“We have an intern whose entire job is filing the hate mail we get at the center.”
Oh. I didn’t know that. “That … do you find that depressing? This antiscience attitude? This outright hatred?”
“I think it highlights the need for education. I don’t think people are antiscience—they’re scared. They know now that vampires and werewolves exist, but they don’t know what to do about it, so it’s easy for them to believe the worst. I know you’ve done your best to get as much information out there as you can, Kitty. But, well, not
to throw any kind of shadow on what you’ve done, you know very well that sometimes backfires. Any hint of conspiracy, people get more scared, not less. And vampires and conspiracy are almost synonymous.”
She wasn’t the first person to call me on that. Last year I’d stood up before an international conference and declared the existence of Dux Bellorum and the Long Game, a cabal of vampires with a nefarious mission of world-domination. Maybe that hadn’t been the most responsible thing to do. But I’d been at a loss—Dux Bellorum was real and I didn’t know how else to stop him. Speaking truth into a microphone was the only thing I knew how to do.
Dux Bellorum—Roman—was a vampire, a soldier of the Roman Empire in the first century who had become a vampire and decided to spend his immortality learning arcane lore and building an empire of his own. He’d traveled the world in search of magic and followers, whom he marked with an enchanted coin. I had a handful of the coins, collected from his minions and former minions, scratched and marred and flattened to destroy the magic in them. He had dozens of allies—the Master and Mistress vampires of cities around the world—and through them he exerted control over the entire supernatural world. Maybe even the mortal world as well, and I had begun to suspect that Roman didn’t just want to take over the world—he wanted to destroy it. Or at least damage it to such an extent that taking it over would be made easier. All the signs over the last few months indicated that Roman was on the move, that his endgame was in play.
I had evidence that he’d caused Vesuvius to erupt and destroy Pompeii, using a spell called the Manus Herculei. I believed he was preparing to use that spell again. I kept a map in my office with every volcano that had been active in the last thousand years marked with red thumbtacks. There were volcanoes all over the world. We’d never be able to stop him.
I’d been trying to track down Roman for years, ever since he came to Denver and decided I was an obstacle. There was a conspiracy, but it wasn’t about good and evil and the supernatural; it was about power and egos. The usual stuff. The supernatural didn’t fundamentally change people; it just gave them power.
I’d blown all this up in public because I figured the more people were watching for him, who knew about him, the less likely he’d be able to pull off anything terrible. Turned out, a lot of people just stopped taking me seriously. I was just like the crackpots calling into my show.
“I blame Dracula,” I said, deflecting the issue entirely, because I had a show to run. “All right, let’s take another call. Hello, you’re on the air.”
An authoritative male voice came on the line and lectured. “I think you’re ignoring the real controversy here, which is how the World Health Organization is planning to start incarcerating werewolves in concentration camps to serve as food for vampires, to spare the human population…”
And that was The Midnight Hour.
* * *
MY PHONE rang as I left the KNOB studios. Normally, after-midnight calls would be a cause for worry, except the caller ID said it was Cormac. He usually called at strange hours, so I wouldn’t know if this was an emergency until I actually talked to him.
“Hey!” I said brightly, hopped up on postshow adrenaline.
“You going to New Moon tonight?” he said, without any extraneous social preamble. Not his style.
Many times after the show, I’d head to New Moon, the bar and restaurant my husband, Ben, and I owned, to burn off said adrenaline with a drink and company. Sometimes Cormac, Ben’s cousin and our friend, joined us. He rarely gave warning ahead of time.
“Yeah,” I said. “Ben should already be there.”
“I’ll meet you there,” he said.
“Why? What—” He clicked off without explanation.
Well, that was Cormac, man of mystery. He’d found something, obviously. And now my stomach was churning, wondering what it was and what can of worms it would open.
Chapter 2
WORRY ABOUT what trouble Cormac had gotten into squashed my postshow buzz, so I walked into New Moon distracted and frowning. After midnight on a Friday the place was busy, but past peak crowd. Seeing lots of people here ordering lots of food and drink usually gave me a warm fuzzy feeling—a busy restaurant was a successful restaurant. Tonight, I cut through the crowd without noticing, looking for a familiar face.
First up was Shaun, the restaurant’s longtime manager and part of our werewolf pack. Family, practically. Early thirties, confident and sensible, he had close-cropped black hair, brown skin, a shining gaze, and a smile that lit up when he saw me. People he didn’t like never saw that smile; I was glad he was on my side.
“Wild show tonight, Kitty.”
“I don’t know how you listen to it with all this racket going on.”
“You kidding? It’s one of our Friday night attractions. The Midnight Hour drinking game.”
How did I not know about this? And why was I not surprised? This was what I got for never being at New Moon during my own show. “A drinking game? How long has that been going on?”
He shrugged. “Maybe a couple months.”
“So what, it’s like someone calls in asking how to get bit by a werewolf, take a drink. I hang up on a religious rant, take a drink.”