Kitty's Big Trouble (Kitty Norville 9)

“It’s a cliché, you know,” he said. “Eternal life being boring. Maybe for some of us it is, the ones who lock themselves away in mansions or castles, cut themselves off from the world and the people in it. For the rest of us, there’s always something new coming along, if we know where to look. We stay interested by having a stake in the game.”

“The Long Game?” I said. The Long Game, a conspiracy among vampires. The few people who knew about it spoke of it in whispers, in hints, if at all. Near as I could figure, it really was a game, but one that dealt in lives and power. And the one who dies with the most toys wins.

Rick shrugged. “Not always. After all, Kitty, you’re one of the people who keeps life interesting.”

He gazed over the dining room and bar, waiting for me to respond. I’d already finished my beer or I would have taken a long drink. “I’m flattered, I think.”

“If you want my advice, you’re narrowing your focus too much,” Rick said. “Don’t just look for the secret vampires and lycanthropes. Look for people who might have hunted them. People like your friend Cormac.”

Now there was an idea. “You’re not going to give me any hints about where to start, are you?”

“Think about it for a minute. If I met Doc Holliday, who else do you think I might have known?”

Western history wasn’t my strong suit, but my knowledge was better than average. I remembered the stories of the Wild West and the O.K. Corral, and a few choice Hollywood treatments of the same, and my eyes grew wide.

“Wyatt Earp?”

Rick just smiled.

Chapter 2

AFTER MY TALK with Rick, I called Alette, vampire Mistress of Washington, D.C. Because that was how little sense of decorum I had.

“Whatever you want to know, I probably can’t tell you,” she said, an amused lilt to her matriarchal tone.

“So does that mean you don’t know, or you know but won’t tell me?”

“Ask your question, and we’ll see.”

“Was General Sherman a werewolf?”

She paused a moment, and I imagined her sitting in the refined Victorian parlor of her Georgetown home, phone to her ear, smiling an indulgent smile. I was asking a favor; I couldn’t force her to tell me. I depended on her kindness. Her tolerance.

“I can’t say,” she said finally, which made me think she knew, and that the answer was yes. Not that I would ever get her to admit that. I let out a growl, and she chuckled. “Did you expect me to say anything else?”

“I had to try,” I said. “I always have to try.”

“Yes, you certainly do. Have you asked Rick?”

“Asked him first. He didn’t know anything about Sherman, but he did bring up Wyatt Earp. I don’t suppose you have any good dirt on him, do you?”

“Well, I don’t know about dirt…”

She told me a story.

In the early 1870s, a group of vampires had traveled west and settled near Dodge City, Kansas, hoping to take advantage of the lawlessness, of people traveling anonymously across the plains—cowboys on cattle drives, prospectors, traders, settlers. They could feed without consequence, kill as they liked, with no one the wiser. But someone noticed, and their den was burned to the ground and all of them killed. The established East Coast vampire Families heard of the slaughter but never discovered who was responsible—though truth be told they were relieved that the anarchic vampires had been disposed of. Shortly after, Families began sending their own representatives west to establish enclaves in the burgeoning cities, to prevent such lawlessness from happening again. Alette let drop the information that Rick had already been in the region for decades and that the eastern vampires were startled to find one of their kind of his age in the lawless West. I’d have to ask him about that.

The timing of the fire that destroyed the anarchic vampires coincided with the time that Wyatt Earp spent as deputy marshal of Dodge City, and rumor had it that his law-enforcement activities extended to the supernatural. I thanked Alette for the tidbit and promised to keep in touch.

Research into ghost towns and fires in 1870s Kansas followed, and I marked likely spots on a map. Not that burned vampires left any hard evidence behind. I was never going to find solid proof, a diary or letter in Wyatt Earp’s handwriting stating, “Yes, I killed vampires while I lived in Dodge City.” But I hoped to get … something. That was how, a month later, Ben, Cormac, and I ended up standing in the middle of a stretch of prairie about fifteen miles northeast of Dodge City.

Getting Cormac out here had been a challenge in itself. He was on parole after serving time for a manslaughter conviction and officially wasn’t allowed to leave the Denver area for the time being. But we were family—Ben was Cormac’s cousin, and I was Ben’s wife. So that made us cousins-in-law. Or something. We explained to Cormac’s parole officer that we were going to visit a dying relative. The story must have been convincing, because Cormac got permission to leave, but we had to make a lot of promises about getting him back to Denver to check in and sign a lot of papers taking responsibility if anything happened while Cormac was with us.

We’d jumped through all the hoops because I’d wanted his perspective out here. And, if I had to admit it, the perspective of the ghost he’d picked up in prison—a nineteenth-century wizard named Amelia Parker. She was either haunting him, had possessed him, or was just along for the ride. It was a long story.

I asked, but Cormac said she hadn’t known Wyatt Earp herself.

“It’s not like the movies,” he said. “Not everybody knew each other.”