Kitty's House of Horrors (2 page)

“No,” he said finally. “She turned us down flat.”

Wonders never ceased. But they’d asked her. And she’d said no, so that was a point in the show’s favor. “Ah. Good,” I said,
and Provost relaxed.

We managed polite farewells and handshakes. Ozzie and I walked the two producers outside to their rented BMW. Provost continued
to be gracious and flattering. Valenti stayed in the background. Sizing me up, I couldn’t help but think.

After they’d driven away, we returned to the building. The summer sun beat down. It had been a beautiful day, a recent heat
spell had broken, and the air felt clean. Smelled like rain.

I turned to Ozzie. “Well?”

He shrugged. “I think it’s a great opportunity. But it’s up to you. You’re the one who’s going to have to go through with
it.”

“I just wish I knew what kooky tricks they have up their sleeves. What are going to be the consequences if I do this?”

“What’s the worst that could happen?” he said.

I hated that question. Reality always came up with so much worse than I could imagine. “I could make an idiot of myself, ruin
my reputation, lose my audience, my ratings, my show, and never make a living in this business again.”

“No, the worst that could happen is you’d die on film in a freak accident, and how likely is that?” Trust Ozzie to be the
realist. I glared at him.

“Who knows? At best it’ll draw in a whole new audience. To tell you the truth, with people like Tina and Jeffrey involved,
it kind of sounds like fun.”

“You know what I’m going to say,” Ozzie said. “Any publicity is good publicity.”

So far in my career, that had been true. I was waiting for the day when it wasn’t. “Let me call Tina and Jeffrey and find
out why they signed on.”

*   *   *

I
had Tina’s cell phone number stored on speed dial—she was one of my go-to people on all things weird—and called her as soon
as I got back to my office and shut the door. I expected it to roll over to voice mail but was pleasantly surprised when she
answered on the second ring.

“Kitty!” she said, before hello even. Caller ID made everyone psychic, at least with phone calls.

“Hi, Tina. How are you?”

“It’s so good to hear from you! Is everything okay?”

People always sounded worried when I called them. Maybe because I only ever called a lot of them when I was in trouble and
needed help. I needed to set up more lunch dates or have more parties, to cure people of the idea that a call from me automatically
equaled danger. Then again, that was probably a lost cause.

“Everything’s fine for once, I think.”

“I love how you never sound sure when you say that,” Tina said cheerfully.

I sighed. “I’m afraid if I relax at all the universe will decide I need a challenge.” Which brought me to the business at
hand. “I’ve just had a visit from a couple of guys with SuperByte Entertainment.”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “
Those
guys. What a couple of freaks, huh?”

I agreed; I’d found them eerily plastic, like they’d been pressed from a mold: Hollywood sleazebag. “This show they’re putting
together? They said you were on board, and I wanted to ask you why you agreed to it. Do you think it’s a good publicity opportunity?
Did you… I don’t know… get a good vibe from those guys or what?”

She paused for long enough I thought we’d lost the connection. “Tina?”

When she finally spoke, she sounded confused. “Um… I mostly signed on because they said that you’d already signed on.”

“What?”

“They told me you’d already agreed to do the show. I figured if you’d decided it was okay, it was a good idea, and I thought
it’d be fun hanging out with you again.”

“Tina—I heard about this for the first time this afternoon. I hadn’t agreed to anything.”

“God, they lied to me. I shouldn’t be surprised.” I imagined her planting her hand on her forehead.

I tried not to sound angry. “You’re psychic! Can’t you tell when somebody’s lying?”

“I’m psychic—that doesn’t mean I can read minds,” she shot back. “Kitty, you met those guys. They were really convincing!”

“You didn’t think to call me to talk about it first?”

“No. I mean, face it—this show totally sounds like something you’d do.”

Any more arguing stalled in my throat. Because she was right. I had a few crazy publicity stunts of my own under my belt.
And why did I get the feeling Jeffrey Miles would give me a similar story? Those bastards had
used
me. Flung my name around like so much currency. I ought to be flattered.

“That’s it,” I said, grumbling. “I’m not doing a show run by lying Hollywood scumbags.”

“Kitty, please, you
have
to sign on. You can’t leave me all alone with this thing. You
owe
me.”

Crap. That was a pretty compelling argument. If I left Tina high and dry with this, I’d feel guilty about it for the rest
of my life.

“Did you sign anything? Surely if you did you can get out of it.”

“Well,” she started, and I waited for the other shoe to drop. “Here’s the thing: this really could be great publicity.” That
was going to be everybody’s excuse for anything, wasn’t it? She continued, “And the other thing is I figure this is the only
way we can counter some of the real wackos they’re bound to recruit for this. Right?”

“The fake psychics and emo vampires?” I said. I knew exactly what she was talking about: the kind of crap that gave people
like us a bad name, that we had to spend half of our time apologizing for.

“Right,” she said.

“You’ve got a point.”

“I’m not going to tell you what to do, Kitty. But please think about backing me up on this thing.”

“All right. I’ll think about it.”

“Thanks, Kitty. Come on, it’ll be fun!”

Maybe we could
make
it fun. We’d be like two girls at summer camp.

We clicked off, and I dialed another number. Joey Provost had left KNOB only an hour before; he might not even have arrived
at the airport yet.

He answered his phone with, “Hey, Kitty, tell me you’ve decided to say yes. Don’t let me get on the plane without hearing
yes.”

I suddenly wanted to punch him. Sometimes I really hated caller ID. “Why did you lie to Tina and Jeffrey and tell them I’d
already agreed to do the show?”

He hesitated only a beat. “Who told you that? Who said I told them that?”

“I called Tina!
She
told me!”

“Well, yes. Okay,” he said, barely stumbling on the words.

“Explain,” I said.

“All right. I’ll level with you. We need names for a production like this, and I had to start somewhere. You were at the top
of our list—you were always at the top of the list. With you on board, half our other names didn’t hesitate.”

“Why didn’t you talk to me first? Why did you have to lie about it?” I said.

“I had to have some way of convincing you, didn’t I? Once I got the others signed up, I could do that.”

The trouble was, he made sense, in a weird corporate-logic way. I understood why he did it; but he wouldn’t admit there was
anything wrong with it.

I tamped down on my anger. “Well, now you have to convince me why I should agree to work with a scheming liar.”

He took a deep breath, and the edge of desperation in his voice made him sound honest and heartfelt. “Look, Kitty, I know
I shouldn’t have lied, I should have been upfront. I know that, and I’m sorry. But this is my big chance. This is SuperByte’s
big chance. We probably look like a bunch of bottom-feeders—and I freely admit that’s what we’ve been until now. But we’re
trying to rise above all that and get out of the late-night cable gutter. We have our sights set on A-list cable, maybe even
network prime time. We want to go upscale, and this is our vehicle. Having you on board will help us do that.”

The guy gave a good pitch, I had to give him credit for that. I had to admit, I was a tiny bit flattered—me, A-list? Really?
This wasn’t to say the whole thing still didn’t sound as exploitative as hell.

But I was always saying I wanted the supernatural out in the open. Didn’t I want to have a hand—or claw—in this? If it turned
out well, yes, I did. If it didn’t turn out well… maybe I just had to take that gamble.

“All right,” I said.

“All right, you’re in?” Provost said hopefully.

“All right I’ll think about it. Seriously.”

“That’s all I can ask for,” he said, back in Hollywood deal-making mode. “Call me if you have any more questions.”

Hanging up, I felt like the decision had already been made. But there was still one person I had to talk to about it.

H
ome was a condo near the Cherry Creek area. I’d spent the whole drive there arranging the coming conversation in my head.
Maybe it would even go a little like how I planned it.

The other person I had to talk to was Ben. My husband. We’d been married for a year. And we hadn’t killed each other yet,
which I was pretty proud about. Not that we would literally do that, but we were both werewolves, and we
could
—if we didn’t depend on each other so much.

Ben was a lawyer with his own practice. He worked from home, which meant he was already in the living room watching evening
news on TV when I came in, wincing and looking guilty, sure he’d suspect something was going on.

But he hardly noticed. “Good, you’re home,” he said. “I have some news.”

He seemed positively bubbling. I blinked at him. Wow—my conversation was already derailed and it hadn’t even started yet.

“So do I,” I jumped in. “I need some advice, actually. I just need to talk this over with someone a little more objective
than I am.”

“You first,” he said. “Let’s get yours out of the way so we can get to the exciting part. ’Cause mine’s better.”

Now I was intrigued. I almost argued, but I wanted to have this talk before I chickened out. I slid next to him on the sofa.

“I’ve got an invitation to appear on a reality TV show—” I held up my hand to stop him because he’d already opened his mouth
to argue. “They’re inviting a bunch of supernatural celebrities. Remember Tina McCannon from
Paradox PI
? She’s signed up, and so has Jeffrey Miles, and I don’t know who else they’ve got. But it looks like they’re trying to do
this with a little credibility. It’ll tape over two weeks in Montana. They’ve got this hunting lodge or something, and they
say
they want it to be educational. Consciousness-raising. You know?” I realized I was trying to make it sound good. I wanted
him to think it was a good idea.

He sat back, brows raised, looking at me like I was a little bit crazy. I’d thought he was long past being surprised by anything
I got mixed up in.

“It sounds like the setup for a horror movie to me,” he said.

“God, please don’t say that. I’m already anticipating nightmares over this.”

“Then why are you even thinking about it?”

“Publicity,” I said, and I could feel the wild gleam in my eye.

“You show-business people are weird,” Ben said.

I liked to pretend I wasn’t exactly part of show business. Sure, I was in the business of entertaining people, but I was on
radio. On the fringe. And I was even on the fringe as far as radio was concerned. It wasn’t like I was in the thick of the
Hollywood madness of
real
show business, right? At least, not yet.

But you know? He was right. Show business was weird.

“It pays pretty well. And. Well. What I’m really worried about is being away from you for two weeks.”

Ben and I were a pack. Even if we hadn’t been the alpha werewolves leading the Denver pack, the two of us were a pair. A matched
set. The idea that wolves mate for life isn’t accurate—in the wild, wolves will find a new mate if one of their pair dies,
and an alpha male will mate with several females if the pack is prosperous. But Ben and I were pretty solid, and since we’d
hooked up we hadn’t been apart for more than a couple of days. That was the worst part of this whole deal. I’d gotten used
to having him in my life, and I didn’t like the prospect of being without. Of not having my guy watching my back.

I saw some of my own thoughts reflected back at me: hesitation, uncertainty. The conflict between human and wolf.

“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “If we were a normal couple and you really needed to do this for your career, it wouldn’t
even be a question, would it?”

We tried to be normal. We tried not to let our wolf sides overrule us. It was a dominance thing, just like being part of a
wolf pack. Every time the wolf side won an argument, we felt a little less human.

“I think I’d still miss you.” I leaned my head on his shoulder.

“Thanks.” He kissed the top of my head, and I could have stopped talking about anything and just cuddled for the next hour
or so. “But you still want to know if I think it’s a good idea or a bad idea.”

“Yeah.”

“It sounds…
interesting.
”

“That is
such
a loaded word,” I said.

“And you said Tina’s agreed to it? She’s cool.”

“Yeah, and Jeffrey Miles—you remember him, from the hearings in D.C.? He’s cool, too.”

He pulled back just enough to look at me. “Do you know what I think? I think it’ll be good for you to get away for a little
while. Since I came along and you took over the pack, you haven’t had a chance to do your own thing. You should go. Think
of it as a vacation.”

I hadn’t looked at it that way. “Most men would get suspicious if their wives wanted to go on vacation alone for a couple
of weeks. Come to think of it, most women would get suspicious if their husbands suggested they go on vacation alone.”

“Honey, I can’t hide anything from you. You’d smell it on me.”

“Hmm, true.” I turned my face to his neck and took in his scent, distinctively his, soap and sweat, spice and wolf.

He kissed me—a quick peck on my forehead. “I still have my news.”

“Is it really better than mine?”

He picked up a letter from the coffee table, marked with some kind of state government seal at the top. Ben was a lawyer;
he had dozens of official-looking papers fanned out on the table.