Low Midnight (Kitty Norville Book 13) Read Free

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