Carrie Vaughn - Kitty's House of Horrors

It couldn’t last. If I’d been here all by myself, settling in for a real vacation, the relaxation might have seeped into my bones. But I was sharing the place with a dozen other people and the production staff. Inevitably, I heard footsteps on the hardwood floor, entering the living room. I took a breath through my nose and sighed at the information.

Jerome Macy wasn’t the person I most wanted to see. Like their animal counterparts, werewolves are territorial. Competitive. They have pack structures and hierarchies. I wasn’t sure how any of that was going to play out with Jerome and me. We hadn’t had a chance to talk about it. I hoped we would talk about it instead of deciding we had to duke it out, however cinematic that would be. However much Provost was hoping we’d duke it out. I was just waiting for the request to shape-shift on camera. I might have made a show of teasing Conrad with the possibility, but I wasn’t really planning on doing it.

Macy moved up beside me and looked out the window to the meadow and elk. My back muscles stiffened, but I tried not to show it. Tried to keep my shoulders from bunching up, like hackles rising. We were all friends here, right?

“Makes me want to go hunting,” Macy said, flexing his hands like he was stretching his claws.

So much for the peaceful morning.

“They’re all healthy adults,” I said. “Too much work.”

“Not if we hunted together.” He glanced at me.

Now, that—turning wolf and going on a hunt with a guy I barely knew—was a bad idea. Even if it would give Provost some great footage.

I smiled wryly. “Why would I want to go through all that trouble when there’s a lovely staff here that wants nothing more than to feed me, and I don’t have to lift a finger?”

His lips curled. “It’s not the same.”

No, it wasn’t. Wolf was salivating at the thought, but I didn’t have to tell Macy that. “Sorry. It’s just that things around here are going to get weird enough without encouraging that side of it. I like to keep Wolf under wraps when I can.”

Being a werewolf isn’t an either-or thing. It’s not the Jekyll-and-Hyde dichotomy. It’s more like a scale, with wolf at one end and human on the other. Some days were a little more wolf than others. Some people were a little more wolf than others. The couple of times I’d met him, I’d had trouble deciding where Macy fell on that line. Did he look kind of burly and mean because he was a boxer turned pro wrestler, or because he was a werewolf who lived right on the edge, who always had a little of his wolf side seeping to the surface? He’d once been the heavyweight world champion. He was huge, solid, like a tree. He’d retain all that mass when he shifted—as a wolf, he’d be monstrous. How much of his fighting instinct came from his wolf side?

After a moment he said, “I know all about keeping it under wraps. Being able to go into a ring and fight it out with somebody without losing my temper, without losing myself? Yeah. But I don’t always get to see a stretch of open land like that. Before I leave, I’m going to shift and run out there. I don’t always get to have company when I run, either. Thought it’d be nice for a change.” His smile turned thoughtful. I considered that maybe there was a real guy hiding in there and not just a thug.

“You don’t have a pack at home?”

“Don’t need one. You?”

“Yes. A pack, a mate, the works. It’s kind of nice having people to watch my back.”

He looked back out the window, a cynical curl on his lips. “Too much trouble.”

A camera mounted in the corner of the room recorded the entire conversation.

I didn’t have anything else I wanted to say. Not much else I could say—I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what all went on in Macy’s head. I had another two weeks here to get his life story.

The elk were moving off, back to the woods on the far side of the meadow. The grass was so high it brushed their bellies. The idea of running through that meadow on four legs, with wind in my fur and the scent of wild in my nose, did appeal. But I’d rather do it with Ben.

One by one, the lodge’s residents woke up and drifted downstairs—except for the vampires and Dorian, who had retired to their sealed basement room before dawn. Breakfast was light—bagels, pastries, yogurt, juice—and so was the conversation. Tina caught me up on the doings of the other investigators on her TV show, Jeffrey talked about the books he’d been writing—self-help inspirational-type stuff about grief and moving on, the kind of thing I’d normally call drivel except this was Jeffrey, whose earnestness made it work. Grant was reticent, not giving any hint about the conspiracy he’d alluded to last night. Ariel sat at the edge of her seat and soaked it all in. I might have been expected to consider her the competition, except she was so darned nice about it. And she was in the business for the same reasons I was: She was insatiably curious about the supernatural, and she wanted to help people cope. She was one of the people I called when I got fed up with it all.

But the person here I was probably most curious about was Lee. He was the last one up, and I cornered him in the kitchen on the pretense of refilling my mug of coffee.

“Good morning,” I said, watching him pick through the breakfast food set out in the kitchen.

“Hi,” he said, wearing a charming smile. He wore a T-shirt and sweats, and his hair was still disheveled from sleeping. “You’re looking at me like you want something,” he said, glancing at me sideways. He didn’t sound put out. Amused, maybe. I must have had a pretty intent look on my face. I was trying to see the seal under his skin. I was still trying to figure out his smell. Not that I’d spent enough time around oceans to know, but I had the feeling he smelled like an ocean.

“Were-seal. I’m trying to imagine how that works.”

“Just the way you’d expect it to, I suppose.”

“Okay,” I said. “But how do you get bitten by a were-seal?”

His smile widened. “You’re out hunting seals by kayak, and you run into one that hunts you back.”

Well, of course. But what in that statement really got me: “Wait a minute. You hunt seals by kayak?”

He chuckled. “You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”

“Yes. I do.”

“Fair enough. I suppose it’s as good a way as any to give the cameras what they want, right?”

I shrugged. I was trying not to pay attention to the cameras. I wanted to do this show on my own terms, which meant asking my own questions.

He said, “Alaska still has a lot of little coastal towns that depend on subsistence hunting. So yeah, I hunt seals. Sometimes I don’t use the kayak.” He raised a knowing brow.

“Are we going to get to see what that looks like?” I said. “The seal half, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” he said. He looked out the kitchen window to the meadow and mountains. Every window here had a view. “That lake is freshwater. It just wouldn’t be the same. I tried to get them to move this to Alaska. Maybe for the second season.”

“So will you hate me if I make a ‘fish out of water’ joke?”

He gave me a long-suffering roll of the eyes.

After a quick breakfast, I explored the rest of the house, which even after a day was beginning to take on the scents and moods of its new residents. It was a wild mix of smells that I wasn’t used to, male and female, human, lycanthrope, and vampire, none of them pack or family. If I thought about it too much, if I let it get to me, it wouldn’t feel safe.

According to the info I’d been given ahead of time, the lodge was a rental. Usually, it was occupied by groups on various corporate retreats or hunters during hunting season. The lake was supposed to have good fishing. A utility shed at the back of the building held not only the lodge’s gas-powered electric generator and solar batteries, but a stash of equipment: fishing poles, kayaks and paddles, snowshoes and cross-country skis. I didn’t feel the need to get that adventurous.