Dancing with Werewolves - By Carole Douglas Page 0,2
was pounding as if I'd actually undergone a recent brush with scalpel and saw and had lived to tell about it. I'd never "felt" the presence of a missing birth twin, like you were supposed to. I'd never sensed an absent "half." Yet the detail that really unnerved me was the tiny blue topaz nose stud on the televised body. Hardly a genetic similarity.
Separated twins were supposed to be so alike that they often held the same jobs, married men who shared a profession, even dressed alike. Long distance. Without one knowing about the other. That small blue glint on the corpse's nose made me shiver. Facial resemblance might eerily echo some stranger's features. But the exact same impudent touch of nose jewelry?
No. Can't be. I'm an orphan so abandoned that I was named after the intersection where my infant self was found.
So who's been trespassing on my mysteriously anonymous gene pool?
I haven't taped the damn show, so I can't rerun my media centerfold moment. Who knew? I'm used to being on TV, but I've never acted, never aimed at a career as a corpse, and I've never been to Las Vegas.
My white Lhasa apso, Achilles, sensing agitation, came bouncing over to comfort me, his lovely floor-length hair shimmering in the bluish light of the television. I absently stroked his long silky ears.
Lhasas are often taken for largish lapdogs, but they've got terrier souls. Achilles is twenty pounds of Tibetan staple gun. I used to wonder why centuries ago the Dalai Lamas bred Lhasas as temple guard dogs... until I got Achilles as a puppy. He was a growling relentless rusher, that short toothy jaw snapping with playful nips. I'd push him back and he'd joyously charge me again. If an intruder ever fell down in a pack of these, it would be Piranha City. Flesh stripped from bone.
In fact, Achilles was named for his playful puppy habit of nipping at my heels wherever I went. And because he's my soft spot, my Achilles heel.
Yeah. I'm an orphan, I'm single. I love my dog.
And apparently I'm now anonymously famous. Or infamous.
Chapter Three
Achilles' sturdy body next to mine radiated pure comfort as I impatiently waited for the CSI Las Vegas show to end. When the legally required credits ran, though, the local station cut them to the size of the fine print in a pre-nuptial contract. That made room for teaser images from the upcoming ten o'clock news. The information that this was "A Hector Nightwine Production" ran in letters two inches high, but I couldn't read a single name from the cast list. Not that a corpse usually gets a credit, not even on the reality TV funeral shows.
The local station, by the way, is my station. WTCH in Wichita, Kansas.
In fact, I had the weird experience of catching a flash of my face on the upcoming footage of the nightly news show and the onscreen line: Delilah Street, WTCH-TV PARANORMAL INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER. I'm used to that, but not after the shock of being personally dissected on primetime network TV.
My piece on the latest wrinkle on the local ritual mutilation and killing incident should run at least number three on the story roster tonight, right after the top two national stories.
I basked for a moment in the sheer joy of where and who I was. I had a great job and I was doing good work, important work. Woodward would have been proud of me but Bernstein probably would have wondered why I was wasting my talents on a Podunk town in the heartland.
Maybe that was because it was the heartland. My heart, my land. What a Brave New World lay out there after the Millennium Revelation of 2000! I'd been young enough to adapt fast, just a misplaced kid with an itch to become a reporter someday.
Of course some of the older folk couldn't accept witches, werewolves, and vampires as near neighbors, not after eating up scary tales about them all their lives. Kids, though, were rapt. After the Millennium Revelation, we learned these creatures-er, supernaturals-weren't necessarily evil, any more than humans were necessarily good. Serial killers, for instance, were pretty much a human phenomenon until recently.
Yet there were criminal elements among the newly outed supernatural population. When I graduated from J-school and got my first job at WTCH-TV, I was so hooked on these new but ancient resident species that I made them my beat.
I reported the crimes that occurred where the various breeds met and went wrong,