Low Midnight (Kitty Norville Book 13) (15 page)

“She’s a werewolf.” That was his excuse. He’d gotten close—sometimes he imagined he could still taste her lips, feel her eager hands gripping him. Then some kind of flight instinct kicked in. Self-preservation, and suddenly he could only see that he was feeding himself to the wolf. He’d gotten scared.
Him,
scared.

He still saw the wolf in her. He just didn’t mind it so much, now.

At least you have the sense to accept her friendship.

Glad you approve, he muttered back.

I’m only trying to be helpful.

*   *   *

K
ITTY’S PHONE—
sitting on the edge of the seat, tucked against her leg where she’d set it before she fell asleep—rang a couple of times before Cormac took the liberty of shutting it off. Ben, both times. Cormac didn’t want to talk to Ben. He probably should have woken her up so she could deal with it, but he didn’t. Dodging. He shut the thing off so she wouldn’t hear the ringing.

Dusk had fallen when they finally pulled into the driveway of her house. Ben kept odd hours and was often out, meeting with clients, springing them from jail, or jumping through hoops at court. Cormac was hoping that Ben would be out when he dropped Kitty off.

She was awake by then, wrapped up in the blanket. The slashes on her arms from the skinwalker had healed, but he was pretty sure traces of blood still lingered in her clothing and that Ben would smell it. Not to mention the lopsided shiner he’d developed, a purplish half moon sloping under his left eye. He kept poking at the puffy skin, and yeah, it hurt. He ought to get some ice on it. He didn’t want to have to explain any of it to his cousin. His plan was to let her out without him ever getting out of the car. She could do all the talking. She was good at it.

But Ben was waiting in the driveway. He must have heard the Jeep’s engine and come out to meet them. He was barefoot, in his casual/sloppy mode, wearing jeans and an untucked T-shirt, and his arms were crossed.

Kitty scrambled for her phone. “Why is it off? Did you turn it off?” She fiddled with it a few seconds and groaned. “He’s been trying to call for an hour. Did you turn your phone off, too?”

“Yup.”

She let out a growl and stormed out of the car, slamming the door behind her.

He still might have had a chance to escape, but Ben came over and put a hand on the roof over the driver’s-side door. Cormac had spent all day going face-to-face with blowhards, and found he couldn’t stand up to Ben. He rolled down the window.

Kitty went around and leaned next to her husband.

“And how was your day?” Ben asked wryly.

She said, “You’re gonna have to ask him, I’m done playing go-between.”

Ben tilted his head, took a searching breath. “You shifted. What happened—wait a minute, are you
bleeding
?” The anger vanished. He held her shoulders, faced her, studied her all over, searching and smelling.

“Not anymore,” she said brightly.

He breathed a word that might have been a curse, wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her into an embrace, kissing her forehead, resting there a moment. When he turned back to yell at Cormac, he didn’t let her go. Kept that arm around her, kept her pulled close, and she melted into the contact.

Cormac thought, not for the first time, that she was better off with him. He couldn’t do what Ben did, wrapping her up with affection so casually. She got sliced up and the best Cormac could do to comfort her was hand her a blanket.

Ben said, “What the
hell
have you gotten into? And is that a black eye? You got into a fight? Thank God you’re off parole.”

He didn’t know where to start, and when he looked at Kitty—the talker, who was so much better at explaining things than he was—she wasn’t any help. She blinked those big brown eyes expectantly at him and stayed quiet.

Cormac sighed. “You remember Anderson Layne?”

He had to think about it a minute. Kitty was watching for his reaction. “The militia nut who hung out with my dad? You ran into him? While looking into a century-old murder? I’m confused.”

“I didn’t go looking for him. He’s hired himself a wizard and is getting into the prospecting business. Jess Nolan’s around, too. The two of them are working up a rivalry and I got caught in the middle.”

“And you got Kitty caught, too.” That edge of anger returned.

“We agreed I should keep an eye on him, right?” she said. She brushed an arm against Ben, and he visibly calmed. “He hasn’t shot anyone. Yet.”

“Did either one of them try to hire you?” Ben said, in full interrogation mode now.

The Jeep’s engine was still running. Cormac could drive away, right now.

“Layne did.” The fact that he took Layne’s money meant he’d essentially been hired.…

“You told him no, right?” Ben sighed, not bothering to wait for an answer. “Okay. Fine. I trust your judgment, and if you need to work with these guys to learn more—”

“I don’t,” Cormac said. “I’m done with them. I’m walking away and won’t run into them again,” he added.

“Seriously?”

“I’ll figure out some other way to get at Crane’s murder. Or get at Amy’s book without help. I don’t need these guys. You’re right, they’re trouble.”

Ben might say he trusted Cormac, but that pause revealed a little too much uncertainty. Like they were still kids, right after Cormac’s father died and everyone walked on eggshells around him, wondering when he was going to blow up.

“Good,” Ben said finally.

His cousin might have been about to invite him in for a beer and further debriefing, but Cormac cut him off before he had the chance. “I’d better get going,” he said, shifting the Jeep into reverse. “It’s been a long couple of days.”

“We’ll talk later,” Ben said.

“Yeah.” He was used to being by himself, and he’d spent the whole day dealing with people. Enough was enough.

Kitty reached through the still-open window to squeeze his shoulder. “Be careful, okay? Get some ice on your face.”

She turned to walk with Ben back to the house. A conventional ranch house at the edge of the suburbs that they paid for with their real jobs. They might have been werewolves, but they were more normal than he’d ever been.

You would never have chosen normal. Would you?

“Can’t say I ever got the chance,” he muttered, and swung the Jeep out of the driveway.

*   *   *

O
N THE
drive back to his apartment, he called Layne, who didn’t answer. He left a message. “I tracked down your werewolf. He isn’t. Nolan and his crew, they’re just screwing around. You don’t need to worry about them, I took care of it. If it’ll make you feel better, have your guy put up protection charms against skinwalkers and keep a good watch. I don’t need the second half of your bounty, and I don’t need to sign up for your operation, whatever the hell you’re doing. I’m out.”

He’d spend tomorrow coming up with a plan B. Tonight—he deserved a cold beer and a long sleep in. At home, he started on the beer and would have forgotten about the ice on his face if Amelia hadn’t reminded him. Enough time had passed—hours—ice probably wouldn’t do any good. But he chanced a look in the bathroom mirror and the bruise had acquired a couple more colors in the intervening time. So he made up the ice pack and rested it over his eyes while he lay flat in bed.

He hardly had to think of it anymore. He closed his eyes, wanting to step out of his world. He wanted to talk to Amelia—and there they were. The meadow—dusk this time, a sunset like a lot of Colorado sunsets he’d stopped to look at, streaks of clouds glowing bright orange over shadowed mountains, bursts of fading sunlight breaking through.

He was sitting on his usual rock, looking over the creek. Amelia leaned in, doing the exact same thing Kitty had, wincing and reaching for his wounded face.

“I shouldn’t have looked in the mirror. I wouldn’t be picturing myself with a black eye then.”

“But your body remembers,” she said. She closed the last little distance, carefully touching his cheek. He flinched, but sat his ground. She wasn’t real, but her touch was gentle, a warmth against the injured skin. “Does it hurt?”

“It’s just sore.”

“Something of a badge of honor, I suppose. What’s next, then?” she asked.

“Exactly what I said. We find another way.”

“You aren’t the least bit curious about what the current Milo Kuzniak has to do with the old Milo Kuzniak and what kind of magic really is involved?”

“I’m curious, but it doesn’t matter. We’re moving on. I told Ben I wouldn’t get wrapped up with those guys, so I won’t.”

She sat on her own chunk of granite, hands folded on her lap, regarding him. She wasn’t happy, judging by her pinched expression. “I can’t let a mystery like this go.”

He knew that, had a shocking amount of experience with that now. The mystery of tracking down the vampire priest last year, the magic centered around Denver’s Speedy Marts before that—Cormac would be living a nice, quiet life, except that Kitty kept bringing him problems to solve, and Amelia was too damned passionate about digging up the powers behind them.

“I can,” he declared.

“That’s not true. You’re just as curious as I am. You hate a mystery, which means you can’t stand letting it go unsolved. I just give you the means to solve it.”

He didn’t think he hated unsolved mysteries so much as he hated loose ends. “Well, what do you suggest?”

She licked her lips, leaned forward. “There’s a spell. It’s rather complex, but not difficult. The plateau where Crane was killed—we know there’s residual magic there, we know some sort of power lingers. If we can gather the right materials—we’ll have to go to Sand Creek, do you know about Sand Creek? I think we can draw out the information we need.”

“What does this spell do?”

“It will re-create what happened—or a shadow of what happened. Perhaps then we’ll learn how Crane died.”

He didn’t really want to know what Sand Creek had to do with this kind of spell, and he didn’t want to go back to the plateau if it meant a chance of running into Layne again. The whole thing was more trouble than it was worth.

“It’s a dead end,” he said. “We keep after Layne and them, we’re just going to keep running in circles. We’ll find another way to decode Scanlon’s book.”

“I hardly care about the book anymore, I want to know how Milo Kuzniak killed Augustus Crane.”

“So you can have that spell for yourself?”

She gave a curt nod. “Yes. And you do, too. How many times today did you wish for a gun that you didn’t have? You won’t need a gun to defend yourself if you have the right magic.”

“I did just fine.”

“What about the next time?”

“There isn’t going to be a next time, that’s the whole point.”

“Cormac, don’t you dare—”

He opened his eyes and sat up. The ice pack was dripping cold water everywhere, soaking his pillow. He went over to the kitchenette, tossed it in the sink, and stretched. Ignored Amelia poking at him, trying to change his mind.

He just wanted to get some sleep. He pulled off his T-shirt and jeans, stretched some of the ache out of his muscles, and collapsed back on the futon.

Chapter 15

L
IFE WITH
Cormac—as his would-be conscience, or perhaps rather a contrary imp riding on his shoulder—was certainly interesting. During that episode with the skinwalker she had thought they were about to find themselves in a real Old West shootout, a meeting between rogues like something out of the dime novels of her childhood. She had been thrilled by the whole thing. She feared Cormac was a bit annoyed by her.

She was very aware that she’d fallen victim—more than a hundred years ago—to the romantic allure of the American West. The daring tales, the exotic peoples, cowboys and Indians and all the rest. Adventure stories took place either in deepest Africa, or in the American West. She even saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in London when she was a girl and had thought it very loud, with all the guns firing and horses stampeding and hundreds of participants yelling and whooping. She had absolutely adored watching Annie Oakley shoot. The woman could do absolutely anything, and so, Amelia decided, could she.

Of course, she would eventually travel to the American West to see it all for herself. What she hadn’t quite realized—but would have, had she thought about it without the emotional dreams of adventure—was that the Wild West of Buffalo Bill’s show had long ago vanished, and had never really existed at all in that stylized form. The Indians now lived impoverished, their native dignity all but vanished after the wars that forced them to the reservations. Real cowboys were coarse rather than heroic. Those so-called frontier towns all had train stations, churches, universities, well-stocked shops, fine ladies in corsets and men in smart hats and ties, and rows of fancy houses, just like any other town in any other civilized part of the world.

Her own adventure in the American West had ended very badly, as it happened. She should have known.

Before then, when she finally met a real Indian face-to-face in the genuine Old West, the encounter was not what she expected. He was an old man sitting in a chair outside of a photography studio in Colorado Springs. He wore a much-washed button-up shirt, dungarees, and had wrapped a battered Indian-woven blanket around his shoulders against a chill in the air. His only gestures toward a legendary appearance were his long hair, ebony streaked with gray, kept in two braids over his shoulders, and a beaded headband with a feather tied to it. A sign in the window of the studio announced that one could pay ten cents to have one’s picture taken with a real Indian. Amelia declined, but spoke with the man for a few moments.

“Sir, do you speak English?” she said clearly to him. “Might I have a word with you?”

“You might need more than one,” he answered, without a smile. His accent was American, which surprised her, and she realized that in truth she hadn’t known what to expect at all.

“I’m from England,” she said. “I’m interested in learning all I can about this region. What tribe are you from, sir? Where do you come from?”