Low Midnight (Kitty Norville Book 13) Read Free Page A

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