Kitty's Greatest Hits (kitty norville) Page 19

  T.J. lay as still as he could while gasping for breath. He kept his head back, throat exposed, hardly understanding what was happening—his body seemed to be reacting without him, showing the necessary submission so that Alex wouldn’t hurt him. He flushed with shame, because he thought he’d be able to fight back.

  Alex got up without a word and stalked out of the room. T.J. moved more slowly, but followed just the same.

  * * *

  T.J. sat in the corner, away from the others, staring out, turning over thoughts that weren’t his. He could run or he could fight. And what happened to safety? To peace? All he had to do was sit back and take it. Not argue. Not rock the boat, not stick his neck out.

  He couldn’t stop staring, which in the body language of these creatures meant a challenge. He dropped his gaze to the bottle of beer, which he hadn’t been drinking.

  Jane pulled up a chair next to his and sat, then leaned on his shoulder, rubbing her head against his neck, stroking his arms. Trying to calm him, make him feel better.

  “You know I’m gay, right?” he said.

  Pouting, she looked at him. “We just want you to be happy. We want you to feel like you belong. You do, don’t you?”

  He closed his eyes. “I don’t know.”

  “It doesn’t matter as long as you’re safe. You know if anyone came through here and gave you trouble, Alex would go after them, right?”

  He almost laughed. Like she knew anything about it. “That isn’t the point.”

  He’d raised his voice without realizing it, glaring at her so that she leaned away, a spark of animal flashing in her eyes. Heavy boots stepping across the floor inevitably followed, along with a wave of musk and anger, as Alex came to stand beside Jane. It was the two of them, bad cop and good cop, keeping the pack in line. Like they were one big happy family.

  T.J. should have gone with Gary.

  He stood, putting himself at eye level with Alex—also a sign of challenge. “I’m leaving,” he said. Alex frowned. His mouth had been open to speak, but T.J. had done it first. The rest of the pack was here—they’d fallen silent and gathered around, the happy family. T.J. recognized a gang when he saw one.

  Alex laughed—condescending, mocking. As if T.J. were a child. As far as their wolf sides were concerned, he supposed he was. He thought back to Alex throwing him to the floor, felt that anger again, and tamped it down tight. The alpha was trying to get a rise out of him, goad him into some stupid attack so he could smack him right back down. T.J. wouldn’t let him. All he had to do was stare.

  “You’ll be on your own,” Alex said. “You won’t like that. You’ll never make it.”

  T.J.’s mouth widened in a grin that showed teeth. He shouldn’t taunt Alex. He ought to just roll over to show his belly like the others. But he shook his head.

  “I’ve done it before,” he said. “I can do it again.”

  The wolf rose up, standing in place of the scared kid he used to be.

  They could all jump him. He looked at the door and tried not to think of it, pushing all his other senses—ears, nose, even the soles of his feet—out, trying to guess when the rest of them would attack. He’d run. That was his plan.

  “You don’t really want to leave,” Alex said, still with the laugh hiding in his voice.

  T.J. looked around at all of them, meeting each person’s gaze. The others looked away. They’d all come here by accident, through werewolf attacks, or by design—recruited and brought to the cage. T.J., on the other hand, had come to them alone, and he could leave that way. Maybe they didn’t mind it here, but one of these days, T.J. would fight back. Maybe he’d win against Alex and become the alpha of this pack. Maybe he’d lose, and Alex would kill him. But they could all see that fight coming.

  Which was maybe why they let him walk out the door without another argument. Rather than feeling afraid, T.J. felt like he’d won a battle.

  He hadn’t been brave enough to live out his old life. But he’d been brave enough to stick his hand in that cage. Maybe, eventually, he’d be okay.

  WINNOWING THE HERD

  Nobody was wearing perfume or fancy aftershave. It wasn’t that kind of crowd. But I did smell patchouli, three different kinds of bathing products from the Body Shop, a recently changed baby, more patchouli covering up the smell of pot, and a shedding German shepherd.

  The German shepherd belonged to Frank from marketing. He’d left the dog at home, cleaned up, didn’t have a German shepherd hair on him, and probably didn’t even realize he smelled like dog.

  “… so I told him, no. Absolutely not. I mean, we’re an NPR affiliate, why would we want to advertise a gun show? We’d be a laughingstock…”

  I nodded politely and made appropriate noises of sympathy. I’d met the German shepherd once. His name was Spirit, or Shadow, or something. He hadn’t liked me much. That was because I could rip out his throat in a white-hot second, and he knew it.

  “… you guys in programming have no clue what we go through.”

  I shrugged with mock apology. “I guess not. Hey, is that a meat tray?”

  Ozzie’s wife, Cherie, was bringing out another platter to the lobby from the break room. Ozzie was the KNOB station manager. The staff appreciation party was Cherie’s idea. Ozzie didn’t appreciate his staff.

  At second sniff, it wasn’t a meat tray. No, it was more hummus. All the party platters were vegetarian—crackers with hummus, pita bread with hummus, ten kinds of vegetables with three kinds of dips, something made of tofu. Not just vegetarian, but vegan. Not even a chunk of Brie in sight. None of it smelled like food to me.

  The beer was free so no one complained.

  I hoped my sigh wasn’t too audible. For lack of anything that might have bled before being cooked, the only things that smelled edible were my coworkers.

  This was one of those optional-but-not-really parties. Time to play nice, even though Ozzie was under pressure to make budget cuts and everyone was on the verge of stabbing each other in the back to make sure they weren’t the ones who were cut. Frank had been making lots of noise about how much work he did and how little anyone realized it. Ann the programming director appealed to noble sensibilities: We were a public service, not a business, and programming should be the last thing to go. Who needed advertising? And every two-bit night-shift DJ was desperate to show how indispensable they were.

  So, if the station was under budget pressures, why were we spending all this money on a party that didn’t even have any meat? I moved through the evening smiling vaguely at little ironies.

  Perry. That was who I’d go after first. If I were going to go after anyone, which I wasn’t, because I had better control than that. Perry was the receptionist/secretary/bookkeeper. Small, delicate, big eyed, slouching warily in her baggy sweater. She wrote romance novels at her desk on the sly. She’d totally freeze in the face of an attack. Easy prey.

  “Kitty? What do you think?”

  “Hm?” I turned to find Ike and Sean staring at me.

  “Weren’t you listening?” Ike said.

  “Sorry. What?”

  “Who would you rather meet: Iggy Pop or Bowie?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “That’s a trick question, isn’t it?”

  KNOB ran a “diverse music” format when it wasn’t running NPR, which meant the average DJ was as likely to follow up Ella Fitzgerald with the Chieftains as with the Clash. More than one programming meeting had degenerated into too-serious arguments about the merits of Velvet Underground versus They Might Be Giants.

  I had to get out of here. I should have skipped the party, mandatory or no.

  “Hey, Kitty, can I get you a beer?”

  “No thanks,” I said and sipped my cup of water. I knew better than to get even a little tipsy the night before a full moon.

  “So, any big plans this weekend?” Sean was talking to me. Ike had disappeared.

  I had originally been scheduled to work tomorrow, Saturday night. I’d had to make a big stink ab
out getting the night off. Called in way too many favors. But since I actually liked the night shift and had traded with people countless other times, I’d had a lot of favors to call in. In the end everyone knew I’d wanted Saturday off and everyone wanted to know why.

  They all figured I had a hot date. I was the station’s resident single twenty-something, always a topic of speculation.

  “I’m going camping.”

  Sean stared blankly. “In March? Isn’t it a little cold?”

  “Yeah, but it’s a full moon,” I said with a straight face. He had no response to that.

  I grabbed a handful of crackers to nibble, to give me something to do. Just another half an hour, then I’d leave. Frank and Bill the tech guy stood by the food table, chatting.

  “I think the food’s great. Takes courage, standing up for a vegetarian lifestyle like this,” Frank was saying. “I didn’t know Ozzie was a vegetarian.”

  “He isn’t,” Bill said. “Neither is Cherie for that matter.”

  Frank looked taken aback. “Really? Huh.”

  “Maybe she thought, it’s public radio, everyone here must be vegetarian.”

  “So, is anyone here actually a vegetarian?” I said.

  Frank shrugged. Bill said, “Ike is.”

  “He looks it.” Ike was thin, gangly, pale. Vegetarianism only worked if you knew how to do it. Otherwise, it made you look sick. He probably tasted like tofu. Ike was the last person in the room I’d go after. If I ever went after people. Which I didn’t. I said, “You know, cows were bred to be eaten. Same with chickens, pigs—all the major meat animals. To not eat them is to deny them their purpose in life. Don’t you think?”

  Frank paused, scoop of hummus dip halfway to his lips. “I guess I never thought of it that way.”

  Bill said the only thing he could in the face of such a declaration. “Can I get you a beer or something?”

  “No thanks, I’m fine.”

  He drifted off to the cooler anyway, and Frank turned back to the bowl of hummus, away from me.

  Sheep. They were all a bunch of sheep.

  I didn’t usually feel this way. Usually, I could get through an entire day of work without making little baaing noises in my head in reference to my colleagues. I didn’t always walk into a room and automatically winnow the herd in my mind.

  Human: The other white meat.

  The later the party went, the more everyone smelled like beer, the more people laughed, and the more I paced like a caged predator. I made myself sit in a chair and watch. Perry had left. So, I’d go after Ann next, because Ann needed getting. She was telling Beth from programming a complicated story about her partner’s, i.e., longtime live-in boyfriend’s, reprehensible behavior at her cousin’s wedding, which was really a disguised rant about his not proposing to her years ago and thus depriving her of her own wedding. Being a freethinking liberal feminist, Ann was not supposed to complain about such things.

  “He’s an animal!” Beth said commiseratively.

  These people had no idea. Try dating people who sprouted three-inch claws on a regular basis.

  It was all pretense, one way or another. The reason I wasn’t kissing Ozzie’s ass or worrying about my job was because if I lost this job, I’d have an excuse to run away and never come back. So maybe that was why I kept up the pretense. For the challenge. Because I wanted to believe that civilization was worth the effort.

  “Kitty! What was that shit you were playing the other night?”

  I blinked, startled, and searched the room for the heckler. Ozzie, aging hippie ponytail and all, was standing on the other side of the sofa, hands on hips, glaring at me. The cluster of people seated on the sofa and nearby chairs fell silent, watching with big eyes like they’d just seen a car wreck.

  What shit? was not the ideal response to that question. “Can you be a little more specific?”

  “A couple nights ago. That spoken word stuff. That totally suicidal spoken word stuff.”

  I composed myself and said, “That was poetry. I found a recording of Sylvia Plath reading her poems. You know—literature.”

  With a scowl, he pulled a crumpled wad of cash from his pocket, smoothed out a couple of ones, and handed them to Bill, who grinned.

  They’d had a bet going on one of my sets? Crazy.

  Ozzie pointed at me. All ready to take his loss out on somebody. “Well, we can’t have that.”

  Have what—literature? I raised my brows, inquiring.

  He continued. “Suicidal shit on the radio. We might be held liable for—for something.” He made a vague gesture.

  My God, if the Plath estate were held liable for every suicidal teenager who got ahold of The Bell Jar …

  I rolled my eyes. “It was two in the morning. Can you prove to me anyone was even listening?”

  “Kitty, we can’t have that kind of attitude here.”

  The air quivered. I wasn’t being nice. I wasn’t playing the game. I might as well have acquired a bull’s-eye on my chest. My colleagues stared at me, nearly salivating. Like a pack of wolves moving in for the kill.

  I supposed I should have been flattered that someone had listened to my shift.

  “Can we talk about it at the next programming meeting?” I said. Nicely.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Ozzie didn’t deserve to be alpha of this pack.

  I stared at him. Hard. Almost, a growl started in my throat. I pursed my lips, to stop them from curling and baring my teeth. My shoulders tensed, like hackles rising. Frank’s German shepherd would have recognized the challenge. Ozzie almost did. His eyes went a little wide, but then he took a long draw from his beer and skulked off to the break room. He may not have understood that he was avoiding a challenge, but that was what he was doing.

  I turned my lips into a wry smile as people nervously restarted conversations and stole twitchy glances at me.

  “Baa-a-a-a-a-a-a!” I yelled in a staccato voice, hands cupped around my mouth. And they all just looked at me, before turning back to their beers and conversation.

  I could eat them all. But I had a bad taste in my mouth. Time to blow this Popsicle stand. I grabbed another handful of crackers, waved a half-assed good-bye, and stalked out the door. It was early enough I could still find someplace to serve me a nice, rare steak.

  KITTY AND THE MOSH PIT OF THE DAMNED

  It felt good to get away from the radio station.

  At least that was what I kept telling myself as I tried to make my way to the back of Glamour, a nightclub that attracted a young and dissolute crowd. I was here for a concert. I squeezed along the wall, pausing every couple of steps as people surged back, threatening to crush me. I dodged full cups of beer and lit cigarettes. The dance floor was shuffle-room only. The crowd was way past fire-code capacity.

  A few hundred hot-blooded beating hearts surrounded me. It was all I could do to keep from drooling. A deeply buried part of me sensed the sweat, the heat, and thought, Easy prey. I could smell ten different brands of perfume and aftershave. Someone nearby was high on pot; I could smell it on his breath. Another had done X in the last hour; I could smell it in her blood.

  This part of me had to sprout fur and claws every full moon. Between moons, I was careful to keep my claws to myself.

  I finally reached the secondary bar with the majority of my self-control intact. Red track lighting backlit a couple rows of liquor bottles, casting shadows over the usual detritus of napkins, lime slices, dirty glasses, and taps. I checked for spills on the black Formica, and finding a dry spot, hopped up to take a seat.

  The bartender started to glare, but when he saw me, he leaned his elbows on the counter.

  “Kitty, hiya.” Jax was about six feet tall and a hundred thirty pounds on a heavy day. He was shaved bald, and, living the nocturnal lifestyle he did, his skin was pale.

  “Hey. When’s Devil’s Kitchen up?”

  “Five minutes. Your timing is great.”

  “What are the chances they’ll
stick around after the show to talk to me?”

  “When I tell them Kitty Norville wants to talk to them? They’ll stick around like duct tape.”

  I was still getting used to the fame thing. My call-in radio talk show for the supernaturally challenged went national less than a year ago, but a lot had happened in that time. I’d revealed my werewolf identity on the air, for one. The episode put my ratings through the roof and made me one of the first lycanthrope celebrities in the country.

  Fame opened doors and I had to take advantage of it when I could. I wanted to get Devil’s Kitchen on my show for an interview.

  The concert started late. The crowd, sensing the minutes ticking on some internal group chronometer, pressed closer to the stage. The angry edge tingeing the air intensified. Lots of black, lots of chains, and shouting.

  The room went dark, all the lights cutting off at once, and the taped music went dead. Crammed bodies that had been governed by the beat of the music milled, uncertain. Then, the stage lit up. White spots glared straight down on amps and mike stands. A drum machine started up, followed by an electrified bass line, manic and terrible, like coming war.

  Spirits from shadow, the band appeared. A bald guy with a ripped T-shirt and denim overalls played bass—Danny Spense. He came on stage and played like he was digging his own grave, with a kind of intense desperation, focusing only on his hands clutching the instrument, wincing in anguish.

  Lead guitar, Kent Hayden, had a fascist look, slick-backed black hair, black T-shirt and jeans, fingerless leather gloves. He stared at the crowd impassively while his fingers danced on the frets of his instrument.

  Together, they set up a textured rain of sound, melody struggling to escape chaos.

  Eliot Ray, lead singer, leapt to the fore, grabbing the mike and pressing his mouth to the foam. He wore work boots, cutoff shorts, and a three-sizes-too-big T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off. He shut his eyes and wailed, but it was controlled, playing with the rhythm and song; it was, after all, music. I forgot to pay attention to the lyrics.