Carrie Vaughn - Kitty's House of Horrors

I wouldn’t be winning any beauty pageants, for one thing. Also, to be honest, I was glad I hadn’t frozen in time at that age. I’d grown a lot since then. I liked to think I was a much better person now, and that I wore my age well.

“You know,” Conrad said, “ not claiming to be a thousand years old almost convinces me that you’re for real.”

“Hey,” I said. “Every vampire had to be brand-new at some point, right?” Gemma just smiled, and I recovered, awkwardly. “I guess I won’t be asking you any ‘wisdom of the ages’ questions, then. Next question’s for Lee. And this is a serious one, so stop smirking at me.” I was getting into a rhythm, just like I did on the show, which was kind of fun. Even more interesting was having everyone sitting here, letting me interact with a live audience. I was glad we were getting this on film.

“Lee: how many were-seals are there, and is there any kind of community? Do you hang out, have packs like werewolves do, anything like that?”

“No,” he said. “We’re loners. I don’t even know how many there are. I know a few others in Alaska; we run into each other occasionally. Usually we give each other a wide berth.”

Conrad said, because obviously he couldn’t let anything go, “You’re asking me to believe in not just werewolves, but were-seals? What about were-bears? Were-poodles? Were-rabbits? Where do you draw the line?”

He was just trying to get my goat. Best thing I could do was play it straight. “Were-rabbit? Not likely. In my experience, only carnivores manifest lycanthropic varieties. But were-bears, yeah, totally, there’s some of those.”

He gaped, but as I’d hoped, he had no other response to that.

“Moving on!” I said. “Odysseus Grant. Where the hell does your box of vanishing open to really? ”

“You’re fishing. Ask another one.” Grant didn’t change his expression, didn’t miss a beat.

“Box of vanishing?” Conrad said. “Are you implying he does the vanishing-person trick and people actually vanish? ”

I glared at him. “Are you going to give commentary on everything?”

“That’s my job here, isn’t it?”

“Alrighty, let’s skip forward. Here’s my question for Conrad: What’s the strangest unexplained thing that’s ever happened to you?”

“Well, I don’t know that anything like that has really happened to me. Not like you’re talking about.”

“Forget the werewolves and vampires for a minute. I’m talking just… odd. Coincidence, déjà vu, fate, any of that. The wind blew a winning lottery ticket into your hand. You got a call from someone right when you were going to call them. Anything that made you stop and wonder for a minute.”

“Let me think.” He leaned back, hand on chin. We all watched, quiet and eager. I felt sure he was going to deny that anything strange or odd had ever happened to him, not so much as a shadow in the closet when he was a kid.

So imagine my surprise when he said, “I thought I saw a ghost, once. That is, I was a kid, and I thought it could be a ghost, until I thought about it and realized there was probably a reasonable explanation. A draft from a window or something.”

Tina looked like she was about to jump up and say something, but I shot her a look and she settled back. We had something here—I didn’t want to scare him off.

“What made you think it was a ghost? What about it made it so strange?”

He shook his head, his expression turning inward, unfocused with the memory. “It was the cold,” he said. “It was a warm summer day, but there was this spot in the hallway that turned freezing. It’s like that expression, someone walking over your grave. That’s what it felt like. I could have sworn that someone was watching me. And that if I’d reached my hand out, someone standing there would have taken it.” Unconsciously, he closed his hands into fists.

If Conrad had said something about smoky figures or moving furniture, I might have written off the account to suggestibility. He was a scared kid whose imagination had reinterpreted his fear based on campfire tales. But he didn’t. My skin had goose bumps at his story.

“Whoa,” I said, in validation. This was my gift, my superpower: making people feel like they could talk about anything. Making them open up and reveal their secrets.

“It could have all been in my head,” he said quickly. “It could have all been my imagination.”

Tina said, “Radical drops in temperature in localized areas have been reported with some hauntings. That whole incident, it doesn’t sound unlikely at all.” This didn’t seem to comfort Conrad any.

“You weren’t afraid of it?” Jeffrey said.

“No,” Conrad said. “It mostly made me feel sad.”

“Had there been any deaths in your family at the time? Had you lost any friends?” Jeffrey asked. “Might someone have been trying to contact you?”

Conrad thought for a moment, and his face was a blank. “No. No, that couldn’t have been it.” His voice was stark, and I wondered if he was lying, but suggesting that would have made him turn surly and shut up. Best move on.

My victims… er, interview subjects were mostly too clever and too used to the spotlight to slip up and answer my really probing questions. I didn’t get stunning confessions from any of them, except the one from Conrad. He was quiet for the rest of the evening, and I wondered what nerve I’d touched.

Around midnight, the group started jumping ship, led by Conrad. I grumbled at the mutiny, but not really, because by the end of it I was left with Anastasia, Gemma, and Dorian. Maybe they’d be more forthcoming without everyone else around.

What was I thinking? We still had cameras focused on us. Probably a lost cause, but I had to try.

I waited until Anastasia and Dorian were involved in a conversation in the kitchen, where he was pouring a glass of wine. I was sure they were trading notes and commentary on their fellow housemates and everything they’d learned. Gemma wasn’t interested and went to the window to look out at the nighttime meadow, trimmed with white from a waning moon. I sidled up to join her, not too obviously, I hoped.

“Hey, Gemma, can I ask you a question?”

“I suppose.” She had a stunning smile—of course. “Doesn’t mean I’ll answer it.”

“Why? Why become a vampire?”

She rolled her eyes. “That’s such a boring question.”

“Still. Humor me.”

She hesitated, then gave a lopsided shrug, her first unstudied gesture. “I was afraid of getting old.” She looked away, refusing to meet my gaze. Like a kid almost—twenty years old and bored by old people, meaning anyone over twenty-five. How long did it take a vampire to develop that haughty poise that was so common with them? Long enough to realize the world was growing old around them? A generation—when you stop understanding the kids who look like you?

Was that arrogance a shield?

“That’s not a very good reason,” I said.

She frowned. It damaged her poise, just a bit. “I’ve been on the pageant circuit since I was eight. It’s all I’ve ever known how to do. When I was fifteen, I went on anti depressants. I was two inches too short for the modeling agencies, and my mom acted like it was the end of the world, like I was this huge failure. My looks—it’s all I have. I don’t know how Anastasia found me. It’s like she had this crystal ball and saw me screaming, ‘Get me out of here.’ She said she could keep me young forever. Like I said, that’s all I have. She’s taken such good care of me, I never looked back. She has uses for a very beautiful woman. What she does—she can use someone like me. I’m happy to help her.”