“I’m going to the next call now. Keep your chin up and take it one day at a time.”
“Okay, Kitty. Thanks.”
Please, please, please let the next call be an easy one. I hit the phone line.
“You’re on the air.”
“Hi, Kitty. So, I’ve been a lycanthrope for about six years now, and I think I’ve adjusted pretty well. I get along with my pack and all.”
“Good, good.”
“But I don’t know if I can talk to them about this. See, I’ve got this rash—”
I had an office. Not a big office. More like a closet with a desk. But I had my own telephone. I had business cards. Kitty Norville, The Midnight Hour, KNOB. There was a time just a few months ago when I’d assumed I would never have a real job. Now I did. Business cards. Who’d have guessed?
The show aired once a week, but I worked almost every day. Afternoons and evenings, mostly, in keeping with the nocturnal schedule I’d adopted. I spent an unbelievable amount of time dealing with organizational crap: setting up guest interviews, running damage control, doing research. I didn’t mind. It made me feel like a real journalist, like my NPR heroes. I even got calls from the media. The show was fringe, it was wacky, and it was starting to attract attention from people who monitored pop-culture weirdness. A lot of people thought it was a gimmick appealing to the goth crowd. I had developed a set of canned answers for just about every question.
I got asked a lot if I was a vampire/lycanthrope/
witch/whatever; from the skeptics the question was if I thought I was a vampire/lycanthrope/witch/whatever. I always said I was human. Not a lie, exactly. What else could I say?
I liked the research. I had a clipping service that delivered articles from all walks of media about anything pertaining to vampires, lycanthropes, magic, witchcraft, ghosts, psychic research, crop circles, telepathy, divining, lost cities—anything. Lots of grist for the mill.
A producer from Uncharted World called to see if I wanted to be on the show. I said no. I wasn’t ready for television. I was never going to be ready for television. No need to expose myself any more than necessary.
I got fan mail. Well, some of it was fan mail. Some of it was more along the lines of “Die, you satanic bitch from hell.” I had a folder that I kept those in and gave to the police every week. If I ever got assassinated, they’d have a nice, juicy suspect list. Right.
Werewolves really are immune to regular bullets. I’ve seen it.
Six months. I’d done the show once a week for six months. Twenty-four episodes. I was broadcast on sixty-two stations, nationwide. Small potatoes in the world of syndicated talk radio. But I thought it was huge. I thought I would have gotten tired of it by now. But I always seemed to have more to talk about.
One evening, seven or eight o’clock, I was in my office—my office!—reading the local newspaper. The downtown mauling death of a prostitute made it to page three. I hadn’t gotten past the first paragraph when my phone—my phone!—rang.
“Hello, this is Kitty.”
“You’re Kitty Norville?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to talk to you.”
“Who is this?”
He hesitated a beat before continuing. “These people who call you—the ones who say they’re psychic, or vampires and werewolves—do you believe them? Do you believe it’s real?”
I suddenly felt like I was doing the show, on the phone, confronting the bizarreness that was my life head-on. But it was just me and the guy on the phone. He sounded . . . ordinary.
When I did the show, I had to draw people out. I had to answer them in a way that made them comfortable enough to keep talking. I wanted to draw this guy out.
“Yes, I do.”
“Do they scare you?”
My brow puckered. I couldn’t guess where this was going. “No. They’re people. Vampirism, the rest of it—they’re diseases, not a mark of evil. It’s unfortunate that some people use them as a license to be evil. But you can’t condemn all of them because of that.”
“That’s an unusually rational attitude, Ms. Norville.” The voice took on an edge. Authoritative. Decisive, like he knew where he stood now.
“Who are you?”