Kitty's Big Trouble

by Carrie Vaughn

  For my family

  Acknowledgments

  I had help from all the usual suspects, and more. Thanks to Daniel Abraham for reading an early draft. To Mandy Douglas for reading an early draft and offering very good advice. To Tor/Forge publicist Cassandra Ammerman for arranging my first book tour and working in the extra time for research in San Francisco, which helped immensely. Thanks as usual to Stacy Hague-Hill, David Hartwell, Ashley and Carolyn Grayson, and friends and family for the sanity checks.

  The Playlist

  NORMAN GREENBAUM, “Spirit in the Sky”

  SOCIAL DISTORTION, “Making Believe”

  WARREN ZEVON, “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”

  THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS, “Wicked Little Critta”

  P.K. 14, “The Other Side”

  BLONDIE, “Atomic”

  VERNIAN PROCESS, “The Maple Leaf Rag”

  SQUIRREL NUT ZIPPERS, “Le Grippe”

  PJ HARVEY, “Down by the Water”

  CARSICK CARS, “You Can Listen, You Can Talk”

  THE B-52’S, “Mesopotamia”

  BILLY PRESTON, “Will It Go Round in Circles”

  LISSIE, “Little Lovin’”

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  The Playlist

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Tor Books by Carrie Vaughn

  Praise for the Kitty Norville series

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  “I KNOW,” I said into my phone. “This isn’t exactly standard—”

  “It’s impossible,” said the poor, long-suffering office receptionist at the Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis. He was too polite to just hang up on me. “It’s absolutely impossible.”

  “Maybe you can give me the name and number of someone who might be able to authorize this kind of request? Is there any representative of the Sherman family on record?”

  His responses were starting to sound desperate. “That information is confidential. In fact, I don’t think you’ll be able to get any further on this without some kind of a warrant or a court order.”

  I was afraid of that. I’d been hoping there’d be a friendly way to accomplish this. That I could find a sympathetic historian who would back up my request or explain the situation to one of the descendants and get permission that way. Surely they would want to know the truth as much as I did. Also, I didn’t think I’d be able to convince a judge to issue said court order. The request was based on little more than rabid curiosity.

  I soldiered on, as it were. “There has to be some kind of standard procedure for an exhumation. Can you tell me what that is?”

  “Ms.… Norville, is it?”

  “Yes, Kitty Norville,” I said, thinking calm. I could wear him down with patience.

  “Ms. Norville—can I ask why you want to have General Sherman’s body exhumed?”

  General William T. Sherman, hero of the Civil War on the Union side, war criminal on the Confederate side, considered one of the greatest soldiers and strategists in American history, and all-around icon. And yeah, I wanted to dig him up. It was a little hard to explain, and I hesitated, trying to figure out what to say. Last week I’d received a package from the Library of Congress containing a copy of an interview transcript from the 1930s. It had been made as part of the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal program that employed journalists and other writers to record local histories around the country. Many valuable stories were collected and preserved as part of the program. The one I’d been sent was an interview with a Civil War veteran—one of the last to survive, no doubt. He’d been sixteen when he joined the Confederate army in the middle of the war and was close to ninety when he’d been interviewed, and he claimed that he’d witnessed General Sherman transform into a wolf during the Battle of Vicksburg. A librarian who was also a listener and fan of my radio show discovered it and sent it to me. I had always had my suspicions about Sherman—he looked so rough and tumble in his photos, with his unbuttoned collar, his unkempt beard, and a “screw you” expression. If any Civil War general had been a werewolf, it would be Sherman. But was my hunch and a single interview proof? No. Which was why I wanted to exhume the body, to test any remaining tissue for the presence of lycanthropy.

  Maybe it was best to lay it out there. “I think General Sherman may have been a werewolf and I want to run tests on his remains to find out.”

  Of course, a long pause followed. I kept waiting for the click of a phone hanging up, which would have been fine; I’d have just called one of the other numbers on my list. I hadn’t expected this to be easy.

  “Seriously?” he said finally. The same way he might have said, You’re eating bugs?

  “Yeah. Seriously. So how about it? Don’t you want to help me rewrite American history?”

  “I’m sorry, could I get your name one more time?” he said. “Could you spell it for me? And tell me where you’re calling from?”

  I felt a restraining order coming on. So in the end, I was the one who hung up.

  Oh well. You can’t win them all.

  * * *

  AT HOME that evening I sat on the sofa, library books lying open on the coffee table next to me and my laptop screen showing a half dozen Web sites open. I was supposed to be researching Sherman. Instead, I was reading through the transcript for what must have been the twentieth time.

  Tom Hanson had enlisted in the Confederate army at the age of sixteen. At several points during the interview he mentioned how young he’d been. How innocent, and how foolish. The interviewer kept having to prompt him to return to the focus of the story, his encounter with General Sherman under the light of the full moon.

  One night while his squad was on patrol outside of Vicksburg, Hanson had gotten separated from the others and lost his way in the swampy forest some distance from where the Confederates were camped. Trying to find his way back, he’d stumbled across a pair of Union soldiers—an enlisted man arguing with an officer. The enlisted soldier kept calling the other man “General,” and Hanson swore the officer was General William Sherman himself. He couldn’t explain the argument because it hadn’t made any sense to him—the enlisted man was telling the general that he’d overstepped his bounds, and that he wanted to challenge him. Hanson had heard that Sherman was crazy—he could understand anyone on the Union side wanting him out of command. But that wasn’t up to an enlisted man, and they certainly wouldn’t have been discussing it in the middle of a swamp.

  Hanson didn’t understand it, but he described what happened next. “The general, he took his clothes off. I couldn’t move or he’d’ve heard me, so I didn’t dare. I just sat there and watched. So there he was, naked in the moonlight. And then he changed. Like his body just melted, and I heard his bones snapping. I can’t say that I ever saw a wolf before, but that’s what he turned into—big, shaggy, with yellow eyes. That other soldier, well—he just ran. Didn’t do him any good. That big ol’ wolf chased him down.”

  The door to the condo opened and closed—my husband, Ben, lawyer and fellow werewolf—arriving home. He set his briefcase near the desk of his home office, a corner of the living room, and regarded me where I sat on the sofa, papers on my lap, my head bent in concentration.

  “Still
on that transcript?” he said, his smile amused.

  I sighed. Ben had seen me reading it every night this week, searching for some insight. “It’s fascinating, isn’t it? What if it isn’t just a story? What if he’s right?” I pulled one of the books over, referring to a timeline of Sherman’s life. “Did you know that early on in the war Sherman had a nervous breakdown? He was relieved of duty, and the newspapers and everyone said he was crazy, that he couldn’t take the pressure. But he recovered and when he came back he was this badass general. He and Grant started kicking ass and eventually Sherman marched the Union army through Georgia and won the war. What if that’s when it happened? Somehow he got attacked and infected around the Battle of Bull Run, it knocked him for a loop, he took time off to deal with it, and when he came back he was a super soldier. A werewolf general.”

  “I suppose it’s possible,” he said. “But if you’re right, he kept it really well hidden.”

  “Lots of people keep it really well hidden,” I said. “I’m betting it was easier to keep it hidden then than it is now.”

  He sat on the sofa beside me, which was too tempting an invitation. I leaned toward him, pulling his arm over my shoulder and snuggling against him. As I hoped, he hugged me close and bent his head to my hair, breathing in my scent as I took in his. Our wolf sides, claiming each other.

  I said, “I just keep thinking—who else is out there? What secret histories slipped through the cracks because people kept it hidden or no one believed it? I’m not talking about Vlad Tepes being Dracula. What if Sherman really was a werewolf? Who else might have been werewolves? Maybe there was a reason Rasputin was so hard to kill, and Jack the Ripper was so bloodthirsty—”

  He stopped me with a kiss, which was okay with me. I touched his cheeks and smiled.

  “What would it change?” he said. “If Sherman really was a werewolf, would it really change anything?”

  “We’d know the truth.”

  He looked skeptical. It was a fair question. Did this mean any more than slapping labels on people? In Sherman’s case, it meant a reinterpretation of his history—his nervous breakdown looked a whole lot different if he was a werewolf. But even that was speculation. He might have been infected with lycanthropy years before.

  It wasn’t just the labels. It meant history had a whole other layer to it, and that supernatural beings might have played an active role in guiding human events for centuries. I could almost get conspiracy minded about it.

  “How can you even confirm something like this for sure? In a way that would hold up in court?” he added. Always legal-minded.

  “I’ve been trying to find out how to get his body exhumed—”

  He looked at me. “You haven’t.”

  “Um, yeah. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be.”

  “Of course it is. You can’t just go around digging up graves. Especially famous ones.”

  “Yeah,” I said, wincing. “I know.”

  “You need to find a vampire who knew him,” he said. “Get a corroborating eyewitness account from someone who wasn’t a scared teenager confronting a guy like Sherman.”

  He probably meant it as a joke, but I turned thoughtful.

  “You know,” I said, “I could probably do that.”

  “Honey, if anyone can do it, you can.”

  Damn straight.

  * * *

  “GOOD EVENING, it’s Friday night which means it’s time once again for The Midnight Hour, the show that isn’t afraid of the dark or the creatures who live there. I’m your ever-eager host, Kitty Norville, and I hope you’re ready for another illuminating evening of supernatural shenanigans.”

  Sitting at my table in the studio, in front of the microphone, headphones on, just a few lights glowing in the darkened space, I could imagine myself in the cockpit of an airplane or at the controls of a spaceship, commanding great power. Through the glass, I watched Matt, my sound engineer, at his board. Above the door, the on-air sign glowed red. Epic.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about history and what to do with it. Vampires and werewolves and the like have only been public for a few years. Some of us are milking that publicity for all it’s worth, I’m not ashamed to say. But we’ve been around for a lot longer than that. We must have been. What impact have vampires, werewolves, and magicians had on history? Were any historical figures—let’s say General William Sherman, just as an example—supernatural creatures themselves? Those histories have been deeply buried, either because people didn’t believe or because the stories were written off as folklore and fantasy. Let me tell you, when you start digging there are a lot of stories out there. What I’m looking for now isn’t stories, but proof. That’s where things get tricky, because traditionally, the supernatural doesn’t leave a whole lot of proof lying around.

  “That’s my question for you tonight: what kind of proof should I be looking for, and what kind of proof would you need to be convinced that a beloved historical figure had a toe dipped in the supernatural world?”

  Shows like this, where I threw open the line for calls right from the start in a freeform brainstorm, were often a crapshoot. I could get a lot of thoughtful discussion and gain some new insight. Or I’d end up yelling at people. NPR to Jerry Springer, my show ran the whole spectrum. Brace for impact …

  “For my first call tonight I have Dave from Rochester. Hello, Dave.”

  “Hi, Kitty, thanks for taking my call, it’s so great to get through.” He sounded suitably enthusiastic—a good opener.

  “Thanks for being persistent. What have you got for me?”

  “Well. It seems to me you’re just assuming that supernatural beings have been around for a long time. This stuff has only been making news for a few years now, and maybe that’s because it hasn’t been around that long. What if vampires and werewolves are actually the result of some government experiment that got loose and is totally out of control?”

  “I can assure you that I’m not the result of some government experiment,” I said flatly.

  “Well, no, not directly, but maybe it’s some virus that escaped and spread, and that’s where vampires and werewolves came from. That’s why we don’t have any historical evidence.”

  “On the other hand we have five thousand years of folklore suggesting that these beings have been around for a long time. What about that?”

  “Planted. It’s all a hoax.”

  I blinked at the microphone. That was bold, even for this show. “You’re saying The Epic of Gilgamesh is a hoax? That the story of King Lycaon isn’t really an ancient Greek myth?”

  “That’s right. It’s all been made up in order to convince people that supernatural beings have been around for thousands of years when they’ve really only been around since World War II.”

  “World War II?” I said. “Like some supernatural Manhattan Project?”

  “Yes, exactly! In fact—”

  Oh, yes, please say it, sink my show to this level in the first ten minutes …

  “—it was the Nazis,” Dave from Rochester said.

  I clicked the line to a different call. “And that’s enough of that. Moving on now, next call please. Hello, you’re on the air.”

  “Hi, Kitty, I’m a big fan of the show,” said a female voice, cheerful and outgoing. Suze from L.A. “I just wanted to say, isn’t most of history based on eyewitness accounts? People reporting what they saw? We should have evidence somewhere of people talking about this. But I’m not sure how you’d go about proving something that no one ever talks about.”

  I was right on the edge of whipping out that FWP transcript—a report that had lain buried and forgotten because no one believed it. I wanted my proof before I brought it into the light.

  Instead I said, “Or maybe people have been talking about it, writing about it, whatever, but those accounts were buried because no one believed them. Which leads me to a big question: How trustworthy are eyewitness testimonies? We depend on them for historical account
s, memoirs, battlefield reports, so of course this is going to be high on the list. But is one eyewitness’s story enough? How about two, for corroboration?”

  “The more the better, I guess,” she said. “But you still have the problem of separating truth from fiction.”

  “Exactly. Part of the reason I’m always trying to get vampires on the show is I figure they’ve got to be some of the best eyewitnesses out there. They’ve been around for decades, for centuries. Not only have they seen a lot, they often seem to be in the front row, watching events play out. But I gotta tell you, they don’t seem particularly interested in sharing what they’ve learned. I think they really like keeping secrets from the rest of us. That’s why we haven’t had any vampire celebrity tell-all books yet. Oh, and if there are any vampires out there writing a celebrity tell-all book, please let me know. Thanks for your call, Suze.”

  Matt flagged a call on the monitor—from a vampire. Ooh, was I going to have my wish granted? I liked nothing better than to feature an exclusive. What were the odds?

  “Hello, you’re on the air.”

  “Kitty, if we keep secrets, perhaps it’s for your own good.” The woman had a faint accent, probably European, topped with a touch of finely aged arrogance.

  “So you’re a vampire,” I said. “May I ask how old you are?”

  “You may, but I won’t answer.”

  The usual response; it didn’t surprise me. “Oh, well, I always have to try. Thank you for calling. My second question for you: Why do you get to decide what should be kept secret? Don’t you think everyone has a right to the truth? Even a dangerous truth?”

  “Your attitude about the truth is a bit naïve, don’t you think? The truth isn’t an artifact you can put in a box and study.”

  “But I don’t want to be lied to outright,” I said. “I especially don’t want to be told I’m being lied to for my own good.”