Low Midnight

Chapter 12

CORMAC’S FATHER and uncle had been involved with—had gotten in trouble with—the previous heyday of the militia movement in the nineties. He shouldn’t have been surprised when the whole thing started up again. He listened to the rhetoric, and it sounded the same as it ever did.

The politics of it all was irrelevant, as far as Cormac was concerned. These things moved in waves. There’d always be radicals, there’d always be discontent. The degree rose and fell, and he figured the government now wasn’t any worse than the government of a hundred years ago, and mostly it was like any other bureaucracy—too big to do any good, and too ponderous to do any real evil as well. All you could do was stay out of its way, take care of you and yours. That was his real problem with most of these guys—they wanted to take care of them and theirs, and everyone else’s as well. They weren’t any more immune to corruption and stupidity than anyone else. And there was no worse combination than stupidity and a lot of guns.

This was the problem with these movements. They talked a big talk and their spiel sounded good, especially if you were someone who’d been screwed over by the government one too many times like a lot of these guys had been. But they ended up being a cover for bullies who saw a way to make money and get other people to take the fall for their crimes. Like Layne buying up foreclosures. Who knew what Jess Nolan was up to.

According to Layne, Nolan and his presumed werewolf held court in a bar down in Cañon City. It was a place to meet, to launder money. Likely the same function the biker bar on Highway 24 served for Layne. He picked Kitty up at the radio station, and they’d gotten all the way to southbound I-25 past Denver before either of them said anything. She was slouched in the passenger seat, head propped on her arm. Saying volumes without saying a word.

Cormac surprised himself by talking first. Kitty had successfully outwaited him. “So what did Ben say?”

“He said to make sure you stay out of trouble.”

Cormac just smiled. Ben had been saying that their whole lives. And, well, Cormac was still around, wasn’t he?

The drive took a couple of hours, and Kitty brought a book with her, something nonfiction about the history of Roman culture in Palestine. Research—know thine enemy, he imagined.

“Find anything good?”

“Hm?”

“In the book.”

“Don’t know yet. I mean, I can always learn something new. I’m just trying to figure out what he must have been like. Back before Roman became a vampire. Just curious, I guess.”

She put the book away when they turned off the interstate. Cormac started looking for their destination.

“Kind of gives me the creeps, making this drive,” Kitty observed. “Reminds me of coming to visit you.”

Cormac did his time at one of the state prisons in Cañon City. He hadn’t really thought about it until now—he’d worked to compartmentalize it, put it behind him so he could move on. But Kitty and Ben had driven here from Denver once a week for over two years to see him during visiting hours. To make sure he was okay. Kitty probably could have made this trip blindfolded. He’d never be able to show enough gratitude. He couldn’t even articulate it.

“That’s over and done with,” he said, eyes on the road.

He found the place without too much trouble. It was even dumpier than Layne’s bar. A straight-up rectangle of a building, it might have been built in the fifties and only had spotty repairs and patching since then. The parking lot to the side might have been asphalt at one time, but the whole thing had crumbled to gravel.

Kitty stared out the Jeep’s window. “My parents warned me about places like this,” she said, deadpan.

“It probably looks scarier than it is.”

“Does anything ever look scary to you?”

Prison ceilings at night. The door to solitary confinement. The thought of calling Ben and Kitty and them not answering.

Death …

That, not so much.

He got out, slammed the door. Back in the day, he’d have worn a handgun in a belt holster, more for credibility than out of any intention to use it. He wondered if he’d ever get used to not carrying a gun, or if he’d always feel a little too light. Like he’d lost a limb or something.

Kitty climbed out of the Jeep more slowly, regarding the building with increasing skepticism as she shut the door.

She said, “If there’s really a werewolf here, he probably considers this his territory, and he’ll notice me before we notice him.”

He’d thought of that. He wasn’t worried. “If that’s the case, he’ll give you a warning, tell you to leave—and we’ll know what we came to find out.”

“That’s the best-case scenario. He may not bother with the warning.”

“I’m sure you can talk it out,” he said.

Arms loose at her side, she walked across the parking lot, moving parallel to the building rather than heading for the door. She studied the area, and her nose was working—chin tipped up, nostrils wide, her breaths coming slow. He stopped to watch her.

“I’m not smelling anything,” she said after a couple of minutes.

If a werewolf had even just walked across the parking lot at any point in the last few days, she’d have sensed it. If one regularly spent time here, she’d definitely smell it. That seemed to be his answer right there. But he had to be sure.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s go in.”

“I want to go on record as saying that this makes me nervous.”

“We’ll go in, sit down, have a drink, and leave. It’ll be fine. I’ll buy.”

“Well, how can a girl refuse an offer like that?”

The inside was marginally better looking than the outside. The linoleum floor seemed to be from the eighties rather than the fifties, at least. The wooden tables and chairs were mismatched, as if they’d been acquired at thrift stores over the last couple of decades. The lighting was appropriately dim. There were people here, a sparse collection of working-class-looking men sitting at the bar and at a couple of tables—coming off shift, or working irregular jobs. A worn-out woman in her forties was both bartender and waitress. She spotted Cormac and Kitty as they came in and told them to sit anywhere, she’d be right over.

“Would you know this guy if you saw him?” Kitty asked.

“I’d probably recognize Nolan. This guy who’s supposed to be a werewolf, I don’t know who he is.”

“He’s not a werewolf. I’d smell him. My Wolf would smell him. Who told you he was a werewolf?”

“Somebody’s spreading stories. Intimidating people, convincing people he uses magic. I think it’s all a put-on. I was told this guy killed somebody by tearing him to pieces. Hence, werewolf.”

“A dead body can be made to look as if it was torn to pieces. There’re other things than werewolves that tear bodies to pieces.”

“Well, something’s going on. I want to know what.”

The waitress came by and they ordered Cokes. Cormac stopped her before she turned away. “Do you know a guy named Jess Nolan? Heard he comes in here sometimes. I’m an old friend.”

“Yeah, sure, I know Jess. He usually shows up late. Want me to tell him you stopped by?”

“No, that’s okay, I’ll track him down.”

Some of the guys in the place looked over, studied him a second, and looked away. Cormac pretended not to notice, but at this point he half expected them all to be familiar faces from the old days. Guys who knew his uncle, his dad, and would saunter on up to him wanting to know if he still killed werewolves. All these old faces, all this talk that was like a scab breaking off.

“How many of these guys have guns on ’em?” he asked Kitty softly.

She tilted her head, half closed her eyes. The wolfish gestures took over, as she studied the air the way he might have studied the room’s layout. But the wince and furrowed brow was all human. “All of them? Or a couple of them have more than one.”

“Right.” He drank most of the Coke, pulled a five out of the inside pocket of his jacket and threw it on the table as he stood to leave.

“So that’s it?” Kitty added a couple of bucks of her own—a conscientious tip—before joining him on the way to the door.

“One other place I want to check out.” Some of the old haunts might very well turn up something. Even though part of him was saying he should walk away. This was trouble, and he was supposed to be keeping his nose clean.

Just looking can’t hurt.

Famous last words, he muttered back.

They got back on the road, traveling west until he turned down yet another county road, rural and unmarked, lined with barbed wire and cattle crossing signs. Graded gravel kicked up to rattle the side of the Jeep. This road wound into the foothills. He was looking for a shed at an abandoned mine. Some friends of his uncle used it to store their stockpile back in the day. He didn’t remember hearing that the Feds had ever cleared this one out, and he had a hunch if anyone in the area was still keeping it up, it might be Nolan.

“Where the hell are we?” Kitty observed, leaning forward to search out the window. “I haven’t been down in this part of the state in years.”

“How much has Ben told you about the shit his dad was into?”

“Not much. He doesn’t like to talk about it. Most of what I know I picked up from the newspaper articles I dug up. He was some kind of bigwig in the local militia movement. His conviction was for illegal weapons stockpiling and conspiracy, some kind of plan to set off a bomb at the state capitol from what I gathered. Didn’t get very far.”

“That’s because the Feds had so much surveillance on him by then they knew when he brushed his teeth. They waited long enough for him to actually say the plan out loud so they could get the charges on him. But there’s a lot that didn’t make the papers. Not about Uncle David specifically—I think he really believed in what he was doing, but Ben would rather write him off as crazy. Some of those other guys, though—you have to ask how they got the money to buy all those weapons. They like to take capitalism as far as they can, you know? Illegal doesn’t matter as long as they make money off it.”

“What, so they were bank robbers? Smugglers? Drug dealers?”

“All of the above? Yeah. So, that’s what I think Layne and Nolan are into. Last few years, what with the economy tanking and the last election, the movement’s been making a comeback, getting popular again. Guys like that’ll use the whole thing as a cover and a recruiting ground.”

“Can we go home now?” she said. She had a sour look on her face. She’d been gripping the door handle for the last five miles as the Jeep bounced over barely-there roads.

“Just half an hour.”

“What does Amelia say about all this?”

“She says it can’t hurt to look.”

“No, I mean about the militia stuff. Your family.”

He turned inward a moment and got nothing articulate. Just the quiet watchfulness she had when he was immersed in modernity.

“Says it’s not her world,” he answered and left it at that.

“Someday I’m going to talk you both into letting me interview her on the show.”

I believe that would be a bad idea. Cormac agreed, and if Kitty hadn’t talked them into it by now, she never would.

“There it is,” he said, steering the Jeep around a curve and to a turnout. The place would be just around the next hill.

As he left the Jeep, he put his hand in his pocket, keeping hold of a bit of sage and the lighter, more to steady himself than any thought that he’d be able to use it. If they ran into trouble, there’d be guns, and Amelia didn’t know any spells to protect against that. They’d either have to run for it or talk their way out of it.

One step at a time.

Kitty moved ahead, her nose tipped into the air, flaring. When she glanced back at him, she looked worried. “I don’t like this.”

He steered her on, over a rise and into a dip between hills, not quite big enough to be a valley. Treeless, gravelly earth sloped downward to a weather-worn, unpainted shed. He didn’t see anyone, but Kitty was right, something was off here. Like a roomful of people holding their breath.

Back in the day, the shed hid the entrance to the abandoned mine tunnel where the weapons stockpile was kept. Now, the whole thing looked deserted. That was probably the idea.

“Cormac, something’s wrong here,” Kitty said. She’d gone into full danger stance, her shoulders bunched up and her back hunched, like hackles rising. Her arms hung at her sides, her fingers curled into claws. She stopped, knees bent, like she expected to have to run.

“What do you smell?”

“That’s just it, it’s not a smell, it’s a feeling, it’s just wrong. Dead, rotten, evil—Cormac, I remember this, from back in Walsenberg—” Her shocked eyes and the edge of panic in her voice triggered his own memories.

“Skinwalker,” he said. “Shit.”

Right pocket, arrowhead charm.

He took out the arrowhead, tied to a simple leather cord, and pulled it down around his neck. It said something, that he didn’t remember half the stuff Amelia had had him keep in his pockets. The Navajo arrowhead was a simple enough charm, but promised sure protection against skinwalkers: shape-shifters, but not lycanthropes. It was a very dark kind of magic. A skinwalker was a specific type of Navajo magician, required to perform human sacrifice in exchange for their powers. The last skinwalker Cormac encountered was a woman. Killing her, even in defense, had sent him to prison. Something about “excessive force…”

So, Nolan didn’t have a werewolf working with him. He had one of these bastards.

He was about to tell Kitty to get back in the Jeep when the wolf came at her, crashing through the pine trees at the edge of the clearing and charging. Her, not him—maybe it could tell what she was and identified her as the bigger threat. Or maybe the arrowhead charm actually worked. Whatever it was, the wolf slammed into her, jaw open and angled for her neck. She didn’t have time to run.

He’d never missed the presence of a gun in his hand more than he did now. But right now, even if he had a gun, he wouldn’t have been able to shoot because they were tangled up together—no way to get a clear target on the other wolf, the skinwalker.

Kitty looked thin and willowy and blond and breakable, but she’d been in scrapes before and was stronger than she seemed. Curling her own lips to show teeth, she let the wolf knock her over, then kept rolling to get herself on top. She went for eyes and groin, tearing with bent fingers that were suddenly looking longer, sharper than human.

The thing was dark, hulking, snarling, and its eyes glowed an otherworldly, gemlike red. It didn’t have any of the grace or power of a natural wolf, or even an oversized lycanthropic variety. It was a bundle of hate and wrongness, biting and slashing. Kitty was holding her own, mostly because her supernatural speed and agility allowed her to duck and dodge. She was strong enough to knock the other wolf back once or twice, to get in a few hits. But she couldn’t do much else, not as a human.

Cormac ran to the back of the Jeep and to the emergency kit he kept there. Digging around, he found the pair of roadside flares stashed in it. Ran back to the fight.

The beast slashed and snapped at Kitty; a flash of red sprayed—that was Kitty’s blood. She was using her arms to block, and they were taking damage. Both were snarling, growling. He couldn’t tell which noises were coming from whom.

Holding the flares in one hand, he lit them with his lighter. Even in daylight they glowed red and threw off sparks. Holding them aloft, he stalked toward the fight, making himself as big and threatening as he could, hoping to scare off the attacker. He swung his arms, making arcs of smoke and fire.

It worked. The skinwalker kicked and writhed to get out from under Kitty—opening more scratches, but Kitty didn’t seem to notice. As it scrambled into the open, it turned and ran, back stiff and tail straight out like a rudder. A werewolf would have had its tail tucked between its legs, getting driven off after a fight like that. But a skinwalker was a human in wolf skin, not a being made up of parts of both.

“Kitty?” he called at her.

Crouching, she stared out into the woods, growling with every breath, an amber sheen in her eyes. Her T-shirt was ripped and hanging off her, revealing skin and bra. She’d torn it off herself, and was now shoving down her jeans. Her teeth were long, and her face was stretching.

“Kitty,” he repeated warningly, even as he backed away to give her room. Her wolf half would recognize him. At least, it had before.

“Gotta track down that bastard,” she muttered, her voice thick.

“No, you don’t—”

She was already shifting. Adrenaline and blood had pushed her wolfish instincts over the edge. Even as she stripped, a sheen of gray and tawny fur sprouted over her naked skin as her limbs seemed to melt, twisting into new shapes. She grunted once in pain, but other than that the change seemed to flow through her, like she’d flipped a switch and let it happen. He looked away, unable to face full-on the sight of her caught between one shape and another, her form distorted.

Then it was over, and an oversized wolf—long, rangy legs, lean body, pointed ears focused forward—was shaking off the last of her clothes. Without looking back she launched into a ground-eating run, chasing the skinwalker into the woods. She might very well be even more pissed off at the thing than he was.

When shots fired—explosive punctuation to the already chaotic encounter—Cormac crouched to take himself out of any line of fire. Looking, he found a man some thirty yards off, near the worn-out shed, aiming a rifle in the direction Kitty’s wolf had raced off.