Low Midnight

Chapter 22

HE’D JUST unlocked the apartment’s front door when Amelia demanded, The laptop. Turn on the laptop. My God, why do these things take so long, we should have just left it on.…

He took his time getting inside, closing the door behind him, setting the dead bolt, turning on the lights, heading to the kitchenette for a glass of water—

Cormac!

Then, he turned on the computer.

New e-mail was waiting for them.

“A new take on the alchemical prize. Interesting. I have studied and practiced magic for many years, and everyone seems to think they have a way to make gold out of something else. The closest I’ve come to what you’re suggesting—mining gold magically, pulling it out of the ground without use of chemicals or equipment—are various earthmoving spells. Spells to move stone, rituals to cause earthquakes. One could build a mine using such magical techniques. But any gold ore would still need to be physically mined. Unless you’ve discovered evidence to the contrary?”

Amelia couldn’t wait to start typing a reply. Her urgency felt like a throbbing running down his arms to his fingers.

“You never had a pen pal, did you?” he said.

I had correspondences all my life, with some of the most diligent arcane scholars of my day. All the letters I collected—I’ve lost them all, along with my other artifacts and treasures. But I would have to wait weeks for replies to my letters. Days at the very least. This—this is nearly instantaneous. You have no idea the technologies you take for granted.

“No doubt.” He thought about his cell phone and how it meant he could never really disappear. Not unless he just left it behind and drove off into the sunset. He’d thought about doing that.

He let Amelia type. “No, I have no evidence, only rambling notes and speculation. I’ve started experimenting, but I’m not hopeful. You’ve confirmed my fears. The idea was simply so intriguing I could not pass over it without giving it at least some thought.”

She sent the message, stared at the screen, and he imagined her rubbing her hands together in anticipation. Their correspondent might reply immediately. Or they could be waiting all night. Cormac thought he might as well go to sleep—if Amelia would let him.

But they didn’t have to wait that long. The program pinged incoming e-mail; their correspondent was online.

He’d written: “The path of magic is never clear cut. I commend your curiosity and your dedication. Have you learned anything new about breaking Amy Scanlon’s code?”

“Several leads. Nothing definite, I’m afraid. My guess is she used a personal, shifting code, something that only had meaning to her. If we knew the key, we could find the pattern. But I didn’t know her personally and I couldn’t guess what she might have used.”

Again, a quick response: “Does she have any family, any close friends still living?”

They hesitated in their response. So far, they hadn’t exchanged details. No names but Amy’s, no locations. Only generalizations, abstractions. Cormac was leery about giving too much away. They had little enough as it was. “That’s one of the leads I’m following. Nothing definite, yet.”

“What do you hope to find in this book of shadows when you are able to read it?”

“Your confidence that I will is heartening. I have some questions that need answering; her book of shadows seems likely to contain such answers.”

“What kind of questions?”

Cormac suddenly had the feeling of being interrogated and drew his hands back from the keyboard.

Amelia argued, If Kitty is right, and knowing about Kumarbis means this person is a vampire, he might have some insight into the Long Game. We could ask—

“I don’t want to show our hand,” Cormac said. “I don’t want to give away who we are. We start talking about the Long Game, who knows what’ll come up. This is about the book for now. That’s it.”

Your paranoia has served you well in the past. I suppose I can’t argue with you now.

That was probably giving him more credit than he deserved. Now, how to be cagey without entirely shutting down the line of communication? This was the kind of thing Kitty was good at.

“Historical magic,” Amelia typed, using Cormac’s hands. The answer was both true and disingenuous. “Spells that might have been lost to time. My understanding is that Amy Scanlon was interested in the past. For example—you yourself mentioned the possibility of creating earthquakes by magical means; have you actually done this, or seen it done? Or is it only in stories? Mere rumor.” According to Kitty, Amy must have had some kind of earthmoving spell to be able to cause the cave-in at the mine there at the end. Maybe it was in the book’s coded sections.

“I never like to say mere rumor. But I will say this: I have good reason to believe that the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii was instigated by magic. The volcano was naturally ready to erupt, of course—but the ultimate trigger was not natural.”

“Good heavens,” Amelia wrote, both honest reaction and conversational filler. “That’s extraordinary. That raises so many questions, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, but I don’t believe that’s the problem you’re working on, is it?”

Amelia’s mind had gone off in a dozen different directions, to other natural disasters that might have been caused by magic, to the reasons someone might have wanted to cause Vesuvius to erupt—revenge against the city? An overblown assassination attempt? An accident? Cormac pulled her back to the conversation at hand.

Amelia replied, “I’m currently investigating two deaths. At least one of them involved a duel between two men known to use magic. In both cases, men known to be powerful magicians were struck dead with no evidence of being attacked, injured, or any usual offensive magic being used against them.”

The next reply didn’t come immediately. Cormac went to the fridge for a beer, took his time crossing the four feet back to the table, while Amelia seethed with impatience.

An answer waited: “In magical duels, the magician who wins is often not the one with the most powerful offense, but the one with the strongest defense. Look to see how their opponents were shielded. My apologies, I have to go now, but I’m sure we’ll talk again. I look forward to our next exchange.”

A defense strong enough to kill. Wasn’t unheard of. Thoughtful, Cormac leaned back in his chair.

This person is brilliant, Amelia said, gushing. I wonder who he is? Or she? My goodness, I think I’m blushing.

He refrained from asking how she could blush without a body. “You ask who he is, we’ll have to tell who we are.”

Not necessarily. But if we lie to him about who we are, then there’s no reason to believe he’ll tell the truth about who he is. Oh, this anonymity is so useful, but terribly frustrating, isn’t it? I’ll have to look into using my scrying spells, but who knows if they’ll even work on e-mail. Though I did know someone who attempted to cast spells via telegraph, as an experiment. With ambiguous results, unfortunately, but I wonder if the technique could be adapted.

He decided it was time to go to bed, before she went off on another research jag. Maybe she’d even stop talking long enough for him to actually fall asleep.

I’m not that bad.

He didn’t credit that with an answer.

HE LAY in bed for a long time the next morning, thinking.

Again, he was in the meadow, and Amelia was again pacing. Cormac wondered if he could lean up against a nearby tree trunk, close his eyes, and go to sleep inside the half-dreaming world of their minds. He hadn’t slept well, waking up every hour or so with some new thought, Amelia probing him with some conjecture about Kuzniak, Crane, the other Kuzniak, and how they were all connected. He thought it could wait until morning; she didn’t. Finally, he’d given in. But he still wanted to sleep.

“If Kuzniak killed Crane in the manner the stories about it say, the evidence of it ought to be in his book. But there’s nothing!”

“It’s not a very thorough book.”

“Yes, I’ve seen that. If the young Milo learned all his magic from it, it’s no wonder he ended up dead. There must be another book. Another source from which he acquired his knowledge. Something.”

“Or we’ve missed something,” Cormac said.

“I haven’t missed anything, I don’t miss things.”

Amelia had studied the book over and over. She’d deciphered the handwriting, figured out abbreviations, copied the whole thing into her own book. Cormac agreed, she probably hadn’t missed anything.

Then the solution wasn’t in the writing. He sat up.

Amelia came toward him. “Cormac, what is it? You’ve thought of something, I can see the look in your eyes—”

He shook his head, shook away the meadow, and sat up in bed, swinging his legs to the floor. Sun came in through the cheap blinds, casting light over the clutter in the place that was so much easier to ignore at night.

Kuzniak’s book was in the lockbox where Amelia kept the most valuable—or dangerous—of the artifacts they’d collected. He went to get it off the set of makeshift shelves on the far wall, pulled it out, ignored her when she complained that he left the box open. Sat back and flipped through it, looking at everything but the writing. Feeling along the pages, the spine, the covers; holding the pages up to the light, up to his nose. Smelled like paper. A little bit musty, like an attic.

He found it in the very back, between the last page and the back cover. The last few pages of the thing were blank, like Kuzniak hadn’t had a chance to fill them all, so they hadn’t gotten this far in their reading. He held the inside back cover to the light, ran his thumb over it, and found the imprint—the shape of a Maltese cross a couple of inches wide, pressed into the endpapers. Once upon a time, someone had stored something here, enclosed inside the book.

“Look at that,” he murmured, knowing full well that Amelia was seeing everything he did. The shape had an irregularity at the top, maybe a ring, but there didn’t seem to be a chain running through it. It looked like a piece of jewelry, some kind of metal pendant or amulet. And it had to have been kept in here a long time to make this kind of an imprint.

Then where is it now?

“Good question. If there was some kind of spell attached to it, it would have survived Kuzniak’s death, wouldn’t it?”

That’s the whole point of amulets and charms, to lock the magic in place so you can give it to someone else, so the magic will survive them. This thing might be very much older than Kuzniak. Either of them.

“And what’s it do?”

It kills people, I’d wager.

He frowned. “Great. Want to bet that Layne has it now?” And did he know what he had…?

Cormac, I want to talk. Face-to-face.

Sighing, he propped himself against the wall, leaned his head back, closed his eyes. Put himself in the meadow, and found Amelia by his side. He almost expected to see a copy of the book in her hand—if she’d really memorized it, she’d be able to do that, manifest a copy in their imaginations. But it was just her, and she was alight with urgency.

“We can solve this, work out exactly what happened. Put yourself in Kuzniak’s place,” Amelia said.

“Older or younger?”

“Younger. The great-grandson. If we know what happened to him, we’ll know what happened to Augustus Crane, and we can go back to Judi and be done with this whole sorry business.”

Right. He could make some guesses. Milo Kuzniak the younger probably had a similar background and upbringing to Cormac’s. Native Colorado, a rural family with deep roots in the region. Ranchers or farmers, or maybe even mining or some other local industry. Maybe a connection to the militia and sovereignty movements, which would be how he hooked up with Layne. This guy would even have had a connection to the supernatural, same as Cormac’s family. Only instead of being hunters, they were magicians. Maybe not seriously—it might have just been stories, at least until Kuzniak got ahold of his great-grandfather’s book. Family might have kept it as an heirloom, or maybe it had been stuck in some trunk in an attic, but Kuzniak would have latched onto it and seen it as something more. That would have started him down the path—with some people, it didn’t take much. He’d have studied what little his great-grandfather knew, added his own discoveries. And then gone to work for the people he knew in his own neck of the woods.

Maybe pacing wasn’t such a bad idea. He stood, to wake himself up, to get his brain working. “The cross tucked in the book. Would he have known what it was?”

“He might not have known what was, or what it did. The book never mentions it, apart from discussing amulets in general.”

“But he’d have known it did something and kept it with him. Could it have killed him?”

She seemed to fold into her own world when she was thinking hard, tugging at her ear and staring off into space, pacing through the grass and absently swishing her skirt out of the way when it snagged on something. He imagined this was exactly how she looked when she was alive, in a Victorian parlor or on the streets of some ornate European city.

She said, “He might never have taken it out of the book. But it wasn’t with the book when he died, was it? You searched him—it wasn’t in any of his other pockets, was it? Could he have hidden it about his person? Then where is it now? Did it remain with him? Is it wherever Layne put the body?”

That didn’t feel right to Cormac. Layne would have searched the body before getting rid of it, even if it was just to pull loose change out of the guy’s pockets.

He spoke slowly, arranging his thoughts while he did. “What if … maybe he didn’t know what exactly it did, but he used it to give himself some kind of credibility. Said it was powerful, bragged about it to Layne.”

“And then gave it to Layne as a sign of goodwill? Or Layne took it, as a pledge of loyalty? He wanted magic but didn’t trust Kuzniak.” She stopped, turned to face him, her eyes wide.

Cormac added, “Kuzniak tries to get it back—and sure enough, Layne’s got all the power now and kills him instead. Whatever it is, whatever it does—it killed him.” Even sounded like a wizards’ duel—a rivalry turned into a fight for power, and bang, it’s done. “He freaks out, calls us—then figured out what happened. And now he thinks he’s got all the magic. And he wants to meet with me. He won’t even need bullets.”

“I’m desperate to get my hands on that thing,” Amelia said.

Her eyes were wide, gleaming, and she reached for him—he was standing right there, and she took hold of his hands, clutching them in excitement, and he squeezed back before even thinking. For a moment, they both went still, uncertain. He didn’t pull away; neither did she. It was like they were both waiting for the other to make a move. And so they remained still, frozen in contact. As close as they had been for the last few years, living mind to mind, inseparable, he couldn’t remember feeling this close to her. He could feel the pressure in her hands, warmth in her skin, which shouldn’t have been possible because she didn’t exist, not really. She was dead—but that didn’t matter here. He took a step in, brushed his thumb along her chin and yes, it felt like skin, impossibly soft. Reflexively, she tipped her chin back, looking up at him. It would take so little effort to lean into her, to bring his lips to hers.

Doing this all alone would have been so much less interesting than doing this with her.

She blinked suddenly, like waking up from a trance, and turned away, letting go of him to resume her pacing along the edge of the meadow. “What are we going to do?”

He stood for a moment, looking at his empty hands. He had to think for a second about what she was really talking about. Layne. This amulet.

“I’d just as soon walk away. Like messing with high explosives, we don’t need that shit.”

A tiny, reflexive scowl crossed her lips. She never said anything about it, but hard swearing grated on her antique sensibilities. He figured he’d have her swearing just as bad, sooner or later.

“Look at it this way, then,” she said. “Do you really want someone like Anderson Layne in possession of such a powerful magical artifact?”

No, no he didn’t. Wasn’t too long ago he would have figured it wasn’t his problem, one way or another. Wasn’t his business.

“It’s exactly your business,” Amelia argued. Cormac shouldn’t have been surprised the thought slipped out. Or, she knew him well enough at this point to guess exactly what he was thinking. “Maybe you can’t go out hunting rogue werewolves with silver bullets the way your father did, but you can do this. You may be the only one who can. What do you say to that?”

“I say you really want that amulet for yourself,” he said.

She seemed taken aback a moment, straightening and studying him. Then, she smiled. “Well, yes. But that doesn’t mean we won’t do a world of good in the course of getting it.”

He wasn’t usually in the business of doing good. No, that wasn’t true—that was how he’d justified every one of the kills he’d made. It was for the greater good, taking monsters out of the world. That was the job his father had given him. And whatever else he was, Anderson Layne was a certain kind of monster.

She stood tall with the strength of her convictions. “We’re stronger than Kuzniak. It won’t kill us.”

“We’re missing something.”

“You’re being cautious.”

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

“But you’ll do it. You’ll go after Layne and whatever this power is?”

He looked over his imaginary meadow and sighed. “Yeah.”

HE MADE the call. Barreling straight ahead without thinking too much about it, just like the old days. Layne answered after the first ring.

“Heard you wanted to talk to me,” Cormac said, casually.

“That’s right,” Layne said, cautious, rightfully so. “I figured we had some stuff to work out. We can come to an understanding.”

The guy wanted to shoot him dead on sight. “You want Kuzniak’s book back, I got it. Do you even know what to do with it?”

“That’s not the point.”

Cormac could just keep poking at him until he got so angry he hung up. But that wasn’t the goal here. “No, it’s not; you know why? Because the book’s not important. You’ve got something else. It killed Milo Kuzniak, and now you want to use it on me, isn’t that right?”

Silence. That was the trick to handling a guy like Layne—keep him off balance, so he never knew how much you knew, or how strong you were. Cormac’s reputation was going to carry him through this, if nothing else.

Cormac continued, “Do you even know what you have, or have you just been hanging on and hoping for the best?”

“You don’t know anything, you’re just mouthing off. I don’t know why everyone’s so scared of you. You were never all that badass, it was all your dad. You’re not half what your dad was.”

Nobody even remembered his father. They only knew the image of him, the myth. He was twenty years dead and didn’t have any power anymore.

If Cormac could flush the guy out right, maybe he could get him to just give it up. “Layne. I know you don’t realize it, but you’re way out of your league here. Why don’t you just hand the thing over to me and I’ll keep it safe.”

“Yeah, right. Tell you what—you want the cross so bad, you come and take it from me.” He spoke with a smugness that set Cormac’s hair on end. He was missing something. “I’ll meet you tonight. Midnight.”

Damn theatrics. Why did magicians always have to do this shit at midnight?

You must admit, it is atmospheric.

“Fine,” Cormac said. “Your place? You get it cleaned up good enough for company?”

“Let’s go where this all got started. The old mining claim. You know it.”

A place already saturated with old magic soaked into the ground. Not exactly neutral territory. But at least it was out in the open. “Fine,” he said.

Layne was talking fast, angry. “And no guns, Cormac. You don’t bring any guns, I won’t bring any. Just you and me. Got it? We’ll take care of this.”

“I don’t need guns, Layne.” He hung up.

I appreciate how you trust my abilities so much that you don’t even question if I’m capable of facing Anderson Layne in such a duel.

“Well, are you?”

I believe so. Yes.

She certainly sounded confident enough. He’d never doubted her.