Ben moved his arm over my shoulder, and I snuggled into his embrace. “I wish I could just go back there and . . . beat them up,” I said.
“We’ve been over that. They didn’t manage to kill you last time. It’s best if we don’t give them a next time.”
Especially since I wouldn’t have quite the same backup if I faced the Band of Tiamat again. Evan and Brenda, the rather uncomfortably amoral bounty hunters who’d saved my ass, had had to leave Vegas in a hurry to avoid awkward questions from the police. They couldn’t help me.
And the one supernatural bounty hunter in the world I actually sort of trusted was still in jail.
“Grant’s keeping an eye on things for us,” Ben continued. “If they do anything funny, we’ll know it.”
Odysseus Grant was a stage magician in Las Vegas, a niche act who’d made his reputation with a retro show featuring old vaudeville props and reviving classic tricks that had gone out of fashion in the age of pyrotechnics and special effects. That was the public face, at least. I still didn’t entirely understand the persona underneath. He was a guardian of sorts, protecting humanity from the forces of chaos. It sounded so overwrought I hesitated to even think it. But, having encountered some of those forces firsthand, I was grateful for his presence.
I had allies. I should have felt strong. I had a whole pack behind me, and a vampire, and a magician. The Band of Tiamat didn’t stand a chance against all that.
It had to be enough for whatever they threw at us. It just had to be.
Chapter 2
What did people ever do before the Internet? Could you really go to the library to find out that the hit TV show Paradox PI was coming to Denver to film a couple of episodes? Because the show’s producers certainly hadn’t chosen to let me know.
I found this information after searching on Harry Houdini, trying to learn more about him. What I found, I liked. He traveled, did thousands of performances and demonstrations of stage magic and escapism. He loved debunking fakes. He claimed that he wanted to believe—he was desperate for proof that the mediums and séances he discredited could actually reach the “other side” and communicate with the dead. But every one he encountered used tricks and stagecraft. When Houdini was alive, the supernatural was still hidden. It kept to shadows and refused to draw back the curtains. I had a theory: You could tell who the real mediums and psychics were because they didn’t advertise, they didn’t brag, and they certainly weren’t going to look for attention from someone like Houdini. Ironically, in his search for the real deal, Houdini drove the real deal away, deeper into hiding. He’d have loved this day and age.
As Professor Olafson had said, Houdini promised that if it was possible, he would deliver a message after his death. Despite hundreds of mediums and séances attempting to help him to do that, the world was still waiting.
Paradox PI did an entire episode on the search for Houdini’s message from beyond and didn’t find anything. Now they were coming to Denver.
I’d seen a few episodes of the show. They specialized in paranormal investigation, especially haunted houses. Went in, set up all kinds of cameras, microphones, infrared scanners, motion detectors, seismographs, and so on, hoping to record some evidence of spectral activity. They usually found something small and indeterminate—heavy breathing in a room where no one had been, the flash of a shadow on a camera, or a drop in temperature in a hallway. The on-camera team—two men and a woman (the woman had beautiful, flowing raven hair and tended to wear tight shirts and jeans)—would stand around, regarding the “evidence” and nodding sagely, and happily inform the haunted establishment’s owner that while they couldn’t prove the place was haunted, this looked pretty cool. The whole thing had a reality-TV aesthetic, lots of shaky video footage of people talking, the occasional expletive bleeped out. It promoted a sense of artificial urgency. They’d never come up with something as definitive as an image of Jacob Marley rattling his chains, but they always pretended that they might. Bottom line: It was a TV show, not paranormal investigation.
Since the emergence of the supernatural—the government acknowledging the existence of vampires and werewolves, my own show exploiting the topic mercilessly, dozens of others jumping on the bandwagon—the fakes had been having a field day. When you’d seen a werewolf shape-shift on live TV, the psychic hotline somehow seemed a lot more reasonable.
I wanted to know what side of the line Paradox PI fell on: sensationalist TV show exploiting interest in the supernatural, or genuine paranormal investigators? I wasn’t necessarily going to try to expose them as fakes. But getting a story out of them would be icing.
Now I just had to figure out how I could crash the party.
I brought all my powers as a prominent media figure to bear in my quest. Well, basically, I sweet-talked a production assistant at the company into giving me the Denver filming schedule. It took me about three tries, calling at different times of the day, before I hit on the right person, but it worked.
They’d already been in the area three days, covering some of the more famous locations like the Brown Palace Hotel in downtown Denver, and the Stanley Hotel sixty miles north in Estes Park. On day four, the PI gang was scheduled to examine Cheesman Park. Of course they were. This was the classic haunting that had supposedly inspired the movie Poltergeist, not that the latter bore any resemblance to the former. About a hundred years ago, a cemetery had been cleared of its headstones and spruced up to make way for a park and fancy neighborhood. And no, the bodies hadn’t been moved. Or they had, but by cut-rate labor that had dumped them together and swept them under the carpet, so to speak. Since then, reports of angry spirits flourished: headless women in Victorian gowns searching for their skulls, ghosts rattling shutters and doors, that sort of thing. No little girls getting sucked into TVs, though.
I arrived at the park before the TV crew did, so I waited, parked along the winding street in my hatchback.
A half hour later, with about an hour to go before dusk—very scenic and photogenic considering the subject matter—a functional white van pulled alongside the curb and parked some fifty yards behind me, near the picturesque fountain area. They might have been plumbers on a dinner break, but a couple of guys got out, opened up the back, and lugged out a camera, a high-end video job. They spent about fifteen minutes setting it up, then one of them spoke on a cell phone. Ten minutes later, a shiny black van with the show’s logo painted on it pulled up and parked on the street, and the cameraman filmed it all. Stock footage, the PIs’ arrival, with the lovely backdrop of golden westering sun slanting across the park. Rapt, I watched.
The guys filmed the Paradox PI team getting out of the vehicle. Then they lowered the cameras, and everyone milled for a moment.
I made my move.
I jumped out of my car and strode toward the cluster of people and vehicles. I had my sights on Gary Janson, the show’s front man both in front of and behind the camera. Tall, maybe six-five, and burly, he had an intimidating presence, but his dark trimmed beard hid a bit of paunch. He’d probably spent more of his life in front of computers than running from poltergeists.
If I had gotten all the way to Janson without anyone stopping me, that would have told me something about how this show was run. But I didn’t, which told me that this wasn’t a bunch of amateurs. They had a
professional production staff. One of the techs climbed out of the white van and intercepted me, jogging slightly, a bit of panic in his eyes.
He held his hand out at me. “I’m sorry, we’re filming a TV show. Can I ask you to stay on that side of the park?”
“I know you’re filming. I was hoping I could talk to Gary and the gang. I’m Kitty Norville.” I gave him my biggest “gosh, gee” smile and offered my hand.
His eyes went round and a little shocky.
“Hey, I recognize you! You’re that werewolf!” This came from a woman by the dark van—the show’s raven-haired hottie, Tina McCannon. Seeing her in person, I was even more convinced she’d been chosen for her model-quality looks, measurements, and preternaturally tight T-shirts rather than any of her other abilities. She pointed at me with the same urgency someone might have when saying, “She’s a witch! Burn her!” I gritted my teeth behind my smile. Being the country’s first celebrity werewolf had its more interesting moments.