Low Midnight Read online

  “That was a long time ago,” he said. He’d only gotten halfway through the beer and didn’t plan on finishing. The stuff tasted warm and musty. He pushed the bottle away.

  Layne said, “We’re all getting together in a couple of days—I could really use your help. You want to know more, come out to my place. Give me your number, I’ll call you.”

  It was ominous, but it was a lead. Cormac gave his number, and Layne entered it into his phone.

  He didn’t feel the need to keep being chummy with the group, so he pushed off from the table. “I’d better get going. Leave you boys to it. Interesting running into you.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  Cormac gave a sloppy wave in reply. He needed to keep track of Layne. Just to keep an eye on these guys.

  He threw open the bar’s front door and marched into the parking lot, more distracted than he should have been because he almost ran into a woman who was coming the other way. They stopped, stared at each other for a moment, blinking. She was in her thirties, brown hair in a short ponytail, dressed in practical jeans and blue winter coat. Tired around the eyes, minimal makeup.

  He didn’t even have to think about it to remember her name, it just popped out. “Mollie. Mollie Layne.”

  She smiled and might even have looked pleased. “Cormac Bennett! Oh my God, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it? And it’s Mollie Cramer now. And for the last fifteen years.” She shrugged as if apologizing.

  It had been close to twenty years since he’d seen her. Had it been that long? He didn’t have a clue she’d gotten married—why should he? “Sure. Well, a late congratulations, I guess.”

  “Yeah—and divorced now. Two kids, single mom, the works. Who’d have thunk?”

  Christ, he was eighteen and awkward all over again. Fifteen years—more than enough time for a marriage, divorce, and two kids. She might have been about twenty pounds heavier, but he recognized the teenage girl he’d known in the woman she’d turned into. The big smile, the fall of brown hair. But he didn’t know what to say to her.

  “What’ve you been up to?” she asked.

  He shoved his hands into his jacket pocket. “This and that, I guess. Just passing through. Funny, running into you.”

  “Yeah—but good, you know? I figured the way you were going back in the day you’d end up doing yourself in in a blaze of glory. I’m glad you didn’t.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Is my brother in there?”

  “Anderson? Yeah. I ran into him up on the mountain. It’s a day for reunions, I guess.”

  She rolled her eyes. “The kids are with their dad this week; I’m supposed to head down to his house and help him clean but he hasn’t given me a key. Now there’s someone who has not gotten his shit together.”

  They spent another long moment studying each other. He sorted through a bunch of memories he hadn’t thought about in a long time, and wasn’t sure what to think about them now.

  “Well, I’d better get going, I guess,” she said, skirting around him to continue on to the door.

  “Yeah, me too. Good running into you.” He even meant it. She shoved Layne and his schemes and every other problem he had to solve straight out of his mind.

  “Yeah. I like the mustache, Cormac. It’s all Marlboro Man. Kinda cool.”

  “See you, Mollie.” And that was that, she was inside, the door closing behind her.

  He sat in his Jeep for a good minute, just taking it in, but then hurried to start the engine and peel back onto the highway before she came back out to the parking lot and he had to figure out what else to say.

  And what was all that about? Amelia had been very quiet through the encounter.

  “That was Mollie.”

  And who is Mollie?

  Amelia caught a whole tumble of images and memories that Cormac couldn’t lock up fast enough. You had carnal relations with her! She sounded scandalized.

  Not just that, she’d been the first girl Cormac ever slept with. They’d been seventeen, both of them virgins fumbling in the loft of the O’Farrell’s main barn when the adults were off at some event or other. But they’d managed and carried on for a few months after that. He couldn’t remember anymore who’d broken up with whom. They’d graduated and gone their separate ways. He seemed to think that maybe he’d stopped calling her before she’d stopped calling him. But he couldn’t think of why. He couldn’t see inside that screwed-up kid’s head anymore. Just as well.

  It occurred to him, now that he was twenty miles down the highway, that he could have asked for her phone number. He was kind of glad he hadn’t thought of it. He probably wouldn’t see her again.

  I will never understand you, Cormac Bennett.

  Not like that was a surprise.

  Chapter 9

  ONE THING Amelia and Cormac had in common: nothing surprised her anymore. She’d started by looking for fairies, and she’d found so much more. She’d made it around the world before arriving in Manitou Springs and meeting her end. She’d learned so much, encountered so much. Never enough, of course. But at least she was rarely surprised anymore. Not by vampires or werewolves, not by magicians’ duels, not by anything.

  She remembered when she first learned that vampires and werewolves were real.

  She had just left home for the last time a few months before, after burning all her bridges with her family, after she’d declined Arthur Pembroke’s proposal and had that terrible row with her brother. If they were going to be disappointed and ashamed of her, she would earn their ill will.

  Looking back on it, she’d been very young, very naïve, and hadn’t known quite where to start in her investigations of the veiled world. She had no other choice but to start where almost everyone started—with the stories. Which led her to Romania, because like so many others at that time, she’d read Dracula and wondered how much of it was real. It had just been published, and she carried a copy of it with her on the ferry out of Dover. In her second life, she could weep over how much that first edition would be worth if she still had it.

  She had launched her own Grand Tour of Europe, visiting Templar castles and prehistoric dolmens, seeking out Romany fortune tellers and Theosophists who held court at salons in the various capitals. The hardest part was convincing them that she was serious, and that she would not be satisfied with parlor tricks. She revealed her own fairy charms and old Celtic protective magic. She feared that most thought her just another silly English girl taken in by fanciful tales. She encountered much chaff in her search for grains of power. But she did find them, and she went to find the seed of truth at the heart of Bram Stoker’s novel.

  A young woman could travel alone in the late Victorian world if she had a good story to explain herself, a ready line of credit, a dictatorial confidence in her dealings with others, and a sturdy umbrella or walking stick. She had all of these. She told people she was a scholar from a well-to-do family, which was entirely true, but she also told them she had her family’s blessing, and by extension their protection. She had a line she used: that in a world where a queen ruled the most successful empire on Earth, couldn’t a woman be expected to travel alone safely? This at least made people stop to consider her.

  Usually, though, they were astonished enough at her demeanor and questions that they seemed to remove her from the category of “woman” entirely. The irony of surviving into a world where she could travel nearly anywhere without enduring endless questioning about “where is your husband/father/brother?” was that she was now housed within the body of a man and it all became moot.

  Bucharest was splendid and modern, and she stayed for a month in a little pension operated by a German widow. She read books in the libraries, questioned professors about local history, and listened for stories of vampires. She learned about Vlad the Impaler of course, and also about Countess Báthory, who was said to have murdered over six hundred girls and bathed in their blood to retain her youth. This story itself planted the seed that led to developing t
he spell she eventually used to preserve her soul within the walls of the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility. The spell had nothing to do with blood and youth, of course, but Amelia became intrigued by the idea of preservation, of using magic to ensure a person might live on. In the end, she had not used the spell in the manner she expected to at all, but she couldn’t complain. She was still here, in a manner of speaking.

  It was all very sensationalist. The stories focused on what one would expect the popular imagination to focus on: the dream of eternal youth, shocking violence, and vast quantities of spilled blood.

  With a collection of tales and threads of inquiry in hand, she went into the rural areas, the forests and mountains and villages that hadn’t changed in centuries. She could feel mysteries seeping up from the ground, charging the very air, beckoning her.

  She procured a room at a village’s lone pension and found herself in the tavern next door, very much like one Jonathan Harker might have patronized in the story. She ordered what passed for an ale in this locale, a hearty stew, and wrote in her journal of what she had found: the gods and spirits said to live in the hills, local charms, protective symbols carved into the lintels over doorways in barns—in the doorway at this very pub, the wheel-and-circle symbol called the gromoviti znaci, which protected against storms.

  Night fell. A man just shy of middle age came into the tavern and sat at the table next to hers. She was aware of his presence, and aware of her umbrella propped at her chair. A glance told her that the proprietor had left for a moment, but there were two others in the room, a pair of travelers bent over their meal in the corner. She would not have paid any more attention to this newcomer, except that he was watching her. After what seemed a very long time of this, she turned to him with a raised eyebrow, questioning.

  “You are very intent on your writing,” he said. He spoke with the sort of precise accent typical of someone who’d been born in another country but educated in England. He’d erased evidence of his origins from that accent. “Might I inquire what it is you write?”

  “I am a bit of a scholar,” she said with a thin smile. “I’ve been investigating local folklore practices.”

  He had an olive complexion, but pale, as if he spent most of his time indoors. Clean shaven, he was well dressed in a tailored coat and silk cravat with a gold and diamond pin in it. He might have been a merchant or high-ranking official of some kind.

  “Oh, please do not tell me you’ve been taken in by that Irish novelist. You do not seem the kind of young woman to read such drivel.”

  “I’ll read anything,” she said. “You’ve read Dracula, then?”

  “You are not the first to come traveling here looking for the truth of Stoker’s monster.”

  She had to hide some disappointment. She had thought people’s annoyance with her had to do with her sex. Setting down her pen, she turned to him, shifting her disappointment to amusement, making a joke of it. “Do any of them find what they’re looking for? Do you believe that vampires exist?”

  “I don’t have to believe it,” he said. “I know they do. And they are very much as dangerous as Stoker writes of. You should be careful.”

  She had no reason to believe him. He was simply a fellow traveler making a joke. But something of his seriousness, his intensity—her impulse was to believe him, even if she could not catch his gaze to look him in the eyes to judge him. This should have made him seem evasive, untrustworthy. Instead, it made him seem sad.

  “Are there very many of them about?” she said, with a newspaper journalist’s detached curiosity. “Or are they rare—a single master with a handful of progeny, as in the novel?”

  “Both, I would say. It depends greatly on where you are. Do keep in mind, such rural environs as this aren’t well suited to vampires, who need a ready supply of living souls in order to survive. They are parasites, after all, with all that implies.”

  She hadn’t thought of vampires in those terms, a parasite like a remora or mistletoe, but the description seemed apt. She became even more curious.

  Her reticule was on the table beside her. She tugged open the drawstring and drew out the silver cross, as long as her fingers, that she kept there. Setting it on the table, she slid it toward the man, watching his reaction. He stared at it, but did not flinch. She wasn’t sure why she thought he might.

  “I’m given to understand this serves as protection.”

  “It does. Sometimes.”

  This seemed ominous. “You seem knowledgeable on this topic—confident—which leads me to believe you can help me. I would like to meet a vampire. I have so many questions.”

  She kept trying to meet his gaze, to hold to it, to judge his character, to learn if he was lying or not. That he kept his eyes downcast suggested he was untrustworthy. A coward, even, with some ulterior motive to trick or rob her. But that lingering sadness about him threw her entirely into doubt.

  “I would advise against it. I fear I must be going, but speaking with you has been a pleasant diversion. Have a good evening, miss. And do be careful.” He stood, gave a short bow, and departed.

  He had never ordered any food or drink.

  That night was a full moon, and from her room she heard the howls of wolves in the distance. When she asked the innkeeper about them, he said they were pests and that hunters were slowly culling the region’s wolf population. We would all be so much safer when they were gone, he said.

  The setting she traveled through for the next month was sufficiently beautiful and intriguing to make her journey worthwhile, but she decided that one location was not any more likely to play host to vampires than any other, and so continued on to Istanbul. She thought about the mysterious man in the tavern often, but still was not sure she’d ever met a vampire. At least, not until she entered Cormac’s world. From him, she learned that vampires had a power they exerted through their gaze, a subtle hypnotic mind control, and that it was best to never make eye contact with them. Cormac wore dark glasses when any of Kitty’s vampire friends came around, to prevent them from catching his gaze.

  The gentleman in the tavern had been protecting her. Her memory of his specific features had faded over time. She remembered the incident more than the man, and so could not show Cormac an image of him or describe him well enough to learn if Kitty recognized him. But she liked to think the man still existed somewhere, and that she might meet him again someday.

  What she’d learned about vampires, lycanthropes, skinwalkers, wizards, people who simply dabbled in magic or those whose entire existence was submerged in the supernatural—they’d all started out as people, which meant they could be understood as people. Their motivations, fears, desires—comprehensible. They only seemed mysterious—and mysteries could be solved.

  Chapter 10

  CORMAC GOT back home past dark and collapsed into bed. Fell into a half sleep, and from there he dreamed of the meadow, and of the woman in a long skirt and high-collared shirt. It was like she’d been waiting for him.

  They walked side by side along the creek, wading through knee-high grass. Her skirts made a shushing, brushing sound as she passed. Overhead, a hawk called as it soared from one end of the valley to the other. Cormac watched it, calmly astonished. Every time they came here, he found more details, from a bee buzzing at a wildflower to the gray-green lichens painting the rocks. It all seemed so real. And impossible.

  “You don’t trust them,” Amelia started the conversation by stating the obvious. “You want to know what they’re doing, but you don’t trust them.”

  “What I really want to know—why’s a guy like Anderson Layne suddenly interested in hunting monsters? I know he knew my dad, but it’s not like they were best friends. They moved in the same circles back in the day but it’s not like they were drinking buddies. He hung out more with my uncle. He said it himself, he thought it was all bunk until the publicity started a few years ago.”

  “It’s quite obvious, isn’t it? He’s interested in hunting monste
rs because he has a monster he needs to kill.”

  Layne had been jumpy, up on that hillside. If he’d found some random stranger poking around, he’d have had no problem threatening them, including firing off a round or two, to scare them off. He was guarding that patch from someone. Something more than a fellow lowlife thug, then? Vampire or lycanthrope? Well, that was just what Cormac needed in the mix, wasn’t it?

  He ran a hand over his hair, grimacing at the distant hills. “Yeah, figured.”

  “Whatever Anderson Layne’s situation is—surely between the two of us we can manage it. Especially for the sake of learning what Kuzniak knows.”

  “What Kuzniak knows—about how his great-grandfather killed Crane, or about how to get gold out of those rocks?”

  She offered a thin smile. “Yes?”

  If you were going to spend your time thinking out loud, this was the way to do it. Cormac knew how to track monsters. Working out more complicated problems like this—it helped to have an extra perspective. And it felt so real. He could see her chest, the fabric of her blouse moving in and out as she breathed. She was dead, she didn’t need to breathe.…

  They stopped, facing each other by the running water of the creek. She said, “If there was ever gold on that claim, it’s still there because no one has any indication that Kuzniak ever got it out. Kuzniak must have passed on his knowledge to his descendants.”

  Cormac continued the thought. “He never even dug, there’s no sign on that plateau of there ever being a mine—”

  “Because he was a magician. He had some magical ability. Was he trying to find a way to bring the gold out of the ground magically?”

  Her expression turned bemused, wondering—mirroring his own slack face, he was sure. “You’d think if that was possible someone would have done it by now. Lots of people would have done it by now, and gotten stupidly rich at it.”