Low Midnight (Kitty Norville Book 13) (2 page)

He walked in, and nothing changed. Nobody shouted surprise, nobody jumped out from behind anything. He stood a moment, wondering what was wrong.

Kitty approached from the bar, carrying a mug of some dark and dangerous-looking beer, which she offered him. Her smile crinkled, an expression of vast amusement.

“Congratulations,” she said, and that was all.

Blinking, he took the beer, holding it at a slight distance as if he didn’t know what to do with it.

“Surprised?” she said, lips parted in a grin that showed teeth. A challenging grin. Ben approached, coming up to look at him over her shoulder.

“You set me up,” Cormac said to him.

“She set us both up. Not my fault.” He held up his hands in a show of defense.

“You people don’t have any faith in me at all, do you?” She heaved a dramatic sigh and turned to walk off to her usual table in back.

Kitty was cute. Not gorgeous, though she could probably approach it if she ever bothered with makeup and high heels and the whole getup. She chose comfort, in jeans and flat-heeled pumps and a short-sleeve blouse. About five-six, she had an athletic build and a quick grace about her. Her shoulder-length blond hair was loose, framing her face. Brown eyes. He’d known her for six or seven years now.

Ben he’d known his whole life, a fact that amazed him. Cormac sometimes had to adjust his own mental image of the man from the scruffy, gangly teenager he’d been when Cormac moved in with his family, to the focused, intense—and still kind of scruffy—adult he was now. He wore a blue button-up shirt untucked over khakis, hands shoved in his pockets. An average guy, likeable in spite of the law degree.

Side by side, the couple stalked to the back of the restaurant, retrieving their own beers from the bar. Cormac watched them, observing the undeniable, underlying truth of their lives: both Ben and Kitty were werewolves.

Cormac still flinched a little thinking of it. Werewolves were the bad guys, he’d known that truth since he was a boy learning to hunt from his father. His father didn’t just hunt the usual game—he also took on vampires, werewolves, the supernatural creatures that most people thought were just stories, at least back then. Then, the inevitable happened. In hindsight, Cormac knew it was a matter of time. You hunted near-invulnerable monsters of the supernatural, ones that science and nature couldn’t explain, that walked the Earth as proof that magic existed—eventually, you’d meet one you couldn’t kill. And it would kill you. The men in the Bennett family who hunted all died young. He expected to die himself, by claw or fang, sooner rather than later. When Cormac was sixteen years old, a werewolf killed his father, and he hated them. Or thought he did. Then Kitty came along.

He’d meant to kill her. He’d been hired to kill her, a blatant attempt by his client to get her new and increasingly popular radio show off the air. Maybe he’d been stupid to take that job—the publicity of killing her on the air hadn’t scared him, and he’d been confident, probably overconfident, of his ability to escape any repercussions after. He’d had a job, and his job was killing werewolves. She’d talked him out of it, live on the air, without breaking a sweat. At least not that he’d been able to see. They’d become something like friends.

When she’d needed a lawyer, he’d recommended Ben. Later, he’d brought Ben along on a job—just backup was what he’d said, someone to call out if the bad guy came around from behind. But there’d been two bad guys, and one of them had gotten Ben. They’d made a pact as kids: if either of them was infected with lycanthropy, vampirism, or something worse, the other would kill him. When the moment came, Cormac couldn’t do it. Couldn’t kill the only person in the world he trusted, because Kitty proved that not all the werewolves were bad guys. Cormac took Ben to Kitty for help. Now they were married.

It seemed like a lifetime ago. Centuries ago. That all had happened to a different person, and now he came to the bar to drink with a couple of werewolves who were also his friends. His father would be so disappointed with him.

Stop minding your father,
Amelia reprimanded him.
He’s dead.

“Yeah, well, so are you,” he murmured.

As he watched Ben and Kitty, he could see their true nature in a dozen little ways that they weren’t conscious of: the way their nostrils flared when the door opened and they smelled newcomers, the watchful look in their eyes, the stiffness in their shoulders when they got nervous. When they perched in their chairs, he could almost see ears pricking forward with interest. Kitty brushed along Ben as she sat, shoulder to shoulder, a gesture both animal and intimate. They kept watch over the bar, which they’d opened to be something of a den for their pack of wolves. Shaun was also a werewolf, and Cormac recognized a couple of others hanging out. Most people wouldn’t see it, but Cormac knew what to look for.

When they were all seated with beers in hand, Ben raised his glass and said, “Cheers.”

It was easy being comfortable here, drinking beer and sitting with friends. Being comfortable made him nervous.

“Does it feel different now?” Kitty asked.

He shrugged a little, the start of a deflection, but he changed his mind. “Yeah, it does. Feels like finally getting the keys to the handcuffs.” He could feel the envelope resting in his inside pocket, pressing against his heart.

“Any big plans?” Ben asked.

“Vacation,” Kitty said. “I’d go on vacation. Someplace with beaches. Or Disneyland! You could go to Disneyland.”

Ben looked pained. “Your vacations don’t tend to be all that relaxing.”

“Someday,” she answered. “
Someday,
I will have a vacation that doesn’t go pear shaped.”

Cormac’s lip quirked in a smile. Kitty couldn’t take a trip without combining it with work, which meant publicizing it, which meant attracting attention, and that was where the trouble started.

“Don’t laugh,” she muttered at him.

Ben said, “It’s probably best not to make any life-changing decisions just yet. I’ve seen it happen—people go off paper, go crazy, throw themselves for a loop, fall into old habits, end up back in prison.” Ben was a criminal defense attorney and spent a good chunk of his business escorting clients through the system.

“You don’t trust me?” Cormac said.

“I’m your lawyer, it’s my job to tell you these things.”

Cormac picked at the edge of a coaster left on the table. “I’m thinking it’s time I follow up the lead in Manitou Springs. Talk to Amy Scanlon’s aunt.” A different road, a new kind of job—he was ready to move on. Maybe this really was what he ought to be doing with the rest of his life.

“You okay with that?” Kitty asked. “You want company? Me being there might make things a little easier.” She was a born diplomat, and for some reason she didn’t think Cormac, in his leather jacket and biker boots, approaching some grief-stricken old lady, was a particularly good idea. Go figure.

“No, I’ll be fine. I’m just getting fidgety. The part of Scanlon’s book we put online might give us something eventually, but I don’t think we can wait much longer.”

Ben turned to Kitty. “You still don’t have anything from Grant? Tina?”

“They’re checking in. You know how this stuff works, it’s hit or miss. More misses than hits, usually. It’s not a science.”

Kitty had a whole collection of contacts, real-deal mediums, magicians, and ghost hunters in addition to the vampires and lycanthropes she knew. She’d met most of them through her radio show. Each of them provided various bits and pieces of information, but they still didn’t have the whole picture—the key to decoding Scanlon’s book, which in turn might be the key to solving an even bigger problem: the vampire Roman.

“Maybe this one’ll be a hit,” Cormac said.

Even though it meant telling this woman that her long-lost niece was dead. And it meant going back to the end of Amelia’s life.

Amelia turned unusually quiet whenever the subject of Manitou Springs came up. They’d both been avoiding it. With his parole over, Cormac was running out of excuses to put off the trip.

He kept himself to one beer and didn’t talk much, but that was usual. Watched Ben and Kitty and their easy way of bantering. They had some friends come through—and not just members of their werewolf pack. Normal people, coworkers and contacts, who chatted and laughed with them. Talked about ordinary things. Ben and Kitty, they had a life. They may have been werewolves, but this wasn’t the first time Cormac felt like the outcast next to them.

Before he started getting too uncomfortable, Cormac bowed himself out. They only argued a little for show, and Cormac assured them that he was fine, he just needed some rest. The usual song and dance. The normality of a life he wasn’t sure he’d ever really get used to.

Chapter 2

A
FTER GETTING
out of prison, Cormac had moved into a rundown studio apartment off the Boulder Turnpike on the northwest side of Denver. Wasn’t much, but he didn’t need much. A place to sleep, a lock to keep out bad guys. It wasn’t like he had people over much. Or at all.

For a while he’d had a part-time job restocking at a warehouse, mostly to keep Porter happy and give the impression of being an upstanding citizen. He’d had to take time off when he broke his arm a few months ago, and he was long since past the time when he should think about going back. He didn’t need much money, but he needed some. His pre-prison savings wouldn’t last forever. He’d earned a surprising amount of cash doing some freelance detective work for Kitty and Ben, and for the Denver Police Department. The idea of going full time—essentially becoming a supernatural private investigator—had seemed ridiculous. But he was on the verge of thinking that maybe there really was a demand for this kind of thing, and maybe he really could make a living at it. It was just another kind of hunting, after all. He wasn’t exactly cut out for working for someone else.

Back home, very late at night now but he didn’t tend to sleep much anyway, he fired up his laptop. The machine was another gift from Ben, a “welcome home” after prison. Cormac had never had a computer in his life, had never needed one. Well, now he did, he guessed.

Amelia had insisted on putting magical protections on the laptop, a protective rune here and an arcane mark there. Cormac wasn’t sure electronics worked that way, that
magic
worked that way.
It couldn’t hurt,
Amelia had said. But it could, if it screwed up the computer’s inner workings.

We had electricity even in my day,
Amelia had said grumpily.
It’s all wires and power in the end. Making connections and letting in or keeping out energies that might be dangerous. Trust me.

His e-mail account had been strangely free of spam since he set it up.

The current problem: Amy Scanlon’s book of shadows. Amy Scanlon had been a possibly-not-entirely-sane—she believed herself to be a modern-day avatar of Zoroaster—but immensely talented magician. Kitty had inherited her book of shadows, her magician’s diary, stored on a USB drive. Kitty was sure the thing was packed with all kinds of information about Dux Bellorum and the Long Game.
That
was the real mystery Kitty was trying to solve: Dux Bellorum—Roman, Gaius Albinus, Mr. White, who knew what other names he went by—was a two-thousand-year-old vampire, and he had a plan, which seemed to be nearing its climax. Dux Bellorum—the leader of war. Cormac didn’t often get nervous, but this guy made him nervous. He’d faced him down exactly once, and Roman had clearly been using his long existence to become as adept as inhumanly possible at waging supernatural war. He had a plan to take over the world: the Long Game. Trouble was, nobody knew just how he was going to do it. He was gathering allies, bringing other vampire Masters around the world under his influence. Building an army, with him as its general. Somehow, Kitty had managed to put herself at the head of those trying to oppose him. Cormac had her back.

Now Kitty had this book that promised to offer answers to all the riddles, just like that. Too bad the whole thing was in code.

Since they didn’t know how to break the book’s code, they decided to crowdsource it. Put it up online and see what happened. Worst case scenario, someone would break the code and find enough magical secrets to take over the world. Kitty thought the risk was worth it. Cormac had taken on the responsibility of keeping track of the e-mails associated with the Web site. The first three or four weeks, nothing happened.

But then serious messages started coming in. Only a few at first. Now, they arrived a dozen or so a week. A couple of online forums had picked up on the book of shadows, posted links, and started discussions. Cormac followed those as well. Most of the discussions assumed the book was old, some Renaissance alchemist’s journal that had been scanned, digitized, and posted by an amateur scholar. Kitty hadn’t posted any identifying information about the author—she’d become protective of Amy Scanlon’s private life. These dabblers treated the book and its code as an interesting problem and nothing more.

Five e-mails this evening. Usually, they came from borderline nutjobs begging for the secret of the universe or declaring that they
had
the secret of the universe, and they wanted to meet in person or send their own five-thousand-page book of shadows. Today, one of them was different.

“Hi. Whoever this is. I don’t know the code, but I know the diagrams, some of the formulas—this looks like Amy Scanlon’s book. I was in her coven in Taos, New Mexico, about six years ago. She started traveling, but I haven’t heard from her in a couple of years. Do you know where she is?” The e-mail listed a name and phone number. A trusting person, to hand out that information.

Cormac didn’t know how to tell her that Scanlon was dead, killed at the center of a mystery they desperately needed to solve. He couldn’t imagine trying to explain it and be sympathetic at the same time. He forwarded the message to Kitty to let her answer it. She was the diplomat and camp counselor. He stuck to lurking on forums and searching for articles that might give him more pieces. Clues to the mystery they’d set themselves to solving.