Kitty’s Greatest Hits (41 page)

He was confused. He was here, awake, and she looked solid. He could feel her, flesh against flesh.

“Are you real?” he said.

She tipped her head, acknowledging the question. “A bit. Partly. I’m not sure.” The smile faltered.

“I can smell you.” He reached for her hand. She gazed at his for a moment, almost startled. Then took hold of it. Then disappeared.

A man in a white lab coat walked to the bed. “Good, you’re awake. How do you feel?”

His fist was clenched at his side, as if he had grabbed at something that had slipped away. That was it, then. She’d done what she came here to do. Stuck around long enough to say good-bye. And now she was gone.

He tried to tell himself that was okay.

The doctor checked his chart, then picked up Cormac’s wrist and counted against the numbers on his watch.

“I’m a little tired,” he answered finally. It was his body she’d used to battle the demon. Of course he was tired.

“You have second-degree burns on your face and hands,” the doctor said. “There was a fire—you’re probably lucky to be alive. You’re sedated to help you rest and to keep the pain down, but in a week or so you should be back to normal.”

He remembered the fire, the riot, and the demon—but what did the people in charge think had happened? So he asked, feigning amnesia.

“The warden’s still trying to figure that out,” the doctor said. “Now, get some rest.”

Cormac felt like something was missing. He’d lost something.

At night, the infirmary never got completely dark. A nurse was on duty in the next room, and light from the hallway filtered in. A piece of monitoring equipment made a faint clicking noise. Red status lights peered out. Cormac stared at the ceiling, wondering. He could live a million years and never understand what had happened. Maybe she wasn’t a ghost but an angel. Trying to give him purpose in the world.

So. Now what?

Lift your hand.
It was a woman’s voice, speaking from a distant meadow.

“Amelia,” he said.

I’m still here. Lift your hand. I want to show you something.

He uncurled his right fist, the one without the IV needle in it, and raised the arm a few inches. It glowed. Faint, blue, with a nimbus of static. Without his bidding, his fingers, snapped, and the glow dissipated in a crackle of energy. A wizard’s spell.

She was still with him, her power still flowed through him.

We’re bound, you and I. And I thank you for it.

He settled more firmly on the pillow. He hadn’t realized he’d been fighting the sedative, holding himself taut. But now, he was floating. He had stopped worrying.

*   *   *

He was ready to go after two days, even if it meant returning to solitary. He still didn’t know what the fallout from the riot—and his part in it—was going to be. If the powers that be would blame him for something and add a decade or so to his sentence. Hardly seemed to matter because he’d won. They’d won.

But two days on his back was plenty. He didn’t even hurt much. The aggravating itching was all on the outside, now—the burns were healing. At least they’d let him take a couple of books from the prison library. He was in the middle of another of Kitty’s recommendations:
Middlemarch,
by a guy named George Eliot.

George Eliot was a woman. Can’t you find something modern? This was stale when I read it as a girl.
Cormac smiled.

When Olson entered the infirmary, Cormac scowled, preparing the arguments to get him out of here. The counselor didn’t seem to notice and pulled over the chair at his bedside. “You’re looking much better.”

When had he been here before?
Cormac wondered. Thinking of Olson looking over his unconscious form made him twitch.

Cormac frowned and looked at the ceiling. “You’re going to ask me what happened, and you won’t believe what I tell you.”

Olson made a thin, wry smile. “Actually, I think I might. We have surveillance footage of most everything that happened. We’ve collected the evidence we need in a few assault and murder cases we’ll be prosecuting. You’re not involved in any of them, if you’re worried. But you did … something, didn’t you?”

“That didn’t actually show up on film, did it?” Most of this stuff didn’t record too well in any form, or it would have come out a long time ago.

Olson narrowed his gaze, a perplexed expression. “I can’t exactly say what I saw. I saw you. You did something—and it all ended. I was hoping you could explain it to me.”

Cormac stared. Where did he even start? There are more things in heaven and earth … “I don’t know how to explain.”

“Just tell me,” Olson said. “Tell me everything.”

Cormac did. Everything except Amelia. He made vague explanations about a demon haunting the place, hungry for blood, gathering power, and about how he’d picked up a spell that banished it. He tried to make it sound matter of fact, like he hadn’t even been sure it would work and he’d have been just as happy to mind his own business. It all sounded crazy and Olson wasn’t buying any of it, he was sure.

“What would have happened?” he said at the end of it. “If you hadn’t done what you’d done to stop it?”

Cormac shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose you folk would have dropped in your tear gas and knocked everyone out anyway. The riot would have died down eventually.”

“But that thing would still be on the loose.”

The statement didn’t require commentary. Cormac kept quiet, lying calmly, book folded across his stomach. Olson’s smile was grim, tired and his eyes shadowed. He probably had a lot more patients after the last week. He straightened his jacket as he stood to leave.

Cormac said, “What happens to me now?” He had a flare of hope that they’d be so grateful they would just open the doors and let him leave. He could call Ben,
Come get me, please.
The hope burned, no matter how unrealistic the thought was. But maybe they’d shave a few months off. He was pecking away at his time, day by day.

“You’ll go back to your cell when the doctor okays it. A regular cell, not the hole. Things go back to normal.” He shrugged. “I’ll put in a good word with the parole board. We’ll see what we can do.”

He walked away.

*   *   *

About a year later, lying on his bunk, staring at the ceiling for the last time, he was scared again.

Maybe it was more accurate to say he’d been scared his whole life. Fear had become background noise that he never noticed. He’d built up this front, these walls, trying to convince everyone he wasn’t afraid. Sometimes the walls cracked. He was starting to notice now that he was scared of being normal, scared of being dependent—scared of being scared, even. He could observe it, acknowledge it. But he wasn’t going to take down the walls. They kept him upright.

He noticed fear when it slipped over the wall: his lack of control during the riot, his fear of having friends because they might leave. And now.

He was getting out tomorrow.

Hardin and Olson had both spoken for him to the parole board. Ben had put up a hell of a case, showing that Cormac had family, a place to stay, potential work waiting for him—legitimate work, even. It had gone so smoothly. Despite all the help, Cormac hadn’t expected it to. He’d expected to have the parole hearing go wrong, but it hadn’t. He was getting out more than a year early as a result. Surprise.

When he had a job to do, he wasn’t afraid. The job kept him focused, and the scary usually came so fast he didn’t have time to think, only react. His reactions were fast enough to match, most of the time. If they hadn’t been, he wouldn’t still be around.

Right now, he had to wait, which wore him down. He should have been excited. Happy. Anticipating. But transition was hard, and the world he was about to enter was a different one than he’d left two years ago.

No, tell the truth: The world was the same. He’d changed. He wasn’t sure he could handle it anymore.

Closing his eyes, he let out a sigh and thought of his meadow. His muscles unclenched, and he fell into sleep.

In a bright and magnificent summer, wildflowers covered the meadow, purples, yellows, blues, reds dotting the grasses like a painting on a postcard. The sky was too blue, it couldn’t possibly be so blue in life. But he knew if he hiked out to the valley and looked, it really would be that blue, and he’d stare up at it marveling at how his memory hadn’t done the scene justice. The air smelled fresh, clean, as if a thunderstorm had just passed, scrubbing the world, making it new.

Amelia was there, standing close. He could touch her with a straightened arm, if he wanted. He almost did. Her face was calm. The storms were long gone, but he couldn’t seem to tell what she was thinking.

He moved toward the set of boulders overlooking the stream where he was used to sitting, watching elk, or sunrises, or just the water playing.

“You want to sit down?” He gestured. She nodded, and he picked a smooth, flat stone with room enough for both of them.

He expected her to be awkward in the long skirt and formal clothing, but she wasn’t. She moved like she was used to it, even in wilderness like this. Tucking her skirt just so, she perched on the boulder, back straight, and folded her hands before her.

“You’ll be fine,” she said. Even her smile was serious, like she couldn’t quite stop thinking about tragedies of past and present.

He shook his head, only able to think,
What am I going to do with myself? What can I possibly do?
He couldn’t imagine what guys who’d been in here ten, twenty, thirty years must feel like, when the world outside really had changed in their absence. What would it be like to disappear into prison before cell phones and come out to find you had to learn a new technology? A new language even? He’d only been out of the world a blink.

But still, the world looked different to him, and he wasn’t sure how he’d live. Tomorrow, the gates would open and he’d walk out a free man.

“Except that you’re saddled with me,” she said.

“No. Both of us walk free. That’s the plan.”

She put her hand on his arm and squeezed. She wasn’t wearing the thin leather gloves anymore, and he wondered where they’d gone.

The weight of her touch was strange—she wasn’t real, she didn’t exist. But here she was, with her hand on his arm, her skin warm against his, and he didn’t quite know what to do next. If this had been real, if she had been real, he might have turned away. Walked away to avoid the contact entirely. But this wasn’t real, so it didn’t matter. He could do anything. So he put his opposite hand on hers, just resting it there. He waited for her to flinch, to pull her hand away, to argue. But she didn’t.

They sat like that until morning, watching the meadow.

AUTHOR’S NOTES

The character Kitty started as a short story. At the time, around 1998, I wrote mostly short stories, and I didn’t think the idea of a werewolf talk radio host would get any bigger than that—it seemed like a gimmick. I should have known better. I’ve heard some writers talk about a character “taking over” a story, and I didn’t really understand that and it hadn’t happened to me until Kitty came along. When I wrote the first short story (“Doctor Kitty Solves All Your Love Problems”), it turned out three times longer than I was expecting, had too many characters, and had too much going on. So I cut it down to two characters—Kitty and Cormac—and saved everything else for the next story, “Kitty Loses Her Faith.” I still had more ideas and more characters. At that point, I realized I could fill a novel. But what would it be about?

I went clubbing with friends one night and was out on the dance floor when Peter Murphy’s “I’ll Fall with Your Knife” came on. I had a vision of Kitty, brimming with newfound confidence, on her own and celebrating. And there was my novel—Kitty learning to stand up for herself.

I still had more ideas. It turns out a werewolf talk radio host is a great platform from which to launch all manner of stories. Ten novels later … yeah. Wasn’t expecting that.

I still write short stories, because while some ideas need the space of a novel to tell them, others don’t. Novels have dozens of characters, at least a couple of plots, lots of settings, time passing, and so on. Sometimes, though, an idea has just a couple of characters, just one problem, one setting, and one moment in time. I had characters I wanted to know more about, but couldn’t explore their histories in the novels. Because the novels are in first-person point of view, I can only write about what Kitty knows or discovers, and the other characters aren’t always keen to tell her their secrets. Short pieces let me explore Kitty’s world, and I can often bring those discoveries back to the novels and make them richer.

Looking back at these stories, I see a record of me trying to work out my own mythology of the supernatural, vampires and werewolves and the like, as protagonists rather than monsters. I’m trying to answer questions like, How do vampires approach sex? How do supernatural beings find each other and interact? How do they make their ways in the world? What do they do for jobs? I write about vampires and werewolves in the “real world,” and I find that I’ve been most interested in the “real world” part of that theme. These stories are about vampires and werewolves (and were-lions and selkies and so on), but they’re also about people coping. I think when you cast supernatural beings as heroes, especially if you give them traditional monstrous strengths and weaknesses, part of their stories are necessarily going to be about coping with what they are and their places in the world.

On a day-to-day basis, putting a few hundred words on the work in progress, sorting through correspondence and promotion and all the business aspects of being a full-time writer, I feel like I never get enough done. But gathering these stories together and looking back—damn, I’ve been busy! I had no idea! I’ve made this whole world! The only thing better than building up a whole world is having people want to read about it. So, to Kitty’s fans and readers: Thank you. Most of these stories wouldn’t exist without you and your interest in Kitty’s world.