Low Midnight

Chapter 7

FROM WHAT little the two women had given him, Cormac had a surprising amount of information to go on: the names of the people involved, newspaper articles about the event, the location where the so-called wizards’ duel had taken place. And Amelia’s memories.

I never met Augustus Crane, but I heard about him. She’s right, Manitou Springs was filled with ghost hunters and Spiritualists back then. Hobbyists, mostly. Well-to-do folk looking for a thrill, trying to be daring. Crane was a bit more serious—he was a mentor to many who still mourned his loss when I arrived in the area. Some claimed his ghost haunted the bit of land where he’d died. People would speak of Crane’s rival without ever mentioning his name. This must be Milo Kuzniak. For my part, the brand of magic practiced by him and his followers was too public and full of artifice for me to pay much mind. Too many frauds manipulating the gullible. I had other interests.

Amelia had never been interested in showing off; she was interested in power. She didn’t care what others thought of her. She wanted to know how magic worked. All of it.

One of the old newspaper archives included a photo of Crane; he looked exactly the way Cormac imagined a late nineteenth-century upper-class gentleman and dabbler in magic would look like, standing tall in front of a gazebo, dressed in a crisp pale suit and striped tie, clean shaven, hat on his head, pocket watch visible. He had a smug assurance about him, and didn’t smile. The caption in the newspaper clipping said this had been taken at a garden party held by one of the local families.

There were no pictures of Milo Kuzniak. He seemed to have been most interested in getting rich. Made him an easy guy to figure out.

Cormac decided to start the hunt where Milo Kuzniak made his old mining claim, the same place he’d faced off with and killed Augustus Crane.

A day of digging in records and checking topographic maps confirmed the location.

Map and GPS reader in hand, he parked his Jeep in a turnoff on one of the dirt roads leading into the hills from Highway 24. The vehicle looked way more at home here than it did in any parking lot. It had ten years of mud caking the wheel wells; sun had faded the brown to tan. The windshield had a dozen star-shaped dings in it, the sides had a couple of noticeable dents and a few angry scratches in the paint. One set of scratches, three horizontal lines running across the hard top then down the side, came from a werewolf that had jumped on and slid off. Battle scars. The Jeep suited him.

He started walking. Winter was winding down; it had been a couple of weeks since the last snow, which had mostly melted away. A few drifts and pockets of packed snow remained in the shadows of rocks, in dirt-rimmed depressions. A cold breeze blew, and he was happy to wear his jacket.

East of here, red sandstone slabs tipped vertical, creating windblown formations like the ones found in Garden of the Gods. The further west you got, the further into the mountains, granite replaced sandstone. Scrub oak and pine forests grew scattered over a dry landscape, cut through with gullies and rock outcroppings. Early prospectors found flakes and nuggets of gold and silver just washing out of these hills. Now, the remaining gold ore lay in veins thousands of feet underground and mining was an industrial operation. Out by Cripple Creek, mining companies were taking off entire mountaintops to get to the gold.

There were easier ways to make a living.

Amazingly, this particular area was still wild. A dozen miles or so northwest of the town, it had been incorporated into the Pike National Forest and left alone, too rocky and inaccessible to easily develop. Cormac suspected this was part of what had drawn Milo here. There hadn’t been any roads up here a hundred years ago, and there weren’t any now. Someone would have needed a burro and a lot of patience to get anything more than themselves to the sloping, precarious claim.

The hillside was steep; Cormac braced on trees and boulders as he made his way up, and each step sent a rain of loose dirt and pebbles sliding down. A path did wind its way through here, a paler strip along in the ground. Hikers and hunters might have frequented the spot. Kids looking for a place to get drunk and make out. This might have been the same burro trail Milo had followed on his way to his claim, worn into the rock.

The trail leveled off to a small plateau, maybe fifty yards across, bound by a narrow ridge on one side, sloping down into the next valley on the other. He checked the GPS and confirmed, this was it. The pines here were small, gnarled by the wind, which must have blown pretty much constantly. A handful of birds, chickadees it sounded like, flitted in a stand of scrub oak. Blowing grit rattled against his sunglasses.

Surely anything he might have left here will be long gone, Amelia observed.

Cormac took a slow walk around the site anyway, tipping up rocks with his boots, checking under trees for anything out of place. Didn’t even find a broken beer bottle or weather-faded can, which meant nobody came up here much. At least, nobody stopped for long if they did. He wondered if bringing a metal detector up here would uncover anything.

He took a moment to stand still, listening. Waiting for that prickling on the back of his neck that told him something strange was close by, a feeling of warning that had as much to do with instinct as anything supernatural.

Let’s scry a bit, see if anything turns up.

Since meeting Amelia and leaving prison, he’d taken to carrying a collection of items in his pockets. String, a candle stub, a packet of salt, a few herbs like sage and rowan. A piece of chalk, a bit of iron, a quartz crystal. The most basic tools of spell casting. He could work just about any kind of basic magic with these items. Rather, Amelia could work magic, using his body to manipulate the items, to power the spells. She’d been able to use her magic to preserve her soul, but without a body, she couldn’t use what she’d learned.

Over time, Cormac had come to see the usefulness of Amelia’s brand of magic. Made up a little for losing his guns—though as he sometimes joked at Ben, it wasn’t having guns that was strictly illegal for a convicted felon like him; it was getting caught with them. Ben didn’t think that was funny.

This is quite simple, really. It won’t tell us details, but it will tell us if this location has a strong magical presence or not. This might indicate if Kuzniak used magic to kill Crane.

“Let’s get to it then.”

First, face east. Then we’ll need a small hole in the ground—

He found east by the sun, which was edging past noon to the western hills, then found a sheltered space where he dug a divot in the ground using his boot heel.

We need kindling for a fire, and a match—

Using his pocket knife, he cut a twig and its lingering dried-up leaves from a scrub oak and crumbled the vegetation into the hole. Early discussions between them established that a disposable lighter worked just as well as a match. Better, even, though it might not have been as elegant and mysterious. Amelia was still getting used to the wondrous modern technology.

In the end, he could only do so much, following the easy directions she gave him. He could do the prep work, the hard labor. But just about every spell had a moment where timing and precision came into the mix. A deeper knowledge, the kind of thing Amelia had spent her life studying, and Cormac hadn’t. So he gave himself over to Amelia.

In that moment, he didn’t have control of his body. He was there looking through his eyes, he could feel his thumb resting on the lighter, felt the sun’s heat on the back of his neck, but Amelia was doing the moving. Wasn’t quite an out-of-body experience. More like sitting in the passenger seat when you didn’t know if the person next to you could really drive. He’d learned to sit back calmly, resting in the back of his own mind so he didn’t panic and freeze up.

Kitty told him once that he’d fallen asleep, but Amelia hadn’t, and talked in a dreamlike state. He didn’t remember that. He wouldn’t say that he was afraid she’d up and take him over entirely one of these days, waiting until he fell asleep and then going for some walk he wouldn’t appreciate. But nervous wasn’t quite afraid, was it?

I wouldn’t do that, she commented. When you sleep, I sleep. I was talking in your sleep, that time.

That didn’t even make sense.

She held up the lighter and a length of red string, then whispered an incantation with his voice, something in a language he didn’t know, probably Latin but knowing Amelia it could have been anything. She repeated the incantation twice more, set the string on fire, and dropped it in the makeshift cauldron filled with leaves.

The vegetation instantly caught and flared in a foot-high burst of flame that made Cormac sit back. In a moment, the leaves were nothing but ashes, and the edges of the shallow dish in the soil were scorched.

Amelia gave a mental shiver that might have been a deep sigh. “That’s good enough, I think.”

It felt like an extra long blink, a brief moment of vertigo, and she fell into the back of his mind. He was at the fore, right where he belonged, without even thinking of it, like nothing had happened. Back in control of his body, Cormac brushed himself off and looked around to make sure they hadn’t set anything on fire.

“I take it that’s a positive,” he murmured.

Oh, I would very much say so.

A noise—footsteps—caught Cormac’s ear, and a male voice shouted at them from the head of the trail. “Hey, you! You there! Stand up! Keep your hands up!”

He looked over his shoulder to see a man standing some thirty yards away, holding a rifle pointed at him.