“Kitty—” Ben said warningly. Surely the vampire was beyond help.
“We can try to help you,” I revised. “I know people who can help.” I had to call Rick; there had to be something we could do. “Please, what’s your name?”
It—he, I thought, based on the square line of his jaw—closed his mouth. The flesh moved as he ran his tongue along his teeth. Then he inhaled, inflating his lungs—a preparation for speaking. The skin around the rib cage creaked and cracked. How long had it been since he had drawn breath?
“Werewolves,” he said in a rasping whisper. “Filthy animals.”
So that was how it was going to be. The creature’s vampiric elegance may have vanished. The arrogance was still healthy.
“Excuse me, but you’re the one living in a hole in the ground,” I said.
He hissed again, flailing under the light, but it seemed to be held at bay for the moment.
“Why are you here?” I asked, crouching, moving as close as I dared. “Why not leave? Can you at least tell me your name?”
He leaned toward my voice, blinking, mouth working. I wondered if he saw us as food. As if he was trying to figure out how to get at us. If I could just get him to talk …
I tried again. “I want to find out about Wyatt Earp—”
The ravaged vampire screeched the howl of a cat and held his hands over his ears as if t
he sound of the words pained him. Startled, I fell back—even Ben took a step back. Cormac didn’t move.
Drawing a rattling breath, the vampire said, “Did he send you?”
Victory. Earp had been here. He’d killed them. My secret history of the world gained another paragraph. Now if only I could get this guy into a studio to record an interview.
“No,” I said. “Wyatt Earp died eighty years ago.”
“Who killed him?” the vampire breathed.
“No one. He died at home of old age.” The vampire had lost all sense of time—did he realize how long he’d been here, stuck? Maybe thinking Earp would return for a final showdown? Was that what he was waiting for? “It all happened a long time ago,” I said.
The vampire shook his head, spreading his mouth wide to show his fangs, tipping back his head to bellow at the sky. Then he jumped at me.
Arms reaching, he launched himself and grasped clawed hands around my neck. I fell back, and he knelt on me, pinning me. He surged toward me with an open mouth, teeth pressing against the skin of my face.
I yelled and kicked. The vampire fell—he hardly weighed anything, but he was fast, and sprang back before I could sit up. This time I grabbed him, managing to hold him away from me, but it was like trying to hang onto an angry badger. An angry, skeletal badger. He clawed, kicked, snarled, and thrashed.
Ben shouted, seemingly right in my ear. The vampire seized, back arcing, ribs straining, face frozen in an agonized grimace. And he disintegrated, ash falling around me like soft snow. So little had been holding him together, he was just gone. A hard, metallic object fell onto my chest.
Ben crouched above me, still stabbing the old stake through the space that used to be the vampire’s heart. The point of it was centimeters from my own chest. We looked at each other and tried to catch our breath.
“You okay?” he said finally.
A fine powder of former vampire covered me. I coughed—it smelled like dirt and death. The thought of sucking that ash into my lungs made me cough harder. I wanted to howl. Ben threw away the stake and gripped my shoulders. “Kitty—”
“Yeah. I’m okay.” I leaned against him and tried not to think about it. My breathing steadied, and my Wolf settled. “That was crazy.”
“I think we’re a couple of steps past crazy on this one.” He was right, as usual. I tried brushing myself off. The stuff just smeared. I grimaced. My hand knocked off an object—the piece of metal that had dropped onto me. Holding it up, I studied it: round, blackened with age and strung on a length of braided leather, it held the worn lines of a design etched into it. It looked like a coin, heavily tarnished, the size of a nickel. The vampire must have been wearing it.
In the meantime, the light that had flared over the twenty feet around us for the last few minutes faded.
“What did you do?” Ben asked.
Cormac showed us a clear quartz crystal the size of his thumb. Its luminescence was fading. Another trick of Cormac the wizard. I’d never get used to it.
“You get what you needed here?” Cormac said.