Carrie Vaughn: Kitty and the Midnight Hour

Three months ago, I missed my mother's birthday party because it fell on the night of the full moon. I couldn't be there, smiling and sociable in my folks' suburban home in Aurora while the wolf part of me was on the verge of tearing herself free, gnawing through the last fringes of my self-control. I made some excuse, and Mom said she understood. But it showed so clearly how, in an argument between the two halves, the wolf usually won. Since then, maintaining enthusiasm for the human life had been difficult. Useless, even. I slept through the day, worked nights, and thought more and more about those times I ran in the forest as a wolf, with the rest of the pack surrounding me. I was on the verge of trading one family for the other.

I went home, slept, and rolled back to KNOB toward evening. Ozzie, the station manager, an aging hippie type who wore his thinning hair in a ponytail, handed me a stack of papers. Phone messages, every one of them.

"What's this?"

"I was going to ask you the same thing. What the hell happened on your shift last night? We've been getting calls all day. The line was busy all night. And the messages—six people claiming to be vampires, two say they're werewolves, and one wants to know if you can recommend a good exorcist."

"Really?" I said, sorting through the messages.

"Yeah. Really. But what I really want to know—" He paused, and I wondered how much trouble I was in. I was supposed to run a late-night variety music format, the kind of show where Velvet Underground followed Ella Fitzgerald. Thinking back on it, I'd talked the entire time, hadn't I? I'd turned it into a talk show. I was going to lose my job, and I didn't think I'd have the initiative to get another one. I could run to the woods and let the Wolf take over. Then Ozzie said, "Whatever you did last night—can you do it again?"

The second episode of the show that came to be called The Midnight Hour (I would always consider that first surprising night to be the first episode) aired a week later. That gave me time to do some research. I dug up half a dozen articles published in second-string medical journals and one surprisingly high-level government research project, a kind of medical Project Blue Book. It was a study on "paranatural biology" sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers attempted to document empirical evidence of the existence of creatures such as vampires, lycanthropes, etcetera. They more than attempted it—they did document it: photos, charts, case histories, statistics. They concluded that these phenomena were not widespread enough to warrant government attention.

The documentation didn't surprise me—there wasn't anything there I hadn't seen before, in one form or another. It surprised me that anyone from the supernatural underworld would have participated in such a study.

Where had they gotten test subjects? The study didn't say much about those subjects, seemingly regarding them in the same way one would disposable lab rats. This raised a whole other set of issues, which gave me lots to talk about.

Pulling all this together, at least part of the medical community was admitting to the existence of people like me. I started the show by laying out all this information. Then I opened the line for calls.

"It's a government conspiracy…"

"… because the Senate is run by bloodsucking fiends!"

"Which doesn't in fact mean they're vampires, but still…"

"So when is the NIH going to go public…"

"… medical schools running secret programs…"

"Is the public really ready for…"

"… a more enlightened time, surely we wouldn't be hunted down like animals…"

"Would lycanthropy victims be included in the Americans with Disabilities Act?"

My time slot flew by. The week after that, my callers and I speculated about which historical figures had been secret vampires or werewolves. My favorite, suggested by an intrepid caller: General William T. Sherman was a werewolf. I looked him up, and seeing his photo, I could believe it. All the other Civil War generals were strait-laced, with buttoned collars and trimmed beards, but Sherman had an open collar, scruffy hair, five-o'clock shadow, and a screw-you expression. Oh yeah. The week after that I handled a half-dozen calls on how to tell your family you were a vampire or a werewolf. I didn't have any good answers on that one—I hadn't told my family. Being a radio DJ was already a little too weird for them.

And so on. I'd been doing the show for two months when Ozzie called me at home.

"Kitty, you gotta get down here."

"Why?"

"Just get down here."

I pondered a half-dozen nightmare scenarios. I was being sued for something I'd said on the air. The Baptist Church had announced a boycott. Well, that could be a good thing. Free publicity and all. Or someone had gone and got themselves or someone else killed because of the show.

It took half an hour to get there, riding the bus. I hadn't showered and was feeling grouchy. Whatever it was Ozzie was going to throw at me, I just wanted to get it over with.

The door to his office was open. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jacket and slouched. "Ozzie?"

He didn't look up from the mountains of paper, books, and newspapers spread over his desk. A radio in the corner was tuned to KNOB. A news broadcast mumbled at low volume. "Come in, shut the door."

I did. "What's wrong?"

He looked up. "Wrong? Nothing's wrong. Here, take a look at this." He offered a packet of papers.

The pages were dense with print and legalese. These were contracts. I only caught one word before my eyes fogged over.

Syndication.

When I looked at Ozzie again, his hands were folded on the desk and he was grinning. That was a pretty big canary he'd just eaten. "What do you think? I've had calls from a dozen stations wanting to run your show. I'll sign on as producer. You'll get a raise for every new market we pick up. Are you in?"

This was big. This was going national, at least on a limited scale. I tried to read the proposal. L.A. They wanted me in L.A.? This was… unbelievable. I sat against the table and started giggling. Wow. Wow wow wow wow. There was no way I could do this. That would require responsibility, commitment—things I'd shied away from like the plague since… since I'd started hanging out with people like T.J.

But if I didn't, someone else would, now that the radio community had gotten the idea. And dammit, this was my baby.

I said, "I'm going to need a website."

That night I went to T.J.'s place, a shack he rented behind an auto garage out toward Arvada. T.J. didn't have a regular job. He fixed motorcycles for cash and didn't sweat the human world most of the time. I came over for supper a couple of times a week. He was an okay cook. More important than his cooking ability, he was able to indulge the appetite for barely cooked steaks.

I'd known T.J. forever, it seemed like. He helped me out when I was new to things, more than anyone else in the local pack. He'd become a friend. He wasn't a bully—a lot of people used being a werewolf as an excuse for behaving badly. I felt more comfortable around him than just about anyone. I didn't have to pretend to be human around him.

I found him in the shed outside. He was working on his bike, a fifteen-year-old Yamaha that was his pride and joy and required constant nursing. He tossed the wrench into the toolbox and reached to give me a hug, greasy hands and all.

"You're perky," he said. "You're practically glowing."

"We're syndicating the show. They're going to broadcast it in L.A. Can you believe that? I'm syndicated!"

He smiled. "Good for you."

"I want to celebrate," I said. "I want to go out. I found this all-ages hole-in-the-wall. The vampires don't go there. Will you come with me?"