Kitty Rocks the House

Epilogue



WASN’T IT nice, having a literal pack of supernaturally strong guys to call on to help us move?

We did the whole thing in a day—loaded the truck, hauled it across town, unloaded it into the house we’d finally settled on. Southwest of Denver, closer to the mountains, but still with reasonable access to the city. The place wasn’t huge, but it was on a full acre of land, adjoining county open space. Like Carl and Meg’s place had been, but not just like. A more modern house, with an open layout, big kitchen, and high ceilings. I walked in and breathed easier. I’d been living in dorm and apartment-sized spaces since college. This was going to be an adjustment.

The pack finished, and I fed them like a good alpha should, with mountains of barbeque, sodas, and beer. I could throw parties in a place like this. I could have the family over, even. Cheryl’s kids could play in the backyard.

After everyone left, Ben and I sat on the patio in the quiet backyard, regarding our view of the sunset over the mountains. Clouds streaked orange and pink against a fading blue sky. Scrub oak marked the boundaries of the property, and wild grasses replaced the lawn. The yard needed a little work after a winter of neglect. I looked forward to it. This was ours.

“We did it,” I said, sounding more than a little startled. “I can’t believe we did it. Look at us, house in the suburbs.”

“Well, we still have to clean and rent out the old place, get the mail transferred, do something about this yard, finish the basement—”

“Details,” I said. “It’s all details.” I leaned over and kissed his cheek, and he smiled.

My senses stretched out. I smelled deer, rabbits, coyotes, fox, and a dozen other creatures on the wind. A feast, right on our doorstep. In my gut, Wolf stretched. She wanted out, to run through this space and mark it as her own.

Not now, I told her. Time enough for that later. Now, we were human beings with a house and a bed and all was well.

Ben’s hand closed around mine. “You’re feeling it, too?”

Our Wolves spoke to each other, smelling the need on each other’s bodies, feeling the tension in the other’s muscles.

“Next full moon,” I said. “It’ll come soon enough.”

* * *

I WAS as nervous as I had been meeting my own in-laws. Well, in-law. Ben’s mother was sweet and welcoming, if a bit sad. Ben’s father was still in prison on a decade-old weapons conviction. Not only was I not sure I wanted to meet him, I wasn’t sure Ben wanted me to meet him. They’d had a falling out, when Ben refused to represent him in court. He hardly ever talked about him.

Family was such a fraught thing. However tangled and difficult it was, pack was family. Trey was bringing his fiancée, Sam, to New Moon to meet us.

“This is weird,” I muttered at Ben. “They’re not looking for some kind of approval, are they? Because that shouldn’t matter, if they love each other that’s it, right?”

He was smiling at me, amused by my discomfort as he often was. Like I was this social science experiment playing out in front of him. Thank goodness one of us was laid back. More likely, I had a feeling he just hid his nerves better than I did. I had to talk about everything.

“It’s a version of that thing that happens when two different groups of friends collide,” he said. “You just want everyone to get along. Imagine how nervous Trey probably is right now.”

Yeah, no doubt. Bringing the love of your life to meet the parents, or wolf parents, or whatever.

The front door opened, and I stood. There he was, and I swore I saw his tail wagging. He held the door and guided her in, fussing, hovering near her shoulder, almost trembling with enthusiasm as he gazed longingly at her. I wondered if she recognized the body language and understood how much devotion he was showing her.

She was cute, with short, dark hair, and a round face. Dressed for business in a skirt and blouse, pumps with low heels. No jewelry or makeup, just her own beaming smile. Sensible, friendly. She clasped his hand as Trey led her across the dining room. I decided I liked her.

They reached our table, Trey made introductions, and there was an awkward shuffle while everyone sat. We ordered drinks, and finally we had to get past the small talk to the issue at hand.

“It’s really good meeting you, Sam. Trey hasn’t talked about anything but you for a month.”

Blushing, she smiled at him. Yeah, I liked her.

She pulled a familiar-looking book from her purse. “I’m almost embarrassed to ask, I’m sure you get this all the time—would you sign this for me?”

I did, happy to. “Trey said it answered some of your questions?”

“I don’t know if it answered them … but it did make me feel better. Like maybe this isn’t so weird after all. I have to be honest, I’m not sure what I should think about you all. This pack thing,” Sam said, wincing. “Trey tried to explain it, that you were sort of like family, but not really, or maybe a little like AA, but not really—I’m a little confused.”

Werewolf pack as group therapy? There’s a thought. I considered for a moment and said, “Think of us as a really weird set of in-laws you might have to deal with every now and then.”

A spark of understanding lit her eyes. I asked about her job, their plans, and then let them talk. Under the table, I held Ben’s hand.

* * *

I CALLED my brother-in-law Mark and made him promise to watch the kids on Saturday night, so I could kidnap Cheryl. She complained—10 P.M. was way past her bedtime. Whatever. She only agreed to it when Mark told her she needed to get out and have some fun. She hadn’t smiled in months, it seemed like. Maybe I could help.

“Wear something punk,” I said when I called to tell her I was picking her up.

“Punk? I don’t think I have anything punk, not anymore. Not that’ll actually fit.”

“I’ve seen you wear that ratty Ramones T-shirt you’ve had since high school. That and your grossest pair of jeans.” Which I’d also seen. They were pretty gross, covered in paint streaks and missing both knees. She kept them specifically for housework.

“Since when do you get to tell me what’s punk?”

“I’ll see you in an hour,” I said in my most chipper voice.

She did a pretty good job with the punk thing, in exactly the jeans and Ramones T-shirt I’d told her to wear, with her hair in a ponytail and black eyeliner marking her eyes. Especially considering I didn’t think she’d been out to a club or concert in a dozen years. Well, we were going to change that.

I drove us downtown, wove my way into the nightlife traffic on Broadway, and sprang the cash for the convenient parking rather than trying to hunt for free parking ten blocks away.

“Why can’t you just tell me where you’re taking me?”

“A guy at KNOB told me about this club that does a pretty rocking eighties’ night. I wanted to check it out and thought you might like it.” Also, the only vampires likely to hang out there were any who were made in the eighties, and I didn’t think the Denver Family had any of those. Either way, they weren’t likely to give me trouble.

“This is going to be weird,” Cheryl said, not sounding at all convinced that it would also be fun.

“We don’t have to stay long,” I said. “I’ll put a couple of drinks in you, we’ll listen to the music, and you can not think about kids or getting a job or anything for an hour. Okay?”

She gave a decisive nod. “Okay.”

I followed Matt’s directions to find the club, in the basement of a much hipper bar. We entered through a door in the back. I paid our cover, we got our hands stamped, and I dragged Cheryl inside.

The DJ had just put on “99 Luftballons.” I couldn’t have timed our entrance better for pure emotional nostalgic hit than if I’d done it on a Hollywood soundstage.

“Oh my God,” Cheryl said, stopping at the edge of the room, a cramped dance floor ringed by white vinyl booths, with a well-stocked bar at the far end. Candy-colored lights broke the darkness. “It’s tenth grade all over again.”

Except we were old enough to drink without fake IDs, now. “Rum and Coke?” I asked.

“Yeah. Sure.” Her mouth was open, astonished, like she really had traveled through time back to high school. I guided her to an empty booth and made her sit.

For the most part, the music was a few years before my time. But it hit Cheryl’s adolescent sweet spot exactly. In hindsight, she might have indirectly set me on my path. We were far enough apart in age that she hadn’t wanted much to do with me when she hit her teen years, but I thought she was a goddess and tried to follow in her footsteps. Mostly by listening to her music, which led to me listening to my music, then to deejaying at the college radio station, then to KNOB. And, well, everything else.

Yeah, the music here was a little like time travel.

I got her a drink, me a plain Coke, and headed back to the booth.

Matt must have known I’d like the place, the minimalist design in monochrome, white-and-black checks painted on the walls, just a couple of lighting effects in play. The crowd here was a mix of a dozen different cliques that I could spot right off, and nobody hassled anybody. Goths in black vinyl, some bachelorette party in cocktail dresses and feather boas, young kids laughing at the theme, middle-aged former punks who’d been dancing to this music for twenty-five years. And plenty just like me and Cheryl, in jeans and T-shirts, looking for a good night out.

Everyone here but me was human, as far as I could tell. The smells were all normal—sweat, alcohol, drywall that needed repairs, a floor that needed to be cleaned. No fur under the skin, no chilled blood on the air, no weird magic. I hadn’t felt this mainstream in years.

I could watch people all night, leaning back in the booth and sipping my soda, Wolf resting contentedly for once. Half the people on the floor were dancing and texting at the same time, which made for a pretty neat trick. More songs followed, and it didn’t seem possible but each seemed more iconic and nostalgia-inducing than the one before it. Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Blondie …

Next to me, Cheryl wiped at her cheek and sniffed. More tears followed.

“Hey,” I said, leaning in.

Her face grimaced in a vain attempt at a smile. “This is making me maudlin.”

I hadn’t meant to make her cry. I just wanted to get her out of the house. “We can go—”

She kept talking. “You know I think it’s been twenty years since I heard this song? How did that happen? What have I been doing all this time?”

“Living?”

“It seems like I should have done … more.”

I put my arm across her shoulders and pulled her close. We sat like that through the next dozen songs, until around midnight, when the music starting turning harsher, more industrial and less New Wave, and Cheryl was ready to go home.

* * *

A COUPLE of weeks later, Cormac called and said he’d found something.

The first time he came over to the new house, he never really said whether he liked it. He looked around at the spacious living room, out the sliding glass door to the great outdoors, and said, “Awfully domestic of you.”

“I thought that was the point,” I said. Cormac had never been very domestic, and I couldn’t imagine him ever choosing a house in the suburbs. I felt a little bit of a pang at that thought, at the long lost might-have-beens. We’d traveled a long way since then.

“And next time you break your arm, we have a guest room for you,” Ben said.

“I hope I never break a damn thing again.”

By this visit, his arm was out of the cast and sling and in a neoprene brace. He still kept it close, favoring it. He was supposed to be going to physical therapy to get it back to its former strength and usefulness. I bugged him about it, asking if he was actually going, and he never gave me a straight answer. I hoped that Amelia was making him go. It was her arm, too, in a way.

Times like these, it was almost like they were married, which was an odd thought. I didn’t dwell on it.

We sat on stools around the island counter in the kitchen and ate pizza. That had been another consideration in choosing this house—wilderness was nice and all, but we had to be in range of pizza delivery. After eating and small talk, Cormac pulled a book from a jacket pocket—a thick hardcover with a fraying cloth binding. I couldn’t see a title.

“I’ve been reading up on that thing that attacked the church. What I have isn’t real satisfying,” he said. He looked down, watched his fingers tap the edges of the cover. “It’s a demon, but that’s a catchall term. Lots of supernatural beings get called demons if people don’t know what else to call them, or the name is untranslatable. This one didn’t do much to identify herself—she might even have been a human magician if it weren’t for the smoke, and the way she escaped—”

“Wait, she escaped? She’s not … gone?” I didn’t say dead, which might not have meant much, depending on her origin.

“She got pulled back to wherever she came from,” he said.

Ben asked, “So what is she?”

Cormac pursed his lips like he didn’t want to answer. Then he said, “Amelia thinks she was one of the fallen.”

“Fallen what?” I said.

“Fallen angels.”

We stared at him, absorbing that little tidbit.

“You’re serious,” Ben said finally.

Cormac opened the book to a page he’d marked and started reading, following the line with a finger. “‘Such place Eternal Justice had prepared for those rebellious, here their prison ordained in utter darkness…’”

The tinted goggles she wore, because even the nighttime glow was too bright for her. Disbelieving, I said, “That’s Paradise Lost. Milton.”

“It’s just an idea,” he said.

“She was from hell? Actual, real, capital H hell?”

He said, “You like to talk about how a lot of the stories are real, or at least have a seed of truth that inspired them. Maybe it was something like her and wherever she came from that started the stories. Not sure it really matters. Whoever summoned the demon to go after the vampire priest—some brand of ceremonial magician most likely—is probably the one holding Roman’s leash. That’s your Caesar.”

The rabbit hole got a little deeper. “And who is that?”

“I did some hunting around at the church. Didn’t find anything.”

“You hire an assassin so no one can trace you,” Ben said.

“Yeah,” Cormac said. “I’d have assumed it was Roman who’d summoned her, if she hadn’t said anything.”

“There’s really nothing we can do but keep on keeping on, is there?”

“You can be damn careful is what you can do,” Cormac said. “Amelia’ll put up protections around the house, your cars, the restaurant, the radio station.”

“I’ll let Angelo know—his places will need protecting, too.”

“Angelo,” Cormac said. “Then Rick really did leave?”

I looked down, studying abandoned pizza crusts left in the cardboard box. From the outside, nothing in Denver would look like it had changed. But the vampires I talked to, Angelo and his minions, were subdued. Wounded, almost. From their perspectives, they’d been abandoned. It didn’t matter if Rick had a mission. Me, I just missed my friend. I assumed he’d arrived in Italy all right, but I hadn’t heard from him yet. I wasn’t sure I would.

Taking the silence as his answer, Cormac shrugged, ultimately unconcerned. “See if this guy wants my help first. What are the odds?”

Angelo probably wouldn’t want Cormac’s help any more than Cormac wanted to give it. “So much for the great alliance,” I muttered and took a long drink of beer.

Cormac said, “I’m not sorry for what I did.”

“I’m not expecting you to be,” I said.

“Does anyone want another beer?” Ben said, getting up and heading to the fridge. A diplomatic interruption.

Cormac leaned back and picked at the seam on his wrist brace, turning inward as he often did—having a discussion with his resident spirit, most likely. Maybe she could talk some sense into him. I had a thought: if I asked her what he was really thinking, would she tell me? At least he didn’t walk out. He would have, not so long ago. Back when he thought he didn’t have anything to lose.

That may have been the most terrifying part of this war I insisted that we all fight: we had so much to lose. Would it be worth it? Would I ever know?

Ben returned from the fridge, and after popping bottlecaps and distributing the goods, held up his bottle. “Here’s to achieving victory by the seat of our pants.”

“And kicking ass,” Cormac said, clinking bottles.

I considered them. For now, the moment was quiet. I had to let the future take care of itself. Smiling, I raised my own bottle.

“Here’s to family.”