Low Midnight by Carrie Vaughn
Well, yes, certainly. Etymologically, the word was doomed, considering so few of the women called spinsters actually spun wool anymore. So what do people call unmarried adult women now?
Um. Women, he said.
Ah.
He turned over the story Judi and Frida had told him. The old mystery intrigued him in spite of himself, but the magic was less interesting than the personalities involved. The egos. That’s all it was in the end, clashing egos, and he was having trouble putting himself in that situation. There was a point where the only thing you were defending was your pride. He saw this kind of fight in prison all the time. Guys might call it fighting for dominance, to be top of the pecking order or to show some other asshole his place. But really, it was pride and not wanting to feel like anybody got the better of you.
Cormac figured out that he could walk away from those fights and his pride would survive just fine. He took care of his own pride, that wasn’t anybody else’s call. The petty fights and gang affiliations went on around him, and he didn’t give a fuck. Everybody knew it, too. He bashed just enough heads to convince everyone to leave him alone. And they did.
But Kuzniak and Crane—two monumental egos, and what exactly had happened there at the end?
As of now, Cormac officially had too many mysteries to deal with. Too many questions needing answers. Hard to know where to start.
One book at a time. One call, one journey, one piece of the puzzle.
She was right. He started with the answer he could get right now, tucking his hands-free over his ear and making a call.
Kitty answered. “Hi. How’d it go?”
“How’d what go?”
“You said you were going to Manitou; I assume you’re calling to tell me how it went. You find anything out?”
It hadn’t occurred to him to call out of the blue to tell her how the meeting went. Mostly because he still didn’t know how it was going to turn out. “No, not exactly. But I have a favor to ask.” One in what was turning into a long chain of favors.
“Oh yeah?” What did it mean, that she actually sounded pleased at the prospect?
“Amy Scanlon’s aunt wants to meet you. She wants to talk to the last person to see Amy alive.”
A hesitation. “That’s rough. I’m not sure I can tell her anything useful.”
“I think she’s just looking for a connection. The news about Amy seemed to hit pretty hard.”
Kitty had a good heart. A big heart. If she thought she could help, she couldn’t not help. That instinct had kept her as the alpha of the Denver werewolf pack the last several years. He felt like he was taking advantage.
“I’ll talk to her,” she said. “I’m happy talking to her. And can I just say I told you, you should have let me come along from the start.” She was smiling. Poking at him. He ignored her.
“We also need to talk about the book of shadows. Amy’s aunt says she can interpret the code, and I think I believe her.” I believe her, Amelia added. “We’re pretty sure she’s telling the truth. But she wants something in return.”
“That’s kind of fairy tale. What is it, you have to guess her real name or you have to give her your firstborn?”
That … he never knew how to respond to her jokes.
“She wants me to solve a hundred-year-old murder.”
“That sounds like … fun? Do you have a chance of actually solving it?”
“I’m mostly trying to decide if it’ll be worth it. You think we can figure out the book of shadows without her help?”
“Her help would make it a lot easier. If she can help. Might not hurt to dig a little, just to see. I’m kind of curious.”
“Then I’ll start digging. See where it goes.”
“Call me if there’s anything else I can do.”
“Yeah, will do.” He clicked off, and boggled yet again at the reality of his current situation: he had backup. He was calling people to ask for help. And they were willing to give it, gratis. He’d opened himself up to Amelia, and he’d had to open himself to the rest of the world. His instinct was to shut it all back down. Flee to the hills, go back to what he knew.
Too late for that, I think.
That wasn’t what bothered Cormac. Getting comfortable with it all—that was the weird part.
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’
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.
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 ha
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.