Free Kitty Raises Hell by Carrie Vaughn Page B

me.”
    “Now that’s a story I want to hear,” Gary said.
    I chuckled. “Got a few hours?”
    “Will somebody
please
help me with this?” Jules demanded, still digging through the wreckage for equipment.
    Matt called out, “Kitty, you’re still on the air. You’ve got five minutes.”
    Shit.
The KNOB van was still upright. I wondered how long that would last.
    I adjusted the microphone on my headset and moved away from the group to pull myself together and get my show back on track.
     Not that this was getting off track—I’d been waiting for something exciting to happen, hadn’t I? Anything more exciting than
     this and I’d be done for the night. I wondered how this was sounding to my audience.
    “Right, okay. What just happened? I believe, in paranormal-investigation parlance, we’ve just seen some activity. Yeah, right.
     The freaking van tipped over, and we don’t know what did it. If you watch
Paradox PI
when this episode airs, you can check it out, because they caught it all on camera and I imagine it looks pretty good. Hey,
     Gary—tell me again you’ve never seen anything like this.”
    Loudly, he announced, “In my twenty years of investigating, I have never seen anything like this.”
    “What’s next for you guys?”
    “We go over the footage with a fine-tooth comb. Make sure there aren’t anomalies, some other reasonable explanation for this.
     Monitor the area. Wait to see if anything like this happens again. Are you sure you don’t get earthquakes here?”
    Tina said, “If it was an earthquake, all the cars would have tipped over. There’d be more damage. This was localized.”
    “Everything’s wrecked,” Jules said, still in his own world of picking through gear. “We’re going to have to replace a lot
     of this if we want to do any more tonight. Not to mention get a tow truck over here.”
    Gary sighed. “Just pull out some of the equipment we put in the house. Those should work.”
    “But what about monitoring the house?” His temper was right on the edge.
    “I don’t think we have the luxury of choosing our battles right now. It’s either the house or the van.”
    I tried to come up with some kind of wrap-up, some way to put all this in context or expound on some nice greeting card conclusion,
     but my nerves were shot.
    “Well, folks. I wish I had something pithy to say, but I’m kind of at a loss to describe what’s going on here. I’ll be the
     first to tell you that the universe is filled with some pretty wild, unexplained phenomena. Me, for example. I’ll also be
     the first to say it’s still a good idea to take things with a grain of salt. But I’m all out of salt right now. Something
     happened here tonight at the old haunted house, but it didn’t happen in the house, and I’m not convinced it was a haunting.
     Whatever it was, it sure wasn’t happy. Tune in next week when, hopefully, I’ll have a little more to give you. I’ll also go
     back to taking calls so you can tell me about some of your own unexplained, unexplainable, experiences. Until then, this is
     Kitty Norville, and this has been
The Midnight Hour.
”
    Matt was in the van, pushing buttons, working his own brand of arcane wizardry. He gave a curt nod, which meant we were done.
     Finally.
    I pulled off my headset and threw it into the van. Then I found Ben and got clingy. I wrapped my arms around his middle and
     hugged him close as his arms closed over my shoulders.
    “Why do I get the feeling this is going to get worse before it gets better?” he said.
    “Because it usually does,” I answered. “Maybe it’s just trying to scare us.” After all, no one had been hurt. Yet. There was
     always a yet.
    “Isn’t that enough?”
    Tina walked up to us. I lifted my head from Ben’s shoulder just enough to face her.
    “You going to tell us what you know?” she said. “
Something’s
going on here, and it has to do with you.”
    What the hell. Maybe they knew something that could help