“Care to explain?” Duke drawled.
“The Denver police have a report of the incident. The situation was self-defense. He—the man I killed—was also a werewolf, and he had murdered several women. When he attacked me, I defended myself the best way I could.” It may not have been the whole truth . . .
“Did you enjoy it? Killing him?”
“I hope I never have to do anything like that again.”
“What about your other half? That demon inside of you? How did it feel?”
He was determined to turn this into a good ol’ witch hunt, wasn’t he? “There is no demon, sir. Just me.”
“That’s what you’d like us to think, with your fancy suit and lipstick—”
“Senator, I’m not wearing lipstick.”
“—and the Good Book says, ‘When he speaketh fair, believe him not for there is abomination in his heart’!”
“Does this mean we’re moving away from the ‘scientific discourse’ part of the testimony?”
“Senator!” That was Henderson. Duke shut up, finally. I sighed. Henderson continued. “May we please return to the subject at hand? You’re in danger of harassing the witness.”
“Well past, I’d think,” Ben muttered behind me.
Duke glared at Henderson, and I caught a glimpse of a long-standing rivalry, acrimonious and far beyond compromise.
“Senator Duke, do you have any further questions?”
Duke meaninglessly shuffled the papers before him. “I do. Ms. Norville, you host a weekly radio show called The Midnight Hour, is this correct?”
Yay, an easy one. “Yes.”
“What is the purpose of this show?”
“Entertainment, primarily. Also education. On good days.”
“Not conversion?”
I could hear Ben fidgeting, straightening, crossing and uncrossing his arms. He whispered, “Objection . . .” This wasn’t a courtroom. He couldn’t stand up and yell it.
“I’m not sure I understand you. Conversion to what?”
“You don’t use your show to recruit?”
My jaw opened and it took me a second to close it and formulate a coherent sentence. “On the contrary, sir. I want to shatter any romantic illusions about these conditions that people might have picked up from late-night movies. I mean, just listen to the show.”
“Ms. Norville, how many werewolves do you think are living in the United States today?”
“I have no idea.”
“None at all?”
“No. There isn’t exactly a space for it on the census form.”
“Maybe we’ll change that. If you had to make a guess, what would you say?”
I took at least a couple calls every week from people claiming to be werewolves or some other variety of lycanthrope. Sometimes more, if the topic was werewolf-specific. I didn’t believe all the claims. Assuming I was only getting a small percentage of the total—
“Really, sir, I hesitate to even make a guess,” I said. I wasn’t going to stick my neck out on a question like that.