Kitty Steals the Show

Epilogue

IN AN ideal world, everyone who heard the speech would take me seriously, the UN would set up a supernatural task force to promote equality and understanding, and forces around the world would unite to locate and oppose Roman. It would be a new golden age. What would probably happen—everyone would ignore me, and I’d go back to being a cult talk-radio host. But then there was the worst that could happen. Torches and pitchforks, I joked with Ben. The wrong kind of people would take my speech seriously.

I hadn’t been home a week when police in Boston caught an arsonist who had burned down an apartment building because he believed vampires were living in the basement. He declared to the judge during his arraignment that he was justified because a war was coming, and he had to destroy them before they came after him. Investigators didn’t find any evidence of vampires in the wreckage—not that they would have. But a young couple whom neighbors described as goth were killed in the fire. Police theorized that the crazed young man had seen them, constantly dressed in black, and made a misguided assumption.

Commentators discussed how “polarizing influences” could only make this kind of tragedy more common. They didn’t mention me by name, but they might as well have.

I SAT in the KNOB conference room with Ozzie and Matt. They’d been my producer and sound engineer from the beginning. We’d had dozens of meetings in this room, with its timeworn walls and scuffed carpet, cheap laminate tables and stained whiteboard. I remembered sitting in on programming meetings back when I was a late-night variety DJ and not a syndicated talk-show host, before anyone knew I was a werewolf. Before any of this. The smell of a decade’s worth of spilled coffee tinged the air. It smelled safe to me. This room should have been safe, but Ozzie was regarding me with such a look of disappointment, and Matt wouldn’t look at me at all.

“We’ve only had twenty outright cancellations,” Ozzie said, looking more harried and middle-aged than usual. Only. As if that wasn’t an actual, measurable percentage of our market. “We’ll probably have more, depending on how you follow up. Do you know how you’re going to follow up?”

“I’m not going to apologize, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I’m not looking for an apology, I’m looking for an explanation,” he said.

“I told the truth.”

He began pacing, gesturing broadly, lecturing in a tone of frustration. “You’re supposed to be the one calling bullshit on the conspiracy theories, and here you are, drinking the Kool-Aid—”

“I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t believe it.”

Ozzie put his hands on his hips and sighed. Neither one of them would look at me now. I stared at Matt, trying to get him to glance up. He’d always been on my side. He’d seen some of this firsthand. I thought he would trust me.

They didn’t believe me. My Wolf side bristled, crouching in a figurative corner, teeth bared in challenge, growling. My body tensed, my gaze narrowed. They couldn’t read the signs.

I didn’t belong here.

Ozzie continued, oblivious. “Kitty. This show is your baby. You made it what it is, no one’s going to argue about that. No one else could have done what you’ve done with it. I’ve never told you what to do, what to talk about, how to run things. I’ve never suggested an agenda. But I’m telling you now—you have to backpedal. Get back to basics. Bring on some cream puff interviews. Because if you keep on, if you turn The Midnight Hour into a paranoid soapbox—no one will listen to you.” No one but the real crazies, he meant.

“It’s not paranoid—” I stopped. I’d been about to say, if they’re really out to get you. I thought I knew what this looked like from the outside—crazy, ranty, unbalanced. I thought if I could just convince them, if I could prove to them that I wasn’t crazy … Maybe I didn’t know what it looked like. Maybe I really had turned a corner. How would I ever know?

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said finally. “I have to think about it.”

“Take a couple of weeks off if you need to,” Ozzie said. “We can always rerun old episodes.”

“That won’t look bad,” I muttered.

“Then come up with something,” he said. “Come back Friday and do something about it.” He marched out of the room, his lips pursed with pity and disappointment.

I waited for Matt to do the same. He was my age, stout, cheerful, with dark hair and faded T-shirt and jeans. He leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, and finally regarded me like he was listening to a new album and trying to decide if he hated it.

“Well?” I finally asked because I couldn’t stand it anymore.

He ducked his gaze, hiding a smile. “Kitty. I’m with you. I’ve been with you since you sat in that studio”—he pointed down the hall—“and said you were a werewolf. I can’t say I understand any of this. I can’t say I ever did. But I’m not going to quit on you now.”

If he had … I don’t know what I would have done. Found someone to replace him, I supposed, but it wouldn’t have been the same.

“Thank you,” I said, my voice cracking.

“You’re welcome.”

THURSDAY NIGHT, I was at New Moon. Cormac had checked in with his parole officer—no harm done there—and was back at his warehouse job, playing the good citizen. He was getting pretty good at it. Ben had had a client call him from the county jail. The client wouldn’t talk over the phone about why he’d been arrested, so with a long-suffering roll of his eyes, Ben had run to the rescue. Life was getting back to normal.

Shaun was managing the restaurant tonight. He’d been hovering, crestfallen when I snapped at him to leave me alone. I was reading a popular history of London I’d picked up at the airport on the way home, and had a pen and notepad to make notes. I was trying to think of some innocuous anecdote to focus the show on, but I found myself wanting to talk about Ned, the convocation of vampires, Flemming, what had happened to Tyler, and every encounter I’d had with Roman and Mercedes. Maybe I could come up with a compromise.

The e-mail comments I’d gotten through my Web site—not to mention blog posts, forum comments, op-ed pieces, essays, and rants—gave me an idea of what to expect when I opened the line for calls next time. Half the commentary was some form of, “Are you crazy?” Had I finally gone around the bend? Was I even really a werewolf or was this all an elaborate hoax? I hadn’t heard that one since my Senate testimony. I expected all of that. The problem was the other half of the comments, which assured me that I was exactly right, there was a mysterious global conspiracy, and here was the lengthy detailed explanation. My favorite so far described the baby-eating lizard aliens who made their home in a tunnel system deep below Denver International Airport. Awesome.

When I said, “But I’m right, my conspiracy is real,” I sounded just like the baby-eating lizard alien people.

Ben and I had started looking at houses in the western foothills. He was right, it was probably time. The condo felt too temporary for our increasingly settled lives. If I wanted to start a family like I kept talking about, more space would be useful. The trouble was, lost market share meant lost income. Even if I could put a book proposal together and sell it tomorrow, I couldn’t count on seeing the money for months. Ben was confident we could scrape together enough for bigger mortgage payments. I wasn’t so sure. I seemed to have lost my optimism somewhere along the way.

When my phone rang, the sound startled me. I’d been lost in my own world, and I hadn’t expected anyone to reach into that world to grab hold and yank me out.

Caller ID said Rick, which was a relief. He couldn’t possibly be disappointed in me. “Hello?”

“Kitty. Do you have time this evening to stop by Obsidian? I’d like to show you something.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“No. At least not more so than usual.” The distinction didn’t seem to bother him; he sounded as easygoing as he always did.

“Yeah. I can be there in an hour or so.”

When I arrived at Obsidian, the art gallery he owned, I went to the basement stairs. Rick was waiting at the door for me, so I didn’t even have to argue with any flunkies about letting me in. He and his Family kept a lair here, an office and apartments, though I’d never seen any part of it other than the main hallway and the office and living room in back. Just like Rick had never seen where the pack spent full moon nights. We had our separate realms. It was a wonder any of us ever worked together.

Rick politely ushered me into the wide living room, which had sofas and a coffee table on one end and a desk and shelves on the other. The place was simple, functional, livable.

“Have a seat,” he said, indicating the comfortable chair on the other side of the desk.

“What’s this about?”

I resisted looking over my shoulder for the practical joke. He opened a drawer and produced a padded shipping envelope, already opened. I didn’t see the return address or stamps, but it looked battered, as if it had traveled some great distance. Turning it upside down, he shook, and a packet fell onto his desk. Thick, heavy, made of some expensive, cream-colored paper, it looked like a wedding invitation, or a medieval deed.

His smile was cryptic. Mischievous, even. He turned it right side up, showing me the wax seal, the thick red blob imprinted with an ornate crest. Medieval deed it was, then.

The seal had already been cracked. I unfolded the thick paper to reveal writing, ornate and curling, in dark ink that seemed to glow against the rich paper. I could make out letters, put some of them together into words, but the language was Latin, which I recognized but couldn’t read.

“What’s it say?” I asked Rick.

“It’s from Nasser, who is the Master of Tripoli. He’s requesting a meeting to discuss ways in which we might oppose Dux Bellorum and…” He picked up the page again and read a phrase. “… terminamus ludum longum.”

“Which means…”

“‘We end the Long Game.’ Once and for all. End it without finishing it. He saw a video of your speech in London and wants to meet you. He didn’t know there was anyone else in the world opposing Roman, and now he does. Should I invite him to visit?”

Stunned, I turned the words over in my mind, trying to parse what they meant. Someone had heard me. A knot of hope settled in my chest. Terminamus … had a nice ring to it.

“Then it worked,” I said softly. “The speech—it wasn’t for nothing.”

“Oh, no,” Rick said, and the smile turned wide and pleased. “I think it worked very well. I think it did exactly what it was supposed to. Assuming you meant it as a call to arms.”

I leaned forward, elbows on the desk, and covered my face with my hands. It was like I’d been holding my breath since London, and the releasing sigh reached every nerve. I couldn’t even move.

“Kitty?” Rick prompted.

“I just keep telling myself it’s going to be all right.”

He cocked his head, a bemused furrow marking his brow. “I think it will. Eventually.”

“You’ve been saying that for five hundred years, haven’t you?”

He just smiled.

“GOOD EVENING, and once again you’re listening to The Midnight Hour, talk radio with teeth. We’ve been talking about conspiracy theories. Especially supernatural conspiracy theories. There are an awful lot of them out there, and I’ve got some of my own as most of you well know.”

In the end, my solution was to not really do anything at all. Run the show like I always did, speaking with the same easy tone I always used. Keep it chatty, keep it light. I didn’t have to defend myself. I didn’t need to convince anyone or change any minds. I just needed to be myself, and keep being myself, like I always had. Anyone who got belligerent or confronted me—well, I’d do the same thing I always did. I’d just talk and see what happened.

My next caller was male with a drawling, pompous voice. Determined to put li’l ol’ me in my place. “The problem with these so-called theories—every last one of them—is that they attribute vast unlikely powers of organization and influence to groups that in the real world can’t balance their own budgets.” The pointed obviously was unspoken.

He couldn’t have fed me a better line if I’d scripted it. “How about this: that apparent inability to balance a budget? It’s a front to make you believe there couldn’t really be a conspiracy.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“That’s what you’re supposed to think!” I fired back, getting into the spirit of the viewpoint I was channeling. “Therefore you’ll never even consider the Byzantine network of control and oppression hidden behind the façade of incompetence!” I made my voice calm again. “You see how this works, now?”

“You’re crazy, you know that?”

I sighed. “That might mean something if you weren’t the”—I checked the sheet of scratch paper because yes, I’d been keeping track with hatch marks—“twelfth person to say that tonight.”

I hung up on him before he could hang up on me. “There’s a paradox inherent in the very idea of a conspiracy theory. For example, if an alien civilization has the technology to travel the vast distances to bring actual craft here to Earth, don’t you think they’d also have the technology to keep out of sight if they didn’t want to be seen? And the technology to examine a person’s insides without probing? I mean, we have that technology right now! The second paradox: if it’s a truly competent, effective conspiracy, none of us will ever know about it. I humbly submit that a vampire who’s been around for two thousand years will be very good at covering his tracks. And yes, I’m fully aware that I can’t prove any of this.

“So what’s the solution? What do you do when your life seems to be under the power of some sinister unnamed force? I’ve got Parnell from San Diego on the line. Hello.”

“Hi, um, yeah. Thanks for taking my call. I wanted to ask you about this documentary I saw awhile back, about how the British royal family are all werewolves?”

I regarded the microphone. “Yeah. I saw that one. You know it wasn’t a documentary, right? It was a horror movie. Fiction. Not real.”

“Oh. Are you sure? It looked just like one of those dramatic reenactment things, you know like they do?” The guy sounded genuinely confused, which kind of confused me. I didn’t think it was this hard.

“I’m pretty sure it was a movie.” If only I could be this sure about everything.

“You don’t think it’s based a little bit on a true story? You were just in London and all, I thought maybe you’d be able to tell.”

“If the British royal family are werewolves? I never got anywhere near them. The queen doesn’t live at the airport shaking the hands of everyone who flies into the country.”

“Oh. Well, okay. I guess.”

“Right,” I said, sighing. “Next call, please. You’re on the air.”

“Hi, Kitty, I’m such a big fan, it’s so good to talk to you.” She was a woman, her voice clear and straightforward. She sounded sensible, at least. One could hope.

“What’s on your mind?”

“Well, I know you’ve been getting a lot of crap lately about some of the things you’ve been saying, that people say you’re stirring up trouble and all. And, well … I live in Denver and I’ve been listening to you from the beginning. Whatever happens, I hope you don’t stop doing what you’ve always done.”

I leaned on the desk, feeling suddenly tired. “I’ve been a little distracted,” I said. “Just what is it I’ve always done? What do you think I’ve always done?”

“You help people. That’s why you started, right? To help people. Please don’t forget about that.”

I felt like I’d been punched. I wanted to cry—and I wanted to give her a hug. I didn’t know what was going to happen. Not with Roman, the show, a new house, a new book, any of it. But the only way to find out was to keep moving forward.

“I’ll do my best,” I said finally.

“Thank you,” she said, sincerely, emotionally.

“No,” I said softly. “Thank you.”