“I’m not going to answer that question, Kitty,” she said, donning a catty smile.
“Didn’t think so. But I wouldn’t feel like I’d done my job if I hadn’t asked. Gemma, how about you?”
She glanced at Anastasia, like she and Dorian always did, as if asking permission. It irritated me, but I wasn’t going to change it by bitching about it. Now, if I could get each of them alone and grill them for a couple of minutes…
I didn’t detect any sign from Anastasia, no hint that she’d spoken or given Gemma a cue, but the younger vampire turned to me and answered, “Nineteen-eighty.”
I blinked. “Holy crap, we’re the same age.” I looked her up and down, judging her all over again. She looked about twenty, give or take a couple of years. That meant about the same year I’d been attacked and turned into a werewolf, she’d become a vampire. I suddenly felt like I was looking into a “what might have been” mirror. What if it had been a vampire instead of a werewolf that had gotten me?
I wouldn’t be winning any beauty pageants, for one thing. Also, to be honest, I was glad I hadn’t frozen in time at that age. I’d grown a lot since then. I liked to think I was a much better person now, and that I wore my age well.
“You know,” Conrad said, “not claiming to be a thousand years old almost convinces me that you’re for real.”
“Hey,” I said. “Every vampire had to be brand-new at some point, right?” Gemma just smiled, and I recovered, awkwardly. “I guess I won’t be asking you any ‘wisdom of the ages’ questions, then. Next question’s for Lee. And this is a serious one, so stop smirking at me.” I was getting into a rhythm, just like I did on the show, which was kind of fun. Even more interesting was having everyone sitting here, letting me interact with a live audience. I was glad we were getting this on film.
“Lee: how many were-seals are there, and is there any kind of community? Do you hang out, have packs like werewolves do, anything like that?”
“No,” he said. “We’re loners. I don’t even know how many there are. I know a few others in Alaska; we run into each other occasionally. Usually we give each other a wide berth.”
Conrad said, because obviously he couldn’t let anything go, “You’re asking me to believe in not just werewolves, but were-seals? What about were-bears? Were-poodles? Were-rabbits? Where do you draw the line?”
He was just trying to get my goat. Best thing I could do was play it straight. “Were-rabbit? Not likely. In my experience, only carnivores manifest lycanthropic varieties. But were-bears, yeah, totally, there’s some of those.”
He gaped, but as I’d hoped, he had no other response to that.
“Moving on!” I said. “Odysseus Grant. Where the hell does your box of vanishing open to really?”
“You’re fishing. Ask another one.” Grant didn’t change his expression, didn’t miss a beat.
“Box of vanishing?” Conrad said. “Are you implying he does the vanishing-person trick and people actually vanish?”
I glared at him. “Are you going to give commentary on everything?”
“That’s my job here, isn’t it?”
“Alrighty, let’s skip forward. Here’s my question for Conrad: What’s the strangest unexplained thing that’s ever happened to you?”
“Well, I don’t know that anything like that has really happened to me. Not like you’re talking about.”
“Forget the werewolves and vampires for a minute. I’m talking just… odd. Coincidence, déjà vu, fate, any of that. The wind blew a winning lottery ticket into your hand. You got a call from someone right when you were going to call them. Anything that made you stop and wonder for a minute.”
“Let me think.” He leaned back, hand on chin. We all watched, quiet and eager. I felt sure he was going to deny that anything strange or odd had ever happened to him, not so much as a shadow in the closet when he was a kid.
So imagine my surprise when he said, “I thought I saw a ghost, once. That is, I was a kid, and I thought it could be a ghost, until I thought about it and realized there was probably a reasonable explanation. A draft from a window or something.”
Tina looked like she was about to jump up and say something, but I shot her a look and she settled back. We had something here—I didn’t want to scare him off.
“What made you think it was a ghost? What about it made it so strange?”
He shook his head, his expression turning inward, unfocused with the memory. “It was the cold,” he said. “It was a warm summer day, but there was this spot in the hallway that turned freezing. It’s like that expression, someone walking over your grave. That’s what it felt like. I could have sworn that someone was watching me. And that if I’d reached my hand out, someone standing there would have taken it.” Unconsciously, he closed his hands into fists.
If Conrad had said something about smoky figures or moving furniture, I might have written off the account to suggestibility. He was a scared kid whose imagination had reinterpreted his fear based on campfire tales. But he didn’t. My skin had goose bumps at his story.
“Whoa,” I said, in validation. This was my gift, my superpower: making people feel like they could talk about anything. Making them open up and reveal their secrets.
“It could have all been in my head,” he said quickly. “It could have all been my imagination.”
Tina said, “Radical drops in temperature in localized areas have been reported with some hauntings. That whole incident, it doesn’t sound unlikely at all.” This didn’t seem to comfort Conrad any.
“You weren’t afraid of it?” Jeffrey said.
“No,” Conrad said. “It mostly made me feel sad.”
“Had there been any deaths in your family at the time? Had you lost any friends?” Jeffrey asked. “Might someone have been trying to contact you?”
Conrad
