Carrie Vaughn - Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand

I had to contact the producer; set up a meeting with her; confirm the guests we’d lined up; sort out the box of Midnight Hour giveaways—the usual T-shirt and bumper sticker stash—I’d brought to butter up the audience; double-check my cue sheets; and double-check my contingencies for when something went horribly wrong, like if the phone lines went down, my guest interviews bailed, or something even worse I hadn’t thought of yet happened.

Then there was sharing space with the gun show to worry about...

Once again, coming to Vegas started to seem like a bad idea. The window in our room overlooked the pool—a fabulous grotto containing millions of gallons of chlorinated water. Completely ecologically irresponsible, but so attractively decadent. Padded lounge chairs. Palm trees. Poolside bars with handsome bartenders beckoning me with smiling eyes. The people sunning themselves, with mai tais in their hands, looked like the most relaxed beings in the universe.

Phone in hand, I looked out the window at the pool and almost cried.

Ben was unpacking and watching me and the pages of notes and schedules I’d spread on the desk. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help?” he said.

Rub my back, nibble my ears, drag me away from all this... I sighed and shook my head. “Not really. It’s all legwork, and most of the list is in my head. But thanks for asking.”

“Maybe I could just keep you company.”

As nice as that sounded, his presence made it less likely I’d get any work done. I smiled. “You’ve been itching to check out the casino. You should go do that now, because after tomorrow night I’m not going to give you a chance.” I raised a brow at him.

“All right. But for the record, it’s now officially your idea that I go play poker.”

“Or maybe you could go have a drink by the pool for me.”

But he already had his room key and wallet in hand, clearly ready to go. “Call me if you need anything.”

“Okay.”

He kissed the top of my head, squeezed my hand, and left the room. Again, I sighed.

Ozzie’s producer friend had booked a smaller theater at the Olympus. A half an hour before our meeting, I wandered down to the lobby to look for it.

There were still too many people. I wondered if I’d ever be able to calm down in this town enough to really relax. Even from down the hall, the casino lights and noises overwhelmed my senses, and Wolf didn’t like that at all. How would we know if something was after us? But that was silly. Nothing was after us. This was just Vegas trying to batter me into submission so I’d spend lots of money.

I still had to slink past that damned gun show.

Not everyone who came to Vegas for a gun show was like Boris. They couldn’t all be in Cormac’s line of work. Edging down the hallway from the elevators until the doors of the main ballroom came into sight, I watched the comings and goings of people. Know your enemy, after all. For the most part, the convention-goers were completely unremarkable. More men than women by a good factor, but there were some women. Most were casually dressed: jeans, shorts, T-shirts, tennis shoes. Of all ages—a few people even had kids along—the stream of people leaving and entering the ballroom seemed an unremarkable cross section of middle America. Firearm enthusiast. That didn’t sound so dangerous. These were hobbyists, people who went target shooting at the range and collected rare guns. Perfectly innocuous. Surely I didn’t have to worry about bounty hunters or assassins, not in the middle of a casino with its intense security. Especially not any who had a thing against werewolves and might take an opportunity—like, say, me sitting onstage under bright lights—to use me for target practice.

But I couldn’t help but think about how many people in this hotel were carrying handguns around with them right at that moment.

I’d started toward the casino and another hallway that led to the Jupiter Theater when my shoulders went stiff. Somebody was following me. Wolf felt it, or heard it, or smelled it, or all of them in the combination that made that side of me hypersensitive. I took a breath to keep from panicking and resisted jumping to the wrong conclusion.

When I turned, the woman looked startled, like she hadn’t expected me to know she was there. She was shorter than me, thin, with a tanned face and short, curly brown hair. She wore sandals, faded jeans, and a white blouse. Her earrings and necklaces were silver, her makeup understated. Inconspicuous in every way.

She recovered from her surprise quickly and offered a smile. “I’m sorry, I guess you must have seen me coming.”

“Yeah, sort of.”

Now she looked nervous, but the smile didn’t dim. “I don’t mean to bother you. This must seem really rude, but—you’re Kitty Norville, aren’t you?”

Ah, there it was. I ducked my gaze. “Yeah.”

“I recognized you from the article Time did last winter.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” I said, grimacing, trying to be polite. Last fall, the Senate held hearings on, of all things, vampires and lycanthropes after a secret NIH project studying paranormal phenomena was made public. I was called to testify, and for various reasons Time chose me as their poster child. I would never live it down.

Doing the radio show, no one ever had to know what I looked like. I liked it that way. But after the hearings and publicity, not to mention being outed on live TV, it seemed silly trying to stay anonymous. Hence the possibility of my own TV show.

“Oh, you shouldn’t be embarrassed, it was a good article,” she said. “Interesting, anyway. Good publicity for you, I’m sure.”

Interesting in the Chinese-proverb sense. “Well, thanks. I can’t complain.” I expected her to make some more apologetic noises, then scurry away. Maybe I was secretly hoping she’d ask for an autograph. Secretly disappointed that she wasn’t asking for an autograph. But she just stood there, smiling up at me. Studying me, and it was making me nervous. “So. What brings you to Vegas?”

“I’m here for the show,” she said, nodding over her shoulder at the ballroom and gun exhibition. I surreptitiously glanced over her to see if she had any holsters or concealed weapons. Didn’t see anything. She looked so normal. “Well, you look busy, so I won’t keep you. But it was really nice talking to you.” She turned to walk away.

Occasionally, I was spotted in public. Not enough to ever get used to it. But having it happen here, right outside the gun show, was too much for my paranoia. Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe it wasn’t. I glanced around for a big bald man in leather and didn’t see him. But that didn’t mean much.

On a hunch, I called, “Sylvia?”

She glanced back.

We met gazes. Her look darkened for a moment, but then she smiled. This wasn’t a normal, friendly smile. It was sly, challenging. Like she’d scoped me out, learned what she needed to, and didn’t care if I knew all about her. I resisted an urge to run.

She turned back around and merged with the crowd filing in and out of the ballroom.

My heart was pounding. I wasn’t sure what had just happened, but it couldn’t be good. I continued on, looking over my shoulder the whole way.

Maybe the bounty hunters weren’t really after me. But if they were, with all the sensory overload going on here, I might never hear them coming.

I called Ben on my cell phone, but he must have still been in his poker game, because it rolled over to voice mail. I told him about meeting Sylvia and fished for some kind of reassurance that the entire hotel wasn’t out to get me.

Meanwhile, the show, as they say, must go on.