Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand

  I answered. “Yeah?”

  “Hey, Kitty.” I sensed tension in his voice, confusion maybe. I could hear street sounds in the background, cars driving by. It sounded like the intersection where New Moon was.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m at New Moon,” he said. “I was about to open up for the afternoon, but. . . well. I think maybe you should come down here.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just. . . can you get over here and take a look?” There was a note of pleading. Like this wasn’t just a bar manager calling the owner about a little problem. Something of the wolf pack had entered into the conversation—he was asking his alpha for help. That meant weirdness, and it meant danger. The hair on the back of my neck tingled.

  “Yeah, yeah. Okay. I’ll be right over.” I hung up.

  “What is it?” Ben asked, straightening.

  “Shaun. Something’s up at New Moon.”

  We both got into my car and drove downtown. Fifteen minutes later we pulled into the parking lot of the boxy brick building, where a big sign in blue and silver announced the bar. Shaun was pacing out front, arms crossed, shoulders hunched over, like stiffened hackles, for all the world like a nervous wolf. When he saw us, he seemed relieved.

  “What is it?” I asked. Nothing seemed obviously wrong. I had braced myself to expect smoke and fire pouring out of the roof, or a roving militant biker gang camped in the parking lot.

  “Does this mean anything to you?”

  He drew me to the front door.

  Burned into the wood, as if with a blow torch, a single word:

  Tiamat.

  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.

  MORE KITTY!

  Here is a special sneak preview of Carrie Vaughn’s next novel.

  Kitty Raises Hell

  Available in March 2009

  chapter 1

  I had to admit, this was pretty cool.

  Rick had gotten us onto the roof of the Pepsi Center in downtown Denver. We sat near the edge, by a railing on a catwalk near the exclusive upper-story clubhouse. From here, we had a view of this whole side of downtown: the amusement park to the west, the interstate beyond that, Coors Field to the north, and to the south, Mile High Stadium. It felt like the center of the universe—at least, this little part of it. We could look downtown and see into the maze of skyscrapers. At night, the sky of stars, washed out in an evening haze of lights, seemed inverted, appearing around us in the lights of the city, in trails of moving cars.

  When Rick had escorted me through the Pepsi Center’s lobby and to the elevator, the security guards didn’t look twice at us. He had a pass key for the elevator. I’d asked him how he got that kind of access, the key and security codes—who he knew or what kind of favors he’d pulled in—but he only smiled. It wouldn’t have surprised me to find out he owned a share in the place. Vampires were like that, at least the powerful ones were: prone to quiet, conservative investing, working through layers of holding companies. They had time.

  A constant breeze blew up here. I tucked the blond strands of my hair behind my ears yet again. I should have pinned it up. The air had its own scent, particular to this place and nowhere else: oil, gas, concrete, steel, rust, decay—usual city smells. But under it was the dry tint of prairie, a taste of air that had blown across tall grasses and cottonwoods. And under that was a hint of cold, of ancient stone and caves that sheltered ice year-round. The mountains. That was Denver, to the nose of a werewolf. Up here, I could smell it all. I closed my eyes and tipped my nose into the breeze, drinking it in.

  “I thought you’d like it up here,” Rick said. I opened my eyes to find him watching me.

  I sighed. Back to reality, back to the world. We weren’t here sightseeing. City sounds drifted to me, car engines, a distant siren, music from a bar somewhere. We had a view, but I was afraid that what we were looking for was too small and too good at hiding for us to find from here.

  “We’re not going to see anything,” I said, crossing my arms.

  “We’ll see patterns,” he said. Rick appeared to be in his late twenties, confident yet casual. He tended to walk tall, with his hands in his pockets, and look out at the world with a thoughtful, vaguely amused detachment; even now, when Denver was possibly under assault, he seemed laid-back. “Traffic on I-25’s thinning out. Downtown’s a mess, as usual. It’s like a tide. In an hour, when the theaters and concerts get out, the cars’ll all move back to the freeway. You watch for things moving against the tide. Pockets of motion where there shouldn’t be anything. Or pockets of unusual quiet.”

  He pointed to a hidden corner of the parking lot, tucked near Elitch’s security fence. Two cars had stopped, facing each other, the drivers’ windows pulled alongside each other. The headlights were off, but the motors were running. Hands reached out, traded handfuls of something. One car pulled away, tires crunching quietly. A moment later, the other pulled away, as well.

  I had a few ideas about what that might have been. It still didn’t seem relevant to our problem. “And what does that have to do with Tiamat?” I asked.

  Not really Tiamat, which was an ancient Babylonian goddess of chaos. According to myth, newer gods, the forces of reason and order, rose up against her in an epic battle and destroyed her and her band of demons—the Band of Tiamat—and thereby created civilization. Really, I was talking about the whacked-out cult of her worshippers that I had pissed off on my recent trip to Las Vegas. Last week, I found the word Tiamat spray-painted on the door of the restaurant I co-owned. I figured the pack of were-felines and the possibly four-thousand-year-old vampire who led them had come to Denver on the warpath.

  But nothing had happened yet. Rick, the Master vampire of Denver, and I had been keeping watch. I was getting more anxious, not less.

  “That? Nothing. I’m just showing you how much can happen under our noses.”

  I scanned all the way around, searching buildings, skyscrapers, parking lots, roads filled with cars, people walking to dinner, concerts, shopping. Someone laughed; it sounded like distant birdsong.

  I didn’t have much room to pace, but I tried. A couple of steps along the catwalk, turn around, step back. I couldn’t stand the waiting. The modern Band of Tiamat was trying to kill me with anxiety.

  “You know what the problem with this is? Wolves hunt by moving. I want to be out there looking for this thing. Tracking it down.”

  “And vampires are like spiders,” Rick said. “We draw our quarry in and trap it.”

  I suddenly pictured Rick as a creature at the center of his web, patiently waiting, watching, ready to strike. A chill ran down my spine, and I shook the image away.

  “What do you really expect to see up here?”

  Absently, he shook his head. It wasn’t really an expression of denial. More like thoughtfulness. “If anything else out there is hunting, I’ll see it.”

  I gave a crooked smile. “I can see you sitting like this in the bell tower of Notre Dame Cathedral, looking out over Paris like a gargoyle.”

  He gave me a sidelong glance, then turned his gaze back to the city. “I’ve never been to Paris.”

  Which was an astonishing thing to hear from a five-hundred-plus-year-old vampire.

  I sat next to him. “Really? No family trips when you were a kid? Didn’t do the backpacking-around-Europe thing? Did people even do that in the sixteenth century?”

  “Maybe not with backpacks. But New Spain sounded so much more interesting to a seventeen-year-old third son of very minor nobility with no prospects in 1539 Madrid.”

  This w
as more detail about his past than he’d ever mentioned before. I didn’t say anything, hoping that he’d elaborate. He didn’t.

  “Are you ever going to tell me the whole story?”

  “It’s more fun watching your expression when I give it to you in bits and pieces.”

  “I can see it now. It’s going to be the end of the world, everyone will be dead. All that’ll be left are vampires, and you won’t have anything to say to each other because you can’t stop being mysterious and secretive.”

  He smiled like he thought this was funny.

  I looked at my watch. “Not that this hasn’t been fun, but I have to get going. I have the show to do.” I headed back toward the roof’s access door. “I’ll find my way out. You keep looking.”

  “Break a leg,” he said.

  “Don’t say that when I’m standing on the roof of a very tall building.” Werewolves healed supernaturally quickly from horrible injuries, but I didn’t want to test if that included the injuries sustained from falling that far.

  I left him on the roof, scanning across the night, perched like Denver’s very own gargoyle.

  For the next few hours, I had the show to worry about, and all other anxieties stayed outside the studio door.

  At this hour, we had the station to ourselves. Except for a security guy and the graveyard-shift DJ, it was just me and Matt, my engineer, tucked away to rule the night. The studio was like a cave, left dark and shadowy on purpose, most of the illumination coming from equipment: computer screens, soundboards, monitors. Matt had his space, behind glass, screening calls and manning the soundboard. I had my space, with my monitor, headset, microphone, and favorite cushy chair. When the on-air sign lit, the universe collapsed to this room, and I did my job.

  “Hello, faithful listeners. This is Kitty Norville and you’re listening to The Midnight Hour, everyone’s favorite talk show dealing in supernatural snark. Tonight I want to talk about magic. What’s the true story, what’s the real picture? Is it pastel fairy godmothers, is it meditating over a stack of crystals, or is it Faust making deals with the devil? What’s real, what isn’t, what works, what doesn’t?”

  Once a week I did this and had been doing it for going on three years. I’d have thought it would start to get old by now. Conveniently, the world kept producing more mysteries, and the public couldn’t get enough of it. As long as that stayed true, I’d still have a job.

  The supernatural world was like an onion. You peel back the layers, only to find more layers, on and on, hopelessly trying to reach the mysterious core. Then you start crying.

  “I have on the phone with me Dr. Edgar Olafson, a professor of anthropology from the University of Colorado here to give us the accepted party line about magic. Professor Olafson, thanks for being on the show.”

  “Thank you very much for inviting me, Kitty.”

  Olafson was one of the younger, hipper professors I’d had during my time at CU. He was hip enough to appear on a cult radio show, which was good enough for me. He was also a scientist and spent a minute or so saying what I expected him to. “Belief in magic has been with human culture from the very beginning. It’s been a way to explain anything that people in early civilizations didn’t understand. Diseases were caused by curses; a spate of bad luck meant that something was magically wrong with the world. By the same token, magic gave people a way to feel like they had some control over these events. They could use talismans and amulets to protect against curses, they could concoct potions and rituals to combat bad luck and promote good luck.”

  “That’s still true, isn’t it? People still have superstitions and carry good-luck charms, right?”

  “Of course. But you have to wonder how many people do this out of habit, built up in the culture over generations, and how many people really believe the habits produce magical effects.”

  “And we’ll find out about that in a little bit when I open the line for calls. But let me ask you something: What about me?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  I hadn’t prepped him for this part. Sometimes I was a little bit mean to my guests, but they kept agreeing to talk to me. Served ’em right. “I’m a werewolf. I’ve got incontrovertible, public, and well-documented proof of that condition, validated by the NIH. I’ve had vampires on my show. I’ve talked to people claiming to be magicians, and some of them I’m totally willing to vouch that they are. While the NIH has identified lycanthropy as a disease, modern medical science hasn’t been able to explain it. So. This inexplicable sliver that you have to acknowledge as existing. Is it really magic? Not a metaphor, not habit, not superstition. But really some effect that flies in the face of our understanding of how the world works.”

  Whew. I took a big breath, because I’d managed to get that all out at once.

  He chuckled nervously. “Well, we’ve gone a little bit outside my areas of expertise at this point. I certainly can’t argue with you. But if something’s out there, I’m sure someone’s studying it. Or at least writing a PhD thesis on it.”

  “I plan on getting a hold of that thesis just as soon as I can. Sorry for putting you on the spot, Professor, I’m just trying to get us a neutral baseline before the conversation goes completely out of control. Which it always does. Let’s go to the phones. Hello, you’re on the air.”

  With great condescension, a man started in. “Hi, Kitty. Thanks for taking my call. With all due respect for your guest, this is exactly the kind of attitude that’s held human civilization back, that’s kept our species from taking the next step toward enlightenment—”

  Away we went.

  I had to butt in. “Here’s what I’m wondering: in this day and age, with the revelations of the last couple of years, isn’t it a mistake to think of magic and science as two different things, as polar opposites, and never the twain shall meet? Shouldn’t practitioners of both be working together toward greater understanding? What if there really is a scientific explanation for the weirder bits of magic? What if magic can explain the weirder bits of science?”

  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 onboard, 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 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 all that 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 what they are.”

  “What do you mean, whether they exist!” He sounded off
ended and put out.

  “I mean there’s no quantitative data about ley lines 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 thing from the fakes. I’m going to say ‘prove it’ every time someone lays one on me.”

  “Yeah, well, check out my website, 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 be a skeptic? 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 every 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 routine and séances were simple 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.”