Chapter 7
My phone rang early—at least, nine a.m. was early when I wanted to sleep in later. I came awake slowly, not wanting to move. Ben had put his arm around me and nestled close in his sleep. We’d had such a nice night.
I answered and spoke briefly to the publicity manager at the Diablo’s theater. Odysseus Grant would speak to me this afternoon for a brief interview. That was my foot in the door; I only needed a chance to meet him so I could talk him into coming on my show. My gig was late enough he could join me after his own performance. Normally, having a magic show on the radio would be ridiculous, but I was going to have an audience, live and on TV. This would be cool.
In the meantime, I had a couple of hours to visit the Hanging Gardens and track down this animal act.
Ben turned out to be curious about the mysterious Hanging Gardens as well. “There’s no animal act full of lycanthropes. Dom’s pulling our leg,” he said. “Just like with that crack about Lee Harvey Oswald.” I was inclined to agree with him.
Ben wanted to have breakfast at the Olympus , but I talked him into going someplace else—and away from the gun show, which was now in full swing heading into the weekend. I’d avoided any more run-ins with Boris and Sylvia, and I wanted to keep it that way. I was still glancing over my shoulder too much. So, after a nice meal at a lovely café—at the hotel next door to the Olympus—we headed to the Hanging Gardens on foot.
As the name implied, the Hanging Gardens Resort looked like an ancient Babylonian ziggurat. Tiered steps made of gray stone, or concrete made to look like stone, climbed to an impossible height. I had to crane my neck to see the top. Apparently, at night a flaming beacon lit at the top of the pyramidal structure was visible for miles. Every level of the building was lined with the windows of guest rooms and drenched with foliage: palm trees, flowering shrubs, vines, and ferns, crawling in a riot as if over some jungle ruin. Phenomenal. According to the brochure, the resort’s property included several swimming pools and lagoons that continued the theme of exotic Mesopotamia . Palm trees swarmed around the whole thing.
A low wall, painted blue, surrounded the property. On it, in relief, marched a row of lions—a replica of the walls of the Ishtar Gate from the ancient city of Babylon . Two stone Babylonian lions, stylized and stern of brow, stood guard at the entrance to the hotel. If they wanted guests to think they were entering another world, they were doing a good job.
Resisting the impulse to stop and gawk was hard. I didn’t want to look too much like a tourist, but it was all so. . . big. The lobby opened into a huge atrium filled with vegetation. The walls dripped with glass and green. The balconies of more rooms overlooked the interior. Beyond it, like a gateway to an ancient temple, a doorway led to a chaos of lights and noise—the casino. Everyone around us seemed to be headed there.
Standing there I felt odd, even more odd than I had since arriving in Vegas. Everywhere here, the air was off—too many people, too much civilization. With all this artificial wizardry, piped air, piped water, piped everything, this was as far from wilderness as a person could possibly get. But here, there was something else.
Side by side, our backs tense, our noses testing the air, Ben and I stood where the atrium branched to various parts of the resort.
“You okay?” Ben asked, his voice soft. As if anyone could overhear us in this racket.
“I don’t know. You?”
“Does it smell funny to you? Not bad, just funny.” His nose wrinkled.
Curling my arm around his, we headed to the hall where a sign labeled “Theater” pointed.
A large poster on the wall here stopped us. The picture showed a stage framed by huge fake columns designed to evoke some ancient civilization. They were decorated with hieroglyphs. A painted backdrop displayed ziggurats and sphinxes, and torches spewed flame in the foreground. Perched imperiously on various risers and platforms, a dozen big felines stared at the camera: a few tigers, one white and the rest orange; a male lion with a dark, shaggy mane; a pair of snow leopards; and a pair of black panthers. This must be the animal show.
Among the big cats stood a man, very handsome, with dark, wavy hair and a square jaw. He went shirtless and wore black leather pants, very tight, that didn’t leave much to the imagination. His muscular chest seemed to be dotted with glitter. He stood with his hands on his hips, presenting his creatures and his show: Balthasar, King of Beasts.
The scale in the picture was off. The animals seemed. . . wrong. The wrong size, compared to the trainer standing front and center. They had the wrong look in their eyes. Like they knew too much. Something. It might have just been the camera angle, some kind of forced perspective on the stage, or a bad Photoshop job.
Ben studied the poster over my shoulder. “I’m not buying it,” he said but didn’t sound convinced. “Those aren’t really—”
I pursed my lips. “But that would explain that smell, that weird feeling we’ve had since we walked in here.”
“Like we’re walking into someone else’s territory?”
“Yeah. That one,” I said.
The lycanthrope smell: the distinctive human/animal, skin/fur combination. No matter how clean the place was kept, a hotel featuring an animal show would smell a little bit like animal. No one else would even be able to sense it.
So, how about that? A Vegas animal act full of lycanthropes. That rated a slot on my show; I could make the space for that. Assuming Balthasar, King of Beasts, would talk to me.
“This is even pushing my weirdness-tolerance level,” I said. “The only thing to do now is talk to Balthasar and ask him whose idea it was to put a bunch of were-tigers in an animal act.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea? This is making me nervous.” He stepped back from the picture, leaned one way, then the other. “I think his eyes are following me. Doesn’t that guy creep you out?”
I tilted my head and considered. “Actually, he’s kind of hot.”
Ben huffed and stalked on without me.
We found the theater box office another thirty paces down the hallway. The scent of lycanthrope grew stronger.
The box office was open and staffed by a perky young woman. “Can I help you? We have a few seats left for tonight’s show.”
“Actually, I have a few questions,” I said. I leaned on the counter in front of her while Ben paced a few steps away and pretended to be fascinated by what were probably the doors to the theater itself. I picked up a brochure from a stack. The front had the same picture as the placard at the end of the hall. Inside were more pictures: leopards jumping through flaming hoops, Balthasar putting his hand in the lion’s mouth, animals standing on one another’s backs in unlikely pyramids. Standard fare.
But the lion was too small. And the leopards were too big.
Lycanthropes transformed into animals—not monsters, not monstrous version of animals. Werewolves in wolf form looked like wolves, except for one thing: size. The law of conservation of mass held true. Werewolves turned into very large wolves, since a two-hundred-pound man becomes a two-hundred-pound wolf.
Natural lions were big, heavy, something like four hundred pounds. Balthasar’s hand should have disappeared in that mouth. It didn’t. The lion had to stretch its mouth to fit over it. Balthasar could have slung the body over his shoulders. And the leopards were about the same size as the lions. But if I hadn’t been looking closely, I might not have noticed. I could still write it off to a bad Photoshop job.
The clerk waited for my questions.
“What’s the show like? It looks like the usual circus tricks.”
“Oh, no, it’s much more than that.” Her eyes grew wide and admiring. “Trust me, you’ve never seen anything like this. The tricks those animals do—they’re complex. Really difficult stuff. It’s like they listen to him. I don’t mean hand signals or the usual training. It’s like they’re really talking to each other.”
“Are they on display? Sometimes with shows like this, you can see the animals during the day, in their habitats.”
She shook her head. “The show takes a lot out of them, so Balthasar insists on letting them rest.”
“What about Balthasar? What’s he like?”
This woman’s face was so expressive. This time, she rolled her eyes and melted into an ecstatic smile of admiration. “He’s so amazing. He’s gorgeous. You don’t realize it until he’s standing right there, but oh, my
“Does he give interviews? My name is Kitty Norville, and I host a radio show. I’m always looking for interesting stories, and this might be right up my alley—”
Her expression shut down, becoming that of a professional gatekeeper. A loyal gatekeeper who would protect her employer to the end. “I’d have to forward you to the press office for that. But really, Balthasar is far too busy and private a person to be able to talk to you.”
“Private? He’s the front man for a Vegas stage show,” I said. “I can get him some great publicity—”
“I’m sorry, I really can’t help you. Call the press office.”
I recognized a brick wall when I saw one. I pulled out a business card and set it on the counter. “Maybe you can give this to the stage manager or someone who can pass it along to him. I really do hope to catch the show this weekend.”
She looked at the card distastefully but took it. The card had the KNOB logo on it, so at least she knew I was telling the truth. Not that I’d bet that the card would actually get to Balthasar. That was okay. There was always more than one way to skin a cat. Whatever the cat.
I joined Ben by the theater doors and lingered, taking in slow breaths to smell every piece of the place.
The area was public, well traveled. Under the odor of carpet cleaner I smelled people, lingering perfume and aftershave, hundreds of warm bodies passing through these doors, and under it all lurked a musky feline scent. Feline, but different. Distinctive, including both fur and skin.
“Let’s get out of here,” Ben said. “This is making me nervous.”
We didn’t speak until we were back outside, on the sun-baked pavement and in the fuel-tainted air. I took a deep breath of it and smiled. After the close environment of the Hanging Gardens , even the crowded, traffic-filled Strip felt like wide-open territory. We walked back to the Olympus .
“I’m not sure I want to see their show,” Ben said, after taking a deep breath right along with me. “It would just be weird.”
“And nobody knows about it. They’ve kept it secret. Of course Dom knows—but wow. What a story.” But I wouldn’t be the one to break it unless Balthasar wanted me to. I had too much respect for the kind of effort it took to keep any lycanthropic identity hidden to blow it for someone else. Kind of like my identity was blown. But that was why I really wanted to talk to Balthasar, to find out how this had started, why they did this—and how.
My face pursed with concentration. “I wonder. . .”
“Hm?”
“Does the group of them work like a pack? If Balthasar’s also a lycanthrope”—and with that look in his eyes, even in the picture, I was betting he was—“is he the alpha? And if both those things are true, do you think the performers are there voluntarily? Or are they being coerced?”
“How? Like someone’s holding a gun to their heads or something?”
