“Look at the end,” Tina said.
The last line. What it was ranting when it realized we had trapped it, when it was being drawn into the bottle. The transcript read, “No, please. I have a wife, a family. I had to do these things, the priestess forced me, she would not release me until I did these things. I am not evil, have pity on me, please.”
For a moment, I felt sick. We had condemned a sentient being to supernatural imprisonment, without trial and without recourse. The priestess had controlled it. In some ways, it had been as much a victim as the rest of us.
But it had killed Mick, and others. I kept coming back to that.
I set my expression and looked back at them, keeping any pity at bay. “It’s a manipulation. It wanted us to feel pity. To feel guilty. It’s still a murderer and deserved what it got.”
This was supposed to be a celebration, and now I was getting depressed. I needed another drink. I’d set my last beer somewhere and couldn’t find it now.
“Hey, Kitty!”
I turned and saw Peter Gurney standing by the door. His appearance was the same as always, kind of scruffy in his army jacket and biker apparel. But he looked better now: stood a little straighter, smiled a little more. He wasn’t so angry anymore.
After the confrontation with the Tiamat cult, I’d asked him what he’d planned on doing. Turned out Paradox PI made him an offer—they could use another person on the team, and Peter passed the audition. He brought his investigative skills to the show and played the part of their junior member in training.
“You made it!” I said, standing to meet him as he came over to join us. We hugged briefly, and he waved at the others, who all waved back. “Come on, sit down.”
He did, then pulled something from his coat pocket. “I brought this for you. Just to say thanks.”
“Thanks for what?”
“For filling in the blanks about Ted. For being his friend.”
He handed over a snapshot. It was T.J. A younger, cockier one than the guy I’d known. He was thin, with rough-and-tumble hair, looking very James Dean in a white T-shirt, tight jeans, and biker boots. Arms crossed, he was leaning against a motorcycle with lots of black and chrome, an older model I didn’t recognize, not the finicky Yamaha he’d had when I knew him.
“This was right before he left home,” Peter said. “He was eighteen. Just got his first bike. Looking back, I think he planned it all out. He worked, bought the bike himself. Bought himself a way to escape when Mom and Dad kicked him out. He expected them to kick him out. I know he never could have taken me with him. But I still wish . . . I don’t know. I wish he’d stayed safe.”
I had to smile, and I had to cry a little at the same time. I had a little piece of T.J. outside my memory now.
“Thank you very much for this,” I said.
“It’s the least I could do. It means a lot to know there’s someone else who feels the same way about him.”
“That your brother?” Tina said, craning her neck to look over the table.
“Yeah,” Peter said, and I handed Tina the picture, which she studied.
“Hm. Cute,” she said. “We could use more like him batting for our side.”
I almost laughed at the joke, but I had to stop and think: Had any of us mentioned to her that T.J. was gay? Had she overheard Peter and I talking about it? Before I could ask, Peter was talking.
“I know it was stupid of me to think you could talk to him on cue,” Peter said, shrugging inside his canvas coat. “I was assuming he’d have something to say to me.”
A thoughtful expression pursing her features, Tina slipped the photo back to me. Then she reached in her purse.
She said, “Peter, what do you know about automatic writing?”
“Nothing, I guess.”
But Gary raised his eyebrows, and Jules dropped his jaw.
“You’re not serious,” Jules said. “Are you serious?”
“What?” Peter said. “What is it?”
“Just open it,” Tina said, handing him an envelope.
We watched him intently as he tore open the envelope. He pulled out a sheet of paper, slowly unfolded it, and went a bit ashen. Looking over his shoulder, I could see mostly white, with just a line of handwritten text. He must have read it a dozen times, his eyes flicking back and forth.
Then he dropped the page, covered his eyes, and took two or three deep, shuddering breaths.
“I’m sorry. This probably wasn’t the time or place for this,” Tina said.
The page was lying there on the table. I couldn’t help but read it. It said: “Petey. Let it go.”
My eyes instantly teared up. It was like a Pavlovian reaction. I couldn’t control it, the tears just happened, in response to the implication of the note. If Tina could do what she said she could, these were his words. This was as close and as real as he’d been in over a year.
And he was telling us to move on. To let him go.
When Peter straightened and raised his head, his eyes were dry. “No. That’s okay. Thank you, I guess. I can almost hear him,” he said, chuckling. “Like a voice over my shoulder. I haven’t seen him in ten years, and it’s still hard to think he’s gone.”
I touched his arm. Like that would do any good. I could almost hear T.J.’s voice, too. I’d also had a voice whispering over my shoulder.
“It’s funny,” Tina said. “We try so hard to hold on to them. I think every ghost story, even the scary ones, is about the fear of dying. We don’t want people to just end. So we tell stories where they don’t. We try our damnedest to talk to them. We’ll believe anything. But I think if we asked them, the ones who are gone, they’d tell us to get on with our lives.”
Funny. I didn’t imagine Mick saying that. I imagined him saying, You were supposed to protect us.
Let it go, Kitty.
With an obvious flourish to break the mood, she drew out another sealed envelope. “I have something for you guys, too.” She put it on the table between Gary and Jules.
“What’s this?” Jules said.
“Remember the episode we did on Harry Houdini? About how he vowed that if there was a way to communicate from the great beyond, he’d do it?”
It took us all a minute to register the implications of that. Of that and her. My eyes got real big. “No way.”
In a near-frenzy, Jules tore open the envelope.
“Why didn’t you say anything before?” Gary said.
Tina said, “I couldn’t say anything about it without blowing my cover or coming off sounding like a quack. We’d just debunked three fake examples of automatic writing. I couldn’t exactly say, ‘Yeah, here’s the real thing’ and not say where it came from. But. Well. I thought you’d be interested.”
Gary and Jules leaned in to read the sheet.
“What’s it say?” I was nearly out of my seat.
The note read, “Everyone who knew my codes is dead, this will not work, no one will believe you. But thank you for trying.”
“You’re having one over on us,” Jules said.
Tina said, “Here’s the thing. Most of the psychics are trying to contact Harry Houdini. How many of them ever try to contact Ehrich Weiss?”
Ehrich Weiss was Houdini’s given name. The really funky thing about it? The handwriting was different than the writing on Peter’s note. Wildly different. More different than someone could fake, unless they were really good.
I asked Tina, “You wrote these both?”
“I held the pen,” she said.
“Peter,” I said. “Does that look anything like T.J.’s handwriting?”
“I don’t really know. I could check, though.”
Then we’d have to compare the other note to samples of Houdini’s writing. God, this was weird.
“It’s like the channeling Arabic, isn’t it?” Jules said.
“I don’t understand it,” Tina said. “That’s why I hooked up with you guys, remember? Somebody’s got to figure out a way to explain stuff l
ike this.”
In the end, maybe that was what separated the real paranormal investigators from the charlatans. The charlatans kept up the aura of mystery and obfuscation. The real investigators kept asking why and how.
“Hey, it’s starting!” Shaun announced, punching at the remote to turn up the volume on the TV. The show’s intro came up, and there was a cheer. Everyone turned to look at the Paradox crew’s table. I beamed at them proudly.
“Have fun, guys. Let me know if you need anything.”
I’d meant to sit down with Ben again, and not get up for the rest of the evening, but I saw Rick standing in the doorway. I went to meet him.
“I invited you in once already, isn’t it supposed to keep working?”
“The invitation stands. I just can’t stay long,” he said. “I only wanted to say congratulations on the publicity.” He nodded at the screen, which now showed my grinning face talking to Tina. I might actually get used to this TV thing someday. I seemed to be showing up on it more and more often.
“Thanks. But I think you owe me some stories, after everything I went through. Doc Holliday and Central City stories. And Coronado. And Spain.”
He twitched the sly smile that meant I wasn’t going to get any stories this time. “You never give up, do you?”
“Nope,” I said. “Not anymore. Not ever.”
“Good,” he said softly.
My smile fell. “I guess you haven’t heard anything about Roman. Where he ended up, what he’s doing now?”
“No. But I’m counting that a blessing at the moment. The usual request still stands. If you hear anything—”
“Same with you. Don’t treat me like I’m an ignorant underling. No more of this you-puny-mortals-wouldn’t- understand garbage.”
“All right. I promise.”
With a guy like Rick, that promise really meant something.
I glanced over at Ben, intending to see if there was space at our table where we could invite Rick to sit. But when I turned back to Rick, he was gone. Back to being all inscrutably vampiric and vanishing in plain sight.
So it was just me who returned to the table and sat next to Ben. “How are you doing?”
He donned a vague smile. “This feels like the first time in weeks I’ve been able to sit and catch my breath.”
“Amen,” I said.
We leaned back, our chairs against the shelter of the wall behind us, and gazed out over our realm. He squeezed my hand.
“I’m thinking of something else,” he said.
“Yeah? What?”
“You want to go out?”
Wolf perked up her ears. She knew what “out” meant, like any canine wanting to go for a run. I played obtuse. “Like on a date?”
“Sort of. Maybe out to that open space west of 93.”
“Full moon’s a week away,” I said.
“I know. But I keep thinking about waking up in the cold air curled up with you. No one around, just the two of us. Leave the kids at home.”
You know, it actually sounded romantic.
“I don’t like to make a habit of that sort of thing.”
He put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close until he was whispering in my ear, his lips tickling against me, almost but not quite kissing me. I wanted to lean into him until he had to kiss me.
“Here’s the thing,” Ben said. “Who says we have to shape-shift in order to go out in the woods, get naked, and make out under the stars?”
Oh my. That flush reached all the way to my toes. My face felt like it had caught fire. Metaphorically speaking. There was something to be said for having one’s inhibitions lowered. I never would have done anything like this before becoming a werewolf.
I turned my head, leaning my forehead against his. “I think you just got yourself a date,” I whispered back.
Paradox PI had just gotten to the part where New Moon was on fire. The audience was riveted, staring ahead, completely enthralled. Good thing Ben and I were sitting in the back. Moving quietly along the wall, we slipped to the door, then crept outside. If anyone noticed, they didn’t complain.
Ben and I drove away, to wilderness and star-filled skies.
About the Author
Carrie Vaughn had a happy and relatively uneventful childhood, which means she had to turn to science fiction and fantasy for material to write about. An Air Force brat, she grew up all over the U.S. and managed to put down roots in Colorado, though she still has ambitions of being a world traveler. Learn more about Carrie’s novels, her short stories, her dog Lily, and her fascination with costumes and stick figure cartoons at www.carrievaughn.com.
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Chapter 1
I knew if I stayed in this business long enough, sooner or later I’d get an offer like this. It just didn’t quite take the form I’d been expecting.
The group of us sat in a conference room at KNOB, the radio station where I base my syndicated talk show. Someone had tried to spruce up the place, mostly by cleaning old coffee cups and take-out wrappers off the table. Not much could be done, with the worn gray carpeting, off-white walls filled with bulletin boards, thumbtack holes where people hadn’t bothered with the bulletin boards, and both of those covered with photocopied concert notices and posters for CD releases. The tables were fake-wood-grain-colored plastic, refugees from the ’70s. We’d only just replaced the chalkboard with a dry erase board a couple of years ago. That was KNOB, on the cutting edge.
I loved the room, but it didn’t exactly scream high- powered style. Which made it all the funnier to see a couple of Hollywood guys sitting at the table in their Armani suits and metrosexual savoir faire. They seemed to be young hotshots on the way up—interchangeable. I had to remember that Joey Provost was the one with slicked-back light brown hair and the weak chin, and Ron Valenti was the one with dark brown hair who hadn’t smiled yet. They worked for a production company called SuperByte Entertainment that specialized in reality television. I’d looked up some of their shows, such sparkling gems as Jailbird Moms and Stripper Idol.
They were here to invite me onto their next show and eagerly explained the concept to me.
“The public is fascinated with the supernatural. The popularity of your show is clearly evidence of that. Over the last couple of years, as more information has come out, as more people who are part of this world come forward, that fascination is only going to increase. We’re not just trying to tap into a market here—we hope to provide a platform to educate people. To erase some of the myths. Just like you and your show,” Provost said. Provost was the talker. Valenti held the briefcase and looked serious.
“We’ve already secured the participation of Jerome Macy, the pro wrestler, and we’re in talks with a dozen other celebrities. Name celebrities. This is our biggest production yet and we’d love for you to be a part of it.”
I’d met Jerome Macy, interviewed him on my show, even. He was a boxer who’d been kicked out of boxing when his lycanthropy was exposed, and turned to a career in pro wrestling where being a werewolf was an asset. He was the country’s second celebrity werewolf.
I was the first.
While working as a late-night DJ here at KNOB, I started my call-in talk radio show dispensing advice about all things supernatural and came out as a werewolf live on the air about three years ago now. Sometimes it seems like yesterday. Sometimes it seems like a million years ago. A lot had happened in that time.
Arms crossed, I leaned against a wall, away from the table where the two producers sat. I studied them with a narrowed gaze and a smirk on my lips. In wolf body language, I was an alpha sizing them up. Deciding whether to beat them up because they were rivals—or eat them because they were prey. They probably had been talking to Jerome Macy, because they seemed to recognize the signals, even if they didn’t quite know what the
y meant. They both looked nervous and couldn’t meet my gaze, even though they tried.
This was all posturing.
“That’s great. Really,” I said. “But what is this show going to be about?”
“Well,” Provost said, leaning forward, then leaning back again when he caught sight of my stare. “We have access to a vacation lodge in Montana. Out in the middle of nowhere, a really beautiful spot, nice view of the mountains. We’ll have about a dozen, give or take, well-known spokespeople for the supernatural, and this will be a chance for them—you—to talk, interact. We’ll have interviews, roundtable discussions. It’ll be like a retreat.”
My interpretation: We’re going to put you all in a house and watch you go at it like cats and dogs. Or werewolves and vampires. Whatever.
“So . . . you’re not using the same model that you’ve used on some of your other shows. Like, oh, say Cheerleader Sorority House.”
He had the grace to look a tiny bit chagrined. “Oh, no. This is nothing like that.”
I went on. “No voting people off? No teams and stupid games? And definitely no shape-shifting on camera? Right?”
“Oh no, the idea behind this is education. Enlightenment.”
Ozzie, the station manager and my boss, was at the meeting as well, sitting across from the two producers and acting way too obsequious. He leaned forward, eager, smiling back and forth between them and me. So, he thought this was a good idea. Matt, my sound guy, sat in the back corner and pantomimed eating popcorn, wearing a wicked grin.
I had a feeling I was being fed a line, that they were telling me what would most likely get me to agree to their show. And that they’d had a totally different story for everyone else they’d talked to.
I hadn’t built my reputation on being coy and polite, so I laid it out for Mr. Provost. “Your shows aren’t exactly known for . . . how should I put this . . . having any redeeming qualities whatsoever.”
He must have dealt with my criticism all the time because he had the response all lined up. “Our shows reveal a side of life that most people have no access to.”