“Right. Let’s get it on.”
Tina had offered to come in and help with the show, but she was still recovering from injuries and I didn’t want her up late and in pain. We had the recorded interview we’d done, that would be good enough. I had my folder of notes, of innocuous topics of supernatural interest I always kept on hand so I’d never run out of things to talk about. I also had a list—what we knew about Roman, what we needed to know. The show could go either way.
On the other side of the window, Matt counted down. The On Air sign lit, “Bad Moon Rising” spooled up, and we were live.
“Good evening, true believers. Once again you’ve tuned in to The Midnight Hour, shining a flashlight on the things that go bump in the night and watching them twitch. I hope you’ve all got your phones ready, because I want your calls.
“First off, a news item has crossed my desk that I want to share: Broadway star Mercedes Cook has retired for good and for real. Her publicist issued a statement yesterday that the actress has, and I quote, ‘officially retired from public life and would no longer be available for any concerts or other performances.’ Unquote. You’ll recall that Ms. Cook came on this very show a few years ago and announced that she was a vampire, making her one of the first outed vampire celebrities in the world. Now, theoretically, Mercedes could keep her career going on, well, forever. So what prompted this sudden retirement, without so much as a farewell tour? I called her publicist and was given a rote statement that they will not be answering questions and that, yes, the retirement is for real and permanent.” All that was true: Cook’s PR firm had issued a statement, and I had called them looking for more information. Mainly hoping they’d let drop a clue about whether or not they knew that she was dead, or if they were just trying to cover for what must have looked like a sudden disappearance. I couldn’t tell if they knew or not. I certainly didn’t tell them what I knew. I didn’t want anyone asking me questions about it. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, she’d simply vanished, not been staked to death, and that was that. The mystery would linger.
“Some critics and commentators have suggested that this is how a vampire like her might maintain a career over several centuries—she periodically drops out of sight and reemerges with a new identity a generation later, after everyone’s forgotten about her. I’m not sure how that’s going to work in this day of Internet searches and pervasive photography, given that everyone knows she’s a vampire. Maybe she just got tired of living the life of a Broadway star, and maybe she really is gone for good. I’m sure we all wish Ms. Cook well.” I managed to keep most of the sarcasm out of my voice.
“Second item of business: I recently ran into a friend of The Midnight Hour, Tina McCannon, costar of the paranormal investigation show Paradox PI. I’ve seen enough of Tina’s work to know she’s onto something when she talks about being psychic, and to know it’s not as simple as TV would have us believe. I asked her a few questions about what she’s been up to lately, what she’s learned, and where she goes from here…”
I signaled the booth, and Matt cued up the recording, which gave me a few more minutes to dither. A tame fluff interview—this was fine, this was innocuous. For the moment, I felt safe. That bubble of safety would end just as soon as the show did.
Calls were already coming in, names and cities and topics scrolling on my monitor. I recognized some of them—regulars with axes to grind calling about the same damn things they always did, and Matt put them through anyway and let me decide, just in case I wanted to have some fun with them. Some had obviously called before the show started, because the topics they wanted to talk about had nothing to do with what was actually coming out their radio speakers. This was normal, and sometimes I’d start taking calls at random just to see what happened. Another chunk of calls actually were on topic: comments about Mercedes Cook’s disappearance, wanting to talk about psychic abilities, hoping to talk to Tina and ask questions. I could fill up the rest of the show just taking these calls.
The interview ended, then we broke for prerecorded station ID and PSAs. They droned through my headset and I tuned them out because I’d heard them a million times before. Getting up from my seat, I stretched, shook out my hands and legs.
I could make this a softball show, picking easy calls and keeping the conversation light. But I didn’t want to do that. Waving a red cape, I’d told Ben. I had a lot of possible red capes. Wolf marking her territory was just one of them. Time for the next one.
Matt called, “Kitty, you’re back on in five, four, three, two…”
“And, we’re back. This is The Midnight Hour, and I’m Kitty Norville. I want to thank Tina McCannon for taking the time to answer my questions. Maybe one of these days I’ll get the whole Paradox PI crew back on the show and they can tell us about some of their recent cases. For now we’re moving on, I do have some meatier topics to talk about tonight. Maybe some bloodier topics. That’s right: vampires. They never seem to go away—of course not, they’re immortal—but what’s more amazing to me is no one ever seems to get tired of them. How many vampire soap operas can one person watch in a night, anyway? The answer would amaze you.
“I have kind of a weird question to throw out there. What do vampires want? This might seem like a deceptively simple question. I mean, I know they want human blood—they need it to survive, and fortunately for the rest of us they don’t need very much of it. Can you imagine the body count? In another respect, they want what anyone wants—a nice life, a safe place to stay, friends and hobbies. I think a lot of vampires have lives that most mortal humans would recognize—just extended over a longer period. We’ve had calls from a lot of those vampires. You vampires listening out there—you’re a big part of the reason I do the show at all.
“But then there are a few. If they’d remained human they might have run for president or become CEOs of major corporations or the like. What is a vampire going to do with all that drive and ambition? And an unlimited amount of time to spend it on?” Especially the few I was thinking about right now …
“Many of them become Masters or Mistresses of cities. I’ve been thinking a lot about these vampires lately, for various reasons. How much power do they really have? How far do their ambitions really go?” This was a way of talking about the Long Game without actually saying the words. I didn’t know where this line of questioning was going to go. I was making noise to see what jumped out to complain. Cormac had his crossbow, Amelia had her magic, Hardin had her badge, Ben had his credentials, and I had my show.
I hit a call from one of the crazy regulars. Mostly because I could predict what he was going to say and had a script for it.
“Hello, you’re on the air, thanks for calling.”
“Kitty, hi, so great talking to you again, I love the show. Anyway, I mean, aren’t you the one who’s always saying that vampires are trying to take over the world?”
“Well, sort of,” I was surprised into saying. “But I don’t think I say that ‘vampires are taking over the world’ so much as I say that a few individual vampires working together might in fact have designs toward world domination. Just, you know, as a hypothesis.”
I’d gotten in trouble before for sticking my neck out about this kind of thing. I’d lost ratings and market share when I crossed the line from “endearingly fringe” to “genuinely crackpot,” which hardly seemed fair. It had been a while since I’d gotten this close to discussing the Long Game in the open. I was curious to see how it would go.
“See?” the caller said. “Seems obvious to me, if you’re immortal you can put plans in place that work out centuries later, and no one will even guess because no one’s around to put all the pieces together.”
Unless Amy Scanlon meets Kumarbis, the vampire who turned Roman two thousand years ago, and records everything she learned from him in her book of shadows, which we were then able to decode, and I was able to bring together a network of vampires around the world who started comparing notes on Roman …
>
My voice took on a wicked tone. “Ah, but someone has been able to put the pieces together, or we wouldn’t be talking about it. Stuff like this doesn’t happen in a vacuum. For example, do you know I’ve heard from a couple of different sources now that indicate that the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum was caused by a magic spell called the Manus Herculei? The Hand of Hercules. I know, right? I have to admit, I get a tiny bit suspicious these days every time there’s a volcano or earthquake or something.
“Let’s take another call now, see what else jumps out at me. Next caller, hello!”
“Well,” the guy huffed. “It only makes sense, doesn’t it? Vampires are clearly the next step in evolution. We’re doomed, like Neanderthal.”
“Except if mortal humans go extinct what are vampires going to eat?”
“Who do you think is funding all this research into artificial blood substitutes?”
“Huh. That’s an angle I haven’t thought of before. So you think their ultimate plan is to get rid of the whole seven billion of us? Is that even possible?”
“Two words: viral pandemic. But here’s the thing: I think enough human scientists will figure this out that they’ll engineer the artificial blood to give vampires cancer! If they try to live on it, they’ll all die! We’ll all die!”
“I’m not sure how that’s better,” I stated.
“Then nature can start over. Fresh. Clean. It’s like Noah’s flood. Zombie apocalypse. It’s beautiful.” He gave a deep sigh.
“And with that, we have veered into another talk show entirely. I’m cutting you off now.” I punched up a new call. “You’re on the air, lay it on me.”
“No, it’s not going to be a pandemic. It’s going to be the weather,” the woman said.
“Oh?”
“If vampires can control the weather, they can cause some kind of greenhouse effect that blankets the planet in perpetual darkness. Then it’ll be nighttime forever. Sunlight won’t be able to kill them. That’s how they’re going to get us.”
This was turning out to be deeply entertaining. I ought to be writing these down so I could sell them to Hollywood. Was Lightman listening? “You know that nighttime is caused by the rotation of the planet and not by cloud cover, right?”
A moment of confusion, then, “Wait, so you think they’re going to make the whole planet stop rotating? Is that how they’re going to do it?”
“Right, moving on…”
It went on like that for a while. Then things got a little strange. Stranger.
“Hi, Kitty,” said a calm female voice. The monitor said she was Elsa from San Diego. “I’m a vampire. I’m not all that old, but I’m older than some, and I wanted to tell you about something. There are these coins—they’re old Roman coins that some vampires wear around their necks, like tokens. No one will talk about them. I’ve been told not to ask. It’s … I think it’s the sign of some secret society. I just wanted to know, have you heard of anything like that?”
A chill washed through me. But I had to keep talking. “Yes. I have. It’s not a secret society as much as it’s … well. Have you heard stories about a vampire called Dux Bellorum?”
“Yes!” she said, excited, as if I was the first person who’d ever been willing to talk about this with her. “He’s this shadowy figure, like something out of a story. Even vampires are scared of him.”
“The coins identify his followers. But you can also find coins that have been marked out, cut up, and ruined, basically.”
“Oh yes, I’ve seen those, too! I wondered … if it was all some kind of harmless club-type squabbling, or if it was serious. I … I’ve had chances to get one of those coins, but I never knew quite what it meant. It’s not harmless, is it?”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “The guy they belong to—he isn’t a good guy. If it were me, I’d stay away.” I had stayed away.
A couple of calls later: “Kitty, you’re so right. I’m a vampire, and if Elsa’s still listening, I just wanted to tell her to listen to you. Elsa, listen to Kitty, stay away.”
And then, “You’re going to pay for this. Talking about Dux Bellorum in the open like this. You don’t know anything, and when the Long Game ends, you will call him Master, if he lets you live.”
“Hey!” I answered, pissed off now rather than nervous. “You’re wearing one of them there coins right now, aren’t you? Yeah. Not worried.”
“Yes, you are. I can smell your fear from here.”
“Yeah, okay, whatever, moving on.”
I took another couple of calls, then the next time I looked at the monitor, there was a call at the top that didn’t list a name or city. The monitor only said, “You really need to take this one.” I looked through the booth at Matt—he was pale, biting his lip. Not just serious, but scared. He’d been threatened. Well, alrighty then, what could this be about?
“Hello, you’re on the air, what have you got for me?”
“This is Roman. Dux Bellorum, if you prefer.”
I went numb, just for a minute. Then Wolf snarled, and my lips parted in a smile. I’d gotten him. Kicked him hard enough he had to come out of hiding. This was a hunt, cat and mouse, and I didn’t know which of us was which. I let my radio self loose.
“Roman, hello, thanks for calling in. You have a problem you need solving? Or a comment on what we’ve been discussing? Hm?”
“At the start of all this you asked what vampires want. What I want. Tell me—what do you want?”
I pursed my lips a moment. “You know that’s the second time in as many days I’ve been asked that?”
“Then you’ve had time to think about it.”
“I want what everyone wants. A nice life.”
“You aren’t going to get that, pitting yourself against me.”
Any quip died on my breath. “Yeah. I know.”
“It isn’t too late for you to drop out of the game,” Roman said. “I’m not unreasonable. If you run, I will let you run. I don’t like giving myself more work by chasing inconsequential mice. But you have been given so many warnings. You have had so many chances. And yet you’re still here.”
“I keep telling you, I’m not part of the game, I’m just trying to kick the board over. Scatter the pieces.”
“The board and all the pieces are still here. Nice work.” His tone cut.
He wasn’t wrong. We’d been kicking at each other for years. We were both still here. “Where is my pack, Roman? What have you done with my wolves?”
He answered, “I haven’t done anything. I don’t know where they are.”
He sounded amused, an adult scoffing at the antics of a child. My rage stayed at a low simmer, because I believed him. He didn’t know.
I would have been speechless, except I had a microphone in front of me, and after some ten years in radio I was constitutionally incapable of keeping quiet in front of a microphone.
“Something’s got to give,” I murmured. “You’ll screw up, and I’m going to make sure I’m there to see it.”
“One last warning, Katherine Norville, and this is the very last one. For you and all your allies. All your deluded listeners. Leave the field quietly, and you can keep your ‘nice life.’ For at least a little while.”
“Just tell me one thing—am I right? About the volcano, about Pompeii and the Manus Herculei—is that right? How close are we to stopping you? Is that why you called, because I’m close enough that you feel like you have to threaten me to get me to back off?”
The line clicked. He’d hung up, he was gone.
“Well, dang, Roman must have had something else he needed to do because he’s gone away. And to think I was going to ask him to stick around and maybe take a few questions from my callers—”
But the monitor was blank. All my callers had hung up. Even the regulars.
This was my nightmare—the show worked because people kept calling in. What would I do if people stopped calling? Did it make a difference if they st
opped because they were scared?
How much time did I have left to fill, when I just wanted to run home and hug my husband, my sister, my niece and nephew, my parents, and all my friends? When I wanted to turn Wolf and stand before them to protect them? Find the pack, circle the wagons—
Just five minutes. Less time than I thought. More than I wanted. There was a metaphor in there somewhere.
“Right, then,” I said. “I think I may leave off there, because how will I ever top that? And I’m a little overstimulated, I’m thinking, which isn’t a surprise, is it? Such prestigious callers! Such intense discussion! All this talk about games, and wants, and taking over the world.
“It’s not a game. And not because there isn’t actually a board with pieces on it like we’re both trying to get enough houses to set up hotels on Park Avenue. That makes it sound so me versus you, us versus them. Good versus evil. And it’s not, really. Making it about good and evil … misses the point, I think. I’m not fighting for good like some kind of—” A moment of hesitation, as I self-edited the expletive. Radio training, ha. “—avenging angel. I just want to protect my family, my pack, my friends. I don’t want too much—I want just enough. And I don’t want to have to put up with crap. That’s what I want. Is that so hard?
“Once again, and as always, thanks for listening. This is The Midnight Hour, signing off. Don’t forget to leave a porch light on so you can find your way home after dark.”
And that was a wrap. Matt cued up the credits, which played along with a howl—my Wolf, recorded back in the day. A territory signal, a declaration of existence. I wanted to howl back.
I sat back in my chair. I expected to be exhausted, but I felt strangely hyper. The spike of adrenaline was still with me. My shoulders were stiff, my hackles tensed up—Wolf was on the surface, watching. I took off my headset and scratched my head.
Matt had come to the door of the booth to look at me with an expression of concern, and I offered a wan smile.
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