Low Midnight (Kitty Norville Book 13) (3 page)

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.

*   *   *

B
ACK 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.

*   *   *

W
HEN
A
MELIA
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.

Chapter 3

C
ORMAC ARRIVED
in Manitou Springs at midday. After parking the Jeep on a side street, he walked to Soda Springs Park, a sheltered stretch of space along the creek in the middle of town. The bare winter branches and trunks of a row of trees and shrubbery gave a semblance of seclusion from the nearby road. Some modern hippie types with white-kid dreads and creative piercings gathered under a covered picnic area and gave him a passing glance.

I don’t remember any of this,
Amelia said.
Heavens, when did this all become so built over? The streets, the trees—it all seems wrong. We can’t possibly be in the right town, but I know we are, because I remember that view of the mountains, and that row of houses there. But wasn’t there a gazebo here, and not that ugly thing?

She meant the picnic shelter, clearly a product of modern parks-and-rec department utility. Her chatter was nervous. Amelia was tough. Ruthless, when it came to her own survival—after all, she’d managed to at least partly survive her own hanging and find a way to continue on, whatever the form. But Cormac could feel the trepidation she’d suppressed for over a century, now boiling up. He got ready to power through it.

A quick search online revealed that Amy Scanlon’s aunt, Judi Scanlon, ran a “supernatural” walking tour of Manitou Springs. Not just a ghost tour, but a tour that promised to highlight all of the town’s supernatural points of interest, from Native American sacred sites to the so-called magic surrounding its famous springs, and so on. Cormac signed them up as a way to gauge the woman before formally meeting her, rather than just walking up to her to tell her that her niece was dead, and could she please help decode the book.

Even in winter a good collection of tourists gathered for the tour, which met at the paved space at the park entrance. The relatively warm, sunny day had brought them out, in ski vests and hip knitted hats. A solitary guy in his leather jacket and sunglasses, Cormac looked out of place. He kept to the edges of the group and watched.

When a lone, older woman came up the sidewalk, wrapped in a colorful wool coat and striding like she was on a mission, Cormac guessed this was Judi Scanlon. Surveying the group, she offered a broad smile, rubbing her hands together, like she was scheming. “You all here for the tour? Great! I’m Judi, thanks for coming out on this chilly day. Let’s get started, all right?”

Cormac worried that she might be into icebreakers—demanding to know everyone’s names and where they were from. But she didn’t go there, just marched on, leading the group to the sidewalk. Judi was vibrant, one of those types who always seemed to be volunteering at libraries or walking in charity fundraisers. Stout without being fat, with short silver hair under a baseball cap, an oversized comfortable sweater and sensible sneakers.

We’re going to have to tell this kindly woman what happened to her niece,
Amelia said.

Cormac still hadn’t figured out exactly how that was going to happen. He was playing this by ear. He trailed along at the end of the group, arms crossed, listening to history he mostly already knew.

Tucked in at the base of Pikes Peak, Manitou Springs had been a tourist town for some hundred and thirty years. Its collection of mineral springs made it an early destination for rich health nuts and tuberculosis patients who’d traveled west in the late eighteen hundreds to take advantage of the dry climate. The wealthy founders of nearby Colorado Springs had vacation homes here. A collection of gingerbread Victorian mansions remained, but most of the businesses on the main drag had been converted to T-shirt shops, art galleries, and trendy restaurants.

Manitou was a storied city, starting out on the frontier of the Old West, with prospectors and explorers, even a few gunslingers and gamblers, along with the original Mexican settlers and Native Americans getting pushed out by the brand new world. Lots of travelers, which meant lots of history, lots of lore, lots of ghost stories. Judi seemed to know them all.

Amelia knew a number of them herself—some of these ghosts had been haunting buildings in the town for a long time. She murmured corrections to Judi’s commentary in the back of Cormac’s mind and added her own observations about what buildings had been there back in the day, which hadn’t, what had changed, and what no longer existed. Like any traveler coming back to any spot after a long absence, some of it was familiar, some of it utterly changed. Ten years, a hundred years, didn’t seem to make a difference.