Page 6 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
That was when I noticed the little black lump at the end of the skid marks he’d left. I glanced back at the rapidly disappearing car and committed his license plate to memory, then gave my bike a little gas to get up to the scene of the fucking crime.
A kitten.
He’d hit a kitten going too damn fast.
What was a literal kitten doing this far out into the hills, alone? We were a mile or more away from any house it could have come from, and I wasn’t aware of any feral colonies in the area.
I turned my bike off and walked over to where the poor thing lay, splayed out. Dropping to one knee next to it, I yanked off one glove and shoved it in my pocket, reaching out to touch the thing.
It was still breathing.
One bright blue eye opened to take me in, and it made a little whining sound in its throat that my brain couldn’t even translate into words. All I got from it was pain.
The flutter of wings sounded a few feet away, but before I could shoo off any possible carrion birds, I looked up to find a raven.
My friend the raven.
She hopped her way over slowly, looking at the kitten, tutting in an oddly motherly way.
“Poor thing. Just a baby.”
“It’s alive, though. I can?—”
She leaned in close, inspecting the kitten with one beady black eye, then looked up at me and gave a nod. “Yes. If you take her to a mage doctor, she can still be helped. That’s a lot of money, though, isn’t it?”
Animals didn’t usually think about money, but my raven friend was an anomaly in a lot of ways.
I shrugged. “It costs what it costs. Who gets to decide how much a life is worth?”
She cocked her head at me, feigning confusion. “The doctor. He’s going to makeyoupay him. Not her.”
It was an excellent point, I supposed, but that was for the doctor to decide on. For myself, I couldn’t put a monetary limit on the value of life. So yeah, I would end up paying what they charged me.
I reached into my pockets, frowning when all I came away with was my one glove that I’d taken off. That wouldn’t help. I struck gold on the inside pocket of my jacket, though: a knit beanie I always wore in the winter.
Perfect.
I reached down and ran a finger along the kitten’s side. “Sorry little friend. This is probably going to hurt, but I have to get you out of here.”
As gently as I could, I lifted the kitten into the woolen hat, then tucked the hat back into the inside pocket of my jacket, with the kitten’s little head poking out.
She—as I assumed my raven friend had that right—blinked at me again, giving a tiny mew then closing her eyes once more.
I rushed back to my bike and rode the edge of “too fast” as I continued my way into town. I knew just the place to go.
In the way of so many clever slackers in the world, I had an incredibly good memory. Eidetic memory, my teacher had called it after I’d told her exactly which page in our shared history book had the information she was looking for.
Not exactly photographic, but a near thing.
All that was to say that I grew up with the Vampiric Senator of the greater Los Angeles Statistical Area, so I knew the name and address of every single one of the three-hundred-and-some odd vampires who lived in LA.
Basically, my mom was their boss, so I’d at least seen every one of them at some point, even if my mother had never encouraged me to hang out with them.
Vampires could only live in very large cities, so each one had an assigned senator. That made my mother one of the seven-hundred most important vampires in the world. Higher than that, really, since LA was one of the biggest cities in the world, so she was in charge of more vamps than most senators.
The fact that I knew all the local vampires was important in this case because of Doc. Doctor Carson Boone, who’d been a mage and a doctor in his human life some two hundred years ago, and who was one of my mother’s vampiric subjects in the modern day.
He wasn’t a vet, but he’d been a doctor in the old west. He wasn’t squeamish or arrogant, and I was sure he wouldn’t think he was too good to use his magic to treat a kitten.
