Kitty Goes to War

by Carrie Vaughn

  “No.”

  “Well, I have. And there’s something off about him. I think he should be brought to justice for what he did to New Orleans.”

  He certainly wasn’t alone in thinking someone ought to be brought to justice for happened to New Orleans. But most people were referring to events after the hurricane, not the hurricane itself.

  “The thing is, Charles, science provides us lots of perfectly reasonable, natural explanations for how storms happen. Most people will say that Katrina wasn’t anyone’s fault. There’s no need to go looking for malevolence.”

  “It’s a nice little arrangement, isn’t it? He wreaks all this havoc and everyone just writes it off on convection currents.”

  The guy may have been a crackpot or he may have been spot on the money. But I ran into the problem I usually ran into when dealing with the supernatural: how did we go about proving this connection?

  “Charles, thank you very much for calling, but I’m running out of time and need to move on, all right?”

  “As long as you listen to me. You have to listen. You’re the only one who can do anything to stop him.”

  I highly doubted that. I highly doubted there was anything to do.

  Matt gave me a neck-cutting signal through the window, then held up a finger—one minute to go. I’d been doing the show long enough that my sense of timing was pretty good—I’d given myself just enough time for a closing.

  “All right, folks, we’re out of time. I want to thank everyone who called in for helping me out on my little research project. I’ll certainly let you know if anything comes of it. In the meantime, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you never can tell what’s out there. So good night, stay safe, and until next week this is Kitty Norville, voice of the night, on The Midnight Hour.”

  The on-air sign dimmed, and the recorded closing credits rolled, a familiar wolf howl playing in the background. My own wolf howl, my other voice, the other half of my being.

  I slumped back, exhausted, pulled my headphones off, and rubbed some feeling back into my ears. Matt came in to stand in the doorway between the booth and studio. He was stocky, and he’d recently cut his black hair short. Way short. He used to wear it in a ponytail, but he’d noticed it was thinning up top and didn’t want to end up like our boss, Ozzie, KNOB’s station manager, who compensated for his thinning hair by growing his graying ponytail even longer.

  Just another little change in the world. If you didn’t pay attention to the little changes, you’d wake up one day and the whole universe would be different.

  “How do you think it went?” I said.

  “I think it went fine,” he said. “I always like it when you do investigative stuff. But it’s going to suck if you don’t actually find some conspiracy. Al Capone’s vault, baby.”

  “That won’t matter,” I said. “No conspiracy theory ever really dies. I’ll be perfectly happy if nothing comes of this, because then I won’t have to look over my shoulder every time I drive past a Speedy Mart.”

  “You do spend an awful lot of time looking over your shoulder, don’t you?” he said, and I grimaced, because he was right.

  I was sick and tired of secrets and conspiracies. These shadow groups, entire shadow worlds that seemed bent on destruction, with the rest of the world none the wiser. The worst part was how justified I was in feeling like a conspiracy-theory nut. I’d seen the results with my own eyes. I’d bled over it.

  No more. No one else should have to die for shitty power games. If something was going on with Speedy Mart, I’d figure it out. If nothing was—then that was just fabulous, too. I’d be happy looking like an idiot if it meant nothing was wrong.

  Matt and I said our farewells for the night. Outside the building, Ben was already parked at the curb, waiting to pick me up. My sense of relief and pleasure at seeing him in his car, looking out the window at me, was physical, a warm flush across my skin.

  It didn’t matter how many times we played this scene out—my crawling into the passenger seat after my shift, leaning into each other for a kiss hello—it never got old.

  I leaned in for a second kiss, and a third, this one long enough to taste him.

  “Hm. Hello to you,” he said, when we finally broke apart. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said with a sigh. “Just a little tired.” I kept my hand on his leg as he drove away from the curb; even that light contact helped me relax. I could feel warmth through the fabric of his pants, and the flexing of his muscles as he pressed the gas pedal.

  “Are we going out or going home?” he asked.

  “Home,” I said. “I don’t want to talk to anyone else but you right now.”

  Ben smiled his crooked smile, and all was right with the world.

  TREES MEANT safety. Forest was home. So when I felt trapped, it was in a building, an impossibly vast mansion, with corridors turning at sharp angles, floors rising and falling steeply. I ran, not knowing if I was on two legs or four. It felt like four, but my skin was smooth, furless, which meant I hadn’t turned Wolf. I could smell blood, rotting blood, but I couldn’t track it. It was everywhere. Sometimes blood meant food, sometimes it meant danger. Conflicting feelings of desire and terror confused me. It meant I ran without resolve, even though danger was close at hand, in the next room. Other people were here, also fleeing, and if we could only find each other we’d all be safe. But I couldn’t find anyone. I couldn’t save anyone. I was alone, running and cornered at the same time, and when a shot rang out, I flinched, feeling the burning pain through my body—

  —and woke up, sitting up, breathing too fast, my pulse racing in my throat, painful.

  “Kitty, shh, it’s okay. Calm down.” Ben was right there, arm across my shoulders, face close to mine, whispering comforts. I’d woken up like this before.

  When I could separate myself from it, I knew what the dream was: the building that trapped me was the lodge in Montana where I’d been hunted with a dozen others. Five of us had escaped. We survivors had all been wounded to one degree or another.

  I still had nightmares, months later.

  I covered my face with my hands and took a deep breath. Part of me was still flailing, terrified, furious, looking for a way to lash out with claws and sharp teeth—my Wolf side, surging to the fore. It took all my self-control to soothe her, to pull her back into the cage. I imagined all that power shrinking to a hard knot in my belly. As long as my heart kept racing it was difficult to listen to Ben, my husband.

  “Keep it together,” he murmured, nuzzling my neck, a wolfish gesture of comfort. He stroked my hair, and finally my heartbeat slowed, my muscles unclenched, and I could breathe without thinking about it.

  Human now—mostly human—I slumped into his embrace, wrapped my arms around him, and let out a sigh. I was safe, I was home. Kneeling in bed, we held each other for a long time.

  “You okay?” Ben said finally, his breath ruffling my hair.

  “I don’t know.” My voice was muted by his shoulder, where I rested my head and took in the scent of him. “I dream about them.” The ones I hadn’t saved; Ben knew.

  He pulled away and smoothed my hair back. “You think maybe you should talk to someone about this? Get some counseling?”

  Ben’s gaze was full of concern, and maybe a little frustration. He’d skirted around the subject before, and I’d dodged because I liked to think I was a tough girl.

  I scratched my head and rubbed my eyes, which ached. I needed more sleep, and I was starting to hate sleeping. “I thought I could handle it.”

  “I know,” he said. “I would just really hate to wake up one night and find your wolf tangled up in the sheets. How would I explain the growling to the neighbors?” The condo complex had a no-pets policy. If I ever did lose it and turn Wolf—yeah, that might get a little noisy.

  “That would almost be amusing enough to try it,” I said, turning a lopsided grin.

  “How about I let you talk to them when the complaints come in?
”

  “How about I just try real hard not to turn Wolf in the house?”

  His brow furrowed, giving him a perplexed look. “Do other lycanthropes have house rules like that? No shape-shifting indoors? No silver in the silverware drawer?”

  Ben was still getting used to being werewolf. He was good at overanalyzing the situation, which I found endearing. Even in the dark, I could make out his form and features: his lean frame, handsome face, shadowed eyes that would be hazel in the light, and scruffy hair sticking out, begging me to comb it with my fingers. So I did. That pulled him close to me, and we kissed, his warm mouth lighting my nerves. Lingering tension melted away, and I pressed my naked self to his naked self. He pulled me under the covers, and sufficiently distracted, I felt much better.

  MONDAY, BACK at the office, I spread the map from the show across my desk. I’d marked a dozen spots, locations where people had told me intriguing stories about Speedy Mart. The marks were spread all over the country, in no discernable pattern. So much for that idea. I was about ready to pass it all off as some statistical anomaly—it wasn’t that crazy stuff only happened at a Speedy Mart, it was just that no one talked about it when it happened anywhere else.

  I was still pondering when I got a call. “Hi, Kitty? This is Lisa down in reception, I’ve got a letter here that you need to sign for.”

  “Really? Okay, I’ll be right down.” Now this was exciting. I wasn’t expecting anything fancy. Certainly nothing I needed to sign for.

  I went down the hallway from my office, and down the stairs to the lobby of the KNOB building, where a reception desk against the back wall faced the glass front doors. Lisa, a prim, professional twenty-something, was standing with a delivery guy. He looked to be from a courier service rather than from the postal service or one of the big parcel companies. He wore a jacket with a company logo, but a plain shirt and slacks rather than a uniform. They both looked up at my approach.

  “Are you Katherine Norville?” the guy said. He held an nine-by-twelve manila envelope and a clipboard.

  “Yeah.”

  “Could you sign here?” He pointed to the line of the form on the clipboard, showing that, yes, I did receive the envelope in question. Then he handed me the envelope.

  “Have a nice day,” he said, with kind of a leering smile, then sauntered out of the building.

  “What is it?” Lisa said. “You expecting anything cool?”

  “Not a thing.” I’d started to have kind of a bad feeling about this. The envelope wasn’t all that thick; it probably had some kind of document in it. Something official and important, no doubt, to be delivered by private courier. I opened it right there at the reception desk.

  It was indeed a document, only a few pages thick, fairly innocuous looking. But the cover letter was printed on linen stationery and had an intimidating logo and letterhead with a string of names and “Attorneys at Law” after it. I read the text of the letter a couple of times and still wasn’t sure what exactly it said. But I got the gist of it.

  “Huh,” I said. “I’m being sued for libel.”

  Chapter 2

  REALLY, IT was bound to happen sooner or later.

  I took the document—an honest-to-God summons—to Ozzie, the station manager. I thought he’d blow a gasket, but he seemed to have the same reaction I did—confusion, colored with a tiny bit of awe. The suit was being brought against me on behalf of Harold Franklin, the president of Speedy Mart, for derogatory and damaging comments made on my program about both him and his beloved and respectable business.

  “What the hell did you do?” Ozzie asked, reading the letter for the fourth or fifth time, as I had.

  “Um, I did the last show on Speedy Mart and whether or not it’s at the center of a supernatural conspiracy.”

  He stared at me a moment. “So this doesn’t really come as a surprise.”

  “I know,” I said. “But it was so fast!”

  “You must have really offended him for him to move this quick,” Ozzie said.

  “Or maybe he really does have something to hide,” I said, pointing. “Maybe there really is some kind of cover-up and he’s diverting attention.”

  “Kitty—”

  “Okay, I know. But we just hand this off to the lawyers and they should be able to wiggle us out of it. Right?”

  “I think you should go pull the recording of that show for the lawyers. And what do you mean us?”

  I escaped before having to come up with an answer for him.

  The thing was, Franklin had a point. If my show somehow made people afraid of going to Speedy Mart, or damaged the company’s reputation to a point where the business was negatively affected, the guy had a right to sue me. I just didn’t think I was a big enough fish for him to notice. I had a decent-sized market share, but not that decent. This seemed like an overreaction. A cease-and-desist order and maybe a request for an on-air apology seemed more appropriate. Maybe Franklin and his lawyers were just trying to scare me, and they’d ask for the apology in exchange for withdrawing the lawsuit. I wouldn’t be able to argue with that kind of deal.

  While I was pulling the digital file of Friday’s broadcast and burning it to a CD for the station’s lawyer people, I called my own live-in lawyer for advice.

  After our hellos, I launched right in. “Well, Mr. O’Farrell, attorney-at-law. Guess what? I’m being sued for libel.”

  “Well,” Ben said. “That’s a new one even for you. Who’s suing?”

  “The president of Speedy Mart.”

  “Already? That was fast, you only did that show a couple of days ago.”

  “I know. I’m almost impressed.”

  “I suppose it was only a matter of time.”

  “That’s kind of what I was thinking,” I said. “But I thought libel was when you lied about someone in print.”

  “Print or broadcast media,” he answered. “It’s libel because you have a built-in audience.”

  “So how do I get out of it?”

  “You either prove that what you said wasn’t damaging, or that it isn’t libel because it’s true. You were pretty good about saying that you were only speculating. I wonder what argument they’re going to make.”

  “You think they have a case?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. This isn’t my area of expertise. A civil suit’s a long way from criminal defense. Do you think they have a case?”

  I shrugged. “My instinct is that something really is going on. But I don’t have any way to prove it. I think my mistake was bringing up the president by name. Because even if something is going on, he may not have anything to do with it.”

  “I assume KNOB has lawyers who can handle this?” Ben said.

  “The legal side of it. I’m not sure they can do anything about proving there’s any supernatural involvement.”

  He paused; I could almost hear him thinking over the phone. “I think I have an idea,” he said finally. “You coming home soon?”

  “It may be an hour or so. What’s the plan?”

  “We’ll talk about it tonight.”

  “At least no one’s trying to kill me this time.”

  “Yet,” he said. “Give it time.”

  There was just no arguing with him. As a lawyer, he was trained to expect the worst.

  WHEN I got home, Ben met me at the door and turned me right back around.

  “You feel like going out to dinner, don’t you?” he said.

  “Um, sure?” Ben had that predatory, on-the-prowl gleam in his eye. Not the predatory gleam that came from being a werewolf, but the one he’d had long before he became a werewolf. This came from being a lawyer.

  He had a plan, and I couldn’t wait to see what it was. We were in the car, headed for the freeway when I asked, “Where are we going?”

  “New Moon.”

  New Moon was a downtown bar-and-grill-type restaurant, and we went there more than anyplace else because it felt like home. It practically was home—Ben and I owned it. I�
�d made it a refuge, neutral territory for the lycanthropes in town. A place where we could go and not worry about territory or posturing. New Moon’s manager was Shaun, Ben’s and my lieutenant in Denver’s werewolf pack. Any given evening, a few of us from the pack hung out there.

  When we entered the restaurant, I got an inkling of Ben’s plan—Cormac was sitting at our usual table in back, against the wall.

  Cormac had been out of prison for five months and I still wasn’t sure how I felt about him. Every time we got together, I was happy to see him. And worried, anxious, relieved, guilty, confused, and a few other emotions to boot. I could sense Ben tensing up beside me, a similar stew of conflicting emotions roiling in him. Cormac had saved our lives and ended up in prison for it. He’d had to put his life on hold; we hadn’t. Cormac and I had had a thing, once upon a time. Then he’d brought Ben, his cousin and victim of a recent werewolf attack, to me. I’d taken care of him, Cormac went to jail, and Ben and I got married.

  The three of us understood each other when no one else did. No one else had the history to be able to understand us. We were like the three musketeers, but kinda twisted.

  Cormac stood to meet us as we approached. He had an athletic leanness to him, and an easy, calm way of moving that could be nerve wracking. Physically, he hadn’t changed so much—same rugged features, short brown hair, a trimmed moustache. But he’d aged. His face was a little more lined than it had been, a little more tired. Like even though he’d spent two-plus years behind the same set of walls, he’d seen too much.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said back. And there ended our usual, laconic greeting.

  Ben looked Cormac over, and he wasn’t very subtle about it. He craned his neck, checked his sides, looked as far behind him as he could without actually walking around him. Looking for telltale shapes.

  Cormac glanced ceilingward and said, “I’m not wearing a gun.”

  “Sorry,” Ben said, defensive. “You can’t blame me for worrying.”

  “I’m not stupid,” Cormac said.

  “So you don’t have a gun anywhere? You’re sure?”