Kitty Takes a Holiday

'My hero.' I rested my chin on my hands and batted my eyelashes at him. His snort of laughter told me how seriously he took me. That only made me grin wider.

'One other thing,' he said, still shuffling pages in his briefcase, avoiding looking at me. 'Your editor called. Wants to know how the book is going.'

Technically, I had a contract. Technically, I had a dead­line. I shouldn't have had to worry about that sort of thing when I was trying to prove my self-reliance by living sim­ply and getting back to nature.

'Going, going, gone,' I muttered.

He folded his hands in front of him. 'Is it half done? A quarter done?'

I turned my gaze to a spot on the far wall and kept my mouth shut.

'Tell me it's at least started.'

I heaved a sigh. 'I'm thinking about it, honest I am.'

'You know, it's perfectly reasonable for someone in your position to hire a ghostwriter. Or at least find a co-author. People do it all the time.'

'No. I majored in English. I ought to be able to string a few sentences together.'

'Kitty—'

I closed my eyes and made a 'talk to the hand' gesture. He wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know.

'I'll work on it. I want to work on it. I'll put something together to show them to make them happy.'

He pressed his lips together in an expression that wasn't quite a smile. 'Okay.'

I straightened and pretended like we hadn't just been talking about the book I wasn't writing. 'Have you done anything about the sleazebag?'

He looked up from his food and glared. 'There's no basis for a lawsuit. No copyright infringement, no trade­mark infringement, nothing.'

'Come on, she stole my show!'

The sleazebag. She called herself 'Ariel, Priestess of the Night,' and starting about three months ago she hosted a radio talk show about the supernatural. Just like me. Well, just like I used to.

'She stole the idea,' Ben said calmly. 'That's it. It hap­pens all the time. You know when one network has a hit medical drama, and the next season every other network rolls out a medical drama because they think that's what everyone wants? You can't sue for that sort of thing. It was going to happen sooner or later.'

'But she's awful. Her show, it's a load of sensationalist garbage!'

'So do it better,' he said. 'Go back on the air. Beat her in the ratings. It's the only thing you can do.'

'I can't. I need some time off.' I slumped against the back of the booth.

He idly stirred the ketchup on his plate with a french fry. 'From this end it looks like you're quitting.'

I looked away. I'd been comparing myself to Thoreau because he made running away to the woods sound so noble. It was still running away.

He continued. 'The longer you stay away, the more it looks like the people in D.C. who tried to bring you down won.'

'You're right,' I said, my voice soft. 'I know you're right. I just can't think of anything to say.'

'Then what makes you think you can write a book?'

This was too much of Ben being right for one day. I didn't answer, and he didn't push the subject.

He let me pay the bill. Together, we headed out to the street.

'Are you going straight back to Denver?' I asked.

'No. I'm going to Farmington to meet Cormac. He wants help with a job.'

A job. With Cormac, that meant something nasty. He hunted werewolves—only ones who caused trouble, he'd assured me—and bagged a few vampires on the side. Just because he could.

Farmington, New Mexico, was another two hundred fifty miles west and south of here. 'You'll only come as far as Walsenburg for me, but you'll go to Farmington for Cormac?'

'Cormac's family,' he said.

I still didn't have that whole story, and I often asked myself how I'd gotten wrapped up with these two. I met Ben when Cormac referred him to me. And what was I doing taking advice about lawyers from a werewolf hunter? I couldn't complain; they'd both gotten me out of trouble on more than one occasion. Ben didn't seem to have any moral qualms about having both a werewolf and a werewolf hunter as clients. But then, were lawyers capable of having moral qualms?

'Be careful,' I said.

'No worries,' he said with a smile. 'I just drive the car and bail him out of jail. He's the one who likes to live dangerously.'

He opened the door of his dark blue sedan, threw his briefcase onto the front passenger seat, and climbed in. Waving, he pulled away from the curb and steered back onto the highway.

On the way back to my cabin, 1 stopped in the even smaller town of Clay, Population 320, Elevation 7400 feet. It boasted a gas station with an attached convenience store, a bed and breakfast, a backwoods outfitter, a hundred-year-old stone church—and that was it. The convenience store, the 'Clay Country Store,' sold the best home-baked choc­olate chip cookies on this side of the Continental Divide. I couldn't resist their lure.

A string of bells hanging on the handle of the door rang as I entered. The man at the cash register looked up, frowned, and reached under the counter. He pulled out a rifle. Didn't say a word, just pointed it at me.

Yeah, the folks around here knew me. Thanks to the Internet and twenty-four-hour news networks, I couldn't be anonymous, even in the middle of nowhere.

I raised my hands and continued into the store. 'Hi, Joe. I just need some milk and cookies, and I'll be on my way.'

'Kitty? Is that you?' A woman's face popped up from behind a row of shelves filled with cans of motor oil and ice scrapers. She was about Joe's age, mid-fifties, her hair graying and pulled into a ponytail that danced. Where Joe's eyes frowned, hers lit up.

'Hi, Alice,' I said, smiling.

'Joe, put that down, how many times do I have to tell you?'

'Can't take any chances,' he said.

I ignored him. Some fights you couldn't win. The first time he'd done this, when I came into the store and he rec­ognized me as 'that werewolf on TV,' I'd been so proud of myself for not freaking out. I'd just stood there with my hands up and asked, 'You have silver bullets in there?' He'd looked at me, looked at the rifle, and frowned angrily. The next time I came in, he announced, 'Got silver this time.'

I went around the shelves to where Alice was, where Joe and his rifle couldn't see me as easily.

'I'm sorry,' Alice said. She was stocking cans of soup. 'One of these days I'm going to hide that thing. If you'd call ahead, I could make up some chore for him and get him out of here.'

'Don't worry about it. As long as I don't do anything threatening, I'm fine, right?' Not that people generally looked at me—a perky blonde twenty-something—and thought 'bloodthirsty werewolf.'

She rolled her eyes. 'Like you could do anything threat­ening. I swear, that man lives in his own little world.'

Yeah, the kind of world where shop owners kept rifles under their counters, while their wives lined healing crys­tals along the top of the cash register. She also had a cross nailed over the shop door, and more crystals hanging from the windows.

They each had their own brand of protection, I supposed.

I hadn't decided yet if the werewolf thing really didn't bother some people, or if they still refused to believe it. I kind of suspected that was how it was with Alice. Like my mom—she treated it like it was some kind of club I'd joined. After full moon nights she'd say something like, Did you have fun at your little outing, dear?

A lifetime of believing that these things didn't exist was hard to overcome.

'How do you two stay married?'

She looked at me sideways, donned a wry smile, and didn't answer. Her eyes gleamed, though. Right, I wasn't going to press that question any further.

Alice rang up my groceries, while Joe looked on, glar­ing over his rifle. I had to think of myself as a goodwill ambassador—don't make any sudden moves, don't say anything snide. Try to show him that just because I was a monster didn't mean I was, well, a monster.

I paid, and Alice handed me the brown paper bag. 'Thanks,' I said.

'Anytime. Now you call if you need anything.'

My nonchalance only went so far. I couldn't turn my back on Joe and his rifle, so I backed toward the door, reaching behind to pull it open, and slipped out, to the ringing of bells.

The door was closing behind me when I heard Alice say, 'Joe, for God's sake put that thing away!'

Ah yes, life in a small mountain community. There's nothing like it.

Chapter 2

The front half of my cabin held a living room and kitchen, while a bedroom and bathroom made up the back half. Only part of a wall separated the two halves, giv­ing the whole place access to the cabin's only source of heat: a wood-burning stove in the living room. The hot-water heater ran on propane, electricity powered every­thing else. I kept the stove's fire burning to hold back the winter. At this altitude I wasn't snowbound, but it was still pretty darned cold, especially at night.

The living room also had my desk, or rather a small table, which held my laptop and a few books: a diction­ary, a dog-eared copy of Walden . Shoved underneath were a couple of boxes holding more books and a bunch of CDs. I'd spent my whole adult life working in radio—I had to have something to ruin the quiet. The desk sat in front of the large window that looked out over the porch and the clearing where I parked my car. Beyond that, trees and brown earth climbed up the hill, to blue sky.

I'd spent a lot of hours sitting at that desk, staring out the window at that view. I should have at least made the effort to find some place with a nice mountain vista to occupy my long stretches of procrastination.

When twilight came, deepening the sky to a rich shade of royal blue, then fading to darkness, I knew I'd wasted another day and not written a single decent word.

But it was Saturday, and I had other entertainments. Very late, close to midnight, I turned on the radio. It was time for Ari el, Priestess of the Night. I snuggled up on the sofa with a fluffy pillow and a beer.

The front page of Ariel, Priestess of the Night's Web site was all black with candy-apple-red lettering and a big picture of Ariel. She seemed fairly young, maybe my age—mid-twenties. She had pale skin, a porcelain smooth face, dyed black hair falling in luxurious ripples across her shoulders and down her back, and black eyeliner ring­ing