Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand (Kitty Norville 5)

I smiled. “I love backstage passes. I’ll be there.”

“Excellent! I’ll make sure will call has tickets for you.”

“I should warn you, I’m going to ask you lots of questions.” Him, and his performers. Assuming they had human vocal cords when I met them.

“I look forward to it. I’ll see you this afternoon.” He stalked off like a cat through his jungle domain. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

Flustered, I sat back in my chair and downed half the margarita in a go.

When I gave my name at the box office, they were all ready for me with my ticket and instructions on waiting for an usher to take me backstage after the show. Legitimately, for a change. Inside the theater, I found myself fidgeting, anxious. If I hadn’t known the act was full of lycanthropes before, I would have discovered it now. Here, the merged scent of fur and skin was unmistakable. The feeling that I was invading another pack’s territory was unmistakable, and it made me antsy. I had to concentrate to calm down, to force my muscles to relax. There was a contradiction.

The curtain went up, and the show began.

Balthasar’s show had all the glitz and chaos that Odysseus Grant’s lacked. Strobe lights and spinners in every color blasted over the stage. Spots tracked across a chrome-trimmed set at super speed. Fog from an industrial-strength fog machine oozed and morphed, adding to the sensory overload, and a pounding rock extravaganza poured through a top-flight speaker system. The whole effect pumped up the audience’s anticipation to a pitch. What’s gonna happen, what’s gonna happen. . .

The cynic in me saw it all as artificial hype, priming the audience to be excited no matter what happened.

The music rose to climax and crashed together at the moment Balthasar leaped out to center stage via some unseen access. He smiled and punched his hands into the air, fog swirled around him, the lights went wild, and the crowd cheered. He looked even better amid the fog and lights. The audience’s screams had a definite feminine tone to them. Balthasar remained in that pose for a moment, as if absorbing the adulation of his audience.

Turning around, he got to work. At a gesture, a tiger ran onto the stage from the right. It bounded up a riser and leapt—almost covering the entire distance to the other side of the stage. At another gesture, a second tiger did the same thing from the left. Then another from the right, and a fourth from the left. All four tigers perched where they landed, so Balthasar was now surrounded by the terrifying, man-eating beasts. One of the tigers yawned, showing thick, sharp teeth, to prove the point.

He ran the tigers through their paces. They performed leaps, did acrobatics, wrestled with each other, wrestled with Balthasar, all on cue, with a focus that was uncanny. It wasn’t natural. And of course it wasn’t—they were were-tigers. It was supernatural.

Once it started, the pace of the performance didn’t slow down. Which was the point. He didn’t give the audience time to question what was happening, or to wonder about anything but the amazing feats they were being shown. Like, those tigers were definitely on the small side.

Balthasar sent the tigers away and brought out a lion. A couple of bespangled female stage assistants, shapely and smiling, wheeled out some props: hoops mounted on posts taller than Balthasar. The King of Beasts touched them with a lighter and they roared to flaming life. The lion jumped through them all, back and forth, landing each time with a flick of his tail and a shake of his mane.

His act had magic in it as well, flashier than what Grant performed. Balthasar levitated leopards, made a panther vanish and reappear, locked himself in a box full of cobras and escaped, unscathed, proving he was the king of all beasts.

This went on for an hour without interruption. If nothing else, my own recent stint onstage had given me a newfound appreciation for people who did this every day, sometimes twice a day. The sheer amount of energy it took to be onstage and keep an audience’s attention was phenomenal.

With all that had already happened, I couldn’t guess what he’d pull out for the big finish. Exploding jet planes? King Kong?

As it happened, the last number told a bit of a story. The painted backdrop lifted into the rafters, revealing a set elaborate even by the standards of the rest of the show. A Babylonian ziggurat—or a really great mock-up of one—rolled in from the back. Another dozen flaming torches sprang to life around it. At its base, two stone pillars were set about an arm’s span apart. Chains and manacles dangled from them.

I wasn’t sure where they came from—maybe from behind the ziggurat or some other piece of stage dressing— but a group of human warriors dressed in leather and headdresses decorated with feathers and bones sprang out and attacked Balthasar. He seemed surprised at the appearance of the stage-dominating structure, but now he looked determined, like he should have expected this all along, like he’d been fighting his way through a jungle and this was the inevitable goal of the journey. He tossed one warrior, who rolled away, but the others sprang at him, subdued him, and dragged him toward the chains.

The warriors were also lycanthropes, other members of Balthasar’s troupe, I assumed. I watched, my heart racing in spite of my determination to be cynical.

Once they had him chained to the pillars, the warriors departed. Then came the cabana boys with the bullwhips.

Things got a little weird.

The boys—young men, really, lean and smooth-skinned where the warriors had been hulking and bearded—wore nothing but loincloths. They approached Balthasar. One ripped his shirt off, and the other toyed with him, running a finger along his shoulder. Balthasar thrashed at the end of the chains, like he might pull his arms out of his sockets rather than undergo this torture. Shirtless now, his muscles rippled for all to see. He snarled, and the boys laughed.

A woman appeared. She might have risen out of the floor through a trapdoor. It was hard to tell—no doubt intentionally—with all the fog and strobe lights. Also because of all the fog and lights, it was hard to tell exactly how much or how little she was wearing. She had gold around her neck, jewels pinned in her luxurious dark hair, and strings of glittering beads hung in a strategic arrangement around her chest and hips. It had to be some kind of illusion, but she looked like she might lose it all if she turned too quickly. She went barefoot, but gold anklets decorated her feet. Like everything else, her ensemble had an exotic mystique.

She sashayed to Balthasar and ran red-painted nails down his chest. He writhed at the touch, baring his teeth in either pain or pleasure. She brought her face close to his, making as if to kiss him. He leaned forward as much as he could, craning his neck, yearning for that kiss, but she dodged, stroked his arms, teased again—and this time, he smiled.

I shouldn’t have been turned on by all this, but I couldn’t deny the allure of Balthasar’s perfectly formed body, flexing and sweating at this woman’s touch. And the idea of what I would do if I had him chained up for my benefit. . .

Okay. Enough of that. This was voyeuristic spectacle, designed to titillate and discomfit all at the same time. Nothing more.

Behind him now, one of the boys cracked his whip, and Balthasar flinched, arcing his back, teeth bared. The woman, still holding his arms, threw her head back and seemed to laugh, but I couldn’t hear anything over the pounding soundtrack. He was now torn between her promises of pleasure before him and the pain behind him. They were teasing, torturing him, he was struggling like a caged animal, and the torches were flaring, the fake smoke swirling, and was it getting hot in here?

The tigers came to the rescue.

One leaped to the top of the ziggurat and roared, calling the other three to flank him. The warriors attempted to face them down, but the tigers chased them, sprang at them, rolled offstage with them—nobody’s skin got punctured, no one bled, it was all very well choreographed. With the warriors dispatched, the tigers returned to corner the sadistic cabana boys. They cowered in fear, slowly backing away, until the tigers forced them into a smoking trapdoor at the base of the ziggurat. They disappeared with a recorded roar and blast of fog.