“He wants you to call him. Something about witches—he didn’t say more than that. You know how cops are. Especially norm cops.” She held up a piece of popcorn, then stuck out her tongue and placed the piece on the tip. She curled her tongue around the kernel and drew it into her mouth. “Mmm.” Trust Juliet to turn eating popcorn into soft-core porn.
“Did you write down his message?”
Juliet waved vaguely in the direction of the phone. She crunched another piece of popcorn, then licked her fingers, one by one. “He likes you, you know.”
“I’m helping him with an investigation.”
“Hah, that’s amusing. I’m sure he’d enjoy investigating you.” She threw a piece of popcorn into the air and caught it between her teeth, then let it fall into her mouth.
“Don’t be ridiculous. And look, this is how you’re supposed to eat popcorn.” I grabbed a handful and shoved it into my mouth. I could feel my cheeks bulge like a chipmunk’s. When I swallowed, my stomach felt a little more normal. “Not everything has to be a sex act, you know.”
“Who’s acting?” Juliet’s leer showed her fangs in their full glory. “Stop changing the subject. That delicious-looking cop wants to get to know you better. Are you going to do anything about it?”
“I’m a witness in one of his cases—cops can’t fool around with their witnesses, you know. Plus, I’m already dating someone.” Although I wondered whether that would still be true after Kane found out that I was on assignment for Lucado.
“Dating? When’s the last time you and Kane had an actual date? You both work too hard. You see each other, what, maybe once every ten days? That’s three whole times a month.”
More like twice a month, unless he had to rescue me from the Goon Squad, but I wasn’t going to admit that. “Our work is important to us. That’s why we’re good together. Neither of us makes demands on the other.”
“You call that being goodtogether?”
“Well, what do you call it?”
She shook her head. “When that oh-so-yummy cop looks at you, the whole room starts buzzing. You shouldn’t let that kind of attraction go to waste.”
“You’re telling me I should cheat on Kane?”
“You’re the one who insists that you two aren’t ‘going steady.’ ” Her voice took on a sarcastic tone as her bloodred nails wiggled quotation marks in the air.
“Yeah, but that’s only because we’re both too busy to date anyone else.”
Juliet sighed. “You’re impossible. If I had a good-looking norm panting over me like that . . .” She paused, licking her lips. “Well, I do, of course. Several of them. All I’m saying is that perhaps you should go for a little pleasure once in a while, instead of work and . . . and whatever it is you and Kane do.”
The Creature Comforts story was coming on again. I watched myself staring down the hungry vampires outside the bar. How many times could they show the damn thing? Wanting to think about something—anything—else, I asked, “Were there any other phone calls?”
“Only about a million. You’re in demand, Vicky. Every news station in town is begging for an interview. And that’s just the beginning. Have you ever wanted to be on Oprah?”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
She shook her head. “The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. I finally unplugged it and let voice mail take over. I changed the message, though.” Juliet loved changing the message for our voice mail, just like she loved turning on the TV. She changed it about three times a week. Now, she licked her lips and lowered her voice to a deep, husky tone that would’ve been perfect for phone sex. “Hello. You’ve reached the voice mail of Vicky and Juliet. Our phone’s been a little busy lately, but we will get back to you. Maybe. If you’re a human calling to offer yourself to Juliet for her pleasure, please call her private number. If you don’t have that number, worse luck for you. If you’d like to schedule an interview with Vicky, please contact the office of her lawyer, Alexander Kane. Otherwise, leave us a message at the beep.”
“You told reporters to call Kane’s office? Please tell me you didn’t.”
“Why not? He’d want to handle it.”
“Yeah, but he’ll expect me to actually talk to them. I’m not going to do that.”
“Not even Oprah?”
I sighed. “Kane’s going to be impossible about this.”
“Speak of the devil.” Juliet was staring at the TV.
I shifted my gaze back to the screen. It showed the same studio where the BU professor had blathered on, but the set now had two chairs, occupied by Kane and an older, well-dressed man. In his black suit and red tie, Kane looked spiffy but tired. He must’ve been up all night trying to run damage control. “Turn up the volume, will you?” I said.
Juliet pointed the remote and hit a button.
The announcer was finishing up the introductions. Besides Kane, the other guest was Seth Baldwin, the anti-PA candidate for governor. Baldwin must’ve been over fifty, but he was a young-looking fifty. Even in his tailored, pin-striped suit, the man boasted an athletic build. His hair was full and a rich brown, and his strong jaw made him look like he could’ve worn the white hat in an old Western. This was the candidate Kane would do almost anything to stop, and there they sat, side by side in the studio. This should be interesting. I sat down and grabbed a handful of popcorn.
The tape from inside the bar rolled yet again, zooming in as Kane yanked at the female zombie’s ankles. Then the scene switched back to the studio, showing Kane and Baldwin, two handsome professionals who might’ve had lunch together on Beacon Hill—if they could make it through a lunch without killing each other. Then the screen showed Brenda Salamanca, the interviewer. A pert blonde in a sunny yellow suit, Brenda sat in the Washington bureau, interviewing them remotely. Better to keep your distance from those werewolves, I guess. And politicians could be scary, too.
Even though the tape had played about a zillion times in the ten minutes I’d been home, Brenda shook her head, artfully furrowing her brow, as though she’d never seen it before. “Shocking,” she said, lip gloss glistening on her frowning mouth. Then she flipped her expression over to a bright smile and said, “Mr. Kane. As we saw on the tape, you were there last night. Why don’t you tell us your view of what happened?”
The camera zoomed in on Kane’s face. A label appeared at the bottom of the screen: Alexander Kane: attorney and werewolf. Kane looked straight into the camera. His expression was serious yet appealing. He resembled a therapist or a favorite professor, someone who knew how to listen and cared about what you had to say. He told me once he’d spent years perfecting that look for the courtroom.
“Thank you, Brenda. Yes, I will. Last night I took two previously deceased humans—”
“You mean zombies,” Baldwin cut in. The camera pulled back to show them both.
“No, Mr. Baldwin, I mean what I said: previously deceased humans. They’re as human as you are. The only difference is that you had the good fortune to be out of town when the plague struck.”
“Woo-hoo! Score one for Kane!” Juliet licked her finger and made an imaginary mark in the air.
“One thing that I want to emphasize,” Kane continued as the camera centered on his face again, “is that most of what happened last night does not appear on that tape. A number of events combined to create a complex situation.” From there, he gave his account of what had happened. He was a master at giving his story just the right spin. Nothing he said was untrue, but the way he told it, the fight wasn’t really anyone’s fault. Instead pointing out that a human had started the whole thing, he suggested that college hijinks had, unfortunately, gotten out of hand—many of us could remember what it was like to have a few too many at that age. Fights break out every day. It was just one of those things.
I thought he did a good job. He managed to put the incident into a context that most humans could understand, without placing any blame. As a PA, the last thing he wanted to do was make it look like he was blaming anyone. It made the norms nuts when the monsters tried to come across as victims of society. For some reason, most people didn’t buy the idea that a “victim” could tear your throat out while bouncing bullets off its hide.
Back in the Washington bureau, Brenda also seemed impressed. “Thank you, Mr. Kane, for reminding us that there’s often more to the news than meets the eye.” She flicked on her high-beam smile again. “Our next guest is Seth Baldwin, who’s challenging current Massachusetts governor Paul Sugden in next week’s election. It’s a tight race. Mr. Baldwin. You’ve made no secret of the fact that you’d like to make Paranormal Americans illegal in Massachusetts. How do last night’s events in Boston’s so-called New Combat Zone affect your position?”
Baldwin’s face filled the screen. Close-up, his face looked craggier, more weathered, than it did from a distance. As he nodded, it was clear that he’d also practiced his serious-but-caring look.
“He’s hot,” Juliet said.
“You think everybody’s hot.”
She arched an eyebrow at me. “And your point is?”
I shushed her so I could hear what Baldwin had to say.
“I believe that there’s a place for monsters in the world, but Massachusetts is not that place. Mr. Kane says the tape doesn’t show us everything. But what it does show is clear, irrefutable evidence that humans and monsters cannot mix.” I waited for Kane to jump in and correct Baldwin’s monsters to Paranormal Americans, but he remained silent, listening. He wasn’t going to let Baldwin blow off his terminology the way he’d blown off zombies earlier. Smart.
“Monsters”—Baldwin shot Kane a look—“whether we’re talking about zombies, vampires, or, yes, even werewolves like Mr. Kane here, represent a danger to human beings. What the world saw on that tape was no ordinary bar fight.” Obligingly, CNN played the tape again, Baldwin’s voice intoning over it like the narrator in a movie. “Yes, humans do fight each other. I’m not saying that fighting is right, but it’s part of human nature. Notice I said humannature. But I think I speak not only for myself, but for every human being who ever lived, when I say that never, ever have I seen a simple bar fight in which one human being attempted to eat another.”
