He looked over his imaginary meadow and sighed. “Yeah.”
* * *
HE MADE the call. Barreling straight ahead without thinking too much about it, just like the old days. Layne answered after the first ring.
“Heard you wanted to talk to me,” Cormac said, casually.
“That’s
right,” Layne said, cautious, rightfully so. “I figured we had some stuff to work out. We can come to an understanding.”
The guy wanted to shoot him dead on sight. “You want Kuzniak’s book back, I got it. Do you even know what to do with it?”
“That’s not the point.”
Cormac could just keep poking at him until he got so angry he hung up. But that wasn’t the goal here. “No, it’s not; you know why? Because the book’s not important. You’ve got something else. It killed Milo Kuzniak, and now you want to use it on me, isn’t that right?”
Silence. That was the trick to handling a guy like Layne—keep him off balance, so he never knew how much you knew, or how strong you were. Cormac’s reputation was going to carry him through this, if nothing else.
Cormac continued, “Do you even know what you have, or have you just been hanging on and hoping for the best?”
“You don’t know anything, you’re just mouthing off. I don’t know why everyone’s so scared of you. You were never all that badass, it was all your dad. You’re not half what your dad was.”
Nobody even remembered his father. They only knew the image of him, the myth. He was twenty years dead and didn’t have any power anymore.
If Cormac could flush the guy out right, maybe he could get him to just give it up. “Layne. I know you don’t realize it, but you’re way out of your league here. Why don’t you just hand the thing over to me and I’ll keep it safe.”
“Yeah, right. Tell you what—you want the cross so bad, you come and take it from me.” He spoke with a smugness that set Cormac’s hair on end. He was missing something. “I’ll meet you tonight. Midnight.”
Damn theatrics. Why did magicians always have to do this shit at midnight?
You must admit, it is atmospheric.
“Fine,” Cormac said. “Your place? You get it cleaned up good enough for company?”
“Let’s go where this all got started. The old mining claim. You know it.”
A place already saturated with old magic soaked into the ground. Not exactly neutral territory. But at least it was out in the open. “Fine,” he said.
Layne was talking fast, angry. “And no guns, Cormac. You don’t bring any guns, I won’t bring any. Just you and me. Got it? We’ll take care of this.”
“I don’t need guns, Layne.” He hung up.
I appreciate how you trust my abilities so much that you don’t even question if I’m capable of facing Anderson Layne in such a duel.
“Well, are you?”
I believe so. Yes.
She certainly sounded confident enough. He’d never doubted her.
Chapter 23
CORMAC MISSED his guns. The feel of them, the weight, the confidence they brought, the reassurance of his own power. He would reach under his jacket for a shoulder holster that wasn’t there, purely out of habit, and feel off balance. Go for the gun at his hip and grab empty space instead. He always would, he thought. Slowly, he stopped missing the actual ability to shoot. Because Amelia brought her own firepower to the partnership.
The first time he’d seen her use magic in a fight was in prison, against a ravaging demon. The only thing that could defeat that monster had been magic. Bullets sure wouldn’t have done it. She prevailed again, going up against some weather magician who had it in for Kitty. She explained the principles to him—was happy to explain—how one studied energies that already existed and worked to turn them, to use them against the person attacking, to build your own energy that you could use to defend yourself; that the world was made up of energy as much as it was made of matter and just because you couldn’t see it didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Among the twentieth-century reading she’d been catching up on, she’d been very interested in quantum mechanics, because she said it sounded so much like how she thought of magic.
If he thought about it too hard, he’d shut down. The implications were too big. He didn’t need to know how it worked, only that it did, and that he could use it when he needed to get himself out of trouble or make his intentions known in as decisive a manner as possible. So far, they’d done pretty well.