Free Kitty Raises Hell by Carrie Vaughn

and we all waited to see what would happen next.
    After a tense moment, the talking started.
    “You recorded it?” Gary said.
    Jules flipped a couple of switches, peering at the equipment through his glasses. “Yeah, of course.”
    “There’s nothing on the cameras,” Tina said, checking all the monitors. “I was looking right at the staircase, there was nothing.”
    “So nothing fell. Nothing’s out of place.” Another manic search of all the screens.
    I asked Tina, “What did you hear?”
    “What do you mean, what did I hear?” She pointed at the speaker. “That thudding. Like something falling over on the stairs.
     You all heard it.”
    “No, I mean before you said anything. What did you hear that made you ask if we’d heard it? Because I know I have better hearing
     than anyone here, and I didn’t hear anything before you spoke.”
    Now everyone was looking at her.
    “Tina has good hearing,” Gary said after a moment.
    “Not as good as mine,” I said, my smile a bit toothy. A bit lupine. “She’s not a werewolf.”
    Gary said, “Tina? Did you actually hear it before it happened?”
    The ratings hound in me was jumping up and down. Had I scooped a story here? Was I about to expose one of the
Paradox PI
crew as actually being paranormal herself? Clairvoyant or something? How cool would that be? I still needed to ask her about
     what she saw when she looked at me, at Ben.
    But Tina was stricken, looking back and forth between her colleagues and shrinking as far as she could against the wall of
     the van.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I saw something on the monitors. Whatever made the noise, I must have seen it. We’ll go over
     the footage later. It’ll be there.”
    But we’d all been looking at the monitors. Nobody saw anything.
    “Can we talk about this later?” she said, almost shrill.
    Another thumping came over the speakers, drawing us back to the task at hand. It sounded like the first noise, a rapid, arrhythmic
     series of hollow thumps, like something falling, or like a herd of children running downstairs.
    “Shit,” Jules murmured. The hairs on the back of my head stood up. I quelled an instinct to run.
    “Do random, unidentifiable noises like this happen often?” I whispered to Gary.
    Slowly, he shook his head. “It never happens like this.”
    It came louder, and closer, if that was possible, rattling the speakers. Still, nothing appeared on the monitors. No visible
     source in the house was producing the noises. In defiance of the laws of physics, these noises seemed to come from nowhere.
    The thudding grew louder again, until the van started vibrating, like now the children were running on our roof. I could feel
     it in my bones.
    “Is it an earthquake?” Jules said. “Maybe it’s not the house at all.”
    “Does Colorado get earthquakes?” Gary asked. His voice was taut, anxious.
    “Sort of,” I said. “Little tiny ones. You can’t actually feel them.”
    “I’ve lived in LA for ten years,” Tina said. “This isn’t an earthquake.”
    Something odd occurred to me. “What if it’s just the speakers?”
    “What?” Jules said.
    “The speakers. Unplug the speakers.”
    Jules and Tina were still gawking at me like I’d sprouted a second head, so I lunged over them and pulled at the speaker units
     mounted above the bank of monitors. Custom jobbies, wires looped into the back of them.
    Of course, either way, pulling the wires would stop the noise. Right?
    We still didn’t see anything on the monitors, which were bouncing on their shelves now. The noise had changed to a steady
     pounding, like someone was beating on the van. This wasn’t happening on the house—this was happening right here.
    I almost had to shout. “The other option is to go into the house and see if this is going on in there, too,” I said, growing
     exasperated. I was ready to pile out of the van myself, one way or the other.
    When no one said anything, I yanked the wires.
    The