God, I was going to start crying again if I kept this up. No crying. I was just having a bad night. Fortunately, Matt in the sound booth tapped his watch, telling me time was up. I took a breath, reset my mental state, and managed to sound cheerful when I gave my usual wrap-up.
“This is Kitty Norville, voice of the night. Stay safe out there, people.” The on-air sign dimmed, and I sat back, exhausted.
The mass murder I’d managed to escape had been all over the news. I’d spent the last show talking about it, fielding questions, condemning the kinds of people who perpetrated these crimes, but mostly talking about my friends who’d died. Begging the world, or whatever part of it listened to the show, not to let anything like this happen again. Be kind to each other.
The same message I tried to deliver every week: be kind. Not that it was helping.
“Kitty?” Matt said.
“I’m fine,” I said flatly, before he could ask the question.
He hesitated, then said, “Okay.” But he didn’t sound convinced.
And I wanted people to stop fussing over me.
The police, working with the FBI, had pieced together most of the story, and it wasn’t pretty.
Joey Provost really was a TV producer and really had been working for SuperByte Entertainment for several years. But he also had ties to a couple of whacked-out right-wing “clubs” that promoted various shades of fascism and gun mania, and the members all had impressive weapons collections stashed at home. Through those leads, he’d met Cabe and Valenti. Cabe was the hunter among them, with a fascination for the supernatural. He’d probably done most of the nitty-gritty planning and designed most of the traps. The three men had met, hit it off, and decided they didn’t like the way entertainment and popular culture were going. They didn’t like that monsters and the occult were being legitimized and glamorized. They wanted to strike back, so they cooked up a plan: trap the worst offenders of this movement, wipe them out, and distribute a film of the accomplishment. They were declaring their own little war. Provost pitched the front show to SuperByte, who then inadvertently funded the enterprise. The company itself was absolved of wrongdoing, except maybe for the mistake of trusting Provost in the first place. The producer hired Valenti and Cabe. During filming, they chose their moment, shut down production, and slaughtered the witnesses. Then they launched their own show. The clips they’d filmed of us talking about each other and how much we missed our families were meant to be our own obituaries.
None of the three had prior criminal records, but their activities, known associates, and known obsessions were indicative. None of it raised flags until you put the three of them together and added lighter fluid. Individually, they never would have acted. Together as their own little army, they egged each other on to destruction. Their egos, their sense of superiority, had never let them think for a moment that they could fail. I remembered Valenti, in Anastasia’s arms, as the full realization of what was happening to him dawned. And maybe Anastasia was right, and they’d been encouraged by someone like Roman.
They’d planned so well. They’d known so much about what they were facing. But in the end they hadn’t had a fucking clue.
I’d called the families of Jerome, Lee, Ariel, and Jeffrey. Not that there was anything I could say. But I was one of the last people to see their loved ones alive and wanted to bear witness. My chattiness failed me, of course. All I could say was I’m sorry, which was so inadequate.
As far as I could tell, Gemma and Dorian didn’t have families. I couldn’t track them, except through Anastasia, and she already knew how I felt.
Like he often did, Ben picked me up after the show. I climbed in the passenger seat, and he didn’t say a word, for which I was grateful. He just leaned over, touched my face, and kissed my cheek, resting his lips there for a long time. I leaned into the touch.
It was going to be okay.
Tina survived. She got better. The first time I saw her back on her own show, I cheered. Her cohosts were babying her, I could tell. They wouldn’t let her carry any equipment and helped her out of their van. That she didn’t argue with them said a lot about how hurt she really was. But she was back in action, and it felt like a big middle finger to Provost and company. We talked often, but not about Jeffrey. When she was ready, she’d bring him up. Me—I had no doubt he was still around, looking out for her.
Conrad also lived, and so did his leg. I got e-mails from him all the time. Updates, pictures of his kids—at the pool, on the beach, playing ball. Conrad was still processing. For him, the only way to believe that it had all happened was to keep in touch with our insane little survivor group. Whatever worked. He was also planning his next book—about his moment of epiphany, and about reconciling skepticism with the supernatural. I promised him an interview for it. I
