Kitty Takes a Holiday

So I stripped naked, turned Wolf, and ran in the woods to avoid the question. As hard as I'd struggled to hold on to my humanity, that was easier.

The closest town of any size to my cabin was Walsenburg, some thirty miles away, and that wasn't saying a whole lot. The place had pretty much stopped growing in the sixties. Main street was the state highway ru

I spotted his car already parked on the street and pulled in behind it. Ben had staked out a booth close to the door. He was already eating, a hamburger and plate of fries. Not much on ceremony was Ben.

"Hi." I slipped into the seat across from him.

He reached for something next to him, then dropped it on the Formica table in front of me: a stack of mail addressed to me, delivered to his care. I tried to route as much of my communication through him as I could. I liked having a filter. Part of the Walden thing. The stack included a few magazines, nondescript envelopes, credit card applications. I started sorting through it.

"I'm fine, thanks, how are you?" I said wryly.

Ben was in his early thirties, rough around the edges. He seemed perpetually a day behind on his shaving, and his light brown hair was rumpled. He wore a gray suit jacket, but his shirt collar was open, the tie nowhere to be seen.

I could tell he was gritting his teeth behind his smile.

"Just because I drove all the way out here for you, don't ask me to be pleasant about it."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

I ordered a soda and hamburger from the waitress, while Ben set his briefcase on the table and pulled out packets of paper. He needed my signature in approxi­mately a million different places. On the plus side, the documents meant I was the beneficiary of several gen­erous out-of-court settlements relating to the fiasco my trip to Washington, D.C., last fall had turned into. Who knew getting kidnapped and paraded on live TV could be so lucrative? I also got to sign depositions in a couple of criminal cases. That felt good .

"You're getting twenty percent," I said. "You ought to be glowing."

"I'm still trying to decide if representing the world's first werewolf celebrity is worth it. You get the strangest phone calls, you know that?"

"Why do you think I give people your number and not mine?"

He collected the packets from me, double-checked them, stacked them together, and put them back in his briefcase. "You're lucky I'm such a nice guy."

"My hero." I rested my chin on my hands and batted my eyelashes at him. His snort of laughter told me how seriously he took me. That only made me grin wider.

"One other thing," he said, still shuffling pages in his briefcase, avoiding looking at me. "Your editor called. Wants to know how the book is going."

Technically, I had a contract. Technically, I had a dead­line. I shouldn't have had to worry about that sort of thing when I was trying to prove my self-reliance by living sim­ply and getting back to nature.

"Going, going, gone," I muttered.

He folded his hands in front of him. "Is it half done? A quarter done?"

I turned my gaze to a spot on the far wall and kept my mouth shut.

"Tell me it's at least started."

I heaved a sigh. "I'm thinking about it, honest I am."

"You know, it's perfectly reasonable for someone in your position to hire a ghostwriter. Or at least find a co-author. People do it all the time."

"No. I majored in English. I ought to be able to string a few sentences together."

"Kitty—"

I closed my eyes and made a "talk to the hand" gesture. He wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know.

"I'll work on it. I want to work on it. I'll put something together to show them to make them happy."

He pressed his lips together in an expression that wasn't quite a smile. "Okay."

I straightened and pretended like we hadn't just been talking about the book I wasn't writing. "Have you done anything about the sleazebag?"

He looked up from his food and glared. "There's no basis for a lawsuit. No copyright infringement, no trade­mark infringement, nothing."

"Come on, she stole my show!"

The sleazebag. She called herself "Ariel, Priestess of the Night," and starting about three months ago she hosted a radio talk show about the supernatural. Just like me. Well, just like I used to.

"She stole the idea," Ben said calmly. "That's it. It hap­pens all the time. You know when one network has a hit medical drama, and the next season every other network rolls out a medical drama because they think that's what everyone wants? You can't sue for that sort of thing. It was going to happen sooner or later."

"But she's awful. Her show, it's a load of sensationalist garbage!"

"So do it better," he said. "Go back on the air. Beat her in the ratings. It's the only thing you can do."

"I can't. I need some time off." I slumped against the back of the booth.

He idly stirred the ketchup on his plate with a french fry. "From this end it looks like you're quitting."

I looked away. I'd been comparing myself to Thoreau because he made ru

He continued. "The longer you stay away, the more it looks like the people in D.C. who tried to bring you down won."

"You're right," I said, my voice soft. "I know you're right. I just can't think of anything to say."

"Then what makes you think you can write a book?"

This was too much of Ben being right for one day. I didn't answer, and he didn't push the subject.

He let me pay the bill. Together, we headed out to the street.

"Are you going straight back to Denver?" I asked.

"No. I'm going to Farmington to meet Cormac. He wants help with a job."

A job. With Cormac, that meant something nasty. He hunted werewolves—only ones who caused trouble, he'd assured me—and bagged a few vampires on the side. Just because he could.

Farmington, New Mexico, was another two hundred fifty miles west and south of here. "You'll only come as far as Walsenburg for me, but you'll go to Farmington for Cormac?"

"Cormac's family," he said.

I still didn't have that whole story, and I often asked myself how I'd gotten wrapped up with these two. I met Ben when Cormac referred him to me. And what was I doing taking advice about lawyers from a werewolf hunter? I couldn't complain; they'd both gotten me out of trouble on more than one occasion. Ben didn't seem to have any moral qualms about having both a werewolf and a werewolf hunter as clients. But then, were lawyers capable of having moral qualms?

"Be careful," I said.

"No worries," he said with a smile. "I just drive the car and bail him out of jail. He's the one who likes to live dangerously."

He opened the door of his dark blue sedan, threw his briefcase onto the front passenger seat, and climbed in. Waving, he pulled away from the curb and steered back onto the highway.

On the way back to my cabin, I stopped in the even smaller town of Clay, Population 320, Elevation 7400 feet. It boasted a gas station with an attached convenience store, a bed and breakfast, a backwoods outfitter, a hundred-year-old stone church—and that was it. The convenience store, the "Clay Country Store," sold the best home-baked choc­olate chip cookies on this side of the Continental Divide. I couldn't resist their lure.