Kitty's Big Trouble (Kitty Norville 9)

Pushing the door open, she held the lantern up and looked inside. This room was mostly a closet, too small for us all to crowd in after her. Looking over her shoulder, I saw an old-fashioned iron safe, two feet on each side, with a combination lock and a big steel handle, sitting against the far wall. It seemed awfully mundane after all the talk of magic.

Anastasia was looking over her other shoulder, tapping her hand against her thigh.

Grace put the lantern on the safe and worked the combination. The air was still—nobody even breathed for several heartbeats.

I spun to face a noise—I’d heard something pattering in the darkness, I’d have sworn it. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” Grace said, not looking away from the safe.

“Nothing? Nothing what?”

“Stray spirits. Nothing.”

The safe’s door creaked open.

“Crap,” Grace said, peering into the safe over her glasses.

“What?” Anastasia said. “What is it?”

“It’s not here.”

“What do you mean it’s not here?”

“I mean it’s supposed to be here, and it’s not here.” Grace turned on Anastasia and glared.

“Then where is it?” The vampire’s voice was quiet, cold, and her arms hung loose at her sides, her hands open and ready.

“I don’t know,” Grace said, shrugging wide.

Anastasia closed her eyes and looked up, as if beseeching a higher power. “Then it’s too late,” she whispered.

“Now wait a minute,” I said. “It doesn’t look like the safe was broken into. Can we figure out what happened? Track it somehow? Did anyone else know this was here and know the combination?”

“I didn’t think so,” Grace said. “But I don’t know that for sure. If someone knew what to look for they might have been able to find it.”

“But you know what this is—you ought to be able to track it, right?”

She winced. “I don’t know.”

“Cormac?” I asked.

“I have some tracking spells, but I’m not the one who knows what to look for,” he said, looking down the hallway. He and Ben were keeping watch in both directions.

Ben had been pacing, a few steps in each direction. Then he stopped, his head cocked to listen, his nose flaring to take in scent. He smelled wolfish. I focused on what had caught his attention. A sound echoed ahead, at the end of the corridor and around the next corner. Trying to make the noise out, I crept forward. The sound was uneven, high pitched, alive and upset—

It was a crying baby, sounding neglected at the very least, but more likely it was hurt.

I ran.

“Kitty, wait!” Anastasia and Grace both called. They took off after me.

I charged around the corner. A faint light came through an open doorway. Another small room, lit by an old-fashioned oil lamp sitting on a box in the corner. This might have been a storage closet for yet another shop, this one cluttered with more boxes and shelves, buckets and brooms. I paused at the doorway, letting my nose take in a picture of what lay before me. A spicy, musty scent filled the space; I’d never smelled anything like it. It didn’t smell at all like a baby.

There, on the floor in the corner, was a bamboo cage as tall as my hip. Inside was a foxlike creature with thick ruddy fur, a narrow snout, and a mouth open to reveal needle-sharp teeth. I would have called it a fox, except it had a thick bouquet of tails flickering off its backside. Disconcertingly, it was making the crying noise, as if it had swallowed a baby whole and alive.

I approached cautiously, trying to reconcile the contradictions of sight, sound, and scent before me. The creature was trapped, anxious, circling in the cage, pressing against the bars. The cage was sturdy; the bars didn’t budge. The creature looked as if it barked, a lost puppy drawing attention to itself. But the sounds that emerged were those all-too-human cries. The tails, thick and covered with fur, slapped against the bamboo bars.

When the creature saw me, it stopped moving to stare up at me with amber eyes, large and shining. Wrinkling its nose, it let out a couple of warning yips.