“Look at that,” he murmured, knowing full well that Amelia was seeing everything he did. The shape had an irregularity at the top, maybe a ring, but there didn’t seem to be a chain running through it. It looked like a piece of jewelry, some kind of metal pendant or amulet. And it had to have been kept in here a long time to make this kind of an imprint.
Then where is it now?
“Good question. If there was some kind of spell attached to it, it would have survived Kuzniak’s death, wouldn’t it?”
That’s the whole point of amulets and charms, to lock the magic in place so you can give it to someone else, so the magic will survive them. This thing might be very much older than Kuzniak. Either of them.
“And what’s it do?”
It kills people, I’d wager.
He frowned. “Great. Want to bet that Layne has it now?” And did he know what he had…?
Cormac, I want to talk. Face-to-face.
Sighing, he propped himself against the wall, leaned his head back, closed his eyes. Put himself in the meadow, and found Amelia by his side. He almost expected to see a copy of the book in her hand—if she’d really memorized it, she’d be able to do that, manifest a copy in their imaginations. But it was just her, and she was alight with urgency.
“We can solve this, work out exactly what happened. Put yourself in Kuzniak’s place,” Amelia said.
“Older or younger?”
“Younger. The great-grandson. If we know what happened to him, we’ll know what happened to Augustus Crane, and we can go back to Judi and be done with this whole sorry business.”
Right. He could make some guesses. Milo Kuzniak the younger probably had a similar background and upbringing to Cormac’s. Native Colorado, a rural family with deep roots in the region. Ranchers or farmers, or maybe even mining or some other local industry. Maybe a connection to the militia and sovereignty movements, which would be how he hooked up with Layne. This guy would even have had a connection to the supernatural, same as Cormac’s family. Only instead of being hunters, they were magicians. Maybe not seriously—it might have just been stories, at least until Kuzniak got ahold of his great-grandfather’s book. Family might have kept it as an heirloom, or maybe it had been stuck in some trunk in an attic, but Kuzniak would have latched onto it and seen it as something more. That would have started him down the path—with some people, it didn’t take much. He’d have studied what little his great-grandfather knew, added his own discoveries. And then gone to work for the people he knew in his own neck of the woods.
Maybe pacing wasn’t such a bad idea. He stood, to wake himself up, to get his brain working. “The cross tucked in the book. Would he have known what it was?”
“He might not have known what was, or what it did. The book never mentions it, apart from discussing amulets in general.”
“But he’d have known it did something and kept it with him. Could it have killed him?”
She seemed to fold into her own world when she was thinking hard, tugging at her ear and staring off into space, pacing through the grass and absently swishing her skirt out of the way when it snagged on something. He imagined this was exactly how she looked when she was alive, in a Victorian parlor or on the streets of some ornate European city.
She said, “He might never have taken it out of the book. But it wasn’t with the book when he died, was it? You searched him—it wasn’t in any of his other pockets, was it? Could he have hidden it about his person? Then where is it now? Did it remain with him? Is it wherever Layne put the body?”
That didn’t feel right to Cormac. Layne would have searched the body before getting rid of it, even if it was just to pull loose change out of the guy’s pockets.
He spoke slowly, arranging his thoughts while he did. “What if … maybe he didn’t know what exactly it did, but he used it to give himself some kind of credibility. Said it was powerful, bragged about it to Layne.”
“And then gave it to Layne as a sign of goodwill? Or Layne took it, as a pledge of loyalty? He wanted magic but didn’t trust Kuzniak.” She stopped, turned to face him, her eyes wide.
Cormac added, “Kuzniak tries to get it back—and sure enough, Layne’s got all the power now and kills him instead. Whatever it is, whatever it does—it killed him.” Even sounded like a wizards’ duel—a rivalry turned into a fight for power, and bang, it’s done. “He freaks out, calls us—then figured out what happened. And now he thinks he’s got all the magic. And he wants to meet with me. He won’t even need bullets.”
“I’m desperate to get my hands on that thing,” Amelia said.
Her eyes were wide, gleaming, and she reached for him—he was standing right there, and she took hold of his hands, clutching them in excitement, and he squeezed back before even thinking. For a moment, they both went still, uncertain. He didn’t pull away; neither did she. It was like they were both waiting for the other to make a move. And so they remained still, frozen in contact. As close as they had been for the last few years, living mind to mind, inseparable, he couldn’t remember feeling this close to her. He could feel the pressure in her hands, warmth in her skin, which shouldn’t have been possible because she didn’t exist, not really. She was dead—but that didn’t matter here. He took a step in, brushed his thumb along her chin and yes, it felt like skin, impossibly soft. Reflexively, she tipped her chin back, looking up at him. It would take so little effort to lean into her, to bring his lips to hers.
Doing this all alone would have been so much less interesting than doing this with her.
She blinked suddenly, like waking up from a trance, and turned away, letting go of him to resume her pacing along the edge of the meadow. “What are we going to do?”
He stood for a moment, looking at his empty hands. He had to think for a second about what she was really talking about. Layne. This amulet.
“I’d just as soon walk away. Like messing with high explosives, we don’t need that shit.”
A tiny, reflexive scowl crossed her lips. She never said anything about it, but hard swearing grated on her antique sensibilities. He figured he’d have her swearing just as bad, sooner or later.
“Look at it this way, then,” she said. “Do you really want someone like Anderson Layne in possession of such a powerful magical artifact?”
No, no he didn’t. Wasn’t too long ago he would have figured it wasn’t his problem, one way or another. Wasn’t his business.
“It’s exactly your business,” Amelia argued. Cormac shouldn’t have been surprised the thought slipped out. Or, she knew him well enough at this point to guess exactly what he was thinking. “Maybe you can’t go out hunting rogue werewolves with silver bullets the way your father did, but you can do this. You may be the only one who can. What do you say to that?”
“I say you really want that amulet for yourself,” he said.
She seemed taken aback a moment, straightening and studying him. Then, she smiled. “Well, yes. But that doesn’t mean we won’t do a world of good in the course of getting it.”
He wasn’t usually in the business of doing good. No, that wasn’t true—that was how he’d justified every one of the kills he’d made. It was for the greater good, taking monsters out of the world. That was the job his father had given him. And whatever else he was, Anderson Layne was a certain kind of monster.
She stood tall with the strength of her convictions. “We’re stronger than Kuzniak. It won’t kill us.”
“We’re missing something.”
“You’re being cautious.”
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
“But you’ll do it. You’ll go after Layne and whatever this power is?”
He looked over his imaginary meadow and sighed. “Yeah.”
* * *
HE MADE the call. Barreling straight ahead without thinking too much about it, just like the old days. Layne answered after the first ring.
“Heard you wanted to talk to me,” Cormac said, casually.
“That’s
right,” Layne said, cautious, rightfully so. “I figured we had some stuff to work out. We can come to an understanding.”
The guy wanted to shoot him dead on sight. “You want Kuzniak’s book back, I got it. Do you even know what to do with it?”
“That’s not the point.”
Cormac could just keep poking at him until he got so angry he hung up. But that wasn’t the goal here. “No, it’s not; you know why? Because the book’s not important. You’ve got something else. It killed Milo Kuzniak, and now you want to use it on me, isn’t that right?”
Silence. That was the trick to handling a guy like Layne—keep him off balance, so he never knew how much you knew, or how strong you were. Cormac’s reputation was going to carry him through this, if nothing else.
Cormac continued, “Do you even know what you have, or have you just been hanging on and hoping for the best?”
“You don’t know anything, you’re just mouthing off. I don’t know why everyone’s so scared of you. You were never all that badass, it was all your dad. You’re not half what your dad was.”
Nobody even remembered his father. They only knew the image of him, the myth. He was twenty years dead and didn’t have any power anymore.
If Cormac could flush the guy out right, maybe he could get him to just give it up. “Layne. I know you don’t realize it, but you’re way out of your league here. Why don’t you just hand the thing over to me and I’ll keep it safe.”
“Yeah, right. Tell you what—you want the cross so bad, you come and take it from me.” He spoke with a smugness that set Cormac’s hair on end. He was missing something. “I’ll meet you tonight. Midnight.”
Damn theatrics. Why did magicians always have to do this shit at midnight?
You must admit, it is atmospheric.
“Fine,” Cormac said. “Your place? You get it cleaned up good enough for company?”
“Let’s go where this all got started. The old mining claim. You know it.”
A place already saturated with old magic soaked into the ground. Not exactly neutral territory. But at least it was out in the open. “Fine,” he said.
Layne was talking fast, angry. “And no guns, Cormac. You don’t bring any guns, I won’t bring any. Just you and me. Got it? We’ll take care of this.”
“I don’t need guns, Layne.” He hung up.
I appreciate how you trust my abilities so much that you don’t even question if I’m capable of facing Anderson Layne in such a duel.
“Well, are you?”
I believe so. Yes.
She certainly sounded confident enough. He’d never doubted her.
Chapter 23
CORMAC MISSED his guns. The feel of them, the weight, the confidence they brought, the reassurance of his own power. He would reach under his jacket for a shoulder holster that wasn’t there, purely out of habit, and feel off balance. Go for the gun at his hip and grab empty space instead. He always would, he thought. Slowly, he stopped missing the actual ability to shoot. Because Amelia brought her own firepower to the partnership.
The first time he’d seen her use magic in a fight was in prison, against a ravaging demon. The only thing that could defeat that monster had been magic. Bullets sure wouldn’t have done it. She prevailed again, going up against some weather magician who had it in for Kitty. She explained the principles to him—was happy to explain—how one studied energies that already existed and worked to turn them, to use them against the person attacking, to build your own energy that you could use to defend yourself; that the world was made up of energy as much as it was made of matter and just because you couldn’t see it didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Among the twentieth-century reading she’d been catching up on, she’d been very interested in quantum mechanics, because she said it sounded so much like how she thought of magic.
If he thought about it too hard, he’d shut down. The implications were too big. He didn’t need to know how it worked, only that it did, and that he could use it when he needed to get himself out of trouble or make his intentions known in as decisive a manner as possible. So far, they’d done pretty well.
They had a couple of hours before they needed to hit the road, and Amelia spent that time reviewing the spells she thought she’d need and gathering the materials she’d use to work them. Not as simple as grabbing your revolver and checking the chamber, but what did he know? There might be demons.
He was on the freeway, halfway to Manitou, when he decided to call Kitty. Just in case something happened. Her phone rang once and went to voice mail. He clicked off the call rather than leave a message. A message wouldn’t have made any sense and would be too late anyway.
It’s Friday night, Cormac.
“Dammit,” he muttered. Kitty’s cell phone was off because it was Friday night and she was at the KNOB studio doing her show.
You could call Ben.…
He was not up to the lecture he’d get from Ben, and he couldn’t call Ben without telling him he was headed to a midnight showdown with Anderson Layne. Not that Kitty wouldn’t lecture him, but the lecture would somehow be easier to take from her.
Because you don’t have a lifetime of history with Kitty. When Kitty says you’re being reckless, you tell yourself she doesn’t know what she’s talking about and that she’s just being shrill. When Ben says you’re being reckless, you can’t ignore him because he knows you very, very well. And he’s usually right.
“Whose side are you on?”
What a silly question that is.
He turned on the Jeep’s radio and tuned it to KNOB. Her voice—rather, a more brash and manic version of her voice, her on-air personality—came through the speakers.
“—and what did you think would happen, when you invited your vampire boyfriend to your parents’ house for dinner without telling them he’s a vampire!”
A panicky-sounding woman answered. “That was the whole point of the dinner, to tell them that he’s a vampire! I figured it was the best way, if they could actually see him—”
“And your boyfriend agreed to this?”
“I—I—I told him they already knew.”
“So your Italian mother fixes a giant batch of garlicky pasta sauce that the vampire can’t eat, and you wonder why everyone’s mad at you?”
Listening to Kitty’s show was like driving past a car wreck—you couldn’t turn away.
“My mother hasn’t spoken to me since, and Gerald says that maybe we should take some time off from things, and this isn’t how I wanted things to turn out at all—”
“Then maybe you should have been up front with everyone in the first place. Boyfriends, parents, family dinners—this is primal stuff, you can’t screw around with it. You definitely can’t use these things as a hammer to passive-aggressively bludgeon everyone into thinking and feeling what you want them to.”
“But—”
“I want you to practice something for me. Repeat these words: I’m sorry.”
“But—”
“Say it. ‘I’m sorry.’”
“I’m sorry?”
“You need to apologize to your mother, and your boyfriend. And none of this ‘I’m sorry you were offended’ crap. You need to be sorry that you lied to your boyfriend and that you didn’t tell your mother that she probably shouldn’t cook a big meal for this particular gathering.”
“But all I did was make a little mistake—”
“Exactly! Apologizing is what we do after we make mistakes!”
The Midnight Hour’s audience often seemed to call in wanting validation. Wanting to be told that they’re right and everyone else in the world is wrong. Didn’t usually work out for them, and Kitty had a great talent for cutting through their bullshit.
Kitty continued: “Here’s the thing, and this goes for everyone out there: if having a boyfriend you can take home to meet your parents is important to you, and your parents are very traditional, then maybe you shouldn’t date vampires. Trust me, I’ve had experience with this so
rt of thing.”
Cormac had not met Kitty’s parents, or her sister and her family. He had no intention of meeting them, because it would be too weird. What would he say? Hi, I met Kitty when I tried to kill her, and I had a thing for her for a while, but now we’re just friends, but there still might be some feelings, and what? No. This was another reason she was better off with Ben, who went to her parents’ house for dinner on a regular basis. He was a lawyer, he could talk about his job. He knew how to make small talk.
Cormac had the number for Kitty’s direct line at the studio, one that would bypass the screening queue and go directly to her monitor. Which meant he shouldn’t have gotten a busy signal when he called, but he did.
“Next caller, you’re on the air, what have you got for me?”
“Hi, Kitty, longtime listener, thanks so much for taking my call, I just want to know what you think about vampire couples adopting children. Since they, you know, can’t biologically have kids, do you think it’s reasonable for them to want to adopt? And, you know, would you expect them to turn that child into a vampire when it got old enough? You know how some people say ‘Don’t you wish they could stay little forever?’ Do you know if anyone’s ever actually made their baby a vampire, to keep it from growing up?”
Maybe a third of the people who called in needed serious advice and made reasonable contributions to the discussion. The rest of her callers were like this: people who didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about but sure had a lot of crazy going on.
Kitty sounded like she was in physical pain when she answered. He pictured her with her eyes closed, head in her hands. “There’s so much wrong with everything you said that I don’t even know where to start. First off, when we talk about vampire Families, we’re not talking Mom and Dad and two-point-five kids. In all my years, I’ve never met a vampire who has expressed an interest in having children—some of them have had children before becoming vampires, and continue to care deeply for those children. But those children are usually already grown. I’ve never met a vampire with, you know, children children. Mostly because I imagine arranging day care would be a bitch. Also, I’ve never met a non-adult vampire. Doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I imagine it’s possible. But you do know that people who wish babies could stay little forever are crazy, right? As the proud aunt of two adorable rugrats myself, I was so happy when they got to be old enough to take themselves to the restroom, you know? Anyway. From a purely biological perspective, vampires don’t reproduce by having children, they reproduce by infecting others with vampirism.…”