“Happy to, love your show! We should hang out sometime! Because you know what I haven’t done? Taken blood from a werewolf who’s high on pot—”
“Moving on now, we’re going to take a short break for messages, but I’ll be right here waiting for you. This is Kitty and you’re listening to The Midnight Hour.”
Meanwhile, something was happening in the booth. Three people had entered, two men and a woman. All three were white, wore dark suits, had subdued professional manners. They moved in behind Matt’s chair and loomed. Matt looked around, his eyes wide, a little freaked. I caught his gaze through the window, and he shook his head, confused.
“Hey, what’s going on?” I asked through the intercom. The public service announcements playing on the air filled the background. One of the men escorted Matt out of the booth. The remaining two looked out the window, at me.
“If you’ll stay right there, ma’am,” the woman said.
I didn’t. I went straight for the door, which opened—and the pair of them stood blocking my way. Matt and the other agent were heading down the hall. What were t
hey doing? They couldn’t take away my sound guy in the middle of a show. I tried to push past, to go after him—they didn’t even flinch.
Calming myself, I took a steadying breath. They smelled human, plain, ordinary. Nothing unusual to speak of. I wasn’t sure why I expected them to smell ominous. Probably because everything else about them was ominous. They didn’t even have guns, and somehow I had expected them to have guns.
I curled my lip, showing teeth, a challenge they would have recognized if they’d been werewolves.
“Ms. Norville? We’d like to talk to you for a few moments,” the woman said.
“Then you should call and make an appointment.” Their glares told me that no, they didn’t do that sort of thing. “I’m in the middle of a show, I can’t just leave dead air.”
“Then do something about it.”
“I don’t suppose you’d be up for an interview? We could talk—”
“I don’t think you want that,” the man said darkly.
The monitor was filling up with incoming calls. I couldn’t do anything about it. Alrighty, then. “Fine,” I muttered, and went into the sound booth to plug in my phone. I couldn’t leave the broadcast empty, and I didn’t want to go hunting through the archives for past interviews I could re-run. So I pulled up a ten-hour loop of the sax riff in “Careless Whisper” and let it play.
The two agents in black were still blocking the hallway; I invited them into the studio.
“Have a seat, Ms. Norville,” the man said.
I didn’t. “Who are you? Can I see some badges or ID or something? I mean, obviously you’re some kind of government agents.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. The last two Men in Black who came after me weren’t from the government at all, and they were way scarier than you. You two are just . . . creepy.”
The woman sighed and pulled a badge out of her inside jacket pocket. In movies and TV, agents flashed their badges and the people looking at them seemed to be able to take in all the information with a glance. That didn’t work in real life. I had to lean in close to study the fine print.
“Agent Martin?” I said. “And you are?”
The man scowled like he was revealing something important. “Agent Ivers.”
“And what exactly is the Paranatural Security Administration?” I asked.
“We’re a division of the Department of Homeland Security,” Martin said.
Well, that couldn’t be good. “Why haven’t I heard about you guys before now? Because I would have heard of you guys before now.”
“We’re still a provisional agency,” Ivers said, walking around the studio, appearing to study equipment, frowning at the no-doubt subversive-looking concert flyers and new-age festival announcements pinned to the bulletin board. KNOB was public radio, what did he expect?
“What does that even mean?” I asked.
Martin peered at the monitor. “You get a lot of phone calls each week?”
“It depends on the topic, depends on the week. Things really ramp up right around Halloween. And Christmas, weirdly enough.”