“There shouldn’t be—”
“Kitty!”
And there was Ozzie, coming around the same corner Matt had. Ozzie was an aging hippie type, thinning ponytail, and—geez, he’d grown a beard. Wild.
“Hi, Ozzie.”
He swept me up in a hug that lifted me off the floor. Even after everything that had happened, all the publicity, I didn’t feel like a werewolf here. This was the only place I was a DJ first and a lycanthrope second. It felt great.
“What are you doing here?” he said, a familiar scowl on his face. He was the kind of manager who got grouchy when things didn’t go as planned. “I thought you weren’t coming back. We turned your office into a storage closet.”
That answered that question.
“Change of plans. Sorry I didn’t call, it was kind of last minute.” Very last minute. Had it really only been two days since Dad called with the news about Mom? “Is it a problem? Can we do tomorrow’s show here?”
“Yeah, sure, of course. Matt?” Matt gave a shrug that Ozzie took to mean yes. “No problem. So what brought you back? Is everything okay?”
I made a decision. Here in this space, everything was okay. All problems stayed outside, and this was home.
“Everything’s fine,” I said and smiled.
I crept through the next week like I was moving through a minefield—careful where I stepped, waiting for an inevitable explosion. I settled into a kind of routine, albeit a stressful one. Mostly, the stress came from waiting for the phone call about Mom’s biopsy. The one that said whether she had cancer, and if so what kind and how bad, and where did things go from there. Ben and I went back to Pueblo briefly to collect a few belongings and the other car. The move to Denver was starting to feel permanent, even though I kept thinking if the test came back negative, I would flee town again.
I avoided downtown and the northwest foothills where the pack mostly ran. Anyplace where anyone supernatural hung out that I knew of, I avoided. I didn’t go out much. KNOB, Ben’s place, Mom and Dad’s in Aurora. That was it. I caught up on a lot of reading.
Ozzie didn’t clean out the supply closet formerly known as my office, but he gave me a new one, an equally cozy hole in the wall that had been waiting for a new marketing assistant that hadn’t been hired yet. The place rapidly devolved into a state of messiness that made it look like I’d been working there for months. Newspapers and magazines piled at a corner of the desk, piles of letters and e-mails—I had to deal with it directly now, instead of having someone else filter it—and a radio tuned to KNOB. It felt like I never left.
Right down to the phone ringing more than I wanted it to. And it still made me jump out of my skin. It was my cell this time.
“Hi, this is Kitty,” I managed to answer in a friendly enough tone.
“Well, it’s the famous werewolf Kitty Norville,” said a cynical female voice.
I knew that voice. I put a fake smile into my tone. “Detective Hardin. Hello.”
Detective Jessi Hardin had gotten caught up in a spate of werewolf killings that happened before I left Denver. She was unusual in that I had told her a werewolf was involved, and she’d believed me, before anyone else even acknowledged the existence of werewolves. She was ahead of the curve. I liked her, except she was always calling me and asking difficult questions. I was her go-to person for cases involving the supernatural.
“A question for you: Are you keeping up with things back in Denver?”
She didn’t know I was back. She’d called my cell; I could be anywhere. It felt like a tiny victory. Keeping my head down seemed to be working. Now if I could just keep from letting it slip that I was back in Denver. Then she’d start coming to see me in person, to show me bodies that had died gruesomely.
I remembered Rick’s newspaper article. “I heard about the nightclub vampire attacks. Have they got you looking into that?”
“Only on the side. The attackers were vampires, and we’ve got descriptions. We’re staking out the most likely clubs—in a manner of speaking. But I’ve had a different problem thrown at me.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve just been made the head of the Paranatural Unit of the Denver PD.” Her voice was wry, like this was a big, ironic joke. “I’m getting to write the law enforcement book on this stuff.”
“Great. Congratulations. I think. So tell me, if the cops have to lock up a werewolf on the night of a full moon, what do they do?”
“Paint the bars with silver.”
Damn, she was good. “And what about a life sentence for a vampire?”
“That one we haven’t quite worked out. I’m kind of in favor of giving the vampire a cell with a nice southern exposure.”
And this was the person writing the book on paranormal law enforcement? “Detective, not that this isn’t pleasant, but do you need something from me?”