Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand (Kitty Norville 5)

Keep cool, I told myself. Act indifferent. “Why do you think he’s a wolf?”

He leaned close, so his breath stirred my hair. “I can smell him on you. It’ll take more than a night to get his scent off you.” He was so close to me he tipped his head to kiss my brow. A warm dry pressure of lips, that was all. Something one friend might do to another to give comfort. Then he shifted, tilting forward to move the kiss to my lips. I could smell him, heat, spice, and fire. Hands touched me, Balthasar’s, on my chin, my arm. And other hands—Nick’s, maybe, on my leg, moving up my thigh. Yet another on my ankle. They all pressed close, a dozen men—boys, some of them. Creatures. With beseeching looks in their eyes, like they needed me to stay, like they’d never seen anything like me and I was treasure to them. It made me flush and feel giddy. But Wolf was cornered.

I was drowning. I couldn’t breathe. I want my mate, Wolf whispered.

Snarling, teeth bared, I stood, shoving away hands, extricating myself from the mob, and backed to the middle of the floor. My shoulders hunched, head low, glaring a challenge—a cornered wolf. Attention from willing males was fine, but feeling helpless wasn’t. Not anymore. We’d had enough of that and weren’t going to go back. If one of them took another step toward me, Wolf would take matters into her own hands. Claws.

Taking a deep breath, I made myself stay calm. There were doorknobs between me and the outside, which meant I had to stay human to get out of this.

“I don’t know what your game is, I don’t know what’s up with you and werewolves and this crazy fucked-up town. But I’m going to go find my mate now.”

“Kitty, wait,” Balthasar said. His voice remained buttery: the seductive tone never left him. “We can help. If there’s a lost werewolf in this town, I can find him—”

An alarm rang. A real one. The deep, electric drone of a fire alarm echoed from the hallway outside. It sounded closer than I would have expected; the suite of rooms seemed so large, and we had seemed so far away from the rest of the hotel.

Balthasar’s packlings glanced at each other in confusion.

I ran to the front door. Surely this wasn’t for real. It was a drill, or a false alarm. Then again, I thought: if a major Vegas hotel was going to go up in flames, of course it would be the one where I was at the moment.

I touched the main door. It wasn’t hot. By this time, Balthasar was on the phone—there was a phone tucked away in the corner of the first room. As I opened the door to leave, he called out—

“Wait, Kitty, they’re telling me it’s a false alarm—”

That might have been the case, but I was still going to use the opportunity to get the heck out of there.

The hall was empty. Maybe everyone but me thought it was a false alarm. Or maybe Balthasar and friends had the whole floor to themselves. Distinct possibility, which made me walk faster. The elevator didn’t seem to be working, probably because of the fire alarm, so I took the stairs. If walking down eight floors didn’t sober me up, nothing would.

The fire alarm echoing through the concrete stairwell gave me a roaring headache.

Ten minutes without heat and smoke convinced me that this was, in fact, a false alarm. Between about the fourth and fifth floors, I rounded the corner, intending to plop down on the step and catch my breath. Maybe try to analyze what had happened over the last half hour. But movement caught my eye, someone darting across the landing below me. The door giving access to the floor opened, and the figure looked back at me, urgency tightening his features. He was tall, tan-skinned, and wore a suit.

It was Evan. And I thought I saw a gun in his other hand.

It all passed as a blur before he was in the hallway, and the door shut behind him. But my nerves spiked, and I ran to the door, opened it, looked—he wasn’t there. Or he was very good at hiding. First Sylvia, now Evan. What was going on here?

Belatedly, I slipped back into the stairwell and pressed myself to the wall, in case bullets did start flying. I was almost gasping for breath; my heart was racing and my head swimming from the alarm and the alcohol. I couldn’t hear anything. I could smell the trace of aftershave and a wool suit that might have been Evan’s. Might have been anyone’s. My imagination conjured the scent of gun oil. I couldn’t be sure of anything.

Carefully, I continued the rest of the way to the lobby. Taking every step carefully, I listened for footsteps, for the sound of a gun being cocked, and I breathed slowly, waiting to catch a scent. I made very slow progress.

By the time I reached the lobby, the alarm had stopped, but my nerves hadn’t stilled. The place was packed with people coming and going, milling in the resulting confusion. A guy in a firefighter coat and helmet walked past, obviously not in a hurry. No real emergency, but people were still confused. Like nothing so much as a flock of nervous sheep. Then a voice called, “Kitty!”

Brenda stood in the lobby ahead of me, gesturing me over. I never, ever thought this would happen, but I was happy to see her. When I reached her, she pulled me over to the wall. She kept looking around us like she expected demons to spring from the walls.

“What’s going on?” I said. “Have you found Ben? I thought I saw Evan upstairs—”

“Yeah, he’s the one who pulled the fire alarm.”

“Wow. I think I should thank him,” I said.

“No doubt,” she said with a huff. “Did you know that animal act is actually a bunch of lycanthropes?”

I said, totally sardonic, “Yeah. I might have figured that one out.”

“And you got yourself stuck up there in the middle of them?” she said, disbelieving. “What were you thinking? Those guys are bad news.”

“So I’ve heard, but no one will tell me why. What have you found out?”

“Everyone keeps out of their way. Even our crowd. And that’s saying something. What were you doing there?” She had a hand on her hip and looked accusing.