Kitty's Big Trouble kn-9

by Carrie Vaughn

  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.”

  “Tell me this: What if you did find the definitive proof you were looking for—a DNA test for lycanthropy for example, or a photograph of someone shape-shifting, or proof that someone was killed with a stake or a silver bullet. What would change? Why would it matter? The events surrounding that person’s life wouldn’t change. Their identity wouldn’t really change—just your knowledge of it.”

  Ben’s question again. I kept saying I just wanted to be treated like a human being—that vampires and lycanthropes of any stripe should be allowed to live normal, law-abiding lives. Would exposing any supernatural secret identities damage that? Make them freaks instead of the historical figures they were?

  “I guess I’m looking for a connection,” I said. “I’ve been floundering, wondering where I fit in the world. Would having a role model be too much to ask for?”

  “I thought being a role model was your job,” she said, with that haughty amusement that only vampires could manage.

  “Oh, heaven help us all,” I replied. “But I have to say that yes, it is important. Being a werewolf is an important enough part of my identity that I’ve been basing a show on it and writing about it for the last five years. If I’m going to be an authority on the subject I really want to be an authority. And that means speculating like this.”

  “As long as you’re aware that you may never find the answers you’re looking for,” the vampire said.

  “Yeah, I’m used to that. Maybe the important thing is to keep asking the questions anyway.”

  And get other people asking them, too. Keep knocking on the door until someone answered. Or until they hauled me away and locked me up.

  * * *

  AFTER THE show I invited Rick, Master of the local vampire Family, to meet me at New Moon, the bar and grill that Ben and I owned. I was careful not to say anything like, “Let’s go for a drink,” or “How about we grab a bite.” Not that Rick would have taken me literally, but I didn’t want to open myself up for the kind of teasing I’d get. Rick was a vampire, feeding on the blood of the living, although I was pretty sure he only drank from volunteers and just enough to stay functional. Still, you had to be careful about what kind of invitations you offered to vampires.

  Rick was a friend, and I trusted him. That didn’t mean he told me everything.

  He was handsome, with a hint of old-world aristocracy to his fine features and straight bearing. From what I could gather, he came by it honestly—he’d been the younger son of a Spanish noble family who traveled to the New World seeking his fortune in the first wave of immigration in the sixteenth century. I didn’t know if he ever considered his fortune found. He wore an expensive trenchcoat even in summer, a button-up silk shirt, and well-tailored trousers. Perfect, elegant. You couldn’t help but respect him.

  “Hi,” I said, letting him through the glass front door. “I’m not even going to ask if I can get you anything to drink.”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” he said, glancing around. “Business seems to be doing well.”

  The place wasn’t crowded—not surprising at this late hour—but enough people sat here and there to create a friendly buzz.

  “Lack of pretension,” I said, guiding him to a table in the back, where my beer was waiting for me. We took seats across from each other. “I think that may be the secret.”

  “I think you may be right,” he said. “Now, what’s the problem?”

  “Everyone always assumes there’s a problem.”

  “This is you we’re talking about,” he said, perfectly good-natured.

  “I just wanted to have a nice, friendly chat,” I said. “How’s life—er, unlife—been treating you? What’s new in your neck of the woods?”

  “Is that a pun?”

  I had to think about it a minute, my brow furrowed. “Ah. Not intentionally.”

  If Rick wasn’t laughing at me, he was at least chuckling, and I scowled.

  “Nothing to report,” he said. Gaze narrowed, I studied him. “Kitty, I don’t ask about every detail of the workings of your werewolf pack, I’m not going to tell you every detail about my Family.”

  “You can’t blame me—I’ve built a career out of gossip.”

  “All the more reason for me to keep my mouth shut.”

  That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I blundered on. “I’d like to ask you about a story I’m tracking down. Did you know Sherman?”

  “As in General William T.?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m afraid not, though I’m sure he was fascinating.”

  I must have looked deflated.

  “It’s not like I knew every public figure who lived for the last five hundred years,” he said.

  “But you knew Coronado. And Doc Holliday. That’s a pretty amazing roster right there. Five hundred years is a lot longer than most of us get. Do you know anyone who might have known Sherman?”

  “Any vampires, you mean?”

  “Anyone who might be able to tell me if Sherman was a werewolf.”

  He pursed his lips, considering, making him the first person who hadn’t looked at the claim with outright skepticism. “What’s your information?”

  I told him about the interview with the Confederate soldier, and my own hunch, which couldn’t exactly be called information. You couldn’t tell a werewolf in human form just by looking. Unless maybe you were psychic, which was something to consider. Maybe I could call my friend Tina, a psychic with the TV show Paradox PI, and see if she could channel Sherman.

  “That would be amazing if you could prove it,” he said. “We’d have a whole new perspective on his career.”

  “But the only way I can really prove it is to test a tissue sample, assuming a testable sample still exists, or talk to someone trustworthy who might have known him.”

  “And no one’s very excited about exhuming the general’s body, I’m guessing.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Alette’s the only one I can think of who would know. She has her fingers in everything, even going back to that period. If Sherman spent any time in D.C., she would know.”

  “Sherman spent a ton of time in D.C. She’d have to know,” I said, excited. Alette was the Master vampire of Washington, D.C., and had been in the 1860s. She was already on my list of people to call after talking to Rick. If she didn’t know, I’d probably never find out.

  “Something to consider,” Rick continued. “Even if she does know, she might not tell you. You’re not the only one who’s been asking these sorts of questions since lycanthropy and vampirism went public. Alette could have leaked the information herself if she wanted people to know.”

  That vampire sense of superiority again. I shook my head. “She shouldn’t be the one to get to decide what people know.”

  Rick made a calming gesture, forestalling the rest of my rant. “Consider this: if Alette knew Sherman, knew that he was a werewolf, but hasn’t told anyone, it may be because Sherman didn’t want anyone to know. The se
cret may be his, and Alette—or anyone else who has the information—may be keeping a promise with him.”

  Sherman was dead and gone, he shouldn’t get a say in it. Historical public figures were fair game for all kinds of digging, as far as I was concerned. But a vampire’s promise went on forever, didn’t it? I had a thing about exposing people who didn’t want to be exposed. My own lycanthropy had been made public against my will. Afterward, I took the publicity and ran with it as a survival mechanism, but I could understand why Sherman wouldn’t want something like this made public. It would overshadow his entire record and all that he’d accomplished. His autobiography—considered one of military history’s great memoirs—would become next to meaningless because it doesn’t say a word about it. Which meant that maybe he didn’t want anyone to know. If Sherman’s ghost appeared and asked me to drop the question, what would I do?

  Thoughtful, I rested my chin on my hand and said to Rick, “How many promises like that are you keeping?”

  Smiling, he glanced away.

  “Oh my God, you are,” I said, straightening. “You know. You’ve got something juicy on somebody famous. What is it? Who?”

  “You’ve gone this long without knowing, why should I say anything now?”

  “I just want to know,” I said. “It’s important to know that people like me have existed for thousands of years, living their lives, surviving. Roman’s been recruiting vampires and lycanthropes for his secret supervillain club for two thousand years. I have to assume that vampires and lycanthropes have been opposing him as well, like us. To know who they were, to have some kind of history—who knows what it could tell us about his methods? You know Roman would have tried to recruit Sherman. I’d love to imagine that Sherman told him to shove it.”

  Rick sat back. He seemed amused, thoughtful, studying me through a narrowed gaze. As if he was considering.

  “What?” I said. I got the feeling I’d said something funny or strange.

  “It’s a cliché, you know,” he said. “Eternal life being boring. Maybe for some of us it is, the ones who lock themselves away in mansions or castles, cut themselves off from the world and the people in it. For the rest of us, there’s always something new coming along, if we know where to look. We stay interested by having a stake in the game.”

  “The Long Game?” I said. The Long Game, a conspiracy among vampires. The few people who knew about it spoke of it in whispers, in hints, if at all. Near as I could figure, it really was a game, but one that dealt in lives and power. And the one who dies with the most toys wins.

  Rick shrugged. “Not always. After all, Kitty, you’re one of the people who keeps life interesting.”

  He gazed over the dining room and bar, waiting for me to respond. I’d already finished my beer or I would have taken a long drink. “I’m flattered, I think.”

  “If you want my advice, you’re narrowing your focus too much,” Rick said. “Don’t just look for the secret vampires and lycanthropes. Look for people who might have hunted them. People like your friend Cormac.”

  Now there was an idea. “You’re not going to give me any hints about where to start, are you?”

  “Think about it for a minute. If I met Doc Holliday, who else do you think I might have known?”

  Western history wasn’t my strong suit, but my knowledge was better than average. I remembered the stories of the Wild West and the O.K. Corral, and a few choice Hollywood treatments of the same, and my eyes grew wide.

  “Wyatt Earp?”

  Rick just smiled.

  Chapter 2

  AFTER MY TALK with Rick, I called Alette, vampire Mistress of Washington, D.C. Because that was how little sense of decorum I had.

  “Whatever you want to know, I probably can’t tell you,” she said, an amused lilt to her matriarchal tone.

  “So does that mean you don’t know, or you know but won’t tell me?”

  “Ask your question, and we’ll see.”

  “Was General Sherman a werewolf?”

  She paused a moment, and I imagined her sitting in the refined Victorian parlor of her Georgetown home, phone to her ear, smiling an indulgent smile. I was asking a favor; I couldn’t force her to tell me. I depended on her kindness. Her tolerance.

  “I can’t say,” she said finally, which made me think she knew, and that the answer was yes. Not that I would ever get her to admit that. I let out a growl, and she chuckled. “Did you expect me to say anything else?”

  “I had to try,” I said. “I always have to try.”

  “Yes, you certainly do. Have you asked Rick?”

  “Asked him first. He didn’t know anything about Sherman, but he did bring up Wyatt Earp. I don’t suppose you have any good dirt on him, do you?”

  “Well, I don’t know about dirt…”

  She told me a story.

  In the early 1870s, a group of vampires had traveled west and settled near Dodge City, Kansas, hoping to take advantage of the lawlessness, of people traveling anonymously across the plains—cowboys on cattle drives, prospectors, traders, settlers. They could feed without consequence, kill as they liked, with no one the wiser. But someone noticed, and their den was burned to the ground and all of them killed. The established East Coast vampire Families heard of the slaughter but never discovered who was responsible—though truth be told they were relieved that the anarchic vampires had been disposed of. Shortly after, Families began sending their own representatives west to establish enclaves in the burgeoning cities, to prevent such lawlessness from happening again. Alette let drop the information that Rick had already been in the region for decades and that the eastern vampires were startled to find one of their kind of his age in the lawless West. I’d have to ask him about that.

  The timing of the fire that destroyed the anarchic vampires coincided with the time that Wyatt Earp spent as deputy marshal of Dodge City, and rumor had it that his law-enforcement activities extended to the supernatural. I thanked Alette for the tidbit and promised to keep in touch.

  Research into ghost towns and fires in 1870s Kansas followed, and I marked likely spots on a map. Not that burned vampires left any hard evidence behind. I was never going to find solid proof, a diary or letter in Wyatt Earp’s handwriting stating, “Yes, I killed vampires while I lived in Dodge City.” But I hoped to get … something. That was how, a month later, Ben, Cormac, and I ended up standing in the middle of a stretch of prairie about fifteen miles northeast of Dodge City.

  Getting Cormac out here had been a challenge in itself. He was on parole after serving time for a manslaughter conviction and officially wasn’t allowed to leave the Denver area for the time being. But we were family—Ben was Cormac’s cousin, and I was Ben’s wife. So that made us cousins-in-law. Or something. We explained to Cormac’s parole officer that we were going to visit a dying relative. The story must have been convincing, because Cormac got permission to leave, but we had to make a lot of promises about getting him back to Denver to check in and sign a lot of papers taking responsibility if anything happened while Cormac was with us.

  We’d jumped through all the hoops because I’d wanted his perspective out here. And, if I had to admit it, the perspective of the ghost he’d picked up in prison—a nineteenth-century wizard named Amelia Parker. She was either haunting him, had possessed him, or was just along for the ride. It was a long story.

  I asked, but Cormac said she hadn’t known Wyatt Earp herself.

  “It’s not like the movies,” he said. “Not everybody knew each other.”

  “I know that. I figured it was worth asking.” I was getting frustrated with everyone treating me like this quest was naïve and silly. It was easy to get frustrated, standing on a stretch of grass that went on for miles with only 140-year-old rumors as a guide.

  While he might be an American hero, Earp hadn’t been the nicest guy in the world. His name came up in a lot of court cases involving things like running prostitution rings. Much like Sherman and his nervous breakdown, Earp
had some missing time in his history, a couple of years when historians couldn’t quite track down where he’d been or what he’d been doing. One account had him hunting buffalo across the Great Plains.

  I had a feeling he’d been hunting something. Not that I had any hard evidence.

  Late afternoon, the summer sun was setting, casting a warm golden haze over a landscape of rolling hills, rippling grasses, and a copse of trees leaning over a trickling stream. Birds fluttered, and a swarm of gnats hovered nearby. I could almost smell the sunshine—ripe grass, rich soil, life thriving just out of sight.

  Sweating in the sticky air, we’d hiked a couple of miles off the end of the dirt road where we’d had to leave the car. I had a GPS navigator, and according to the coordinates, there used to be a farmstead around here. We fanned out to search for evidence.

  “What are we looking for again?” Ben said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Timbers, foundations, scraps.”

  “Fire,” Cormac said. His expression was unreadable behind his sunglasses. He wasn’t carrying guns, but he looked like he should have been. He wore a leather jacket over a T-shirt, worn jeans, scuffed biker boots, determined scowl—ready for action. In the pockets of the jacket he was probably carrying something that he—that Amelia—could use as weapons. Amulets, charms, potions, spells. I didn’t know what all she could do, through Cormac’s body. Cormac would appear to be the wizard to anyone who knew what to look for. You had to really know Cormac to recognize that he wasn’t always the one in charge. I tried not to think too hard about it.

  “This is like looking for a needle in a haystack without even knowing if the needle is there,” Ben said.

  “Everyone needs a hobby,” I said.

  “We don’t have a whole lot of daylight for this,” Cormac said, glancing west. A bright orange sun had touched the horizon and was sinking fast.

  I turned on him, arms out. “I’m sorry. Next time I’ll make sure someone puts out neon lights so we know exactly where to go.”