Kitty Takes a Holiday (Kitty Norville 3)

“None.”

I turned my face into the pillow and giggled. “If it weren’t happening to me, this would be downright hilarious.”

“I did find this.” He held out his hand.

I looked at it first, then gingerly opened my hand to accept it. It was a cross made of barbed wire, a single strand twisted back on itself, about the length of my finger. The steel was smooth, the barbs sharp. Not worn or rusted, which meant this hadn’t been sitting outside for very long.

“You think this is from my sacrificial fan club?”

“Could be. If so, the question is Did they leave it on purpose, or did they just drop it? If it’s on purpose, then it means something. It’s supposed to do something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

I could almost feel malevolence seeping out of the thing. Or maybe the barbs just looked scary. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

“I recommend finding somebody with a forge and have them melt the thing into slag. Just in case.”

He thought it was cursed, and he brought the thing into my house? I groaned with frustration. I wanted to throw it, but I set it on the floor instead.

“Why a cross?”

“There’s a dozen magic systems that borrow from Christianity. This part of the country, it might be an evangelical sect, or maybe some kind of curandero.”

“Curandero. Mexican folk healer, right?”

“They do all kinds of stuff. Sometimes, they go bad.”

“You know a lot about this sort of thing.”

“It helps, knowing as much as I can. The people who hire me—they’re believers. They have to believe in werewolves and magic to call me in the first place. The symbols may be different, the rituals are different, but they all have one thing in common: they believe in the unbelievable. You know what I’m talking about. You’re one of them. One of the believers.”

“I only believe because of what I am. I don’t know anything about any of it.”

“Hell, I don’t know anything. This is just scratching the surface. There’s a whole world of freaky shit out there.”

He was being uncharacteristically chatty. I didn’t know if it was stress or sleeplessness. Maybe something about sitting in a tiny cabin in front of a wood-burning stove on a cold morning made people personable.

“How did you find out about the freaky shit? I found out the morning after I was attacked—the whole pack stood there telling me, ‘Welcome to the family, have fun.’ But who told you?”

He smiled, but the expression was thin and cold. “I don’t remember anyone telling me werewolves are real. I’ve always known. My family—we’ve been hunting lycanthropes for over a hundred years. My dad taught me.”

“How old were you when he died?”

He looked sharply at me. “Who told you he died?”

“Ben.”

“Bastard,” Cormac muttered.

“That was all he said,” I said quickly. “I asked how you two met and if you’d always been so humorless, and he said you had a right to be humorless. I asked why and he told me.”

He was staring at me, and I didn’t like it. Among wolves, a stare was a challenge. The thought of a challenge from Cormac made the wolf inside me cringe in terror. I couldn’t fight Cormac. I looked away, hugging the blanket tightly around me.

“You still talk too much, you know that?” Cormac said.

“I know.”