A rather intense-sounding woman called in to agree with me. “Because really, I think we need both points of view to understand how the world works. Like this—I’ve always wondered, what if it’s not the four-leaf clover that brings good luck, but belief in the four-leaf clover that causes some kind of mental, psychic effect that causes good luck?”
“Hey, I like that idea,” I said. “The problem that science always has with this sort of thing is how do you prove it? How do you measure luck? How do you prove the mental effect? So far, no one’s come up with a good experimental model to record and verify these events.”
Sometimes my show actually sounded smart, rather than outrageous and sensationalist. I was hoping with Professor Olafson on board that we’d be leaning more toward NPR than Jerry Springer. So far, so good. But it couldn’t possibly last, and it didn’t.
“Next caller, hello. What have you got?”
“I want to talk about what’s going on with Speedy Mart.” The caller was male. He talked a little too fast, a little too hushed, like he kept looking over his shoulder. One of the paranoid ones.
“Excuse me?” I said. “What does a convenience-store chain have to do with magic?”
“There’s a pattern. If you mark them all on a map, then cross-reference with the locations of violent crimes, like armed robbery, there’s an overlap.”
“It’s a twenty-four-hour convenience store. Places like that get robbed all the time. Of course there’s a correspondence.”
“No—there’s more. You overlay both of those sets of points on a map of ley lines, and bingo.”
“Bingo?”
“They match,” the caller said, and I wondered what I was missing. “Every Speedy Mart franchise is built on the intersection of ley lines.”
“Okay. That’s spooky. If anyone could agree on whether ley lines exist or where they really are.”
“What do you mean, whether they exist!” He sounded offended and put out. Of course he did.
“I mean there’s no quantitative data that anyone can agree on.”
“How can you be such a skeptic? I thought this was supposed to be a show about how magic is real.”
“This is supposed to be a show about how to tell the real from the fake. I’m going to say ‘prove it’ every time someone lays one on me.”
“Yeah, well, check out my web site and you’ll find everything you need to know. It’s w-w-w dot—” I totally cut him off.
“Here’s the thing,” I said, long overdue for a rant. “People are always saying that to me—how can I possibly be a skeptic given what I am? Given how much I know about what’s really out there, how can I turn my nose up at any half-baked belief that crosses my desk? Really, it’s easy, because so many of them are half-baked. They’re formulated by people who don’t know what they’re talking about, or by people trying to con other people and make a few bucks. The fact that some of this is real makes it even more important to be on our guard, to be that much more skeptical, so we can separate truth and fiction. Blind faith is still blind, and I try not to be.”
“Houdini,” Professor Olafson said. I’d almost forgotten about him, despite his occasional commentary.
“Houdini?”
“Harry Houdini. He’s a good example of what you’re talking about,” he said. “He was famous for debunking spiritualists, for proving that a lot of the old table-rapping séance routines were sleight-of-hand magic tricks. What many people forget is that he really wanted to believe. He was searching for someone who could help him communicate with his dead mother. Lots of spiritualists tried to convince him that they’d contacted his mother, but he debunked every one of them. The fakery didn’t infuriate him so much as the way the fakers preyed on people’s faith, their willingness to believe.”
“Then he may be one of my heroes. Thanks for that tidbit.”
“Another tidbit you might like: He vowed that after he died, he would try to send a message back to the living, if such a thing was possible.”
I loved that little chill I got when I heard a story like this. “Has he? Has anyone gotten a message?”
“No—and lots of people have tried.”
“Okay, let’s file that one away for future projects. Once again, thank you for joining us this evening, Professor Olafson.”
“It was definitely interesting.”
So was his tone of voice. I couldn’t tell if he loved it or hated it. Another question to file away.
Matt and I wrapped up the show. I sat back, listened to the credits ramble on, with my recorded wolf howl in the background. Soon I’d have to go back outside, back to the real world, and back to my own little curse, which I didn’t have any trouble believing in.
New Moon stayed open late on Friday nights, just for me.
Restaurant reviews describe New Moon as a funky downtown watering hole that features live music on occasion, plays host to an interesting mix of people, and has a menu with more meat items than one might expect in this health-conscious day and age. All in all, thumbs-up. What the reviews don’t say is that it’s a haven, neutral territory for denizens of the supernatural underworld, mostly lycanthropes. As the place’s co-owner, that’s what I set it up to be. I figured if we could spend more time relating to each other as people, we’d spend less time duking it out in our animal guises. So far, it seemed to be working.
The bartender turned the radio on and piped in the show Friday nights. When I walked through the door, the few late-night barflies and wait staff cheered. I blushed. Part of me would never get used to this.
I waved at the compliments and well-wishes and went to the table where Ben sat, folding away his laptop and smiling at my approach. Ben: my mate, the alpha male of my pack. My husband. I was still getting used to the ring on my finger.
Though Ben could pull off clean-cut and intimidatingly stylish when the situation required it, most of the time he personified a guy version of shabby chic. He was slim, fit, on the rough side of handsome. His light brown hair was always in need of a trim. He could usually be found in a button-up shirt sans tie, sleeves rolled up, and a pair of comfortably worn khakis. If you went back in time to a year ago and told me I’d be married to this guy, I’d have laughed in your face. He’d been my lawyer. I only ever saw him when I had problems, and he scowled a lot when I did.
Then he landed on my front door with werewolf bites on his shoulder and arm. I took care of him, nursed him through his first full moon when he shifted for the first time and became a full-fledged werewolf. I’d comforted him. That was a euphemism. It had seemed the most natural thing in the world to fall into bed with him. Or so my Wolf side thought.
Over the months, my human side had come to depend on having him in my life. Love had sneaked up on us rather than bursting upon us like cannons and fireworks.
Sliding into the seat next to him, I continued the motion until I was leaning against him, falling into his arms, then almost pushing him out of the seat. Our lips met. This kiss was long, warm, tension-melting. This was the way to end a day.
When we drew apart—just enough to see each other, our hands still touching—I asked, “So, how was it?” The show, I meant. Everyone knew what I meant when I asked that.
He smirked. “I love how you work out your personal issues on the air. It must be like getting paid to go through therapy.”
I sat back and wrinkled my brow. “Is that what it sounds like? Really?”
“Maybe only to me,” he said. “So, are you okay? Everything’s all right?”
“I’m fine. Nothing’s happened. I still haven’t learned anything new.”
“What’s Rick been doing?”
“Sitting on rooftops being gargoyle-y. He says he can see ‘patterns.’” I gave the word quotes with my fingers.
“He’s just saying that to make himself look cool,” Ben said. I kind of agreed with him.
“Is there anything else we ought to be doing?” I asked.
“The restraining order against our fri
end Nick and the Band is filed. There’s not much more we can do until something happens. Maybe this—this emotional harassment—is all there is.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?”
Nick, a were-tiger, was the leader of the Band of Tiamat. He also led an animal and magic act in Las Vegas—only the animals were all feline lycanthropes. The whole act was a front for the Tiamat cult, and when they weren’t using the Babylonian-themed stage and sets in their show, they were using them to conduct sacrifices. Their preferred victims? Werewolves. Dogs and cats, at it again. Nick himself was certainly hot and sexy enough to front a Vegas show. He was also an evil son of a bitch. I got chills just thinking about him.
Ben moved his arm over my shoulder, and I snuggled into his embrace. “I wish I could just go back there and . . . beat them up,” I said.
“We’ve been over that. They didn’t manage to kill you last time. It’s best if we don’t give them a next time.”
Especially since I wouldn’t have quite the same backup if I faced the Band of Tiamat again. Evan and Brenda, the rather uncomfortably amoral bounty hunters who’d saved my ass, had had to leave Vegas in a hurry to avoid awkward questions from the police. They couldn’t help me.
And the one supernatural bounty hunter in the world I actually sort of trusted was still in jail.
“Grant’s keeping an eye on things for us,” Ben continued. “If they do anything funny, we’ll know it.”
Odysseus Grant was a stage magician in Las Vegas, a niche act who’d made his reputation with a retro show featuring old vaudeville props and reviving classic tricks that had gone out of fashion in the age of pyrotechnics and special effects. That was the public face, at least. I still didn’t entirely understand the persona underneath. He was a guardian of sorts, protecting humanity from the forces of chaos. It sounded so overwrought I hesitated to even think it. But, having encountered some of those forces firsthand, I was grateful for his presence.
I had allies. I should have felt strong. I had a whole pack behind me, and a vampire, and a magician. The Band of Tiamat didn’t stand a chance against all that.
It had to be enough for whatever they threw at us. It just had to be.
Chapter 2
What did people ever do before the Internet? Could you really go to the library to find out that the hit TV show Paradox PI was coming to Denver to film a couple of episodes? Because the show’s producers certainly hadn’t chosen to let me know.
I found this information after searching on Harry Houdini, trying to learn more about him. What I found, I liked. He traveled, did thousands of performances and demonstrations of stage magic and escapism. He loved debunking fakes. He claimed that he wanted to believe—he was desperate for proof that the mediums and séances he discredited could actually reach the “other side” and communicate with the dead. But every one he encountered used tricks and stagecraft. When Houdini was alive, the supernatural was still hidden. It kept to shadows and refused to draw back the curtains. I had a theory: You could tell who the real mediums and psychics were because they didn’t advertise, they didn’t brag, and they certainly weren’t going to look for attention from someone like Houdini. Ironically, in his search for the real deal, Houdini drove the real deal away, deeper into hiding. He’d have loved this day and age.
As Professor Olafson had said, Houdini promised that if it was possible, he would deliver a message after his death. Despite hundreds of mediums and séances attempting to help him to do that, the world was still waiting.
Paradox PI did an entire episode on the search for Houdini’s message from beyond and didn’t find anything. Now they were coming to Denver.
I’d seen a few episodes of the show. They specialized in paranormal investigation, especially haunted houses. Went in, set up all kinds of cameras, microphones, infrared scanners, motion detectors, seismographs, and so on, hoping to record some evidence of spectral activity. They usually found something small and indeterminate—heavy breathing in a room where no one had been, the flash of a shadow on a camera, or a drop in temperature in a hallway. The on-camera team—two men and a woman (the woman had beautiful, flowing raven hair and tended to wear tight shirts and jeans)—would stand around, regarding the “evidence” and nodding sagely, and happily inform the haunted establishment’s owner that while they couldn’t prove the place was haunted, this looked pretty cool. The whole thing had a reality-TV aesthetic, lots of shaky video footage of people talking, the occasional expletive bleeped out. It promoted a sense of artificial urgency. They’d never come up with something as definitive as an image of Jacob Marley rattling his chains, but they always pretended that they might. Bottom line: It was a TV show, not paranormal investigation.
Since the emergence of the supernatural—the government acknowledging the existence of vampires and werewolves, my own show exploiting the topic mercilessly, dozens of others jumping on the bandwagon—the fakes had been having a field day. When you’d seen a werewolf shape-shift on live TV, the psychic hotline somehow seemed a lot more reasonable.
I wanted to know what side of the line Paradox PI fell on: sensationalist TV show exploiting interest in the supernatural, or genuine paranormal investigators? I wasn’t necessarily going to try to expose them as fakes. But getting a story out of them would be icing.
Now I just had to figure out how I could crash the party.
I brought all my powers as a prominent media figure to bear in my quest. Well, basically, I sweet-talked a production assistant at the company into giving me the Denver filming schedule. It took me about three tries, calling at different times of the day, before I hit on the right person, but it worked.
They’d already been in the area three days, covering some of the more famous locations like the Brown Palace Hotel in downtown Denver, and the Stanley Hotel sixty miles north in Estes Park. On day four, the PI gang was scheduled to examine Cheesman Park. Of course they were. This was the classic haunting that had supposedly inspired the movie Poltergeist, not that the latter bore any resemblance to the former. About a hundred years ago, a cemetery had been cleared of its headstones and spruced up to make way for a park and fancy neighborhood. And no, the bodies hadn’t been moved. Or they had, but by cut-rate labor that had dumped them together and swept them under the carpet, so to speak. Since then, reports of angry spirits flourished: headless women in Victorian gowns searching for their skulls, ghosts rattling shutters and doors, that sort of thing. No little girls getting sucked into TVs, though.
I arrived at the park before the TV crew did, so I waited, parked along the winding street in my hatchback.
A half hour later, with about an hour to go before dusk—very scenic and photogenic considering the subject matter—a functional white van pulled alongside the curb and parked some fifty yards behind me, near the picturesque fountain area. They might have been plumbers on a dinner break, but a couple of guys got out, opened up the back, and lugged out a camera, a high-end video job. They spent about fifteen minutes setting it up, then one of them spoke on a cell phone. Ten minutes later, a shiny black van with the show’s logo painted on it pulled up and parked on the street, and the cameraman filmed it all. Stock footage, the PIs’ arrival, with the lovely backdrop of golden westering sun slanting across the park. Rapt, I watched.
The guys filmed the Paradox PI team getting out of the vehicle. Then they lowered the cameras, and everyone milled for a moment.
I made my move.
I jumped out of my car and strode toward the cluster of people and vehicles. I had my sights on Gary Janson, the show’s front man both in front of and behind the camera. Tall, maybe six-five, and burly, he had an intimidating presence, but his dark trimmed beard hid a bit of paunch. He’d probably spent more of his life in front of computers than running from poltergeists.
If I had gotten all the way to Janson without anyone stopping me, that would have told me something about how this show was run. But I didn’t, which told me that this wasn’t a bunch of amateurs. They had a
professional production staff. One of the techs climbed out of the white van and intercepted me, jogging slightly, a bit of panic in his eyes.
He held his hand out at me. “I’m sorry, we’re filming a TV show. Can I ask you to stay on that side of the park?”
“I know you’re filming. I was hoping I could talk to Gary and the gang. I’m Kitty Norville.” I gave him my biggest “gosh, gee” smile and offered my hand.
His eyes went round and a little shocky.
“Hey, I recognize you! You’re that werewolf!” This came from a woman by the dark van—the show’s raven-haired hottie, Tina McCannon. Seeing her in person, I was even more convinced she’d been chosen for her model-quality looks, measurements, and preternaturally tight T-shirts rather than any of her other abilities. She pointed at me with the same urgency someone might have when saying, “She’s a witch! Burn her!” I gritted my teeth behind my smile. Being the country’s first celebrity werewolf had its more interesting moments.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the tech guy had signaled to the cameraman to film this. Groovy. If I could be charming enough, they might end up with a very special episode of Paradox PI, guest starring Kitty Norville. The publicity opportunity was mouthwatering. Their audience was bigger than mine.
“Hi!” I said cheerfully. “You’re Tina, right? You’re much taller in person.”
She blinked at me, confused.
The third member of the on-camera team, Jules Simpson, came around from the other side of the van, watching with interest. He was dark-skinned, with short-cropped hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He dressed in a sweater and slacks, an intelligentsia hipster. He was British, and his accent played as well on TV as Tina’s figure.
“What are you doing here?” Tina said, still confused. She didn’t seem to know what to make of me, which was pretty funny considering she was supposed to be a paranormal investigator.
“I was hoping I could interview you, maybe have you come onto my show. I know I probably should have called first.” My shrug was perhaps exaggerated. “But I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by.”