, and we were close enough to the front of the protest to hear words.

Luis elbowed past people and pulled me the final step to the barricade.

Esperanza was on the other side of it, shouting, hands in fists at her sides, teeth bared. “You don’t have that power! If someone stands here and tells you they’re a human being, a person, you don’t have the power to argue with that!”

“You are not a person, you are not a human being! You’re not like us!” He was a young man in jeans and a T-shirt. Sweat matted his hair, and his muscles stood out. He brandished a sign on a stick, waving it above his head as if it added to his voice: ANIMALS ARE NOT PEOPLE.

God, this was so wrong. Both of them had crossed their respective barriers, but hung back, arguing across an open stretch of sidewalk, as if kept to their side of the protest by magnetism. Where were the cops? I saw the cars, the lights, heard the bullhorn—they were trying to push forward, I thought. I hoped.

“Esperanza! We need to break this up!” I shouted. “Now, before the cops get here!”

“Essi, listen to her!” Luis added.

She glanced back at us. Strain marked her features; her mouth hung open, her teeth slightly bared. She was hunched and tensed in that cat-like manner, like Luis.

Luis reached his hand, held it out despite being jostled by the crowd behind him. Everyone was shouting; the sirens were loud. Esperanza nodded, then. She glanced back at her heckler, spit at the asphalt near his feet, and turned to reach back to Luis.

Someone from the other side ran forward, tipping one of the sections of barricade in his effort to get past it. He was also young, also scrappy—and he held a bucket in his hands. He moved like an attacking predator, head down, arms reaching.

“Esperanza, get down!” I shouted. Too late—she was looking at the attacker. Everybody was looking at the sudden burst of movement across open space.

The man threw the contents of the bucket, an arc of thick, red liquid that splashed in a wall, hit Esperanza in full, and continued on to spatter a swathe of the crowd on either side, including me and Luis. People around us screamed.

The stench of it filled my nose, making me sneeze. I fought past the initial shock and horror to identify it: cow blood. Plain old cow blood. Nothing more sinister than what you found on the average butcher block, which was probably exactly where this came from.

Not that that mattered. He might as well have thrown kerosene on a fire.

The taut fury marring Esperanza’s features, the hiss she let out, weren’t human.

The crowd was in motion, and its tenor had changed. Instead of a slow press, an ebb and flow, people surged in a panic, away from the source of the attack, away from the blood. Luis went the other direction, toward his sister, and I followed. He knocked down the plastic barrier and leapt for her, far more agile and graceful than a normal person would have been.

I wasn’t a jaguar who could leap and turn on a dime, but I could put my head down and power through. We both reached Esperanza and grabbed her before she could pounce at her attacker. Luis took her arms, held them back, and locked her in an embrace; I got in front of her, hands on shoulders, holding her back, blocking her view. The man with the bucket, now empty, stood in the middle of the sidewalk, regarding his handiwork with wide-eyed bafflement, as if he hadn’t expected everyone to actually start screaming.

Luis was speaking rapid, steady Portuguese close to Esperanza’s ear. Her skin was hot under her clothing, tingling against my touch—close to shifting. Her glaring eyes had turned emerald—she might not even have seen her brother.

“Luis, we have to get her out of here.”

He’d already hoisted her into his arms, cradling her. She struggled, batting him with a hand that now bore claws. I hovered close, both to grab her if she broke free, and to shelter them from the screams and shouts of the mob as I guided them to the nearest doors at the hotel’s lobby.

Without the barricade, the two groups of protestors came together, merging into a riot. Somebody fell, smacking into my back—Wolf turned to snap, until I yanked her back. Had to stay human. Had too much to do, too much to go wrong.

The bullhorn was close, now. Somebody was yelling to stop. I assumed they weren’t yelling at us.

One of the doors ahead of us opened up; Cormac held it, clearing the path for us, urging us inside. He was right where he needed to be, to come to the rescue. The warm air of the hotel lobby had a corporate, carpeted scent that stabbed through the turmoil. I steered Luis toward that smell, our escape route.

“Thanks,” I gasped.

“This way,” Cormac said, pointing to a room—a bellhop station or maybe just an office or small meeting room, I couldn’t tell. I pulled Luis’s arm and pointed to the shelter.

Cormac shouted, a path cleared, and we moved forward.

Another familiar face emerged from the crowd of onlookers—Dr. Shumacher. “Can I help?”

I couldn’t think of very many people I’d want helping in a situation like this, but she was one of them. She’d seen out-of-control lycanthropes before. The four of us lunged into the room, and Cormac slammed the door.

After the mob on the street, the room was very quiet. It was small, no more than ten feet across, carpeted, empty, lit by fluorescents. It could have held a small conference table and a few chairs, or served as luggage storage.

Luis set Esperanza on the floor. She was still batting at him, and he was doing a good job ducking, but she’d gotten a swipe across his cheek, three rows of cuts dripping blood. The wound was hard to differentiate from the smears of cow blood that covered us all.

Her whole body was rigid, braced against itself, and she was gasping for breath. Traces of fur gave her brown skin a sheen. She was trying to keep it in, to hold it together. Luis held her close, still whispering in their language.

“Thanks,” I said to Cormac and Shumacher.

The scientist stood by the door, watching with her neutral, clinical gaze. “Her shifting under duress in public would have been a disaster.”

“Good thing it didn’t happen, then,” Cormac said.

Got that right. If she’d shifted in the middle of the crowd, the odds of her getting out without hurting anyone, even by accident, were slim. At least here, with friends looking after her, she had a chance of staying safe and in control. I couldn’t tell if she was right on the verge of shifting or not.

“You two might want to stay outside for now,” I said. “Just in case.”

Even Cormac didn’t argue, and they both stepped quickly outside and closed the door.

I pressed to the wall, ready to help if needed but wanting to stay out of the way, to avoid upsetting her precarious balance. If she was going to shift uncontrollably, she’d have done it by now, I thought. But I didn’t know her well enough to tell. Luis did, and he continued holding her, cradling her. Were-jaguars didn’t have packs like wolves. I didn’t know if the contact would help. Then again, maybe it would, not because he was another were-jaguar, but because he was her brother.

Using the hem of my shirt, I wiped at the blood spattered on me, which didn’t help to clean it up, really. So my shirt instead of my arm was bloody—hardly seemed an improvement.

Finally, Esperanza sighed, slumping in Luis’s arms. Her skin had lost the sheen of fur, and her hands were hands, with human fingers and fingernails, resting on her lap. Luis continued whispering at her, murmuring at her, until she seemed to fall asleep. He tried to clean some of the blood off her face, using a corner of his shirt. Didn’t have much more luck than I had.

When he finally looked at me, his face was ashen and lined with worry. “That was too close,” he said.

“Is she going to be okay?”

“Pissed off when she wakes up, but yes. I think so.”

I opened the door, let Shumacher back in and introduced her to Luis, who thanked her. Esperanza started to rouse, as if from a brief fainting spell, her face creased, struggling to sit up. She said something in Portuguese, and Luis reassured her.

“You might want to stay here for a time,” Shumacher said. “At least until that crowd clears out a little. Your friend is standing watch, keeping people out.”

If I focused, I could still hear shouting. I settled in to wait. Shumacher pulled a cell phone from her jacket pocket and made a call. She waited for an answer, and waited. When the number went to voice mail, she left a message.

“This is Elizabeth Shumacher, there’s been some trouble outside the hotel and I just wanted to touch base. Please call back when you get this.”

“Who?” I questioned. She looked worried.

“Sergeant Tyler,” she said. “I hope he’s all right.”

“He probably just missed the call,” I said.

She made another call. “Yes, can you call room twenty-four eighty, please. Thank you.”

Again, she waited, and waited. Again, she left a message when no one answered.

“When was the last time you saw him?” she asked me, putting her phone away.

“I talked to him on the phone this morning; he was fine then.”

“You haven’t seen him at all since?”

“No.”

“Neither have I,” she said, frowning.

“I’m sure he’s fine. He probably went out sightseeing.” I didn’t sound convincing.

A catalog of possible disasters scrolled through my mind. Some of those protesters may have gotten out of hand and taken direct action. Any supernatural bounty hunters in town may have decided to gun for him. I’d have pointed to the local werewolves if I didn’t know Caleb. Then I thought of the vampires—Mercedes hadn’t been able to get to me. What if she’d decided to go after Tyler? I didn’t even know where to start.

I had to stave off the panic and remind myself: Tyler was ex–Special Forces. Highly trained, very badass. He could take care of himself. Someone would need a huge amount of know-how, not to mention firepower, to take him out.

“He’s a tough guy, Doctor. There’s probably a logical explanation.” But my own instincts were screaming at me.

“He wouldn’t just leave, Kitty.”

“Is something wrong?” Luis asked.

Esperanza groaned. “Yes. I need a shower. Badly.”

“Friend of ours. A werewolf, Joseph Tyler.” I turned to Shumacher. “Can we check his room?”

“Maybe we should.”

Esperanza was ready to move, so we decided to leave our shelter, chaos outside or no. Getting to her feet with Luis’s help, she seemed tired, as if she had actually shape-shifted and run wild rather than merely threatened to. She’d used all her strength to keep that from happening. She looked awful, sticky blood soaked into her clothes, matting her hair, streaking her face. She looked like she’d come out of a war zone.

“You okay?” I asked, not because I thought she was, but I didn’t know what else to say to her.

Wincing, she nodded. “What kind of asshole does something like that? Most people wouldn’t know right off it was cow blood.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He probably just wanted to shock people.”

“Well, I hope he’s happy,” she said, with a bitter chuckle.

Actually, I hoped he was in jail right now. What were the odds? I took the time to make a call of my own, and held my breath until I got an answer.

“Kitty,” Ben said. Single word, heartfelt greeting. “Where are you? I saw what happened on TV, CNN was broadcasting. Are you okay?”

Oh, so everyone saw that. Great. “I’m fine. Luis and Esperanza are safe. Cormac’s here with us. But there’s another problem. Can you get over to the hotel right now?”

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.” I sighed, thinking of Tyler, looking at Esperanza. “Maybe everything.”