The air reeked, concentrated sulfur in a thick miasma. Noises surrounded me: water boiling, steam jetting from vents. The sound of heat, power, and danger. The ground under me felt hot, but despite the heat my skin broke out in gooseflesh. The air was hazy, chilled. The ground around me was barren, stained and blasted with heat and chemicals. A wintry sunlight made everything seem faded.
Rather than kill me, Ashtoreth had taken me somewhere else—her home, her origin. Capital H hell. Killing wasn’t good enough for me, so she brought me here. She was gone now, and I didn’t know what happened next. There had to be a way out of here. I straightened, brushed my hands on my jeans, and looked around.
I was only a little surprised to see Charles Lightman standing there, hands in pockets, polished shoe scuffing the chalky ground like he really was sorry. Mostly I felt this wash of horror that things were much, much worse than they looked. At this point, that was really saying something.
Run, Wolf growled in the back of my throat. My muscles tensed, getting ready to do just that. Not that it would help. I stared a challenge at Lightman. It was the only thing I could do, waiting for answers he wasn’t giving.
“Is this hell?” I croaked. My throat ached, swollen, as if I’d gone for a week without water. My eyes stung, I was so dried out, and my skin felt stretched. I could still feel that boiling sun roasting me.
“No,” he said. He seemed quite pleased with himself, giving a wry wink. “You’re in the Norris Geyser Basin, in Yellowstone National Park. It’s not quite open for tourist season, so we have the place to ourselves. I thought it would be fun—you can see everything up close when it blows. Should be exciting. A once-in-a-lifetime experience. Ha.”
My senses finally cleared enough for me to really look around.
I was on a pale, dusty plain cupped in a shallow valley, surrounded by a pine forest. The few scattered trees on the plain were stunted and bleached, and the plain itself was awash in stinking pools of water joined by wide streams of runoff. Steam rose everywhere, and geysers spit, sloshed, and hissed around me. In some spots the crust was broken, sinkholes dropping through, lined with the orange-tinged washes. Steam rose lazily from pools, other springs bubbled with heat, and water spit noisily from holes in the ground. Yeah, it kind of looked like hell. But I was just five hundred miles from home.
Which meant I could get out of here. After I killed the guy, before Ashtoreth came back. In daylight, though, Ashtoreth wouldn’t appear. Neither would Roman. I had time, I hoped, before Roman launched the Manus Herculei.
Lightman kept talking. “Regina Luporum. I hear that’s what they’re calling you. And you, an American, I thought you all were supposed to be against kings and queens and monarchs and all that. All democratic and egalitarian. But Queen of the Wolves—you’re okay with that?”
Who was this guy? “It’s just a metaphor. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Oh, but it does. Monarchy, authoritarianism, has been the dominant method of organizing people for most of human history. Everything else is an anomaly. A deviation.”
This area was ostensibly part of a forest in the Rocky Mountains, but it didn’t feel anything like home. None of the smells were familiar. Even the ground felt unstable, boiling just under the surface. Lightman seemed unconcerned by it all. He was just as casual and pointedly charming as he had been back in Denver.
“Who are you?” I asked softly.
“Kitty, tell me—where do vampires and werewolves come from?”
This was obviously a trick question. I took the bait. “Some kind of infectious retrovirus—”
He put up a hand, shook his head. “That’s a mechanism. I’m looking for why. How about I just tell you? Those stories about how vampires and lycanthropes, all the creatures of darkness, were made by Lucifer to pervert God’s greatest creation of humanity? About how Lucifer made monsters to stand against His righteousness at the end of time? Those stories that annoy you so much when people call into your show with them? Turns out, they’re true.
“But there’s one thing I couldn’t change. One part of His creation I couldn’t break: free will. No matter how monstrous I made you, the vampires and werewolves, my soldiers and my children, I couldn’t make you be monsters. You still had a choice, to follow me or not. And Katherine Norville. Kitty. You, all on your own, have been convincing a great many of my soldiers to choose the side of angels.”
He didn’t look like much. That was probably the point. Dux Bellorum was only the general, we’d realized. Who then was the Caesar holding his leash? Ah yes. Of course.
I always told my callers, you can choose. You can decide what to do. Don’t blame your homicidal urges or basic assholeness on being a monster, because you can choose. God help me.
God, help me.
“Are you saying,” I said, gasping a little. Wolf had gone strangely quiet—neither running nor fighting would likely do us much good here. I tried again. “Are you saying, that you, you, are afraid of me?” I tilted my head, narrowed my gaze, like a dog who’d heard a far-off noise. But there was just the hissing of geysers and bubbling of hot springs. I couldn’t even tell if this man, this being, was breathing, or if he had a heartbeat.
“That’s a strong word,” he said. “But you did get my attention. That’s something to be proud of, I’ll give you that.”
I could not stop glaring at him. One way or another, I suspected I was not going to get out of this. I could talk, I could fight, I could howl, I could run—and he was Lucifer. I might as well challenge him, because I didn’t have anything to lose.
“What now?” I breathed.
“I’ll kill you,” he said. “Kill all your friends. Smooth the way so Dux Bellorum can finish his work and end the world. That line about it being better to reign in hell? Yeah, not so much. But Earth? I can make myself a worthy hell right here.” He gazed around, as if contemplating a change of drapes in a suburban living room. Softer, he said, “Stick it to the Old Man, you know?”
I ran. Then I fell. The earth itself tripped me, with sudden cracks opening underfoot. My foot fell into already weakened crust, and when I tried to push myself back up, my hands fell through, and the earth held me there. I ripped free, spun onto my back—and again the crumbling earth trapped me, locking me in place, bands of soil folding tight over my arms and legs.
Lightman—Lucifer, though I was having trouble calling him that, it seemed so outrageous—strolled over to me. He had a sword in his right hand. I hadn’t seen him carrying one; he’d probably drawn it out of thin air. He held it up, looking it over, seeming pleased. Flicked a finger over the no-doubt razor-sharp edge. It was probably silver. Wouldn’t matter, because it was big enough he could chop my head off with it just by leaning a little.
“And Kitty—what is up with that? Please tell me that name’s an accident and that you didn’t decide to call yourself that to spite me.”
I struggled to break free because I couldn’t not, but my limbs were locked down tight. But maybe, maybe …
Let it go, let it wash over me. I imagined Wolf living behind the bars of a cage in my gut, and if those bars disappeared, I could summon her, and she would rise up, change my body, change me and we would run, escape, run all the way back home if we had to—
Nothing happened.
She was there, I could sense her, a curled-up mass of predator, of monster. Usually she was right there. When we were in danger, she came to the surface, breaking free to fight with her stronger teeth and claws. I curled my fingers, willing claws to break through the skin. But nothing happened. She wasn’t waiting to break free. It was as if she slept.
“Oh no,” he said, showing teeth as he grinned. “You don’t get that power. Not while I’m here. You won’t be a wolf for me, you certainly won’t be one against me.”
Being a werewolf was a disease, a curse. I’d spent most of the last ten years working not to shape-shift, to keep it together, to control the urge to turn Wolf and run. But now, now, I needed her, I needed
Wolf, I needed to shift and fight and flee on her long animal legs.
Wolf slept.
I whined, a breath exhaling on the verge of a scream.
“Yeah,” Lucifer murmured. “You’re not so tough.”
He took the hilt in both hands, held the point over my heart, and a look of blazing hatred crossed his face as he prepared to drive down. I kept my eyes open. I could do that. No life flashing before me. Not much of anything. Just glaring at him, with animal focus.
He stabbed down, grunting with effort—and the point of the sword stopped cold an inch above my breastbone. It didn’t move, didn’t waver, no matter how hard he pressed. He tried again, slashing at my neck this time, then my face. Instinctively, I winced away. But he didn’t kill me. He couldn’t even hurt me.
Falling to his knees beside me, he began pawing me. But he couldn’t touch me. His hands skittered an inch away from my skin, my clothes. He threw the sword away; it vanished.
His expression went slack, his eyes focusing on the collar of my shirt.
“What are you wearing around your neck? Show me. Show me now.”
My right hand burst away from the dirt trapping it. I went to punch him with it, but I didn’t get very far with the rest of my body pinned down, and he smoothly leaned away from the hit.
“Show. Me,” he said, teeth bared.
“Ha,” I said, teeth also bared. “Pissed you off.”
“What are you wearing around your neck?”
I pulled at the cord and let the coin hang over my shirt. My wedding ring, which I wore on a chain rather than on my finger most of the time, came with it, but I pushed it aside, hiding it from him. What was left: the marked-up coin of Dux Bellorum, the one worn by Angelo. His betrayal, turned on its head.
He drew back, then laughed. “These were supposed to mark my followers, my acolytes. Identify them to each other, connect them to me. Nothing more. But this? I have no idea what this means.” He tried again to reach for the coin, but once again his touch skittered away from me.
I’d spent enough time with Cormac, Amelia, and Odysseus Grant, I thought I knew what they’d say: destroying, marring the coins didn’t just negate their power. It was a repudiation. A declaration not just of independence, but of opposition. And there was power in that—a deep, protective magic. Maybe entirely unintentional, but I wasn’t going to question it.
“You can’t hurt me,” I said madly.
He leered back. “No, I can’t kill you. I’m pretty sure I can hurt you.”
The ground under me cracked and collapsed. Finally, I screamed.
Chapter 16
A SINKHOLE OPENED under me, dropping me into an underground pool of steaming-hot water, one of the sources that fed the aboveground geyser systems. The water was so hot it didn’t register as heat at first—I splashed in, and felt numb. When the searing came, it was almost from the inside out, muscles flaring then flashing to a burn on my skin.
I was still a werewolf, I was still tough. The burning wouldn’t kill me. Whatever happened, I would heal. I kept telling myself that.
Snarling with the effort, clothes dripping, I splashed to my feet and looked for escape. I was in a crevice, a cleft jagging its way across the pockmarked rock. Exposed to air, my burned skin seared as if every cell were on fire. My feet, still in the pool of water, were boiling. I could smell my own flesh cooking.
I ran, but the ground under me shook and I tripped, falling again into the hot stream.
Lightman stood over me at the edge of the crevice, ready to inflict the next blow. He couldn’t touch me, but he could affect everything around me. The ground rumbled, edges of the crevice crumbling further, stones pattering down. Another earthquake—he could keep opening sinkholes under me until I baked to death in a pool of magma. And he would watch, grinning that smug Hollywood grin.
He expected me to run; he figured all he had to do was keep me from running away. I couldn’t shift, but I still had Wolf’s power. She was still inside me, and unthinking I moved with her drive, her fierceness. Scrambling over debris up the side of the crevice, I went straight toward him. Didn’t stop, didn’t plan. This was a hunt; I only focused on the target.
I could tell by the startled roundness in his eyes he hadn’t expected me to run at him. I discovered, gratefully, that while he couldn’t touch me, I could touch him. But I wasn’t interested in touching so much as grabbing, shoving, and stomping. Wrapping my hand in the first bit of convenient shirt, at the buttons, I yanked, swung him around, and put my shoulder into knocking him over the side, right into the water where I’d been. He made a shout. I didn’t look back. I didn’t have time. I barely paused, kept moving forward.
Any minute now I expected the ground to open under me. It wouldn’t even have been him doing it; it might have just been the soft dirt weakened by thermals. My feet sank a few times, but I scrambled on. Avoided anyplace with cracks or steam spitting out. I made for the trees and the ridge marking the edge of the basin.
When I finally fell, skidding into a bank of ice-crusted snow lingering in shadows, I curled up and didn’t get back up again. My skin and all my nerves throbbed. My cheek, pressed into the ice, was the only part of me not on fire, so I focused on that, the soothing chill. The rest of me, though—all my muscles locked up with the pain.
I’d heal. I’d get better. I had to be patient. In the meantime, blacking out would be nice. Instead, I listened for following footsteps, for a suave voice taunting me from beyond the next row of trees. I had to hold my breath, to keep from gasping loudly.
Quiet, all quiet.
I unfolded—carefully, slowly. I didn’t want to look at myself. My muscles seemed to pop, and my skin stretched, feeling like it was blistered and falling off. But it was still there, though tender, and probably lobster-red. My feet were blistered, swollen. My shoes were just gone. But I was still conscious. I was still in one piece. Lucifer hadn’t found me yet.
I was in the middle of Yellowstone, with no clue what to do next. I patted my jeans pocket—my phone was there. Whether I’d get any reception—No, no I would not.
Run.
The word run was sometimes a euphemism among werewolves. It didn’t just mean the physical movement of running. It also meant turn, shift, flee to the wilderness. Run with me, meant something more.
“You’re back,” I murmured. “You’re awake.”
My Wolf stirred, and I felt something like claws press against the inside of my gut. Wolf, awake, wanting to run. It’s time to go.
Whatever Lightman had done to lock her away, we were out of range now, and he couldn’t stop us. We had to get away before he found us.
This was going to hurt.
Even taking off my clothes hurt, so I worked it like a Band-Aid—ripping it off fast rather than prolonging the torture, shoving off my jeans, and dealing with the flaming agony of fabric rubbing against blistered skin. Before I was too far gone, I checked for the coin, made sure the cord was tight and solidly around my neck, pressed it firmly to my chest, and repeated over and over, don’t lose it, don’t lose it. Maybe Wolf would remember, maybe Wolf would keep the coin safe. We needed it.
Then I let go of the bars of the cage in my gut, and Wolf roared out. My neck arched back, my teeth bared, my limbs stretched. Fur prickled along my burned skin, but I shut my eyes and let it wash through me. I was strong, I was Wolf—
* * *
Run, that’s all there is. There is pain, but it will pass. The danger is too large to manage. Some hunts aren’t worth the effort, so you leave off and wait for better odds. Running means being able to try again later.
This territory is difficult and unfamiliar. It ought to smell like forest and mountain, like home, but there’s a stench masking the air, confusing her. Finally, she finds a deer trail, follows it not to hunt, but to find water. A river, close. She heads toward this. It smells safe. Stretching, she lopes faster, her stride covering ground. The pain lessens the faster she goes, as if she is fleeing pain. Wind throu
gh her fur doesn’t hurt the way air on skin did.
Along the way she smells wolves—musky and alien. She avoids those scents and trails. She’s in foreign territory, and she isn’t strong enough to meet new wolves, especially ones that clearly aren’t like her. Wild wolves, pure wolves.
The daylight is too bright and feels wrong; she’s used to running at night.
Something hard and uncomfortable thumps against her chest with every stride. She could stop, scratch it off and get rid of it, but her other self whispers urgently, don’t lose it. She must carry it in her teeth if she has to, but she must not lose it. So she leaves it around her neck, and its weight is a reminder of what she flees.
She runs a long time until her tongue hangs out and her breath pants, but she finds a place that doesn’t smell of rot and steam, where young pine trees slope down to a clean-running river. Here, she smells prey and other predators, competition. Bear and fox as well as wolf. She avoids these. Is too tired and hurt to hunt. Isn’t even hungry, much. Sleep now, hunt later. Survive, the rest will come. She snugs into a den by a fallen tree, on fresh earth, rich with dead leaves and living forest.
* * *
I HEARD voices, one male and one female, talking nearby. I couldn’t understand them because they were speaking a different language. Chinese maybe? Though I was woozy, I was sure if I just concentrated hard enough I’d be able to understand them. Their manner was low and urgent.
I looked, but wasn’t sure I was really awake. Somehow I could feel that my eyes were amber, like Wolf’s, and saw the world through wavering, hyperfocused senses. But I had human hands, human fingers with hardened, pointed nails—not quite claws but definitely not normal nails. Gray and tawny fur covered my arms. I felt my face—a human face, flat with a small nose, but dusted in fur. My ears were Wolf’s pointed ears. I rubbed my arms, ruffling the fur, and shivered. It was like I was caught halfway between forms, stuck between myself and her. We are the same.