Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand kn-5

by Carrie Vaughn

  “You’re on the air.”

  “Yeah, hi, thanks for taking my call.” It was a woman, serious in a school librarian kind of way. The not-cool school librarian who told you to be quiet rather than the cool school librarian who slipped you Stephen King books when no one was looking.

  “What’s your question?”

  “I wanted to know: do you find dog shows to be offensive?”

  I raised my eyebrows at the microphone as I took a moment to decide what to say. The audience twittered slightly.

  “You know,” I said. “I never really thought about it, but now that I have, I’m going to say no, they don’t offend me. Not on the surface. I suppose if I thought about what inbreeding does to some of those show dogs, I might be. But I’ve never spent any brain energy on it at all.”

  Now she was offended. She spoke in a huff. “It doesn’t bother you that your canine brethren are being paraded around show rings like slaves?”

  “My canine brethren?” I said. “I don’t have any canine brethren.”

  “How can you say that! You’re a werewolf.”

  “That’s right. I’m a werewolf, not a poodle. What makes you think I have any kinship with dogs?”

  “Well, I thought—”

  “No, obviously you didn’t. I can’t get within twenty feet of my sister’s golden retriever without it barking its lungs out. We’ve got no brethren going on there. Show dogs are pets, while I’m a sentient human being. Do you see the difference?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to say. Don’t you think that the very existence of werewolves, of all lycanthropes, proves that there really isn’t much difference between us at all, and that maybe we should think about extending human rights to all creatures?”

  I had a flash of insight. “Oh my God, are you from PETA or something?”

  A long, ominous pause. Then, “Maybe...”

  I leaned forward and bonked my head on the table, just like Matt was afraid I would do. And the audience laughed, and I blushed, because while I tried to tell myself they were laughing with me, I was pretty sure they were laughing at me.

  “Okay, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not supposed to do that where people can actually see me. All right. Equal rights for animals. What can I say? If I say no, absolutely not, that opens an argument for claiming I’m not human and denying me my civil rights.”

  “Right, exactly,” said PETA lady, sounding like she’d won a point.

  “Okay. So I’m not going to do that. But I’m sure as hell not going to lobby for voting rights for beagles. Here’s the thing: a werewolf isn’t a half-person, half-wolf cousin of the AKC grand champion. I’m a human being with a really whacked-out disease. Apples and oranges. Got it?”

  “But—”

  I clicked her off. “I always get the last word. Ha.”

  During the PETA lady call, one of the doors in the back of the theater opened. That didn’t catch my attention in itself. We didn’t have an intermission, so people had been slipping in and out all evening, usually during the commercial breaks. This time when the door opened, I caught a scent—the smell I’d been missing. Human and animal, merged, inseparable. Lycanthrope.

  A man strode down the far left aisle, making his way to the microphone near the stage. Beside him stalked a hip-high leopard. The animal was sleek, muscles sliding under fur and skin. His tail flicked behind him. His head held low, he glared forward with yellow-green eyes. Some human awareness glinted in those eyes—a lycanthrope. A couple of people screamed, in short bursts of shock. Others tried to push away, leaning back in their seats, crowding into the people next to them, an instinctive reaction, trying to get away from this uncaged predator. The cat ignored the ruckus; the man beside the cat smiled.

  He was medium height, with rich brown hair, like mahogany, and a wicked, I’ve-got-a-secret expression on his tanned, boyishly gorgeous face. He was a lycanthrope, some variety I hadn’t encountered before. It wasn’t just the smell, it was the stance. He moved like a feline, muscles shifting under his almost-too-tight black T-shirt and just-tight-enough jeans. Graceful, poised, ready to pounce. He had a cat-that-ate-the-canary look about him. Literally.

  When the pair reached the microphone, the cat leapt to the stage. This elicited another round of gasps from the audience, and a couple of security guys pounded forward from the wings. I jumped from my chair to intercept the guards.

  “No, wait!” I held my arms out, stopping them, and the two burly guys hesitated, straining forward, ready to do their jobs, glancing at me with uncertainty. But the very last thing I wanted was for them to tangle with a were-leopard, possibly getting scratched or bitten in the process.

  The leopard stalked along the edge of the stage, tail flicking thoughtfully. Still watching me, he sat primly, a few feet away from his companion. We regarded each other, and I resisted an urge to stare, though my heart was racing and Wolf’s hackles were stiff. I suppressed a growl—find out what this was about first. Then get pissed off at the invasion. I couldn’t believe the nerve, bringing a fully shifted lycanthrope into a crowded room like this. My Wolf would have fled, fighting her way clear if she had to. But I had to admire this one’s control. He stood in front of a crowd and hardly seemed to notice. Maybe they just had a question for the show.

  The leopard started licking its paws, like a big old cat, after all. The human half of the pair looked up at me; his stare didn’t quite challenge me, but he was definitely sizing me up. Wanting to see if I’d blink first.

  I never blinked first. Mostly. But I kept glancing at this huge cat, perched a couple of yards away from me. He could shove me over in a single leap.

  I gave the man a hunter’s smile. “Aren’t there laws against letting wild animals out of their cages?”

  “You mean Kay here? He’s perfectly safe,” he said. The leopard blinked at me. He really was a beautiful animal; I wondered about the person inside.

  “How do you know I was talking about him?” I said, raising a brow. The guy actually winked at me. Oh, I hoped the cameras were picking this up. Ratings gold. “And what brings you to The Midnight Hour?”

  “I’ve got a secret. Wondered if you’d be interested.” He had a clear male voice to go with his handsome body. He might have fronted a boy band.

  “I just bet you do. You sound like someone who’s about to make me an offer.”

  He pulled something out of his back pocket and held it up—a pair of tickets. “These are you for you, if you want them.”

  “Front-row seats to see Wayne Newton?”

  “No, not quite,” he said, turning the smile on full force. It was pouty and sultry.

  I moved to the edge of the stage to take his offering, which made the security guys—still lurking behind me, ready to tackle the leopard—twitch, but oh well. I didn’t get any overt aggression from either one of them. Just posturing. I could do posturing.

  Close to him, his smell washed over me like strong aftershave. The lycanthropy on him was thick, like his animal was close to the surface, more fur than skin. He spent a lot of time in animal form, I guessed. The leopard was now close enough to take a swipe at me, but I stayed calm. Kept my breathing steady. Worked very hard to pretend like I wasn’t nervous around him.

  I wasn’t surprised when I looked on the tickets and saw the name of the show printed.

  Smirking, I announced to my audience, both TV and live, “Two tickets to see Balthasar, King of Beasts, at the Hanging Gardens. Trying to make me feel at home, are you?”

  “Oh, there aren’t any werewolves in this show.”

  “But there are... something else?”

  He winked. “It’s a secret.”

  “I get it,” I said, playing to him, the audience, the cameras. “It’s a publicity stunt. You’re here with tickets to Vegas’s hottest animal show, acting all mysterious and talking about a secret, so I will naturally want to check it out. And in the meantime you get a free plug.”

  I almost said something. I almost pointed to
them and called, Lycanthrope! But I was sensitive to revealing the lycanthropic identities of people who didn’t want to be revealed. Until this guy announced the fact himself, I wasn’t going to blow their cover. As far as the audience was concerned, this was a guy and his very well-trained leopard.

  “You really should come see for yourself.”

  This was sure making me wish I’d been able to get Balthasar on for an interview. “So I see the show. Then what?”

  “Then we’ll talk.” He gave me another wink, turned, and walked away, stalking up the aisle like, well, a king of beasts. The leopard sprang off the stage and trotted after him. Most of the people here would assume he was just a trained cat. But didn’t anyone notice that not a single word or hand signal had passed between them?

  I stared after him probably a little longer than I should have. Shaking my head, I brought my attention back on task.

  “Well, it’s just like getting hung up on, except in person. Story of my life.” A few people in the audience made sad, sympathetic noises on my behalf.

  The teleprompter said I had five minutes left. After a moment of panic wondering how I was going to wrap everything up after that bit of excitement, I returned to my chair and got to work.

  “It looks like we’re about out of time this evening. Thank you all so very much for joining me in this great experiment.” And everyone cheered. Victory.

  I closed the show by thanking everyone, introducing everyone, letting the crew and stage managers have their moment in the spotlight, because I thought it would be fun. I finished downstage, front and center, letting the applause crash over me. A person could get addicted to this sort of thing. Live TV. I’d done it and survived, and it felt good. This was the rush that made all the anxiety worthwhile.

  Once the cameras were off, I gave away the rest of the T-shirts and sat on the edge of the stage for half an hour to sign autographs, which was fine, because I had so much nervous energy bubbling in me I wouldn’t have been able to do anything but stand there and shake if I hadn’t had a job to do.

  In the midst of the post-show chaos and winding down, Erica handed me a cordless phone. Through it, Ozzie’s voice greeted me. “It was fabulous. I told you this was a good idea. You’re a natural. How did it feel?”

  “Like I’d fallen from twenty thousand feet and was building my parachute on the way down,” I said. As in airless and desperate. Yet exhilarating. He just laughed.

  We wrapped up a short debriefing. Finally, the only people left were crew breaking down equipment and cleaning up, Dom the vampire with some of his hangers-on, my parents, and Ben. I sat on the edge of the stage to talk to them.

  Dom came to shake my hand and offer congratulations. “Thanks for inviting me, Kitty. That was a lot of fun.”

  “Glad you liked it. Hey—do you know who that guy was with the tickets to Balthasar’s show?”

  “One of the people from the act, I assume,” he said, shrugging. “I don’t keep up with them all.”

  “Really? Every other vampire Master I’ve met has kept files on the local lycanthropes. Total spy crap.”

  “But this is Las Vegas. They leave me alone, I leave them alone. Better that way, don’t you think?” He winked at me before sauntering off with his entourage. The vampires looked like any other night owls crawling around Vegas.

  “Oh, Kitty, we’re so proud of you!” Mom and Dad joined me next, leaving their front-row seats. Big hugs all around.

  “Did you like it? Did you have fun?”

  They said yes, and I had to admit that no matter how old I got, I would still be happy at my parents’ approval. So much for being a rebel.

  Dad nodded at the door Dom had just left through. “Who was that guy?”

  “That was a real live vampire. A real undead vampire, I mean. Friend of a friend.”

  He donned a thoughtful “well, isn’t that something” expression. “Hmm. How about that?”

  Sometimes I thought my parents really hadn’t registered the fact that their daughter was a werewolf and made a living delving into the realm of supernatural horror movies made real. They seemed to regard it all as a rather strange hobby that I’d taken up—they didn’t understand it, but they’d be supportive. That was okay, because I didn’t want them to have to understand it any more than necessary. I wanted them to stay safe. As safe as possible. The world didn’t need supernatural badness to be a scary place. It already had things like cancer.

  Ben joined me, sitting next to me on the edge of the stage.

  “Hello, Ben, how are you?” Mom said, beaming at her soon-to-be son-in-law.

  “Fine, thanks.”

  “You two all ready for tomorrow?”

  The getting-married thing. I kept forgetting. Not really forgetting, but I’d been so focused on the show, it had faded to the background. No, I’m not, I wanted to say. That was post-show nerves talking. “I guess I ought to get some sleep or something. I think I need a drink.”

  Mom took Dad’s hand. “It’s past our bedtime, so we’ll leave you two to it.”

  I said, “This is Las Vegas. You can’t have a bedtime in Vegas.”

  Mom just gave me a look. “Good night, dear.”

  Oh. Right. Bedtime. I didn’t want to know.

  I hugged them each one more time. Then it was just me and Ben.

  We sat for a long time. I took a deep breath through my nose. The familiar scent of him steadied me. He smelled like pack, like home. Safety. I shifted closer, took his arm, and leaned my head on his shoulder.

  “What was that all about?” he said.

  “I think my mom and dad are having too much fun.”

  “Not that. That guy. The were-whatever. And I can only assume that the leopard is from the Balthasar, King of Beasts Show.”

  Ah, yes. I’d have to look at the recording of the show to even guess what that must have looked like from Ben’s point of view.

  “I think he might be a tiger.”

  “So is he cute? Good-looking, I mean? Because I can’t really tell with guys, and it looked like you two might have hit it off.”

  I grinned at him. “Jealous?”

  He grinned right back. “That’s a trick question. If I say yes you’ll accuse me of being paranoid and unreasonable, and if I say no you’ll make some defensive crack about how I don’t think you’re worth getting jealous over.”

  This was what I got for hooking up with a lawyer.

  “They were here to get my attention,” I said. “They want me to go check out their show and ask questions.”

  “Maybe they want to go public.”

  “Then they should have called me earlier,” I grumbled. “I don’t see how I even have time to go talk to them. We’re going to be in the middle of a lot of celebrating tomorrow.”

  He raised his brows and clearly didn’t believe me. “But you’re curious. You want to know what a troupe of performing lycanthropes is really like.”

  “What I really want to know is if they’re there because they want to be, or if something funky is going on. To be part of his act, they’d have to shape-shift every night. That’s not normal, it’s not right.”

  “I’m still having a little trouble finding a baseline normal with this whole situation,” he said.

  He hadn’t been a werewolf for even a year yet. We’d grown so comfortable, I forgot that. At least, I’d grown comfortable. I almost took him for granted. Almost.

  “There’s something weird about the whole thing.”

  He put his arm around me and kissed the top of my head. “You always manage to find the weird stuff, don’t you?”

  I whined. It wasn’t like I went out looking for weird. Much. It just found me.

  “Now, what about that drink you mentioned?” he said.

  When Ben steered me toward the Olympus Hotel’s main bar—right across from the gun show—my feet started dragging. “This wasn’t quite what I had in mind.”

  “This is where all your fans congregated. Think how popular y
ou’ll be.”

  The place was also filled with people from the gun show who looked like Boris.

  “My fans or your fans?” I muttered.

  In fact, we’d only just found places at the bar when someone called, “Ben! Hell, it really is you!”

  A guy with Asian features, short dark hair, a long face and hard gaze, wearing a leather jacket—not a biker leather jacket, but a designer jacket in brown leather with lean, slimming lines—came over from one of the tables. In his thirties, he had polished good looks and the confident stance of someone who was successful in his line of work and proud of it.

  Unlike the meeting with Boris, they engaged in a burly old-pal handshake. “Evan, how you doing?” Ben said.

  “Not bad,” said the suave and smiling Evan. “Yourself?”

  Ben gave a noncommittal shrug. “You here for the exhibition?”

  “You know how it is, it’s a good place to meet up with people. Catch up on all the gossip.”

  “Hear anything good?”

  “I heard about Cormac. That must have been a rough scene.”

  “It could have been worse.”

  Wives who went to their husbands’ business conferences must feel like this. I didn’t even have a drink to hide behind yet. I sat there smiling. In five seconds, I was going to jump in and introduce myself.

  I must have been vibrating or something, because they both looked at me. Ben might have been about to introduce me, but Evan beat him to it.

  “And you’re Kitty Norville. Good to finally meet you,” he said, and we shook hands. He focused his gaze on me like he was taking aim. My shoulders tensed up. Then it clicked.

  I glared. “You were at the show. I saw you! Left-hand side, third row back—you were spying on me!”

  He didn’t try to deny it, and he didn’t seem bothered by it. His laid-back, amiable expression didn’t change. “I wanted to see what a performing werewolf looked like.”

  “Well, I hope you had a grand old time at the freak show—”

  Ben put a hand on my arm. “Kitty. Calm down.” My teeth were bared. I crossed my arms and snarled.