Kitty and the Midnight Hour

by Carrie Vaughn

  I kept my breathing slow and regular. I’d let her out when I wanted her out, and not a second earlier.

  The forest was silver, the trees shadows. Fallen leaves rustled as nighttime animals foraged. I ignored the noises, the awareness of the life surrounding me. I pulled off my T-shirt, felt the moonlight touch my skin.

  I put my clothes in the hollow formed by a fallen tree and a boulder. The space was big enough to sleep in, when I was finished. I backed away, naked, every pore tingling.

  I could do this alone. I’d be safe.

  I counted down from five—

  “One” came out as a wolf’s howl.

  The animal, rabbit, squeals once, falls still. Blood fills mouth, burns like fire. This is life, joy, ecstasy, feeding by the silver light. . .

  If turning Wolf felt like being drunk, the next day definitely felt like being hungover.

  I lay in the dirt and decayed leaves, naked, missing the other wolves terribly. We always woke up together, in a dog pile, so to speak, and I’d always woken up with T.J. at my back. At least I remembered how I got here, this time. I whined, groaned, stretched, found my clothes, brushed myself off, and got dressed. The sky was gray; the sun would rise soon. I wanted to be out of here by then.

  I got to my car just as the first hikers of the morning pulled into the trailhead parking area. I must have looked a mess: hair tangled, shirt untucked, carrying sneakers in my hand. They stared. I glared at them as I climbed into my own car and drove back to the hotel for a shower.

  At noon I was driving on I-40, heading west. It seemed like a good place to be, for a while. I’d end up in Los Angeles, and that sounded like an adventure.

  However, the middle of the desert between Flagstaff and L.A. wasn’t especially thrilling. I’d played just about every CD I’d brought with me while I traveled through a land of no radio reception.

  Which made it all the more surreal when my cell phone rang.

  Phone reception? Out here?

  I put the hands-free earpiece in and turned on the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Kitty. It’s Ben.”

  I groaned. Ben O’Farrell was my lawyer. Sharp as a tack and vaguely disreputable. He’d agreed to represent me, after all.

  “Happy to hear you, too.”

  “Ben, it’s not that I don’t like you, but every time you call it’s bad news.”

  “You’ve been subpoenaed by the Senate.”

  Ben was not one to mince words.

  “Excuse me?”

  “A special oversight committee of the United States Senate requests the honor of your presence at upcoming hearings regarding the Center for the Study of Paranatural Biology. I guess they think you’re some kind of expert on the subject.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  Yeah, I’d heard him, and as a result my brain froze. Senate? Subpoena? Hearings? As in Joe McCarthy and the Hollywood blacklist? As in Iran-Contra?

  “Kitty?”

  “Is this bad? I mean, how bad is it?”

  “Calm down. It isn’t bad. Senate committees have hearings all the time. It’s how they get information. Since they don’t know anything about paranatural biology, they’ve called hearings.”

  It made sense. He even made it sound routine. I still couldn’t keep the tone of panic out of my voice. “What am I going to do?”

  “You’re going to go to Washington, D.C., and answer the nice senators’ questions.”

  That was on the other side of the country. How much time did I have? Could I drive it? Fly? Did I have anything I could wear to Congress? Would they tell me the questions they wanted to ask ahead of time, as if I could study for it like an exam?

  They didn’t expect me to do this by myself, did they?

  “Ben? You have to come with me.”

  Now he sounded panicked. “Oh no. They’re just going to ask you questions. You don’t need a lawyer there.”

  “Come on. Please? Think of it as a vacation. It’ll all go on the expense account.”

  “I don’t have time—”

  “Honestly, what do you think the odds are that I can keep out of trouble once I open my mouth? Isn’t there this whole ‘contempt of Congress’ thing, that happens when I say something that pisses them off? Would you rather be there from the start or have to fly in, in the middle of things, to get me out of jail for mouthing off at somebody important?”

  His sigh was that of a martyr. “When you’re right, you’re right.”

  Victory! “Thanks, Ben. I really appreciate it. When do we need to be there?”

  “We’ve got a couple of weeks yet.”

  And here I was, going the wrong way.

  “Can I drive there from Barstow in time?”

  “What the hell are you doing in Barstow?”

  “Driving?”

  Ben made an annoyed huff and hung up on me.

  So, I was going to Washington, D.C.