Kitty Takes a Holiday (Kitty Norville 3)

He idly stirred the ketchup on his plate with a french fry. “From this end it looks like you’re quitting.”

I looked away. I’d been comparing myself to Thoreau because he made running away to the woods sound so noble. It was still running away.

He continued. “The longer you stay away, the more it looks like the people in D.C. who tried to bring you down won.”

“You’re right,” I said, my voice soft. “I know you’re right. I just can’t think of anything to say.”

“Then what makes you think you can write a book?”

This was too much of Ben being right for one day. I didn’t answer, and he didn’t push the subject.

He let me pay the bill. Together, we headed out to the street.

“Are you going straight back to Denver?” I asked.

“No. I’m going to Farmington to meet Cormac. He wants help with a job.”

A job. With Cormac, that meant something nasty. He hunted werewolves—only ones who caused trouble, he’d assured me—and bagged a few vampires on the side. Just because he could.

Farmington, New Mexico, was another two hundred fifty miles west and south of here. “You’ll only come as far as Walsenburg for me, but you’ll go to Farmington for Cormac?”

“Cormac’s family,” he said.

I still didn’t have that whole story, and I often asked myself how I’d gotten wrapped up with these two. I met Ben when Cormac referred him to me. And what was I doing taking advice about lawyers from a werewolf hunter? I couldn’t complain; they’d both gotten me out of trouble on more than one occasion. Ben didn’t seem to have any moral qualms about having both a werewolf and a werewolf hunter as clients. But then, were lawyers capable of having moral qualms?

“Be careful,” I said.

“No worries,” he said with a smile. “I just drive the car and bail him out of jail. He’s the one who likes to live dangerously.”

He opened the door of his dark blue sedan, threw his briefcase onto the front passenger seat, and climbed in. Waving, he pulled away from the curb and steered back onto the highway.

On the way back to my cabin, I stopped in the even smaller town of Clay, Population 320, Elevation 7400 feet. It boasted a gas station with an attached convenience store, a bed and breakfast, a backwoods outfitter, a hundred-year-old stone church—and that was it. The convenience store, the “Clay Country Store,” sold the best home-baked chocolate chip cookies on this side of the Continental Divide. I couldn’t resist their lure.

A string of bells hanging on the handle of the door rang as I entered. The man at the cash register looked up, frowned, and reached under the counter. He pulled out a rifle. Didn’t say a word, just pointed it at me.

Yeah, the folks around here knew me. Thanks to the Internet and twenty-four-hour news networks, I couldn’t be anonymous, even in the middle of nowhere.

I raised my hands and continued into the store. “Hi, Joe. I just need some milk and cookies, and I’ll be on my way.”

“Kitty? Is that you?” A woman’s face popped up from behind a row of shelves filled with cans of motor oil and ice scrapers. She was about Joe’s age, mid-fifties, her hair graying and pulled into a ponytail that danced. Where

Joe’s eyes frowned, hers lit up.

“Hi, Alice,” I said, smiling.

“Joe, put that down, how many times do I have to tell you?”

“Can’t take any chances,” he said.

I ignored him. Some fights you couldn’t win. The first time he’d done this, when I came into the store and he recognized me as “that werewolf on TV,” I’d been so proud of myself for not freaking out. I’d just stood there with my hands up and asked, “You have silver bullets in there?” He’d looked at me, looked at the rifle, and frowned angrily. The next time I came in, he announced, “Got silver this time.”

I went around the shelves to where Alice was, where Joe and his rifle couldn’t see me as easily.

“I’m sorry,” Alice said. She was stocking cans of soup. “One of these days I’m going to hide that thing. If you’d call ahead, I could make up some chore for him and get him out of here.”

“Don’t worry about it. As long as I don’t do anything threatening, I’m fine, right?” Not that people generally looked at me—a perky blonde twenty-something—and thought “bloodthirsty werewolf.”

She rolled her eyes. “Like you could do anything threatening. I swear, that man lives in his own little world.”