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

Bestseller Carrie Vaughn is the author of a wildly popular series of novels detailing the adventures of Kitty Norville, a radio personality who also happens to be a werewolf, and who runs a late-night call-in radio advice show for supernatural creatures. The Kitty books include Kitty and The Midnight Hour, Kitty Goes to Washington, Kitty Takes a Holiday, Kitty and the Silver Bullet, Kitty and the Dead Man’s Hand, Kitty Raises Hell, and Kitty’s House of Horrors. Vaughn’s short work has appeared in Jim Baen’s Universe, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Subterranean, Wild Cards: Inside Straight, Realms of Fantasy, Paradox, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, and elsewhere. Her most recent books are Steel, her second venture into young-adult territory; After the Golden Age; and two new Kitty novels, Kitty Goes to War and Kitty’s Big Trouble. She lives in Colorado.

Here she takes us into Kitty’s world for a poignant look at how you don’t abandon old friends, even if—or maybe especially if—you’re immortal.

RICK AWOKE AT SUNSET AND FOUND A PHONE MESSAGE FROM AN OLD friend waiting for him. Helen sounded unhappy, but she didn’t give details. She wouldn’t even say that she was afraid and needed help, but the hushed tone of her voice made her sound like she was looking over her shoulder. He grabbed his coat, went upstairs to the back of the shop where he parked his silver BMW, and drove to see her.

The summer night was still, ordinary. Downtown Denver blazed. To his eyes, the skyscrapers seemed like glowing mushrooms; they’d sprung up so quickly, overwhelming everything that had come before. Only in the last forty years or so had Denver begun to shed its cow town image to become another typical metropolis. He sometimes missed the cow town, though he could still catch glimpses of it. Union Station still stood, the State Capitol of course, and the Victorian mansions in the surrounding neighborhoods. If he squinted, he could remember them in their glory days. Some of the fire from the mining-boom era remained. That was why Rick stayed.

Helen lived a few miles south along the grid of streets around the University of Denver, in a house not quite as old or large as those Victorian mansions, but still an antique in the context of the rest of the city. She’d lived there since the 1950s, when Rick bought her the place. Even then, Denver had been booming. The city was an ever-shifting collage, its landmarks rising and falling, the points around which he navigated subtly changing over the decades.

Points like Helen.

He parked on the street in front of her house, a single-story square cottage, pale blue with white trim, shutters framing the windows, with a front porch and hanging planters filled with multicolored petunias. The lights were off.

For a moment, he stood on the concrete walkway in front and let his more-than-human senses press outward: sight, sound, and taste. The street, the lawn, the house itself were undisturbed. The neighbors were watching television. A block away, an older man walked a large dog. It was all very normal, except that the house in front of him was silent. No one living was inside—he’d have smelled the blood, heard the heartbeat.

When he and Helen became friends, he’d known this day would come. This day always came. But the circumstances here were unnatural. He walked up the stairs to the front door, which was unlocked. Carefully, he pushed inside, stepping around the places on the hardwood floor that creaked, reaching the area rug in the living room. Nothing—furniture, photographs, bookcase, small upright piano in the corner—was out of place. The modernist coffee table, a cone-shaped lamp by a blocky armchair, silk lilies in a cut-crystal vase. They were the decorations of an old woman—out of place, out of time, seemingly preserved. But to Rick it was just Helen, the way she’d always been.

His steps muffled on the rug, he progressed to the kitchen in back. He found her there, lying on the linoleum floor. Long dead—he could tell by her cold skin and the smell of dried blood on the floor.

Standing in the doorway, he could work out what had happened. She’d been sitting at the Formica table, sipping a cup of tea. The cup and saucer were there, undisturbed, along with a bowl of sugar cubes. She must have set the cup down before she fell. When she did fall, it had been violently, knocking the chair over. She had crawled a few feet—not far. She might have broken a hip or leg in the fall—expected, at her age. Flecks of blood streaked the back of her blue silk dress, fanning out from a dark, dime-sized hole. When he took a deep breath, he could smell the fire of gunpowder. She’d been shot in the back, and she had died.

After such a life, to die like this.

So that was that. A more than sixty-year acquaintance ended. Time to say good-bye, mourn, and move on. He’d done it before—often, even. He could be philosophical about it. The natural course of events, and all that. But this was different, and he wouldn’t abandon her, even now when it didn’t matter. He’d do the right thing—the human thing.

He drew his cell phone from his coat pocket and dialed 911.

“Hello. I need to report a murder.”

SHE WALKED THROUGH THE DOORWAY, AND EVERY MAN IN THE PLACE looked at her: the painted red smile, the blue skirt swishing around perfect legs. She didn’t seem to notice, walked right up to the bar and pulled herself onto a stool.

“I’ll have a scotch, double, on ice,” she said.

Rick set aside the rag he’d been using to wipe down t

he surface and leaned in front of her. “You look like you’re celebrating something.”

“That’s right. You going to help me out or just keep leering?”

Smiling, he found a tumbler and poured her a double and extra.

“I have to ask,” Rick said, returning to the bar in front of her, enjoying the way every other man in Murray’s looked at him with envy. “What’s the celebration?”

“You do have to ask, don’t you? I’m just not sure I should tell you.”

“It’s just not often I see a lady come in here all alone in a mood to celebrate.”

Murray’s was a working-class place, a dive by the standards of East Colfax; the neighborhood was going downhill as businesses and residents fled downtown, leaving behind everyone who didn’t have anyplace to go. Rick had seen this sort of thing happen enough; he recognized the signs. Murray wasn’t losing money, but he didn’t have anything extra to put into the place. The varnish on the hardwood floor was scuffed off, the furniture was a decade old. Cheap beer and liquor was the norm, and he still had war bond posters up a year and a half after V-J Day. Or maybe he liked the Betty Grable pinups he’d stuck on top of some of them too much to take any of it down.

Blushing, the woman ducked her gaze, which told him something about her. The shrug she gave him was a lot shyer than the brash way she’d walked in here.

“I got a job,” she said.

“Congratulations.”

“You’re not going to tell me that a nice girl like me should find herself a good man, get married, and settle down and make my mother proud?”

“Nope.”