Free Kitty Rocks the House by Carrie Vaughn

out.
    “Wait, what are you doing?” I called, scrambling out of my side of the Jeep. “You can’t go staking him or anything. Rick’ll kill us.”
    He glanced at me sidelong, and I growled under my breath.
    “I’m only guessing he’s here,” he said. “A vampire isn’t going to leave a trail or reveal himself unless he wants to. Nothing’s better at hiding than they are. But you’ve seen it before—don’t look for the vampire, look for what he’s using to protect himself. I made a list of likely places and started visiting them, and I found something.”
    We walked around to the back of the building, to a quiet space by a house connected to the church—the former rectory. A row of shrubs and a flower garden, daffodils nodding and lilacs filling the air with a heady smell, sheltered the space from the foot traffic on the sidewalk.
    Cormac knelt on the ground, and I knelt with him, watching. He pulled items out of his pockets and arranged them on the lawn in front of him, which meant he was going to work a spell. Or, Amelia was. Because of her, I never knew what Cormac was going to draw from his figurative hat next. His pockets always had arcane bits and pieces in them.
    He picked up a stub of a red candle, the wick already blackened; a sprig of some herb; and a piece of black twine. He wrapped the herb to the candle with the twine, then lit the candle using a cheap lighter, which seemed wrong somehow. A real wizard ought to be able to spark it out of thin air, right? But I’d hung around with enough magicians over the last few years to know the answer to that: you don’t waste magic on something you can do without it. The cheap lighter ignited the candle’s wick just fine.
    Cormac’s lips moved, mouthing words. He stepped forward, toward the church wall, holding the candle in front of him, its flame wavering with the movement. About twenty steps away, the yellow drop of fire went out. The air was still, but a stray breeze might have extinguished it. I looked around, as if expecting to find that some invisible person nearby had blown it out.
    He backed up, and the candle flared to life again. He walked a little ways farther down, following the line of an invisible circle, moved toward the building—and again the flame died. He tried it two or three more times, and each time he crossed that invisible threshold, the candle went out, or relit.
    “That’s really weird,” I said, unnecessarily.
    “Yeah, Amelia saw markings, there and there.” He pointed to black squiggly marks, one on a corner of the church, another on a nearby tree, and a third on the back of a NO PARKING sign near the street. I’d have figured they were random graffiti tags, if I noticed them at all. But now that he’d pointed them out, they had a pattern—pairs of stylized letters, medieval alchemical or zodiac signs maybe.
    I tried to visualize what the candle told us was there in spirit. “Someone cast a protective circle here,” I said. “Protecting against what?”
    “That’s the question, isn’t it?” Cormac said. “May be nothing. May be a habit of his.”
    “You’re sure it’s Rick’s vampire friend that did it?”
    “Because we don’t know any other vampires who are magicians, right?”
    My shoulders unconsciously bunched up, an imitation of hackles rising. He was talking about Roman, who’d spent part of his two thousand years as a vampire learning how to work magic. Guy could do it all.
    “Are you saying Columban is with Roman?”
    “I’m just saying that vampires and magic aren’t mutually exclusive. And that this guy knows how to cover his ass and doesn’t seem to need any help doing it. The symbols are European, medieval—it’s what I’d expect from a vampire working for the Vatican.”
    “So he’s a vampire Catholic priest and a magician. I’d have assumed those would all be mutually exclusive.”
    “I don’t think we can make any assumptions. Guy’ll do what he needs to do.”
    Didn’t