Carrie Vaughn - Kitty Raises Hell

“Ma’am, you need to go to the hospital.”

“No, I don’t. I’ll be fine.”

“You’ve got second-degree burns on your arms, ma’am.”

“Really?” I looked. My arms were red. Very red. Bad sunburn red. But didn’t second-degree mean blisters?

The paramedic stared at my arms, as well. He blinked a couple of times. Then he shook his head. “I could have sworn that was a lot worse a minute ago.”

“Maybe you’re just stressed,” I said. He went away, shaking his head.

The fire was almost out, and the building itself remained intact. The investigators had already had their first look and gave us their impression: There hadn’t been an explosion, so it probably wasn’t a gas leak. Just fire. I hoped all this meant we could make repairs and reopen quickly. But how was I going to explain this to Shaun?

Ben talked to the police and fire investigators about what we were doing here and proved that we owned the place, so no one would get hauled off on trespassing or vandalism charges.

“The police want to take a look at all the video footage, to see if they can figure out what happened. I have to say I’m looking forward to reading that report,” he said.

“I’m not sure how much more of this I can take,” I whined. My fury had drained away along with the rush of adrenaline. “It’s going to keep coming after us. It’s going to keep... destroying things, until...” Until it destroyed us. I didn’t want to say it.

He put his arm around me, tucked my head on his shoulder, kissed my hair. “I wish I had some suggestions. But this is way out of my league. All I really want to do right now is go run. ” His body was stiff, hands clenched even as they rested against me from the tension of keeping his wolf under control. He hadn’t gotten to the numb stage, apparently.

I didn’t want to sit around and wait to see what disaster happened next. “Come on,” I said, pushing myself off his shoulder to stand up, then tugging on him to get him to his feet. “Let’s go see how Gary’s doing.”

Gary Janson had a concussion. He hadn’t suffered anything as serious as a skull fracture or bleeding in the brain, but the length of time he’d spent unconscious had the doctors worried, so they were keeping him in the hospital under observation. Before we arrived at the hospital, he’d woken up, been aware of his surroundings and of his team gathered around him. But he didn’t remember what had happened, and he’d seemed confused at some of the doctor’s questions. He hadn’t been able to answer the classic “How many fingers am I holding up?” for example. Still, the doctor expected him to recover, given time and rest.

The cameras had followed us to the hospital and spent time getting video of the doctor explaining Gary’s injuries. I wanted to corner the show’s cameramen and ask if they were really wanting to put all this into the show. It seemed sensationalist, even by my standards.

We found Tina and Jules in a nearby waiting room, sitting hunched in their chairs, looking bereft. Jules had taken off his glasses to rub his eyes. I hated to break the mood, but I was still under attack, and my restaurant had almost burned down. I had to find out if Tina’s little experiment had accomplished anything.

“So,” I said, scuffing my feet. “Can I assume the Ouija board just pissed this thing off?”

They looked at me like I’d turned green. Ben had wandered off to read a public health notice hanging on the wall—pretending like he didn’t know me. Then they sputtered with laughter. Tina held a hand over her mouth and turned red, almost crying from trying to keep from laughing, and Jules just shook his head.

“Bloody hell, ” the Brit said. “I have never seen anything like that!”

Either this was a lot of pent-up stress getting loose, or I was confused.

“I can’t believe it. When I said it was dangerous I was talking demonic possession. I’ve never had anything like that happen before,” Tina said, gasping for breath. “We almost died. And Gary—oh, my God!”

Stress, I decided. I wondered if I should say something.

“And you—” Jules pointed at his colleague. “What was that? What are you, some kind of psychic? Medium? Have you been holding out on us?”

Tina stopped laughing. Because Jules reminded us of what had happened right before the fire.

The room went quiet, and Jules stared at her. She stared back, looking like she’d been hit by a truck. Jules’s eyes were wide with revelation.

I stepped in. “Maybe we should all talk about this over coffee.” I raised my brows hopefully.

The hospital cafeteria had just opened—it was something like five in the morning—so we went there.

Jules, completely sober now after whatever post-traumatic hysteria had gripped him, almost sounded betrayed. “Tina, I’ve never seen anybody work a Ouija board like that.”

“And you can tell what I am just by looking at me,” I said.

Jules again, even more insistent: “What’s your angle on all this? What aren’t you telling us?”

I felt like I had a front-row seat to my own private reality-TV show; too bad the cameras hadn’t followed us here.

They communicated by stares. Jules leaned over the table, demanding an explanation from Tina with his accusing gaze. Tina turned sullen, like she was a kid who’d just gotten in trouble for something.

“I’ve been doing it since I was a kid,” she said at last, voice soft, all humor gone. “And not just with the board, but with dowsing, automatic writing, runes, most of the old tricks. It all works. I walk into a house, and I know if it’s haunted or not because it talks to me. Things talk to me. I sense things. Ghosts, spirits. Whatever.”

The old tricks Tina mentioned—using rods or pen and paper to communicate with the spirit world, reading tea leaves, shapes in a plume of smoke—they were old tricks exactly because they must have worked for someone, at some time. But it wasn’t a science, because the results weren’t reproducible. The methods worked for some people and not for others, and even those people with talent didn’t have it all the time. With the Age of Reason and rise of science, what couldn’t be dissected and explained was discredited and abandoned. Still, the tricks lingered, and thousands of people clung to them, used them—or abused them—because they so desperately wanted them to work.

What happened when someone like Tina came along? Someone who actually could make the tricks work? And what did that say about the world?

We stared at her.

“Really,” Jules said flatly.

“Really,” she said, echoing. “I don’t advertise it because of people like you, who assume everyone who picks up a forked stick or holds a séance is faking it.”

I bet she used her looks and humor, as well, to distract from those moments when she stared out into space, as if listening. She was the show’s eye candy; she couldn’t possibly be its resident psychic.

Paradox PI had a resident psychic. A real one. I so wanted to be the one to break that story.

“So, Tina,” I said, trying to sound encouraging. “I’d love to have you on the show next week to talk about this, how you discovered this, what it’s been like to live with it—”

“No,” she said. Didn’t even think about it.

“Why does everyone always tell me no like that?” I said. “Am I really that bad?”

Ben patted my hand. “I think it’s the predatorial gleam in your eye when you ask them.”

“What gleam?” I grumbled. Okay, so there might have been a little predatorial gleam.