Okay. Cool. I didn’t say anything. I cringed inwardly at the silence, anathema on the radio. But this wasn’t a talk show anymore, this was drama, 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 beating, pounding, thudding noise stopped.
We all held our breaths, waiting for it to start again.
Jules’s shoulders slumped. He grabbed the speaker out of my hand. “Don’t tell me that was an equipment malfunction? Christ.”
In the midst of grumbling, I paused, nostrils flaring. I smelled something. It pinged a memory, but I couldn’t quite catch it. Something recent. Something bad, dangerous—
Sulfur and fire. Brimstone. Attack in the forest. In the back of my brain, Wolf howled.
I bit back a growl and lunged for the door.
“Hey—”
The van tipped over.
Chaos rocked us, objects falling, monitors smashing, bodies tumbling. People shouted, cried out with surprise. I wrapped my arms around my head, over the headset I was still wearing. Then movement stopped. We ended up sprawled on the van’s side, picking ourselves out of the mess of shelving and gear that had been stored there.
I didn’t wait. I could move, I didn’t hurt, except for the panic and anger burning in my gut. I lunged for the back door, shoved it open, and spilled out.
The van was on its side, in the middle of the street. The windshield had smashed, spreading sparkling pebbles of glass across the asphalt. The metal side looked slightly crumpled, as if there’d been a collision. One of the tires was spinning slowly.
Matt and Ben were jumping out of the KNOB van and sprinting toward me. Something in me identified them as friend, so I ignored them. Shoulders tight, hackles stiff, I circled, looking for the enemy, waiting for the thing to attack again.
“Kitty?” Ben caught my body language and looked around with me, searching.
It was here, I knew it was, I could smell it. Any minute it would pounce. I couldn’t talk. All I had in my throat were growls. Wolf stared out of my eyes.
Ben held my arm, took a scent. His grip tightened. “You smell that?”
“Yeah,” I said.
The three investigators had picked themselves out of the van, brushed themselves off, and looked each other over, cursing.
The exterior cameramen, along with the crew, was coming toward us in a hesitating panic. Jules yelled at one of the camera guys, “What did this? What did you guys see?”
“Nothing,” one of them said. “There was nothing there, it just fell over.”
Gary looked at me. “Is she okay? Is she in shock?”
“No. Nothing like that,” Ben said.
A minute ticked on and nothing happened. The panic faded. Wolf crept away, and I was fully me again. Blinking, I shook my head and looked around. We were standing in the middle of the road, staring at the wreckage of the van. This felt like the aftermath of a car accident. Which it kind of was.
A pair of cameras focused on us, capturing every moment for the show. I was still broadcasting, as well. This was going to end up making a pretty good episode for both of us.
But this was far, far too personal for me to be thinking of that.
“Is everyone okay?” I said.
“Cuts and bruises,” Gary said. “What the hell was that?”
“Full-on poltergeist, I’d say,” Jules announced, sounding excited.
“But why us and not the house?” Gary said.
“Didn’t like us looking at it? She really did tick it off. I dunno.” His accent had gotten thicker. He started picking through the wreckage for something. “I’ve got to get some readings. EMF, temperature, infrared. This is unbelievable. Where is everything?” No one moved to help him. The rest of us were standing around, shell-shocked. Waiting for the second round, possibly.
“What do you know about this?” Tina said. She was rubbing her arms, obviously chilled, looking around like she expected something to drop out of the sky. “You act like you know something.”
I didn’t know. It was just the smell, the same prickling on my skin I’d felt the other night. But it was gone now. Only a lingering scent remained. I said, “This is about me, it’s not about the house. There’s something after me.”