Down These Strange Streets (George R.R. Martin) (Kitty Norville 6.50)

“I want to find out who killed that woman,” he said. “Someone killed her to get me—a woman I didn’t even know.”

I heard it in his voice under the anger. No one else would have, but I have very, very good hearing.

I took a chance and stepped in close to him, putting my arms around him and pulling him into me. “Not your fault,” I said. “Not your fault.”

“I know that,” he snapped, but he didn’t pull away. After a moment, he leaned back against me and put his hands on my arms, holding them where they were. “I know that—who better? I see it all the time. ‘But maybe if I were a better cook, he wouldn’t hit me’ or ‘If I could just have bought that car she wanted, she wouldn’t have taken off with my best friend.’ It is not my fault that someone killed her—not your fault either if it turns out to be that way.”

I just held him.

“It feels like it, though,” he said in a much different voice, the voice that no one else ever heard from him. He didn’t let himself be vulnerable in front of anyone else.

“I’ll find him,” I told him, and then I leaned down and blew a teasing huff of air into his ear. “Or else Elizaveta will turn me into a toad.”

WE WENT OUT TO EAT THAT NIGHT. KYLE LIKES TO COOK, BUT HE TAKES too long and it was way past dinner time. He didn’t talk much over the food, pausing occasionally to stare into space, as he did when working on a particularly difficult case instead of dealing with getting munched on by a dead woman.

I’d lost him once, when he’d found out what I was. It says something about Kyle that it wasn’t the werewolf part that bothered him, but the lies I’d told to keep the wolf from him. I hadn’t had a choice about the lies—I think that was the only reason he forgave me.

I’d gotten him back and I wasn’t likely to take him for granted anytime soon. The food tasted like sawdust as I waited for him to realize that he wouldn’t have zombies trying to kill him if I weren’t part of his life.

“Hey,” he said, his gaze suddenly sharpening on my face. “You okay?”

“Fine.” I smiled at him and tucked into supper with a little more effort. I wasn’t going to kill the chance I’d been given by brooding over losing him before it happened.

Of course, there was a note on the door to Kyle’s house when we drove into the driveway.

Kyle ripped it off and opened it. “He’s objecting to your truck,” he told me dryly as he read, giving me the abbreviated version. “He’s sent a duplicate letter to the city. With photos to illustrate his point.”

“Nothin’ wrong with my truck,” I said indignantly, and Kyle grinned. He lost his smile as soon as he looked back down at the note.

Three months ago, the nice family who lived next to Kyle’s house had moved to Phoenix and sold their place to a retired man. We hadn’t thought much about it at the time, not until the first note. Some children (three solemn-faced kids who, with their mother, were staying with us until their mother’s ex-husband quit threatening them) had made too much noise in Kyle’s pool after seven P.M., which was when Mr. Francis went to bed. We should make sure that all children were in their beds and silent so as not to disturb Mr. Francis if we didn’t want the police called.

We’d thought it was a joke, had laughed at the way he’d referred to himself as “Mr. Francis” in his own notes.

The grapes along the solid eight-foot-tall stone fence between the backyards were growing down over Mr. Francis’s side. We should trim them so he didn’t have to look at them. He saw a dog in the yard (me) and hoped that it was licensed, fixed, and vaccinated. A photo of the dog had been sent to the city to ensure that this was so. And so on. When the police and the city had afforded him no satisfaction, he’d taken action on his own. I’d found poisoned meat thrown inconspicuously into the bushes in Kyle’s backyard. Someone dumped a batch of red dye into the swimming pool that had stained the concrete. Fixing that had cost a mint, and we now had security cameras in the backyard. But we didn’t get them in fast enough to save the grapes.

He’d been some kind of high-level CEO forcibly retired when the stress gave him ulcers and other medical problems. He came here, to the Tri-Cities, because he was a boat-racing fan. Other cities had boat races, I’m sure of it. Maybe I could recommend some for him.

“This kind of thing is supposed to happen when you live in an apartment,” Kyle told me, crumpling the latest note in his hand. “Not in a four-thousandsquare-foot house on three-quarters of an acre.”

“We need to have a paintball game in the backyard,” I told Kyle. “I could invite the pack.”

“Escalation is not a solution,” Kyle said, though he’d smiled at the thought. He’d seen some of our paintball games. “Right now the city is on our side. We want to keep it that way.” Since Mr. Francis moved in, the folks in city hall, the police department, the zoning commission, and the building code enforcement office had all grown to know us by name.

“I know,” I groused, unlocking the front door. “As long as we act like adults, there’s nothing he can do to us.”

Kyle followed me into the foyer. His house was the first place I’d ever lived that was big enough to have a foyer.

“I could move,” he said reluctantly.

“Nah,” I rubbed his head affectionately—Kyle loved his house. “You’d miss Dick and Jane.”

Dick and Jane were the life-size naked statues in the foyer. The woman was currently wearing a little Bo Peep bonnet he’d found somewhere and a green silk sari that had belonged to his grandmother. Dick was still sporting the knitted winter hat with the long tail and a poof ball on his pride and joy because Kyle hadn’t found anything he thought was funnier yet.

“We could move back into your apartment.”

That apartment was a point of contention. He said I was keeping it because I didn’t believe that he really understood he was sleeping with a werewolf. He also said I was being stupid because he was mine as long as I never lied to him again, werewolf or not. Kyle was a smart man. He was right about why I kept it—but I wasn’t sure he was right about the rest. So I hadn’t given up the apartment yet.

Proposing a move back to it showed that Mr. Francis was getting to him. If so, the time might have come to quit playing nice.