“No. And I’ll show myself out.” She did just that, yanking off the headset and practically launching herself from her seat to march to the door. She turned the wrong way into the hall and had to march back across the doorway in the other direction. I’d have laughed if I hadn’t been gritting my teeth.

“And that’s a special kind of crazy for you,” I said into the mike. “Once again, that was Tracy Anderson of Truth Against the Godless, which has been protesting the conference all week because they think Satan is in charge, or something. I dunno. Let’s take a break, and when we come back I’ll have another guest on for you.”

The recording light went out, and I leaned back in my chair, rubbing my hair.

Matt talked at me from the Skype call on the laptop. “Kitty, why do you love baiting these people so much? You know what they’re going to say, and you’re not going to change their minds.”

“Know thine enemy,” I said tiredly. “People have to know the crazies are out there.”

“Well, you sure know how to find them.”

“I keep thinking if I give them enough rope they’ll hang themselves right on the air and I can save my breath.”

“If a whole crowd of people like that are protesting out there, you must be having a hell of a time.”

He didn’t know the half of it, all the crap I wasn’t talking about on the air or anywhere else. “It’s been … interesting. But good. I have to think the good guys are winning.”

“Who’s defining good?”

Yeah, that was the problem, wasn’t it? In her own mind, Tracy Anderson thought she was freaking Joan of Arc. I thought she was a petty little woman with fears so gigantic she had to lash out at something to feel safe. Werewolves and vampires were pretty easy targets, all things considered. I almost understood it.

Didn’t make it right.

Chapter 13

I FINISHED MY interviews well after dark, and was cranky and in desperate need of some dinner. Another day gone, and the conference was already half over. Despite all my on-air proclamations to the contrary, I felt like I hadn’t accomplished anything. But I had to keep up a good front. We were supposed to be saving the world, weren’t we? Maybe I ought to set the bar a little lower. The conference was half over, and we hadn’t had any riots yet. There, that was something to be proud of.

Ben met me at the studio, and we walked back to the convention. Emma was going to meet us there with the car to take us back to the town house.

“Where’s Cormac?” I asked once we’d left the studio.

“Nick Parker invited him to dinner, and he said yes. Apparently Amelia wants to meet the family.”

“Huh. That’s so weird.”

“I don’t know. I think it’ll be good for him. He actually seems to be developing social skills.”

“You mean he can’t hide anymore,” I said.

“Yeah, that, too.”

“Hmm, to be a fly on that wall.” I wished them all well. After a hundred years in limbo, Amelia was getting a second chance. A happy ending of sorts.

“How’d your interviews go?” Ben asked.

I sighed. “Maybe Matt can fix it all in post-production.”

He chuckled. “That bad?”

I winced. “I can never tell. I got some great people to come in, recorded a couple of really great interviews. We ought to be able to get a good couple of hours of show out of it.”

“But?”

“It feels like spitting into the wind sometimes.”

“Here I was thinking this whole conference would never have happened without all your work.”

“Work, or mouthing off?”

“Yeah,” he said and put his arm over my shoulders.

“Thanks, I guess. But is it for the best? Would it have been better if this had all stayed underground?”

He waited a few steps before saying, “I don’t know.”

I tried to imagine a world in which I didn’t have my show—in which I had never announced to everyone that I was a werewolf—and had a tough time with it. I’d still be bottom of the pecking order of the pack at home, the old alphas would probably still be alive, and still beating me up. I’d have never met Alette, Emma, Dr. Shumacher, Tyler, Luis, Esperanza, or a dozen other of my friends. Including Cormac. And Ben would be dead, because I wouldn’t have been there for Cormac to bring him to, to save him after he’d been attacked.

I reached around and hugged him. “I wouldn’t want things any different.” He kissed the top of my head.

We continued on a few more steps, warm and comfortable, before Ben said, “I suppose this would be a bad time to ask you how your speech is coming along.”

I groaned. “I still haven’t written it. What am I going to do?”

“You can always wing it. That might be kind of fun.”

“For who?”

“I’d bring popcorn to that,” he said, and I fake-punched his shoulder.

We reached the hotel. A few protestors lingered, gathered behind the police barricades and holding their signs. Most of them seemed to have given up for the evening.

Vampire-centric programming would be going on now. I turned my nose to the air and watched the clumps of people that had gathered outside the front doors, smoking and talking while waiting for taxis. A few vampires stood here and there, indistinguishable from other conference attendees, unless you knew what to look for: their skin seemed to radiate cold, and they didn’t breathe, though some of them did smoke as an affectation. They didn’t have to worry about a pesky thing like lung cancer, after all.

Emma wasn’t on the sidewalk, so we went inside to look around. The lobby was still fully lit, busy. All the chairs and sofas were occupied with intense-looking people chatting. I studied the crowd, my nose working to take in scents.

I spotted Emma at the end of a darkened hallway, talking to an earnest, dark-haired man dressed in business-casual. He was a vampire—maybe he’d been at the shindig the other night, but I didn’t think so. Thinking Emma had business and I might be interrupting, I held back to wait for her to finish. They had to know Ben and I were there; I hadn’t been trying to mask my approach. But she’d crossed her arms, her stance was rigid, and the other vampire had moved close to her, looming. When Emma shook her head and looked away, I had to intervene. If I made a mistake I could be embarrassed about it later.