Kitty's House of Horrors

by Carrie Vaughn

  “I believe her,” Anastasia said. “I believe there’s more going on here than we think. I would certainly like to know what.”

  I bet you would, I managed not to mutter. She and Grant were back to studying each other, without looking like they were studying each other. The cynic in me was starting to think they were both plants, in cahoots with Provost to jack up the tension until somebody snapped. All to make the show more exciting. Except I knew Grant wouldn’t do that kind of thing. I thought Grant wouldn’t do that kind of thing. The last thing I needed here was to decide I couldn’t trust anyone.

  “Clearly, you have an unusual talent,” Anastasia said to Tina.

  Tina looked away. “I wish I didn’t, most of the time.”

  “That’s another way to tell the fakes from the real thing,” Grant said, turning to Conrad. “The real psychics tend to treat it as a burden. They tend not to show off.”

  Tina gave him a thin-lipped smile.

  The skeptic crossed his arms, set his expression into a frown. “I’ll give you this much, you all are putting on a great show.”

  “Will you lay off with that?” Tina said.

  For my part, I’d about had it with him, and it had only been two days. “That’s it,” I said, marching to the front door. “I’m doing it right there on the front porch for everyone to see so he’ll just shut the hell up.”

  “Kitty—” Ariel, who was closest, grabbed for my arm. I brushed her away, and a growl cut from my throat.

  She backed away, arms up defensively. Something inside me wanted to howl. I closed my eyes, held my head for a moment while taking several deep breaths, and thought of broccoli. Thought of anything that wouldn’t make me bare my teeth and snarl.

  The room had fallen silent, like the hush at a party after somebody breaks a wineglass. Without the laughing after.

  Making the effort to settle, I rolled my shoulders, straightened my back, and opened my eyes to regard my colleagues and housemates with a friendly, nongrowling smile. I suddenly felt exhausted. But some of the tension went out of the room. Everyone could breathe now.

  “What just happened?” Conrad said.

  “I’m taking a walk. If something’s out there, maybe I’ll catch a sign of it,” I said and went outside.

  This whole situation was designed to make me go crazy. I just had to keep that in mind and not let it get to me. Thank God the nearest full moon was behind me instead of in front of me, or keeping it together would be that much harder.

  I stomped down the front steps to the clearing and already felt better. Closer to the earth, more in my element. I shook my arms and let some of the tension fall out of me. Maybe I could shift. Run as Wolf, just for a little while. Take the edge off.

  Gordon and his camera followed me out, but I ignored him. Ignoring him was getting easier.

  I heard another set of footsteps on the porch and turned back just as I caught Jerome’s scent. My shoulders stiffened, like rising hackles. He hesitated, turned sideways. Came down the steps obliquely instead of right at me. It made me only marginally less twitchy.

  “Well?” I said. Rather ambiguous, but that was about as articulate as I was feeling at the moment.

  “Maybe you have the right idea. If Tina thinks something here’s out to get us, maybe we should go looking for it.”

  “If something here’s out to get us, it’s because Provost and his people planted it for the sake of the show and it’s all a setup.”

  “Fair enough. But have they planned it because they expect us to go after it and figure it out, or not? Why not play along?”

  The bottom line: we’d feel better by actually doing something rather than standing around bitching.

  “For somebody who lets himself get beaten up professionally, you seem to have hung on to a few brain cells,” I said.

  “I think I got out of boxing just in time to save them. Pro wrestling’s a little tamer.”

  I started to say something snide, then stopped. Who was I to judge? “Shall we take a walk around the house? I take clockwise, you take counter, and we’ll see if we find anything.”

  He continued down the steps to join me in looking out over the meadow, the lake with its surface shining metallic in darkness, the shadows of the forest. The light from the lodge’s windows extended only to the edge of the clearing. A faint wind was blowing; we both turned our noses into it and breathed deeply. In a way, with just the two of us here, I felt more comfortable. I wasn’t so aware of the ways I wasn’t human. Jerome wouldn’t think I was strange, sniffing the wind, pacing silently, peering into the darkness. Acting like a wolf on the hunt.

  Both of us took on that body language, prowling step by step around the house, glancing back to check on the other’s progress. Anyone watching from inside would notice it; Conrad would probably say we were only acting. I reached the corner of the lodge and turned my senses outward, letting Wolf bleed into them, letting her instincts tell me if anything was wrong. Moving slowly, I zigzagged to cover more ground, listening for the smallest sounds. What I heard were normal nocturnal noises, the creatures who came out at night, mice or voles in the underbrush, an owl flapping in trees overhead. Nature’s white noise.

  Around the lodge I smelled people. Humans. Part of the crew, I assumed, or residents of the house who had walked here earlier. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that raised my hackles. The night was calm, dark, like it was supposed to be. The lodge had golden light shining in most of the windows, making it an island of welcome warmth. Maybe Wolf wanted to go hunting, but I would be just as happy to go back inside and settle for the evening. As soon as I walked off some of my nerves.

  I was looking for anything out of place, and I found it: a circle of glass and metal perched in a tree, pointed at the back door: another one of the remote cameras. I looked up into it, waved a little, wondering if we were following Provost’s script.

  In the back of the house, I waited to hear footsteps as Jerome and I approached each other. I smelled him first, catching the trace of a fellow werewolf. I marveled at how such a massive man could move so quietly.

  We spotted each other across the scrubby clearing behind the house, froze a moment, caught in each other’s gazes, then relaxed and moved again. I decided I really did want to see him as a wolf at some point before the show ended. I imagined he was impressive.

  “Anything?” I said, and he shook his head.

  “You think it’s all in Tina’s head?”

  “I’ve worked with her before,” I said. “She’s not one to cry wolf. No pun intended.”

  “Then what is going on?” He huffed.

  Did I tell him that I thought the vampires were bringing their own brand of hijinks into the proceedings? That Grant had his own plotline going on in addition to whatever one Provost had worked out for us? I decided I didn’t really want to bring all this up with Jerome. We might have both been werewolves, but he was still a stranger. Not part of my pack.

  “I don’t know,” I said softly. “Let’s get back in before the others start a rumor about us.”

  He leered. “Isn’t that what this show’s all about?”

  “I have my guy back home, and I’d really hate for you two to decide you had to duke it out over me.” Not to mention Jerome could pound Ben into mush. I loved my husband, but he wasn’t built like a tank.

  “I think that may give Provost his next show.”

  I shook my head and marched inside.

  None of us found anything weird; nobody could point to anything specifically wrong, except for the feeling that Tina had, which had now spread to the rest of us by the power of suggestion. Predictably, Conrad said, “You’re all just trying to scare me,” at which point Jerome snarled at him, and half the room jumped. I didn’t. I glared at the wrestler, with a silent admonishment: Cut it out.

  Yeah, I was pretty sure Provost’s ulterior motive was to drive us all crazy, to see who snapped first. I hoped there wouldn’t be any blood when it happened; Provost was pr
obably hoping otherwise.

  In keeping with the seminocturnal schedule, I went to bed a few hours before dawn. My bedroom light had been off only twenty minutes when someone knocked on my door, very softly. If I hadn’t been awake and twitchy already, I wouldn’t have heard it. I could have called for whoever it was to come in, but I wasn’t feeling that trusting and open. I padded to the door and opened it a crack.

  Tina stood outside, pressed close, almost pushing her way in. “Can I talk to you?”

  “Yeah, of course.” I let her in and glanced behind her, expecting to see one of the PAs and a camera, but she’d managed to ditch them. I quickly closed the door.

  Tina paced. She was wringing her hands, looking around like she expected something to jump from the walls at her. I turned on the bedside lamp, which gave just enough light to chase away shadows.

  “Sit down,” I said, settling on the edge of the bed with enough room for her. “Still shaken up?”

  She sat, sighed, but remained tense, bracing her arms on the edge of the mattress. “What do you know about Grant? I mean really know about him?”

  Whatever was going on here, Grant must have been at the center of it, the way people kept asking about him. Was I going to have to sit him down and ask what he was cooking up?

  “He’s a magician,” I said. “Really a magician. Not just stage tricks. He makes things vanish, he opens doorways to… to other places. He knows things. Does things that I’ve never seen before. I can’t explain it, but I always thought he was one of the good guys.”

  Tina’s expression turned confused. “That sounds so… epic.”

  “Yeah. You’d see why I’d rather think of him as one of the good guys.”

  “I’ve heard of people like that,” she said. “But so much of it is stories. Dr. Dee, Aleister Crowley. They’re so shrouded in mystery no one knows what to believe about them. Everything gets written off as tall tales, larger-than-life lies. But you’re saying Odysseus Grant is for real?”

  “Yeah.”

  She leaned forward. “He’s making Jeffrey and me nervous. Jeffrey says the guy doesn’t even have an aura.”

  “Then you know more about what he is than I do.”

  “Kitty, he’s your friend and you went through something together, I understand that. But that hypnotism, or whatever it was, freaked me out. It’s not that he was inside my head, it’s like he’s still there. Poking around my senses, looking through my eyes.” The expression in her gaze was wild.

  I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t begin to understand what she was experiencing. What was strange: I didn’t question what she had told me. Odysseus Grant was capable of anything. “Why would he do that?” I said.

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you. Maybe he doesn’t trust me to tell the truth.”

  “Maybe I could talk to him. Hell, maybe you should talk to him—he’s not a mean guy.”

  “I can’t do that!” She leaned forward, setting her head in her hands. “He scares me.”

  Enough. This was getting out of control. “Tina, I believe you when you say something’s going on. But I also think this whole situation is designed to manipulate us, make us paranoid until someone loses it and one of us shape-shifts or starts sucking blood or speaking in tongues. So we just need to keep it together.”

  Straightening, she took a deep breath. “Okay. Right. You’re right. I’m not going to freak out. But you will talk to Grant?”

  “Yes. Tomorrow.”

  She leaned over for a hug, and I complied. Poor Tina. She must have been even more sensitive to living in a house full of weirdos than I was. All that strange psychic energy, with her in the middle of it. At least Jeffrey understood what she was going through. Jeffrey—I smelled him on her hair. Just a little. As if she’d been leaning on his shoulder. Aw… I didn’t say anything, but I wanted to. Later.

  I loved the idea that at least one good thing might come out of this show.

  chapter 8

  I couldn’t sleep, tossing and turning for a couple of hours. Maybe if I got up, took a walk, and drank another glass of wine, I could relax.

  Outside, the air had a predawn chill, making my breath fog. I loved mornings like this, especially waking up outside after a full moon, naked, curled up with Ben, my skin tingling at the combination of warm bodies and cool air. I could enjoy the world as it seemed to pause and take a breath before my crazy life started up again. Watch the sky get light, try to notice the moment it turned from night to gray dawn to palest blue, then watch the sun rise.

  I went down the path to the edge of the meadow. A mist lay across the valley, drifting over the surface of the lake, clinging to the grass in the meadow, lacework fog waiting for the sun to burn it off. Atmospheric rather than obscuring. I felt better, even if I wouldn’t be getting any more sleep.

  Back at the lodge, Dorian was standing at the end of the porch, leaning forward against the railing and gazing out over the clearing. I scuffed my feet up the path to make noise, so I wouldn’t startle him. He glanced at me slowly, like I’d woken him from a spell.

  “Hi,” I said. “I wasn’t sure I was ever going to see you in daylight, without the escort.”

  He chuckled but didn’t offer any additional commentary. He might have been the quietest guy I’d ever met.

  I should have left him alone to enjoy the moment, but I might not have another chance to talk to him without the vampires. I kept my distance, watching him watch the world. The morning sun was still low in the sky, but it turned the valley golden, the light seeming to paint every tree, every blade of grass. The sky was bright blue, and a hawk was soaring over the meadow.

  “It’s a nice morning,” I said, wincing at the awkward conversational gambit.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I like to do this sometimes. Stay up to watch the sunrise.”

  “When Anastasia lets you off the leash?”

  His smile turned wry. “It isn’t like that. I don’t have to ask her permission.”

  “And you can leave her whenever you want?”

  “I wouldn’t want to.”

  I’d already gotten more from him than I expected. I should have quit while I was ahead. “Can I ask a personal question?”

  He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no. He had a great smile, which suddenly made me want to ask what was so funny.

  “Are you in training?” I said. “It’s my understanding that some people in your position are serving some kind of apprenticeship, and that they hope to become vampires someday.”

  “No, I’m not. I’d miss this too much to ever give it up.” He nodded at the sunlit world. “Anastasia’s offered. To turn me, I mean. But I think I like being alive too much. I stay with her because we’re friends. It’s not so mysterious.”

  “I’ve talked to people who’d give a lot to be in your position. Who’d jump at the offer to become a vampire.”

  “I listen to your show,” he said. “And no offense, but a lot of your callers are either crazy or looking for attention.”

  I decided I really liked Dorian. He’d never call in to my show, because he knew how to fix his own damn problems.

  “Yeah,” I said, grinning. “Can’t argue. So what about the immortality? The power? You’re not attracted to that?”

  “There’s the price for all that,” he said. “I’ve seen it up close. It’s not worth it.” He glanced away, shaking his head.

  “You are wise beyond your years,” I said.

  “If you say so,” he said. “Now. Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Fire away.”

  “Are you one of those people who went looking for this? Did you want to be a werewolf?”

  I said, “If the first question people ask about vampires is ‘How old are you?’ that’s usually the first question people ask lycanthropes.”

  “If you don’t want to answer, I understand—”

  “I was attacked. I wasn’t looking for it.”

  “You seem to have done pretty well with
it despite that,” he said.

  “It was either that or go completely crazy. I got pretty close to that, by the way.”

  He glanced away for a moment. “That’s true of most of this, isn’t it? Cope or go crazy.”

  “Any bets on which way Conrad will go when all this finally hits him?”

  “He’s a basket case waiting to tip over.”

  I giggled. Wouldn’t that be worth the price of admission? I turned back to the door. “I’ll let you enjoy your sunrise. It’s been very nice talking to you, Dorian.”

  “Likewise,” he said, with that gorgeous smile.

  I left him to his sunny morning. It was hard enough to find a quiet moment of solitude around here without me wrecking it.

  Next I called Ben, needing to rant to a friendly ear and hoping to get some outside perspective on whether we were all turning freaky paranoid or if something weird really was going on. Not only was he already awake, he didn’t even let me say hello. “Hey,” he said. “I’ve got something for you. A message from Rick.”

  I perked up. “It’s about”—I didn’t even want to say her name—“what I asked you about?”

  “Yeah. First he wanted to know if this is the Anastasia who’s medium height, Chinese, with a sense of humor.”

  “Yeah, that’s her,” I said.

  “Then he knows her. Met her a hundred or so years ago in San Francisco—and can I just mention how surreal it is talking to Rick about this sort of thing?”

  “What does he know about her?” This was the jackpot. I hadn’t expected Rick to know Anastasia; I’d been grasping, throwing the name out there hoping he’d have some inkling of her reputation. It turned out vampires moved in a very small world indeed.

  “She was the lieutenant of the Master of San Francisco. Sometime in the 1920s, a new Master took over and Anastasia vanished. Rick said he was never sure if she left to save her own skin—or if she’d colluded with the new Master by betraying the old. Since then, he’s caught a rumor of her every decade or so. She tends to keep her head down. He was surprised to hear about her being part of this show. He’s not sure what her game is or where her loyalties are. He says he likes her but doesn’t trust her.”