He refrained from asking how she could blush without a body. “You ask who he is, we’ll have to tell who we are.”
Not necessarily. But if we lie to him about who we are, then there’s no reason to believe he’ll tell the truth about who he is. Oh, this anonymity is so useful, but terribly frustrating, isn’t it? I’ll have to look into using my scrying spells, but who knows if they’ll even work on e-mail. Though I did know someone who attempted to cast spells via telegraph, as an experiment. With ambiguous results, unfortunately, but I wonder if the technique could be adapted.
He decided it was time to go to bed, before she went off on another research jag. Maybe she’d even stop talking long enough for him to actually fall asleep.
I’m not that bad.
He didn’t credit that with an answer.
* * *
HE LAY in bed for a long time the next morning, thinking.
Again, he was in the meadow, and Amelia was again pacing. Cormac wondered if he could lean up against a nearby tree trunk, close his eyes, and go to sleep inside the half-dreaming world of their minds. He hadn’t slept well, waking up every hour or so with some new thought, Amelia probing him with some conjecture about Kuzniak, Crane, the other Kuzniak, and how they were all connected. He thought it could wait until morning; she didn’t. Finally, he’d gi
ven in. But he still wanted to sleep.
“If Kuzniak killed Crane in the manner the stories about it say, the evidence of it ought to be in his book. But there’s nothing!”
“It’s not a very thorough book.”
“Yes, I’ve seen that. If the young Milo learned all his magic from it, it’s no wonder he ended up dead. There must be another book. Another source from which he acquired his knowledge. Something.”
“Or we’ve missed something,” Cormac said.
“I haven’t missed anything, I don’t miss things.”
Amelia had studied the book over and over. She’d deciphered the handwriting, figured out abbreviations, copied the whole thing into her own book. Cormac agreed, she probably hadn’t missed anything.
Then the solution wasn’t in the writing. He sat up.
Amelia came toward him. “Cormac, what is it? You’ve thought of something, I can see the look in your eyes—”
He shook his head, shook away the meadow, and sat up in bed, swinging his legs to the floor. Sun came in through the cheap blinds, casting light over the clutter in the place that was so much easier to ignore at night.
Kuzniak’s book was in the lockbox where Amelia kept the most valuable—or dangerous—of the artifacts they’d collected. He went to get it off the set of makeshift shelves on the far wall, pulled it out, ignored her when she complained that he left the box open. Sat back and flipped through it, looking at everything but the writing. Feeling along the pages, the spine, the covers; holding the pages up to the light, up to his nose. Smelled like paper. A little bit musty, like an attic.
He found it in the very back, between the last page and the back cover. The last few pages of the thing were blank, like Kuzniak hadn’t had a chance to fill them all, so they hadn’t gotten this far in their reading. He held the inside back cover to the light, ran his thumb over it, and found the imprint—the shape of a Maltese cross a couple of inches wide, pressed into the endpapers. Once upon a time, someone had stored something here, enclosed inside the book.
“Look at that,” he murmured, knowing full well that Amelia was seeing everything he did. The shape had an irregularity at the top, maybe a ring, but there didn’t seem to be a chain running through it. It looked like a piece of jewelry, some kind of metal pendant or amulet. And it had to have been kept in here a long time to make this kind of an imprint.
Then where is it now?
“Good question. If there was some kind of spell attached to it, it would have survived Kuzniak’s death, wouldn’t it?”
That’s the whole point of amulets and charms, to lock the magic in place so you can give it to someone else, so the magic will survive them. This thing might be very much older than Kuzniak. Either of them.
“And what’s it do?”
It kills people, I’d wager.
He frowned. “Great. Want to bet that Layne has it now?” And did he know what he had…?
Cormac, I want to talk. Face-to-face.
Sighing, he propped himself against the wall, leaned his head back, closed his eyes. Put himself in the meadow, and found Amelia by his side. He almost expected to see a copy of the book in her hand—if she’d really memorized it, she’d be able to do that, manifest a copy in their imaginations. But it was just her, and she was alight with urgency.
“We can solve this, work out exactly what happened. Put yourself in Kuzniak’s place,” Amelia said.