Low Midnight

Chapter 15

LIFE WITH Cormac—as his would-be conscience, or perhaps rather a contrary imp riding on his shoulder—was certainly interesting. During that episode with the skinwalker she had thought they were about to find themselves in a real Old West shootout, a meeting between rogues like something out of the dime novels of her childhood. She had been thrilled by the whole thing. She feared Cormac was a bit annoyed by her.

She was very aware that she’d fallen victim—more than a hundred years ago—to the romantic allure of the American West. The daring tales, the exotic peoples, cowboys and Indians and all the rest. Adventure stories took place either in deepest Africa, or in the American West. She even saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in London when she was a girl and had thought it very loud, with all the guns firing and horses stampeding and hundreds of participants yelling and whooping. She had absolutely adored watching Annie Oakley shoot. The woman could do absolutely anything, and so, Amelia decided, could she.

Of course, she would eventually travel to the American West to see it all for herself. What she hadn’t quite realized—but would have, had she thought about it without the emotional dreams of adventure—was that the Wild West of Buffalo Bill’s show had long ago vanished, and had never really existed at all in that stylized form. The Indians now lived impoverished, their native dignity all but vanished after the wars that forced them to the reservations. Real cowboys were coarse rather than heroic. Those so-called frontier towns all had train stations, churches, universities, well-stocked shops, fine ladies in corsets and men in smart hats and ties, and rows of fancy houses, just like any other town in any other civilized part of the world.

Her own adventure in the American West had ended very badly, as it happened. She should have known.

Before then, when she finally met a real Indian face-to-face in the genuine Old West, the encounter was not what she expected. He was an old man sitting in a chair outside of a photography studio in Colorado Springs. He wore a much-washed button-up shirt, dungarees, and had wrapped a battered Indian-woven blanket around his shoulders against a chill in the air. His only gestures toward a legendary appearance were his long hair, ebony streaked with gray, kept in two braids over his shoulders, and a beaded headband with a feather tied to it. A sign in the window of the studio announced that one could pay ten cents to have one’s picture taken with a real Indian. Amelia declined, but spoke with the man for a few moments.

“Sir, do you speak English?” she said clearly to him. “Might I have a word with you?”

“You might need more than one,” he answered, without a smile. His accent was American, which surprised her, and she realized that in truth she hadn’t known what to expect at all.

“I’m from England,” she said. “I’m interested in learning all I can about this region. What tribe are you from, sir? Where do you come from?”

He might have smiled, by the way the furrows in his face shifted. He nodded, indicating the street behind her. “I’m from here.”

“You were born here in the city?” she responded, confused.

“Wasn’t a city then.”

“Where is your tribe now? I would like to meet a medicine man—if you could perhaps introduce me to someone who might be able to teach me—”

“Ma’am,” he said curtly. “He’s dead. Everybody’s dead. There’s no one left. I can’t help you.” He looked away and tugged the blanket more tightly around his shoulders.

She straightened, taken aback. What she had taken for sadness in the drawn look in his face, the shadows in his eyes, she now saw was anger. A futile anger that had been buried for a long time.

Before she could make another attempt to question him, a smartly dressed couple came to the shop, eager to have their picture taken with a real Indian. His services required, he went into the shop at the photographer’s command, and Amelia was left staring at the rough chair where he’d been sitting, wondering why she felt queasy.

She did more research, asking and reading, learning what Indian tribes had been located in the area before the city was founded. There were many, Cheyenne and Arapaho, with other tribes passing through—Ute, Kiowa, Comanche. She had no idea there were so many different tribes. She’d only known about the Sioux of the plains, featured so vividly in the Wild West Show, and the Pueblo of the southwest, with their fascinating clay-built dwellings. So much to learn, and she only had the barest scraps of knowledge to go on: stories of strange magic, medicine men who transformed into animals and entered other worlds, hints of mystical healing. They would tell her that if she had not been raised in their tribes, grown up with their knowledge, then she couldn’t possibly gain access to it now. But she would convince them, she had to convince them.

Then she learned about Sand Creek. The old Indian at the photography shop said everyone was dead. It seemed he did not exaggerate. She knew, then, that no Indian medicine man, even if she could find one still living, would ever help her, a white woman, learn their secrets. She could not blame them for refusing her.

People told ghost stories about Sand Creek, and even if she never learned a scrap of Indian magic, she wanted to follow the thread of inquiry to its end.

She traveled to Lamar by train, then hired a horse to make the rest of the journey. She brought little with her—a dowsing rod, some candles and sage for dispelling, and a charm meant to attract ghosts. Mainly she wanted to observe. She’d never stopped hunting for fairies.

She’d been told this spot of land was haunted, that you could not step onto it without feeling the misery, the abject tragedy of what had happened. She’d been told one could see the ghosts rising from the ground where the massacre had taken place. Some still called it the Battle of Sand Creek, but more and more the word “massacre” superseded the previous title. After all, one could hardly call it a battle when one of the two sides had laid down their weapons.

A full moon rose over the prairie. It was still several hours until midnight, but she’d been walking an hour already, guiding her horse along a likely path. She hadn’t asked for specific directions because she didn’t want to know; if this place really was so powerful, she ought to be able to feel the spirits.

When the hired horse planted its feet, shying away from an invisible spot ahead, she stopped and set up her little camp, feeding and hobbling the horse, spreading her bedroll, and making a fire to boil water for tea.

She stayed calm and breathed deeply, letting her senses, her presence, her mind, settle into the place. A cold wind blew. Sitting on the blanket, she wrapped her coat and another blanket around her and moved close to the fire. She wasn’t going to get any sleep, which was fine, that wasn’t her purpose here. Nearby, her horse shuffled in its hobbles and nibbled at the dried winter grasses, a calming noise against the wind. Patches of snow lay here and there, left over from the last storm and glowing silver in the moonlight. This far east, at night, the mountains of the Front Range weren’t visible. Nothing but prairie and farmland all around her.

The horse, she noticed, wouldn’t move any further north than the spot where she’d made her fire. It wandered back and forth, never straying far, but only on one side of her camp. She directed her attention north, then. Peeling out of her warm blankets, she went to her saddlebag, found the right charm, and lit the candle from a brand she took from the fire. Moving a little ways off, turning her back to the fire and letting her eyesight adjust to the night, she set the candle on a clear space of ground, clasped the charm between her hands, and murmured the words to waken it.

She reached up and swiped her hand across the air as if she were pulling back a curtain—a metaphorical action, but one with consequences.

Still, nothing but a faint wind rustled the grasses and moonlight.

She spoke softly, carefully. “I would like to talk to you. I know a great wrong was done to you and you have no reason to listen to me, to trust me. But my intentions are good, I think you’ll find. I simply want to learn—”

A gun fired, a sound like a single concentrated crack of thunder, painful to her ears. Then another fired, and another, then many, all at once. Nothing at all like the Wild West Show, this was the sound of war, of being in the middle of a battle and having the world explode around you. She wondered how soldiers stood it, their ears tearing apart while they raised their own weapons and hoped to function as they’d trained. All she could do was squeeze hands over her head and curl up on the ground, hoping to protect herself from this onslaught.

But there was no battle. No shouting, no men bearing rifles, no smell of burning gunpowder. Just the noise, the ghost of long-ago events. She did, however, catch a faint scent of blood.

She grabbed her bundle of sage, lit it from the embers of her fire, and swept its pungent, earthy smoke all around her. “Aufere, aufere, aufere!”

The horse shied, hopped a step, then settled back to grazing. It hadn’t heard any gunfire or it would have bolted, hobbles or no.

There was no gunfire, no phantom sounds or smells. The prairie was silent again. It wasn’t real. But something had happened—not ghosts, maybe. But something.

She stayed at her camp until dawn, but she didn’t sleep. Sitting wrapped in her blanket, she fed twigs into the fire to keep it burning low, and looked out at the prairie, her ears still ringing from phantom gunfire. Dawn came slowly.

After packing her things and brushing and saddling her horse, she took a few moments to walk around the site, stepping carefully on hard-packed soil, last year’s dried grasses catching on the hem of her skirt. The massacre had happened more than forty years ago. A generation. But that old man—he could have been a boy here. No physical sign of the Indian camp, of what had happened here, remained. The prairie, the wind and the dust blowing over it, had obscured it all. Only memories remained. Memories and shadows.

Her toe hit against something with a metallic clink. She knelt, searched, found what her step had dislodged: a brass bullet casing, weathered and corroded. It had obviously been lying here, half buried, for years. When she lifted it, it felt much heavier than it should have. As if the bullet was still housed in it, as if the weight of what the bullet had done still clung to it.

Of course, there was no way to tell that this came from a gun that had been used in the massacre. Forty years had passed, forty years of people crossing this patch of ground for any number of reasons. No reason to think this particular casing was cursed.

She put it in her pouch and would think on this further.

SO MUCH for the romance of the American West. Anderson Layne, Jess Nolan, all of them were a pale shadow of those old days. No, that wasn’t right. These days, these people were probably not so very different at all. Just as venal, just as criminal. These days simply hadn’t had time to gain a veneer of romance. No one had yet told any thrilling tales of men like Anderson Layne.

She had thought to use the casing she’d found at Sand Creek for some kind of charm or talisman. Even if it hadn’t been used in the massacre, the fact of its age, of its lying in such a place of power, would give it some small usefulness. But she never got the chance. She didn’t know what happened to her belongings after her arrest. Confiscated and given away, she imagined. Thrown in a trash heap. This was why returning to her childhood home to retrieve what few things she’d left behind there had become so important, last year when Cormac went to London with Kitty. It had been a small treasure hunt, but such a large prize, because it was all she had.

HIS RINGING phone woke Cormac up. He took a long time to crawl to wakefulness, as if the ringtone was some thread from a dream, not at all real, and his conscious mind dismissed it. But it didn’t stop. He grabbed his phone from the crate he used as a bedside table. Three A.M. The number wasn’t Kitty or Ben calling, which meant it wasn’t an emergency as far as he was concerned.

He answered anyway, and Layne talked at him. “Bennett, oh God, Bennett, you have to get over here.”

Cormac flopped back on the bed, stared at the ceiling, and bit back a curse. “Did you get my message?”

“No … no, there’s no time for that, you don’t understand—”

“I can’t help you,” Cormac said. “I’m not working for you. Leave me out of your shit.”

“But—but this is crazy! I don’t know anyone else who can help!”

“What about your guy, Kuzniak? Let him figure it out.” He almost hung up at that, but Layne let out a wail.

“That’s just it! He’s dead! He’s been killed!”