Kitty's House of Horrors

She chuckled. “How perfect. We’ll be able to draw this out for days.”

  From the kitchen, where he was opening another bottle of wine and pouring drinks, Conrad said, “I haven’t seen anything yet that can’t be explained by perfectly normal means.”

  “Hey Conrad,” I called. “You know the principle that in a given situation, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one?”

  “Occam’s razor. Yes.”

  “What’s simpler: that we imported a live seal, brought it a thousand miles inland, and set it loose in an environment that might kill it, for the purpose of playing a joke on you; or that Lee’s a lycanthrope?”

  He said, “If one of your options is impossible, it doesn’t matter how outlandish the only probable one sounds. It has to be the correct one.”

  “I won’t argue with your logic,” I said. “Only your assumptions.”

  “I don’t think you imported a seal. I think you’re making it all up,” he said.

  Almost angrily, Tina said, “Is someone paying you to be this stubborn?”

  Now, there was an idea. I hadn’t considered that Conrad might also be part of some conspiracy. Hell, maybe we had more than one conspiracy afoot. Wouldn’t that be exciting?

  But Conrad denied it. “I’m getting paid the same stipend the rest of you are. At least, I assume I am. I’m just a lowly author and not a TV celebrity, so I may be getting peanuts compared to you.”

  The door to the study/production room opened, and I jumped. Just a little. Not freaked-out jumped. Just startled. Ghost fur prickled along my back. Looking around, I saw at least a couple of the others had also flinched, startled: Tina, Gemma. All of us stared at Joey Provost, who came into the living room wearing his showbiz smile. He was carrying a shoe box–sized wooden case.

  “How’s everyone doing?” he said. I clamped shut my jaw so I wouldn’t be able to say, Fine, until you got here.

  “We’re all just fine, I think,” Anastasia said, eyes half-lidded, purring in perfect vampire allure. It must have been one of the powers they got, along with immortality.

  “That’s great. You all up for some more fun and games?”

  “Another activity rigged for maximum entertainment value,” I said. “Excellent.”

  I couldn’t pull off allure like Anastasia could. All I had was snark. Glaring at me, Provost set the box on the coffee table. We gathered around.

  “Your instructions are in here. Wait ’til I leave, then take a look and have at it.” He smiled like a guy who was having a lot of fun keeping a secret. Very smarmy. I didn’t like it.

  The door closed behind him. He was gone, but nobody moved.

  “Well?” Tina said. None of us looked all that enthusiastic—none of us were really the types who appreciated being Provost’s dancing monkeys. I wondered how they were going to edit the footage to make us look excited.

  “Let’s get this over with,” I said and knelt by the table to open the box.

  Inside, on bare wood, lay a folded note, five velvet jewelry boxes, and a stopwatch. I unfolded the page and read aloud.

  “‘Treasure Hunt,’” the top of the page said. “‘You all have special talents, ways of searching out the hidden, of doing the impossible. You’ll break into the following five teams, and one at a time each team will have a chance to find the other half of the lockets in these boxes, which have been hidden outside the lodge. Conrad will monitor the stopwatch and see who finds the treasure the fastest.’ Dude, cliché,” I said. Sure enough, each box had a gold locket on a chain with the lid broken off. Each locket was a different shape: oval, circle, square, rectangle, and—of course—a heart. I read off the teams: Jerome and I were on one team, the vampires and Dorian on another. He’d teamed Tina with Ariel and Jeffrey with Lee. Odysseus was all by himself. This ought to be interesting.

  “Isn’t there supposed to be a prize?” Lee said. “What do we get for winning?”

  “The satisfaction of winning?” I said, shrugging. I didn’t really care, because I shuddered to think of what cheesy prize Provost would come up with.

  “This isn’t very scientific,” Tina said. “And I thought we weren’t supposed to have competitions.”

  “Bitching isn’t going to get it over with any faster. Think of it as a party game. Like Pin the Tail on the Donkey,” I said. “Who’s first?” We all glanced guiltily away—no one wanted to be first. We weren’t even bothering to look enthusiastic.

  “Conrad, you pick, since you seem to be the one in charge,” Anastasia said.

  “Let’s see,” Conrad said in a mock-serious tone. “Tina and Jeffrey are supposed to figure out where it is using their psychic powers, right? The werewolves… what are you supposed to do, sniff it out?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Jerome said.

  “The vampires do what, fly through the air and use super vision?”

  “You watch too many bad movies,” Gemma said.

  Conrad huffed and said, “And maybe Odysseus can pull it out of his top hat.”

  Tina looked at Grant. “Can you really do that?”

  Grant’s lips turned in a thin smile. “Not without preparation and a trapdoor.”

  Conrad shook his head. “I still can’t tell if you think you’re for real or not.”

  “A lot of what we’re doing here deals with perception rather than truth,” Grant said. “Many would argue that reality depends more on the former than the latter.”

  There was a pause as we all absorbed that. Gemma’s forehead wrinkled, like she was still parsing the sentence.

  “Right, yeah,” Conrad said finally. “So, I still perceive that you’re all deluded or faking. I think Tina and Ariel should go first.”

  Ariel shrugged. “I don’t even have any weird talents. I’m like Kitty, I just talk too much.”

  “Come on, why us?” Tina said.

  “Because I’m betting you’ll put on the best show,” Conrad said.

  And they did. At least Tina did. She started by choosing one of the lockets, closing her eyes, feeling it. Picking up vibes, whatever. I might have believed in the things she could do, but I still didn’t understand how it worked.

  “What do you want me to do?” Ariel whispered, clearly in awe of the psychic.

  “Hold the flashlight,” Tina said, retrieving the light from the kitchen counter.

  They went outside. Gordon followed them with one of the cameras.

  “What if they don’t find it?” Jerome said.

  Lee sat back and stretched his arms over his head. “It’s going to be a long night.”

  Tina and Ariel returned, prize in hand, about forty minutes later. Which, as long as it seemed, was still more quickly than I would have expected. It didn’t bode well, because I was pretty sure we wouldn’t be able to find our half so quickly, and I kind of wanted to win. And I hated that I kind of wanted to win, because that meant I was playing Provost’s game. I’d just have to be obnoxious about it.

  Ariel was bubbling, holding up both halves of the locket for all to see. Tina looked annoyed. She held a crooked, forked stick a couple of feet long that she might have picked up off the ground.

  “Is that a dowsing rod?” Jeffrey said. Tina nodded.

  “A dowsing rod?” Conrad said. “Are you serious?”

  “Took us straight to it,” Ariel said.

  Jeffrey grinned at Tina. “You are so cool.” She blushed.

  Conrad shook his head, as skeptical as ever, but he wrote the time down on the sheet of paper anyway.

  “It’s spooky out there,” Tina said. “I’d just as soon not have to go out at night again.”

  “Spooky?” I said. Meaning: spookier than a nighttime forest usually is?

  “Maybe I’m still creeped out by that hypnotism trick last night.” She threw Grant a glare.

  “You should trust your instincts,” Grant said. “If you think something’s out there, you should listen to that feeling.”

  “That’s just it, I can listen to my instincts all I
want, but unless I get something specific, I’m just panicking.” She slumped into an armchair, shrugging off further inquiry. “Who’s next?”

  Jeffrey and Lee went next. Jeffrey touched the locket like Tina had. Lee held the piece of jewelry to his nose and took a deep breath. Taking in the scent. It took them about forty-five minutes, and when they returned, Tina and Ariel did a little high-five because they were still in the lead.

  “These things must not be very well hidden,” Conrad observed. “I guess Provost wouldn’t want to make it too hard.”

  “Sometimes when you’re looking for something, it just calls out to you,” Jeffrey said.

  Then came Jerome and me. We both took big draws of air off our locket, the oval one. Not that it would help, because it smelled generic—cheap metal, a little bit tangy, and a little bit like Provost’s aftershave. Maybe that would be enough to give me a trail. Really, I didn’t know how we were going to manage this. Picking a weak scent out of the wilderness was like looking for a needle in a haystack. No—a specific piece of hay in a haystack.

  Jerome and I ended up outside, along with Gordon the PA and his camera, looking into the great outdoors, letting our eyesight adjust to the darkness. I turned my nose up, breathed deep, and caught the trail of Provost’s aftershave. Leading right back to the lodge, of course.

  “I’m not sure this is going to work,” I said.

  “Well, let’s get started doing something. Crisscross the ground, cover all the area around the house, see what we can pick up.” It was as good a plan as any.

  We split up, him taking the front of the lodge and me taking the back. I caught the trails of the teams that had gone before us and ignored them. I was looking for Provost.

  “Kitty!” Jerome called, and I trotted over to join him.

  He was kneeling, resting one hand on the ground, head bent over. His powerful body was taut, like he was ready to run, his gaze up and watchful. He looked animal, a little bit of his wolf bleeding into his gaze. Not wanting to set him off, I approached cautiously, obliquely.

  “There,” he said, nodding in the direction where the woods joined the meadow, a little ways from the lodge. Nose flaring, taking in the air, I caught it—Provost. I nodded, and we set off, stalking our prey.

  We went carefully for about ten minutes. The trail was faint, but we were able to follow it. Especially after we told Gordon he had to stand downwind. A strange, twilight feeling came over me; I was feeling more wolf than human, even though I wasn’t shifting; I was still solid within my human skin, but this felt like hunting. Jerome and I hadn’t spoken since we left the lodge—we communicated by glances, by tilts of our heads and shoulders. The night blazed with information. I saw everything clearly, heard a hundred little noises in the woods and meadow, from an owl’s swoop of wings to insects and mice burrowing through grass. Being part of this world felt so natural. I’d be perfectly happy spending the whole night out here and not going back to the lodge. And wouldn’t that shake things up?

  I followed the trail, but at one point I branched right and Jerome branched left. Brow furrowed, confused, I backtracked, zigzagged over the ground, reading the scents of the world like it was a book. Sure enough, the trail split. Joey Provost had been over this ground twice, in two different directions.

  Noticing I had stopped, Jerome looked back at me.

  “There are two trails here,” I said, wincing because my speech sounded so loud and intrusive. “Which is right?”

  Jerome went over the same ground and found what I did. He took a moment to gather words, like he, too, had to remember human speech. “You sure it isn’t a false trail? When he was planting the other teams’ lockets?”

  “It probably is. Just in case, you stick to the main trail and I’ll check this one out. If it goes to the wrong locket, I’ll turn back and catch up with you.”

  “Come on, guys, please don’t split up,” Gordon said. “Who am I supposed to follow?”

  “Easy—whichever one of us takes the right trail, right?” I said. “Did Joey tell you where he hid the thing?”

  Gordon almost looked surly. “Jerome, you wait here. I’ll follow Kitty first, then come back and follow you.”

  That was actually a fairly elegant solution. Jerome didn’t look happy about it, but he crossed his arms and waited.

  We split up.

  The trail continued faintly, mostly because there were so many smells, so much to take in. This area may have been isolated, but other people had been through here. Hikers, hunters, whatever.

  I lost the scent in a clearing. No—the trail stopped. I walked around the perimeter, and it didn’t continue further. Provost had stopped here, but I didn’t find a locket piece. His scent didn’t linger in any one place; rather, he seemed to have come here, paced around, then left again by the same path.

  I did find other signs, though: the remains of a meal, bone and gristle from someone’s chicken dinner, haphazardly buried with a thin layer of dirt thrown over it. A mashed-down square space—a tent footprint. A tree that had done latrine duty. Someone had camped here recently.

  “Hey, Gordon? Do you know if anyone else has been in the area? Was anyone from the crew camping or something?” I glanced over my shoulder to ask. I showed him what I was talking about, the evidence of occupation.

  He had to lower the camera to see what I was looking at. After a cursory glance, he shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think it was any of us.”

  That moment, Jerome found us hunched at the edge of the camp, staring. My face scrunched up with concentration.

  “I got it,” he said, holding up a piece of locket on a chain.

  “Hey, you were supposed to wait!” Gordon said, then hurried to lift his camera in place and start recording.

  Jerome ignored him. “What’s wrong?”

  “What do you make of this?” I gestured around the clearing and gave Jerome a few minutes to find the same things I had. A normal person without a whole lot of tracking skills would have overlooked the signs. To a werewolf with a hyperactive sense of smell, the evidence jumped out.

  Jerome looked at me. “Who do you think was here?”

  “Besides Provost? I don’t know. There were two others, I think. Valenti maybe?”

  “You think maybe someone’s spying on us? On the lodge, the production, whatever?” he said.

  “Where are they now? Where’d they go?”

  The trails went out, then disappeared. Whoever had been here had scattered. I shook my head.

  “Should we be worried?” Gordon said.

  I sighed. “I’m always worried. We should get back.”

  We returned to the lodge, and if Jerome and I looked unhappy, the others assumed it was because we had the slowest time yet. Next up, the vampires took about as long as the psychics had, and I couldn’t have said how they did it. Maybe they just looked.

  Odysseus Grant, all by himself, ended up winning. When his turn came, Conrad started the stopwatch. Grant held the original piece of the locket for a moment, running his thumb along the chain. He set it down on the table, walked out the front door, closed it behind him. Less than half a minute later—not even enough time for the rest of us to sit back and start a conversation—he returned. Holding up the other half of the locket.

  I assumed that all four prizes were hidden about an equal distance away from the lodge. Jerome and I had managed to find ours, after some trial and error and a lot of hunting, in an hour. The box with the locket piece itself was at least a quarter mile away—it took fifteen minutes just to walk there and back, so how had Grant returned with it in mere seconds? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. This may have been all about putting the whammy on Conrad, but I had limits.

  “Wait. How did you find it so fast?” Conrad said.

  “I pulled it out of my top hat,” Grant said.

  Conrad sputtered, “I thought you said—”

  Tina glared. “Odysseus? You don’t have a top hat.”

  Grant just smi
led.

  “I call shenanigans,” Conrad said.

  “You’ve been calling shenanigans all week,” I said. “Why stop now?”

  “But I want to know how he did it.” He turned to Grant. “You’re in on it, right? You had the other half in your pocket the whole time.”

  “If you’ve already decided what to believe, I can’t possibly convince you otherwise,” Grant said.

  “Mr. Grant is full of mystery, isn’t he?” Anastasia said, her tone stinging. “Really, Mr. Grant, tell us—are you a ringer? Are you here as one of us—or for another reason entirely?”

  I rolled my eyes at the conspiracy. “Oh, please.”

  But everyone else was looking at Odysseus. Tina, who’d been suspicious of him since the hypnotism; Jeffrey, who couldn’t see his aura; the others, who simply didn’t know what to think of him. Once again, it would make great TV.

  “This is going to go all Lord of the Flies on us, isn’t it?” I wondered if that was the idea. I shook my head. “We’re better than that, people.”

  That broke the tension, or rather broke it enough for us to stop glaring at each other.

  Ariel stood. “It’s late. I think I’ll head to bed. So, good night, everyone. We’ll all feel better in the morning.”

  Jerome and Lee followed. Then Conrad. Then Tina and Jeffrey, glancing at those of us remaining as they went to the stairs, frowning.

  Anastasia and Grant didn’t look away from each other. Epic staring match.

  “Anastasia?” Dorian said.

  “It’s all right. You and Gemma go on.” Dorian touched the younger vampire, and the two of them walked arm in arm to the basement. “Gordon, you’re probably tired. Why don’t you call it a night?” And amazingly, the PA listened to her, wandering to the back room and leaving the front of the house without a camera operator.

  “Kitty, would you give us some privacy, as well?” Anastasia said. Hint hint.

  “Oh no,” I said. “Somebody’s got to stick around and keep you guys from killing each other.”

  Her lips flickered a smile. “You really think you could stop us?”

  She was right. Both of them could knock me aside, werewolf or no. “I’m not leaving,” I said, no matter how unable I was to back up my bravado.