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

I didn’t know quite how to put this. “Do you think that maybe if you’re Elvis Presley reincarnated you’d be happier, I don’t know, working on something original? Starting a new music career?”

“You think anything’ll top the last one?”

He had a point.

“Arty, would you do a song for us? What you do you guys say?” I asked the audience, which roared encouragement. Bet that sounded cool over the radio. Of course we’d planned this out ahead of time; we had a mike set up and music on cue.

Arty trotted off to the performance space we’d set aside at the edge of the stage. He had t

he moves down—he was, in fact, a pretty good Elvis impersonator. Grabbing the mike, he said, “Kitty, this one’s just for you.”

The bastard sang “Hound Dog.” And the crowd went wild.

In the back of my mind I worried that the cameras weren’t working right, that the microphone wasn’t picking up my voice, that something little was going to go wrong to ruin the whole broadcast. But that was why we had techs. It was their job to worry about it. I just had to keep the show moving.

How did Oprah do this every single day?

Besides having my parents in the audience, which gave the evening a sort of school-play undertone (before the show, Mom had insisted on giving me a hug and telling me that I’d do just fine, she was sure of it), I spotted Dom. He was standing in the back, exuding his elegant post-Mob gangster aura and surveying the theater like he owned the place and had set up the show himself. It gave me an urge to call him up to the microphone, just to see if it would shake that smug expression. But I’d promised.

I didn’t smell any other lycanthropes in the theater. There were a few vampires besides Dom. But nothing animal, nothing that suggested lycanthrope. I was disappointed. I liked to think that I did the show for them. That me talking about my own experiences helped them. But none of them had come. Dom had said there weren’t any outside of the show at the Hanging Gardens. Maybe I’d hoped that at least one of them would be in the crowd.

After saying farewell to Arty, I alternated between taking questions over the phone and from the audience. During commercial breaks, I had to keep my crowd entertained—no chance to sit back and stretch during station ID like I could on the radio. I did giveaways, raffle drawings using ticket stub numbers, CDs, T-shirts, copies of my book, all kinds of things. They loved it, which was all that really mattered. If the audience—whether it’s in front of you or listening on the radio—loves you, it’ll follow you anywhere. I had fun—in the same way that bungee jumping must be fun. Not that I’d ever wanted to try it.

I took another call. “Hello, I’ve got our next caller on the line. What’s your question?”

“Hi! Would sunscreen work for a vampire who really wanted to go out in daylight?”

I looked quizzically at the microphone. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever asked that question. And I’m not really sure I know the answer. Except I don’t think I’d want any of the vampires I actually like to try it.”

“I’m talking about sunblock. The really heavy-duty SPF 60 stuff.”

“They make SPF 60? Wow. But for it to work, I think that would assume that the UV radiation is what causes the damage to vampires. I’m not sure that’s a valid assumption. I’ll tell you what, I’ve got some vampires here in the audience—any of you guys want to take a stab at answering Dan’s question?”

And there was Lisa, coming toward the microphone below the stage where people came to ask their questions. She was wearing a kicky red dress today, and her hair was up in a ponytail, which bounced when she moved. She grinned and waved at me. Definitely the perkiest vampire I’d ever met.

Murmuring carried through the audience, heads bent together, whispering. Normal people who’d maybe come here for just this chance—to see a real live, sort of, vampire. The thing was she’d been sitting there the whole time, and people who didn’t know what to look for would never recognize her. But now she was spooky. Lisa glanced over them with a sly smile on her lips and a glint in her eye, encouraging all their ideas about what her being a vampire meant, before turning back to me.

“Hi, Kitty!”

“Hello! And what can you tell us?”

“I’ve only been a vampire for like five years, but I can totally tell you it doesn’t matter how much gunk you put on, it won’t help. It’s just like you said, it’s not the UV radiation, it’s something else. Something about the light. I mean, what makes people vampires in the first place? It’s the same kind of weird things that can hurt them. It doesn’t make much sense, but there it is.”

“Okay, caller, I think that’s your answer. The miracles of modern chemistry aren’t enough to combat the supernatural. At least not yet, but I know some people who are working on that. Thanks for that answer, Lisa.”

She beamed so hard I thought her face might break, then returned to her seat.

We were entering the last half hour of the show, about the time I started feeling like I’d been running a marathon, usually. This time, I’d felt like that from the start, but adrenaline kept me going. Wolf had settled down. I was still on high alert, but the situation hadn’t changed—hadn’t become any more dangerous—so she trusted me that we weren’t going to get ambushed.

Thank God the evening’s really weird question came over the phone. I had no idea what I’d have said to this person face-to-face.

“You’re on the air.”

“Yeah, hi, thanks for taking my call.” It was a woman, serious in a school librarian kind of way. The not-cool school librarian who told you to be quiet rather than the cool school librarian who slipped you Stephen King books when no one was looking.

“What’s your question?”

“I wanted to know: do you find dog shows to be offensive?”