Kitty Goes to Washington

Chapter 4

"Don't move. I'll get it."

Luis was already out of bed before I realized someone was knocking on the front door. The noise had a steady rhythm and was getting louder. Luis put on a robe and went to the door. "Yes?"

The answer was muffled by the barrier, but perfectly comprehensible.

"It's time for Kitty to leave now. She's had enough fun for one night."

Leo. He must have tracked me down.

It had to be getting close to dawn. Maybe I'd thought I could wait him out. As it was, he had just enough time to drag me back.

Luis looked at me. I didn't want to say anything. Leo rattled the doorknob.

"You don't have to go," Luis said. "He can't come in. I'm not going to invite him."

Ah, the home turf advantage. If we could stand another hour of Leo nagging at us through the door, we'd be fine.

A click and drag rattled the door—the sound of a dead bolt sliding back. Luis moved back in time to avoid being hit as the door swung in.

Bradley stood in the doorway, holding a device that was most likely a lockpick.

Leo leaned on the wall outside, safely beyond the threshold, regarding us with an expression verging on laughter. "Fortunately, the mortal humans in Alette's employ aren't bound by that annoying little restriction."

"You're trespassing," Luis said.

"Hello, Luis. How is your band of miscreants at the Crescent these days?"

Luis stood with his hands clenched and back braced, giving the impression that he was about to pounce. Was he going to defend me in some gloriously violent manner? How romantic. It scared the daylights out of me.

"Luis, it's okay. I should probably get going."

"Why should you go with them?" He spoke over his shoulder, without shifting his gaze from the vampire.

"They're holding my car hostage," I said. Luis didn't look convinced, but he didn't say anything else. I was still in bed, holding the sheets over my chest. I glared at Leo and Bradley. "Could you close the door so I can get dressed?"

"No," Leo said. "I don't trust you. I'm not taking my eyes off you this time."

Luis started to close the door anyway, but Bradley put out his arm to block it. Bradley tried hard to brace it, leaning forward and putting his weight into it, but Luis was stronger, and slowly pushed him back. Bradley put his other hand against the door. They'd break it before Luis got it closed. They glared at each other.

"Never mind," I said. I didn't want to start a fight. Not that I didn't think Luis couldn't handle himself. But I hated to think that I was the one who dragged him into it.

I climbed out of bed and made a point of not shrinking under Leo's gaze. Bradley was polite enough to look away, and Luis was still guarding his territory. But Leo watched me walk naked across the room to where I'd abandoned my dress on the floor. He was trying to aggravate me, which made it a little easier to ignore him. I'd run with a wolf pack; they'd seen me naked. I turned my back to him to pull the dress over my head. I found my shoes and handbag and met Luis by the door.

"Very nice," Leo said.

I said to Luis, "I had a good time. Thanks."

"Be careful with them."

"I'll watch my back." I leaned forward for a kiss and he gave it to me, gently, warmly. I closed my eyes and sighed wistfully.

"I'll see you later," he said. A statement, not a question.

I smiled. "Yeah." I lingered, thinking he might kiss me again—hoping he would.

"Finished?" Leo said. Scowling, I stepped out and Luis closed the door.

Leo and Bradley flanked me on the way out, my own personal Secret Service.

The vampire sat in the front seat of the sedan while Bradley drove.

"You're a fucking loose cannon," Leo said cheerfully over his shoulder. He crossed his arms and smirked. The sky was graying; he was cutting it close. I couldn't tell if he was anxious about it. His blase attitude might have been an act to cover up how annoyed he really was, for all I knew.

"Thanks," I said. He rolled his eyes.

If I'd felt like a teenager on the way to her prom on the way out, Alette waiting up for me when we arrived back at her place completed the image. Bradley and Leo guided me to the parlor, where she was waiting, seated regally in her wingback armchair. At a gesture from her, they left.

Frowning, she rose. "I begin to understand why you're a wolf without a pack. Have you always been this contrary?"

"No. It took me years to develop a backbone."

"Your last pack kicked you out, did it?"

"I left."

"Leo tells me you found your way to the Crescent. What did you think of it?"

The question put me off balance. I was all ready for her to chew me out, and I was all ready to be, well, catty about it.

"I really liked it," I said. "It's been a long time since I felt like I was with friends."

"I've tried to give you that here."

Then why did I feel like a teenager being dressed down by her mother? "Leo made it difficult."

"He must find you easy to provoke."

I wasn't going to start this argument.

"Before I forget." I reached back and undid the clasp on the necklace. I hadn't taken it off all night, lest I end up a pathetic character in a de Maupassant story. I gave it back to her. "Thanks. I think it was what made Luis finally hit on me."

She narrowed her gaze. "Do I even want to know?"

"Probably not."

"We'll have to continue this tomorrow evening. I trust you can find your way to your room? Everyone else is asleep."

I had a feeling that was a very subtle, guilt-inducing dig. "Um, yeah."

"Good morning, Kitty." She swept past me, down the corridor and away.

Morning. Sleep. Yeah. What a night.

I was bleary-eyed when I met Ben in front of the Dirksen Senate Office Building at noon.

"What the hell happened to you?" he said by way of greeting.

I peered at him through slitted, sleep-encrusted eyelids and smiled self-indulgently.

"I went out last night."

He shook his head and took a sip of coffee out of a paper cup. "I don't want to know."

I blinked, trying to focus and feeling like I was only now waking up. I knew this was Ben standing in front of me. The figure certainly looked like Ben, and sounded like Ben. But his suit was pressed. His shirt was buttoned. He wore a tie, and his hair lay neatly combed back from his face.

I should have known it would take the U.S. Senate to polish him up.

"What are you staring at?" he said. I could only grin sheepishly.

We went inside and managed to find the room the hearing was being held in with only a couple of wrong turns. We sat in the back of the room, which was nicer than I was expecting: blue carpet, wood-paneled walls, the desks and tables in the front made of an expensive-looking wood. The place had a formal, legal air. The chairs for the audience were padded, which was nice.

The space for observers wasn't huge, but it was filled. A lot of the people looked like reporters. They held tape recorders or notepads. A couple of TV cameras stood off to the side.

No one noticed us. I considered it one of the perks of radio that I could be well known and completely unrecognizable at the same time. The reporters focused all their attention on the front of the room: the row of senators, eight of them, each with an identifying nameplate, and Dr. Paul Flemming, sitting at a long table facing them.

Ben leaned over. "You met him. What's he like?"

"I don't know. He's kind of cagey. Nervous. Territorial."

"He looks kind of mousy."

"Yeah, that too."

C-SPAN live wasn't any more exciting than C-SPAN on TV. I paid attention anyway, waiting for McCarthy to burst out of some unassuming senator's skin and ravage the hearings with Cold War paranoia. No such luck. The proceedings were downright sedate, very Robert's Rules of Order.

Senator Duke opened the hearings after laying down the rules of how long each senator could speak and when. As Chair, he got to decide such matters.

"Because of the highly irregular nature of the subject which we have convened to discuss, and the secrecy under which the research on this subject has been conducted, the committee has opted to reserve the first two sessions for questioning the gentleman who supervised the research. Dr. Paul Flemming, welcome. You have a statement for us?"

Each witness could enter a prepared statement into the record. They tended to be dry and academic. I expected Flemming's to be doubly so.

"Five years ago, I received a grant of funds from the National Institutes of Health to conduct research into a number of previously neglected diseases. These are diseases which have for centuries been shrouded in superstition and misunderstanding—"

And so on. He might as well have been talking about cancer or eczema.

The senators' questions, when they finally started, were benign: what is the Center, where is it located, who authorized funding, from which department was funding derived, what are the goals of the Center. Flemming's answers were equally benign, repetitions of his opening statement, phrases like the ones he'd given me: the Center strives to further the boundaries of knowledge in theoretical biological research. He never even used the words vampire or lycanthrope. I squirmed, wondering when someone was going to mention the elephant in the room.

Senator Duke granted my wish.

"Dr. Flemming, I want to hear about your vampires."

Dead silence answered him. Not a pen scratched in the entire room. I leaned forward, waiting to hear what he'd say.

Finally, Flemming said, very straightforward, as if delivering a paper at a medical conference, "These are patients exhibiting certain physiological characteristics such as an amplified immune system, pronounced canines, a propensity for hemophagia, severe solar urticaria—"

"Doctor," Duke interrupted. "What are those? Hemophagia? What?"

"Consuming blood, Senator. Solar urticaria is an allergy to sunlight."

He made it sound so clinical, so mundane. But what kind of allergy caused someone to burn into a cinder?

"And what have you discovered about these so-called patients of yours, Doctor?"

Flemming hesitated a moment, then leaned closer to the microphone set before him. "I'm not sure I understand your question, Senator."

"Vampires. In your opinion, what are they?"

Flemming cleared his throat, nervousness slipping into the calm, and said cautiously, "I believe I explained previously, that vampirism is characterized by a set of physical characteristics—"

"Cut the bull, Doctor. We've all seen Dracula, we know the 'physical characteristics.' I want to hear about the moral characteristics, and I want to hear about why they exist."

I leaned forward, scooting to the edge of my seat, not because I would hear any better. The microphones worked great. I was waiting for the fight to break out.

"My studies don't involve the scope of your question, Senator."

"Why not?"

"Those points are irrelevant."

"With all due respect I disagree with you. Strongly."

"Senator, I'm not qualified to comment on the moral characteristics of my patients."

"Your test subjects, your patients—how do you feed them, Doctor? Whose blood do they suck out? How many of them turn into vampires?"

"Despite all the stories to the contrary, the condition is not transmitted by direct fluid contact—"

"And the blood?"

"Blood bank, Senator. We use pints of the most common types that the existing blood supply can spare."

"Thank you, Doctor." He said it like he'd gained some kind of victory.

"Doctor, I have some questions over the budgeting of your research—" One of the other senators on the committee, a woman named Mary Dreschler, quickly steered the discussion back to more mundane matters. A Democrat from a Midwestern state, Dreschler had run for the seat held by her late husband, who'd died suddenly in the middle of a reelection campaign. She was on her third term.

After two hours of this, the day's session was over. It was just as well it wasn't an all-day thing. If people in Congress did this sort of thing a lot, I was going to have to respect them a little more. Here I was, thinking the job was all glamour and state dinners. When Duke called the session into recess for the day, a sense of relief passed through the room, and the group sigh of exhaustion changed the air pressure.

Ben, leaning back in his chair, smirked in amusement. "If this is the tone the whole hearings are going to take, we're in for a roller coaster. I can't wait to see what Duke does with you."

"I thought you were supposed to be on my side."

"I am. It's still going to be fun to watch." I could hear it now: Eaten any babies lately, Ms. Norville?

Eggs for breakfast. Does that count?

Looking purposeful, Ben gathered up his briefcase and jacket.

"Where are you off to?" I asked.

"I have some research I want to do. You don't need me for anything, do you?"

"Nope." I had some research of my own I wanted to take care of.

"Then I'll see you tomorrow." Outside the hearing room, he took off down the hallway, away from the front doors of the building.

As I turned to leave, a man with a mini digital camcorder tucked in his hand stepped into my path. I balked, startled.

"You're Kitty Norville," he said. "Aren't you?"

I wondered how he knew. I didn't include my picture with any of the publicity for the show for exactly this reason. But he might have overheard Ben talking to me. He might have pulled my file off DMV records. It could have been anything.

He wasn't tall for a guy, only a couple inches taller than my five feet six. His build was average and he dressed preppy, a brown leather coat over a sweater and khakis. But his eyes shone with a barely suppressed zeal that was unnerving, because it was focused on me.

"Who are you?"

"Roger Stockton, I'm a reporter for Uncharted World. Do you have a couple minutes to answer some questions?" Without waiting for an answer he hefted the camera and turned an eye to the little screen, which was no doubt showing me glaring at him.

I had to be calm. CNN was watching from down the hall. I didn't want to do something that would get me a starring role on the six o'clock news.

"Wow. I didn't think Uncharted World had reporters. Aren't you guys more the urban legend and unverified amateur video footage kind of show?"

He didn't react to that, but he was probably used to getting that kind of crap from people. "What was your reaction to being subpoenaed by the oversight committee?"

"I'm sorry, I really don't have time for this." I dodged him and continued down the hallway. The guy was persistent, though. He ran after me and planted himself in front of me again, cutting me off when I tried to go around him. The hall wasn't wide enough to avoid him.

He spoke quickly. "What are your thoughts regarding the Center for the Study of Paranatural Biology and Flemming's work there?"

The shining little eye of the camera lens stayed trained on me. I had to get away from that thing. "No comment."

"Come on, you've got more of a right to an opinion on this stuff than anyone else in that room, and you can't take a minute to share your thoughts with the public? Are you going to leave it to other people to decide what tone this debate takes?"

I turned on him, my shoulders bunched, my jaw tight, my gaze burning. I only half raised my hands and took a step toward him, but his reaction was immediate and unambiguous. He stumbled back against the wall, pressing himself to it as if he could fall through it, and clutched the camera to his chest. His eyes went wide and the blood drained from his face.

He knew I was a werewolf. More importantly, he believed it, and everything it entailed. He thought I might actually maul him, right here and now. Idiot.

"I don't want my picture on TV, especially not on Uncharted World. Get rid of the camera and I'll think about talking to you. But right now I'm not inclined to be nice."

I stalked away from him. And half a second later, I heard footsteps hurrying behind me.

He could not take a hint.

"Look, we're both in the broadcast business. Why not do a colleague a favor? Just give me a couple of quotes and I'll give your show a plug. We both win."

It didn't even help that his voice had a nervous waver to it now. I tried to ignore him, but he was right alongside me again, holding up that damned camera.

He was looking back and forth between me and the camera, so he didn't see Bradley standing in front of us, blocking the corridor. But I did.

I stopped. Stockton didn't, until Bradley grabbed his wrist and took the camera out of his hand.

"Hey!" Stockton struggled, until he looked at Bradley. First his chest, then up to his face. They couldn't have played it better if they'd been making a movie. All I had to do was sit back and watch.

"This guy bothering you?" Bradley said.

Oh, how a girl loved to hear those words from someone with Bradley's build. "I think he was just leaving. After he erases the last five minutes of footage off his camera."

Bradley let go of him, then studied the camera's controls. He started pushing buttons, and I had no doubt that in moments my face would be wiped clean from the camera's memory.

Stockton pointed a finger at him. "This is harassment."

"No, that's harassment," I said, nodding at the camera.

He frowned. "I don't understand why you're turning down free publicity."

"I'd like to hold on to the last bit of anonymity I have," I said. I was going to lose it soon enough when I showed up on C-SPAN.

Bradley handed back the camera. His expression was smug, so I was confident the purge had been a success.

Stockton backed away. "We'll talk again. Tomorrow."

The bodyguard and I made it out of the building without any other interruptions.

I gave a tired sigh. "I think I owe you one."

"Not to worry," he said. "It was my pleasure."

Only after a couple minutes did I realize that he'd been on his way to meet me after the hearings finished, to escort me to the car, as if I couldn't be trusted to make it to the curb without getting into trouble. Maybe I couldn't. It still annoyed me.

"Shotgun," I called as we neared the sedan in the parking garage.

He glared. He'd been heading for the rear door, preparing to be all chauffeur-y.

"I can see better out the front," I explained. He sighed in what I thought was an overly dramatic manner, but he opened the front passenger door for me.

As he pulled out of the garage and into the bright sunshine of the daytime street, I asked, "Can we make a detour? Just a tiny little stop. You can even leave the motor running."

I faced him, eyes wide and pleading. Even in broad daylight, he managed to look as foreboding as he had the night I first saw him, with his dark, nondescript suit and stony features. As we emerged into daylight, he put on a pair of sunglasses, completing the Man In Black image. "You are an awful lot of trouble, you know that?"

"It's not on purpose, honest." The trouble I caused was almost always a direct result of speaking without thinking first. This, for example: a rational person would do whatever she could to avoid annoying Bradley. Not me. "Please? Just a tiny little errand, I promise."

"Where?"

I cringed. "The Crescent?"

"No, absolutely not!"

"I just want to run in and leave a message for Luis, that's all, I promise."

"No. No way."

"Please?" I wasn't above begging. "We wouldn't have to tell Alette."

"Do you really think I wouldn't tell her?" He would, he absolutely would. For a moment, his sincerity almost made me back off. This genuine, seemingly uncoerced loyalty Alette inspired in her people was daunting. I set my elbow on the door and leaned my head on my hand.

Bradley pursed his lips, his gaze flickering at me. "She has your best interests in mind. She's only looking out for your safety."

"She thinks a wolf needs an alpha, does she? Doesn't want me running around without a leash?"

He didn't answer. As altruistic as he made Alette out to be, there was a core of truth to what I'd said. I stared out the window as we passed yet another neoclassical building. I wondered what that one was.

"All right," he said. "A minute. That's all. If you duck out on me, Alette may never let you out of the house again."

I gave him a tight-lipped smile. "All right."

He waited at the curb, with the motor running. Just so I knew the clock was ticking. I ran.

Maybe Luis would be there, maybe not. Maybe I just wanted to make sure the place was real, that I hadn't dreamed last night.

It was real. In the light of day, the silver on the sign above the restaurant part of the building sparkled. A menu was taped inside the window. I went downstairs.

The door to the lower section was propped open, letting in the slight breeze. I peeked inside. Only a few people were there, before the after work and supper crowds. A man at one of the tables in back drank coffee and read a paper, a couple was talking at the bar, and an old man sat alone at a table and chair, where the musicians had played last night. Hunkering inside a tired, stained overcoat, he stared into a tumbler that he gripped with both hands. He was a werewolf; I could tell without scenting him or sensing anything about him. He was grizzled enough, he looked the part. Wiry, steel-gray hair bristled from his liver-spotted head into thick sideburns, down his wrinkled neck, and under his ears, which were slightly pointed. I caught a glimpse of elongated canine teeth sitting just over his lower lip. His fingers were thick, ending in sharp, narrow nails. He probably terrified small children he passed on the street.

Here was someone who'd been a werewolf for a long, long time, and had spent much of that time in his wolf form. I'd heard of this, but I'd never seen it: his body was forgetting how to be human. If I hadn't known anything about werewolves, I might have looked at him and thought he was arthritic and aging badly. As it was, I expected his eyes to be golden-amber if he happened to glance up.

I somehow found my way to the bar. Bumping into it, I realized I'd been staring. I shook my head to clear it of the image of the old man.

"You're Kitty, right?" the bartender said. He was the same guy from last night, the young one. Now that I had a good look at him, I could tell that he wasn't wolf, or jaguar like Luis. I couldn't tell what the hell he was.

"Yeah, hi."

"Jack." He stuck out his hand. I gripped it. He squeezed back a little too hard, giving me a half grin as he did. Trying to prove something. He was strong—stronger than I would have expected from someone his size. But then, so was I. I let go and leaned on the counter like I hadn't noticed.

"Can I get you something?"

"No, thanks, I just wanted to leave a note for Luis." I nodded toward the old man at the table. "Who's he?"

Jack put his elbows on the bar and raised a conspiratorial brow. He whispered, "People call him the Nazi."

I blinked at him, startled.

"I don't know if he really is or not," Jack continued. "But Ahmed says he did fight in World War II, and that he is German. Who knows? He comes here every day at four, drinks his schnapps, and leaves without saying a word."

"Whether he is or he isn't, he must have some amazing stories to tell. I wonder—" And that was all I did, because the old man tipped his glass to his mouth, drained the last bit of liquid, stood, and settled his coat more firmly on his shoulders as he stalked out of the place. That was that.

I turned to Jack. "What about you? You have any good stories?"

"Me? I'm just a cub," he said, grinning. "Give me a few years."

"May your life be so dull that you don't actually collect any."

"Where's the fun in that?"

Fun? I glared at him.

I left a note for Luis. Not like I had anything to say beyond, Hi, it's me. It felt like high school all over again, which was kind of fun in its own way. I hadn't crushed this hard over anyone—outside of a movie screen, at least—in a long time. I felt giddy, young, and silly—and completely distracted, which meant the timing was horrible. Senate hearings were supposed to be serious, and I kept picturing Luis in bed.

Bradley got me back to Alette's house without any further ado.

Before I'd left that morning, Emma brought me an envelope, thick stationery paper with my name written on it in fancy cursive. Inside was a square of cardstock bearing a handwritten note informing me that Alette requested the pleasure of my company for dinner that evening. It felt very old-school, like something out of Emily Post.

I'd never had dinner with a vampire, and part of me dreaded finding out what that involved. The imagination ran a little wild. But if I was going to have a chance to talk to her, this was it. Maybe I could draw her out a little.

I wondered if she expected me to dress for dinner, in the Victorian tradition, silk gowns and suits in your own parlor. I'd worn slacks and a blouse for my day at the hearings, so I didn't look particularly ratty. But around Alette, I'd feel downright drab. Then again, no matter what I wore, I'd feel drab next to Alette.

In the end, I didn't "dress for dinner." If slacks and a blouse were good enough for the U.S. Senate, they were good enough for the vampire.

I hoped Leo wouldn't be joining us.

I took a nap, washed up, and Emma brought me to a dining room in another part of the ground floor. Like the parlor, this was classically English, with wood paneling on the walls, which were hung with many paintings, rows and rows of them, landscapes and still lifes of dead birds and hunting rifles, and a few portraits of scowling old men and grim-looking ladies in opulent gowns decorated with flounces and lace. More portraits, like the ones in the parlor and the photos in the hallway upstairs. Were they old friends? Relatives?

A long table ran down the center of the room. Twenty people could have sat there easily, and for a moment I thought this was going to be like one of those comedies where two people sat at either end and had to shout at each other for the salt. But no, Alette stood by the chair at one end, and there was a place setting to her right, one chair away along the side.

"Welcome," she said. "Thank you for coining."

"Thanks for the invitation." I glanced around nervously, but Alette was alone. No Leo. I relaxed a notch. "Not that you gave me much of a choice, with Bradley keeping tabs on me all day."

She ignored the dig and indicated the chair with a graceful turn of her hand. "Please, sit."

The table only had the one place setting. By her chair, the polished mahogany surface was empty.

I should have been relieved.

She said, "I took the liberty of asking the cook to prepare your filet rare. I assume this is acceptable."

There was a time I didn't much like steak, and I preferred any meat I ate ground up and well burned on a grill. The Wolf, however, liked meat to bleed. So I ate rare steaks.

"Yeah, thanks." I gestured at the empty place on the table in front of her. "So, what are you…"

"I've already dined this evening."

This was going to be awkward. When one of her staff brought out a plate with the steak and tastefully arranged vegetables and set it in front of me, I half expected she'd also bring out a goblet full of thick red stuff and give it to Alette. Though it was probably just as well she wasn't going to be… dining… in front of me.

I managed to overcome a lifetime of socialization about eating in front of people who weren't and started in on the meal, which was perfect, of course. Warm, bleeding, tender, tangy. Small bites with fork and knife; not messily devoured. The Wolf and I compromised on these points.

"Tell me how the hearings went today."

I was supposed to be her spy, then? "I think C-SPAN was broadcasting. At least they had cameras there. You could have watched it for yourself."

She narrowed her gaze. "I was indisposed."

I shrugged, nonplussed. "You could tape it. Heck, you could probably download it off the Web." I didn't know if the old vampires even used the Internet. She probably let her minions do that.

Resting her elegant chin on her hands, she said, "I want to hear what you think."

Did she really want to know what I thought, or was she testing my bias?

"Flemming testified today. He's the head of the Center, and the committee has put him in the position of having to defend his project, his baby. In that respect, this could be any government research project being put under the microscope. But then there's Duke. He wants to turn it into a witch hunt. Since this is a PC world, he can't get Flemming to make a judgment call like 'vampires are evil' or 'werewolves are hellspawn.' Flemming's being very clinical about the whole thing, and I think it's pissing Duke off. I'm wondering if this isn't all his idea in the first place. He's always been on the fringe. He may see these hearings as a way to gain validation for his ideas."

"Senator Duke knows very little of the matters on which he speaks so fanatically."

"Yeah, but he's a fanatic with political clout. That makes him scary."

"The werewolf, afraid of the politician?"

I smirked. "As werewolves go, I'm a total coward. Give me a good alpha to hide behind any day."

"You just haven't found a good one, is that it?"

It was kind of like finding a good boyfriend. You kept hoping the perfect one existed, but the trial and error in the meantime could be gut-wrenching. "You're very nosy."

"It's how I learn. You have some experience with that yourself, I believe."

"Can't argue."

"What have they scheduled for tomorrow?"

"More grilling of Flemming, I think. If it's anything like today they'll end up going around in circles. This is an oversight hearing, so they could go for days, until they've heard everything they want to. They haven't even announced the whole schedule of witnesses yet. It's like the whole thing was thrown together."

"When do you testify?"

"I don't know."

"Duke will postpone your testimony until next Monday, if he can."

I paused and considered. Monday was the next full moon. Alette must have known that. Did Duke? Did he know that I'd be at my worst, the day Wolf rose so close to the surface? I didn't want to give him that much credit. "I hope not," I said simply.

She said, "What do you hope will result from these hearings?"

"I guess I just want everyone to say, 'Yeah, okay, this stuff exists.' Then I want them to leave us alone."

"What is the likelihood of that happening?"

"I don't know. The trouble is, I don't think they can both happen at the same time. I keep thinking, if the government recognizes the existence of these things, it'll want to regulate them."

"That is my fear as well. Whatever happens, that must not be allowed to come to pass. The government—Flemming, Duke, all of them—must, as you say, leave us alone:"

"We may not have a choice what happens."

"Oh, there are always choices. Above all, the conclusion of these hearings must be that we are not a threat—to the public or to the government. You know very well we are not. We have regulated ourselves for centuries to ensure our secrecy, to ensure that the mortals don't have a reason to fear us and take action. It may be up to you to preserve that balance."

And I was one of the reasons that secrecy was coming to an end. No pressure or anything. "I don't think I have that kind of authority—"

"I think you sell yourself short. People listen to you, Kitty. You simply don't see it because you stay sheltered behind your microphone."

She was implying that it was all make-believe to me. That I didn't believe I really had an audience.

Maybe it was true. Here, for the first time, I was meeting some of my audience. I had to face them and stand up to defend all the stuff I'd been talking about on the air for the last year.

So much easier to hide behind the microphone.

"I'm only worrying about telling them the truth. I'm not going to be able to dictate what action the committee takes."

"The implications may run far wider than you think. Have you ever seen someone burned at the stake? I have."

Why was I not surprised? "It won't come to that. We've gotten past that."

"Perhaps."

Even with all the conversation, I'd managed to finish eating. The steak was good, and I'd been hungry. I tapped my fork—stainless steel, not silver, another courteous gesture from the mistress of the house—on the plate, fine china in some antique pattern. I should have been afraid of breaking it.

"Flemming's the one who's going to swing this," I said. "He's the scientist, and he's the one who depends on the committee for his livelihood. They'll listen to him."

Alette reached over and took the fork out of my hand, setting it down out of my reach. I stared at my hand, startled. I hadn't seen her coming. I hadn't had time to flinch. She said, "Are you suggesting we should be more worried about Flemming than Duke?"

"Duke is predictable. We know exactly where he stands. But Flemming? I don't know anything about him. Look, Alette. I have to be able to get out and travel around without your people hanging around me. You're worried about me and I appreciate that, but I want to look around, find out more about Flemming and his research, see if I can't follow up on a few contacts. But I can't do that with Bradley or Leo looking over my shoulder. No one would talk to me. I'm not trying to be disrespectful of your hospitality. But I can take care of myself, at least a little, and I need some freedom." I'd had precisely two days to earn her trust. I didn't know if it was enough, especially since I'd already run off once. Er, twice. But if she wanted me as an ally, she had to know she couldn't keep me on a leash and expect me to be effective.

"You aren't saying this just so you can run off with that were-jaguar from the Brazilian embassy, are you?"

I shrank back in my seat and tried to look innocent. "Maybe just a little."

She studied me, lips pursed in a wry smile. After a moment she said, "I don't suppose I could blame you for that. All right, then. But I want to hear what you learn on your investigations."

"It's a deal." The kitchen staff came to clear away the dishes, then brought dessert: chocolate mousse in a crystal goblet. My God, what had I done to deserve dessert? The maid was human. I'd only seen a small fraction of the house. I was getting nervous. "Alette, can I ask—where are the others?"

"Others?"

"I've met you and Leo. But you must have other…" Minions? Lackeys? "… companions. Vampire companions."

She suppressed a wry smile. "You're accustomed to Master vampires who surround themselves with followers, as reflections of their own importance."

Vast halls filled with pouty Eurotrash vampires—yeah, that was the image.

She said, "I'm extremely selective about who I bring into this life, this existence. It's not necessarily an easy way to be. I require pure motives. You've met no other vampires because there are none. Just the two of us. I would not tie someone to me for eternity lightly, Kitty."

Then she saw something in Leo that I didn't. She might have looked forward to spending eternity with him. I couldn't stand being in the same room with him for a minute.