Kitty Takes a Holiday (Kitty Norville 3)

I couldn’t sleep. Part of me was squirming with glee at the mighty blow I had struck against my competition. Er, mighty blow, or petty practical joke? I’d been like a kid throwing rocks at the old haunted house. I hadn’t even broken Ariel’s stride. I’d do better next time.

The truth was, I was reduced to crank calls, followed by bouts of insomnia.

Run. Let me go running.

Restlessness translated to need. Wolf was awake and wouldn’t settle down. Let’s go, let’s go—

No.

This was what happened: I couldn’t sleep, and the night forest beckoned. Running on four legs for a couple of hours would certainly wear me out to the point where I’d sleep like a rock. And wake up naked in the woods, kicking myself for letting it happen. I called the shots, not that other side of me.

I slept in sweatpants and a tank top. The air was dry with the heat and smell of ashes from the stove. I wasn’t cold, but I huddled inside my blankets, pulling them firmly over my shoulders. I pulled a pillow over my head. I had to get to sleep.

I might even have managed it for a minute or two. I might have dreamed, but I couldn’t remember about what. I did remember moving through cotton, trying to claw my way out of a maze of fibers, because something was wrong, a smell in the air, a noise that shouldn’t have been there. When I should have only heard wind in the trees and an occasional snap of dry wood in the stove, I heard something else… rustling leaves, footsteps.

I dreamed of a wolf’s footsteps as she trots through dead leaves on the forest floor. She is hunting, and she is very good. She is almost on top of the rabbit before it bolts. It only runs a stride before she pounces on it, bites it, and it screams in death—

The rabbit’s scream was a horrible, high-pitched, gut-wrenching, teakettle whistlelike screech that should never come out of such an adorable fuzzy creature.

I jerked upright, my heart thudding fast, every nerve searing.

The noise had lasted only a second, then silence. It had come from right outside my door. I gasped for breath and listened: wind in the trees, a hiss of embers from the stove.

I pushed back the covers and stood from the bed.

Moving softly, barefoot on the wood floor, I went to the front room. My heartbeat wouldn’t slow. We may have to run, we may have to fight. I curled my fingers, feeling the ghosts of claws. If I had to, I could shift to Wolf. I could fight.

I watched the window for movement outside, for shadows. I only saw the trees across the clearing, dark shapes edged with silver moonlight. I took a slow breath, hoping to smell danger, but the scent from the stove overpowered everything.

I touched the handle of the front door. I ought to wait until morning. I should wait until sunlight and safety. But something had screamed on my front porch. Maybe I’d dreamed it.

I opened the door.

There it was, lying stretched out in front of me. The scent of blood and bile hit me. The thing smelled like it had been gutted. The rabbit was stretched out, head thrown back, the fur of its throat and belly dark, matted, and ripped. The way it smelled, it ought to have been sitting in a pool of blood. It didn’t even smell like rabbit— just guts and death.

My nose itched, nostrils quivering. I—the Wolf— could smell blood, the thick stuff from an animal that had died of deep wounds. I knew what that smelled like because I’d inflicted that kind of damage on rabbits. The blood was here, just not with the rabbit.

I opened the door a little wider and looked over.

Someone had painted a cross in blood on the outside of my front door.

chapter 3

I didn’t go back to bed. Instead, I put a couple of new logs in the stove, poked at the fire until it blazed hot, wrapped myself in a blanket, and curled up on the sofa. I didn’t know what bothered me more: that someone had painted a cross in blood on my door, or that I had no clue who had done it. I hadn’t seen anything, heard anything after the rabbit’s death cry, or smelled so much as a whiff of a breath mint. What was more, I didn’t remember if I had only dreamed the rabbit’s scream, or if I had really heard it. If it had been real, and crossed into my dream, or if my subconscious had made it up. Either way, it was like someone killed the rabbit, smeared blood on the door, and then vanished.

At first light, I called the police.

Two hours later, I sat cross-legged on the porch—on the far side, as far away from the rabbit as I could get—and watched the county sheriff and one of his deputies examine the door, the porch, the dead rabbit, and the clearing. Sheriff Avery Marks was a tired-looking middle-aged man, with thinning brown hair and a fresh uniform with a big parka over it. His examination consisted of standing on the porch, looking at the door for about five minutes, then crouching by the rabbit and looking at it for about five minutes, then standing on the ground, hands on hips, looking at the whole ensemble for about ten minutes. His deputy, a bearded guy in his thirties, wandered all around the cabin and the clearing in front of it, staring at the ground, snapping pictures, and writing in a notepad.

“You didn’t hear anything?” Marks asked for the third time.

“I thought I heard the rabbit scream,” I said. “But I was still asleep. Or half asleep. I don’t really remember.”

“You’re saying you don’t remember if you heard anything?” He sounded frustrated at my answers, and I couldn’t blame him.

“I thought I heard something.”

“About what time was that?”