Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand by Carrie Vaughn Page B

Sir, would you like me to bring your wife back?” Soft laughter—nervous laughter—rippled through the audience. I couldn’t see the man, but presumably he nodded yes. Grant smiled. “One of these days a husband is going to say no. Then where will I be?”
    Again he turned the box, opened the door, and there stood Mary, wide-eyed and a little breathless.
    Grant asked, “Madam, are you well?”
    “Yes, I think so.”
    “And how was it?”
    “It—it was very dark in there.” She looked over her shoulder at the inside of the cabinet. Was that a little bit of fear in her eyes?
    That, more than anything, made the illusion a success. Any magician could make someone in a cabinet disappear. But I had never seen the disappearee look at the prop afterward with trepidation. What had happened?
    Grant sent her back to the audience, which showered applause over him. He accepted it gracefully, with a thin smile and short bow. Then he left the stage, and the curtain closed.
    I sat in the theater for a long time, staring at that closed curtain, wondering what it was I had just seen. A magic show, yes. But that wasn’t all. Couldn’t have been all.
    Only one thing for it: I sneaked backstage.

Chapter 5
    I ’d been to enough concerts with enough backstage passes that I knew some tricks. First: act like you belong. If you walk with purpose and disguise the fact that you don’t know where the hell you’re going, most of the underlings won’t stop you. That would take a bouncer or stage manager. Second: most theaters had the same basic layout. The house, the stage, the rigging, the booth, and somewhere in back were dressing rooms and storage areas. Follow your instincts, poke your nose in enough rooms, eventually you’d find something interesting. The hard part was usually finding an unlocked, accessible door to the backstage area in the first place.
    In the lobby area between the theater and the casino, an emergency exit toward the back looked promising. I checked for alarms, hoped for the best, and opened the door. On the other side was a concrete hallway, functional and unattractive. Wiring and vents were exposed. Directly opposite me was another door marked EMERGENCY. It probably led to the outside. To my right, however, the hallway led back to the direction of the theater. Bingo.
    The place was mostly dark, lit by a few unobtrusive work lights. Boxes, chairs, lighting and microphone stands, and other theatrical detritus lined the walls, shoved here to be out of the way. I followed my nose, strained my ears listening for human sounds: movement, voices. I didn’t hear anything. The place smelled musty and a little ripe—thirty years of performers working and sweating here had seeped into the walls. I found a door marked STAGE. It was locked. I continued down the hall looking for another way in, to get a closer look at Grant and his gear.
    The Wolf side didn’t like this at all. The hallway seemed too narrow. It was crammed with stuff, scaffolds, wiring, larger vents trailing along the ceiling, an optical illusion making me claustrophobic.
    I heard something then, like a box dropped on a hollow floor. Freezing, motionless, I waited for the next noise to tell me what was happening and heard movement, shifting, someone walking on the stage, maybe. When I turned, the direction the sound came from seemed to change. Carefully, I continued on, and the sound seemed less human. More like mice scritching behind the walls of an old house. The muscles in my shoulders started to bunch up, like hackles rising.
    Maybe this place was haunted. Every old theater had a ghost, right? Nothing to be afraid of. Actually, I didn’t know enough about ghosts to know whether to be afraid of them or not. I tried to breathe slower. Had to keep it together.
    Ahead, another doorway—double doors, with long metal push-in handles—stood open. It seemed to be lighter beyond. Maybe this was where the dressing rooms were. I continued, expecting to find