Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand

“All right. Kitty, I’m glad Ben’s safe.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” I shut off the phone. “She wants to know when we’re getting married.”

“That turned out to be a little more complicated than we expected, didn’t it?” he said.

Frowning, I looked away. “It does seem like the universe is conspiring against us.”

He regarded me a moment, holding my left hand, rubbing a finger over the engagement ring, pondering. Then he smiled.

“I have a plan. Meet me out front in, oh, let’s say an hour.”

“You think I’m going to let you out of my sight after everything that’s happened?”

“I know. But I’ll be careful. I have an idea.” He smiled and looked at me with the gaze of a predator.

“An idea?”

“It’s a good idea.” He dressed, slipping on boxers, jeans, shirt, and socks, and running fingers through his hair in lieu of a comb.

“What idea?”

“Do you trust me?”

We’d already had this discussion, and the answer wasn’t any different now. I nodded.

“Just meet me outside in an hour.”

He kissed me, deeply and fiercely, then walked out.

Rather than sitting around waiting, I got dressed and took a walk. I was curious, so I went back to the Hanging Gardens.

The police cars were all gone, though I suspected yellow crime-scene tape still wrapped the theater and stage. A couple of TV news vans had replaced the squad cars, but I didn’t see any reporters. I wasn’t going to go near them to find out what was happening.

I only went as far as the lobby, where the poster for Balthasar’s show had changed.

The photo was the same, showing the big cats perched in their Babylonian temple setting, and the name of the show was the same: “Balthasar, King of Beasts,” blazoned across the top. Another sign, attached to the side, announced a new opening date set for sometime next week. But a picture of Nick had replaced Balthasar in the center of the poster. There he stood, hands on his hips, smiling haughtily, brown hair swept back, looking like the cover of a romance novel. His eyes seemed to follow me as I moved around the lobby.

Nothing had changed.

Outside the hotel, even the Las Vegas desert heat couldn’t dispel the chill in my spine.

But I had a date, so precisely one hour after Ben left, I arrived on the sidewalk in front of the Olympus. A minute later, a huge white Cadillac convertible pulled into the drive. All it needed was a longhorn hood ornament. Ben—in the driver’s seat, his shirtsleeves rolled up, one hand on the steering wheel, the other elbow resting on the door—looked out at me over his sunglasses.

“Hey,” he drawled.

The rest of the weekend receded to a pinpoint of distant memory. This was all about here and now, Ben’s crazy plan, and all the reasons I never wanted to be without him.

I almost cackled. “Oh my God. It’s perfect.”

“Get in,” he said, a glint in his eye and curl to his lip.

Squealing like a teenage groupie, I clambered into the front seat. Fortunately, the bellhop had opened the door first. I was all ready to just leap into the boat of a car.

“Where did you get this?” I asked as he pulled out of the drive.

“You know you can rent anything in this town?”

“Where are we going?”

“Just you wait.”

The front seat was big enough for a whole family. I slid all the way over, squishing right up next to Ben. He smiled indulgently, and I couldn’t stop grinning. I didn’t care what the plan was, tooling around Vegas in this monstrosity seemed the perfect way to spend the afternoon.

Five minutes later, I discovered the rest of Ben’s plan. All my questions were answered as we turned the corner and pulled into the lane of a drive-through wedding chapel.

My eyes got real big. I just kind of stared up at the sign, suddenly weepy.

Seventies Elvis, complete with shining pompadour and white spangled jumpsuit, leaned out of the window, looking bored.

Ben said to him, “Can we hurry up and do this before a meteor drops on us?”

“Sure thing, bro,” the Elvis drawled.

It was perfect.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said, digging for my phone. “My mom’s going to kill me. I mean really kill me this time. I have to tell her.”

“Kitty, we can’t wait,” Ben said. “We’ll block traffic.”

Exactly how many people got married at the drive-through every day? I’m not sure I wanted to know the answer to that.

I’d already dialed my mother. “Kitty?” she said when she answered. “Where are you? We’re about to go out for brunch, and if you and Ben want to—”

I turned on the speaker phone. “Hi, Mom? I’m sorry we couldn’t give you more warning. But things got crazy.” Uh, yeah, you think? “Just listen.”

“Kitty!” she argued.

Paperwork was handed back and forth. Souvenir photo snapped. I held up the phone while Elvis officiated.

“Do you, Benjamin O’Farrell, take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife?”

“I do.” He clasped my hand, squeezing tight.

“And do you, Katherine Norville, take this man to be your lawful wedded husband?”

“I do.”

“Then I pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride. Thankyouverymuch.”

I totally jumped Ben, right there in the car. Well, not totally. But I did throw myself at him, wrap my arms around him, and kiss him with all the enthusiasm I could muster. He hugged me back, his hands kneading me, his returning kiss equaling—or bettering—my own enthusiasm. Like we were challenging each other to top ourselves. I could have done this for the rest of the day.

I could hear Mom say, “Kitty! What’s going on? Is this what I think it is?” over the speaker. Ben took the phone out of my hand and folded it shut.

“Hey,” said Elvis. “You cats are going to have to pull on through. Get a room.”

I looked up at him, my grin wild and my gaze feral. “We’re not cats. We’re wolves.”

Ben stole one last, lingering kiss on my mouth before extricating himself from my grip to drive the car. “Come on, let’s blow this popsicle stand.”

Tires squealed as he gunned the car out of the driveway. We slipped into gridlocked traffic on the Strip. Just sat there, arm in arm, gazing at the sunlight blazing off the towering signs and buildings around us.

“Where to now?” Ben said. “I have the car for five more hours.”

“I figure we need to find a sunset to drive off into.”

“Amen to that.”

He turned the first corner we came to and revved the engine. Then we drove away. Away from the city and the chaos, and into the desert, heading west.

Epilogue

Mom eventually forgave me for getting married without her. In fact, she took what might be called revenge. She called me a few days after we all got home.

After the usual pleasantries, she announced, “I hope you’ll indulge me, but I’m putting together a little gathering. Just a little celebration. I want to show you and Ben off to my friends.”

“What kind of gathering?” I said warily. A wolf confronting a bear.

“Oh, just a luncheon over at the country club.”

I agreed, knowing full well I was trapped.

The woman managed to put together a full-on wedding reception with two weeks’ planning. I didn’t want to know how many favors she called in for that. We even had champagne and dancing. It made Mom happy; who was I to complain?

Even if I did have to deal with some of Mom’s clueless friends, like one of her old PTA buddies who gushed at me, “Are you going to start having children right away?”

I’d been warned that this question would happen. A lot. I had a polite answer prepared, and another one designed to inflict loads of guilt. This was the one I used on Mrs. Anderson.

I donned a very sad look, my thin smile noble and long-suffering. “I’m afraid I’m not able to have children.” Shape-shifting and pregnancy were incompatible. I tried not to be too put out about it.

She was supposed to look stricken and apologize profusely. Instead, she gushed some more. “Oh, well, then you can adopt! Like Brad and Angelina!”

There was not enough champagne in the world.

At Mom’s reception I finally met Ben’s mother, his counterpart to my own avatar of hyperactive suburban bliss. Ellen O’Farrell had been a rancher’s wife until her husband was convicted of various weapons and conspiracy charges and sent to prison. Now she was a divorced waitress in Longmont, a midsized town north of Boulder. Her brother—Cormac’s father—had been the one to teach Cormac the lycanthrope-hunting trade. Ellen came from a family of werewolf hunters. And that was why we hadn’t met yet. Ben wasn’t sure how she’d take her only son sleeping with the enemy. He also hadn’t told her he’d become the enemy. That, we decided, could wait.

I was on my very best behavior when Ben introduced me to the thin, quiet woman. She was close to sixty, her face soft and lined, her graying brown hair tied in a braid. She seemed tired, but her hazel eyes shone.

“It’s nice to meet you,” I said, trying to be eager and human, shaking her hand.

“Likewise.” She wrapped my hand with both of hers, beaming at me, and Ben.

And I could tell: She was proud of him. Happy for him. He shouldn’t have been worried. Before the party was over, we had an invitation to come to her place for dinner.

In the end, being married didn’t feel a whole lot different than not being married. Not in this day and age, where people like us lived with each other and thoroughly tried each other out before the big day. And for us, it felt doubly so, because our wolf halves were thinking, Well, duh. We were mates for life, and we didn’t need some Elvis impersonator in Vegas telling us so.

Rather quickly, life got back to normal.

A couple of weeks later, the door to the condo slammed open late in the afternoon. I looked up from the sofa, where I’d been reading a book of H. P. Lovecraft stories. Ben walked in, looking