“They did it on principle? Is that what you’re saying?”

There’s a war coming, Anastasia had said. And maybe she was crazy, fanatical, paranoid—

Or maybe she wasn’t.

“I think that’s what I’m saying,” I said, smiling thinly.

He squeezed me again and didn’t seem any more likely to let go of me than I was to let go of him. Good.

“Cormac’s going to be proud of you,” he said. “When he hears about all this.”

“Yeah? Have you talked to him? Does he know about this?” I wanted to get his opinion. Could we have done something differently? Something that would have saved a few more of us—

Stop. Think about it later.

“You can tell him all about it when we go pick him up from Cañon City.”

I sat up to look Ben in the eye. Leaned on his chest, clutching his shirt. He was smiling. Grinning, even. I said, “He’s getting out? He got parole?”

“He got parole.”

Epilogue

A couple of weeks passed.

I sat in the studio, resting my head on my hand, staring at the mike, trying to concentrate. This had been going on for a couple of minutes now.

“… then I tried leaving milk in a saucer, because one of the books I read said that works to calm brownies. But every morning the milk is gone and the house is a mess again. So then I wondered, what kind of milk? I used two percent, but maybe I should be using whole milk? Or half-and-half? But that’s closer to cream, and the book specifically said milk. And it’s pasteurized—is that going to make a difference? None of the books say anything about whether pasteurized milk works. My sister thinks I should have a priest in to exorcise the place, but that seems a little, oh, I don’t know, violent, and if I could make the brownies feel more at home they might actually help out a little, like in the stories, even though I’m not a shoemaker or anything like that…”

I tapped my finger on the arm of my chair as I swiveled back and forth in a quarter-circle, like a kid in detention. I’d been staring at my microphone so long it was blurring. My headphones itched. And this woman just kept talking. It was hypnotic.

My caller had a very serious problem, surely. It just didn’t seem like it to me at the moment. Especially not after the last couple of weeks.

Finally I interrupted, like I should have done a long time ago. “Margaret, are you sure it’s brownies that are wrecking your house every night? Maybe the saucers of milk aren’t working because it’s not brownies.”

“Well, what else could it be? I swear, I go to sleep at night, don’t hear a thing, and when I wake up there are dishes knocked down and broken, my Beanie Baby collection is scattered everywhere, the pillows are shredded, and what else could it be?”

Lightbulb moment. “Do you have cats?”

“Yes. Six.”

It wasn’t brownies. It was crazy-cat-lady syndrome. I needed a separate hotline for callers like this. “Margaret, have you considered that maybe your cats are a bit rambunctious and may be the ones wrecking your house?”

“Well, of course I have,” she said, sounding indignant. Not that I could blame her. “But if it were the cats, wouldn’t I hear something?”

“I don’t know. Are you a sound sleeper?”

“Can anyone possibly be that sound a sleeper? Even medicated?”

“Wait a minute,” I said, losing patience. “You have six cats and you take sleeping pills at night?”

“Well… yes…”

“Okay. That’s just asking for it. I think you need to call a different show.”

“But—”

I hung up on her, sorry I had only a button to slam and not a whole handset, which would have been more satisfying. Not that I wanted to lose my temper. Not that I was feeling violent.

I couldn’t take another call right now. I couldn’t stand another call. I couldn’t deal with another not-problem. It was all I could do not to lean into the mike and yell, “Get a life.”

But I’d get over it.

“Sorry, people. My tolerance for bull seems to have gone way down lately. I hope you’ll understand and forgive me, but I think for tonight I’ve just about had it for calls. I’d like each and every one of you out there to consider your problems for a moment and consider that maybe they’re not as epic as you think they are. The solution may be staring you in the face. Or it may be you’ve let a mere annoyance take over your life until it’s become a problem. And while you’re considering your problems and grasping for solutions, you should also take a moment to find that one good thing that makes getting through the tough times worthwhile. Those of us who spend our nights awake and watchful need those reminders, that sunrises are beautiful and worth waiting for.”

God, I was going to start crying again if I kept this up. No crying. I was just having a bad night. Fortunately, Matt in the sound booth tapped his watch, telling me time was up. I took a breath, reset my mental state, and managed to sound cheerful when I gave my usual wrap-up.

“This is Kitty Norville, voice of the night. Stay safe out there, people.” The on-air sign dimmed, and I sat back, exhausted.

The mass murder I’d managed to escape had been all over the news. I’d spent the last show talking about it, fielding questions, condemning the kinds of people who perpetrated these crimes, but mostly talking about my friends who’d died. Begging the world, or whatever part of it listened to the show, not to let anything like this happen again. Be kind to each other.

The same message I tried to deliver every week: be kind. Not that it was helping.

“Kitty?” Matt said.

“I’m fine,” I said flatly, before he could ask the question.

He hesitated, then said, “Okay.” But he didn’t sound convinced.

And I wanted people to stop fussing over me.

The police, working with the FBI, had pieced together most of the story, and it wasn’t pretty.

Joey Provost really was a TV producer and really had been working for SuperByte Entertainment for several years. But he also had ties to a couple of whacked-out right-wing “clubs” that promoted various shades of fascism and gun mania, and the members all had impressive weapons collections stashed at home. Through those leads, he’d met Cabe and Valenti. Cabe was the hunter among them, with a fascination for the supernatural. He’d probably done most of the nitty-gritty planning and designed most of the traps. The three men had met, hit it off, and decided they didn’t like the way entertainment and popular culture were going. They didn’t like that monsters and the occult were being legitimized and glamorized. They wanted to strike back, so they cooked up a plan: trap the worst offenders of this movement, wipe them out, and distribute a film of the accomplishment. They were declaring their own little war. Provost pitched the front show to SuperByte, who then inadvertently funded the enterprise. The company itself was absolved of wrongdoing, except maybe for the mistake of trusting Provost in the first place. The producer hired Valenti and Cabe. During filming, they chose their moment, shut down production, and slaughtered the witnesses. Then they launched their own show. The clips they’d filmed of us talking about each other and how much we missed our families were meant to be our own obituaries.