Carrie Vaughn: Kitty Goes to Washington

You'll be okay. You can take care of yourself.

I sat in the car, gripping the steering wheel, and squeezed shut my eyes to keep from crying. I had acquired a voice. It was an inner monologue, like a part of my conscience. It reassured me, told me I wasn't crazy, admonished me when I was being silly, convinced me I was going to be okay when I started to doubt myself. The voice sounded like my best friend, T.J. He died protecting me, six weeks ago today. The alpha male of our pack killed him, and I had to leave Denver to keep from getting killed, too. Whenever I started to doubt, I heard T.J.'s voice telling me I was going to be okay.

His death sat strangely with me. For the first week or two, I thought I was handling it pretty well. I was thinking straight and moving on. People call that stage denial. Then on the highway, I saw a couple on a motorcycle: neither of them wore helmets, her blond hair tangled in the wind, and she clung to his leather jacket. Just like I used to ride with T.J. The hole that he'd left behind gaped open, and I had to pull off at the next exit because I was crying so hard. After that, I felt like a zombie. I went through the motions of a life that wasn't mine. This new life I had acquired felt like it had been this way forever, and like it or not, I had to adapt. I used to have an apartment, a wolf pack, and a best friend. But that life had vanished.

I locked the car, put the keys in my jeans pocket, and walked away from the parking lot, away from the trail, and into the wild. The night was clear and sharp. Every touch of air, every scent, blazed clear. The moon, swollen, bursting with light, edged above the trees on the horizon. It touched me, I could feel the light brushing my skin. Gooseflesh rose on my arms. Inside, the creature thrashed. It made me feel both drunk and nauseous. I'd think I was throwing up, but the Wolf would burst out of me instead.

I kept my breathing slow and regular. I'd let her out when I wanted her out, and not a second earlier.

The forest was silver, the trees shadows. Fallen leaves rustled as nighttime animals foraged. I ignored the noises, the awareness of the life surrounding me. I pulled off my T-shirt, felt the moonlight touch my skin.

I put my clothes in the hollow formed by a fallen tree and a boulder. The space was big enough to sleep in when I was finished. I backed away, naked, every pore tingling.

I could do this alone. I'd be safe.

I counted down from five—

One came out as a wolf's howl.

The animal, rabbit, squeals once, falls still. Blood fills mouth, burns like fire. This is life, joy, ecstasy, feeding by the silver light —

If turning Wolf felt like being drunk, the next day definitely felt like being hungover.

I lay in the dirt and decayed leaves, naked, missing the other wolves terribly. We always woke up together in a dog pile, so to speak. I'd always woken up with T.J. at my back. At least I remembered how I got here this time. I whined, groaned, stretched, found my clothes, brushed myself off, and got dressed. The sky was gray; the sun would rise soon. I wanted to be out of here by then.

I got to my car just as the first hikers of the morning pulled into the trailhead parking area. I must have looked a mess: hair tangled, shirt untucked, carrying sneakers in my hand. They stared. I glared at them as I climbed into my own car and drove back to the hotel for a shower.

At noon, I was driving on I-40 heading west. It seemed like a good place to be, for a while. I'd end up in Los Angeles, and that sounded like an adventure.

The middle of the desert between Flagstaff and L.A. certainly wasn't anything resembling an adventure. I played just about every CD I'd brought with me while I traveled through the land of no radio reception.

Which made it all the more surreal when my cell phone rang.

Phone reception? Out here?

I put the hands-free earpiece in and pushed the talk button.

"Hello?"

"Kitty. It's Ben."

I groaned. Ben O'Farrell was my lawyer. Sharp as a tack and vaguely disreputable. He'd agreed to represent me , after all.

"Happy to hear you, too."

"Ben, it's not that I don't like you, but every time you call it's bad news."

"You've been subpoenaed by the Senate."

Not one to mince words was Ben.

"Excuse me?"

"A special oversight committee of the United States Senate requests the honor of your presence at upcoming hearings regarding the Center for the Study of Paranatural Biology. I guess they think you're some kind of expert on the subject."

"What?"

"You heard me."

Yeah, I'd heard him, and as a result my brain froze.

Senate? Subpoena? Hearings? As in Joe McCarthy and the Hollywood blacklist? As in Iran-Contra?

"Kitty?"

"Is this bad? I mean, how bad is it?"

"Calm down. It isn't bad. Senate committees have hearings all the time. It's how they get information. Since they don't know anything about paranatural biology, they've called hearings."

It made sense. He even made it sound routine. I still couldn't keep the panic out of my voice. "What am I going to do?"

"You're going to go to Washington, D.C., and answer the nice senators' questions."

That was on the other side of the country. How much time did I have? Could I drive it? Fly? Did I have anything I could wear to Congress? Would they tell me the questions they wanted to ask ahead of time, as if I could study for it like it was some kind of test?

They didn't expect me to do this by myself, did they?

"Ben? You have to come with me."

Now he sounded panicked. "Oh, no. They're just going to ask you questions. You don't need a lawyer there."

"Come on. Please? Think of it as a vacation. It'll all go on the expense account."

"I don't have time—"

"Honestly, what do you think the odds are that I can keep out of trouble once I open my mouth? Isn't there this whole 'contempt of Congress' thing that happens when I say something that pisses them off? Would you rather be there from the start or have to fly in in the middle of things to get me out of jail for mouthing off at somebody important?"

His sigh was that of a martyr. "When you're right, you're right."

Victory! "Thanks, Ben. I really appreciate it. When do we need to be there?"

"We've got a couple weeks yet."

And here I was, going the wrong way.

"So I can drive there from Barstow in time."

"What the hell are you doing in Barstow?"

"Driving?"

Ben made an annoyed huff and hung up on me.

So. I was going to Washington, D.C.

I seemed to be living my life on the phone lately. I could go for days without having a real face-to-face conversation with anyone beyond "No, I don't want fries with that." I was turning into one of those jokers who walks around with a hands-free earpiece permanently attached to one ear. Sometimes, I just forgot it was there.

I went to L.A., did two shows, interviewed the band—no demon possessions happened in my presence, but they played a screechy death metal-sounding thing that made me wish I'd been out of my body for it. That left me a week or so to drive to the East Coast.

I was on the road when I called Dr. Paul Flemming. Flemming headed up the Center for the Study of Paranatural Biology, the focus of the Senate hearing in question. Until a month ago it had been a confidential research organization, a secret laboratory investigating a field that no one who wasn't involved believed even existed. Then Flemming held a press conference and blew the doors wide open. He thought the time was right to make the Center's work public, to officially recognize the existence of vampires, werewolves, and a dozen other things that go bump in the night. I was sure that part of why he did it was my show. People had already started to believe, and accept.