“Know thine enemy,” I said tiredly. “People have to know the crazies are out there.”
“Well, you sure know how to find them.”
“I keep thinking if I give them enough rope they’ll hang themselves right on the air and I can save my breath.”
“If a whole crowd of people like that are protesting out there, you must be having a hell of a time.”
He didn’t know the half of it, all the crap I wasn’t talking about on the air or anywhere else. “It’s been … interesting. But good. I have to think the good guys are winning.”
“Who’s defining good?”
Yeah, that was the problem, wasn’t it? In her own mind, Tracy Anderson thought she was freaking Joan of Arc. I thought she was a petty little woman with fears so gigantic she had to lash out at something to feel safe. Werewolves and vampires were pretty easy targets, all things considered. I almost understood it.
Didn’t make it right.
Chapter 13
I FINISHED MY interviews well after dark, and was cranky and in desperate need of some dinner. Another day gone, and the conference was already half over. Despite all my on-air proclamations to the contrary, I felt like I hadn’t accomplished anything. But I had to keep up a good front. We were supposed to be saving the world, weren’t we? Maybe I ought to set the bar a little lower. The conference was half over, and we hadn’t had any riots yet. There, that was something to be proud of.
Ben met me at the studio, and we walked back to the convention. Emma was going to meet us there with the car to take us back to the town house.
“Where’s Cormac?” I asked once we’d left the studio.
“Nick Parker invited him to dinner, and he said yes. Apparently Amelia wants to meet the family.”
“Huh. That’s so weird.”
“I don’t know. I think it’ll be good for him. He actually seems to be developing social skills.”
“You mean he can’t hide anymore,” I said.
“Yeah, that, too.”
“Hmm, to be a fly on that wall.” I wished them all well. After a hundred years in limbo, Amelia was getting a second chance. A happy ending of sorts.
“How’d your interviews go?” Ben asked.
I sighed. “Maybe Matt can fix it all in post-production.”
He chuckled. “That bad?”
I winced. “I can never tell. I got some great people to come in, recorded a couple of really great interviews. We ought to be able to get a good couple of hours of show out of it.”
“But?”
“It feels like spitting into the wind sometimes.”
“Here I was thinking this whole conference would never have happened without all your work.”
“Work, or mouthing off?”
“Yeah,” he said and put his arm over my shoulders.
“Thanks, I guess. But is it for the best? Would it have been better if this had all stayed underground?”
He waited a few steps before saying, “I don’t know.”
I tried to imagine a world in which I didn’t have my show—in which I had never announced to everyone that I was a werewolf—and had a tough time with it. I’d still be bottom of the pecking order of the pack at home, the old alphas would probably still be alive, and still beating me up. I’d have never met Alette, Emma, Dr. Shumacher, Tyler, Luis, Esperanza, or a dozen other of my friends. Including Cormac. And Ben would be dead, because I wouldn’t have been there for Cormac to bring him to, to save him after he’d been attacked.