Kitty and the Dead Man’s Hand

I gave a crooked smile. “I can see you sitting like this in the bell tower of Notre Dame Cathedral , looking out over Paris like a gargoyle.”

He gave me a sidelong glance, then turned his gaze back to the city. “I’ve never been to Paris .”

Which was an astonishing thing to hear from a five-hundred-plus-year-old vampire.

I sat next to him. “Really? No family trips when you were a kid? Didn’t do the backpacking-around-Europe thing? Did people even do that in the sixteenth century?”

“Maybe not with backpacks. But New Spain sounded so much more interesting to a seventeen-year-old third son of very minor nobility with no prospects in 1539 Madrid .”

This was more detail about his past than he’d ever mentioned before. I didn’t say anything, hoping that he’d elaborate. He didn’t.

“Are you ever going to tell me the whole story?”

“It’s more fun watching your expression when I give it to you in bits and pieces.”

“I can see it now. It’s going to be the end of the world, everyone will be dead. All that’ll be left are vampires, and you won’t have anything to say to each other because you can’t stop being mysterious and secretive.”

He smiled like he thought this was funny.

I looked at my watch. “Not that this hasn’t been fun, but I have to get going. I have the show to do.” I headed back toward the roof’s access door. “I’ll find my way out. You keep looking.”

“Break a leg,” he said.

“Don’t say that when I’m standing on the roof of a very tall building.” Werewolves healed supernaturally quickly from horrible injuries, but I didn’t want to test if that included the injuries sustained from falling that far.

I left him on the roof, scanning across the night, perched like Denver ’s very own gargoyle.

For the next few hours, I had the show to worry about, and all other anxieties stayed outside the studio door.

At this hour, we had the station to ourselves. Except for a security guy and the graveyard-shift DJ, it was just me and Matt, my engineer, tucked away to rule the night. The studio was like a cave, left dark and shadowy on purpose, most of the illumination coming from equipment: computer screens, soundboards, monitors. Matt had his space, behind glass, screening calls and manning the soundboard. I had my space, with my monitor, headset, microphone, and favorite cushy chair. When the on-air sign lit, the universe collapsed to this room, and I did my job.

“Hello, faithful listeners. This is Kitty Norville and you’re listening to The Midnight Hour, everyone’s favorite talk show dealing in supernatural snark. Tonight I want to talk about magic. What’s the true story, what’s the real picture? Is it pastel fairy godmothers, is it meditating over a stack of crystals, or is it Faust making deals with the devil? What’s real, what isn’t, what works, what doesn’t?”

Once a week I did this and had been doing it for going on three years. I’d have thought it would start to get old by now. Conveniently, the world kept producing more mysteries, and the public couldn’t get enough of it. As long as that stayed true, I’d still have a job.

The supernatural world was like an onion. You peel back the layers, only to find more layers, on and on, hopelessly trying to reach the mysterious core. Then you start crying.

“I have on the phone with me Dr. Edgar Olafson, a professor of anthropology from the University of Colorado here to give us the accepted party line about magic. Professor Olafson, thanks for being on the show.”

“Thank you very much for inviting me, Kitty.”

Olafson was one of the younger, hipper professors I’d had during my time at CU. He was hip enough to appear on a cult radio show, which was good enough for me. He was also a scientist and spent a minute or so saying what I expected him to. “Belief in magic has been with human culture from the very beginning. It’s been a way to explain anything that people in early civilizations didn’t understand. Diseases were caused by curses; a spate of bad luck meant that something was magically wrong with the world. By the same token, magic gave people a way to feel like they had some control over these events. They could use talismans and amulets to protect against curses, they could concoct potions and rituals to combat bad luck and promote good luck.”

“That’s still true, isn’t it? People still have superstitions and carry good-luck charms, right?”

“Of course. But you have to wonder how many people do this out of habit, built up in the culture over generations, and how many people really believe the habits produce magical effects.”

“And we’ll find out about that in a little bit when I open the line for calls. But let me ask you something: What about me?”

“I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand the question.”

I hadn’t prepped him for this part. Sometimes I was a little bit mean to my guests, but they kept agreeing to talk to me. Served ’em right. “I’m a werewolf. I’ve got incontrovertible, public, and well-documented proof of that condition, validated by the NIH. I’ve had vampires on my show. I’ve talked to people claiming to be magicians, and some of them I’m totally willing to vouch that they are. While the NIH has identified lycanthropy as a disease, modern medical science hasn’t been able to explain it. So. This inexplicable sliver that you have to acknowledge as existing. Is it really magic? Not a metaphor, not habit, not superstition. But really some effect that flies in the face of our understanding of how the world works.”

Whew. I took a big breath, because I’d managed to get that all out at once.

He chuckled nervously. “Well, we’ve gone a little bit outside my areas of expertise at this point. I certainly can’t argue with you. But if something’s out there, I’m sure someone’s studying it. Or at least writing a PhD thesis on it.”

“I plan on getting a hold of that thesis just as soon as I can. Sorry for putting you on the spot, Professor, I’m just trying to get us a neutral baseline before the conversation goes completely out of control. Which it always does. Let’s go to the phones. Hello, you’re on the air.”

With great condescension, a man started in. “Hi, Kitty. Thanks for taking my call. With all due respect for your guest, this is exactly the kind of attitude that’s held human civilization back, that’s kept our species from taking the next step toward enlightenment—”

Away we went.

I had to butt in. “Here’s what I’m wondering: in this day and age, with the revelations of the last couple of years, isn’t it a mistake to think of magic and science as two different things, as polar opposites, and never the twain shall meet? Shouldn’t practitioners of both be working together toward greater understanding? What if there really is a scientific explanation for the weirder bits of magic? What if magic can explain the weirder bits of science?”

A rather intense-sounding woman called in to agree with me. “Because really, I think we need both points of view to understand how the world works. Like this—I’ve always wondered, what if it’s not the four-leaf clover that brings good luck, but belief in the four-leaf clover that causes some kind of mental, psychic effect that causes good luck?”

“Hey, I like that idea,” I said. “The problem that science always has with this sort of thing is how do you prove it? How do you measure luck? How do you prove the mental effect? So far, no one’s com«r, em e up with a good experimental model to record and verify these events.”

Sometimes my show actually sounded smart, rather than outrageous and sensationalist. I was hoping, with Professor Olafson onboard, that we’d be leaning more toward NPR than Jerry Springer. So far, so good. But it couldn’t possibly last, and it didn’t.

“Next caller, hello. What have you got?”

“I want to talk about what’s going on with Speedy Mart.”

The caller was male. He talked a little too fast, a little too hushed, like he kept looking over his shoulder. One of the paranoid ones.

“Excuse me?” I said. “What does a convenience-store chain have to do with magic?”

“There’s a pattern. If you mark them all on a map, then cross-reference with violent crimes, like armed robbery, there’s an overlap.”

“It’s a twenty-four-hour convenience store. Places like that get robbed all the time. Of course there’s a correspondence.”

“No—there’s more. You overlay all that on a map of ley lines, and bingo.”

“Bingo?”

“They match, ” the caller said, and I wondered what I was missing. “Every Speedy Mart franchise is built on the intersection of ley lines.”

“Okay. That’s spooky. If anyone could agree on whether ley lines exist, or what they are.”

“What do you mean, whether they exist!” He sounded offended and put out.

“I mean there’s no quantitative data about ley lines that anyone can agree on.”

“How can you be such a skeptic? I thought this was supposed to be a show about how magic is real. ”

“This is supposed to be a show about how to tell the real thing from the fakes. I’m going to say ‘prove it’ every time someone lays one on me.”

“Yeah, well, check out my website, and you’ll find everything you need to know. It’s w-w-w dot—” I totally cut him off.

“Here’s the thing,” I said, long overdue for a rant. “People are always saying that to me, how can I be a skeptic? How can I possibly be a skeptic given what I am? Given how much I know about what’s really out there, how can I turn my nose up at every half-baked belief that crosses my desk? Really, it’s easy, because so many of them are half-baked. They’re formulated by people who don’t know what they’re talking about, or by people trying to con other people and make a few bucks. The fact that some of this is real makes it even more important to be on our guard, to be that much more skeptical, so we can separate truth and fiction. Blind faith is still blind, and I try not to be.”

“Houdini,” Professor Olafson said. I’d almost forgotten about him, despite his occasional commentary.

“Houdini?”

“Harry Houdini. He’s a good example of what you’re «of '4%talking about,” he said. “He was famous for debunking spiritualists, for proving that a lot of the old table-rapping routine and séances were simple sleight-of-hand magic tricks. What many people forget is that he really wanted to believe. He was searching for someone who could help him communicate with his dead mother. Lots of spiritualists tried to convince him that they’d contacted his mother, but he debunked every one of them. The fakery didn’t infuriate him so much as the way the fakers preyed on people’s faith, their willingness to believe.”

“Then he may be one of my heroes. Thanks for that tidbit.”

“Another tidbit you might like: He vowed that after he died, he would try to send a message back to the living, if such a thing was possible.”

I loved that little chill I got when I heard a story like this. “Has he? Has anyone gotten a message?”

“No—and lots of people have tried.”

“Okay, let’s file that one away for future projects. Once again, thank you for joining us this evening, Professor Olafson.”

“It was definitely interesting.”

So was his tone of voice. I couldn’t tell if he loved it or hated it. Another question to file away.

Matt and I wrapped up the show. I sat back, listened to the credits ramble on, with my recorded wolf howl in the background. Soon I’d have to go back outside, back to the real world, and back to my own little curse, which I didn’t have any trouble believing in.

New Moon stayed open late on Friday nights, just for me.

Restaurant reviews describe New Moon as a funky downtown watering hole that features live music on occasion, plays host to an interesting mix of people, and has a menu with more meat items than one might expect in this health-conscious day and age. All in all, thumbs up. What the reviews don’t say is that it’s a haven, a neutral territory for denizens of the supernatural underworld, mostly lycanthropes. As the place’s co-owner, that’s what I set it up to be. I figured if we could spend more time relating to each other as people, we’d spend less time duking it out in our animal guises. So far, it seemed to be working.