Carrie Vaughn - Kitty's House of Horrors

But Conrad denied it. “I’m getting paid the same stipend the rest of you are. At least, I assume I am. I’m just a lowly author and not a TV celebrity, so I may be getting peanuts compared to you.”

The door to the study/production room opened, and I jumped. Just a little. Not freaked-out jumped. Just startled. Ghost fur prickled along my back. Looking around, I saw at least a couple of the others had also flinched, startled: Tina, Gemma. All of us stared at Joey Provost, who came into the living room wearing his showbiz smile. He was carrying a shoe box–sized wooden case.

“How’s everyone doing?” he said. I clamped shut my jaw so I wouldn’t be able to say, Fine, until you got here.

“We’re all just fine, I think,” Anastasia said, eyes half-lidded, purring in perfect vampire allure. It must have been one of the powers they got, along with immortality.

“That’s great. You all up for some more fun and games?”

“Another activity rigged for maximum entertainment value,” I said. “Excellent.”

I couldn’t pull off allure like Anastasia could. All I had was snark. Glaring at me, Provost set the box on the coffee table. We gathered around.

“Your instructions are in here. Wait ’til I leave, then take a look and have at it.” He smiled like a guy who was having a lot of fun keeping a secret. Very smarmy. I didn’t like it.

The door closed behind him. He was gone, but nobody moved.

“Well?” Tina said. None of us looked all that enthusiastic—none of us were really the types who appreciated being Provost’s dancing monkeys. I wondered how they were going to edit the footage to make us look excited.

“Let’s get this over with,” I said and knelt by the table to open the box.

Inside, on bare wood, lay a folded note, five velvet jewelry boxes, and a stopwatch. I unfolded the page and read aloud.

“‘Treasure Hunt,’” the top of the page said. “‘You all have special talents, ways of searching out the hidden, of doing the impossible. You’ll break into the following five teams, and one at a time each team will have a chance to find the other half of the lockets in these boxes, which have been hidden outside the lodge. Conrad will monitor the stopwatch and see who finds the treasure the fastest.’ Dude, cliché,” I said. Sure enough, each box had a gold locket on a chain with the lid broken off. Each locket was a different shape: oval, circle, square, rectangle, and—of course—a heart. I read off the teams: Jerome and I were on one team, the vampires and Dorian on another. He’d teamed Tina with Ariel and Jeffrey with Lee. Odysseus was all by himself. This ought to be interesting.

“Isn’t there supposed to be a prize?” Lee said. “What do we get for winning?”

“The satisfaction of winning?” I said, shrugging. I didn’t really care, because I shuddered to think of what cheesy prize Provost would come up with.

“This isn’t very scientific,” Tina said. “And I thought we weren’t supposed to have competitions.”

“Bitching isn’t going to get it over with any faster. Think of it as a party game. Like Pin the Tail on the Donkey,” I said. “Who’s first?” We all glanced guiltily away—no one wanted to be first. We weren’t even bothering to look enthusiastic.

“Conrad, you pick, since you seem to be the one in charge,” Anastasia said.

“Let’s see,” Conrad said in a mock-serious tone. “Tina and Jeffrey are supposed to figure out where it is using their psychic powers, right? The werewolves… what are you supposed to do, sniff it out?”

“You’d be surprised,” Jerome said.

“The vampires do what, fly through the air and use super vision?”

“You watch too many bad movies,” Gemma said.

Conrad huffed and said, “And maybe Odysseus can pull it out of his top hat.”

Tina looked at Grant. “Can you really do that?”

Grant’s lips turned in a thin smile. “Not without preparation and a trapdoor.”

Conrad shook his head. “I still can’t tell if you think you’re for real or not.”

“A lot of what we’re doing here deals with perception rather than truth,” Grant said. “Many would argue that reality depends more on the former than the latter.”

There was a pause as we all absorbed that. Gemma’s forehead wrinkled, like she was still parsing the sentence.

“Right, yeah,” Conrad said finally. “So, I still perceive that you’re all deluded or faking. I think Tina and Ariel should go first.”

Ariel shrugged. “I don’t even have any weird talents. I’m like Kitty, I just talk too much.”

“Come on, why us?” Tina said.

“Because I’m betting you’ll put on the best show,” Conrad said.

And they did. At least Tina did. She started by choosing one of the lockets, closing her eyes, feeling it. Picking up vibes, whatever. I might have believed in the things she could do, but I still didn’t understand how it worked.

“What do you want me to do?” Ariel whispered, clearly in awe of the psychic.

“Hold the flashlight,” Tina said, retrieving the light from the kitchen counter.

They went outside. Gordon followed them with one of the cameras.

“What if they don’t find it?” Jerome said.

Lee sat back and stretched his arms over his head. “It’s going to be a long night.”

Tina and Ariel returned, prize in hand, about forty minutes later. Which, as long as it seemed, was still more quickly than I would have expected. It didn’t bode well, because I was pretty sure we wouldn’t be able to find our half so quickly, and I kind of wanted to win. And I hated that I kind of wanted to win, because that meant I was playing Provost’s game. I’d just have to be obnoxious about it.

Ariel was bubbling, holding up both halves of the locket for all to see. Tina looked annoyed. She held a crooked, forked stick a couple of feet long that she might have picked up off the ground.

“Is that a dowsing rod?” Jeffrey said. Tina nodded.

“A dowsing rod?” Conrad said. “Are you serious?”

“Took us straight to it,” Ariel said.

Jeffrey grinned at Tina. “You are so cool.” She blushed.

Conrad shook his head, as skeptical as ever, but he wrote the time down on the sheet of paper anyway.

“It’s spooky out there,” Tina said. “I’d just as soon not have to go out at night again.”

“Spooky?” I said. Meaning: spookier than a nighttime forest usually is?

“Maybe I’m still creeped out by that hypnotism trick last night.” She threw Grant a glare.

“You should trust your instincts,” Grant said. “If you think something’s out there, you should listen to that feeling.”

“That’s just it, I can listen to my instincts all I want, but unless I get something specific, I’m just panicking.” She slumped into an armchair, shrugging off further inquiry. “Who’s next?”

Jeffrey and Lee went next. Jeffrey touched the locket like Tina had. Lee held the piece of jewelry to his nose and took a deep breath. Taking in the scent. It took them about forty-five minutes, and when they returned, Tina and Ariel did a little high-five because they were still in the lead.

“These things must not be very well hidden,” Conrad observed. “I guess Provost wouldn’t want to make it too hard.”

“Sometimes when you’re looking for something, it just calls out to you,” Jeffrey said.

Then came Jerome and me. We both took big draws of air off our locket, the oval one. Not that it would help, because it smelled generic—cheap metal, a little bit tangy, and a little bit like Provost’s aftershave. Maybe that would be enough to give me a trail. Really, I didn’t know how we were going to manage this. Picking a weak scent out of the wilderness was like looking for a needle in a haystack. No—a specific piece of hay in a haystack.