Kitty's Mix-Tape Read online

  High school felt so big while we were living it, but the percentage of our lives those years represented got smaller and smaller as time went on. What was an entire quarter of our lives ten years ago was now, what, fourteen percent? And in ten more years it would be ten percent. And the beat goes on.

  “You look like you’re about to start crying,” Ben said.

  “I think I’m sad,” I said.

  “Let’s go find you a glass of wine—”

  “Kitty!” I turned to the call, coming from down the foyer. A woman rushed toward me. She had honey-brown hair in a bob, and was stout and confident, in a cute black dress and loud earrings. Sadie hadn’t changed a bit. Except neither one of us had the confidence and poise for slinky cocktail dresses back in high school. Now look at us, like we were grown-ups or something.

  She ran up to me. In wolf language, this—a fellow predator coming at me with arms outstretched—was an attack. But I was a civilized werewolf and she was a friend, and I was just so happy that I recognized her, and she knew me. And this right here made me glad I came. I reached for and accepted the enthusiastic hug. A little of the tension I’d been feeling slipped away.

  “I’ve missed you!” she said into my hair, holding tight.

  “I’m sorry I lost touch,” I murmured. “You look really good!”

  “So do you.” We separated and beamed at each other in admiration.

  “How are you? What have you been doing?”

  “We have so much to talk about!” She glanced appraisingly at Ben. “And you are . . .”

  “Sadie, this is Ben.” I presented them to each other.

  “Nice to meet you,” Ben said neutrally.

  “Hm,” she purred.

  “Do you want to go get a glass of wine or something?”

  “Oh God yes.” We hooked arms and stalked into the ballroom. Ben followed, amused.

  After acquiring wine and staking out territory at one of the white-cloth-draped tables, we caught up. Sadie had gone to school at Northwestern, then law school, returned to Denver to work for the legal department of an environmental non-profit, which was exactly the kind of thing she always said she’d do, if maybe not exactly the way she thought. She’d had dreams of riding Greenpeace Zodiacs to save whales, which I was just as glad she never did. This was safer. She and Ben instantly bonded over law-school anecdotes and seemed relieved that their areas of expertise were so far apart they’d never had to meet professionally.

  As for me . . . I didn’t have to explain much because Sadie said she listened to my show sometimes. As soon as I’d gotten a website with a contact form she’d thought about sending me a note. The reunion finally prompted her to do it.

  I couldn’t explain why I hadn’t ever reached out to her. “I . . . had a rough couple of years there. And then I figured you’d be too angry to want to hear from me.” It sounded stupid now, and her frown of reprimand told me that yes, it was stupid.

  “So,” she said, idly running a purple-painted nail around the base of her wineglass. “You talk to Jesse at all?”

  Jesse Kramer. Another set of memories crashed over me. Part of the old life, again. I shook my head. “I haven’t talked to him since graduation.”

  “Ah,” she said suggestively.

  Ben caught the tone. “And who is Jesse?”

  “Just a guy,” I said, pretty sure I was blushing. I didn’t want to talk about this. Ben arced a brow.

  “Her boyfriend senior year.”

  “Oh really?” Ben’s brows went up. “Any chance I’ll get to meet this guy?”

  “I doubt it,” I said quickly. “He moved away right after graduation.”

  Sadie leaned in. “They broke up right in the middle of prom, it was amazing.”

  “You’ve never told me any of this,” Ben said admiringly.

  Honestly, I hadn’t thought much about it until now. It hadn’t been very relevant to the post-werewolf life.

  “He won’t come to this,” I said, almost pleading with Sadie to agree with me. She shrugged expansively.

  “So, Sadie, you have any embarrassing pictures of Kitty I should know about?” Ben asked.

  I blanched. “We don’t really need to go looking—”

  She grinned. “They’ve got some old yearbooks at the front table if we want to go check.”

  The place filled up, and I recognized more and more people, and somehow we all looked completely different than we had, and we hadn’t changed a bit, both at the same time.

  “Hi, Kitty?” An upbeat woman with her dark hair in a ponytail, wearing a silky pantsuit, came up to me. “I don’t know if you remember me—”

  “Amanda, we worked on yearbook together,” I said and accepted a quick hug. We did the one-minute update of the last ten years of our lives, and I repeated the same exchange with a dozen other people. Wolf slowly settled; these weren’t strangers, we weren’t in danger, even though this definitely didn’t feel like our territory. It helped that Ben was looking out for us. He patiently let himself be introduced over and over. This is my husband, Ben. And what do you do, Ben? Lawyer, criminal defense. Yeah, that got a couple of stares. And a raised eyebrow when one of the old marching band crowd asked him for a business card.

  “You were on yearbook?” Ben asked, incredulous.

  “Yup.”

  “I had no idea. I’m learning all kinds of things about you. I suppose you were all over spirit week and went to all the football games?”

  “I was practically normal, back in the day.”

  “Before,” he said.

  “Yeah, before.”

  He squeezed my hand and kissed my cheek.

  “Sadie?” A tough-looking guy with an expensive-looking haircut and dark jacket came up to our table, and Sadie’s eyes widened. “Trevor?”

  Trevor Ames? He’d changed. He hadn’t just put on that filling-out weight that everyone else had, he’d put on muscle, and moved with a practiced efficiency. He was a fighter. Back in school he’d been one of our crowd, Sadie and Jesse and me and the rest of us who weren’t cool enough to be in the cool crowd but weren’t goth or jocks or nerds enough to be in any other clique so we just made our own. He’d joined the army right after graduation, and was another one I’d completely lost track of when I lost track of everybody.

  “He’s got a gun under that jacket,” Ben whispered in my ear.

  I looked sharply at him. “Silver bullets?”

  “Can’t tell.”

  He smiled wryly as Sadie insisted on hugging him. They separated, then he looked right at me, a challenging stare, and his smile thinned.

  “Kitty. You really are a werewolf.”

  “You saw the YouTube video, just like everyone else,” I said drily.

  He looked me up and down. “I could just tell.” He looked Ben up and down the same way, meaning he’d spotted both of us. We usually didn’t tell people about Ben being a werewolf too.

  You could spot a werewolf just by looking, if you knew what to look for. This meant Trevor knew what to look for. And how, exactly?

  “That a problem?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “No, it isn’t.”

  I wondered . . . what would make it a problem?

  “This is making me so happy,” Sadie said, beaming. “All of us together again—”

  “Do you know if Jesse’s coming?” Trevor asked me.

  “I don’t,” I said. “I kind of lost touch with everybody.”

  “I figured if anyone knew . . .” He trailed off and shrugged.

  Ben said brightly, “I really want to meet Jesse. I hope he shows up.”

  “He’s not going to show up,” I said.

  The guy who’d been class president went to a podium at the front of the room and tapped on the microphone, which was indeed on and screeched in disapproval. I winced—what had that poor mic ever done to him? He gave a speech about how happy he was, how great it was to see everyone, and how happy he was again, and so on. Then he announced that there we
re prizes. Prizes? Shouldn’t we all get a prize just for being here?

  Former class president went down the list. Who had traveled the farthest to be here? Someone had come from Amsterdam, and why would anyone leave Amsterdam to come back to freaking Aurora, Colorado? Who had the most kids—four. Well, someone had been busy. The prizes were gift certificates to local restaurants for the most part, which was kind of ironic for the guy who’d come from Amsterdam. A few more categories followed, and I started to tune them out.

  “And who has the most interesting job?” the guy asked. “The winner is . . . Kitty Norville!”

  What? Who had decided this? I had a suspicion that Trevor’s job was way more interesting than mine, which hardly seemed like a job most of the time. Maybe I should have brought my own mic and recorder and done an episode of the show from here. People were clapping. Everyone was looking at me. I had to get up. Probably a good thing I hadn’t had a second glass of wine yet.

  I managed to get to the podium, collected my gift certificate, and murmured a polite thank you into the microphone before fleeing. They might have expected more, considering my job involved talking into a microphone. But no one was paying me for this, and nobody stared at me in radio. One of the other members of the reunion committee cornered me before I could get back to my territory. I didn’t remember ever knowing her.

  “It really was no contest about the job thing,” she said. “You seem to meet so many interesting people on your show!”

  “I suppose I do.” She wasn’t wrong, I did meet some interesting people. And that was only what I could be public about. Just last winter I’d consulted for the army, trying to help werewolf veterans returning from Afghanistan. Maybe I deserved that fifty dollars for Mario’s Italian Bistro.

  I tried to escape. She kept talking at me. “So what’s it like, being a werewolf?”

  I honestly didn’t know how to answer that. It was strange. It was personal. It was too big. “It’s hard to explain.”

  Thoughtfully, she put a finger on her chin and her gaze went unfocused. “I suppose a condition like that, it must be a little like fibromyalgia,” she said.

  I stared. “It’s nothing like—yeah, sure, it’s a little like that.” Because that was easier than trying to explain. “If you’re really curious you could tune into the show sometime.”

  “Oh, of course, I’ll be sure to do that!”

  She was never going to listen to my show.

  Back at our table, Ben offered me a fresh glass of wine and I gratefully drank it down.

  “What’d you get, what’d you get?” Ben asked.

  “Food.”

  “Hm, the night almost pays for itself.” He cheered my wine with his glass of water.

  With the speeches over, the dancing began. The DJ started the first set with Smash Mouth’s “All Star.” So, it was going to be like that, was it?

  “So,” Ben asked. “Why’d you break up with this Jesse guy?”

  I narrowed my gaze. “Is this going to be a problem, you being jealous of a guy I dated ten years ago?”

  “Just curious.”

  “He was going away to Boston for college. He made noises about trying to stay together, but . . . it was just noise. We’d have been setting ourselves up to fail.”

  “It might have worked out.”

  “And if it had, we wouldn’t be here,” I said.

  If Jesse and I had managed to stick together and make it work . . . my life would be so completely different I had trouble fathoming it. For one thing, I wouldn’t be a werewolf. Which sounded good until I also realized it meant I wouldn’t have my radio show, and I wouldn’t have Ben.

  I tried to avoid regretting pretty much anything. Regret had no boundaries once it started.

  Trevor was standing a little apart from the table, watching the crowd, noting every face, turning to the doorways every time someone entered or left.

  “You look like a hunter on the prowl,” I said.

  He chuckled. “Yeah, I suppose you’d know all about that.”

  “What’s your story? You joined the army, and then . . .”

  He shrugged. “Here and there, this and that. It’s not that interesting.”

  “Not like me,” I said, waving the envelope I’d won for having the most interesting job. Trevor laughed.

  Next up on the set list: “Tubthumping.” That got a couple of people out on the dance floor for some half-hearted bouncing.

  Ben said preemptively, “I’m not dancing, that’s my line in the sand.”

  “I will not ask you to dance, I promise,” I said.

  Suddenly, his chin tipped up, his nose flaring. His brow furrowed, and a tension tightened his shoulders. An intrusive smell caught his attention. I took a breath to find the scent he’d spotted. A body moving into the ballroom. Chilled, corpse-like but not rotting, cold with death but still alive. A vampire.

  We both turned to the man who had just entered the ballroom. Svelte, wearing a dark shirt and gray slacks, casual and stylish, his hair slicked back. Everyone was eyeing him. He looked good. Of course he did, it was how vampires attracted prey. I gasped and slapped my hand over my mouth, astonished, because it finally clicked and I recognized him.

  Jesse Kramer, my high-school sweetheart, broke-up-at-prom-drama ex-boyfriend, was a vampire.

  Across the room, he met my gaze. And I let him, and I think Sarah McLachlan came up on the set list right that moment. For just a moment, he looked into my eyes with his vampiric, mesmerizing stare, and I was frozen—

  “Oh my God, he’s actually here,” Sadie exclaimed.

  I shut my eyes and shook my head to clear it. Had Jesse actually tried his vampiric hypnotism on me? The bastard . . .

  “There he is,” Trevor murmured and stalked toward him. Jesse spotted him. His eyes widened, and he turned and walked out.

  “Wait a minute—” I ran after Trevor.

  “What—” Sadie ran after me. I assumed Ben followed as well.

  In a foot race between a vampire and a mortal human, I’d put money on the vampire every time. Trevor must have known he couldn’t win a straight-up race, so in the ballroom lobby he veered to a side door while Jesse charged out the front. I kept after Jesse.

  “Jesse, get back here, you jerk!” I shouted.

  This was almost exactly what had happened at senior prom, which made me even more furious. You cannot escape the past, you can only repeat it. I pounded out the doors to the lighted nighttime parking lot and caught him just about to round the corner of the building. Wolf loved this. This was a chase. We had him in our sights. Next was the pounce, the grabbing him by the throat, the ripping—

  No. I just wanted to talk.

  “Jesse!” I yelled, and it must have come out partly like a growl, because he pulled up short. Slowly, he turned around.

  Jesse couldn’t have been a vampire for more than a couple of years—he looked to be in his mid-twenties. Now, if this had been the twentieth reunion, there’d have been questions about how well preserved he appeared.

  Still, I had a lot of questions.

  “Hey, Kitty.” He scuffed his foot, tried to smile.

  I had to take a moment to slow my breathing down so I didn’t, like, freak out and sprout fur. A reunion to remember.

  “What . . . what is this?” I gestured vaguely at him, his condition, unable to formulate a concise question to take it all in. “Although this is pretty much the first time I’ve met a vampire and known exactly how old he is.”

  “Good to see you, too,” he said, chuckling.

  That moment, Trevor came around from the other side of the building, aiming a handheld crossbow loaded with a wooden bolt. Without thinking, I sprang, getting between Trevor and his target. I ended up pushing my ex-boyfriend into the wall, covering him with my body. A wooden stake would barely scratch me.

  “Kitty, get out of the way!” Trevor ordered.

  That was the moment Ben jogged up with Sadie and saw me and Jesse locked together.
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  “This must be the famous Jesse,” Ben said evenly.

  Great. Just great. “Trevor, put that thing down!” I said. He didn’t. I bared my teeth. “Trevor!”

  He lowered the crossbow. Jesse relaxed, just a bit.

  “Put it on the ground, now!” I said. He did. I stepped away from the wall, straightened my dress. I was blushing. I resisted an urge to pour out apologies to Ben. This isn’t what it looks like . . . I trusted he knew that.

  “What the hell is going on?” Sadie demanded, her voice edging into panic.

  I looked back and forth between the two men, the vampire and the apparently professional vampire hunter. “What are the odds, really?” I muttered. “Trevor. Why are you trying to kill Jesse? I mean, is this something you make a habit of, killing vampires? And Jesse . . . why the hell are you a vampire!”

  “You’re a vampire?” Sadie said, taking a step back.

  “Who is that?” Jesse said, pointing at Ben. “I don’t remember you.”

  “We’ve never met. Hi, I’m Ben, I’m Kitty’s husband.” He stepped forward, offered his hand and, a slave to social conventions, Jesse shook it. Ben appeared to squeeze extra hard.

  “Husband?” Jesse said. “Oh. And you’re a werewolf too. I guess that makes sense.”

  Sadie stared at Ben. “You are?”

  “We don’t make a thing of it,” Ben said.

  I pointed at Jesse and Trevor. “I need you two to answer my questions.”

  “You first,” Trevor said.

  “No,” Jesse stated. So I glared back at Trevor.

  Trevor said, “It isn’t personal. Jesse crossed some bad people. I took the contract on the off chance he might be here. And I was right.”

  “You can’t murder people at the class reunion!” I yelled.

  “Is it murder if it isn’t human?” Trevor said, leering.

  “Oh my God, are we really going to have that conversation?”

  Jesse backed away. “Kitty, this is between the two of us, you should probably get out of here—”

  “You have silver bullets in that gun?” I asked Trevor.

  “Oh my God, you have a gun?” Sadie demanded.

  Ben was at Sadie’s side. “Sadie, you’d probably better get back inside—”