Kitty Raises Hell (20 page)

I shrugged. How did you answer that question about someone in prison? “I don’t think so. He didn’t seem worried, just curious.”

“Oh.” A few more steps in silence. “Then I’m going to decide not to worry about this.”

“You go right ahead,” I said with a smile. Because of course we were both going to worry.

“This isn’t anything he can’t handle, right?” Ben said.

“Right.”

We reached the car. He was driving today. In a few moments, we were back on the highway.

I said, “It’s weird. I met Cormac before I met you, that time he tried to kill me. Remember?”

“Yeah, and if I recall he never actually fired at you.”

“No. If he’d fired I probably wouldn’t be here now.” Ben grunted an agreement. We drove a few more miles, and I said, “Remember
when we met?”

He smiled. “You needed a lawyer who wouldn’t freak out when you told him you’re a werewolf. So Cormac referred you to me.
Now I have to ask, did you have any idea we’d end up like this?”

This was one of those heavy relationship questions that had no good answer. Just about anything I said would get me in trouble.
“Not a clue. To tell you the truth, I thought you were kind of sleazy.”

“Sleazy?” he said, indignant, but he was still smiling.

“Come on, anyone who’d be Cormac’s lawyer?” I said. He laughed, because I definitely had a point. “Seems like a million years
ago.”

So much had happened. So much had changed. So many people just weren’t here anymore.

“Yeah.” He sounded sad. He’d been normal then. Human. Uninfected, with no hint that his life would swerve in this direction.

I squeezed his hand. More for my own comfort than his, if I was honest. But he squeezed back, smiled at me, and I felt better.

W
hen the call from the Paradox crew came the next morning, it was Jules. That was the first surprise. The second was how pleased
he sounded when he said, “We’re staying. You’ve got to come over here.”

“Why, what is it?”

“We found something,” he said.

B
en and I arrived at their hotel suite within the hour.

The suite, in one of those modern, functional hotels that catered to business travelers, had a living-room area between bedrooms.
The coffeemaker smelled like it had been going all night, and a half-empty box of donuts sat on the dresser.

The team had pulled chairs to a round table, where they huddled around a couple of humming laptops attached to heavy-duty
speakers. Gary lay on a nearby sofa, resting. A gauze square was taped over his left temple. It actually made him look tough.

“Gary, it’s good to see you conscious again,” I said, smiling.

“Good to be conscious. I had no idea Denver would be this exciting,” he said.

“It usually isn’t. Most of our ghost stories are the garden-variety kind.”

“Who wants garden variety when we’ve got this?” Jules said, nodding at one of the screens.

“What is it?”

“Here, watch,” Jules said. We crowded around the laptop.

A video clip filled the screen. It had the grainy, filtered quality of a low-light, night-vision-type camera. Everything in
the scene had a green tinge, but I recognized the view: looking along the bar at New Moon, across the back half of the restaurant,
including the table where we’d worked and a partial view into the kitchen. A stainless-steel worktable and the industrial
gas grill were visible, along with some shelves of pots, pans, utensils, and packages. It was one of a half dozen cameras
the crew had set up before the séance.

The time stamp in the corner ticking off seconds was the only indication that time was passing. Nothing in the clip showed
movement; we sat still around the table. And these guys watched film like this for
hours
. Even if you scanned through using the fast-forward button, it must have been tedious. But they’d also had a lot of practice.
I certainly wouldn’t have noticed the anomaly that Jules pointed out.

“There, there it is. You see it?”

He put his finger on the screen showing where, on the upper corner of the kitchen doorframe, a tongue of flame emerged. It
looked white and glaring in the night-vision footage. It was like a fire had started on the inside of the wall, then burned
through, licking outward and expanding like an explosion. One moment it was a hint of fire, emerging in one or two places.
The next moment, a wall of fierce fire blew from the kitchen through the dining room, pushing air and heat—and the table,
and us—before it. This was the fireball that had roared out to shock us. The rest of the film showed us reacting, panicking,
the table knocking Gary’s head, me running for the fire extinguishers, Ben running after me, and so forth. Pandemonium.

The fire itself seemed to come out of nowhere.

“Spontaneous
building
combustion?” I said. If it could happen to people, why not structures?

“There’s usually a reason a place catches fire like that,” Jules said. “I talked to the investigators about this. They haven’t
finished their report, but they haven’t found anything obvious like a gas leak or faulty wiring, or ignition of flammable
materials, which is usually what happens. In an older building like this, there’s any number of things that can go wrong,
but there’s something else. I didn’t see it until I went through it frame by frame. The investigators wouldn’t have caught
it.”

He proceeded to show us, backing up to the point where the fire started and clicking forward, a half second at a time. The
flames moved almost like they were alive, dancing, swaying, each step and unexpected flicker captured on a split second of
video. When the fireball burst, a brilliant sphere of light expanding out, searing my eyes, it was almost beautiful. Like
some cosmic event rather than a destructive earthly force.

Jules hit pause and pointed, his excitement clear. “There, do you see it?”

I’d never have caught it. No one who didn’t have the investigators’ experience in looking for weird shadows, blips, and anomalies
in video like this would have seen it.

A human figure stood outlined in the middle of the billowing flames.

It was off-color, a slightly more golden tinge than the fire surrounding it, a heat mirage within a heat mirage, shimmering
at a different angle. But it had a head, body, legs, and arms, spread in something like ecstasy.

A frame later, it vanished, melting into the rest of the fire. The image only lasted for a split second. At full speed, the
clip just looked like flames changing shapes.

Jules backed the clip up, so that we were all staring at that figure, unreal, undeniable.

“Is it someone in a suit?” I said. “Like one of those fireproof stunt-guy suits?”

“Except that it just disappears,” Jules answered. “Granted, fire does strange things, it’s unpredictable, but it’s right there
on the video.”

I should have been happy to see a form, an actual enemy—the demon. We now had an image, a being that reveled in fire, maybe
used it to destroy. But that also meant we were dealing with something sentient, with a mind, a will, and a mean streak. My
gut felt cold.

Jules, at least, seemed happy at the discovery. “This is proof. It’s
proof.
”

“Proof of what?” Ben said.

“The impossible.”

Ben pointed at the screen. “Just so you all know, the insurance company is buying that it was an accident. So I don’t care
if there’s the slightest hint of supernatural nastiness going on with this. I don’t care if you find Casper the Friendly Ghost
playing with matches. If any of you talk to the insurance company, it was a gas leak due to the age of the building. That’s
what’s going on the paperwork, that’s the story, and we’re all sticking to it. Got it?”

Full-on lawyer mode. That was my honey. “Got it,” I said.

From the sofa, Gary shook his head. “A video like that is too easy to fake. It’s not good enough for proof.”

“That’s the trouble,” Tina said. “Everything we discover is too easy to fake.”

For my part, I felt like I was finally looking my enemy in the eye. Not that I could tell whether this thing had eyes.

“But this gives us something,” I said. “It’s a thing. A being. It has a shape. Maybe it has a mind. That means we can lure
it out. We can trick it. Trap it, maybe.”

Tina huffed. “I can see us standing there with fire extinguishers blasting it. Why do I get the feeling that won’t work?”

“Maybe we can talk to it,” I said. “Maybe we can just
ask
it to stop.”

“True to form,” Ben said. “Always ready to talk it out.” His voice was sarcastic, but his smile was sweet.

“I’m not sure I like that idea,” Gary said. “This is out of our league.”

I shrugged. “So change leagues. I want to try another séance. I want to talk to this thing.”

Nobody said anything. If they didn’t like the idea, they could have at least argued with me, but everyone stared, eyes kind
of buggy, expressions taut. The anxiety was tangible. We all saw the monster, but nobody wanted to face up to it.

“Come on, we want to lure this thing out. Use me as bait! I’m the focus of all this anyway,” I said.

“That’s exactly why you shouldn’t be acting like bait,” Ben said. “Sure, maybe this thing wants you—so the last thing you
should be doing is throwing yourself at it.”

“Aw, honey, that’s sweet. You trying to protect me and all.” My smile was probably a little too sarcastic.

“
Somebody
has to,” he said, curt.

We glared at each other a moment, a couple of not entirely happy wolves in people clothing.

“What does your contact say? The one who gave you the protective potion?” Jules said.

“I don’t know. I haven’t been able to get ahold of him. Give me a minute.” I called Grant’s number again. And again, no answer.
I needed to find another way to get in touch with him. I had to know if he was okay, so I called the Diablo, the Vegas hotel
that housed the theater where he performed. I keyed my way through the phone maze until I reached a real live person at the
theater box office.

“Hi, I was wondering when Odysseus Grant’s shows are today,” I said to the clerk.

“Oh, I’m sorry, all his shows have been canceled for the next couple of days,” she answered.

Damn. This couldn’t be good. “Oh. Do you know why?”

“I think it’s illness. I wasn’t given any details.”

Then Grant was in trouble, too. My hair prickled.

“What’s wrong?” Ben said, after I put away my phone. I must have gone especially pale.

“I can’t get ahold of him,” I said. “His shows are canceled. He seems to have disappeared.”

“So no help there,” Tina sighed.

I was about ready to run back to Vegas to deal with this at the source, despite all the warnings. “What about you? Surely
you have some kind of . . . I don’t know, psychic hunch or something? ’Cause that would be really useful.”

Another long and meaning-filled silence descended. Tina blushed, and Jules intently studied the laptop screen.

“I’m still waiting to hear about the psychic-hunches thing myself,” Gary said. “Tina keeps telling me she’ll explain how she’s
the only person I’ve ever seen get a Ouija board to act like that when I feel better. Tina—honest, I feel better.”

“Huh. I assumed you all had already had that conversation,” I said.

A loud, insistent pounding on the door started right about then. Good timing there, and I wondered how far Tina’s psychic
reach actually extended. Mind control of room service, maybe? Convenient.

Ben went to the door, checked the peephole, looked back. “I don’t recognize him. Young guy, kind of scruffy. Anybody order
a pizza?”

Nobody had. Ben called through the door, “Can I help you?”

“Tell Kitty to let me in,” a voice answered. I recognized the voice and made a dash for the door.

“Why am I not surprised?” Ben grumbled.

“I’ll talk to him. It’ll only take a minute.”

I cracked open the door to find Peter Gurney, young, intense, focused, slouching in his canvas army jacket, standing on the
porch outside the room. This was such bad timing. I didn’t know what he wanted—to accuse me of lying again or to demand more
information that I didn’t have—but there had to be a better time for it.

We regarded each other for a moment. “Peter. As much as I’d love to talk to you, this really isn’t—”

“I want to talk to them,” he said and pointed into the room behind me.

I looked at the PI team, who were now staring at us with interest, and back at Peter. I fought past the cognitive dissonance—what
did Peter even know about them? “Oh? Why?”

“I’ll tell them,” he said, almost surly. He was nervous, his hands fidgeting with the hem of his jacket. He had to work to
summon this bravado.

“What’s happened?” I said. “What have you been up to, besides following me around?” He had the grace to look chagrined at
that. That didn’t stop him.

“I need to talk to you.” He called this over my shoulder, toward the table where the Paradox team gathered. This couldn’t
have been great timing for them, either. I wondered: Was Peter a fan? Did they get accosted by fans a lot?

I said, “Peter, I’m sure you’re upset, but this isn’t a good time. Maybe you could come back—”

“I have a job for you,” he said to the team, glaring at me as an afterthought. I blocked the doorway, or he might have shoved
his way in.

“Sounds serious,” Tina said.

“Maybe not to you,” Peter said. “But it is to me. I want to hire you.”

“Got a place that’s haunted, then?” Jules said.

“No. Not really.” He was still nervous, his gaze darting. I got the feeling he really didn’t want to be here, but he was desperate.
He said, “I need you to talk to my brother.”

“What?”
I said, disbelieving. Of all the ridiculous . . . Desperate didn’t begin to cover it. My sympathy ran out, all at once. This
wasn’t grief—this was not being able to face reality. “Peter, what are you thinking?”

“I’ve been following you—”

“I know,” I said.

His gaze was stone cold and dead serious. “If you were lying about Ted, I’d follow you and maybe you’d lead me to him.”