Kitty Rocks the House (Kitty Norville 11)

I trotted down the stairs and walked around the building and the rectory next door, looking for a lit window or a door that wasn’t bolted tight, but didn’t find anything and ended up back by the front steps. I knew Columban and Rick were here, I just knew it. The markings that laid out the protective circle were still here. They may even have been touched up since Cormac’s last escapade. This place was still being defended.

Halfway up the front steps, I put my hands around my mouth and called, “Rick! Rick, I need to talk to you! Rick!” I shouted up at those bell towers; their shadowed interiors stared down at me like eyes.

If he was here, he’d heard me. If he didn’t come out, he was ignoring me, just like he’d ignored my phone calls, and Angelo’s, and everything else. And I couldn’t change that.

Ben was at the foot of the steps, not watching me, but the sidewalks around the church. Keeping a look out for me. I worried that I took him for granted. I got in trouble and dragged him with me over and over. It wasn’t a good pattern.

Nothing happened.

I descended, my steps landing heavy. What else could I do but call again, leave yet another message? But I could do it from someplace warm and well lit, after a shower and change of clothes. But it felt like giving up.

When I reached the bottom, Ben put his arm around my shoulders, and together we walked back around the building to the car.

“Maybe he just doesn’t want to talk,” Ben said.

I scowled. “Maybe he’s really not here.”

“But if he’s not here, and he’s not at Obsidian, and the other vampires haven’t seen him…”

“Maybe he’s not here, in Denver.”

Rick had spent most of his life being nomadic. If he decided to leave, I couldn’t assume that he’d tell me first. I’d been alive for a bare fraction of his years—would only live for a fraction of them. Why should he care about what I thought? I wanted to believe our friendship had meant more than that. Him just leaving—that would mean he didn’t consider me a friend at all.

That was still better than thinking he’d been killed, which was an alternative I hadn’t voiced. Rick had lived for five hundred years, he couldn’t just die.

Ben slowed, his arm tugging me to a stop beside him. He nodded toward a back corner of the chapel, where a figure moved, stepping out of shadows from behind a clump of shrubbery. I didn’t recognize him at first—he was wearing a T-shirt and trousers, and his dark hair was mussed, flopped around his ears instead of combed back from his face. Without his trench coat, his shape was different.

“Rick?” I said, walking toward him.

He waited for me, lingering by the doorway he’d come out of, as if wanting to stay near shelter. “Kitty.”

“Are you okay?”

“Of course. But are you? You look like you’ve had a rough night of it.”

With the overcoat covering them, I’d forgotten my clothes were ripped enough to fall off in a slight breeze. I hugged the coat tighter around me. When I didn’t say anything, Rick looked at Ben.

“She lost it,” he said. The vampire raised an eyebrow.

“I lost my temper and shifted in the middle of Highlands Ranch.”

“She ate somebody’s cat,” Ben added. I was never going to live that

down, was I?

Rick seemed taken aback. “Really? That isn’t like you. What’s wrong?”

Everything, I almost said. “I’m a little stressed out. And this isn’t supposed to be about me, this is about you.”

“I’m fine, Kitty. What are you even doing here?”

“Angelo called me. He’s worried.”

“There’s nothing to be worried about,” Rick said curtly. “That is, as long as your bounty hunter keeps his distance.”

I didn’t want to talk about Cormac right now. The protective spell was obviously doing its job; Cormac wasn’t a threat. “The Buenos Aires vampires are going to be here in a couple of days, they’re bugging Angelo about procedure, and we haven’t talked at all about what to say to them.”

“I’m sure you can handle it,” he said. “There’s nothing I can say to them that you can’t say perfectly well on your own.”