Kitty Raises Hell
Page 39

I found a slip of paper palmed in my hand.
I curled the hand into a fist and pretended not to notice. Sitting there, my hands on the table in fists, Rick must have thought I was very angry.
“Kitty, I’m sorry,” he said again, and would keep saying, as if that made everything better. “I’ll do everything I can to help, you know I will.”
“Everything except letting in the one person who claims to know how to stop it.”
“If I let him in, if he gained a foothold in Denver, we’d never get him out again. You know that.”
I did. Part of me, a big part, agreed with Rick. Roman was a stranger, therefore untrustworthy. Who knows what havoc he could wreak here in the long term?
“But you wouldn’t even listen to him,” I said.
Rick sat, not really looking at me, his jaw taut, body braced. This hadn’t been easy for him. Him becoming Master vampire of the city hadn’t been any easier than me becoming its alpha werewolf. We were floundering. Which meant he couldn’t, under any circumstances, give an inch to someone like Roman. Rationally, I understood, but I wasn’t being particularly rational about this.
“Kitty—” he said, starting another round of apologies. I held up my hand to stop him.
“I understand, Rick. Really I do. I need to go check on my people. We both need to work on stopping this. Without outside help. So, I’m going to go.”
He bowed his head, acquiescing.
I left the club, not knowing if we were still friends. Not knowing if we’d ever be able to talk to each other after what he’d done, and what I was about to do.
I walked to my car, about three blocks away, before daring to look at the scrap of paper in my hand. It had a number and street marked on it, about a mile away, toward Capitol Hill. Looking around, I took a deep breath of air, trying to catch the cold scent of vampire. To see if Rick had sent anyone to follow me. I didn’t sense anything. I drove to the address Roman had given me.
It was on the corner of a block of run-down houses. Cars crammed the curb on both sides, making navigating the two-way street difficult. This late, though, no one else was out and about. I had to park a block away, slipping into a spot on the curb in front of a driveway. It was late, and I didn’t plan to be here long. I hoped no one would mind.
Roman found me before I could backtrack to the location. The address was just a landmark, not a destination.
“I wasn’t sure you’d meet me,” he said, approaching me on the sidewalk.
“It’s like you said, I don’t have to many options.”
“What will Rick do when he finds out you’ve gone behind his back?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I took a deep breath. “I don’t really care. He’s not in charge here—we’re supposed to be partners.”
“You assumed he’d say yes. That he’d do what was necessary to help you.”
I looked away. I didn’t want to go so far as to say I’d assumed, but I’d definitely hoped. Whatever my bravado, Rick wouldn’t be happy about me talking to Roman like this.
Roman gestured for me to join him, and I fell into step beside him. We walked along, at midnight, in a part of town that really wasn’t meant for walking late at night. But we were a couple of monsters, confident that anything that might try to bother us simply couldn’t.
“The demon killed one of your wolves,” he said. “The police are involved. What are they saying about it?”
“Spontaneous human combustion,” I said, smirking.
“I’m constantly amazed by the explanations people will come up with to avoid the obvious, when they can’t conceive of the obvious.”
“Demon?” I said. Even me, with my experience, questioned it. I kept trying to draw a line around what I believed, what supernatural, legendary tales I was willing to buy. I kept having to shift that line outward. “Like, heaven-and-hell, fire-and-brimstone demon?”
“That word encompasses a wide variety of phenomena.”
“So it could be anything,” I grumbled. I crossed my arms tightly, frustrated. Roman had a brisk, no-nonsense stride, like he had someplace to be and wasn’t about to dawdle. I had the feeling he took leisurely strolls through gardens the same way. I could keep up with him without too much trouble, letting my strides go long and wolflike. I wanted to pace. Like going back and forth inside a cage, staring out.
“This one’s very specific,” he said. “I guarantee, even if you knew what it was, you don’t have the ability to defeat it. I do.”
“How very convenient for us both,” I said flatly. He acknowledged the sarcasm with a smirk.
“Now that I’m dealing with you alone instead of Rick, I’ll need other arrangements.”
“Other payment,” I said. “Since I can’t give you vampiric permission to stay here. What do you want from me?”
He only glanced at me, not turning the focus of his attention from the path in front of him. A man with a mission. My senses were taking in everything, the hum of tires on the street the next block over, music coming from an upstairs window, the claws of a dog tapping on the sidewalk as it trotted away from us. The scents of garbage, a car leaking oil, grass and vegetation drying up in the autumn weather. The touch of a very faint wind changing direction. I was ready for anything, from any direction.
Roman only needed to know what was right in front of him. He was unconcerned.
He said, “Your loyalty. That’s all.”
His words were chilling. This was such a little thing, after all. So easy to say yes, since it didn’t cost anything right now, but it was so open-ended. He could ask for anything later on. To vampires of certain ages, of certain sensibilities, who carried ancient values into the modern era, certain words—hospitality, honor, and loyalty—had weight and depth that they’d lost for someone like me, who had grown up in a rootless, disposable modern culture. The old meaning of hospitality wasn’t about napkin rings. It held that you were responsible for the total well-being of anyone you sheltered in your walls, that you were obligated to help someone who came to you and asked. Honor touched on the core of one’s very identity, which when lost was nearly impossible to recover. And loyalty. Fealty. The word called to mind knights on bended knee before their kings. For someone of that mind-set, to break such a vow was to break the world.