Kitty's Mix-Tape

by Carrie Vaughn

“No! These are my friends. At least I thought they were.”

  And didn’t that break my heart just a little. Meanwhile, Ben had his phone out and was talking to someone, walking just far enough off that I couldn’t hear.

  “Well, Trev?” I asked.

  “Um.”

  “So that’s yes, you do have silver bullets.” Along with the visceral jolt of panic, I was offended and furious. “Were you planning on killing me too?”

  “Only if you try to stop me.”

  “Here I was thinking how this isn’t at all like class reunions in the movies and you have to go pull some Grosse Pointe Blank shit!”

  “I wasn’t trying to pull some Grosse Pointe Blank shit, it just happened,” Trevor said.

  “Shit like this doesn’t just happen,” I muttered.

  Sadie said, “Maybe if we all went back inside and had a drink—”

  “I don’t think you want that,” Jesse said, grinning.

  I covered my face with my hands. This was too much.

  “So. Um,” Jesse said, sticking his hands in his pockets and losing all his vampire suave. “It’s good to see you guys. Really.”

  “I didn’t think you’d actually be here,” Trevor said.

  “So, if you hadn’t been trying to kill Jesse, you wouldn’t be here?” I asked.

  “No,” he admitted.

  I turned to Jesse. “Then why did you come?”

  He looked at each of us. Not with the vampire hypnotism. Just a nervous glance, which dropped to his feet.

  “I’m here because it’s my last chance,” Jesse said. “My last chance to hang out with people my own age and look like I belong. Twenty years, they tell me. Twenty years after being turned is when it hits that you won’t get older and you stop fitting in. I . . . I wanted to feel like I fit in, one more time.”

  He didn’t seem so much sad as resigned. This was his life now. His unlife. He was saying goodbye to the old.

  This was getting too maudlin even for me. I sighed and glared at him. “Jesse, you never fit in. I mean, did any of us? We certainly don’t now.”

  “Kitty, this is exactly like one of your shows but in real life!” Sadie said.

  “I don’t listen to your show,” Trevor said. “Sorry.”

  “Neither do I.” Jesse winced.

  “Well, maybe you should, you might learn something! Thank you, Sadie, for listening to my show, I don’t think I said that yet but thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Christ, Kitty, couldn’t you have at least changed your name if you were going to become a werewolf?” Trevor said, exasperated.

  “Seriously,” Jesse agreed, and they glanced at each other. “I mean, if we’d voted for who was least likely to become a werewolf it would have been you. What happened?”

  “I don’t like to talk about it. I was attacked, it was bad, let’s leave it there. It changed every single thing about my life, I wasn’t going to let it take my name, too.”

  That killed the conversation.

  “I wanted the power,” Jesse said finally. “I know that’s a cliché. But I didn’t have the money or the social connections or anything else to get anywhere. But this?” He shrugged. “You don’t like the game, you break the rules.”

  “You just traded out for a different set of rules,” I said.

  “But I get to live forever.”

  “Unless some ex-military bounty hunter yahoo sets his sights on you!” I glared at Trevor. His turn now. “Would you really have done it? Come back here and killed your old friend for a few bucks?”

  “A few? Try a quarter mil.”

  Even I whistled low at that. Jesse had the gall to look pleased. “Wow, I didn’t know I was that dangerous.”

  “You just really know how to piss people off,” Trevor countered.

  “I can’t believe you people,” Sadie muttered.

  Ben rejoined us, slipping his phone back in his pocket. He pointed at Trevor. “This guy works for the Master of Boston.” Then he pointed at Jesse. “And I’m guessing you were part of a recent attempt to overthrow that Master.”

  “You called Cormac,” I said, smiling. Cormac, Ben’s cousin, and a supernatural bounty hunter himself. He had contacts. He knew the gossip.

  “Cormac Bennett?” Trevor said. “How do you know Cormac Bennett?”

  “He’s family. Oh, I also put a call in to Rick. Master of Denver. He wants to know if he needs to come over and help sort things out.”

  Jesse stared. “You can just call the Master of Denver and have him come over?”

  I made a play of casually studying my fingernails. “We’re pretty tight.”

  “I won’t go back to Boston,” Jesse stated. “I’ll keep out of sight. Just drop the contract.”

  “A quarter million dollars, Jesse,” Trevor pleaded, as if Jesse was just supposed to sacrifice himself.

  Sadie’s eyes were bugging out of her head. “It would make me really happy if my friends didn’t kill each other!”

  Trevor looked at her. “You’re not, like, a secret witch or magician or something supernatural that we should know about?”

  “No, I’m a lawyer.”

  “I thought you were going to go live in Antarctica and rescue penguins,” Trevor said.

  “Yeah, well, sometimes dreams die hard. Turns out I like takeout and hot running water too much.”

  “So, nobody’s killing anybody,” Ben said. “That’s from Rick.”

  “Fine. Contract’s off,” Trevor said.

  “You won’t get in trouble for dropping the contract?” Jesse asked.

  “Nice of you to care, but no. I may even be able to throw the client off. Convince them you were never part of the conspiracy and were too stupid to realize what was happening.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “And stay out of Boston.”

  “You’ll never see me again,” Jesse said.

  I sank to the concrete and sighed. “And that’s what reunions are for, realizing you have so little in common anymore with your high school friends that you’ll probably never see each other again.”

  That was when the police cars pulled up, three of them, red and blue lights flashing. No sirens, at least. So probably no one was dying.

  “Did you call the police, too?” Trevor pointed accusingly at Ben.

  “Hell no,” he said, looking on with interest.

  A trio of cops got out and entered the lobby.

  “What did we miss?” I said.

  Sadie touched my arm. “I’ll go find out.” She ran off, back to the ballroom.

  After not too much longer, the cops returned, dragging two men in handcuffs with them. The men were clearly drunk, belligerent, shouting curses at each other, seemingly oblivious to the fact they were in the process of being arrested. One of them had a bleeding cut over his eye, the other a split lip. A pair of women, likely wives, trailed after them, crying, also yelling curses—at their husbands.

  “If you’ll excuse me for just a minute,” Ben said, drawing business cards out of his pocket. He made a beeline for the women.

  “Oh man, he isn’t just a lawyer, he’s an ambulance-chasing lawyer! I didn’t know that about him!” I exclaimed. I might have wiped a proud little tear from my eye.

  “He take good care of you?” Jesse nodded after Ben.

  This sounded more like the Jesse I remembered. He’d been kind and fun and . . . directionless, back then. He’d just wanted to get away. I’d gotten mad at him for not being satisfied with being here, with me. I wondered if he’d ever be satisfied with anything.

  “Yes,” I said. “He takes good care of me.” “Good.” He smiled.

  Sadie ran up then, eyes wide and full of glee. “Drunken brawl! Chris Hancock and Pete Kirkland, hitting on each others’ wives. This is why you don’t marry someone else’s high school sweetheart, amiright? Talk about your Tubthumping.”

  “Well, I have to admit, I’m glad I came after all,” Trevor said. “Just to see what it
’s like.”

  “And now we never have to do it again,” Jesse said.

  Ben returned to join us after distributing business cards, and we all ended up sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against the wall, watching the proceedings. A crowd, the entire reunion it looked like, had spilled onto the sidewalk to gawk. We had a pretty good view.

  So, that was the class reunion, one for the books, disintegrating into chaos and it wasn’t even any of our faults.

  Ben looked the row of us over and scowled. “This is so John Hughes I kind of want to gag.”

  Five of us, all lined up. Looking thoughtful, disheveled, and disaffected. Yeah, even a little John Hughes. “Which one are you, honey?” I asked.

  “The brain, clearly.”

  “And that would make me the basket case.”

  He reached out, and I snuggled under his arm as he pulled me close and kissed the top of my head.

  Sadie said, “Would you guys do me a favor and keep in touch this time? Like even a Christmas card or something. Or a text message every six months. And don’t kill each other?”

  “Monthly coffee date?” I suggested.

  “You’re on.”

  “I do miss coffee,” Jesse sighed. “The trick is finding someone who’s just had a double venti latte, then drink their blood—”

  I looked at him. “I didn’t need to know that.”

  Trevor laughed.

  I could almost hear music coming from the ballroom, over the chatter of the crowd. With so few people left inside, the sound echoed and carried. “That poor DJ isn’t still trying to keep things going, is he?” I said.

  “‘My Heart Will Go On’ was on when I ducked in,” Sadie said.

  And wasn’t that just terrible? “What’s playing now?”

  We all got quiet, trying to make out the hint of a chorus. Jesse, who probably had the best hearing of any of us, leaned forward, head tilted. Then, he laughed.

  “Oh, it isn’t,” I said. Then we all heard it.

  Don’t you forget about me . . .

  It’s Still the Same Old Story

  RICK AWOKE AT SUNSET and found a phone message from an old friend waiting for him. Helen sounded unhappy, but she didn’t give details. She wouldn’t even say that she was afraid and needed help, but the hushed tone of her voice made her sound like she was looking over her shoulder. He grabbed his coat, went upstairs to the back of the shop where he parked his silver BMW, and drove to see her.

  The summer night was still, ordinary. Downtown Denver blazed. To his eyes, the skyscrapers seemed like glowing mushrooms; they’d sprung up so quickly, overwhelming everything that had come before. Only in the last forty years or so had Denver begun to shed its cow town image to become another typical metropolis. He sometimes missed the cow town, though he could still catch glimpses of it. Union Station still stood, the State Capitol of course, and the Victorian mansions in the surrounding neighborhoods. If he squinted, he could remember them in their glory days. Some of the fire from the mining boom era remained. That was why Rick stayed.

  Helen lived a few miles south along the grid of streets around the University of Denver, in a house not quite as old or large as those Victorian mansions, but still an antique in the context of the rest of the city. She’d lived there since the 1950s, when Rick bought her the place. Even then, Denver had been booming. The city was an ever-shifting collage, its landmarks rising and falling, the points around which he navigated subtly changing over the decades.

  Points like Helen.

  He parked on the street in front of her house, a single-story square cottage, pale blue with white trim, shutters framing the windows, with a front porch and hanging planters filled with multicolored petunias. The lights were off.

  For a moment, he stood on the concrete walkway in front and let his more-than-human senses press outward: sight, sound, and taste. The street, the lawn, the house itself were undisturbed. The neighbors were watching television. A block away, an older man walked a large dog. It was all very normal, except that the house in front of him was silent. No one living was inside—he’d have smelled the blood, heard the heartbeat.

  When he and Helen became friends, he’d known this day would come. This day always came. But the circumstances here were unnatural. He walked up the stairs to the front door, which was unlocked. Carefully, he pushed inside, stepping around the places on the hardwood floor that creaked, reaching the area rug in the living room. Nothing—furniture, photographs, bookcase, small upright piano in the corner—was out of place. The modernist coffee table, a cone-shaped lamp by a blocky armchair, silk lilies in a cut-crystal vase. They were the decorations of an old woman—out of place, out of time, seemingly preserved. But to Rick it was just Helen, the way she’d always been.

  His steps muffled on the rug, he progressed to the kitchen in back. He found her there, lying on the linoleum floor. Long dead—he could tell by her cold skin and the smell of dried blood on the floor.

  Standing in the doorway, he could work out what had happened. She’d been sitting at the Formica table, sipping a cup of tea. The cup and saucer were there, undisturbed, along with a bowl of sugar cubes. She must have set the cup down before she fell. When she did fall, it had been violently, knocking the chair over. She had crawled a few feet—not far. She might have broken a hip or leg in the fall—expected, at her age. Flecks of blood streaked the back of her blue silk dress, fanning out from a dark, dime-sized hole. When he took a deep breath, he could smell the fire of gunpowder. She’d been shot in the back, and she had died.

  After such a life, to die like this.

  So that was that. A more-than-sixty-year acquaintance ended. Time to say goodbye, mourn, and move on. He’d done it before—often, even. He could be philosophical about it. The natural course of events, and all that. But this was different, and he wouldn’t abandon her, even now when it didn’t matter. He’d do the right thing—the human thing.

  He drew his cell phone from his coat pocket and dialed 911.

  “Hello. I need to report a murder.”

  She walked through the doorway, and every man in the place looked at her: the painted red smile, the blue skirt swishing around perfect legs. She didn’t seem to notice, walked right up to the bar, and pulled herself onto a stool.

  “I’ll have a scotch, double, on ice,” she said.

  Rick set aside the rag he’d been using to wipe down the surface and leaned in front of her. “You look like you’re celebrating something.”

  “That’s right. You going to help me out or just keep leering?”

  Smiling, he found a tumbler and poured her a double and extra.

  “I have to ask,” Rick said, returning to the bar in front of her, enjoying the way every other man in Murray’s looked at him with envy. “What’s the celebration?”

  “You do have to ask, don’t you? I’m just not sure I should tell you.”

  “It’s not often I see a lady come in here all alone in a mood to celebrate.”

  Murray’s was a working-class place, a dive by the standards of East Colfax; the neighborhood was going downhill as businesses and residents fled downtown, leaving behind everyone who didn’t have anyplace to go. Rick had seen this sort of thing happen enough; he recognized the signs. Murray wasn’t losing money, but he didn’t have anything extra to put into the place. The varnish on the hardwood floor was scuffed off, the furniture was a decade old. Cheap beer and liquor were the norm, and he still had war bond posters up a year and a half after V-J Day. Or maybe he liked the Betty Grable pinups he’d stuck on top of some of them too much to take any of it down.

  Blushing, the woman ducked her gaze, which told him something about her. The shrug she gave him was a lot shyer than the brash way she’d walked in here.

  “I got a job,” she said.

  “Congratulations.”

  “You’re not going to tell me that a nice girl like me should find herself a good man, get married, and settle down and make my mother proud?”

 
; “Nope.”

  “Good.” She smiled and bit her lip.

  A newcomer in a clean suit came up to the bar, set down his hat, and tossed a couple of bills on the polished wood. Rick nodded at the woman and went to take the order. Business was steady after that, and Rick served second and third rounds to men who’d come in after work and stuck around. New patrons arrived for after-dinner nightcaps. Rick worked through it all, drawing beers and pouring liquor, smiling politely when the older men called him “son” and “kid.”

  He didn’t need the job. He just liked being around people now and then. He’d worked at bars before—bars, saloons, taverns—here and there, for almost two hundred years.

  He expected the woman to finish quickly and march right out again, but she sipped the drink as if savoring the moment, wanting to spend time with the crowd. Avoiding solitude. Rick understood.

  When a thin, flushed man who’d had maybe one drink too many sidled up to the bar and crept toward her like a cat on the prowl, Rick wasn’t surprised. He waited, watching for her signals. She might have been here to celebrate, but she might have been looking for more, and he wouldn’t interfere. But the man spoke—asking to buy her another drink—and the woman shook her head. When he pleaded, she tilted her body, turning her back to him. Then he put a hand on her shoulder and another under the bar, on her leg. She shoved.

  Rick stood before them both. They hesitated midaction, blinking back at him.

  “Sir, you really need to be going, don’t you?” Rick said.

  “This isn’t any of your business,” the drunk said.

  “If the lady wants to be left alone, you should leave her alone.” He caught the man’s gaze and twisted, just a bit. Put the warning in his voice, used a certain subtle tone, so that there was power in the words. If the man’s gaze clouded over, most onlookers would attribute it to the liquor.

  The man pointed and opened his mouth as if to speak, but Rick put a little more focus in his gaze and the drunk blinked, confused.

  “Go on, now,” Rick said.

  The man nodded weakly, crushed his hat on his head, and stumbled to the door.

  The woman watched him go, then turned back to Rick, her smile wondering. “That was amazing. How’d you do that?”