Carrie Vaughn - Kitty's House of Horrors

Jerome and I ended up outside, along with Gordon the PA and his camera, looking into the great outdoors, letting our eyesight adjust to the darkness. I turned my nose up, breathed deep, and caught the trail of Provost’s aftershave. Leading right back to the lodge, of course.

“I’m not sure this is going to work,” I said.

“Well, let’s get started doing something. Crisscross the ground, cover all the area around the house, see what we can pick up.” It was as good a plan as any.

We split up, him taking the front of the lodge and me taking the back. I caught the trails of the teams that had gone before us and ignored them. I was looking for Provost.

“Kitty!” Jerome called, and I trotted over to join him.

He was kneeling, resting one hand on the ground, head bent over. His powerful body was taut, like he was ready to run, his gaze up and watchful. He looked animal, a little bit of his wolf bleeding into his gaze. Not wanting to set him off, I approached cautiously, obliquely.

“There,” he said, nodding in the direction where the woods joined the meadow, a little ways from the lodge. Nose flaring, taking in the air, I caught it—Provost. I nodded, and we set off, stalking our prey.

We went carefully for about ten minutes. The trail was faint, but we were able to follow it. Especially after we told Gordon he had to stand downwind. A strange, twilight feeling came over me; I was feeling more wolf than human, even though I wasn’t shifting; I was still solid within my human skin, but this felt like hunting. Jerome and I hadn’t spoken since we left the lodge—we communicated by glances, by tilts of our heads and shoulders. The night blazed with information. I saw everything clearly, heard a hundred little noises in the woods and meadow, from an owl’s swoop of wings to insects and mice burrowing through grass. Being part of this world felt so natural. I’d be perfectly happy spending the whole night out here and not going back to the lodge. And wouldn’t that shake things up?

I followed the trail, but at one point I branched right and Jerome branched left. Brow furrowed, confused, I backtracked, zigzagged over the ground, reading the scents of the world like it was a book. Sure enough, the trail split. Joey Provost had been over this ground twice, in two different directions.

Noticing I had stopped, Jerome looked back at me.

“There are two trails here,” I said, wincing because my speech sounded so loud and intrusive. “Which is right?”

Jerome went over the same ground and found what I did. He took a moment to gather words, like he, too, had to remember human speech. “You sure it isn’t a false trail? When he was planting the other teams’ lockets?”

“It probably is. Just in case, you stick to the main trail and I’ll check this one out. If it goes to the wrong locket, I’ll turn back and catch up with you.”

“Come on, guys, please don’t split up,” Gordon said. “Who am I supposed to follow?”

“Easy—whichever one of us takes the right trail, right?” I said. “Did Joey tell you where he hid the thing?”

Gordon almost looked surly. “Jerome, you wait here. I’ll follow Kitty first, then come back and follow you.”

That was actually a fairly elegant solution. Jerome didn’t look happy about it, but he crossed his arms and waited.

We split up.

The trail continued faintly, mostly because there were so many smells, so much to take in. This area may have been isolated, but other people had been through here. Hikers, hunters, whatever.

I lost the scent in a clearing. No—the trail stopped. I walked around the perimeter, and it didn’t continue further. Provost had stopped here, but I didn’t find a locket piece. His scent didn’t linger in any one place; rather, he seemed to have come here, paced around, then left again by the same path.

I did find other signs, though: the remains of a meal, bone and gristle from someone’s chicken dinner, haphazardly buried with a thin layer of dirt thrown over it. A mashed-down square space—a tent footprint. A tree that had done latrine duty. Someone had camped here recently.

“Hey, Gordon? Do you know if anyone else has been in the area? Was anyone from the crew camping or something?” I glanced over my shoulder to ask. I showed him what I was talking about, the evidence of occupation.

He had to lower the camera to see what I was looking at. After a cursory glance, he shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think it was any of us.”

That moment, Jerome found us hunched at the edge of the camp, staring. My face scrunched up with concentration.

“I got it,” he said, holding up a piece of locket on a chain.

“Hey, you were supposed to wait!” Gordon said, then hurried to lift his camera in place and start recording.

Jerome ignored him. “What’s wrong?”

“What do you make of this?” I gestured around the clearing and gave Jerome a few minutes to find the same things I had. A normal person without a whole lot of tracking skills would have overlooked the signs. To a werewolf with a hyperactive sense of smell, the evidence jumped out.

Jerome looked at me. “Who do you think was here?”

“Besides Provost? I don’t know. There were two others, I think. Valenti maybe?”

“You think maybe someone’s spying on us? On the lodge, the production, whatever?” he said.

“Where are they now? Where’d they go?”

The trails went out, then disappeared. Whoever had been here had scattered. I shook my head.

“Should we be worried?” Gordon said.

I sighed. “I’m always worried. We should get back.”

We returned to the lodge, and if Jerome and I looked unhappy, the others assumed it was because we had the slowest time yet. Next up, the vampires took about as long as the psychics had, and I couldn’t have said how they did it. Maybe they just looked.

Odysseus Grant, all by himself, ended up winning. When his turn came, Conrad started the stopwatch. Grant held the original piece of the locket for a moment, running his thumb along the chain. He set it down on the table, walked out the front door, closed it behind him. Less than half a minute later—not even enough time for the rest of us to sit back and start a conversation—he returned. Holding up the other half of the locket.

I assumed that all four prizes were hidden about an equal distance away from the lodge. Jerome and I had managed to find ours, after some trial and error and a lot of hunting, in an hour. The box with the locket piece itself was at least a quarter mile away—it took fifteen minutes just to walk there and back, so how had Grant returned with it in mere seconds? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. This may have been all about putting the whammy on Conrad, but I had limits.

“Wait. How did you find it so fast?” Conrad said.

“I pulled it out of my top hat,” Grant said.

Conrad sputtered, “I thought you said—”

Tina glared. “Odysseus? You don’t have a top hat.”

Grant just smiled.

“I call shenanigans,” Conrad said.

“You’ve been calling shenanigans all week,” I said. “Why stop now?”

“But I want to know how he did it.” He turned to Grant. “You’re in on it, right? You had the other half in your pocket the whole time.”

“If you’ve already decided what to believe, I can’t possibly convince you otherwise,” Grant said.

“Mr. Grant is full of mystery, isn’t he?” Anastasia said, her tone stinging. “Really, Mr. Grant, tell us—are you a ringer? Are you here as one of us—or for another reason entirely?”

I rolled my eyes at the conspiracy. “Oh, please.”

But everyone else was looking at Odysseus. Tina, who’d been suspicious of him since the hypnotism; Jeffrey, who couldn’t see his aura; the others, who simply didn’t know what to think of him. Once again, it would make great TV.