Kitty's House of Horrors kn-7

by Carrie Vaughn

  “Bitching isn’t going to get it over with any faster. Think of it as a party game. Like Pin the Tail on the Donkey,” I said. “Who’s first?” We all glanced guiltily away—no one wanted to be first. We weren’t even bothering to look enthusiastic.

  “Conrad, you pick, since you seem to be the one in charge,” Anastasia said.

  “Let’s see,” Conrad said in a mock-serious tone. “Tina and Jeffrey are supposed to figure out where it is using their psychic powers, right? The werewolves… what are you supposed to do, sniff it out?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Jerome said.

  “The vampires do what, fly through the air and use super vision?”

  “You watch too many bad movies,” Gemma said.

  Conrad huffed and said, “And maybe Odysseus can pull it out of his top hat.”

  Tina looked at Grant. “Can you really do that?”

  Grant’s lips turned in a thin smile. “Not without preparation and a trapdoor.”

  Conrad shook his head. “I still can’t tell if you think you’re for real or not.”

  “A lot of what we’re doing here deals with perception rather than truth,” Grant said. “Many would argue that reality depends more on the former than the latter.”

  There was a pause as we all absorbed that. Gemma’s forehead wrinkled, like she was still parsing the sentence.

  “Right, yeah,” Conrad said finally. “So, I still perceive that you’re all deluded or faking. I think Tina and Ariel should go first.”

  Ariel shrugged. “I don’t even have any weird talents. I’m like Kitty, I just talk too much.”

  “Come on, why us?” Tina said.

  “Because I’m betting you’ll put on the best show,” Conrad said.

  And they did. At least Tina did. She started by choosing one of the lockets, closing her eyes, feeling it. Picking up vibes, whatever. I might have believed in the things she could do, but I still didn’t understand how it worked.

  “What do you want me to do?” Ariel whispered, clearly in awe of the psychic.

  “Hold the flashlight,” Tina said, retrieving the light from the kitchen counter.

  They went outside. Gordon followed them with one of the cameras.

  “What if they don’t find it?” Jerome said.

  Lee sat back and stretched his arms over his head. “It’s going to be a long night.”

  Tina and Ariel returned, prize in hand, about forty minutes later. Which, as long as it seemed, was still more quickly than I would have expected. It didn’t bode well, because I was pretty sure we wouldn’t be able to find our half so quickly, and I kind of wanted to win. And I hated that I kind of wanted to win, because that meant I was playing Provost’s game. I’d just have to be obnoxious about it.

  Ariel was bubbling, holding up both halves of the locket for all to see. Tina looked annoyed. She held a crooked, forked stick a couple of feet long that she might have picked up off the ground.

  “Is that a dowsing rod?” Jeffrey said. Tina nodded.

  “A dowsing rod?” Conrad said. “Are you serious?”

  “Took us straight to it,” Ariel said.

  Jeffrey grinned at Tina. “You are so cool.” She blushed.

  Conrad shook his head, as skeptical as ever, but he wrote the time down on the sheet of paper anyway.

  “It’s spooky out there,” Tina said. “I’d just as soon not have to go out at night again.”

  “Spooky?” I said. Meaning: spookier than a nighttime forest usually is?

  “Maybe I’m still creeped out by that hypnotism trick last night.” She threw Grant a glare.

  “You should trust your instincts,” Grant said. “If you think something’s out there, you should listen to that feeling.”

  “That’s just it, I can listen to my instincts all I want, but unless I get something specific, I’m just panicking.” She slumped into an armchair, shrugging off further inquiry. “Who’s next?”

  Jeffrey and Lee went next. Jeffrey touched the locket like Tina had. Lee held the piece of jewelry to his nose and took a deep breath. Taking in the scent. It took them about forty-five minutes, and when they returned, Tina and Ariel did a little high-five because they were still in the lead.

  “These things must not be very well hidden,” Conrad observed. “I guess Provost wouldn’t want to make it too hard.”

  “Sometimes when you’re looking for something, it just calls out to you,” Jeffrey said.

  Then came Jerome and me. We both took big draws of air off our locket, the oval one. Not that it would help, because it smelled generic—cheap metal, a little bit tangy, and a little bit like Provost’s aftershave. Maybe that would be enough to give me a trail. Really, I didn’t know how we were going to manage this. Picking a weak scent out of the wilderness was like looking for a needle in a haystack. No—a specific piece of hay in a haystack.

  Jerome and I ended up outside, along with Gordon the PA and his camera, looking into the great outdoors, letting our eyesight adjust to the darkness. I turned my nose up, breathed deep, and caught the trail of Provost’s aftershave. Leading right back to the lodge, of course.

  “I’m not sure this is going to work,” I said.

  “Well, let’s get started doing something. Crisscross the ground, cover all the area around the house, see what we can pick up.” It was as good a plan as any.

  We split up, him taking the front of the lodge and me taking the back. I caught the trails of the teams that had gone before us and ignored them. I was looking for Provost.

  “Kitty!” Jerome called, and I trotted over to join him.

  He was kneeling, resting one hand on the ground, head bent over. His powerful body was taut, like he was ready to run, his gaze up and watchful. He looked animal, a little bit of his wolf bleeding into his gaze. Not wanting to set him off, I approached cautiously, obliquely.

  “There,” he said, nodding in the direction where the woods joined the meadow, a little ways from the lodge. Nose flaring, taking in the air, I caught it—Provost. I nodded, and we set off, stalking our prey.

  We went carefully for about ten minutes. The trail was faint, but we were able to follow it. Especially after we told Gordon he had to stand downwind. A strange, twilight feeling came over me; I was feeling more wolf than human, even though I wasn’t shifting; I was still solid within my human skin, but this felt like hunting. Jerome and I hadn’t spoken since we left the lodge—we communicated by glances, by tilts of our heads and shoulders. The night blazed with information. I saw everything clearly, heard a hundred little noises in the woods and meadow, from an owl’s swoop of wings to insects and mice burrowing through grass. Being part of this world felt so natural. I’d be perfectly happy spending the whole night out here and not going back to the lodge. And wouldn’t that shake things up?

  I followed the trail, but at one point I branched right and Jerome branched left. Brow furrowed, confused, I backtracked, zigzagged over the ground, reading the scents of the world like it was a book. Sure enough, the trail split. Joey Provost had been over this ground twice, in two different directions.

  Noticing I had stopped, Jerome looked back at me.

  “There are two trails here,” I said, wincing because my speech sounded so loud and intrusive. “Which is right?”

  Jerome went over the same ground and found what I did. He took a moment to gather words, like he, too, had to remember human speech. “You sure it isn’t a false trail? When he was planting the other teams’ lockets?”

  “It probably is. Just in case, you stick to the main trail and I’ll check this one out. If it goes to the wrong locket, I’ll turn back and catch up with you.”

  “Come on, guys, please don’t split up,” Gordon said. “Who am I supposed to follow?”

  “Easy—whichever one of us takes the right trail, right?” I said. “Did Joey tell you where he hid the thing?”

  Gordon almost looked surly. “Jerome, you wait here. I’ll follow Kitty first, then come back and follow
you.”

  That was actually a fairly elegant solution. Jerome didn’t look happy about it, but he crossed his arms and waited.

  We split up.

  The trail continued faintly, mostly because there were so many smells, so much to take in. This area may have been isolated, but other people had been through here. Hikers, hunters, whatever.

  I lost the scent in a clearing. No—the trail stopped. I walked around the perimeter, and it didn’t continue further. Provost had stopped here, but I didn’t find a locket piece. His scent didn’t linger in any one place; rather, he seemed to have come here, paced around, then left again by the same path.

  I did find other signs, though: the remains of a meal, bone and gristle from someone’s chicken dinner, haphazardly buried with a thin layer of dirt thrown over it. A mashed-down square space—a tent footprint. A tree that had done latrine duty. Someone had camped here recently.

  “Hey, Gordon? Do you know if anyone else has been in the area? Was anyone from the crew camping or something?” I glanced over my shoulder to ask. I showed him what I was talking about, the evidence of occupation.

  He had to lower the camera to see what I was looking at. After a cursory glance, he shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think it was any of us.”

  That moment, Jerome found us hunched at the edge of the camp, staring. My face scrunched up with concentration.

  “I got it,” he said, holding up a piece of locket on a chain.

  “Hey, you were supposed to wait!” Gordon said, then hurried to lift his camera in place and start recording.

  Jerome ignored him. “What’s wrong?”

  “What do you make of this?” I gestured around the clearing and gave Jerome a few minutes to find the same things I had. A normal person without a whole lot of tracking skills would have overlooked the signs. To a werewolf with a hyperactive sense of smell, the evidence jumped out.

  Jerome looked at me. “Who do you think was here?”

  “Besides Provost? I don’t know. There were two others, I think. Valenti maybe?”

  “You think maybe someone’s spying on us? On the lodge, the production, whatever?” he said.

  “Where are they now? Where’d they go?”

  The trails went out, then disappeared. Whoever had been here had scattered. I shook my head.

  “Should we be worried?” Gordon said.

  I sighed. “I’m always worried. We should get back.”

  We returned to the lodge, and if Jerome and I looked unhappy, the others assumed it was because we had the slowest time yet. Next up, the vampires took about as long as the psychics had, and I couldn’t have said how they did it. Maybe they just looked.

  Odysseus Grant, all by himself, ended up winning. When his turn came, Conrad started the stopwatch. Grant held the original piece of the locket for a moment, running his thumb along the chain. He set it down on the table, walked out the front door, closed it behind him. Less than half a minute later—not even enough time for the rest of us to sit back and start a conversation—he returned. Holding up the other half of the locket.

  I assumed that all four prizes were hidden about an equal distance away from the lodge. Jerome and I had managed to find ours, after some trial and error and a lot of hunting, in an hour. The box with the locket piece itself was at least a quarter mile away—it took fifteen minutes just to walk there and back, so how had Grant returned with it in mere seconds? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. This may have been all about putting the whammy on Conrad, but I had limits.

  “Wait. How did you find it so fast?” Conrad said.

  “I pulled it out of my top hat,” Grant said.

  Conrad sputtered, “I thought you said—”

  Tina glared. “Odysseus? You don’t have a top hat.”

  Grant just smiled.

  “I call shenanigans,” Conrad said.

  “You’ve been calling shenanigans all week,” I said. “Why stop now?”

  “But I want to know how he did it.” He turned to Grant. “You’re in on it, right? You had the other half in your pocket the whole time.”

  “If you’ve already decided what to believe, I can’t possibly convince you otherwise,” Grant said.

  “Mr. Grant is full of mystery, isn’t he?” Anastasia said, her tone stinging. “Really, Mr. Grant, tell us—are you a ringer? Are you here as one of us—or for another reason entirely?”

  I rolled my eyes at the conspiracy. “Oh, please.”

  But everyone else was looking at Odysseus. Tina, who’d been suspicious of him since the hypnotism; Jeffrey, who couldn’t see his aura; the others, who simply didn’t know what to think of him. Once again, it would make great TV.

  “This is going to go all Lord of the Flies on us, isn’t it?” I wondered if that was the idea. I shook my head. “We’re better than that, people.”

  That broke the tension, or rather broke it enough for us to stop glaring at each other.

  Ariel stood. “It’s late. I think I’ll head to bed. So, good night, everyone. We’ll all feel better in the morning.”

  Jerome and Lee followed. Then Conrad. Then Tina and Jeffrey, glancing at those of us remaining as they went to the stairs, frowning.

  Anastasia and Grant didn’t look away from each other. Epic staring match.

  “Anastasia?” Dorian said.

  “It’s all right. You and Gemma go on.” Dorian touched the younger vampire, and the two of them walked arm in arm to the basement. “Gordon, you’re probably tired. Why don’t you call it a night?” And amazingly, the PA listened to her, wandering to the back room and leaving the front of the house without a camera operator.

  “Kitty, would you give us some privacy, as well?” Anastasia said. Hint hint.

  “Oh no,” I said. “Somebody’s got to stick around and keep you guys from killing each other.”

  Her lips flickered a smile. “You really think you could stop us?”

  She was right. Both of them could knock me aside, werewolf or no. “I’m not leaving,” I said, no matter how unable I was to back up my bravado.

  Didn’t matter; she proceeded to ignore me.

  “Odysseus Grant,” the vampire said, in the way of a judge preparing a verdict.

  The magician met her gaze, didn’t flinch. Shocking, astonishing—vampires had power in their gazes. Grant didn’t seem to care. Her gaze didn’t affect him.

  I didn’t necessarily want to be here for this. They faced each other in some kind of silent, telepathic battle.

  “You’re going to ask me about Roman,” Grant said finally. He started pacing, a few steps one way, then back. Calculated, intimidating. “Has he contacted me. Am I working for him. Will I report to him about you. Will I finish you for him.”

  “You can’t finish me.”

  “The difficulty is, I have some of the same questions about you. What are you working for?”

  “Not who am I working for?” she said, her voice smooth as silk. He nodded, the barest inclination of his head. “So, are you working for Roman? Has he sent you to kill me?”

  “Why should I answer your questions when you haven’t answered mine?”

  “You guys are idiots,” I said. They both looked at me like they’d forgotten I was there. Or like they’d expected me to stay polite and quiet. To merely witness.

  Didn’t they know me better by now?

  “You’re the two most powerful people in this house, but that doesn’t automatically make you rivals, does it? So can you please just lay out what you’re really worried about and quit with this clandestine bullshit?” Like my bitching would really get them to be reasonable.

  And yet, after a moment, Grant said, “All right. I learned about Roman last year—with Kitty’s help, I might add. I learned that he controlled Las Vegas—my city—through two different vampires, different fronts that hid his identity. An obfuscating sleight of hand that I can almost appreciate. But I don’t, because this is a being who is consolidating power, who doesn’t want peop
le to know he’s consolidating power. I’m trying to learn more about him. Now, perhaps I should apologize for my suspicion, but you’re a vampire, an old one, and it’s more likely that you’re another front acting on his behalf than an independent force acting against him, as I am. There it is. I’ve laid it all out.”

  She considered him. “Telling me exactly what I’d like to hear. What would show you in the best light in my eyes.”

  “Assuming we’re both telling the truth, we’re both working for the same thing,” Grant said.

  “Assuming,” she said, painstakingly polite.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, raising my hand. Thinking hard—I had to get the thought out before I lost it. This was important. “Why is this about Roman? How would he know about this crazy little reality show, and why would he even care? If he wanted to go after you all, or recruit you, or whatever, why would he do it here? Unless—unless the whole show is a front.”

  Grant had said it himself: fronts behind fronts behind fronts again. This was exactly how Roman operated. Now they were both looking at me, and not as an annoyance. Rather, I was suddenly interesting to them.

  The magician followed the thought through. “If someone like Roman wanted to remove some of his rivals, getting them in one place like this is the perfect opportunity.”

  “Jerome and I found a campsite out in the woods. Like someone’s been out here watching the place.”

  “Roman wouldn’t go through all the trouble,” Anastasia said. “Would he? That would mean Provost is the one working for him.”

  I looked away. “I don’t know. It’s crazy. I’m too full up with conspiracy theories right now. But if you’re both working against Roman, you play into his plans by fighting with each other.”

  “Roman’s plans stretch across centuries,” Anastasia said. “Nothing’s too far-fetched.”

  “If we’re right, what do we do about it?” Grant said.

  “We watch,” she said. “We wait.”

  “Ah, the vampire way,” I said. “I don’t have that much time. I’m going to poke the wasp nest.”

  I stood and went to the back of the lodge, to Provost’s production room.