Low Midnight

Chapter 2

AFTER GETTING out of prison, Cormac had moved into a rundown studio apartment off the Boulder Turnpike on the northwest side of Denver. Wasn’t much, but he didn’t need much. A place to sleep, a lock to keep out bad guys. It wasn’t like he had people over much. Or at all.

For a while he’d had a part-time job restocking at a warehouse, mostly to keep Porter happy and give the impression of being an upstanding citizen. He’d had to take time off when he broke his arm a few months ago, and he was long since past the time when he should think about going back. He didn’t need much money, but he needed some. His pre-prison savings wouldn’t last forever. He’d earned a surprising amount of cash doing some freelance detective work for Kitty and Ben, and for the Denver Police Department. The idea of going full time—essentially becoming a supernatural private investigator—had seemed ridiculous. But he was on the verge of thinking that maybe there really was a demand for this kind of thing, and maybe he really could make a living at it. It was just another kind of hunting, after all. He wasn’t exactly cut out for working for someone else.

Back home, very late at night now but he didn’t tend to sleep much anyway, he fired up his laptop. The machine was another gift from Ben, a “welcome home” after prison. Cormac had never had a computer in his life, had never needed one. Well, now he did, he guessed.

Amelia had insisted on putting magical protections on the laptop, a protective rune here and an arcane mark there. Cormac wasn’t sure electronics worked that way, that magic worked that way. It couldn’t hurt, Amelia had said. But it could, if it screwed up the computer’s inner workings.

We had electricity even in my day, Amelia had said grumpily. It’s all wires and power in the end. Making connections and letting in or keeping out energies that might be dangerous. Trust me.

His e-mail account had been strangely free of spam since he set it up.

The current problem: Amy Scanlon’s book of shadows. Amy Scanlon had been a possibly-not-entirely-sane—she believed herself to be a modern-day avatar of Zoroaster—but immensely talented magician. Kitty had inherited her book of shadows, her magician’s diary, stored on a USB drive. Kitty was sure the thing was packed with all kinds of information about Dux Bellorum and the Long Game. That was the real mystery Kitty was trying to solve: Dux Bellorum—Roman, Gaius Albinus, Mr. White, who knew what other names he went by—was a two-thousand-year-old vampire, and he had a plan, which seemed to be nearing its climax. Dux Bellorum—the leader of war. Cormac didn’t often get nervous, but this guy made him nervous. He’d faced him down exactly once, and Roman had clearly been using his long existence to become as adept as inhumanly possible at waging supernatural war. He had a plan to take over the world: the Long Game. Trouble was, nobody knew just how he was going to do it. He was gathering allies, bringing other vampire Masters around the world under his influence. Building an army, with him as its general. Somehow, Kitty had managed to put herself at the head of those trying to oppose him. Cormac had her back.

Now Kitty had this book that promised to offer answers to all the riddles, just like that. Too bad the whole thing was in code.

Since they didn’t know how to break the book’s code, they decided to crowdsource it. Put it up online and see what happened. Worst case scenario, someone would break the code and find enough magical secrets to take over the world. Kitty thought the risk was worth it. Cormac had taken on the responsibility of keeping track of the e-mails associated with the Web site. The first three or four weeks, nothing happened.

But then serious messages started coming in. Only a few at first. Now, they arrived a dozen or so a week. A couple of online forums had picked up on the book of shadows, posted links, and started discussions. Cormac followed those as well. Most of the discussions assumed the book was old, some Renaissance alchemist’s journal that had been scanned, digitized, and posted by an amateur scholar. Kitty hadn’t posted any identifying information about the author—she’d become protective of Amy Scanlon’s private life. These dabblers treated the book and its code as an interesting problem and nothing more.

Five e-mails this evening. Usually, they came from borderline nutjobs begging for the secret of the universe or declaring that they had the secret of the universe, and they wanted to meet in person or send their own five-thousand-page book of shadows. Today, one of them was different.

“Hi. Whoever this is. I don’t know the code, but I know the diagrams, some of the formulas—this looks like Amy Scanlon’s book. I was in her coven in Taos, New Mexico, about six years ago. She started traveling, but I haven’t heard from her in a couple of years. Do you know where she is?” The e-mail listed a name and phone number. A trusting person, to hand out that information.

Cormac didn’t know how to tell her that Scanlon was dead, killed at the center of a mystery they desperately needed to solve. He couldn’t imagine trying to explain it and be sympathetic at the same time. He forwarded the message to Kitty to let her answer it. She was the diplomat and camp counselor. He stuck to lurking on forums and searching for articles that might give him more pieces. Clues to the mystery they’d set themselves to solving.

I quite like the idea of supernatural investigation. We could be the magical Sherlock Holmes and Watson.

“Yeah, but which of us is which?”

Well, I think that’s rather obvious, don’t you?

He snorted.

Hunting for information wasn’t too far off from hunting game, in the end. You had to have a good idea of what you were looking for and the places you’d be most likely to find it. Keep an open mind and your vision wide—focus too hard on one thing, you miss stray movement at the edges of your perception. Most of all, you had to be patient.

When it came to Scanlon’s grimoire, though, he was losing patience.

“It’s time to go to Manitou,” he said.

Silence from Amelia.

Part of the book of shadows—the part Kitty kept offline—was biographical, uncoded, and mentioned one of Scanlon’s mentors, an aunt living an hour or so down the freeway from Denver.

“We’ve got no other leads.”

Still nothing. He sighed, wondering at the weird twists in his life that brought him to standing in his apartment, talking to himself.

“You want to talk about this in person?” he said.

After a moment she answered, If you like.

What the hell, it was probably time for bed anyway.

BACK IN prison, Cormac spent much of his time thinking about a meadow.

The place was a memory of a high mountain valley in Grand County where his father used to take him hunting. Mundane hunting for elk and deer with licenses and rifles and standard, non-silver bullets. Douglas Bennett’s main line of work had been as a guide on high-end outfitting trips, leading hunting parties into the backwoods of the Rockies to bag trophies. Sometimes when they were on their own, just him and his father, they’d camp in this meadow, a stretch filled with thick grasses, surrounded by lodgepole pines and a rushing stream cutting through the middle. Boil coffee on a butane camp stove before dawn, watch the sunrise as mist burned off the creek. Nothing smelled as clean as those mornings.

To keep himself from going entirely crazy in his ten-by-ten cell, he imagined himself back there. He’d lay on his metal cot and thin mattress and fall asleep by putting himself somewhere else. Over time, the place grew in detail, richness. He could see individual blades of grass blowing in a faint breeze, hear water rushing over rocks in the creek. Feel the sun on his face as he tipped his head back, watching white clouds scudding across an impossibly blue sky.

Habit kept bringing him back. Also, in a sense, this was where he’d met Amelia. This was how she’d found her way into his mind. This was where they talked.

In waking hours, she was a disembodied voice, a presence watching the world over his shoulder. When he closed his eyes, opened his mind, put himself in the place where he’d always felt most at home—safest—he saw her. She found him.

There was a boulder, a weathered outcrop of granite where he sat to watch the meadow and its valley. This was where she joined him. At first, back in prison, she’d approach cautiously and stand a few yards off, regarding him skeptically as if negotiating with a hired laborer.

Now, after all they’d been through, she sat in the grass nearby, legs folded to the side, her long skirt spread around her, and gazed out at the scene with him. Her clothing was antique, formal—dark gray skirt, white shirt with a high collar and touch of lace at the sleeves. Her black hair was wrapped in a tight bun, pinned to the back of her head, and she wore a flat, feathered hat. She was, would always be, a woman in her mid-twenties, straight and severe in demeanor, frowning as she studied the world with dark eyes.

She took a deep breath, sighed in satisfaction, and he had to remind himself that she wasn’t exactly alive. Here, she spoke, more than just a voice. She had expression, gestures, shrugs and frowns. She was almost real.

“We’re going, you know. We have to go,” he said.

“I know.” She didn’t seem agitated or upset about it, here. She sat calmly, gazing out.

“You ready for this?” he asked.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” She wouldn’t look at him. Why would she, with a view like this? The world was in winter, but the meadow here was bright, warm summer.

“Manitou is where it happened. Where that girl was murdered, where they arrested you.”

“I don’t remember discussing this with you.”

Memories bled between them in both directions. She knew why this valley was so important, she knew what had happened to his father. And he knew what had happened to her. “It was in that old newspaper story.”

Her voice went soft. “Ah yes. Of course.”

“So. Are you ready?”

She didn’t answer right away, not even in a righteous huff to disguise whatever she actually felt. Ultimately, what she felt didn’t matter—he had the body, he needed to go to Manitou Springs despite her bad memories of the place, so he’d go. But she could make things difficult if she wanted to, so he had to look her in the eyes, to ask.

“I’ll be fine,” she said finally, with determination, glancing at him over her shoulder. “It happened a hundred years ago. More than a hundred years ago. It’s done with.” She had drawn her knees up and sat hugging them to her chest, a strangely childlike gesture.

They’d find out soon enough how she really felt.

WHEN AMELIA was a little girl, she had wanted to see fairies so very badly. She spent hours, days, in a glen by a fishpond on the family’s estate, outside the village of Sevenoaks, setting out bread crumbs and bowls of milk, hanging colored ribbons and silver bells, anything that might entice the creatures from their leafy bowers where she imagined them hiding, shy and fearful. The perch in the pond and finches in the undergrowth got most of the bread crumbs, and the only creatures she ever saw hiding there were several generations of a family of mice, living and breeding in their dens under the tree roots. But there’d been magic in that place, she’d felt it, a spark bubbling up from the spring that fed the pond, an otherworldliness in the green of the moss covering the stones. She’d started reading about Grail lore then, wondering if her pond was the Chalice Well, or perhaps a chalice well, and that had led her to the whole Arthurian mythos, far beyond the Tennyson she got from her governess, and she learned about the spirit of the land and ley lines. She’d found out about the Uffington White Horse carved out of a hillside in Oxfordshire and begged her parents for an outing there, which they accomplished when she was sixteen. She speculated wildly about its origins, its no-doubt magical purpose, and what great ritual or spell had been wrought on the location. Predictably, her parents and brother suggested she ought to direct her attention and energies toward more ladylike pursuits, most importantly her inevitable marriage. Her childish interest in magic and fairies and the wights living in old Celtic hill forts might have been amusing when she was a girl in braids and pinafores. But she would soon be a lady, they said. That was the beginning of all the mess that followed.

She read every moment she could, books that her tutors would never have approved, clandestine pamphlets and penny dreadfuls about the Golden Dawn and Freemasonry and alchemical lore. Most of it was bunk, but she picked out the threads that felt true. When she was eighteen, she worked her first real spell, a simple charm to make a length of thread impossible to cut. It worked. So did the spell to uncharm the thread. She felt powerful. With such magic she could bind the world.

That was when she decided she would not marry, because she could not imagine any husband in the world allowing his wife to study and work magic, and she could not imagine keeping such a thing secret from the person she was meant to spend her life with. Never mind how she would hide such a thing from children. She was not interested in children. Therefore, no marriage for her. Of course, this was the precise moment that Arthur Pembroke appeared to court her. She could still see him standing in her father’s parlor, gaping in astonishment that she had just told him no.

Objectively, she could observe that he was considered a very good catch at the time. In hindsight, especially considering what happened to her just a few years later, she could admit that her life with him most likely would not have been horrible. She’d looked for him, when Cormac got out of prison and had access to the resources. Pembroke had found a different girl to marry, had continued on in his family’s textile export business. Then he’d got a commission and commanded a regiment in World War I. He’d been killed at the Somme. She’d have been widowed at forty, undoubtedly with children to care for, in a precarious financial situation as the war had disrupted trade. Just as his wife had been. It all seemed very sad to Amelia.

She had missed so much, cloistered with no body and little awareness for that hundred years. It might have all gone differently, if she’d actually seen fairies in the long-ago glen. If she had, she might have stopped looking for magic.

She had been born a hundred years too early. Her soul should have been patient, so she could be born into a world where she could choose not to marry, not to have children, and no one would think it strange. She would not have been so outcast.

Now, she was simply out of place, out of step, bodiless, and with a broken soul that lived only because Cormac had not yet learned how to eject her entirely. He would grow strong enough to do so, someday. He would grow tired of playing host. With the magic they practiced, she was teaching him the means by which he could dispel her, if he chose. Then she would truly die.

She still wasn’t ready to die. All this time, all this strangeness, she still wanted to live. She must make herself useful to Cormac. She must make herself necessary, so that he would not think of rejecting her. Cormac, the man who prided himself on his loneliness. He didn’t need anyone.