Kitty Goes to Washington

by Carrie Vaughn

  “Take care of yourself, Kitty.”

  “Thanks.”

  I wrapped things up at the station and went to my hotel to sleep off the rest of the night. Locked the door, hung out the DO NOT DISTURB sign. Couldn’t sleep, of course. I’d become nocturnal, doing the show. I’d gotten used to not sleeping until dawn, then waking at noon. It was even easier now that I was on my own. No one checked up on me, no one was meeting me for lunch. It was just me, the road, the show once a week. An isolated forest somewhere once a month. A lonely life.

  My next evening was spoken for. Full moon nights were always spoken for.

  I found the place a couple of days ago: a remote trailhead at the end of a dirt road in the interior of a state park. I could leave the car parked in a secluded turn-out behind a tree. Real wolves didn’t get this far south, so I only had to worry about intruding on any local werewolves who might have marked out this territory. I spent an afternoon walking around, watching, smelling. Giving the locals a chance to see me, let them know I was here. I didn’t smell anything unexpected, just the usual forest scents of deer, fox, rabbits. Good hunting here. It looked like I’d have it all to myself.

  A couple of hours from midnight, I parked the car at the far end of the trailhead, where it couldn’t be seen from the road. I didn’t want to give any hint that I was out here. I didn’t want anyone, especially not the police, to come snooping. I didn’t want anyone I might hurt to come within miles of me.

  I’d done this before. This was my second full moon night alone, as a rogue. The first time had been uneventful, except that I woke up hours before dawn, hours before I was ready, shivering in the cold and crying because I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten to be naked in the middle of the woods. That never happened when I had other werewolves there to remind me.

  My stomach felt like ice. This was never going to get easier. I used to have a pack of my own. I’d been surrounded by friends, people I could trust to protect me. A wolf wasn’t meant to run on her own.

  You’ll be okay. You can take care of yourself.

  I sat in the car, gripping the steering wheel, and squeezed shut my eyes to keep from crying. I had acquired a voice. It was an inner monologue, like a part of my conscience. It reassured me, told me I wasn’t crazy, admonished me when I was being silly, convinced me I was going to be okay when I started to doubt myself. The voice sounded like my best friend, T.J. He died protecting me, six weeks ago today. The alpha male of our pack killed him, and I had to leave Denver to keep from getting killed, too. Whenever I started to doubt, I heard T.J.’s voice telling me I was going to be okay.

  His death sat strangely with me. For the first week or two, I thought I was handling it pretty well. I was thinking straight and moving on. People call that stage denial. Then on the highway, I saw a couple on a motorcycle: neither of them wore helmets, her blond hair tangled in the wind, and she clung to his leather jacket. Just like I used to ride with T.J. The hole that he’d left behind gaped open, and I had to pull off at the next exit because I was crying so hard. After that, I felt like a zombie. I went through the motions of a life that wasn’t mine. This new life I had acquired felt like it had been this way forever, and like it or not, I had to adapt. I used to have an apartment, a wolf pack, and a best friend. But that life had vanished.

  I locked the car, put the keys in my jeans pocket, and walked away from the parking lot, away from the trail, and into the wild. The night was clear and sharp. Every touch of air, every scent, blazed clear. The moon, swollen, bursting with light, edged above the trees on the horizon. It touched me, I could feel the light brushing my skin. Gooseflesh rose on my arms. Inside, the creature thrashed. It made me feel both drunk and nauseous. I’d think I was throwing up, but the Wolf would burst out of me instead.

  I kept my breathing slow and regular. I’d let her out when I wanted her out, and not a second earlier.

  The forest was silver, the trees shadows. Fallen leaves rustled as nighttime animals foraged. I ignored the noises, the awareness of the life surrounding me. I pulled off my T-shirt, felt the moonlight touch my skin.

  I put my clothes in the hollow formed by a fallen tree and a boulder. The space was big enough to sleep in when I was finished. I backed away, naked, every pore tingling.

  I could do this alone. I’d be safe.

  I counted down from five—

  One came out as a wolf’s howl.

  Chapter 2

  The animal, rabbit, squeals once, falls still. Blood fills mouth, burns like fire. This is life, joy, ecstasy, feeding by the silver light—

  If turning Wolf felt like being drunk, the next day definitely felt like being hungover.

  I lay in the dirt and decayed leaves, naked, missing the other wolves terribly. We always woke up together in a dog pile, so to speak. I’d always woken up with T.J. at my back. At least I remembered how I got here this time. I whined, groaned, stretched, found my clothes, brushed myself off, and got dressed. The sky was gray; the sun would rise soon. I wanted to be out of here by then.

  I got to my car just as the first hikers of the morning pulled into the trailhead parking area. I must have looked a mess: hair tangled, shirt untucked, carrying sneakers in my hand. They stared. I glared at them as I climbed into my own car and drove back to the hotel for a shower.

  At noon, I was driving on I-40 heading west. It seemed like a good place to be, for a while. I’d end up in Los Angeles, and that sounded like an adventure.

  The middle of the desert between Flagstaff and L.A. certainly wasn’t anything resembling an adventure. I played just about every CD I’d brought with me while I traveled through the land of no radio reception.

  Which made it all the more surreal when my cell phone rang.

  Phone reception? Out here?

  I put the hands-free earpiece in and pushed the talk button.

  “Hello?”

  “Kitty. It’s Ben.”

  I groaned. Ben O’Farrell was my lawyer. Sharp as a tack and vaguely disreputable. He’d agreed to represent me, after all.

  “Happy to hear you, too.”

  “Ben, it’s not that I don’t like you, but every time you call it’s bad news.”

  “You’ve been subpoenaed by the Senate.”

  Not one to mince words was Ben.

  “Excuse me?”

  “A special oversight committee of the United States Senate requests the honor of your presence at upcoming hearings regarding the Center for the Study of Paranatural Biology. I guess they think you’re some kind of expert on the subject.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  Yeah, I’d heard him, and as a result my brain froze. Senate? Subpoena? Hearings? As in Joe McCarthy and the Hollywood blacklist? As in Iran-Contra?

  “Kitty?”

  “Is this bad? I mean, how bad is it?”

  “Calm down. It isn’t bad. Senate committees have hearings all the time. It’s how they get information. Since they don’t know anything about paranatural biology, they’ve called hearings.”

  It made sense. He even made it sound routine. I still couldn’t keep the panic out of my voice. “What am I going to do?”

  “You’re going to go to Washington, D.C., and answer the nice senators’ questions.”

  That was on the other side of the country. How much time did I have? Could I drive it? Fly? Did I have anything I could wear to Congress? Would they tell me the questions they wanted to ask ahead of time, as if I could study for it like it was some kind of test?

  They didn’t expect me to do this by myself, did they?

  “Ben? You have to come with me.”

  Now he sounded panicked. “Oh, no. They’re just going to ask you questions. You don’t need a lawyer there.”

  “Come on. Please? Think of it as a vacation. It’ll all go on the expense account.”

  “I don’t have time—”

  “Honestly, what do you think the odds are that I can keep out of trouble once I open my mou
th? Isn’t there this whole ‘contempt of Congress’ thing that happens when I say something that pisses them off? Would you rather be there from the start or have to fly in in the middle of things to get me out of jail for mouthing off at somebody important?”

  His sigh was that of a martyr. “When you’re right, you’re right.”

  Victory! “Thanks, Ben. I really appreciate it. When do we need to be there?”

  “We’ve got a couple weeks yet.”

  And here I was, going the wrong way.

  “So I can drive there from Barstow in time.”

  “What the hell are you doing in Barstow?”

  “Driving?”

  Ben made an annoyed huff and hung up on me.

  So. I was going to Washington, D.C.

  I seemed to be living my life on the phone lately. I could go for days without having a real face-to-face conversation with anyone beyond “No, I don’t want fries with that.” I was turning into one of those jokers who walks around with a hands-free earpiece permanently attached to one ear. Sometimes, I just forgot it was there.

  I went to L.A., did two shows, interviewed the band—no demon possessions happened in my presence, but they played a screechy death metal-sounding thing that made me wish I’d been out of my body for it. That left me a week or so to drive to the East Coast.

  I was on the road when I called Dr. Paul Flemming. Flemming headed up the Center for the Study of Paranatural Biology, the focus of the Senate hearing in question. Until a month ago it had been a confidential research organization, a secret laboratory investigating a field that no one who wasn’t involved believed even existed. Then Flemming held a press conference and blew the doors wide open. He thought the time was right to make the Center’s work public, to officially recognize the existence of vampires, werewolves, and a dozen other things that go bump in the night. I was sure that part of why he did it was my show. People had already started to believe, and accept.

  I’d been trying to talk to him. I had his phone number, but I only ever got through to voice mail. As long as I kept trying, he’d get so sick of my messages that he’d call me back eventually.

  Or get a restraining order.

  The phone rang. And rang. I mentally prepared another version of my message—please call back, we have to talk, I promise not to bite.

  Then someone answered. “Hello?”

  The car swerved; I was so surprised I almost let go of the steering wheel. “Hello? Dr. Flemming?”

  There was a pause before he answered, “Kitty Norville. How nice to hear from you.”

  He sounded polite, like this was a friendly little chat, as if there wasn’t any history between us. He wasn’t going to get away with that.

  “I really need to talk to you. You spent six months calling me anonymously, dropping mysterious hints about your work and suggesting that you want me to help you without ever giving any details, then without any warning you go public, and I have to recognize your voice off a radio broadcast of a press conference. Then silence. You don’t want to talk to me. And now I’ve been subpoenaed to testify before a Senate committee about this can of worms you’ve opened. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a great can of worms. But what exactly are you trying to accomplish?”

  He said, “I want the Center to keep its funding.”

  At last, a straight answer. I could imagine what had happened: as a secret research organization, the Center’s funding was off the books, or disguised under some other innocuous category. An enterprising young congressman must have seen that there was a stream of money heading into some nebulous and possibly useless avenue and started an investigation.

  Or maybe Flemming had wanted the Center to be discovered in this manner all along. Now the Senate was holding official hearings, and he’d get to show his work to the world. I just wished he’d warned me.

  “So all you have to do is make sure the Center comes off looking good.”

  “Useful,” he said. “It has to look useful. Good and useful aren’t always the same thing. I’d heard that you’d been called to testify. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, don’t be,” I said lightly. “It’ll be fun. I’m looking forward to it. But I’d really like to meet you beforehand and get your side of the story.”

  “There’s nothing much to tell.”

  “Then humor me. I’m insanely curious.” Wait for it, wait for it—“How about I interview you on the show? You could get the public behind you.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  Good thing I was driving across Texas—no turns and nothing to run into. Flemming had all my attention.

  “This may be your only chance to tell your side of the story, why you’re doing this research and why you need funding, outside of the hearings. Never underestimate the power of public opinion.”

  “You’re persuasive.”

  “I try.” Carry them along with sheer enthusiasm. That was the trick. I felt like a commercial.

  He hesitated; I let him think about it. Then he said, “Call me again when you get to D.C.”

  At this point, anything that wasn’t “no” was a victory. “You promise you’ll actually answer the phone and not screen me with voice mail?”

  “I’ll answer.”

  “Thank you.”

  Mental calculation—the next show was Friday, in four days. I could reach D.C. by then. I could get Flemming on the show before the hearings started.

  Time for another call, to Matt this time. “Matt? Can you see about setting up this week’s show in Washington, D.C.?”

  For years I hadn’t left the town I lived in, much less driven across country. I didn’t want to leave the place where I was comfortable and safe. It was easy to stay in one place and let my packmates, my alpha, take care of me. Easy to stagnate. Then the show started, and the boundaries became too narrow. What was supposed to happen—what happened among wild wolves, behavior that carried over to the lycanthropic variety—was that a young wolf moved up through the pecking order, testing boundaries until she challenged the leaders themselves, and if she won, she became the alpha.

  I couldn’t do it. I challenged and couldn’t lead. I left town. I’d been essentially homeless since then. Wandering, a rogue wolf.

  It wasn’t so bad.

  I drank coffee, which put me on edge but kept me awake and driving. Before I left Denver I’d never done this, driven for hours by myself, until the asphalt on the highway buzzed and the land whipped by in a blur. It made me feel powerful, in a way. I didn’t have to listen to anyone, I could stop when I wanted, eat where I wanted, and no one second-guessed my directions.

  I took the time to play tourist on the way. I stopped at random bronze historical markers, followed brown landmark highway signs down obscure two-lane highways, saw Civil War battlefields and giant plaster chickens. Maybe after the hearings I could set some kind of crazy goal and make it a publicity stunt: do the show from every state capital, a different city each week for a year. I could get the producers to pay for a trip to Hawaii. Oh, yeah.

  Matt set me up at an Arlington, Virginia, radio station. I got there Friday around noon. I was cutting it close; the show aired live Friday night.

  Lucky for me, Flemming had agreed to be a guest on the show.

  The station’s offices and broadcast center, a low brick fifties-era building with the call letters hung outside in modernist steel, were in a suburban office park overgrown with thick, leafy trees. Inside the swinging glass doors, the place was like a dozen other public and talk radio stations I’d been to: cluttered but respectable, run by sincere people who couldn’t seem to find time to water the yellowing ficus plant in the corner.

  A receptionist sat at a desk crowded with unsorted mail. She was on the phone. I approached, smiling in what I hoped was a friendly and unthreatening manner—at least I hoped that the dazed, vacuous smile I felt would pass for friendly. I could still feel the roar of the car tires in my tendons. She held her hand out i
n a “wait a minute” gesture.

  “—I don’t care what he told you, Grace. He’s cheating on you. Yes . . . yes. See, you already know it. Who works past eleven every night? Insurance salesmen don’t have night shifts, Grace . . . Fine, don’t listen to me, but when you find someone else’s black lace panties in his glove box don’t come cryin’ to me.”

  My life could be worse. I could be hosting a talk show on normal relationship problems.

  After hanging up the phone she turned a sugary smile on me as if nothing had happened. “What can I do for you?”

  Wadded up in my hand I had a piece of paper with the name of the station manager. “I’m here to see Liz Morgan.”

  “I think she may be out to lunch, let me check a minute.” She played tag with the intercom phone system, buzzing room after room with no luck. I was about to tell her not to worry about it, that I’d go take a nap in my car until she got back.

  “I don’t know. I’ll ask.” She looked up from a rather involved conversation on one of the lines. “Can I pass along your name?”

  “Kitty Norville. I should be scheduled to do a show tonight.”

  Raised brows told me she’d heard the name before. She didn’t take her gaze off me when she passed along the answer.

  “Says she’s Kitty Norville . . . that’s right . . . I think so. All right, I’ll send her back.” She put away the handset. “Wes is the assistant manager. He said to go on back and he’ll talk to you. Last door on the right.” She gestured down a hallway.

  I felt her watching me the whole way. Some time ago I’d stated on the air, on live national radio, that I was a werewolf. Listeners generally took that to mean a couple different things: that I was a werewolf, or that I was crazy. Or possibly that I was involved in an outrageous publicity stunt pandering to the gullible and superstitious.

  Any one of them was stare-worthy.

  I arrived at the last door, which stood open. Two desks and two different work spaces occupied the room, which was large enough to establish an uneasy truce between them. The man at the messier of the two stood as soon as I appeared and made his way around the furniture. He left a half-played game of solitaire on his computer.