“I need to talk to my baby brother.”
Of course, it was a wrong number. Kitty checked her watch. Five after ten. Anyone who knew her mom, Anne Irish, knew better than to call after nine-thirty at night. It was one of the house rules. Break it at your peril. Besides, there was only one baby brother in the house and that was Kitty’s own, Sam, who happened to be standing at the door of the study staring at her. He must have slipped out of bed—his blonde hair already looked like bed head—and down the stairs at the ring of the phone.
Kitty shooed him back to his room with her hand. If their mom got out of the shower and found him there, it wouldn’t be pretty. Cupping her palm over the receiver, she hissed, “It’s not Dad. Get in bed or Mom’ll….” and she drew her forefinger across her throat in a severing motion. Into the phone, she said, “Sorry, wrong number.”
As Sam turned and began climbing the stairs, Kitty pulled the receiver away from her ear and held it toward the cradle. The voice said something, and the name she only half heard made her draw it back. “I’m sorry?”
“Nate. Gotta talk to Nate. He there?” The noise coming out of the phone was somewhere between a rasp and a gurgle, as if the speaker had screamed so long his throat was raw and bleeding.
“Ummm.” Kitty considered hanging up again. Whoever it was had her father’s name right, but Nate Irish was an only child. At least that’s what she had always been told. “I think you have the wrong number.”
The caller coughed. Half his lung must have come up in that hacking gush. Kitty grimaced in disgust. Good thing there was a phone line between her and whoever this nut job—infectious nut job—was. She walked to the bottom of the stairs to double-check on Sam. He wasn’t sitting on the top step; she hoped he was back in his room. She returned to the window. A slight chill radiated off the glass, making the hair on her arms rise.
“Nate Irish,” the caller rasped when he was able. “Is this Annie?”
Kitty pressed the receiver a little closer to her ear. He knew her mother’s name too. She had never heard her mother called anything but Anne, but still she knew it wasn’t a wrong number. The background hum strengthened for a second, then fell off before rising again. The wind. Her caller was outdoors. She scrubbed one hand up and down her forearm, trying to rub some warmth into her skin, but the goose bumps stayed, dotting her arm.
“Annie?” the caller asked again.
She was supposed to hang up. Her mom always told her that. It was in all the horror movies her friend Jenna made her watch. Staying on the line with the creepy guy asking all the questions was the last thing she should do. “No. They’re busy. Can I take a message?”
The only answer was the rise and fall of the air on the line and his ragged breathing.
“Can I take a message?” she repeated. Only a tiny pane of glass hung between her and the inky black outside. Not even a sliver of moon cut through the cloud cover. Kitty was positive he stood in the dark on his end of the line—huddled in the lee of some corner convenience mart or against the back wall of a crappy bus station; his feet surrounded by week-old shopping flyers and fast food wrappers. Why did the weird ones always call late at night?
“Who is this?” The voice was all soft edges now, almost purring.
She nearly laughed. Was he trying to be charming? Part of her wondered why she continued the conversation. She’d probably do something really stupid next—like wander out into the woods on a full moon night without a silver bullet. She tossed the question back at him. “Who are you?”
“I’m Nate’s big brother.”
The words stunned Kitty, and she sat down in the wingback next to the phone. Her butt hit harder than she intended and the bump rattled up her spine, forcing out a little laugh. “Good one. Dad doesn’t have a big brother.”
Even as she said the words, she knew they were a lie. It had been nine months since she’d first heard the name Kevin Irish—some sort of horrible gestation period. Five months since she’d heard the story of how he’d been attacked by werewolves and gone on the run over twenty years before. Three months since she found the pictures in the workshop of her dad and an older boy—a boy who looked surprisingly like Kitty herself. “Nate and me” proclaimed the words on the back. He wasn’t some second cousin twice removed like she told herself.
She could deny it all she wanted to the man on the phone, but Kitty had an uncle. And he was a werewolf.
A soft laugh rippled into her ear. “Oh, but he does. He just doesn’t claim me. So you’re his delightful daughter. Kathleen, right?”
Kitty cowered back into the chair, drawing her legs up into a ball. The wings wrapped protectively around her, shielding her view of the dark window. Maybe she could pretend the ugly yellow-green of the chair was actually daylight streaming in around her. She could hear the thrum of the shower from the bathroom; she didn’t want—or need—her mom getting out and hearing this. “Why wouldn’t he claim you?”
The line hummed as the wind rose on the caller’s end. When he spoke again, she swore he was smiling and it wasn’t a friendly smile either. “Because I scare him.”
Kitty thought of her father at the air base the last time she’d seen him—tall and straight in his desert camo herding a gaggle of younger soldiers toward the troop plane taking them to Iraq. Her father’s deployment had been the first of all the changes in her life. Her mother went back to work, and Kitty took over the house and Sam. Then Kitty met Phinney—local town eccentric—and added werewolf hunter to her list of extracurricular activities. With Kevin’s call, the job was about to come a lot closer to home.
“Daddy isn’t scared of anything.” Daddy? She hadn’t called him that since she was Sam’s age. She willed herself to calm down. “He doesn’t have a big brother,” she whispered, but this time it sounded more like a question.
The shower cut off and the farmhouse grew quiet. Her mom was fast. It was one of the advantages of short hair. Kitty knew from experience once the water shut off, she had two minutes max before Anne would be moving around the house.
Harsh breathing whooshed down the line again. “He was probably right not to tell you. Don’t get me wrong—certainly I’m disappointed, but I understand. I’m a very dangerous man.” He began to laugh, a wheezy sound that broke down into another coughing fit.
He probably thought you were going to give us all TB, Kitty thought, hoping a little humor would quiet the churning in her stomach. Her body wasn’t so easily convinced this was funny though, and her stomach rolled again.
When the coughing subsided, the caller continued. “He could have at least used me as a tale to terrify you when you misbehaved. I think I deserve that much.” He paused for a few seconds. “I do scare you, don’t I?”
Her stomach rippled in response and she pressed farther back into the armchair. “No,” she lied. “It’d take a lot more than you to scare me.”
I’ve had things in my face that want to kill me. A voice in my ear is nothing. Her hand shook, and the phone jerked into the side of her head. Nothing. Now repeat it until you believe it, Kit.
“Hmmm,” the caller mused. “Too bad. I should.”
Kitty whispered, “I’m hanging up now.”
She pulled the phone away from her ear, but the voice came again and she froze. “Forget Nate. He wouldn’t be that happy anyway. Why don’t you tell Annie I’m coming home? Somewhere around the twenty-third or twenty-fourth should work out.”
Kitty swallowed hard. There would be more on her calendar than just the full moon.
“You know who I’m really eager to meet? Sam. Yeah, tell him Uncle Kevin’s comin’.”
Clunk. Kitty shoved the phone down hard.
“Hey. No talking with your buddies after nine-thirty. Save the late nights for college.” Her mother stood in the doorway in her robe, running a towel through her short dark hair. “Anybody who calls after nine is either an emergency or a crazy.”
Or both.
“Prank call,” said Kitty, standing up. She reached out to the window and twisted the little stick to turn the blind down. She didn’t want to see the blackness outside the window any more.
More than that, she didn’t want whatever was outside in the dark seeing her.