Kitty Saves the World (Kitty Norville 14)

Let me go, let me kill … Wolf surged with rage, pressing against my control. Baring my teeth, I stepped forward—and Angelo flinched. Small victory.

“But, Kitty, they were already gone,” he said. “We couldn’t find them. I don’t know where they are.”

I blinked, confused, because if Angelo and the vampires hadn’t done something to the pack, I didn’t have a clue what had happened. I had to scramble to think, with Wolf rumbling under my rib cage.

“It’s not too late, Angelo,” I said softly. “Take off the coin, smash it. It’s not too late to come back.”

His minions looked at me, looked at him. I couldn’t tell what they were thinking, and I couldn’t meet any of their gazes, to try to silently persuade them to my way of thinking.

Angelo stepped forward; Ben threatened with the crossbow, and the vampire stopped. But he reached, begging.

“Kitty. Katherine. Please listen to me, you don’t understand. I had to do what I did. You told me to protect Denver, and that’s what I’ve done. They’re going to destroy Denver if we don’t do what they say. And they can do it. They can do it.”

His job as Master was to protect Denver, and he saw siding with Roman as the best way to do that. And I’d been trying to protect Denver from him.

“You should have come to me. We could have stood against him together. Rick would have stood against him!”

Angelo spat. “Rick isn’t here, is he? This is why he never should have left! I told you I wasn’t strong enough!”

I couldn’t argue with that.

Abruptly, the vampire looked skyward. “And now … it’s too late.” Something had startled him.

I smelled brimstone.

“Ben!” I hissed, grabbing his shirt, prepared to drag him away.

First, though, he fired the crossbow, and it would have hit Angelo if the demon hadn’t snatched it out of the air first.

At first I thought it was a stray burst of wind knocking it off course, maybe a sign of weather coming in from the mountains. But the wind was followed by a gloved hand reaching out, a body shifting from blurred movement to visibility. It was as if she stepped through a door made of wind that slapped at the leather straps of her armor as she came to stand between us and the vampires.

“Do you happen to have your gun with you?” I asked Ben.

He was busy cocking the crossbow again. “Yeah. You think it’ll do any good?”

“No, but it might make us feel better.”

“Cormac would be very proud of you for saying that,” he said.

The demon had a silver knife drawn—I didn’t want that thing anywhere near us. But she didn’t come after us; she had all her attention focused on Angelo.

“The wolf is still alive,” Ashtoreth said to the Master vampire. “She is a traitor to her kind—as are you.”

Angelo’s fangs showed, and his eyes were wide with desperation. “No. No, she isn’t. Watch, I will still kill her, I will—”

He rushed past Ashtoreth and flew at me, a shadow with fangs and killing hands. Ben fired again; Angelo swerved midstride. The bolt pierced his arm, but he hardly noticed. His hands closed around my neck, squeezed hard, knocked me over. He was too fast to dodge.

My head banged on the concrete. I choked, then I scratched, clawing at him with fingers that were growing sharp and weaponish.

More vampires were on Ben before he could fire again, biting and punching. He couldn’t reach his other weapons. He writhed, flinched, hit, scrambled—managed to stay out of their reach by moving, always moving.

I smelled blood, mine and his. I had a gash on my arm where Angelo’s teeth had dug in and I’d pulled away. Another vampire appeared behind me, one of the women from the nightclub. She grabbed my arms, wrenched them back. I hollered and kicked, but she held tight.

“No! I’ll kill her myself, I have to kill her myself!” Angelo was so furious the woman just let me go.

I lunged forward toward Angelo, and managed to knock him off balance, but he came right back, grabbing my neck, throwing me down.

Something in my arm cracked. Bone—I’d stuck my hand out to catch myself. There was pain; I tucked my arm close to my body and tried to run. I needed a bolt, a spear, a tree branch, anything.