Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand

That left me giggling. When I thought about it, Ben was right. I didn’t want a big wedding. I didn’t want to have to pick a caterer, or decide on an open or cash bar, and I certainly didn’t want to hire a DJ who couldn’t possibly do as good a job as I could, having started my professional life as a late-night radio DJ. But I did want the dress. And I wanted to do something a little more interesting than wait in line at some government office so we could sign a piece of paper.

That got me thinking. I tapped my finger on a catering menu and chewed on my lip. What if there was a way to save all the time, avoid the organizational nightmare, and yet still have the spectacle? All the fun without the headaches? I had an idea.

“What are you thinking?” Ben said, wary. “You’ve got that look.”

“What look?”

“You’re planning something.”

What the hell? The worst he could do was say no, and that would only put us back where we started.

“Las Vegas,” I said.

He stared. “Your mother really would kill you.” But he didn’t say no.

“You can do nice weddings in Vegas,” I said. “It isn’t all Elvis ministers and drive-through chapels.”

“Vegas.”

I nodded. The more I thought about it, the better it sounded. “It’s like the wedding and honeymoon all rolled together. We’d go straight from the ceremony to the swimming pool and have a couple of froufrou drinks with little umbrellas.”

He just kept looking at me. We hadn’t been together all that long, not even a year. Before that he was my lawyer and always seemed mildly in awe of the problems I managed to get myself into. But I couldn’t always read him. The relationship was still too new. And we still wanted to get married. God help us.

Then he turned his smile back on. “Big scary werewolf drinking froufrou drinks?”

“You know me.”

“Vegas,” he said again, and the tone was less questioning and more thoughtful.

“I can get online and get us a package rate in an hour.”

“And we won’t be paying four figures for a photographer.”

“Exactly. More money for froufrou drinks.”

He shrugged in surrender. “All right. I’m sold. You’re such a cute drunk.”

Uh... thanks? “But I’m still getting a really great dress.” Maybe something in red. Me, Las Vegas, red dress... Forget the bridal magazines, I was ready for Vogue.

“Fine, but I get to take it off you at the end of the day.”

Oh yes, he’s a keeper. I smiled. “It’s a deal.”

At work the next afternoon, I mentioned the Vegas idea to Matt, the guy who ran the board for my radio show. We were in the break room pouring coffee and chatting.

“Las Vegas?” Matt said. He was another show-business twenty-something, stocky, with his black hair tied in a ponytail. “That’s seriously cool. Whacked out, but cool. I wouldn’t expect anything else from you.”

“You only live once, right? And we’ll have a story to tell at cocktail parties for the rest of our lives.”

“It would be more cool if you’d already done it and not told anyone until you got back,” he said.

“We haven’t decided anything yet. We may still get talked into going the conventional route.”

He looked skeptical. “I don’t know. You found a guy who’s willing to elope in Vegas—let everyone else have the normal wedding. You only get married the first time once.”

There was the philosophy of a generation wrapped up in a tidy little sentence.

That afternoon, Ozzie, the KNOB station manager and my immediate boss, poked his head into my office. I wondered what I’d done to piss him off this week.

“Kitty?”

“Yeah—what can I do for you?”

“I hear you’re headed to Las Vegas to get married,” he said.

I tossed aside the stack of press releases I was reading. “Where did you hear that?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s all over the building. It doesn’t matter, because here’s the thing, I’ve got this great idea.”

Ozzie fit the general stereotype of the aging hippie—thinning hair in a ponytail, a general belief that he was enlightened and progressive—except that somewhere along the line he had embraced capitalism and was always looking for ways to make a few more bucks. Why should big industrialists have all the fun? He wanted to beat them at their own game.

“You’ve been talking about doing a TV show for a while, right? I mean a real one, not that disaster in Washington last year.”

Disaster. That was putting in mildly. Never mind that that disaster had made me famous and boosted my ratings.

“I wouldn’t say talking. Woolgathering, maybe.” We’d mostly been looking for ways to piggyback The Midnight Hour onto someone else’s talk show to see if there was a market for it. I’d appeared on Letterman last month when my book came out and managed not to make an ass of myself, despite way too many cracks from Dave about how often a werewolf has to shave her legs. But that was a long way from my own show. Still, any way we could keep cashing in on my instant celebrityhood as the country’s first publicly outed werewolf had to be considered.

“How about a one-off? A special, maybe a couple of hours long, where you do the show live. It’d still be exactly the same—you’d take calls, do some interviews maybe. Just with cameras and an audience.”

Weird. But cool. And so crazy it just might work. “You think something like that would fly?”

“You on TV? You’re photogenic, of course it’ll work. And in Vegas you’ve got an instant audience, access to studios and theaters. I’ve got a producer friend there—let me make a few calls.”

Far too late I realized: he wanted me to work the same weekend I was getting married?

Right. Now both Ben and my mother were going to kill me.

“We’re getting married, and you want to work all weekend?” he said, in the offended tone of voice I’d expected.

“Not all weekend.”

I’d come home from the station, slumped on the sofa, and told Ben the big idea. He was still at his desk, where he’d been working at his computer, and regarded me with an air of bafflement. He’d be perfectly within his rights to call the whole thing off. Postpone it at the very least. I clasped my hands together and twisted the engagement ring he’d given me.

Crossing his arms, he leaned back in his chair. “Why does anything that happens to you surprise me anymore?” He was smiling, and the smile was encouraging. His nice smile, not the “I’m a lawyer who’s about to gut you” smile.

“So... you’re okay with this?”

“Oh, sure. But while you’re working, I’m going to go lose a lot of money playing blackjack or poker or something, and you’re not allowed to nag me about it. Deal?”

I narrowed my gaze. “How much money? Your money or mine?”

“No nagging. Deal?”

My fiancé, the lawyer. The werewolf lawyer. I should have expected nothing less. At least he hadn’t said he wanted to cruise all the strip clubs in Vegas.

“Deal,” I said.

Chapter 2

Ozzie arranged it, and more quickly than I would have thought possible. A million things could stall a plan like this. I figured he’d have lost touch with his contact, or this person would have changed careers and was now selling used cars, or it wouldn’t be possible to put this kind of show together, or he wouldn’t be able to get airtime for it. Maybe Ozzie would lose interest, and I wouldn’t have to work the same weekend I was getting married. But he pulled it together. His producer friend thought it sounded like a great idea and signed on, found the venue, sold it to a high-profile cable network, and before I knew it the avalanche was upon me. I couldn’t say no. They picked a weekend, I told them no—full moon that weekend, no way was I going to be spending it in foreign territory. They changed the weekend, the contracts were drawn up and signed, and we had a TV show. We’d broadcast in a month. Promotion began in earnest.

To tell the truth, I was excited. My first TV appearance had been against my will under very trying circumstances. It would be nice to be the one in charge this time.

The month before the trip passed quickly. With the Las Vegas producer’s help we booked the theater, lined up an interesting set of local guests, and started promotion. On the wedding front, we set it all up via the Internet. No long, drawn-out stress at all. As a bonus, because this was now a business trip, the boss was paying for the hotel and plane tickets. I even found the cutest dress in the world in the window of a store downtown—a sleeveless, hip-hugging sheath in a smoky, sexy blue. Sometimes all you had to do was look around and solutions appeared like magic.

The only problem really remaining—I still hadn’t told my mom I was planning a Vegas wedding. And wasn’t that an oxymoron? You weren’t supposed to plan a Vegas wedding. Maybe I could pretend it had been spontaneous.

In the meantime, I still had this week’s conventional show to get through.

“—and that was when I thought, ‘Oh, my, it’s an angel, this angel has come down from Heaven to tell me how to write this book!’ These words on the page, these aren’t my words, these are the words of the angel Glorimel, a cosmic being of pure light who in turn is channeling the voice of the universe itself! If you close your eyes you can almost hear the singing in the words, the harmony of the spheres—”

“If I close my eyes how am I going to read the book?” Oops, that was my outside voice. I winced. Fortunately, if the fringe element of any group had one thing in common, it was an inability to recognize sarcasm.

Chandrila Ravensun said, with complete earnestness, “The words flow through you. You just have to be open to them.”

I set my forehead on the table in front of me, which held my microphone and equipment. The resulting conk was probably loud enough to carry over the air.

This was the last, the very last time I did Ozzie a favor. “I have this friend who wrote a book,” he said. “It’d be perfect for your show. You should interview her.” He gave me a copy of the book, Our Cosmic Journey, which listed enough alluring paranormal topics on the back-cover copy to be intriguing: past-life regression, astral projection, and even a mention of vampirism in the chapters on immortality of the soul. I assumed that anyone who wrote a book and managed to get it published, no matter how small and fringe the publisher, had to have their act together enough to sound coherent during an interview. I had thought we might have a cogent discussion on unconventional ways of thinking about the mind and its powers and the possible reality of psychic energy.

I was wrong.