Low Midnight (Kitty Norville 13)

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.