Low Midnight

  Following Amelia’s instructions on what to pack, he loaded up the Jeep and headed out at dusk.

  The nocturnal lifestyle he’d been leading lately felt familiar, even comforting. This was what he’d done for years: stay in for most of the day and earn his living at night. Driving south, watching the sun set over the mountains—he’d done this all before. Times like this, he felt like he was in the right place, that he fit. He was calm.

  He hiked for a time, double-checked the GPS and cross-referenced with some historical maps he’d researched. In this creek valley, a dozen claims had been staked and four of them had turned into working gold mines. One of those had produced right up into the 1970s. They hadn’t been abandoned because they were paid out. Rather, the effort to get what ore remained—and transport it, process it, refine it, and so on—was no longer cost effective. There ought to be gold here still, and if it could be gotten with magic, they’d get it.

  Here. This is a good spot. Amelia stopped him in a flattened clearing, south-facing and clear of snow. The moonlight was faint, and he used a flashlight to see by. He set down her pack of gear and waited for her instructions.

  She had what she called a cauldron. It was really a small cast-iron pot, a highly portable fire pit maybe eight inches across. His dad might have used something like this to cook supper Dutch-oven style over a fire. It was a convenient way to create light and heat for rituals. Charcoal briquettes lined the bottom of it for fuel. He set this up, lit the charcoal, got it burning. She set up another little dish with a few ingredients and supplies, including a gold band he’d picked up at a pawn shop.

  Like seeks like, she explained. You must start with some gold in order to call gold to you.

  It made a weird kind of sense. The rest of the spell she’d found in Kuzniak’s notebook she wasn’t so sure about.

  All right. To begin, we must strip. Divest yourself of your clothing, please.

  Times like this he wished she was standing in front of him so he could glare at her. “You know it’s the middle of winter. It’s fucking cold out here.”

  I assure you, there’s a very good reason for it. A ritual like this must begin with a cleansing, to shed any negative energies and ill feeling.

  “Yeah? You want to talk about ill feeling, do you?”

  It isn’t so terribly cold, is it?

  It was. His balls were very certain it was. “You haven’t been cold in a hundred years, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  You’re not scared, are you?

  “No. But I’m as pure as I’m ever going to get, with or without my clothes.”

  Please, Cormac. Only for a few minutes …

  “I suppose I can tell myself you like seeing me naked.”

  She had nothing to say to that, which made him smirk. If she’d had a body, he’d bet she’d be blushing. He shrugged off his jacket, peeled off his shirt. Boots, jeans, boxers. And yes, it was cold. He didn’t mind so much in his clothes, but he sure felt it now in the sensitive bits. He was going to get her for this.…

  “I hope you’re feeling this,” he muttered.

  It is … rather unpleasant.

  “Let’s get this over with.”

  He gathered that in other circumstances this might involve a full-on bath, but since there were no enchanted springs nearby, they were left using a washcloth and bottle of water. Damp cloth on the skin, freezing air—not a good combination, and she wouldn’t let him hurry.

  Finally, she deemed them pure enough in body and intentions to proceed, and he quickly slipped back into his clothes, leaving the jacket aside for now.

  The spell she’d concocted was based on sympathies, she explained. Certain herbs had a connection to the earth, certain stones or crystals aligned certain energies, all of which would call to the gold in the earth. She thought the spell was supposed to turn it liquid, and it would bubble to the surface, where it would collect in pools they could simply gather up. It would be impressive, if it worked.

  Guided by her instructions, he drew a circle in powdered chalk. Drew the appropriate symbols at the cardinal points, all familiar actions. Placed the gold ring at the center of the circle. The fire in the iron pot was burning low but steadily. A sequence of dried herbs tossed on the coals produced a heady incense. Here in the dark, in a halo of orange light, Amelia murmuring in the back of his head, pungent smoke surrounding him, he did feel as if he slipped out of the world and into a sideways one, where anything could happen. The earth under him might crack open, spirits might fly down from heaven.

  Shaking his head, he woke himself from whatever trance was weaving through him.

  There, she murmured, which meant … was it done?

  They waited.

  The coals burned down; the chill returned to their circle of warmth. Nothing else happened, no cracks breaking in the soil, no veins of ore rising to the surface, no liquid threads pooling. They were both patient. Cormac sat still until he started shivering and had to go put on his jacket.

  I’m not entirely sure what to expect, Amelia said, sounding perplexed. I should try again, make adjustments. Hope for the best.

  This was going to be a long night.

  Chapter 20

  AMELIA REMEMBERED the very last time she spoke with her brother. With anyone in her family, really. She had already told her mother and father she wanted to leave. To travel in order to pursue her education was what she’d told them, with a safe-sounding plan to go to Paris and stay with respectable friends, never mind that she’d almost immediately leave for less safe and less respectable destinations around the world. This was perhaps not her wisest course of action—her mother still broke into uncontrollable weeping whenever anyone mentioned Arthur Pembroke, whom Amelia had so indecorously refused. Refusing a good offer of marriage was one thing. Wishing to travel was ever so much worse, apparently. But she’d told them, set them off weeping again. At least, her mother wept and her father glared at her, his soft face growing more florid by the second.

  They demanded that she speak with James. She gathered he’d been ordered to “knock some sense into the silly girl.” Figuratively, of course, but the level of outrage she’d generated might indicate otherwise.

  He arrived later that afternoon by carriage. She was in the garden reading a book and had to be summoned to the drawing room, which seemed to infuriate him, as if she should have been waiting for him, dutiful and quiet, hands folded in her lap. As if she should spend her whole life waiting, never speaking a word.

  She arrived in the drawing room. He was pacing back and forth before the fireplace, agitated, like a character out of an Austen novel. She stood, trying to think of what to say. To speak exactly the right words so he would understand. Her mind was a blank.

  “Are you insane? Really, Amelia. Are you utterly out of your mind?” He turned on her with a look he might give a hound with no house training. He was a handsome man, tall and fit, very well dressed by a London tailor, hair and mustache trimmed by his well-trained valet.

  “I hadn’t thought so,” she said softly. “I simply don’t think I can stay here with you all giving me that look.” She felt smaller and smaller, regressing in time and space, until she might have been a child again. “My plans are not so very strange—”

  “And what exactly do you imagine people will think of us? How will your plans reflect on the family, do you think?”

  Truthfully, she didn’t care. The family could take care of itself. It didn’t need her. She was tired of this, though. Tired of James, tired of all the shouting and the tears, tired of disappointing everyone so thoroughly. She wanted to be gone. James could rant all he wanted, she put her mind elsewhere, repeating to herself the Latin names of plants with medicinal properties. Salix alba, Stachys byzantina …

  “Amelia!” His shout echoed.

  Startled, she flinched and looked up at him. He’d crossed the room to stand directly in front of her. She was too surprised to back away.

  “What in God’s na
me do you want!” He said it as a curse, not a question, but she answered anyway.

  “I want to find fairies.”

  She’d never said it out loud before. It sounded stark, desperate, childish. Nevertheless, it was as true as it had ever been. Hands clasped tightly together, a heavy lump in her belly, she waited for his response.

  He laughed. If he had done anything else, said any words at all, she might have stayed. If they could have had any conversation at all, if he had asked for explanation, if he had listened—she might have stayed. But he laughed.

  She turned and left the room. Her one bag was already packed, she had saved a good deal of cash, and in the future she would have access through banks to her inheritance, which came through one of her grandmothers and the rest of the family could not touch. It was her one stroke of luck. She would walk all the way to the village to catch the train. She would never return.

  But she did, so many years later, in such an altered form. She wished she could talk to James just one more time. She wished he would say something to her without shouting.

  Now, she had Cormac, who never shouted. More than that, he listened. She could weep.

  * * *

  A COUPLE of hours before dawn, she gave up. Cormac collected what was left of the tools and materials and crawled into the Jeep to put his head back and catch an hour or two of sleep.

  Amelia didn’t want to sleep. Perhaps if we perform the spell on the night of a full moon—

  He shook his head. “You know I don’t like to spend full moon nights running all over hell and back.”

  Surely Kitty and Ben can do without you for one night.

  The couple didn’t know it, but Cormac liked to stay close to town on full moon nights, when their wolf sides took charge, forcing them to shape-shift. They usually went with their pack into the mountains or out east into the remote plains, far away from civilization and trouble. They’d been doing it long enough, they could handle themselves just fine. They’d been just fine without him when he was in prison. But now that he was out, Cormac liked to be within easy reach. They’d never called for help. Not yet. But just in case. “No.”

  Then we find someplace near Denver with gold in the rocks. This shouldn’t be hard.

  “Are you sure it’s even possible?” She didn’t say anything, which meant she had doubts. “You know that’s the trouble those old alchemists had—if you don’t know something’s impossible, you’ll keep trying until you kill yourself.”

  I will not kill myself. I haven’t yet. Cormac, come talk to me in person. So to speak.

  This was the woman who had survived her own execution. Cormac shouldn’t even try arguing with her. He let his mind fall into their shared space, the high country meadow.

  Here, the sun was setting, casting a late-day glow over the valley, the pattern of clouds and light much like the sunset they had watched the previous evening. The sight gave him a jolt, throwing his sense of time off balance. Time of day, weather—it seemed arbitrary here, when it shouldn’t, because he decided what happened here. Didn’t he?

  “The sunset last night,” Amelia said. “You were calm. You latched onto the sense of calm.”

  He was sitting on his usual rock; she was standing nearby, looking into the western sky. He guessed she was right. Dealing with his mental state would be easier if he didn’t feel like his brain was working all by itself so much of the time.

  “I’d be even more calm if you’d let me sleep.”

  She came toward him, eyes lit with enthusiasm. “So many variables are involved in a spell like this, it could take months to test them all. Years, even. Performing the spell at midnight locally is a safe choice, of course. But does the phase of the moon play a part, or the time of the year? Both? This might be a spell that can only be performed once in decades, if an alignment of the phase of the moon and planets and one of the solstices or equinoxes is a factor—”

  “I don’t want to spend years doing this.”

  “Well no, of course not, since we don’t even know if this spell is possible. I’m merely reviewing possibilities. The more I review them, the more I think it can’t work. It’s just as you say, the old alchemy problem, which as it turned out didn’t need magic to solve, but modern chemical manipulation. Kuzniak wrote down plenty of speculation, but I gather he did very little practical testing. It’s less an idea than it is a rumor.”

  “Question is,” Cormac said, “does Layne know it doesn’t work? Layne knows I wanted that book—I’m sure he thinks I’m going to go after the gold. Like he did, like Kuzniak did. Why else would I want it?”

  “Does that matter?”

  “Yeah. It means he isn’t going to leave me alone.”

  “Cormac, I’d like to try one more thing, if you agree to it. I’d like to send a message.”

  “What message? To who?”

  “To the person who wrote to us about Amy Scanlon,” she said, carefully, as if she expected an argument.

  Interesting idea. If this person knew about Amy, he knew about magic. It was a long shot, but Cormac was happy enough to light that fuse to see what happened.

  Back in the world, eyes open, Amelia typed out the e-mail. “If you know of Amy Scanlon, then you must know something of magic. Perhaps even a great deal. If this is so, I’d like to get your opinion on a situation I’ve encountered. I have information on the possibility of a spell that produces gold, presumably by pulling it directly from the rock without the effort of mining it. It seems to be a sympathetic-based ritual with earth-element components designed to draw forth the desired effect—” and so on.

  Her discussion of magic made it sound scientific rather than mystical. She didn’t have any agenda besides just figuring this stuff out, which meant she didn’t need to dress it up in mysticism to impress anyone. She didn’t write what she’d learned in any kind of code, because she wasn’t competing with anyone. Her curiosity was fierce and genuine.

  Sometimes, Cormac thought about the kind of magician he might have ended up with living inside his head. Someone determined to control absolutely, who might have broken him without thinking twice. Amelia had tried to break her way in, until she found that negotiating worked better. But say it had been Roman whose spirit was locked in the stones of the prison—Cormac might not have survived. Or worse, he might have survived but been trapped, overcome, crushed by magic and intention, fighting a constant battle just to maintain his self. His whole life co-opted. Would anyone—Ben, Kitty—even have noticed?

  Better not to think of it.

  She finished writing, read it half a dozen times, still wasn’t fully satisfied but he convinced her it was good enough, so he sent it. Then spent a full minute staring at the screen, waiting for a response that he rationally knew wasn’t likely to show up immediately. He started to shut off the computer.

  Just a little longer. An answer could come any second.

  “I’m not going to sit around here waiting.”

  But—

  He shut it down anyway and grabbed his jacket and keys. Best thing to do was to take a walk. Burn off some of the impatience.

  Chapter 21

  HE ARRIVED at New Moon, sure that Kitty and Ben would be there. That was always his excuse. It wasn’t like he needed to go out; he’d never go out at all, if not for meeting those two at their restaurant. Maybe an exaggeration, maybe not. Sometimes they weren’t there; he’d go anyway, sit in the back and read a book and have a beer before packing up and going home. But odds were good they’d be there, and he could give them an update on what he’d found. Leaving out the exploding bits, of course.

  He went in, paused a moment to take in the shape of the place, the number of people and where they were sitting, the traffic patterns, the mood. This was a mellow after-work crowd, carrying with it an atmosphere both exhausted and giddy. Shaun, working behind the bar tonight, gave Cormac a cautious nod in greeting.

  “Kitty here?” Cormac asked.

  “She should be here in half an hour
or so,” the bartender said. “You want something to drink or are you just dropping by?”

  “Sure. The usual.” Predictable. He’d become painfully predictable. He had a usual watering hole where people recognized him and they knew what he drank without asking.

  And why not? You’re practically middle-aged, you ought to be more settled than you were in your youth.

  He was not going to start thinking about that.

  Shaun finished pouring the beer and set it on the bar. “Thanks,” Cormac muttered, and carried it to a table in back, where he could sit in a corner and watch. And read—at Amelia’s insistence, he brought along Milo Kuzniak’s notebook. He sat, drank his beer, read, and didn’t much care how it looked from the outside.

  Sure enough, Kitty came in about a half an hour later. Ben was with her, and the two were talking. Or she was talking, and he had a vaguely amused smile on while he nodded at her encouragingly. They spotted him quickly, as soon as the door opened. They could smell him.

  The ensuing pattern was familiar: she checked in with her pack members, Shaun at the bar and anyone else who happened to be around. She had the friendly, amiable disposition of a politician without the artifice, handing out friendly touches and comforting smiles. Her pack members, the other werewolves, leaned into her, following her with devoted gazes. Cormac wasn’t sure she realized the effect she had on them. She’d say she was just being nice.

  Ben came straight over and took the chair across from Cormac. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  He shrugged, leaving Cormac wide open to stick his foot in his mouth. Kitty rescued him by sweeping over, setting two mugs of beer on the table, and perching in the other chair. She revealed the book she’d held tucked under her arm and pushed it across the table to him.