Kitty's House of Horrors (Kitty Norville 7)

We were all awake. Some of the others—Lee, Ariel—looked like they’d been trying to sleep, too, curled up in armchairs, sprawled on a sofa. But no one was asleep. Everyone looked up at the sound of voices. Grant and Anastasia had been by the table, watching the psychics. Now they watched me.

Tina was pacing in front of the fireplace. “They won’t have to do anything to get us. We’ll all go stir-crazy at this rate. Then we’ll all go screaming into the woods—”

“They’re waiting for us to panic,” I said. “All we have to do is not panic.”

She rolled her eyes, evidently not too confident of our chances of doing that.

Thinking like Cormac again: he wouldn’t sit around waiting. I said, “We’re not going to find out anything about these guys until we can draw them out. Get a look at them, see what their resources are.”

Grant said thoughtfully, “Actually go outside and take a look around.”

“Are you crazy?” Tina said. “They’re out there with arrows, guns probably—”

“So we’ll have to be careful. Stay out of sight,” Grant said. “Get the lay of the land, find out what’s really out there, then formulate a strategy. Reconnaissance.”

“We’re in the army now,” Lee said, shaking his head.

“Yo Joe,” I muttered. “What do you say? Want to go hunt some bad guys?”

“I’ll go,” Ariel said.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “It’s my stupid idea. I’ll volunteer.”

Anastasia said, “I’ll go. Some of us are better equipped for this sort of situation.”

“But I want to help,” Ariel said. She sounded so earnest. She wasn’t a supernatural creature; she didn’t have otherworldly powers. She was just a person with a few folk spells. And she wanted to help. I wanted to hug her.

“We’ll need someone to keep watch while the three of us search,” Grant said. “We can keep an eye on each other that way.”

He made it sound sinister.

So Grant, Anastasia, and I stepped out to the front porch, but I was sure they were watching each other as much as they looked out to the dark, searching for an attack. Ariel, joined by Jeffrey, waited by the door, and their job was to look to the forest for anything suspicious. Grant held a flashlight; Anastasia and I didn’t. A faint glow from candles leaked to the outside, but otherwise, nothing intruded on my night vision. I could see individual trees and the stripe of sand along the lake shore. Above, the Milky Way was a visible band, a cloud of stars. I had my ears and nose tuned to the air, listening for footsteps, voices.

What I needed were a bunch of the guys from a police procedural TV show. Then I needed the world to act like the world in a police procedural TV show so that they could actually figure out what was going on by the scraps of clues lying around. They had to be lying around, right? A little piece of fabric that would light up under a UV light with a complete description of what was happening?

Didn’t think so.

Anastasia ran her fingers along the wood post where the railing had broken off, studying the sabotage that had killed Dorian.

“Are you okay?” I said softly.

“Fine.” She turned her attention to the clearing in front of the porch and walked away.

We went along the porch, searching for anomalies. Then, reluctantly, I moved off the porch, to the steps. Every third second I glanced to the trees, sure that something was watching us. Maybe it was the paranoia talking.

I stopped on the last step.

A stripe of gravel in front of the steps was different. I hadn’t noticed it before because I hadn’t been looking. The brain glosses over a thousand anomalies a day—someone had been fixing the wiring or the pipes, or putting in a sprinkler system, or making a repair. There were a hundred reasons why there’d be a stretch of off-color ground near a house like this. But now, when I looked on everything with suspicion—what was the reason? A mound of dirt, raised fractionally, as if something was buried.

Grant saw me staring and said, “I’ll get a shovel.”

Ariel shone the flashlight on the spot while we dug. We didn’t have to dig deep, only a few inches. There, just under the surface, we found a steel rod sprouting a dozen spikes, maybe a couple inches each. Again, I could come up with a dozen reasons why something like this might be here: some arcane piece of construction left over from a remodeling job and accidentally buried, some unknown bit of landscaping. But digging out to either side, we found the rod was attached to a motor, and the motor protruded above ground, just a little, in a spot sheltered by the porch steps. There, a tiny antenna suggested some kind of radio transmitter or receiver.

Grant demonstrated: when the signal arrived, the motor would turn the rod, and the spikes would spring to vertical, emerging from the ground like some parking lot tire-killing defense barrier.

“Oh, my God,” Ariel said, wincing.

The spikes were a razor-sharp steel and silver plate. If Lee, Jerome, or I had been standing here or passing over this spot when the signal came, the spikes would have launched, torn through our shoes, and cut our feet. Silver poisoning would do the rest. It would be slow and agonizing, as silver-poisoned blood climbed from the feet to the heart.