Low Midnight

Chapter 6

KITTY FREED up her schedule the very next day and rode with Cormac down to Manitou Springs. She was uncharacteristically quiet during the trip, spending most of the time fidgeting, picking at her fingernails. Remembering, he expected. The disaster that had killed Amy Scanlon hadn’t been all that long ago. Kitty’s gaze had turned inward.

He found parking a block away and led her to the souvenir shop’s front.

“This is it, huh?” she said, looking up at the MANITOU WISHING WELL sign overhead, arms crossed. Her hair was up in a sloppy ponytail, fringes of it hanging down around her ears and tanned cheeks. “Seems so ordinary. You say it’s a couple of witchy types?”

“Something like that. Ready for this?”

She sighed. “Yeah.”

A bell on the door rattled as they went inside. He watched her reaction—her nose flared, taking in scents, and she tilted her head and examined the space. Lupine movements, slightly odd if he hadn’t been used to them by now.

“I suddenly want to buy everyone I know a T-shirt,” she murmured, looking around at the collection, Colorado flags on pastels, lots of pictures of deer and columbine blooms. She gave a wry smile to one that showed a romanticized picture of a howling wolf, along with the words COLORFUL COLORADO. Wild wolves hadn’t lived in the state for decades.

“I think they’ve got a spell on the place for that,” he said.

Her brow furrowed. “Really? Nice.”

The cat, Esther, was sitting on the glass counter again. When it saw Kitty, it arched its back, hissed loud enough to echo, then spun and dashed away. Kitty stared after it, blinking.

“Was that a cat? A hairless cat?” she said. “A hairless cat that evidently hates me?”

“She’s a good judge of character,” Frida said, emerging from the back room. She leaned both hands on the glass and nodded at him confrontationally. “You’re a man with two auras and now you bring me a werewolf?”

Cormac hadn’t remembered mentioning that about Kitty; of course, Frida could just see it.

“Hi,” Kitty said, waving a hand. “Nice to meet you, too.”

“Judi wanted to talk to her,” Cormac said, then stepped out of the way.

“Who is it?” Judi asked, coming from the back of the store, feather duster in hand. “Wait a minute, I recognize you—aren’t you the werewolf who shape-shifted on TV?”

Kitty turned to him. “See? We already know what the first line of my obituary is going to say.”

He wished she wouldn’t joke about obituaries.

When she looked back at the women, her smile was bright and amiable. The radio personality coming to the fore, a useful mask for situations like this. “I’m Kitty Norville. Cormac said you wanted to talk to me about Amy.”

Both women seemed to deflate. Like they hadn’t believed he would really bring Kitty to talk to them. She was the eyewitness, tangible proof that Judi’s niece was well and truly gone.

“I’ll go make some tea,” Frida said softly. She glanced at Kitty, and her gaze fell. Frida squeezed Judi’s hand as she passed by.

“We have some chairs, if you’d like to sit down.” Judi led them toward the back of the shop, near the crystals and bookshelves, where she arranged a couple of folding chairs that had been tucked to the side. Kitty took the offered seat, and Judi sat across from her, but not too close—enough to read her face, not close enough to touch.

Cormac shook his head at a third chair and remained standing nearby, listening in but looking elsewhere. Wasn’t his conversation, but he felt like he was standing guard.

Judi started: “He says you were with Amy when she died.” Not a question, almost an accusation.

Kitty’s smile was comforting, sad. “Not exactly. She was still alive when I left her. But we were in a cave, part of an old defunct mine up near Leadville. It collapsed while she was still inside. She … she knew she wasn’t going to make it.”

Kitty was very calm during this explanation. Cormac and Ben had arrived on the scene shortly after the cave-in—the noise of it, the rumble of a minor earthquake shuddering along the hillside, had drawn them to the location. She’d texted Ben, left a message with a GPS tag he’d been able to track, but the mine collapse had guided them the last hundred yards. Kitty had been missing for a week, and she’d looked like the survivor of some horror movie, coated with grime, torn clothes hanging off her, a wild look in her eyes. A starved wolf breaking out of a trap.

Hard to believe this was the same person. He’d been holding a rifle at the time, and a small corner of his mind had wondered if he’d have to shoot at her. When Ben arrived, she’d fallen into his arms, one of those beautiful scenes of reunion and love. He’d stepped aside, like usual.

Frida arrived with mugs of tea, gave one to Judi first, and Kitty accepted the next. She didn’t offer one to Cormac, and that was fine.

“She caused the cave-in. I don’t know exactly everything that happened, but there was a lot of magic involved. She and the people she was with were working a very powerful ritual. I was there because they kidnapped me, they needed a werewolf queen in order to work the spell—” She shook her head, as if she still hadn’t made sense of it. “They opened a door, and a demon stepped through. Amy tried to banish it, but couldn’t, so she brought down the cave to close the doorway on the thing. She didn’t make it out, but two of us did. She saved our lives.”

Judi gripped her mug and appeared dazed, as if she had just been informed about the death. “When I taught her, it was all charms, simple spells, nature magic. Nothing that would collapse a cave. What happened to her? These people she was with, this ritual—she knew better than to bother with anything that might summon a demon. What was she trying to do?”

“She was trying to save the world,” Kitty said, straightforward, without irony. “She was kind of nuts. But she was brave.” She took a sip of her tea, hiding her expression.

Cormac had a feeling Kitty was being kind, painting the girl in a better light than Cormac—or anyone else—would have. Probably for the best. Maybe her family would feel better remembering her as a hero. Didn’t hurt anything.

Even Amelia was getting emotional. I see so much of myself in Amy Scanlon, which makes no sense. It shouldn’t be possible in a woman born in this era instead of mine. She had so many freedoms, so many opportunities … to have what she did and still yearn for more …

You should talk to Kitty, he told her. Get a crash course in feminism. She’d tell you there’s still plenty to yearn for.

I’m trying to decide … can I reasonably speculate about what Amy might have been thinking, simply based on my perception of our similarities? Or am I deluding myself that we had anything in common at all?

They’d just add it to the list of maybes.

“We think a lot of what she did was coded in her book of shadows,” Kitty said, kindly but still leading in a subtle way Cormac never would have been able to manage. “I would love to know what she was thinking, before she got to where she ended up.”

Judi shook a thought away and said, “So would I. She went to places I never thought of going. Never wanted to go. I’m not even sure what she was looking for.”

Kitty wasn’t a trained counselor, but she’d had plenty of practice playing amateur therapist on her radio show, and she obviously pulled those skills out now. “I’ve got her journal, her book of shadows. She told me to keep it, to use it. But we need the code to be able to do that. If you can help us with that, we’ll give you the book, you can find out for yourself what she—”

“Oh, but I don’t want that kind of magic,” Judi said, smiling sadly. “And I must say I’m suspicious of you, that you do want it.”

Kitty ducked her gaze, hiding amusement. “So you give Cormac a test, hand him this mystery and tell him to solve it, to see if he’s worthy?”

“Is he?” Frida said bluntly, tipping her head at Cormac.

Cormac himself kind of wondered what Kitty was going to say to that.

She looked up at him, lips curled. “He does all right.”

Then it was Kitty and Cormac looking back at the two of them. Kitty’s brown-eyed gaze was so sympathetic, how could anyone tell her no?

The bell on the door rang, a customer entering, and Frida went to the cash register to help. The hairless cat reappeared, jumping on the counter to rub against the woman.

“You handed me a mystery,” Cormac said. “I’m curious enough I’ll take a look at it and let you know what I come up with, whether or not you want to help us with Amy’s book. You can decide that later. How does that sound?”

Judi eased herself off the chair, collected Kitty’s empty mug. “How can I argue with that?”

Kitty pulled a business card from her pocket. “Here’s my number. If you want to talk any more about Amy, just call, any time.”

Nodding, Judi accepted the card.

Then the meeting was over, and he and Kitty were back outside, walking on the sidewalk in the sunlight.

“Well,” Kitty said. “Goodwill won, I think.”

“So. You think she can help? Or is she stringing me along?”

Mouth pursed, she thought a moment. “They just … Judi at least has a memory of Amy that doesn’t match up with the Amy I knew. That has to be hard. They want to be careful, I think. Neither one of them made my hackles twitch, if that helps. Well, that cat did. Yeesh. Don’t trust that cat, okay?”

It was as good a vote of confidence as he was likely to get.