Kitty Steals the Show

Chapter 20

THE STREET outside the hotel, visible through the lobby doors, was oddly clear of people. Everyone had fled, or the cops had cleared everyone out. The barricades lay toppled. A car was parked across the way. Trash was scattered, and a dark, wet splash marred the sidewalk—blood from the attack. Here in the lobby, groups of two or three people stayed close together, talking low and nervously. A couple of them glanced at Esperanza, staring. Cormac glared back, and they turned away.

“Essi, we should get out of sight,” Luis said, and she nodded.

“Call me if you need anything,” I said.

Arm in arm, they hurried to the elevators.

Shumacher went to speak with a manager at the front desk.

I waited, scratching at the streaks of blood drying on my skin, staring out at the eerily deserted street. We had to make sure Tyler was okay. Maybe Jan and Mercedes couldn’t target me, but they could target him.

Then Ben appeared, stepping out of Ned’s car, which had just pulled up to the curb. I wanted to rush to meet him, but I waited. I could be calm. But my hands itched until he was standing in front of me, and I could grab his hand. He squeezed back, and glanced at Cormac as if checking him for damage.

“We can’t get ahold of Tyler,” I said.

“You think something’s happened?” he asked. I shook my head to say I didn’t know.

Shumacher turned away from the counter. “They’ll let us into his room with someone from security.”

A woman in a nicely pressed suit with a hotel name tag pinned to the jacket lapel came through an office door behind the main desk, joined by a man in a security uniform.

Together, we went to the elevators.

Tyler’s room was on the third floor—second floor, in British-speak. Probably the lowest floor he could possibly get a room, which would have appealed to his werewolf side—closer to the ground meant easier escape routes. The elevator ride up was claustrophobic, anxiety-ridden, and thankfully short. We spilled out, and I looked back and forth down a long corridor—two possible routes.

The hotel manager took the lead and guided us to the farthest room on the left. She swiped a key card three times without being able to open the door. I almost shoved her out of the way to try it myself, but on the fourth try the lock clicked and the door opened inward.

Dr. Shumacher was about to push past her and enter the room when the security guard suggested they both step back, so he could enter first. “Mr. Tyler, sir?” he called in.

No one answered.

The officer entered, then Shumacher. I’d have crammed in right after, if the officer hadn’t turned around and ushered us both straight out again.

“What?” I said, trying to look past him, to see into the room.

“I need to call the police,” the guard said. “We’ve got a crime scene here.”

“Oh my God, he’s not—”

Shumacher shook her head. “No, he’s not there. But there’s obviously been a struggle.”

“He was kidnapped?”

She didn’t answer, but she’d gone pale and clasped her hands. The officer was speaking on a phone, Ben was at my shoulder. The hotel manager hovered, looking lost and worried. I leaned on the door frame, to see as much as I could without stepping inside. The room was dark, the curtains drawn. The bedspread lay in a heap on the floor at the foot of the bed. The TV had fallen off the dresser, and the mirror on the wall was cracked.

Closing my eyes, I took a deep, slow breath.

Tyler had been living in the room for a week, and his scent—his distinctive imprint of fur, skin, and wild—lay thick on the air. On top of that, I caught the barest hint of blood. Not a lot—the trace from a cut, that was all. And then, on top of that—

“Can you smell that?” I murmured to Ben.

“Like someone spilled a medicine cabinet?”

The odor was even fainter than the blood, but nonetheless distinctive—antiseptic with a sickly floral overlay. “Did they drug him?” I said, trying to be still, letting my nose work to take in as much air as possible.

“Maybe. Whoever it was was human,” he said.

He was right—not another werewolf, and not a vampire. The invaders had made an effort to cover their scents, probably wearing gloves, boots, and masks and the like. There’d been more than one of them, but the individual marks were a tangle, too faint to make out.

“We have to find him,” I said.

“The police should arrive soon,” the security guard said. “They’ll want to talk to you all, if you wouldn’t mind waiting.”

We didn’t have time to wait. Someone had taken Tyler—when had it happened? Where had they gone? We had to track him down, as soon as we could—

“Give me your phone,” Ben said. Blinking, I handed it to him, watched him scroll through numbers, pick one, and call. “Hi, Nick Parker? Ben O’Farrell here, from the other day? Yeah. I wondered if I could ask you a couple of questions about CCTV footage. Yeah, the police are involved, or will be soon…” He walked a few steps away for privacy. I heard Nick’s answer buzzing through the speaker; he was too soft-spoken for me to make out words.

Cormac said softly, to keep the others from hearing, “Even if there is footage, you really think the cops will be able to find him?”

Of course he was right. It wasn’t that the cops couldn’t ordinarily find a kidnapping victim. They just might need help with this one and not even know it. The sooner we got that help …

Ben returned, clicking off the phone and handing it back to me.

“What’d he say?”

“He’s got some contacts with the police. He’ll find out what he can and keep us in the loop.” He shrugged, as if in apology for not being able to do more.

I made a call of my own. Fortunately, he answered right away, saving me those few seconds of anxiety.

“Caleb? It’s Kitty.”

“If this is another scheme of Ned’s—”

“It’s not Ned. Tyler’s missing. Someone’s taken him.”

“Taken him? Who? Where?”

“I don’t know—if I knew I wouldn’t need help.”

“Settle down. Is it the vampires?”

“In broad daylight? Besides, we didn’t smell any in the room. Really, it could be anyone.”

“If the vampires—their minions, I mean—took him out of some kind of revenge for last night, he could already be dead.”

I shook my head. “I have to think that he’s more valuable alive.”

“Sounds like a tracking job, then. We’ll get on it. Where was he taken from?”

I explained the situation. Caleb and his people knew the city, would have the best idea where Tyler might have been taken. They were the best people to look for him. It was hard, though, leaving it in their hands.

The next couple of hours went too quickly, or too slowly, depending. I changed my mind minute to minute. Either way, it was a blur. Police, uniformed and plainclothes detectives, and forensic technicians descended on the room in a swarm and herded us into yet another bare office for interviews. They asked us about the last time we saw Tyler, we told them, and they asked who we thought might have wanted to do Tyler harm. That was the problem—I had to explain how difficult doing him harm actually was, and that the perpetrator had to have known exactly how.

The list of suspects I gave the poor overwhelmed detective was very long and ranged from foreign militaries to anti-werewolf extremists to vampires.

“Vampires?” the detective said, unhappily. “How am I meant to look for vampires?”

“Before sunset, in a room with no windows?” I said, and she glared at me.

The police finished their interviews, took our phone numbers and contact information, asked us not to leave town, and let us go.

Then we hunted.

In the back of the hotel, at one of the service entrances, we caught Tyler’s scent, along with that human, vaguely medicinal smell from the room. They’d taken him out the door here. He was probably already unconscious. And then—nothing. The trail vanished.

“Probably loaded him into a car,” Cormac said.

“What do we do now?” I asked, looking back and forth down the small, empty side street, as if they had just turned a corner.

“The security cameras had to pick up something,” Ben said.

I paced, back and forth, over ten feet of sidewalk.

“Kitty,” Ben said, meaning to be soothing, probably. The tone annoyed me.

I pulled out my phone and called Caleb again. “You find anything yet?”

He sounded growly even over the phone. “Of course I haven’t, London’s a big city. Have you even got an idea of where to start?”

“No. They apparently drove him somewhere.”

“Then he could be anywhere. We’re hunting, but there are a lot of strange werewolves in town just now.”

“Okay. I know you’re trying. Thanks.”

“Kitty. If he really was snatched, they’ve got him stashed someplace we won’t be able to smell him. You understand?”

He was giving up before even starting. No—he was warning me. Being realistic. “I know. Thanks,” I said, and we hung up.

We had to be able to do something. I wasn’t going to just let him go.

I called Dr. Shumacher for an update. The police hadn’t told her anything yet, but she’d called the American embassy to report Tyler’s disappearance, and the authorities there promised to put their considerable resources into the search. We called Nick Parker again, and he did have some news. Ben and I both listened, heads together, the phone between us.

“I’m with a friend who works in CCTV evidence, which means I’m probably looking at this footage before the DI on the case, but don’t tell anyone. A camera on the street behind the hotel shows a gray SUV with tinted windows parked by the service door you indicated, four hours ago. The car stays there for ten minutes while three men offloaded a bundle from an industrial laundry hamper. The bundle could hold a large person.”

“Can you ID the car? The people? Can they track it?”

“That’s just it,” he said. “We can reasonably confirm that your friend was taken from the hotel. But the men are wearing scarves over their faces, and the car’s registration plate has been covered with tape. They could very easily have driven to the next block, pulled the tape off, and blended into traffic. The make and color of the car are common enough it’ll be difficult to spot them. We’re looking at CCTV footage from surrounding areas, but it’ll take time. I’ll let you know if we find anything more.”

He was going through a lot of trouble for us, which was kind and a little heartbreaking. “Thank you.”

With such slim clues to follow, I tried to reconstruct what had happened. They’d caught Tyler by surprise in his room. They must have said something reasonable to convince him to open the door—there hadn’t been any sign of a break-in. Once inside, though, they must have revealed themselves, and he’d struggled, but they had some way of quickly overpowering him. Tranquilizer darts, probably—I’d seen them work on werewolves before. They’d loaded him into one of those hotel laundry bins, taken him down a service elevator with no one the wiser. And it had all happened four hours ago. What were we doing four hours ago?

The riot. Luis and I had been struggling to the front of the crowd, and the attack on Esperanza had come right around then.

“Was it a setup?” I said out loud, wonderingly.

“Was what a setup?” Ben asked. “What are you thinking?”

“Crazy conspiracy theory,” I said. “The same time Tyler was being loaded into the car, the riot was breaking out in front of the hotel.”

“A distraction?” Ben said. “It would sound crazy if it didn’t actually make sense.”

“What are we dealing with here?” I continued, thinking aloud. “Whoever took Tyler also has the wherewithal to instigate riots?”

“It would have just taken the guy with the bucket of blood to tip that crowd over the edge,” Cormac said.

I called Nick again, told him about the correlation with the riot, and suggested looking for the guy with the bucket of blood. He might be a thread back to whoever had Tyler. Nick said he’d pass the information along to the police.

We walked back to the front of the hotel, but I didn’t know where to go from there. The police were working on it. We’d followed the leads we knew to follow. Caleb was searching—without a lot of chance of success, but still searching.

It wasn’t enough.

I stopped, and Ben and Cormac stopped with me, turning to look.

“Cormac,” I said. “We have a fairy wish to use.”

Ben chuckled. “You think that’s for real?”

Cormac ignored him. “You sure you want to use it on this? We might be able to find Tyler without it.”

“Alive?” I said, and Cormac didn’t answer. “Yes. I can’t think of anything better to use it on.”

“You’re both talking like this is actually going to work,” Ben said. “There’s magic and then there’s…” He paused, a sour taste puckering his mouth.

“And then there’s fairies. Yup,” I said.