Kitty Raises Hell

by Carrie Vaughn

  Peter probably wouldn’t be able to answer any of those questions, but I now knew something about T.J. I’d never known before: He’d chosen lycanthropy. He’d gotten himself infected on purpose. And it had made him strong.

  So, T.J., was it worth it? You might have lived longer with HIV.

  No answer came from the beyond.

  “Jesus,” Peter murmured.

  I gave the pages back to him. “I didn’t choose this life. I always wonder why some people do. Why someone like T.J. would.” Not that it made me feel any better.

  “I think he must have been a different person than the one I remember. I just wish—” He shook the thought away. He hadn’t seen his brother in ten years. He’d been a kid. If my memories of the man were idealized, what could his possibly be like?

  We stood in silence, both of us wishing he was still alive.

  “The thing is,” Peter said after a moment, “I don’t know what to do now. I had a plan. I’d find him, and he’d—he’d have a great life. I just knew he would. He’d own a bike shop somewhere, or be a mechanic for some big racer. He’d have his own place and a bunch of great friends. I wanted to be part of that. He’d get me a job, I’d meet his friends, I’d be his little brother again. He’d be happy to see me. I always imagined that he’d be happy to see me. He’d say, ‘I knew you’d find me.’ Like finding him was a test. I never thought that he’d be . . . that he wouldn’t be here. And now I don’t know what to do.”

  I spoke carefully. “I think he’d have wanted you to be your own person. He wouldn’t want you trailing after him like this. Being in his shadow.”

  “Yeah,” he said softly. “I’m sorry I was so rotten before. That I didn’t believe you. It must have been a shock, me calling out of the blue. I didn’t mean to stir up bad memories.”

  “It was a shock,” I said, accepting his apology with a shrug. “But I’m glad you did. I’m glad I got to learn more about him.”

  “Were you really his best friend?”

  That made me smile. “I don’t know about that. But he was definitely my best friend for a while there.”

  Peter chuckled, like he understood the difference.

  We both turned around at Ben’s approach. “Is everything okay?” He gave Peter a sinister look. He was here checking up on me, and the statement was a warning.

  “Everything’s fine,” I said, reassuring. “We’re just going through our own little version of ‘This Is Your Life.’ Ben, this is Peter. T.J.’s younger brother.”

  Ben’s eyes widened a little, and they shook hands.

  Peter said, “Did you know him, too?”

  “No, but he’s kind of a legend around here. A lot of people miss him.”

  “I guess that’s good,” Peter said, shrugging deeper into his jacket, looking younger. “Is it strange, that that makes me feel better?”

  I patted his shoulder, because it didn’t sound strange. He could be proud that T.J. had left a mark on the world. Not everyone did.

  Ben pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “They’re still talking. Tina wants to try again with the Ouija board, but they need to talk to you.”

  Back to it, then. I turned to Peter. “Are you going to be in town long? I can introduce you to more people who knew T.J., if you’d like.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I guess I’ll be around a few more days at least, until I figure out what’s next.”

  “Well. Okay, then.”

  “Kitty—” He stepped forward, looking boyish and nervous. “I don’t know exactly what’s going on here, but is there anything I can do to help?”

  I started to say no, because I didn’t want anyone else involved in this, but I hesitated. The thing we needed, more than almost anything else, was information. And Peter knew how to find information. Another set of eyes doing research had to help.

  “You know anything about paranormal investigation?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “I’m more up on the mundane version.”

  I smiled. “That may be exactly what we need.”

  We went back to the suite. Ben leaned over to mutter at me, “Just what we need, another potential target.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I admitted.

  “So you invited him anyway?”

  “I couldn’t say no.” It wasn’t like I was hoping Peter might replace T.J. It just kind of looked that way from the outside.

  “Everyone, this is Peter,” I said, introducing him.

  The sound of recorded laughter answered me, coming from Jules’s laptop. Not eerie, sinister, Vincent Price laughter. Rather, it sounded like a grown man trying not to chuckle at a silly joke. It was sniggering. Then it vanished into crackling static.

  “What was that?” I said, wincing. The noise grated in my sensitive werewolf ears.

  “EVP. The timing matches it to the appearance of the figure in the fire,” Jules said.

  EVP. Electronic voice phenomenon. Another paranormal investigative mainstay, like EMF detectors. Great. Giving the creature a voice somehow made it even worse. “What’s it mean?”

  “I’m thinking of all the ways someone could claim the figure in that clip is a guy in a fireproof suit, like you said,” he explained. “Even though we all know there was no one else in that building, and the cameras didn’t pick up anything, no movement, nobody entering and leaving, nothing. Because I’m sorry, but that sounds like a guy in a suit laughing at us. Even though I know it isn’t. But that’s what the skeptics are going to call us on when we show this.”

  “But how do you prove a negative?” Peter said. “How do you prove it wasn’t a guy in a suit?” The voice of the skeptic. The voice of reason, rather. If it weren’t for everything else that had happened, I’d be there with him.

  “Now you understand the problem with just about everything we do,” Gary said.

  “Maybe you’ve been going about this backward,” Peter said. “This isn’t random, right? Someone put this in motion. So go to the source. Shut them down on their end.”

  “Kitty can’t go to Vegas,” Ben said. “They already tried to kill her once, I don’t want to give them another chance.”

  “And Odysseus Grant, my contact there, is missing. I’m afraid something’s happened to him.”

  Peter shrugged. “I could go look for him. Maybe dig up anything else on whoever’s doing this.”

  “Would you?” I said.

  “Can you front the money for a plane ticket?”

  Straightforward guy. I liked him. Give him a few more years and a few more hard knocks he could do Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade. “Sure.”

  “Maybe that’s what we need,” Jules said. “We work on the paranormal end of things, and you can figure out how they started this in the first place. Is that a plan?” With a look, he consulted everyone gathered in the room: me, Ben, Peter, his teammates.

  Any plan that didn’t involve Roman made me happy.

  “When can you leave?” I asked Peter.

  “As soon as we get a flight, I can leave. I’ll need to park my bike somewhere,” he said.

  “You can use the carport at our place,” Ben said. “I can drive you to the airport.”

  The plan, such as it was, came together. Using Jules’s computer, we ordered tickets for an afternoon flight for Peter. Ben and Peter would drive to the condo to drop off Peter’s motorcycle, then Ben would drive him to the airport. I’d stay and help with the research, even though I wasn’t much good for anything beyond creative Internet searches. Sometimes, creative Internet searches could be incredibly useful.

  The hope was we’d have more information by evening, so we wouldn’t be going into the second séance quite so blind. Roman kept stressing how little time we had to solve this thing. I didn’t know what that meant, but the sooner the eureka moment came, the better.

  Peter and Ben headed out. On his way out, Ben took my wrist and pulled me to a private corner on the porch. It was about as domineering as he ever got with me, and I co
uldn’t say that I liked it.

  I pulled my arm away from him and glared. “What?”

  He held my face in his hands and studied me, looking into my eyes like he could see through them, see to what I was thinking.

  “Ben.” He was starting to freak me out.

  “I just know you’re going to do something stupid and crazy as soon as I leave.”

  I smirked. “Don’t have a whole lot of faith in me, do you?”

  Glancing away, he brushed his fingers along my hair, then shoved his hands in his pockets. “We joke about being a pack. Like it’s an excuse for every little neurotic twitch we have about each other. But it’s real. It’s there. It drives me crazy thinking you might be in trouble and I can’t help you.”

  I knew that fear. There’d been times Ben was in trouble, when I’d believed I was too late to save him. Racing to him with a hole growing in my gut, draining everything but panic. I knew what Ben was feeling.

  “Likewise,” I murmured. “But do you think we could live never letting each other out of our sight?”

  He chuckled. “We’d really drive each other crazy.”

  “We were both lone wolves for too long, weren’t we? Not used to all this togetherness and sharing.”

  “Ah, more pop psychology.”

  By this time we’d pulled each other into a hug, belying my claim. “That’s me,” I said, tipping back my head so I could nuzzle his chin. He obliged me with a kiss. And another. We sort of kept going like that until someone cleared his throat. Loudly.

  “Um, yeah,” Peter said from halfway down the sidewalk, pointing a thumb over his shoulder. “Sorry, but we should get going.”

  Ben and I managed to pry ourselves apart. “Grr,” I muttered.

  He held my shoulders and planted one more kiss on my forehead. “Call me if something happens. Call me if you go anywhere. Okay?”

  “I will, I promise.”

  “Be careful,” he said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “I never do anything stupid,” I said.

  He gave me a very unconvinced glare.

  “You be careful, too,” I said.

  He left with Peter and didn’t look back.

  Right. Time to get to work. No sense worrying about him yet.

  Chapter 16

  Gary, still recovering, went to sleep. Jules had been making phone calls, about a dozen by my count, and the conversations ranged from merely odd to outright bizarre. He’d been saying things like, “Yeah, but this isn’t localized like the Enfield Poltergeist. I’m talking about free-ranging activities linked to a specific person. You’ve never seen a similar case?” and “But EMF readings aren’t a reliable indicator of psychic hostility.” Finally, he said something that made sense to me: “Professor, I’m telling you, there was a fucking humanoid shape standing in the flames and laughing at us! No, it wasn’t a guy in an asbestos suit!”

  So. Jules’s contacts weren’t panning out so much.

  Tina and I had been engrossed in Internet research on two different laptops. I’d been learning a lot about hauntings, demonic possession, hoaxes, and the people who talk about them. It was like a religion: No amount of proof seemed able to sway the absolute skeptics or the absolute believers.

  Typing in a phrase like “demonic communication” got about a quarter of a million hits. After looking at a dozen sites, my eyes started to glaze over. The tones varied from wild belief to scientific skepticism. But a phrase kept jumping out at me, something that none of the Paradox crew had mentioned yet.

  I leaned back, stared at the screen a good long time, and finally asked, “What do you guys think about trance mediums?”

  Tina didn’t say anything. Jules peered over the screen of his own laptop.

  “Theory or practice?” he said.

  I shrugged. “Both.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “The theory is that certain people have the ability to channel spirits directly. They go into a trance, and any presence at a haunted location can speak through them. In practice, it tends to be bollocks. It’s too hard to verify and too easy to fake. The charlatans have built up this image of it being really dangerous, so they use it as a way to get a good scare out of people.”

  “So it’s not real?” I said.

  “It’s real,” Tina said. “Just very rare.”

  “Do you think it’s something we could use to learn more about this thing?” I said.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Tina said quickly.

  Jules blinked at Tina. “Wait a minute. Tina. What do you know about trance mediums? It’s not actually something . . . I mean you don’t have any experience with it. Do you?”

  She smiled. “It’s almost gratifying that you’re taking me seriously now.”

  “Can you really do it?” Jules said.

  Her hesitation, and the way her gaze darted nervously between us was enough of an answer. She couldn’t come right out and say no.

  “Oh, my God, Tina, this is incredible. We’ve got to get a tape of this. If we can show what the real thing looks like and maybe find a way to demonstrate how the fakes—”

  “No,” she shook her head. “I want to help, really I do, but this—the Ouija board is one thing, but actually channeling it directly . . . it is dangerous. I’ve never wanted to get that close. It’s better having something like the board between me and the phenomenon.”

  A lead, any lead, was too good to give up. I said, “But Tina, if you could contact it directly—”

  Tina said, “This thing has killed. If I let it inside me—could we even stop it?”

  “Or maybe we could stop it from killing again,” I said.

  “If you could talk to it, directly, through me,” Tina said. “What would you say?”

  Good question. “I’d want to find out where it came from, what it wants, and what I need to do to convince it to go away. However it was sent here, there has to be a way to send it back again. If it’s sentient, I have to be able to reason with it.” That was my idealism talking again.

  Tina took a deep breath. “The reason I’ve kept quiet all this time about what I can do is because in a way, even when this stuff works, it’s still all parlor tricks. The only people who are really interested are the ones who want to exploit it, or desperate people messed up with grief, like Peter. They treat it like a psychic hotline they can call up whenever they want. When really, I don’t understand what’s going on most of the time.”

  “I’m just asking you to try.”

  “Gary wouldn’t go for it,” Tina said.

  “We’ll tell him it’s an experiment,” Jules said.

  Tina leaned back and studied the ceiling. Communing with the beyond, maybe. I wondered for a moment what it would be like to be her. Did she hear voices all the time? Some of the time? Was it like listening to a faint radio, like she only tuned in to distant spirits, or did they speak to her directly, loudly? How did a person live with something like that?

  How annoyed would she be if I asked her all these questions?

  Rubbing her face, she leaned forward and let out a sigh. A weight seemed to settle on her, slumping her shoulders, pulling her lips into a frown. It made her look older, far different from her screen persona. It wasn’t fear or trepidation, I didn’t think. More like resignation.

  “Here’s what we do. I call the shots. If it doesn’t feel right, we stop, no arguing. Got it?”

  Jules and I nodded.

  “Where are we going to do this?” I asked. “What can we burn down this time?”

  She scowled at me. “Not here. We have to keep at least one place safe. Can we get into New Moon? It talked to us once, there.”

  I shook my head. “If we try to get in before the investigators are done with it, it’ll screw up the insurance.”

  “Then we go to Flint House,” she said.

  “The house that kills people?” I might have shrieked a little.

  “I figure the demon’ll know where to find us, it’s been there before.”<
br />
  A combined sense of curiosity and inevitability drove us. We wanted to see what would happen. We also didn’t have a whole lot of other options.

  Well, there was always running away. Except we had no guarantee the thing wouldn’t follow us. Which was also the problem with me letting it go ahead and get me. Self-sacrifice was all well and good if you could guarantee that it would actually stop the attacks. Wouldn’t we all feel stupid if I let it kill me and it just kept attacking? Not that I’d be feeling much of anything at all. Or maybe I would, and that was another problem with this whole life-after-death concept.

  I’d also kind of missed the moment when I stopped being able to run away. I had too much to protect now.

  Being proactive was better than being morbid. So I helped Tina and the others set up another séance at Flint House. Jules summoned the Paradox PI camera crew, which arrived with the equipment van to set up the usual array of cameras, microphones, and gear.

  “You guys really like getting your footage,” I said. “You’ll probably get a whole season’s worth of episodes out of this.”

  “At this point, our production schedule is already screwed up beyond repair. We’re doing this for science,” Jules said. “Maybe we can get some hard, incontrovertible measurements. This is for posterity.”

  Almost made me feel like we were doing something noble.

  “But it wouldn’t hurt to get a good episode out of this,” Tina called from the other room, where she was setting up another camera. “If I’m going to do this for science I want some good screen time out of it.”

  Noble and commercially viable. I could go for that.

  I’d made up another batch of the blood-and-ruin potion. I should come up with a better name for it, like “Eau de Ick.”