Table of Contents

Title Page

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Epilogue

Coming Soon: Badlands Witch

Other Books by Carrie Vaughn

About the Author

Copyright

Cormac didn’t really know cats. He didn’t get cats. The cats he’d known as a kid had been barn cats. They lived outside, took care of themselves, earned their keep killing mice and baby rabbits. Aloof creatures, they stayed out of Cormac’s way, he stayed out of theirs.

Standing in the middle of this close and cluttered apartment, looking up at the giant, tangled furball crouched on the top of a bookshelf, he was at a loss. That thing was twenty-five pounds of pure hate, teeth bared, hissing and spitting. Pale fur shook from it every time it moved. Whenever anyone approached, it swiped with long, sharp claws. Nothing like daggers—more like hypodermic needles, and they’d draw just as much blood.

The animal tipped back its head and yowled to the ceiling, an otherworldly noise that made Cormac’s spine clench. Hell, maybe the thing really was possessed by a demon.

There is nothing supernaturally wrong with this cat, Amelia declared. He’s simply a cat. Amplified, rather, but still. . . . The cat hissed again, shuddering, letting loose another rain of fur.

Apparently, Amelia knew cats. Cormac caught the edges of her memories involving a whole series of kittens and cats she’d grown up with in her family’s lush Victorian manor house. Beautiful, soft animals born to sit demurely on laps, to be petted, to have satin ribbons tied around their necks, to ride in a little girl’s doll carriage. Those cats had followed her around the house, batting tiny paws at the edges of her petticoats while she giggled.

This was a side of herself Amelia rarely revealed. She didn’t like to think of her past—she’d left her home and family as soon as she could, to travel the world and study magic. Anymore, she didn’t like to think of her old life. Before she’d died.

Those cats from her childhood had looked much like this one: a luxurious Persian with brushable fur and an aristocratic face. But this one was, the owner confidently reported, possessed by a terrible demon.

“Schubert didn’t used to be like this,” the old man said. He was a widower, the cat his only companion in his assisted-living apartment. “He was always a little stubborn, but can you blame him? A fine old gentleman like that?” Mr. Wegman chuckled then, nervously. “But then he started hissing at everything, yowling in the middle of the night, clawing me.” The fine skin of his liver-spotted hands was covered with slash marks and thin scars.

Cormac—and by extension, Amelia, though their clients mostly didn’t know about her—had been referred to Wegman by friends of his daughter’s, a family who really did have a haunted house. They lived off of Cheesman Park in the center of Denver, the site of dozens of hauntings over the last century because that was what happened when developers plowed over a cemetery and built residential neighborhoods on top of it without moving the bodies. Cormac and Amelia had successfully exorcised the place and set the restless spirits at peace.

Surely they could do the same with a possessed cat?

He isn’t possessed, Amelia insisted. He’s ill.

Cormac and Amelia both had met demons. They’d fought demons, alone and together. In a way, that was how they’d met: fighting the demon that had invaded the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility. She’d been a disembodied spirit trapped in its walls, after being wrongfully hanged for murder a hundred years ago. He did time there on a manslaughter conviction—a bit more recently.

He’d deserved his sentence. Probably worse, too. He’d been lucky. When the demon started killing prisoners, he’d been lucky she was there and knew how to destroy it. Lucky she’d been able to contact him. Lucky he’d been patient enough—eventually—to listen to her. To let her in.

Yeah, standing here looking at that cat, he had to remind himself how lucky he really was.

“So what are we going to do?” Cormac murmured. Mr. Wegman waited in the kitchen for the verdict. If Cormac could suddenly make the cat well, maybe he could get paid anyway. He had a feeling this wasn’t going to be that simple.

Well, Amelia said, matter-of-factly. A veterinarian should see him, I suppose.

Cormac returned to the kitchen and asked Mr. Wegman if he had a carrier for Schubert. He did, and Cormac and Amelia spent the next hour in the back room where the cat had been lurking and terrorizing everyone. Cormac let Amelia take over then. In the years since they’d begun their partnership, he had never entirely gotten used to the sensation. It was like stepping aside, closing his eyes and moving to the back of his own mind, and Amelia—her soul, her essence, whatever that part of her was that had survived—came forward and took charge of his body. She was the magician, really—she needed to use his body to work her spells, to scry her magic. He was merely the muscle. The front man. The bounty hunter turned. . .whatever it was that he’d turned into.

We are partners, she said firmly, as she often did. She never took control of his body without warning him, without them both agreeing to it. It was part of their understanding.

With a can of tuna and more patience than Cormac could have managed by himself, Amelia lured the demon cat into the carrier. The animal set to howling again as soon as the door closed—and he had finished eating the tuna. Hunkered down in the carrier, he was at least safe, and Mr. Wegman was safe from him.

The cat whisperer. Amelia always seemed to be revealing new and amazing talents.

Cormac was back in charge when he brought the carrier to Mr. Wegman and told him that the cat really needed to see a veterinarian, that these changes in behavior were likely medical rather than supernatural.

“Oh,” Mr. Wegman said, sounding a little disappointed as he regarded the carrier on the kitchen table. Because wouldn’t it have been simpler—and far more interesting—for the problem to be solved by someone waving a magic wand and chanting a few words? Wouldn’t that always be simpler? As it was, he now had lots of expensive tests and an uncertain diagnosis ahead of him.

“How much do I owe you?” Mr. Wegman said, reaching for a wallet sitting on the kitchen counter.

“Nothing,” Cormac said. “No charge, since it wasn’t anything I could fix. Just get that cat to a vet and get him healthy.”

“Well, thank you, son. Thank you very much.” He shook Cormac’s hand as he showed him to the door.

It was an afternoon of work with nothing to show for it. Cormac didn’t remember exactly when he’d turned into a nice guy. He didn’t used to be a nice guy. Prison had changed him.

Or I have, Amelia said.

Same thing, really.

When he—when they—had gotten out of prison, the studio apartment in a middling part of Denver had seemed perfect. It had four walls and a door that Cormac held the key to, and could lock and unlock whenever he wanted. What more did they need?

The place was a box, with an efficiency kitchen in one corner and a bathroom tucked into another. The kitchen table was usually covered with books, papers, bags of herbs, maps, arcane alphabets, and whatever else Amelia was working on at the moment. He usually ate standing over the sink. Shelves held more of her tools: boxes, crystals, a staff, more books, carved pieces of wood, and little planter boxes with things growing in them. Cormac slept on a futon with a makeshift bedside table made from a crate. More books were piled on it, as well as his laptop.

Not a lot of Cormac himself was visible in the room. Since prison, he’d put his guns and weapons into storage and hadn’t gotten them back out. He’d promised his cousin Ben he’d keep out of trouble. That meant his bounty hunting days were over. Mostly. The duffel bag full of sharpened stakes, silver spikes, and jars of holy water couldn’t technically be perceived as weapons to most anyone looking at it. Those belonged to him, at least.

The place—maybe a little small, a little rundown—was his, while most everything inside belonged to Amelia. That cut somewhat close to the truth of the situation for his taste. Maybe this was right where they belonged.

Memories intruded. Amelia had grown up in a mansion, with acres of land, gardens, lawns, and forests. Carpeted halls, rooms crammed with furniture, windows framed by luxurious drapes, and not just a feeling of safety, but of an abiding comfort supplied by wealth. She never criticized the little apartment Cormac had chosen. She never complained. But she wanted things.

Just a little yard, she’d begun to hint. I could grow my own herbs. Work spells outdoors in privacy.

With a little planning, they could have a place that didn’t share walls with anyone. No midnight shouting, no smell of pot outside their door. They could aspire to anything they wanted. But Cormac had grown suspicious of hope. Wasn’t what they had enough? Or was he afraid to aspire?

And if I could catch a bit of rainwater now and then. . . .

They could move out of the city, up north maybe, to a little peace and quiet. Getting expensive around here anyway, wasn’t it? If he was working for himself he didn’t need to live any place in particular.

Well. If he kept catching cats for old men for free, he wasn’t going to be upgrading anything.

Much of his work came through the internet, which had taken some adjustment. This wasn’t how he’d worked in the old days. Back then, there’d been a lot of footwork and networking, talking to people, getting the word out that he was a man who could solve a certain kind of problem. He rode a little bit on his father’s reputation; Cormac had learned the trade of hunting supernatural creatures from him. After his death, Cormac continued, and enough people knew that to keep him in business.

Then he’d spent a few years in prison and most of his old networks assumed he’d died.

Starting from scratch had been just as well. This was a new kind of business he was running these days: supernatural problem solver. Paranormal detective. Now, word of mouth happened via email and forums. He hadn’t gotten as far as putting up a Facebook page for himself; that seemed a step or two too far. He didn’t want to be too easy to find.

His email inbox seemed to get a little more activity every week.

“Picked up a Ouija board at a garage sale. Needs cleaning. Can u help?”

“I need to curse my boss right now.”

“Haunted restaurant, need help please!”

“How do I keep vampires out of the laundromat?”

They didn’t do curses. Amelia could, but as she pointed out to Cormac, they were trying to get out of the assassination business and the one seemed awfully close to the other. The Ouija board issue seemed straightforward—whether or not the thing was actually haunted, Amelia could work a purifying spell or two, the owner would be happy, and they could charge fifty bucks for half an hour of work.

The haunted restaurant might or might not be, and Cormac wasn’t sure what was going on with vampires and laundromats. He could respond, ask for a basic consulting fee and not feel too bad about taking money from people who didn’t know what they were talking about.

The next email read: “I’ve been told you’re someone who’s good with mysteries. Weird mysteries. I might have one for you. Really, I’m absolutely certain something terrible is going on here, but I can’t get anyone to listen to me. Here’s what happened: one of my colleagues starved himself to death. He was in a fully stocked cabin, his car was full of gas, he didn’t need to starve. But he did. The medical examiner says it’s a fluke—some weird undetected medical condition. If it had taken place anywhere else in the world, I might say yes, it’s a fluke, he got sick and it’s just one of those things. But Mr. Bennett—we work at Donner Pass. This man starved to death in a cabin at Donner Pass.”

That caught Cormac’s attention. The presence that was Amelia also seemed to lean forward with interest. “You know about Donner Pass?” he asked.

Of course I do, it was one of the most lurid tales ever to come out of the American West. A group of pioneers was caught in the Sierra Nevada mountains over the winter and resorted to cannibalism—or so it’s said. Even in my time, fifty years later, survivors were publishing memoirs, and dime novels covered the event incessantly.

The message continued. “We’re a tourist area, a lot of people come through here. If this is some kind of curse, if something’s really wrong here, it could get bad. I can’t let that happen. Can you help?”

The message was signed by Annie Domingo, U.S. Forest Service Ranger, Tahoe National Forest. Her tone throughout was even, straightforward. Not someone prone to panic, but she was definitely disturbed. And desperate, to be reaching out on the basis of a scrap of reputation.

“Do you think there’s something to this?”

Amelia considered. I’m not sure. I knew of magicians who were interested in the location. Some feared that such a terrible event would turn the spot into some kind of psychic sink—a pit of despair if you will. Many were sure the place must be haunted.

“Still are, I’d guess. But is it possible something’s there?”

Oh my goodness, do you even need to ask such a question?

An internet search brought up a local news story about the man, a Forest Service ranger who’d been working a month-long shift at a research station near Donner Memorial State Park when he stopped checking in. State troopers found his body lying on his cot, apparently peaceful. The coroner determined that he’d died of malnutrition—he had starved. That had been just a week ago. Tests were still being done to determine if he’d had some disease or condition that would cause such a death. The coroner and other authorities interviewed for the short article all agreed that while the incident was strange, and the death tragic, it didn’t require any more attention.

Cormac called the number in Annie Domingo’s message.

“Hello?”

“Annie Domingo? My name’s Cormac Bennett, I got your email and wanted to follow up.”

The woman had a young-sounding voice, full of energy. “Oh, wow. Thank you so much for calling. Did all that sound crazy? It must have sounded crazy.”

“I don’t follow up on the crazy ones,” Cormac said.

“So you think there may really be something weird going on?”

“Well, that’s why I wanted to talk. Why do you think something weird’s going on?” He also wanted to get a better idea of her definition of weird. Did she think this was a cult, a serial killer, that kind of weird? Or weird weird. His kind of weird.

“I think there’s some kind of magic working up here.”

Yeah, that kind of weird. “Yeah?”

“Just a feeling. It’s hard to explain. It’s sort of like. . . .”

She was hesitating. Self-editing, trying to figure out what to say. What wouldn’t make her sound crazy. “Just say it,” Cormac said firmly.

Her next deep breath sounded over the phone line. “It’s a sense. Almost a boundary. I was with them when the cops found Arty’s body, and walking into the place almost made me sick. Not physically, not nausea or anything, even though it was a pretty ugly scene. But heartsick. Soulsick. Something.” The feelings she described were vague, as if she couldn’t put the sensation into words. But she’d certainly experienced something. Not only that, she recognized the wrongness of the experience.

She’s magical herself, Amelia observed. She must have some kind of connection to the supernatural, to be able to sense that. She might not know it.

“Whatever happened—you think it’s connected to Donner Pass? To the Donner Party?”

“It almost has to be, doesn’t it?”

It might have been the power of suggestion. Or it might have been some kind of dark magic evoking the power of suggestion. Fine lines, here. “Not sure, without knowing more,” Cormac said.

“Can you come look at the place? Would that tell you more?”

“I need to do some research. I can let you know tomorrow. You should probably hear my rates, see if you really want me there.” He told her a modest daily rate that was a fraction of what he charged in his hunting days, but still decent money. Plus the mileage to get himself out there, plus expenses.

“That’s fine,” she said, without hesitation. “Just please tell me you can come help.”

He thought she would have balked at the money. That she didn’t showed how serious she was. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Early.”

She thanked him and hung up.

Well, this sounded like a job. A strange, fascinating job, and maybe nothing would come of it—the death was natural, and Domingo was prone to paranoia. But Cormac felt like he used to feel before a hunt, when he had to size up his prey and consider his strategy, arrange his weapons and choose his ground. When he had a mission and purpose, a job no one else could do, that he was uniquely suited for by upbringing and disposition. He felt, in a word, happy.

Kind of weird.

So we’re taking the job? Amelia displayed an eagerness to match his own. They were both desperate to get back to work.

Cormac slept, and dreamed.

He was in a valley very much like one high in the Colorado Rockies where his father had taken him hunting when he was a teenager. A stone-laden creek ran through the middle, and grassy meadow climbed up the sides of the bowl, giving way to thick pine forests. A hazy summer heat lay over it all, and the sky above was searing blue. Cormac sat, or imagined himself sitting, on an outcrop of gray boulders near the trees, partway up the slope, looking down on the water as it frothed and foamed on its way.

A woman in a high-necked gray dress, the skirt of which brushed the grass at her feet, stood looking at the same view. She clasped her hands in front of her and seemed serene.

He wasn’t really sure if it was a dream anymore, if this was something that happened in his sleeping mind, his waking self, or someplace in between. This was a cloth woven from memory, imagination, and whatever threads tied him and Amelia together. This mindscape was where they’d first met when he was in prison, and a forceful, ghostly presence demanded that he listen to her.

When they first met her hands were gloved. They weren’t, anymore. Hadn’t been for some time, and he couldn’t remember exactly when the gloves had vanished. He wondered if he’d stopped imagining them, or if she had somehow removed them from their shared vision. Likewise, her hair had changed. She used to wear her dark hair tied in a prim bun under a simple hat, the picture of a proper late-Victorian woman. Now, she clipped it back from her face and left the rest to hang down her back in curls. She had grown comfortable with him. When she turned to smile at him over her shoulder, his breath caught.

Had he been born a hundred years too late, or just in time?

“You believe something unnatural killed that man,” she said. Here, she wasn’t just a voice. They could talk face to face. It almost felt normal.

“I’ve seen a lot of crazy in my time. This is new. But Domingo didn’t give us a lot to go on,” Cormac said.

Pacing a few feet, the fabric of her skirt shifting the grass as she moved, she said, “Even if there’s nothing to this, even if we get there, speak to this woman, and find nothing—if she’s willing to pay our fee, it’s only a few days of time, and we might have a story to tell at the end of it. We’ll definitely have the payment.”

Cormac agreed with this point. It would be good to be doing something. And paying the rent. “And if there is something to it?”

“Our last adventure was saving the world,” she said. “We can do anything.”

“Then let’s call Domingo and pack up.”

In her former life, her actual life, Amelia had always intended to come to this part of California. She’d been distracted, made a detour, arrived in Colorado, and then— Well, and then it had all come to an end.

But she’d made it here eventually, hadn’t she?

A hundred years before, she’d arrived in this country in the port of Seattle. As she almost always did when arriving in a new place, she started a search for magic. For magicians. For whatever she could learn. There was so much to learn.

As she often did, she started with local Theosophical Society, spiritualist lectures and gatherings. She rarely met with anything, or anyone, useful at these events—popular movements sanitized for general consumption, with much belief and hope but little practical application. Easy to judge and dismiss, but not so many years ago she’d been among the general public who attended these gatherings. The difference between them and her was all the work she had put into her passion over the years. She had never been satisfied with vague hopes.

In a newspaper she found a listing for a lecture by a member of the British Society for Psychical Research. She had encountered the man before; he made a living traveling around Europe and America lecturing on a variety of topics. He attempted to bring a rigorous scientific methodology to his work and had the endorsement of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself.

She arrived at the meeting hall just as the event was starting. She paid her coins and found a spot at the back of the room, standing against the wall because all the seats were taken. A gentleman tried to offer her his seat; she declined. The place was full, an excited audience attracted by the lecturer’s reputation and by Conan Doyle’s endorsement, blazoned on all the flyers and the program. The bulk of the audience were upper-class ladies who had the leisure for such esoteric pursuits and the money to spend on foreign lecturers and the pamphlets they invariably sold at a table in the foyer. The evening’s topic: The Possibility of Detecting and Measuring Electronic Fields Surrounding Ectoplasmic Emanations.

In all her travels and studies, Amelia had never encountered an ectoplasmic emanation. She had found auras, spheres, and lines of power, but they were insubstantial, and while she was interested in what steps could be taken to measure such fields, it became clear in moments that the lecturer was speaking of the solid masses that were meant to emerge from mediums in the course of séances. She knew of at least one so-called spiritualist who used cheesecloth to produce the effect. One didn’t need wires and magnets to detect cheesecloth.

To his credit, the lecturer acknowledged the existence of frauds, but he believed some real phenomenon existed behind the stories—and he would prove it as soon as he perfected a way to measure it.

Amelia felt as if he rather missed the point of the mystical—scientific method was all well and good, but science had not advanced far enough to be able to truly examine these phenomena. This lecturer approached his work from an assumption that science had advanced as far as it possibly could and therefore could entirely explain everything—with a little philosophical effort.

If he missed the mark he at least did no harm, which was more than could be said for the charlatans who charged outrageous sums of money to conduct theatrical séances rigged by cables and hidden trapdoors and electrical effects. A reprehensible practice.

Amelia wasn’t really here for the lecture. What she looked for were the other people standing in the back of the room, the ones in practical suits and walking dresses, with their amulets and charms discreetly hidden under ties and scarves, or inside the cuffs of sleeves. The ones who frowned and unconsciously shook their heads at what the lecturer said, rather than staring raptly with unquestioning acceptance. The ones like her, in other words.

As the lecturer went on about wire gauge and strength of current as it related to strength of ectoplasmic presence, one of these others caught her studying the audience rather than the lecturer and held her gaze when it passed to him.

He was a Caucasian gentleman in his thirties, clean shaven, with a beige suit and a high-collared shirt, a plain tie around his neck. His dark hair was ruffled, and the lines around his eyes indicated he smiled often. His walking stick had a smooth silver head engraved with a pattern she couldn’t quite make out. It was the walking stick that intrigued her—both elegant and unobtrusive, it jostled her instincts. There was more to this man. She wondered what detail about herself had attracted his attention. He nodded at her, and she returned the gesture. A secret recognition of their secret avocation.

When the lecture ended and the audience began to disperse, she waited, and as she thought he would, the man approached, bowler hat tucked under his arm, walking stick loose in his hand.

“Good afternoon, ma’am. Did you enjoy the talk?” He had a delightful American accent, with just that little bit of a drawl that stage actors made so much of.

“Yes, it amused me,” she said. “But I’m not sure I agree that science is yet able to measure all that is measurable.”

He smiled politely. “I hear you share a country of origin with this evening’s scholar. May I welcome you to the fair shores of America?”

“You may,” she said.

“Welcome,” he said, bowing politely. “I’ll go one step further and say that there is an aspect of the universe that is unmeasurable.”

“Such as. . . .”

“The soul, ma’am.”

“Ah. Yes, that. I would also say art, perhaps.”

“Oh? How so? That painting over there seems to be about forty inches by thirty inches, I’d reckon.”

He was joking, of course; she smiled in appreciation, and studied the painting he had indicated: a small copy of Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware.”

“I don’t mean the physical object, but rather the feeling it evokes,” she said. “This particular scene, for example, evokes little emotion in me. It is a fair representation of an incident that is part of another nation’s history, nothing more. However, for you and for most of the Americans in the room, for the people who chose to hang it here at all, I expect this piece evokes a great upwelling of patriotic feeling, pride in the scene and admiration for the man portrayed. That is the mystery, and those feelings cannot always be predicted or measured. That, sir, is the mystery that represents the gap between science and magic that our esteemed lecturer this evening has failed to address.”

He regarded her with an interest that bordered on insulting, as if she were some foreign curiosity and not a respected colleague. She suppressed the incipient blush spreading across her cheeks and also the urge to apologize for her forwardness. This was what her older brother James meant when he said she would never attract a husband. She merely had to speak and instantly became an oddity to men.

But then the charming American said, “Did you know it’s said that President Washington had wooden teeth? I admit, I can’t look at a picture of him without thinking about that.”

She laughed as she was meant to, and thought no more about what James would say.

The American gentleman, Mr. Roland Langley, invited her to tea at a nearby café. She accepted, and they discussed the quantifiable power of art and many other ideas besides. She no longer remembered which of them claimed the status of magician first. They seemed to slip into conversation about amulets, wardings, arcane circles, summoning, banishments, and all the rest of it without conscious acknowledgement. They simply recognized that part of themselves in the other. It had been like this at other times during her travels; she recognized a magic symbol carved above a door or the particular scent of incense drifting from an otherwise unremarkable bookshop, and known that something more lurked behind the façade. She always looked for such places, such moments. This was how she learned.

Mr. Langley was also a pleasure to talk to, and this delighted her. He asked her where she had traveled from—he would have expected her to travel across the Atlantic to America, not the Pacific, and she explained that she had set off from Britain to the east rather than the west, across Europe, the Slavic countries, Turkey, and then the British colonies of the Middle East and South Asia before reaching Singapore, Hong Kong, and then the ship bound for Seattle. She had almost completed the circle back home, but she planned on spending a good deal of time in the Americas first.

“And do you travel, Mr. Langley?”

“I do, but maybe not as widely as you.”

“Tell me where you were before you came to Seattle, then.”

“Well, this may interest you, now that I think of it. I’ve just come from California, a spot in the Sierra Nevada mountains called Donner Pass. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of the tragedy of the Donner Party?” he asked.

“I certainly have. This is where I will be forced to reveal my secret vice of reading penny dreadfuls.”

“Well, I’ll try not to judge you too harshly for that. Fifty years gone and fascination with the Donner Party seems to only grow in the public imagination.” He was no longer smiling, and his voice had taken on a serious cast. She had thought of him as affable, without care. Perhaps his public demeanor was a mask for more studious depths.

“That seems to worry you.”

“It’s like you said about art. Maybe we can’t measure it, but there’s power, when people react to something. Something beautiful, or something awful.”‘

“More people, stronger reactions—” As in the horror evoked by a particularly lurid description of the events that transpired in those mountains: starvation, cannibalism, despair.

“More power,” he finished. “I traveled with some of our colleagues to the pass to try to. . .how should I put it. . .disperse some of that power. Ground it out like a lightning rod.”

“You believe such a concentration of. . .ill history. . .could be dangerous?” She thought of all the terrible happenings throughout history—wars, massacres, plagues—and all the power that might possibly surround such events. The world would be a blazing crater of hell by now.

Had magicians always worked to temper such events, such locations?

Langley offered an expansive shrug, in the demonstrative way of Americans. “Sure can’t hurt to settle things down a little. Folk like us have been going up there since the start, making sure it’s not haunted, or that nothing worse than ghosts show up.”

“Fascinating,” she murmured. “Although I’m not certain I agree with you. It seems as though the whole world must be covered with ghosts and ill power, if such tragedies anchor harmful power to the material world.”

“Who’s to say it isn’t?” he answered with his ready, charming grin. “At any rate, time will tell. If nothing bad ever comes of the events of Donner Pass, we may never know if it was our work that helped—or if there was never any danger to begin with.”

“It’s likely neither of us will be alive to witness it, in either case,” she said, and poured herself more tea from the pot.

And now here she was.

It’s beautiful, Amelia murmured.

The interstate climbed into the mountains, and Cormac had exited and pulled into an overlook. The view spreading before them was a postcard picture of tree-covered hills rising up to ragged granite peaks. The air smelled clean in the way only mountain air could. Ancient stone and young pines, the sharp edge of lingering snow.

The valley was busy. The town of Truckee nestled at the base. The interstate arced around it on one side, the railroad on the other, and in between was a tourist mecca of shops, ski resorts, parks, and people.

After the reading about the Donner Party Amelia’d made him do, he’d gotten a picture in his mind that this would be some desolate, remote place. Instead, it was where everybody crossed through the mountains on their way to and from northern California. And a big chunk of those folks stopped for vacation. Lake Tahoe was a dozen or so miles south. The traffic was bad, and the roar of semi trucks on the freeway was constant, inescapable.

Perhaps it’s more peaceful in winter? Amelia suggested.

“Not with all those ski areas,” he muttered. He was from Colorado. He knew how mountain tourist towns worked. If anything, the place might be worse in winter. Hard to imagine the twenty-foot blanket of snow that had socked in the Donner Party.

If the members of the Donner Party could see this, the land that killed so many of them so brutally, what would they think?

“That maybe they should have stayed in St. Louis?” Cormac said.

Haven’t you ever wanted something so badly you’d have gone through any amount of hardship to achieve it? Believed in the chance of a new life so much the risk would have been worth it?

He thought about it a minute, and decided that no, he never had. He’d had to take risks to get out of situations, not in them. But Amelia—Lady Amelia Parker—had taken that kind of chance when she left her family, along with its wealth and status, to become a magician. She had traveled the world, taking risks, until it killed her. Sort of.

“I think they didn’t know what they were getting into. They didn’t believe in the risk,” he said. They’d been fed a line by guides and outfitters trying to get rich on the wave of settlers moving west in the 1840s. Apart from the gruesome details about that terrible long winter when they’d been trapped on the mountain, the whole story was ultimately sad. A tragedy.

He took another deep breath of pine-filled mountain air, surveyed the valley one more time, and climbed back in the Jeep.

“Let’s go track down Annie Domingo.”

He called Domingo, who asked him to meet her at the visitor center at the state park, a few miles down the freeway.

Literally right on the freeway. The site where forty people starved to death, where the survivors engaged in cannibalism and participated in one of the most famous tragedies in American frontier history, was no more than a hundred yards from a major interstate. A massive statue put up to commemorate the place by an overly enthusiastic heritage group back in the nineteen teens was visible from the interstate. The cognitive dissonance of it might actually give Cormac a headache.

In the parking lot, a set of tired-looking parents leaned on the hood of their minivan and watched three squirrelly school-age kids run around screaming, full of pent-up energy from riding in a car for hours. The dad had a camera in one hand but appeared to have given up trying to get everyone to stand still for a picture. Mom had a hand against her temple like she was nursing a headache. Years from now, this would be a treasured family memory. Or something.

Cormac gave them a wide berth, walking through the lot to the new-looking visitor center. Like the visitor centers at a hundred other parks all over the west, the place was rustic—painted brown, suggesting a cabin with its sloped roof and backdrop of trees—and yet had plenty of wide concrete sidewalks that met Federal accessibility standards. Signs pointed to nearby nature trails and reminded visitors not to litter or feed animals. The parking lot was full, but most of the visitors seemed to wander out to the giant statue of an overwrought pioneer family, take pictures, and wander back to their cars. They were families with hyper kids, or older couples belonging to tricked-out RVs. Cormac—alone, frowning, studying the area through his sunglasses—felt out of place. Anywhere he went around here, he was going to stand out: that surly-looking guy all by himself, glaring at everything.

He went inside to find Domingo.

The old woman behind the desk just inside the main doors wore an olive-green uniform with a “volunteer” tag on it. She smiled broadly at him. She seemed tiny and earnest to Cormac, and did not look like she could be Annie Domingo.

“Welcome to the park! Do you have any questions I can answer?”

Such a broad offer, Amelia murmured. So many questions. . . .

“Is Annie Domingo here?” Cormac said.

The volunteer opened her mouth to tell him when a door behind the desk opened, and a woman in her thirties in a Forest Service uniform emerged, as if she’d heard her name spoken. She was average height, with an athletic build and skin like weathered sandstone. Her thick black hair was braided down her back. Her dark eyes were piercing.

“Oh, here she is! Annie, someone’s here to see you.”

“Thanks, Mary.”

Mary smiled happily at him. “Have a lovely visit!” she said before moving off to help another visitor. That left Cormac and Domingo regarding each other across the laminate counter, between the bins of brochures and park maps.

Native American, isn’t she? Amelia answered. There were several tribes located in this area, weren’t there?

“Hi, can I help you?” she asked.

“I’m Cormac Bennett, we spoke on the phone a couple of days ago.”

She blew out what looked for all the world like a relieved breath. “Oh my God, thank you for coming.” She came around the front desk, all business. “We should go somewhere to talk.”

Bemused, he followed her out the building and across the parking lot to some kind of nature trail, marked with gravel and plastic educational signs.

“I just want to get out someplace no one will overhear. I’m already on the outs with a couple of people over this.”

“What, for calling in a supernatural consultant?”

Her answering smirk suggested she had some sense of humor. “The medical examiner is doing another round of blood tests, trying to figure out if Arty ate something poisonous that affected his digestion, so that he either couldn’t eat, or even when he ate he couldn’t absorb nutrients. Like that McCandless kid from Into the Wild? You hear about that?”

Cormac had. A suburban kid abandoned everything and fled to Alaska to live in the wild. Starved to death in a matter of weeks. The initial assumption was he’d been too stupid to hack it. Turned out, he might have eaten seeds containing some kind of toxin.

“I suppose that makes sense.”

“Arty—his name was Art Weber—was a backwoods ranger here for fifteen years. He knew what not to eat. Something else killed him.”

“You sure he didn’t just. . .pass away? He have any emotional issues?”

She gave him another look, her brow furrowed. “Starving yourself to death is a real inefficient way to commit suicide.”

“Stranger things have happened.”

“Yeah,” she said thoughtfully.

They stopped at a rustic, rough-hewn wooden bench along the trail. A nice place to rest, for anyone who needed to rest on a half-mile circular trail. For all that the area around the visitor center and monument was crowded and noisy, they had this trail to themselves. Even noise from the freeway was muffled. The running water of a creek trickled nearby, and the underbrush was thick with birds calling.

Before sitting, Domingo took another look around. “I think something happened to Arty. Something the medical examiner’s never going to find.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know—what do you normally do in a case like this?”

“Not sure there’s ever been a case like this.”

Amelia said, We look for stories, scour the old texts for symptoms, for similarities. We examine the site and look for symbols carved or painted on the walls. We look for bits and pieces of spells that have been used up. We hope for a lead, to make scrying easier. If we don’t find a lead we scry anyway.

Amelia had a spell that woke dead bodies, so she could question them about their final moments. He was pretty sure this Arty had been dead too long to try that. He hoped.

I do have other methods. I think we should see this place, where the man died.

“Can you show me where your friend died? I’ll know more if I can have a look around.”

This must have reassured her—first that he was going to investigate, and second that he might actually be able to learn something. The tension in her shoulder slipped, and she let out another relieved breath, like she hadn’t believed he was serious. “I can take you there right now.”

She drove him in a Forest Service truck, twenty minutes up a couple of increasingly unkempt dirt roads. She had to stop and unlock a steel gate on one of them, and soon the road faded to just a couple of ruts worn into the forest.

A little further on, she finally parked, and up ahead sat the cabin. The thing was small, maybe twenty feet on a side, with a tool shed and narrow porch attached. It looked like it might have been built in the thirties, of simple plank board and a shingled roof. A stone chimney rose on one side. Cormac’s father had worked as a hunting guide and outfitter in the northern Rockies of Colorado. He’d have brought his clients to stay in places a lot like this: functional cabins with few amenities, a woodburning stove but no electricity, no plumbing to speak of. But the walls were solid and the roof stayed dry. A place like this could stay toasty warm all winter. You could live here just fine, assuming the pantry and woodpile were stocked.

Yellow caution tape wound around the outside.

Domingo carefully peeled back a length of tape and invited him onto the porch while she unlocked the front door. When the door opened in, she paused as if steeling herself, and Cormac felt it, that sense that she’d talked about on the phone, a stomach-churning wrongness. He looked around, thinking he’d be able to see something, a shimmering in the air or a shadow covering just this area of forest, the cabin, and a little space around it. But nothing looked out of the ordinary or wrong. It was all in his head, in the shiver traveling down his spine.

“You felt that, yeah?” Domingo asked.

“Yeah.”

“Everybody does. I’ve always had kind of a sixth sense—spend enough time in the woods you get a feel, you know? But I mean everyone—the cops, the coroner, everyone who came in here. They write it off as the power of suggestion. They know what happened here, they just think it’s creepy. Even though they’re all tough, experienced guys who’ve seen a lot worse than this. What is it? What’s making us feel like this?”

Magic, Amelia offered. But it’s. . .off.

Since meeting Amelia he’d encountered a lot of magic. That was where his own sensitivity came from—not any natural ability, but an instinct developed over years, like an allergy that grew worse over time. A demon might crawl out of some rift in reality and exude dread; even a benevolent magician might cast some kind of protection that produced a vague sense of ill feeling in someone who wasn’t welcome. Most of the time, it felt like little more than a tingle on the skin that faded as soon as he was aware of it.

This—the magic had already happened. Any lingering sense of it should be indistinct. A prickling of hairs and nothing more. This—

It’s like some kind of hole in the world.

Domingo seemed hesitant to enter the cabin, so Cormac pushed past her and took a look around.

The place had a sour, musty smell that indicated the man had been dead for a few days before he’d been found. That only contributed to the unconscious creeping fear tugging at his perception. A spot of movement at the edges of his vision. He looked, but nothing living was here. There should be mice in an uninhabited cabin like this. Bugs. Birds. Anything.

As Domingo said, the pantry was stocked. A set of shelves on the back wall was filled with canned food: vegetables, tuna, pasta. A couple of cupboards likely held more. Out of curiosity, Cormac opened a drawer and found a can opener, so that wasn’t the problem. He was willing to bet the propane tank outside was full enough to run the gas stove by the wall. In another corner stood a desk covered with USGS contour maps, pens, pencils, a stack of worn notebooks, binoculars, compass.

“What was he doing here?”

“Arty was a field biologist. He spent a month or so up here every summer doing wildlife surveys, maintaining trails, that sort of thing. He called it his vacation.” Her face was screwed up, her eyes shining, tears ready to fall. She scowled and looked outside. “Nothing was different. Nothing had changed. So why did this happen?”

“Where was the body?” he asked.

“On the bed. Like he just lay down and gave up.”

“He wasn’t on drugs or anything?”

“No! The blood tests came back negative. They’re running a second round of tests for plant toxins. There weren’t any signs of violence or illness.”

The bed where he died was a basically a cot, with a thin mattress, made up with white sheets and a government-issue-looking wool blanket, a single pillow. The pillow still held a depression, a crease where a head might have lain. The blanket had been smoothed out.

He knelt, looked under the cot, and found two things: a jackknife, blade open and ready to use, but then dropped, discarded. And a piece of bone, smooth and flattened, probably part of a rib. It was just a couple of inches long, so no telling what it came from.

I’ve no idea what those mean.

Might not have meant anything. Guy dropped his knife. He was a biologist, so the bone might have been a sample he brought in and lost track of. It was smooth, bleached. If it had been magical, part of a spell maybe, it would have had something written or carved into it. He set them on the table, and wondered if the cops had missed the items, or figured they weren’t important.

He held the knife up. “Ms. Domingo, that look like Weber’s knife?”

“Yeah, that’s his.” She stood with her arms tightly crossed, unhappy. “He always had it with him. Where’d you find it?”

“Under the bed.”

Her brow furrowed, maybe thinking what he was: it didn’t make sense, but it also didn’t not make sense. Both the knife and the bone might have just fallen out of his pocket.

Look around, Amelia said. There must be something more here.

He let his vision go soft. He might miss something, so Amelia had to be present, slipping into his eyes, occupying not just his mind, but his body. She had knowledge and skills, but needed physicality to use them. She would see the magic where he might not.

Domingo wouldn’t know the difference. She’d see Cormac standing in the middle of the cabin, turning slowly, studying the walls, the roof beams, the furniture, the floor. She wouldn’t see Amelia looking through his eyes.

Anything? he murmured inwardly.

Let’s try something else.

They’d been doing this long enough that he knew what came next. Before she could instruct him, he drew thread and iron nail from the pocket of his jacket. He unrolled the thread, held the end of it so the nail hung in perfect balance, a compass needle pointing at random. He whispered the words she told him.

Hard to notice at first, if the thing moved or not. The gentle swaying it displayed, shifting left, then right, then back, came from its own natural movements, a draft in the air, or maybe the tiny vibrations of blood pumping through the capillaries of his fingertips. Dowsing alone was inconsistent, unreliable. But then Amelia whispered words that gave the iron purpose. If magic had been cast here, the nail’s point would show the direction it came from.

The thread trembled; Cormac tried to hold his hand especially still, but this was the trouble with physicality: the more you thought about holding still, being quiet, breathing slow, the harder controlling yourself got. Movement amplified.

Vibrations traveled down the thread, shuddered through the nail—which swung to point straight down.

Interesting, Amelia declared. I said it felt like a hole. But this is some kind of vortex. There’s a pull here.

Is there still a danger? he thought to her.

I’m not sure.

He suddenly wanted to get the hell out of here.

What’s next? Cormac prompted.

We need to have a very good look around, said Amelia. Not just here. The whole area. To see if this is happening anywhere else. And to see why anyone would want to target this cabin over anywhere else.

“Could Weber have done it to himself?”

I wouldn’t have thought so—this isn’t the cabin of someone magically inclined. But. . .we can’t discount the possibility.

“You found something?” Domingo sounded hopeful.

Cormac shook his head. “Not sure. Need to look around some more, I think.”

“Will this happen again or is it a one-time thing? How worried do I need to be?”

I don’t know, Amelia admitted.

Maybe this was just about Art Weber. Maybe he’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe this was a one-and-done. Cormac’s silence was answer enough—he was worried.

“I’ll call you the minute I have something,” he said.

They stepped back outside, and the sun seemed bright, and the air clean. The death and uncertainty, that creeping primal fear, was closed up in the cabin. Cormac suppressed a shudder.

There isn’t much that frightens you like this, Amelia said.

Frightened might have been a strong word for it. But she was right—he didn’t like it. Usually when he felt something off, he could tell what it was. He could at least make a guess and start hunting. He’d faced down werewolves, vampires, demons, ghosts— This was like water coming through the roof and he couldn’t find the leak.

We’ll find it. Her optimism could be annoying sometimes. She didn’t have physical skin to feel the gooseflesh, or hair on the back of her neck.

As he and Domingo walked back to her truck, another truck pulled in behind them, a basic Chevy pickup ten or so years old. Maybe another Park Service official, Cormac thought, until Domingo groaned with annoyance.

“God, not again,” she muttered.

A man in his forties climbed out of the truck and marched to intercept Domingo, fists clenched and eyes glaring. He was a white guy with thinning hair, wearing a rumpled button-up shirt, khakis, and hiking boots. An outdoors type. He gave Cormac a brief once-over and frowned. All his attention was on Domingo.

“Annie. What’s going on? They tell me the area’s still restricted.”

Domingo reclaimed a professional demeanor, standing tall and relaxed, speaking evenly. “Mr. Peterson, hello. We can’t open that area until we get the okay, and we haven’t gotten it yet.”

“Then it’s true, that you won’t let the police close the investigation?”

“It’s not up to me one way or another.”

“You just don’t want me here anymore. You don’t want me to continue my work, to finish my book—”

Domingo waited with apparent patience, as if she’d heard all this before. Finally, Peterson’s rant landed on Cormac.

He pointed. “—And who is this? I suppose you’re going to tell me he’s part of the investigation? More like some buddy you brought in to gawk—”

The ranger’s job might not allow her to step on this guy, but Cormac didn’t have to take this. He stepped forward, stuck his hand out, and grinned aggressively. “Hey, name’s Cormac, and you are. . .Peterson? Just Peterson?”

The man blinked, nonplussed, and reflexively took Cormac’s hand. His grip was hesitant and he let go quickly.

“Elton. Elton Peterson.”

“Elton, yeah, good meeting you.” Cormac could be as backwoods amiable as Andy Griffith when he needed to be. Best part, it threw people off when they noticed his eyes weren’t smiling. “As a matter of fact, Ms. Domingo here did ask me to come in and help with the investigation. You seem to think you know this area pretty well—you notice anything off around here over the last couple of weeks? Anything suspicious?”

The guy took a minute to stare, probably wondering if Cormac was for real. Cormac just smiled back at him with the patience of a rock.

Peterson shook his head quickly and looked away. Gritting his teeth, like he was trying to keep from shouting. “No, I didn’t notice anything. I thought it was just an accident, the police said it was an accident, and it’s very sad but I need to get back to my research—”

“You said you’re writing a book?” Cormac prodded.

“I’m a historian. I’m writing about the Donner Party.”

“Huh,” Cormac said. “Seems like there can’t be that much more to tell about the Donner Party. Folks have been writing books about it for a hundred and fifty years.”

“Everyone thinks that. There’s always more to say. And I’ve found something. I’m telling you, I know more about what happened than anyone, just wait—” He clamped his mouth shut, glared. Tried again. “And what exactly is your expertise?”

“Oh, nothing special, I’m just having a general look around.”

Domingo stood back to watch this exchange, considering Cormac with particular interest.

Peterson simmered. “Oh yeah?” the historian shot back. “And what do you think happened here?”

Cormac shrugged offhand. “I’m not at liberty to say until the authorities close the investigation.”

Peterson glared one last, fuming look before storming off. Out of the corner of his eye, Cormac saw Domingo hiding a smile.

“You didn’t close that gate behind us on the way up, did you?” he said, his voice turned flat again.

She sighed. “No, I didn’t. He must have passed by and seen it open. Like a big welcome mat. Arty was able to get him banned from the park entirely for awhile. He was hiking all over the backwoods without a permit, disrupting wildlife surveys. Whew, you should have seen the guy blow his gasket then. But Peterson took it to court, got the ban rescinded, and now here he is.”

“Who all has a key for that gate at the end of the road? Does Peterson?”

“No, but that hasn’t stopped him from parking and hiking up. The sheriff’s office has one, most of the emergency services have a master key, the rangers, the handful of people who own cabins up here.”

“So it’s not hard to get past that gate.”

“No. It’s mostly there to discourage tourists, not to really close off the area.”

Good to know. “What’s Peterson’s real story?”

“Just what he says. He thinks he’s going to tell the real story of the Donner Party, like everyone else.”

“And what’s the real story, that they ate each other or they didn’t?”

“It’s what happens when you put a few dozen people in a pressure cooker. You know something’ll pop, but nobody really agrees on how.”

He looked around at the trees, at the bright blue sky beyond them. Chickadees were calling in the branches. “Yeah, sounds about right,” he said. “And Peterson thinks he has a new ‘how,’ does he?”

“He won’t tell anyone what it is. Doesn’t want anyone stealing his idea.”

Cormac chuckled. Yeah, the guy seemed like one of those. “Right,” he agreed.

“So—you need anything else?” Annie said.

“A place to stay in town. A quiet place.”

Truckee had two sides to it. “Old” Truckee was the tourist side of the town, where you couldn’t get a hamburger for under $15 or a hotel room for under $200. Exactly the kind of mountain tourist town that made Cormac’s skin crawl. Colorado was lousy with them, and he’d spent too much time in places like it as a kid, working instead of playing. Cormac had started going along on trips to help his father when he was a teenager. The façade of it all—the high-end stores in fake-log-cabin buildings, the so-called rustic vacation lodges that had granite counter tops and hot tubs—was symbolic of the prepackaged experiences people came here for. They didn’t really want to rough it in the wild, just pretend like they could. And they needed people like Cormac’s father, like Annie Domingo, to keep them from getting hurt.

Domingo directed him to the other half of town, that had an actual supermarket and looked like any modern main street of any small town. Normal, in other words. The old highway ran through here, from before the interstate went in, and this was where he found the old-style motor lodges and almost-forgotten vacation spots from decades before. Domingo guessed, correctly, that Cormac would be happier on this side of town.

He found a low-key place that had cabins tucked back by a rushing creek. He’d have plenty of space and privacy, and they rented by the week. The sign with “Donner Trail Inn” spelled out in rustic log-shaped letters might have dated from the fifties.

Everything around here seemed to be named “Donner” something. He couldn’t tell if it was good branding or a kind of wretched product placement.

He went into the small lobby of the Donner Trail Inn, glanced over the rack of tourist brochures and the faded moss-green carpet, a refugee from another decade. He searched for a bell on the wood-laminate counter, found it, but didn’t need to ring it, because a young woman dashed out of the back office at his approach. She had honey-brown hair in a ponytail, a round face, and adjusted her glasses as she looked Cormac over. She was maybe twenty. In college, working for the summer?

“How can I help you?”

“Need a room. One of the cabins if you have one. Farthest from the road.”

She smiled happily. “I certainly do. And how long will you be staying with us?”

“Not sure. That a problem?”

Her smile grew sly. “It certainly isn’t. My name’s Trina, just let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

She tapped the keys of a very ancient computer and made some kind of affirmative noise. Cormac couldn’t see the screen to tell what she was nodding at. She kept glancing at him out of the corner of her eye, her lips locked in a smile.

“I just need to get your name and information,” she said, sliding a card across the table for him to fill out. Dutifully, he did so. She studied it when he handed it back over.

“So, Mr. Bennett, what brings you to town?”

“Just having a look around.”

“Nice. It’s a great town. You’ll love it here.”

“You from around here?”

“My whole life! My grandparents build this place!”

He tried to turn his wince into a smile. “Nice.”

“I mean, why would I leave? And you know what? People come to visit here and like it so much they never leave. Half the people in town have a story like that! Car broke down, liked it so much they decided to stay. Came for vacation, liked it so much they just stayed. Neat, huh?”

Along with the sign out front, the keys on a plastic key ring—no magnetic key cards here—might have dated from the fifties. Trina put the key on the desk and kept her hand on it. He couldn’t just reach out and grab it from her.

She beamed. “So, you know, just watch yourself. You might never leave, too!”

Through Amelia, he felt the sudden urge to make a warding sign against evil.

“We’ll see about that,” Cormac said, since he wasn’t able to manage a polite chuckle.

Trina slid the key across the counter, along with a strip of paper with a wifi code on it, because God forbid anyone have a mountain vacation without internet access.

“Anything else I can help you with? Need a place to eat? Maybe rent a mountain bike or something? Anything?”

Cormac gathered the Donner Trail Inn didn’t get a lot of business this time of year. Trina was leaning on the counter now, making it hard to look away from the low-cut scoop of her purple T-shirt. She wore a woven leather necklace and had a tattoo of roses on her left bicep.

Amelia seemed rather nonplussed, expressing roiling discomfort in the back of his mind. What. . .is she. . .what would you call it?

She’s flirting, he thought back. He pressed his lips into a thin smile, amused and a little annoyed. Trina was cute because she was young and bright eyed, but she wasn’t his type.

Do you have a type?

He had to think about that a minute. And realized he wasn’t sure he did. He liked what he liked.

“I’ll let you know,” he said, leaving without a backward glance.

The photocopied map she’d given him highlighted which unit was his. She’d also written her name down and circled the phone number for the front desk. Just in case.

“What do you think so far?” Cormac asked, back in the fresh air and sunlight, crossing the parking lot to the row of little cabins nestled among sparse pines. A raven sailed overhead, and chickadees called from the trees. “Is Donner Pass haunted?”

You mean other than Art Weber’s cabin? No sign at all. This place is so bright, it’s the opposite of haunted. After another moment of thought she added, You never hear so many birds around a place that’s haunted.

First thing they did—or rather Amelia did—was cast protective magic over the room. Just a basic spell to keep the bad stuff out, make sleeping at night a little easier. In her first life, when Amelia was traveling all over the world, she made a habit of protecting her room wherever she stayed. She’d taken up the habit again, with Cormac. He was skeptical that the magic did much good. It might keep out an angry ghost, but wouldn’t stop anyone who decided to drive a truck through the wall. The odds of either thing happening were pretty slim. But the spell didn’t hurt anything, so why not? The one time I don’t do this will be the one time something terrible happens.

They had an argument about whether lighting a sage smudge would violate the motel’s no-smoking policy—$250 fine for smoking in the cabin, a plastic sign on the nightstand declared. Cormac thought it probably would, Amelia didn’t much care, and when did Cormac worry about following the rules anyway? Answer: since he got off parole after his felony conviction. Given the unknown nature of what they were investigating, Amelia was adamant: they needed the spell, and the spell needed incense. They could add any fines to their list of expenses when they handed Domingo the bill.

You could probably persuade that very helpful young woman at the front desk to dispense with any fines, should the issue arise.

Cormac didn’t want to go near that conversation.

So they cast the spell, filled the room with haze from a smoldering bundle of sage, and hoped they wouldn’t need it. When Amelia murmured the last syllable of her chant, using his voice, Cormac felt something like a wall going up, a thin sheet of bluish light, invisible to anyone who didn’t know what to look for. He did breathe a little better when it was done.

Next, he wanted to have a look around town. He found a sporting goods store where he bought a detailed map of the area, and put a mark at the rough location of Art Weber’s cabin. The road it was on barely showed up as a faint dotted line. The woods around here probably had dozens of cabins tucked away on back roads, in addition to the ones prominently overlooking the lake. Still, the area had some remote stretches—part of the Pacific Coast Trail went through here. The Tahoe National Forest reached in all directions.

Amelia circled maybe a dozen or so areas equally spaced around the location of Weber’s cabin. She wanted to raise her pendulum and take readings at each spot—a magical survey. An almost scientific approach, taking measurements that would help them discover if whatever supernatural influence they’d located only affected that one spot—if this was an isolated event—or if that magical sink they’d sensed had appeared anywhere else.

They started in the woods around the state park visitor center and worked in a circle, west toward the glacial lake between the town and the mountain pass, east toward the town. It took longer than Cormac expected. Not every spot Amelia wanted to check was on a road or hiking trail. In a couple of spots he had to park at a trailhead then hike a mile or so to some grove of tangled underbrush or granite outcrop.

One of the spots was just a few feet off of a scenic overlook. A couple of other cars were parked there. None of the tourists made his nerves twitch, and they didn’t even stare when he left the pavement and went through the underbrush. When Amelia found the place she wanted, it turned out to have a view, looking out over a stretch of forested hills to the east, across the lake, to the town beyond. This was the view the Donner Party might have seen if they’d made it this far and bothered to turn around to look.

Weber’s cabin was visible from here only because Cormac knew where to look. Its brown shingled roof made an angular line at odds with the vertical trees around it. From here, it looked harmless. Normal. He didn’t sense anything like what he’d felt passing through the doorway.

Ready?

“Yeah.”

Amelia slipped into his limbs, taking charge of his nerves. She grounded them both, taking stock of the space around them as he uncoiled the nail pendulum. He expected it to swivel, then point decisively to the cabin. But just like at every other spot they’d tried so far, the nail shivered, then pointed straight down before going slack as if tired. Unlike at the cabin, the nails didn’t stay pointed. They jerked in the one direction, then returned to neutral. The farther from the cabin, the less the nail moved. The effect disappeared about five miles away in all directions—at least the directions they could check. He didn’t feel the need to climb the ridge that rose up south of the cabin. This much should give them something to work with.

I don’t like this, Cormac. It’s like some kind of bomb went off and flattened the atmosphere around it.

Back at their room, Amelia worked on the map, adding markings, interpreting what they found. She consulted one of her standard research books, one of the first things she’d asked him to track down when he’d gotten out of prison: a study of ley lines, maps marked with color-coded lines and dots that supposedly represented veins and roads of magic existing deep in the earth all over the world. According to these maps, a couple of lines passed through the area, and she copied their routes over her increasingly crowded markings.

When they sat back to regard the whole picture, they found a swirling mass of magical influences, flows of power saturating the area. Nothing indicated why Weber’s cabin should be the focus of whatever it was they’d discovered.

“Could what happened to Weber be connected with the Donner Party in any way?”

No, she said, which surprised him. She rarely made such decisive declarations. Usually it was probably not, or I don’t believe so. Look at the map. I’ve marked the presumed locations of the campsites where the party made shelter, the spots where the deaths occurred, even the ones along the pass and beyond. None of them correspond in any way to Weber’s cabin or the ley lines, or influence reaching beyond it.

She indicated a trio of squares near the visitor center— the Donner Party’s campsites. Another set of squares marked a few miles east—the party had separated before getting trapped for the winter. The Donner family itself was at that eastern location.

Mostly, Cormac was amazed that this much information survived about the Donner Party, to be able to mark the deaths on a map.

They’re still making archeological investigations to learn more about what happened. It’s an obsession with some people.

“Peterson?”

Indeed.

“What now?”

I need more information, she said, with an intensity that might have been, if he could say it, obsessive.

Time to hit the books.

The local library was rustic, but honestly so, a small brown building tucked into yet another collection of pine trees—and right next to the sheriff’s department, Cormac noted. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, no reason he ought to draw suspicion. A bunch of kids’ drawings decorated the library windows.

The nice cardigan-wearing woman at the counter smiled briefly at him as he entered and turned back to whatever she was doing. The place was soft and insulated. Safe, which should have been comforting.

First, he found the local newspapers going back to Weber’s death, and read everything he could. He didn’t learn much more than Domingo had told him and what he’d read online. The man didn’t have much family, wasn’t married, and didn’t have kids, which was a small comfort, he supposed. Weber had been a popular guide and ranger. He was an authority on the white-headed woodpecker, a local rarity. People liked him. They’d miss him. And he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d kill himself. There was no reason someone like him should have died so mysteriously—and no reason that he shouldn’t, if he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Like a lot of libraries in tourist towns, this one had a section of local books about the area. Places like this always had a couple of local authors who collected folklore and stories of regional interest, publishing them in pamphlets just a couple of steps up from homemade. And yes, he found a few by Elton Peterson, the angry historian. He’d written biographies of several of the main figures from the tragedy; an entire book discussing the children who were part of the expedition—as depressing a subject as Cormac could imagine, so he didn’t even crack the cover on that one—and another covering the equipment and survival techniques the members of the party would have used to set up their not-particularly successful camp. As far as Cormac could tell from skimming the work, Peterson hadn’t done much original research—the archeological information in that last book was all done decades ago, and he compiled it from other sources and recycled it into the newer book. He’d talked about a new book in his rant at Domingo. Cormac wondered what could possibly be left to cover.

Amelia took notes. Just in case, she insisted. It was probably most noteworthy that they didn’t find anything new and interesting. The Donner story was tragic, but it wasn’t supernatural.

Next stop was the local historical society, which could be another font of quirky and often useful information in a town like this. What stories were important to the town itself, maybe overshadowed by the notoriety of the Donners? Then again, it might just be a room with lots of black and white pictures of Fourth of July parades of yesteryear. Amelia didn’t want to miss anything, so they looked.

The society had a small cabin at one end of a standard city park, with ball fields and a playground, a few kids playing and people throwing sticks for dogs. It all would have looked innocuous except for a couple of vans and a big SUV parked near the cabin, blocking out half the lot, and a series of traffic cones marking out an area of the grassy lawn nearby. The reason for the presumptuous claim of public space became clear quickly: the nearby cluster of people included a man with a big video camera, another with a mike boom, and a few of the others were wearing historical costumes, cheap nineteenth century pioneer outfits, shirts and trousers, skirts and shawls, floppy hats and sunbonnets.

Somebody was filming something. Cormac wondered if the costumes looked as fake to Amelia as they did to him.

How am I supposed to know if they look real? Those costumes represent an era well before my time, she answered with a huff. You do realize the nineteenth century was a hundred years long, don’t you? She added, But yes, they look fake.

An energetic young man emerged from the back of one of the vans. He had slicked-back dark hair and wore expensive-looking shirt and trousers. Clapping his hands, he started calling out orders. The cameraman and mike operator took positions at one end of the grassy stretch, and the people in costume—actors—straightened skirts and hats and moved toward the other end of the grass, against a backdrop of trees, the one and only place they could be filmed without the modern buildings, roads, wires, and so on, intruding. One of them dropped a half-burned cigarette and stomped it out.

The energetic man must have been the director. Cormac scanned the vans for some kind of production company logo, but they looked like plain white rentals. A few more people were on hand with clipboards, bottles of water, and other odds and ends. Some of the dog walkers wandered over, and one of the women with a clipboard marched over to them. “Move along, folks. We’ve got people working here, we need you to stay out of the way.”

That didn’t really help. This was too interesting to just walk away from.

“Okay, people! This is part one of the Fort Bridger scene, everybody know where we’re at?”

Amelia observed, Fort Bridger is a thousand miles away, in Wyoming. What are these people doing?

Cormac believed they were filming a dramatic reenactment for some kind of documentary.

“All right!” the director checked in with his crew while the actors took up places they’d obviously discussed or rehearsed. “Ready? Action!”

Two of the men in costumes began arguing. “We should continue on the old route! It’s the safest way!”

“No!” said the other. “This new shortcut will be faster! It will shorten our journey by three hundred miles!”

“But we know nothing about the route and we have no guide!” They made expansive gestures and over-enunciated in a way that made Cormac wince.

“How hard can it be?” the second man declared. Cormac couldn’t tell if this was intended to sound as ironic as it did.

Oh dear Lord, are they reenacting the Donner Party? Amelia seemed horrified by the idea.

One of the actresses hefted a bundle of cloth, bouncing it against her shoulder like she would a baby, but exaggerated. The whole thing was exaggerated. “Darling! I’m afraid!” she declared, clinging to the man arguing for the shortcut.

“Don’t be, my dear! I know what I’m doing!” The man turned forward, gazing into some invisible distant horizon. They looked very much like the giant pioneer statue over at the state park. This might have been intentional. “Soon, we’ll be in California and all will be well!”

“Great, great!” the director said. “Now, let’s do it again. Take two!”

Ignoring the film shoot, which had nothing to do with him, Cormac headed over to the Historical Society building. Turned out, the place was closed—a sign on the door helpfully indicated the society was only open three days a week, and not today.

“Sir! Sir, you can’t be there, you’re in the shot!” The woman with the clipboard hurried toward Cormac. As far as Cormac could tell, the camera pointed well away from him. He crossed his arms, and she hesitated, not coming any closer. “Uh, hi. Can I ask you to please move along? Just for a little while.”

“You guys making some kind of movie?” he asked.

“A TV show, yes.”

“About the Donner Party?”

“Y-yes?”

He nodded like she had revealed some deep dark secret. “Just give me one more minute.” He went to the sashed window to the left of the door, cupped his face to the glass, and looked in.

“Sir!”

The windows weren’t particularly clean; he didn’t see much. Mostly framed black and white photos of stern men on horseback and parades.

Satisfied, he crossed to the other end of the lot and his Jeep. The director glanced his way, and Cormac caught his gaze. The director didn’t look away right off; instead, he gave the impression of making some calculation.

Well, this should make our investigation more interesting.

Cormac sincerely hoped not.

Back at the Donner Trail Inn, Cormac dropped by the office. Trina again tore out of the back room as soon as she heard the door, and her face lit up when she saw him. Unfortunately. He resisted an urge to walk out and instead asked what he came to ask. She claimed to know everything about the area. Time to test that.

“You hear anything about filming down at the park?” he asked.

Trina’s reaction was dramatic, as she slapped the counter and rolled her eyes. “Oh my God yes, I heard all about it, they’re doing some kind of documentary for one of those history TV shows about the Donner Party, including recreations. Like, with kids sitting around campfires licking bones and that kind of thing, can you believe it? I mean there’s always somebody or other coming through and making documentaries, but these are apparently way out there. The historical society isn’t happy but the producer is paying the town off so what’re you gonna do? Some of my friends are furious, they thought there’d be some kind of local casting call for extras or whatever, just people standing around in the background, you know? I have this friend who lives in L.A. and being an extra in crowds is, like, her job. She just stands around all day and makes pretty good money. Isn’t that cool?”

“But these guys aren’t hiring locals,” Cormac prompted, hoping to move the conversation along.

“No, from what I hear this company does a lot of these reenactments for cable shows and crime shows and stuff and they have their own actors they bring in. Just think how much goodwill they’d get if they hired like at least a few locals—”

“You know how long they’re supposed to be filming?”

She shrugged. “A week? Something like that?”

“Thanks. Another question—you know anything about Art Weber?”

“Oh my God, the ranger who died last week? That was so weird.”

“Did you know him?”

“No, I didn’t know him. But my friend Katie used to go out with him—just a few dates, you know? She ended up breaking it off because he was kind of a loner. And then he died. . .all alone. . . .” Her gaze went a little vacant.

“But you don’t know of any rumors about him that might give an idea what happened?”

She shook her head. “People liked him. He was always around, helping out and stuff.”

“What about Elton Peterson?”

At this, she gave a frustrated huff. “He’s just your basic know-it-all. Oh my God, don’t tell me you’ve run into him already.”

“He was out at the state park.”

“He’s obsessed with the park. Keeps trying to get people to sign petitions to change the signs—not even the information on the signs, it’s just that he wants to be the one to write them. He’s not even local. He’s originally from Fresno!”

“Right. Thanks.” He turned to go, but she stopped him.

“Are you really a detective? Like a private detective, like on TV?”

“I’m not sure I’d go that far,” he said. He was still trying to figure out what kind of detective he really was.

“So is there really something weird going on with Arty? Like some secret evidence that tells what really happened?”

Cop and detective TV shows tended to portray murder as some kind of baroque puzzle, with obscure pieces that only an intrepid hero could discover, that when assembled pointed to the most unlikely suspect imaginable, who had equally baroque reasons for wanting the victim dead. Murder in the real world hardly ever worked like that. Not even when the supernatural was involved. Sure, sometimes a murderer worked out an elaborate plot to kill someone in secret, without getting caught, usually for the most prosaic reasons—sex or money. But most murders were violent, sudden, messy, unpremeditated. People killed people they knew when they got angry. Nothing mysterious about it, and it was often just a case of tracing back the blood spatters, metaphorical or otherwise, to the person standing at the source of them. Trick to not getting caught was not to be the person standing in the spot the spatters all pointed to. Being a professional mostly meant knowing to not be standing where the evidence led back to. Cormac had only failed at that once; that was all it took.

Here, a magical bomb had gone off. Where did the blast point back to?

“Nothing as fancy as that,” Cormac said. “I’m mostly just helping Ms. Domingo clean up the cabin.”

Trina was clearly disappointed—this probably wouldn’t make nearly as interesting gossip as some other tale about a horrifying secret behind Weber’s death.

“Ah. And everything else? You getting around okay? You find the grocery store? Gas station?”

“Everything’s fine.”

“Okay, just let me know if—”

She might have still been calling after him, but he shut the door as he walked out.

I have an idea.

“Oh?” They were back in their sage-scented room, their maps and books spread around them. Night had fallen. He’d grabbed fast food for dinner, and his stomach wasn’t thanking him for it. They had only arrived in Truckee that morning, after driving through the night. Really, they ought to sleep. He wasn’t quite vibrating with exhaustion, but he was getting close.

Only speculation, really. Someone—or a group of someones—casting powerful spells and not cleaning up after themselves. Not using circles to ground the magic, but rather letting it simply. . .explode.

He could imagine the gesture, Amelia raising her arms and flicking her fingers out to demonstrate.

I want to set up a kind of. . .alarm. In case it happens again, we’ll know and can perhaps track down the culprit.

“Can it wait till morning?”

I think so. But right now I want to look for ghosts.

“I thought you said—”

Indulge me.

The Donner Party camped over the winter of 1846 and ‘47 in two different locations. The first, the main camp, was near the lake, where the visitor center, monument, campground, and park were located. The bulk of the party stopped here, holing up in three cabins. The other camp was some six miles away, near Alder Creek, off a state highway, commemorated by a national forest turnout and trailhead. The Donner family itself, stymied by broken wagons and injuries, had stopped here and tried to tough out the winter under little more than a tent and tree branches. Most of them hadn’t made it.

For decades, ghost hunters assumed the whole valley must be haunted. Over forty people had died in one long, drawn-out, horrifying event. Surely the place was saturated with supernatural energy.

Not necessarily, Amelia murmured.

Recently, ghost hunters had done all the usual, taken EMF readings, searched for EVP—but noise from the freeway complicated both those efforts. They always found the usual: vague feelings, unsubstantiated clues. Psychics had their opinions.

But the ghost of Tamsen Donner was said to walk between the two camps, a trek she’d made in life right before she’d died, and—possibly—been consumed by the main camp’s last survivor, Louis Keseberg.

After dark, Cormac pulled into the parking lot, turned off the headlights, and shut off the engine. Once again, he had a feeling of disconnect. This landscape was so tame, so populous, how could he reconcile it with the stories of the Donner Party, the twenty feet of snow and pervasive death? Like the other locations significant to the story, nothing here gave any sign about what had happened. He didn’t feel a lurking menace, no sense of dread. No hint of the spirits of those who’d died. No, this was another beautiful mountain meadow with a trickling creek running through, ringed by towering pines, all of it silvered by the light of a half-moon. Only the ubiquitous bronze commemorative slabs told the story of what had gone wrong here.

Time erases, Amelia said.

It did and didn’t, Cormac thought. Of course a hundred and fifty years would change the landscape. But echoes remained. They changed the names of the pass and the lake to match the party. Everything around here was Donner. You could not know anything about the story and still have some inkling that something had happened here. Like an old battlefield with a single bronze plaque marking an event that no one but historians knew about.

Penlight in hand, he got out to walk around. This spot, some ways down an easy, well-groomed trail, had two markers: one where common belief said the Donner camp was located, and another some twenty feet away where archeological digs determined the camp probably was. Without a time machine, no one would ever know for sure. Unless Amelia decided to run some kind of séance and try to talk to one of the party.

Even then, any spirit raised might not know. The trees are different. The path of the creek will have changed. Memory is a tricky thing.

He kept the penlight pointed down, studied the grassy meadow as well as he could in the moonlight.

Walk that way a bit, I want to see something.

He got the feeling she wasn’t looking for anything in particular—she just wanted to look. He scuffed his boots through the grass, drying out in high summer, panned the light back and forth for anything that might jump out.

Meanwhile, he also listened. Kept his awareness turned out to the stands of pines surrounding the meadow, to the shadows around the parking lot a couple hundred yards away. They’d escaped the truck roar on the freeway, but the night wasn’t completely quiet, when he really listened. Trees creaked, a bit of underbrush rustled—one nocturnal creature hunting another.

There, Amelia murmured, and he sensed her frustration at not being able to simply reach out. If she wanted to badly enough, she could try to take control of his body—briefly, at least, before he fought back. At the beginning, he’d fought. The headaches had been mind ripping, and she hadn’t succeeded. They cooperated now.

He looked for where she indicated, and finally saw it: the glint of something unnatural mostly buried in the dirt, hidden by grass. Crouching, he picked at it, brought it into the light. It was a small brown button, made of bone or horn, polished.

“This what you wanted?”

Yes. I wonder. . . .

The button was old—but probably not that old. This ground had been scoured over so many times, nothing from that time would have been left. Unless some tiny artifact—like a button—happened to bubble up from the ground and appear just for them.

I want to try something, she said, and pressed forward. She wanted his hands, his muscles, his voice, to work a spell that was too complicated to explain. Frustrated, he nonetheless relented. One of these days, he was going to know her entire catalog of spells, every possible thing she could pull out in a situation like this. He hadn’t reached the end of her knowledge yet.

“And you never will,” she murmured with his own voice, as he slipped to the back of his own mind.

She struck a match from his pocket, started a tiny fire with a bit of grass—and was careful to clear a space around it and keep it barricaded, in response to his spike of anxiety about accidentally setting the entire forest on fire. Sprinkled some herbal mix into it, releasing a scent of earth and spice. Whispered words like she always did, that he couldn’t quite catch and could never quite remember. He was about to ask what this was supposed to do.

Something caught his—her—eye. She didn’t notice, she was so intent on reciting the spell and pressing the old lost button between her hands, calling forth whatever thread of power she was searching for. He tried to get her to turn her head, or at least shift her gaze to a sliver of movement, light where there shouldn’t be any. He didn’t have as much practice catching her attention as she had catching his.

At last she flinched, startled into paying attention to him.

The faintest blur of fog had risen. The night was dry, the sky clear. This might have been the start of morning dew—except it wasn’t morning and the gray mist only rose here, on this spot, some ten feet away. It had the shape of a woman. Details emerged: she wore a long skirt and a threadbare blanket over her shoulders, and stood with her hands folded before her. She gazed west as if waiting for someone to arrive from over the next hill.

“Tamsen Donner,” Amelia breathed.

And the fog slipped away, melting back into the air.

So did Amelia, in that moment. She was so astonished that she slipped out of Cormac’s body, back to her usual place lurking around his subconscious. He stretched his fingers and winced, adjusting to the feel of blood and breath again.

They stared at the space where the mist had formed—Cormac resisted calling it a ghost, that explanation seemed too easy—for a long time, waiting for something else to appear, for that unsettled prickling feeling to fade. Finally, Cormac stomped out the wisp of fire.

“Was that your spell?” he asked. “Did you do that?”

I fear it might have been coincidence. Suggestion. I’m not certain she was really a ghost. Merely an echo. Her pain, recorded on the ether. Just one bit of magic calling to another.

“What was your spell supposed to do?”

Recall history, she admitted. Show a glimpse of what had happened. But when I’ve used it in the past it’s mostly evoked noises and emotions, something linked to the artifact used to recall the image. I really doubt that button was a hundred fifty years old, however much I may wish it.

“If you want to try again we could always swipe something from the museum at the visitor center.”

That won’t be necessary. She sounded a little testy. Maybe because she knew he could really do it, and get the artifact back in place when they were done before Annie Domingo found out.

This seemed a somber end to their first day on the job.

The next morning Cormac called the hospital and a couple of local clinics to find out if there’d been any illnesses related to starvation or malnourishment. Since he wasn’t asking about specific patients—he didn’t bring up Weber’s death—he hoped officials could tell him about broad trends. But no, the couple of administrators he managed to get on the line didn’t think such a thing was possible. Eating disorders didn’t generally come in waves, like he was suggesting. He couldn’t get them to understand that he wasn’t talking about eating disorders—this was something else. But didn’t that generally happen, trying to talk about the supernatural? It didn’t fit in the regular categories, so people didn’t know what to think. They didn’t have a paradigm to follow, and so what he described didn’t—couldn’t—exist.

I have heard of starvation magic being used in battle, Amelia offered. A siege tactic, to hasten the suffering within a holding under attack. But spells of that type are usually directed at the food and water supplies—foul the wells, rot the food, the people will starve as a result. That isn’t what happened here.

So much magic worked slantwise—not directly at a thing, but near it. Sympathetic relations. That Weber just starved, within reach of food, for no medically obvious reason, was throwing them off.

Their next stop was back to Weber’s cabin, to place Amelia’s warning system. In the parking lot on the way to the Jeep, Cormac slowed, listened. Trina was standing outside the office, talking loudly on her phone. Her back was to him; he stayed hidden by the wall of the office.

“. . .yeah, right. I don’t know why he’s here, he’s asking a lot of questions. . . . Of course I’m keeping an eye on him! Well I don’t know. I asked Mag at the diner and she said she talked to Mary over at the park, and Mary says Annie Domingo hired him for something. You think it has something to do with Arty? Between this guy asking questions and the Hollywood people it’s like someone rigged this whole thing up as a publicity stunt. . .right? And it wouldn’t even bother me that much except, you know, what actually happened? It’s some sick joke, I’m telling you. Do I think this guy has something to do with it? Well, I don’t know. . . . Yeah, he’s cute—”

Cormac sidled away without a word, however fun it might be to tap her on the shoulder and watch her squirm. The Jeep was waiting at the other end of the parking lot.

Well, you are.

“What?”

Never mind.

The gate at the end of the dirt road to Weber’s cabin was already open, so Cormac wasn’t entirely surprised when he drove up and found a couple of SUVs and a utility van blocking the drive. At least a dozen people milled in the clearing in front of the cabin. Cormac pulled over and got out for a look around. Then he saw the cameras, the historical costumes, and a woman consulting a clipboard and marshalling forces—the one who’d yelled at him yesterday. The same film crew.

Cormac stood back to watch as some kind of order emerged from the chaos. The director, wearing a different set of slick clothes but with the same polished urgency, shouted, “Places!” and the camera operators took up positions, pointing toward a canvas lean-to set up under a stand of trees, near a weathered cabin wall. Two male actors in homespun trousers, shirts, boots, and large beards, arranged themselves in front of the cameras. One held an axe, and the two were arguing, presumably about the weather since they occasionally looked up at the sky with anguished expressions.

“If we don’t cross the pass now, we’ll never cross!” one actor solemnly told the other.

“But we can’t go on! The storm’s too bad. We’ll. . .we’ll have to wait it out.”

“Then we’re doomed!”

Both actors again gazed forlornly at the clear blue sky. The axe didn’t seem to serve much purpose. Nobody in the Donner Party had axed another member, after all. It mostly seemed to be there to show that yes, these were pioneers. Or something.

“Cut!” the director called out, and the actors sagged. One of them walked over to an assistant who offered him a cigarette.

The caution tape was still up around the cabin. Didn’t seem to bother anyone on the crew. A Forest Service pickup truck was parked across the way, hidden by the film crew’s vehicles. Annie Domingo leaned on the hood, arms crossed, scowling. She must have been the one to open the gate.

The director spotted him and moved to intercept. However much he wanted to, Cormac couldn’t ignore him. The guy was right there. He stood with his hand outstretched, and didn’t miss a beat when Cormac refused to shake it.

“Hi, I’m Ford Bellamy. And I hear you’re Cormac Bennett? Is that right? You have a couple minutes to talk?”

Cormac bristled. Small town—he could make a couple of guesses how Bellamy knew his name. “I’m busy, sorry.” He couldn’t imagine what Bellamy could have to say to him. Cormac walked around the guy, giving him a wide berth. Bellamy chased after him, still talking, like he was used to chasing after people who didn’t want to talk to him.

“Um, so. . .I understand you’re a detective investigating the Donner Party tragedy?”

Nothing obligated Cormac to talk to anyone he didn’t want to. This basic fact made his life so much easier. People so often relied on the basic politeness of others to get what they wanted, and they always seemed so surprised that Cormac just didn’t care.

Bellamy wouldn’t take the hint. “Our company produces recreations of historical events, and right now we’re making a documentary of the Donner Party. We’re interviewing local experts for the show, and we’d love to get your perspective, to maybe talk about some of the more unexplained aspects of the tragedy—”

Cormac stopped, and the guy smiled, victorious. He probably thought everyone wanted to get on film.

Cormac said, “You going to recreate that scene where Betsy Donner fed her children flesh from their own father without telling them what it was?” Amelia had floated that tidbit up from the back of his mind, and he delivered it deadpan.

What did it say about Bellamy that his smile remained fixed? “Inspiring, isn’t it, the lengths a mother will go to to ensure her children’s survival?”

“I’m not a historian, I’m not investigating the Donner Party. You don’t want to talk to me.” Again, he turned away, and again Bellamy followed. He was reaching out, like he might grab Cormac’s arm. The whole time, Domingo was watching from her truck with a kind of wide-eyed appreciation.

“But Mr. Bennett, I think you could really add something to our production. You’ll be compensated of course.”

He thought about that for half a second and decided he wasn’t that hard up. “There’s another guy you should talk to—Elton Peterson? I bet he’d love to be on your show.”

While Bellamy might have been able to keep his smile in place, he couldn’t suppress the eye roll. “That guy would like nothing better than to be our expert commentator. To be the expert commentator. But what can I say—he’s just not good in front of a camera.”

What a punchable smile Bellamy had. Cormac shook his head and tried, again, to walk away.

“But wait! You are a detective, right?”

This time, Bellamy actually grabbed his arm. Actually touched him. The only reason Cormac didn’t punch him was Amelia anticipating him and whispering, Calm, calm. . . .

So, with a great deal of calm—he thought—he stepped away from the other man and out of his grip.

The producer’s smile finally fell, as if he realized how close he’d come to injury. He blinked, owl-like, at Cormac, who continued over to Domingo. She seemed to be trying not to chuckle.

“Could have used some help there,” he said flatly.

“I wanted to see if you were really going to deck him,” she said. “What stopped you?”

“Intervention from the great beyond.” Amelia humphed at this. “So how is it everybody around here knows about me?”

“Trina at the inn likes to talk,” she said. “And she knows everyone.”

“I’m used to being a little more under the radar.”

“Too small a town for that, Mr. Bennett. So, have you found anything?”

“I was hoping to do a little work here. Didn’t expect all this.” He waved at the vans and SUVs. Some of the actors were drinking coffee now, while part of the crew cleared a spot in the underbrush to set up some lights on tripods. In broad daylight. He didn’t get it.

“Yeah, I had to let them in. They thought it would be ‘atmospheric.’” She shook her head. “They’re apparently paying the town a lot of money. But getting in the cabin shouldn’t be a problem.”

He nodded at the cabin. “What’s going to happen to it when this is all over.”

“It’s Forest Service property, so as soon as I let them sign off on it, we’ll clean it out and assign it to the next researcher.”

“That’s why you’re getting pressure to close the investigation?”

“Yeah. But I seem to be the only one who thinks this could happen again, and I can’t risk that.”

“Even if we do figure out that something weird’s going on here, I don’t know if I can guarantee it’ll never happen again. Not much about this is ever cut and dry.”

“I know,” she said, sighing.

The longer the cabin stayed empty, the dustier and lonelier it would feel.

The place could use a good cleaning. Magical and otherwise, Amelia observed.

Then why not do it? he thought in response. Clean the place, set an alarm in case that magical vortex struck again. If nothing else, they’d all feel a little better being here.

He went around the whole building, gathering up tape into a huge messy armful, then went back and dumped it in front of the truck, next to Domingo.

“Cleaning house?” she asked.

“Something like that,” he said.

All right, we’ve done this before. Salt, candles, sage.

He could almost picture Amelia rolling up her sleeves and brushing her hands. After gathering materials from her kit in the Jeep, he let her take over, stepping to the back of his own mind. She’d do the work; he’d keep watch. He could still hear and see out of the corners of her vision, sound and movement she wasn’t paying attention to while she cast the spell. He became her subconscious, tapping into an awareness she wasn’t connected to. If anything happened, he’d shout.

Some of the film crew and actors had stopped to watch him. Bellamy in particular had his hand on his chin, looking thoughtful.

Never mind, we’re here to do a job.

A circle of salt poured out of a small tin, candles at the cardinal points, a lit bundle of sage—they were running out of sage—and the words of a spell that Cormac still didn’t know by heart since half of it was in Latin and half in what Amelia said was Egyptian. He took her word for it. Three times they circled the house, and back at the north candle she kicked an opening in the salt circle and snuffed the candle with her—with his—hand. And something changed, as if a breath of wind blew out from the house.

Domingo, waiting at the front of the cabin and looked around in wonder. “I felt something. What was that?”

“Check it out,” he said. Amelia retreated, and he stepped into his body again. Stretched his fingers, popped a kink out of his neck. Took a comforting breath of clean air to anchor himself. Domingo unlocked the front door and cautiously stepped in. Cormac followed.

The place still smelled musty and sad, but the sense of doom was gone. The place felt abandoned now, not cursed. Domingo sighed as if waking up from a sleep.

“It’s gone,” she said, amazed. “Whatever you did. . .it’s gone.”

Not really. The prickling on the back of his neck was still there—they still didn’t know what had caused the dank scent of dark magic in the first place. It could still come back. “One more thing I need to do,” he said.

He sorted through his pockets—he was going to have to do a major cleaning and overhaul when he got back to the room this afternoon, since he didn’t know what he had left in them anymore. But Amelia seemed to know. She knew everything.

Does the plumbing here still work?

Cormac tried the faucet at the kitchen sink, and water ran from the tap.

Even better. Water from the same place will anchor the spell even more firmly.

He held a strip of paper under the stream for a moment, just enough to soak but not so much that it would disintegrate. Following Amelia’s instructions, he tied a piece of red string around the paper strip, and tied the other end of the string to a spot in the middle of the room, to a bolt sticking out under the kitchen table. From this spot it was exposed to almost everything going on in the room, yet would be invisible to someone giving the place a cursory look-over.

He must have looked awkward, kneeling under the table, craning up to see, but this was what Amelia wanted so here he was. He closed his eyes, let out a breath—and Amelia was the one who whispered words over the ensemble of materials. Laid out a teaspoonful of incense under the paper, which went up in a flash at the touch of a match and left a spicy scent in the air.

“What is this?” Domingo had been standing watch at the open door, her attention divided between keeping an eye on the film crew outside and watching Cormac. Her nose wrinkled.

“I guess you could think of it as an early warning system,” Cormac said.

“So if this is happens again, we’ll know?”

It was a little more complicated than that. “Sure,” he said.

The strip of paper was dry now, the incense a smudge of ash on the floor, and Amelia retreated. Whatever she needed to do was done, but she had one last instruction for him.

Carefully, he tore the strip in half, left the one piece hanging under the table, and folded the other half and put it in his pocket. If something happened to the first strip, if some kind of magic affected it, the torn piece would be affected as well. They’d know, and maybe be able to get out here to see what it was.

He managed to crawl out from under the table without bumping his head, brushed off his jeans, and considered. He could almost feel the torn piece humming in his pocket, and couldn’t decide if he wanted it to go off— smoke or buzz or whatever it was going to do—or wished it wouldn’t. He just wanted to fix this.

“Now we wait.”

Domingo locked the cabin behind them with a sense of finality. “I guess that’s it then.”

Cormac looked at her. “How so?”

“Part of what’s been keeping me from letting them close the case is just how. . .wrong this place felt. That whatever happened to Arty would happen again, as long as that evil was there. Well, now it’s gone. I’m going to have to let them open the cabin back up.”

“Not sure that’s the best idea.”

“At some point we have to move on. You fixed the big problem.”

“And whatever caused that problem is still out there,” he said.

Bellamy was waiting for them outside the cabin.

“Just what exactly are you investigating up here, Mr. Bennett?’

“Oh you know, the usual.” Cormac gestured around at the crew setting up for the next bit of filming. “What’s this scene supposed to be about?”

“George Donner and James Reed are deciding if they should push on or stay and wait out the storm.”

Well, at least the dialog was on the nose. Of course this would be the storm that ended up dropping twenty feet of snow on the area. He looked around at the sun-dappled woods on a bright summer day. “Shouldn’t there be some, you know, snow?”

“We’ll CGI that in post. You know, I’m still looking for expert witnesses. I think you’d be perfect. We’ll give you the script.”

Cormac wasn’t an expert on anything, and he didn’t want to end up on TV. “No,” he said over his shoulder, walking with Domingo back to their vehicles. Just in time to get out of the way as another truck barreled up the drive and threw up gravel as it slid to a halt. Elton Peterson just about fell out of the driver’s seat. He hadn’t appeared to have changed clothes since yesterday, or maybe he just had a lot of the same flannel shirt. The historian glanced at Cormac and Domingo, blinked in what seemed to be surprise, but then stalked toward his original target: Bellamy.

Peterson leaned into his rant, just about spitting at Bellamy while pointing at the cabin.

“You don’t have permission to use this spot for your. . .your theater.”

“Actually, we do.” Bellamy waved a hand and one of his college-age PAs scurried over, holding out a clipboard like an offering. “All the Forest Service and California State Park System permissions are right here. We’ve paid to be here for a full week, and the filming license is in order. This is all publicly posted at the Forest Service Office.”

“You should be talking to me. I know this history better than anyone. Nobody from the Donner-Reed Party even stopped at this spot!”

“Sir, I need to ask you to leave,” Bellamy said patiently.

“I—I’ll give you my new book, the one I’m working on. You’ll see, what I’ve discovered—you should be talking to me!”

Bellamy called over to the ranger. “Ms. Domingo? Can we maybe call the sheriff’s department to get this guy out of here?”

Peterson managed to look both helpless and full of rage. His eyes bulged, his fists clenched. Cormac straightened, because however laughable the guy looked, he was boiling over. “You have no respect for history, for the Donner Party, for. . .for anything! People died, and this is how you honor them, with this garbage?”

“Yes, actually. We’re an educational show. Mostly.” Bellamy’s smile conveyed an awareness of little ironies.

Peterson did not appear to have a sense of irony whatsoever. He lunged at Bellamy, shouting in fury.

Half of Bellamy’s crew lurched to try to grab one or the other of the men; the other half scurried out of the way. Bellamy mostly dodged, so Peterson only clipped his jaw rather than knocking him over. The two switched places in preparation for the next go-around. Cormac chose this moment to act. The actor playing Reed was trying to wade in, but Cormac shoved him aside, grabbed Peterson’s shirt, and hauled backward. The man kicked and flailed, but Cormac stayed behind him, out of reach, and nothing connected.

With the instigator out of the mix, everyone else fell back and recovered. Bellamy had a cut lip but was grinning. He probably really did enjoy this.

Cormac dropped Peterson and stepped away, out of reach. The guy’d run out of fight and sat in the dirt, panting.

The cameramen were filming the whole time. Cormac glared at them.

“What are you doing?” Peterson yelled at him.

“Saving your ass.” The actor with the large beard and axe was standing off to the side, holding it like he might use it.

Bellamy pointed, clearly gleeful. “This is all on film. I’ll go straight to the sheriff and have you charged with assault unless you get the hell away from my shoot right now.”

Peterson straightened, brushing himself off. Marked Bellamy, Cormac, and Domingo like he was trying to memorize their faces. Then he climbed into his truck, slammed the door hard, and took about three Y-turns to work his way out of the drive and back to the road, while everyone stood watching and he grew increasingly flustered, bent over the steering wheel like he could use it to physically lift the car.

He might be laughable, but this worries me. The stakes here are so low, and yet—

“Thanks for your help,” Bellamy said, extending his hand to Cormac, who still refused to shake it. “I owe you one. I’ll tell you what—if you don’t want to be my expert witness, you want to be an extra? Just a bit part in the background, one of the teamsters in the party maybe.”

“No.”

He and Domingo walked away, out of earshot. Bellamy went back to the shoot, and the actors went back to worriedly looking up at the treetops as if it were snowing.

“Peterson’s really getting to be a problem. I’ll talk to the sheriff about him,” she said.

“Probably a good idea,” Cormac said. “I’ll check in with you tomorrow, if that’s okay.”

“Thank you, Mr. Bennett.”

He gave her a lazy salute and headed back to the Jeep.

Peterson was waiting for him at the bottom of the hill. His truck was pulled across the road; Cormac didn’t have a choice but to stop.

Elton Peterson stood by his truck, arms crossed. His manner was still hunched over and squirrelly, like he was on the cusp of something earth-shattering that was weighing him down and fraying his nerves. Cormac didn’t have time for this. But, as he expected, Peterson got right in front of him and stared him down.

“So. Did Bellamy ask you to be on his show?” Peterson demanded. He was probably trying to be calm.

“You mind pulling the truck over so I can get by?”

“Who are you, that he asks you and not me?”

He doesn’t really expect an honest answer to that. . . .

“I don’t know,” Cormac drawled, looking off into the trees, giving one of his country-boy shrugs. “Don’t really understand those Hollywood types.”

“No, I mean it,” Peterson said, stepped forward. “Who are you?”

If he got any closer, Cormac would be very tempted to deck the guy. Assault charge, that post-conviction ticker in the back of his head reminded him. So he took a breath and just stared. “I’m just looking into some things for Annie Domingo.”

“Art Weber? Is that what you’re looking into? He was just as bad as all the rest of them, he didn’t understand, not really.”

“And what is it we’re all supposed to be understanding?”

“The possibilities.”

Cormac tilted his head, asking silently. What was it the guy had found, or thought he’d found?

Peterson shook his head, as if acknowledging that he’d said too much. “You won’t find it. People have been in this valley for a hundred and fifty years looking for something. They haven’t found it. None of them.” His eyes blazed, and the tiniest smile twitched on his lips. “Stay out of my way, Mr. Bennett. Everyone needs to stay out of my way.”

He clambered back in his truck, roared down the road.

What has he done? Cormac—what has that man gone and done?

“I have no idea,” he murmured, watching the dust kicked up by Peterson’s departing car.

Amelia paced back and forth, her skirt swishing through the lush grass of their shared meadow. “I wouldn’t have thought the man had a magical bone in his body, much less the knowledge to evoke. . .well, whatever it is that’s been evoked.”

“The memory of starvation,” Cormac murmured.

Frowning, she looked at him. “Well yes. Exactly.”

They’d argued, after Peterson drove away. Cormac wanted to go after him right that moment, run him off the road, put his hands around his throat and demand answers. Amelia argued for restraint, and not just because Cormac couldn’t afford to get caught assaulting someone. “If he really did do something that resulted in Weber’s death—on purpose, even—we hardly want to confront him directly. Neutralize his power first.”

Which sounded good, but they didn’t know what his power was. The hint of a magical vortex, the open knife, the scrap of bone. Nothing in Amelia’s catalog of experience accounted for it. She needed to think. They needed to plan.

And so, however much he hated the idea of doing nothing, he went back to the motel, had dinner, and went to bed early. Sort of went to bed. Rather, he dreamed, and watched Amelia pacing.

In the valley in his mind, the one place he could look at Amelia—or at least an image of her, whatever that meant—he studied the map she’d spread out on a rock. She’d reproduced their map of the area—or drew on his memories to create an image of it, he still wasn’t sure of the mechanics and didn’t think about it too much. She’d marked it up with circles and diagrams to show what they’d done, what spikes of magic they’d found, and speculated about what might happen next. The Alder Creek campsite, all by itself on the upper right corner, had a star in a different color. They’d encountered something there, but it wasn’t connected to the magic centered around Weber’s cabin. Probably.

It should be her with the body, dealing with all this. He felt like a poor translator.

“Does it bother you?” he asked.

“Of course it does, if Peterson really is some amateur would-be wizard dealing with powers of which he has no idea and little control—”

“No, I mean. . . this.” He gestured around at their meadow, the place in his mind they shared, this strange dream-place existence. The one place they stood face to face.

“Oh. Being effectively if not actually dead? I try not to think of it. I have plenty of other things to think about instead. I’m finally learning Aramaic, after all—when you’ll actually open the book. This is certainly better than it was, trapped in a brick wall with no access to the world. You can smell the pines and revel in that sensation, and I can appreciate that feeling, even if I can’t smell them myself.”

“Can’t you?”

She closed her eyes, tipped back her head, took a deep, full breath that she didn’t need and wasn’t real.

“Almost. . .like I’m right at the edge. . .and then. . .it vanishes.” She opened her eyes and frowned. “I sometimes think of the mummies in Egypt. The mummification process was meant to preserve them for the afterlife, so they could continue on as they were, in wealth and luxury. And I think—is this it? Is this some sort of afterlife? If we traveled to Egypt, would I meet the old pharaohs, lounging on their boats on the Nile, ancient spirits living strange little half lives?”

Someone clever would probably offer some kind of sympathy, some kind of comfort. But he didn’t know what to say.

“I am grateful for what I have, for what I’m able to do,” she said, determined. “We will meet true death someday, you and I. No need to rush into it. In the meantime, we have work to do.”

Pure impulse made him reach out and tuck a strand of her hair back behind her ear. This cleared the view of her profile, the slope of pale cheek, the slender shape of her nose. Glinting dark eyes turned on him, startled but unafraid.

The touch was real. The impulse, the gesture, even if the physicality of it was an illusion, nothing more than shared neurons.

“You’re smiling,” she observed. A question was implicit in the statement. And then he couldn’t stop smiling.

“Yeah, I guess I am,” he said. He couldn’t have said why, but she didn’t ask. Why didn’t matter. Just that he was smiling, and wasn’t that a thing?

Then she smiled too. “There are a number of spells—more active protection than throwing sage and salt around a room. They’re rather generic—it would be useful to know exactly what we’re up against—but we can perhaps throw them at Peterson and do some good that way.”

“A curse?”

“No. . .more like a wall. We just have to contain the man.”

“Can’t hurt,” he agreed.

She pursed her lips, touched her nose, looking especially thoughtful. How many times had she stood like that in life, considering some problem or other? Did she even realize her quirks had followed her into her afterlife? “I don’t suppose we can get a lock of hair from him, or a fingernail clipping?”

“What was that about assault charges?”

“Right then. We’ll work with what we have.”

Part of him never really slept, waiting for. . .something. There was always something. It wasn’t paranoia—he’d been a hunter too long not to be aware of what was coming up behind him, and there was usually something coming up behind him. So when a knock came at the door, he merely opened his eyes. Nothing startling about any of it. The sky outside the window was dark. Middle of the night, chilled and quiet as stone.

Cormac reached for a gun at the bedside that wasn’t there. Clenched his fist in frustration.

Something’s wrong, terribly wrong.

Yes, of course it was. He checked his phone, in case he’d missed a call or message. Nothing. Time was shy of midnight. He’d slept through the evening.

The knock at the door came again, and Trina’s voice called, “Mr. Bennett? Cormac, are you in there?”

Wearing nothing but sweatpants at the moment, he wasn’t especially interested in opening the door. Let her think he was a sound sleeper.

“Cormac,” Trina called again from the other side of the door, her voice fast and anxious. “I know you’re here because your Jeep is here and the police are here and really want to talk to you.”

He rubbed his face. Then he smelled smoke.

He froze. Nothing seemed to be on fire. This was a flash, like catching a whiff of cigarette smoke. It jolted his nerves.

Oh no.

He’d left his jeans flung across the end of the bed. The front pocket, where he’d left the other half of the magical alarm, was warm. When he reached in, he found only ash.

We need to get to the cabin.

Yeah, but first they had to get past the police outside.

“Just a minute!” he called as he pulled on clothes. He also called Domingo. The phone went straight to voice mail. Cormac paused. He tried again—it was late, she didn’t strike him as being much of a night owl. Maybe she’d just shut her phone off. Or maybe something was wrong. “Goddamn it.”

Taking a deep breath, he opened the door and found Trina looking back at him, along with a pair of burly men in beige state trooper uniforms.

Cormac didn’t want to talk to cops. He didn’t want to deal with the police ever again in his whole life, if he could help it. He’d been off parole for a year, he shouldn’t have this reflexive knee-jerk. . .annoyance at seeing men in uniform trying to stare him down. But he was still a convicted felon, and he could assume that Trina told them everything she knew about him, that they’d run the Jeep’s license plates, and when you had a mystery no suspect looked quite as good as the one who already had a record.

This will be fine. They are not the enemy.

Yes, they are, Cormac muttered back at her. They had their own agenda. They got in the way.

Trina’s nose wrinkled. “You haven’t been smoking in there, have you?”

Cormac stepped out, leaving the door cracked. “What is it?” he asked evenly. If he tried to sound innocent he’d only sound more guilty.

“Cormac Bennett? That Jeep in the parking lot is yours?” The cop pointed at the only vehicle in the lot with Colorado plates.

“Yeah.” He read the names on their badges, Jankowitz, Stanley. He ought to ask for their identification. He didn’t really want to stall these guys.

“Ford Bellamy. You know him?” The shorter one was doing all the talking. He was a white guy, stocky, with a buzz cut. The taller one was blond and glared at Cormac like he expected him to bolt, and yes, his right hand was at the holster on his belt.

Cormac let out a breath. He’d expected them to mention Annie Domingo.

“Yeah, just met him yesterday. He tried to rope me into his film thing, but I said no.”

“Too busy? And what’re you doing in the area? A long way from home, aren’t you?”

“Not that long. I’m just looking into a few things for Annie Domingo over at the state park.” There, that got him a uniform on his side. The taller of the two cops still looked like he was waiting for Cormac to do something threatening. Trina stood to the side, looking back and forth with round eyes.

“When was the last time you saw Bellamy?”

“This afternoon at the park’s research cabin. Why, what’s happened?”

“He’s missing,” Officer Stanley said.

“Oh yeah?” Cormac tried to sound startled. But he wasn’t surprised. They needed to get out of here, now. . . .

“Yeah. We’re checking in with all the people who saw him last.”

“You talked to Elton Peterson yet? The two of them argued this afternoon. Domingo was there, she’ll tell you.”

The two officers glanced at each other. “We haven’t been able to reach Annie yet. We’re still looking for Peterson.”

Shit, Cormac thought, and felt Amelia’s urgency as a jolt in his hindbrain.

“You seen any of them since this afternoon?” Stanley pressed.

“‘Fraid I haven’t.”

“Found your record,” he said next, as if this was a surprise. “Seems like you’ve been around a lot of missing people in your time.”

Cormac almost chuckled, because that was such a roundabout way of putting it. “Yeah, I can see how you’d think that. How about if I hear anything about Bellamy I’ll let you all know?” He needed to circumvent this conversation entirely. He needed to get back to the cabin.

Stanley drew a business card out of his trouser pocket and handed it over. Standard contact info. “I’d appreciate it if you’d do that.”

The two went back to their patrol car; from inside, a radio scratched out indecipherable news.

“What’s going on?” Trina asked, still gaping.

“We need to get ahold of Annie Domingo. She’s not answering her phone.”

“I’ll try calling. I know her neighbor, I’ll call her too, have her knock on the door of her house—”

“No,” Cormac said, holding out a hand. “No one goes into her house. No one gets close. Just keep calling, maybe she’ll answer.”

“Okay. Okay, yeah. I’m sure everything’s okay—”

“And Elton Peterson. You have any idea where he is?”

“He lives south of here, out on the highway. I don’t have his number, I mean who’d want his number—”

“You think you can find out where he is right now?”

She nodded quickly. “Yeah, yeah, I think I can do that.”

“Good. You find out, and call me. Don’t talk to him, nobody goes near him. Call me, got it? Here’s my number—”

“I already have it. It’s on your registration card.”

He smiled back. “You think that’s my real number, you got something to learn about paranoia.”

Her eyes widened. Then she grinned. “Yes, sir.”

The missing director wasn’t his problem. Let the cops deal with that.

Except he disappears, and the warning alarm at the cabin goes off?

Amelia didn’t believe in coincidences. Worry about the cabin first, then Bellamy. The cabin was the center of it all.

“So tell me this,” he said out loud, as they roared up the service road toward Weber’s cabin. The alarm had been triggered; the slip of paper in his pocket had burned to ash. Whatever had gotten to Weber had returned. “Bellamy and maybe Domingo are both missing. Peterson’s pissed off at both of them, which means he’s also pissed off at me. So why are we okay?”

I told you we’d need that protection magic someday.

He gripped the steering wheel, wrestling the Jeep around curves, and was still half a mile from the cabin when he put on the brakes and skidded to a stop. In the headlight beams the dirt road ahead showed ruts where the tires of a vehicle had kicked up trenches of gravel as it lost control and skidded. The tracks disappeared into the trees.

“You don’t think. . . .” Cormac murmured.

Be careful, Amelia murmured. His first impulse was to snap that he didn’t need reminding. On consideration, he appreciated the reminder. He needed an extra set of eyes. A sixth sense. Clairvoyance. The ability to channel the dead. Omnipotence.

I am a mere magician, she said.

Cormac walked a little ways from the truck, keeping his gaze soft enough to catch unexpected movement in his peripheral vision, but focused enough to notice details that didn’t fit. Anything out of place, from a recently fallen tree to a newly dug ditch. If he knew what he was looking for, he wouldn’t need to search.

A soft breeze rocked the pines above him. Living wood creaked, a perfectly natural if ominous sound. An owl grumbled a little ways off. The world around him appeared perfectly ordinary, except for the place where a car had obviously skidded off the road, suddenly and violently.

He left the road and followed the tracks through the pathless forest.

He didn’t have to go far. The ground dipped, sloping into a shallow gulch, and a black SUV sat innocuously shored up against a big pine. It hadn’t been moving fast enough down the track to do more than crunch the bumper when it hit the tree.

This was Ford Bellamy’s car.

This is not good.

Maybe the driver had lost control, managed to brake hard enough to keep the crash from being a total disaster. And then what, walked away? Then where was Bellamy? Why hadn’t the cops found this? Cormac approached, still looking around for. . .whatever.

He reached the driver’s side door and looked in through the tinted window. Someone was sitting inside; Cormac could only see the driver’s shape. He pulled a pair of gloves out of his jacket pocket, slipped them on. Old habit, but even now he wasn’t willing to leave behind any confusing prints that would have to be explained. He let out a breath, hoping the door would be unlocked.

More than that, it was open a crack. As if the driver had moved the handle but hadn’t had the strength to push the door any further. Cormac opened it. The man’s hand flopped down. A sour smell came out—a sickroom reek, as when someone had been ill for a long time.

The driver, Ford Bellamy, was dead. Clearly dead, his eyes open and clouded, his cheeks sunken, his body slumped in a limp, familiar manner. Nothing looked quite like a dead body. His stylish, expensive clothes hung off him as if they were too large, and seemed to drape around a too-thin frame. The bones of his hands stood out, skeletal, the flesh shrunken away.

He looked like he had starved to death.

He can’t have; he’s only been missing a day. Half of a day. A body like this—he would have had to be starving for weeks. Months, even.

“Your spell,” he said. “The one that lets you talk to the dead—”

I fear there isn’t enough body left to hold a soul. Besides—do you think he understood what was happening to him?

Cormac guessed he didn’t, that the man had been overcome with—whatever it was that overcame him. Probably in the middle of driving back down the mountain. When he tried to open the door, to get out, to escape—he’d been too weak to do even that much. He must have been terrified, though the desiccated features didn’t reveal any dying expression.

A phone rested in a drink holder between the front seats. Cormac checked it—the battery was dead. Like something had sucked away all the energy in the car, not just Bellamy’s life. He put the phone back, just like he’d found it. He did some more searching—and found a keychain-sized Leatherman dropped on the floorboard at Bellamy’s feet. Knife blade open, ready to use and then abandoned, just like at Weber’s cabin.

On the dash, tucked right up against the glass, a piece of bone. A bit of rib, the length of his thumb.

The cabin—we must get there immediately.

“No. We need to get the hell out of here. Get back home,” Cormac said. His first job, always, was keeping themselves safe. He was ready to hit the freeway and never come back.

We can’t do that.

Whatever this was. . .it wasn’t going to stop. Was Domingo already dead too? Cormac tried to call her again—and couldn’t get signal.

We help her by stopping this at the source—the cabin. You aren’t one to run. I know you.

When you have the skills, when you have the tools—you need to use them. His father had taught him that. Should have applied to carpentry, not. . .whatever this was. And his father had died young. “I usually know what I’m up against when I stay to fight.” Whatever this was. . .could they even fight back?

Sacrifices, Amelia murmured finally, from the back of Cormac’s mind. Thinking out loud, as out loud as she could. He’s making sacrifices.

“What kind of sacrifices? I don’t get it.”

A sacrifice presumes that the deaths will end when the perpetrator attains whatever goal is aspired to. But then what is the goal? To feed whatever got fed a hundred and fifty years ago when the Donner Party was stranded here? But what did that accomplish? All those people died, and for what?

“Fame,” Cormac murmured. “A hundred and fifty years later, we’re still talking about them.”

He felt Amelia give a frustrated huff, and could picture her brushing the fabric of her skirt in irritation. The wrinkle to her brow, the lines around her mouth. There are easier ways to achieve fame, even as a killer. Jack the Ripper didn’t go through this much trouble.

“Maybe this isn’t about fame as a killer.”

That leaves us back where we started. These deaths are sacrifices. They’re fueling something. But what?

“Do we go back down the mountain to tell someone about Bellamy, or check out the cabin?”

Cabin. While the scent is fresh.

So be it then. Report the body later.

Sometimes Cormac really hated magic.

Me as well, Amelia said, which surprised him, and she explained. It never occurred to me to use magic to hurt anyone. I only observed so many inexplicable details in the world, and I wanted to know more. I wanted knowledge. And yes, power. But I hoarded my power like treasure. I didn’t have a purpose for it. Not like this. Any purpose that could be derived from this must be terrible. We are moving toward a very dark place, Cormac.

Wasn’t the first time. They were better equipped than most to go there. “So let’s do it,” he muttered.

What made it hard, they weren’t looking for an assailant, an artifact, a thing. A target he could hunt and kill. Instead, they were looking for a curse, a black hole, a free-floating area of ill intent. Invisible, deadly, that also seemed to have intent and a vast capacity for evil. This force wanted to kill painfully. Vampirically, almost. Not consuming blood or energy or spirit, but the basic physicality necessary for life. It was vicious in a way that most people wouldn’t think of. Not even someone like Cormac. There were faster, nastier ways of killing.

If only they could set out a net to catch the thing, like a bird.

The gate at the bottom of the drive was closed. Holding his penlight in his teeth, Cormac picked the lock quick enough. Slower than he wanted, though. He forced himself to keep calm, keep breathing steady. He might not have had his guns, but this was a hunt just the same. Like his usual prey from the old days, the vampires and werewolves and so on, this target was hunting him, too. He just had to get there first. Easy.

Finally, the gate swung open. He returned to the Jeep and raced up the hill to Weber’s cabin. A half-moon didn’t do anything to make the forest any clearer. Looking up through the treetops, stars blazed.

He reached the clearing, which this time of night was stark and full of shadows. The cabin lurked, the pair of windows somehow darker than everything around them, something out of a goddamn horror movie. Striding toward the front door, Cormac reached into his pocket for one of the charms Amelia had him put there, a glass Turkish eye the size of a quarter. Not that it would help, but it was something to do.

At the steps up to the porch, he stopped.

What is it?

He simply nodded at the piece of rib bone sitting there. He’d have to walk right past it to get inside.

Two things, she demanded. A protective circle, and alarms. It’s coming, we’ll know when it gets here.

He got to work, quick and calm.

Pouring from a bag of salt, he made a circle some twelve feet in diameter. At the four cardinal points Amelia set a new alarm spell, string and paper resting on the ground. He kept the torn pieces in his hand. If any magic passed this way, they’d know. In the center she had him build a fire, but not light it. He set out a bundle of sage, a candle, a knife. He and Amelia weren’t quite sure what they were up against. Something that killed with malice. But they would be ready.

“Now what?”

Patience, Amelia said. We just have to be patient.

He sat on the ground in the center of the circle, to keep watch on the trap they’d set. The summer night was crisp. No breeze touched the air.

He scratched his jaw, which was going past feeling like sandpaper into actual beard territory. Waited. This was so like a hunt it was almost comforting. Up at dawn, waiting for a bull elk to walk into his sights. Time seemed to freeze in those moments. He closed his eyes, just for a moment.

Cormac, light the fire. Light it, now!

He smelled burning and tried to swat it away, as if it was part of a dream, as if he was still asleep. He didn’t think he’d been asleep for that long, but a chill had settled over the forest. He shivered.

Cormac!

The scraps of paper from the magical trigger had turned to ash. They’d been on the ground in front of him; a wisp of smoke still lingered. He was supposed to be watching them. He looked around—which trigger had been sprung? Which direction was the danger coming from?

All of them at once. All four scraps had burned simultaneously. The danger was here, and everywhere. He felt strangely leaden.

This is it! Cormac, it’s here! The curse is here!

The circle of protection hadn’t worked because it was already here; they’d locked it in with them. He couldn’t stand up. He knew that he ought to. He was sure he needed to stand, right now.

Cormac!

He remained rooted to the ground, nerveless. “I can’t move,” he murmured, staring at his legs like they belonged to someone else. Fear blasted through him—Amelia’s fear, a panic rooted in the back of his mind. He’d never felt fear like this from her. Something was very wrong.

When was the last time you ate?

Dinner, a fast-food burger before going back to the motel. His stomach cramped, far beyond hungry. He was starving.

Don’t you have a. . .a. . .what is it, a power bar in your shirt pocket? Some jerky? You always carry around a bit of jerky. Eat it. Just a bite.

“I can’t.” He winced, knowing he should be angry, unable to find the energy for it. Well, at least he was right—whatever had gotten Weber and Bellamy was right here. Maybe it’d been here the whole time. They’d finally managed to draw its attention.

Cormac, did you hear that?

He listened. Held his breath to hear better, and there it was. Not a voice, this was only a suggestion. A thought on the air, directed at him. He’d probably heard it before, but not with his conscious mind. Now, he listened hard and heard the words.

What’s it saying? What’s it telling you?

“It’s telling me to eat.”

But it wants you to starve—

“No. This is about torture. It wants me to eat.”

He picked up the pocketknife, the ritual blade she’d had him set by the unlit fire. Yes, for this, the curse let him have free rein. No trouble at all moving for this.

He stabbed the knife into the ground next to him. His hand was shaking. He was gritting his teeth hard, and forced himself to unclench his jaw.

Cormac. She was worried, with a sharp edge to her presence. Please, Cormac. What is this?

He looked at the knife. He looked at his thigh, the thick, fleshy stretch of muscle laid out just under the fabric of his jeans, just below the skin. Fresh, bloody meat.

Understanding dawned on them both.

All Cormac had to do was cut into himself. Then he could eat.

Amelia could do nothing.

The cruelty of the spell was breathtaking. No, upon consideration, much crueler tortures were possible—she could even think of some herself involving children, involving long roads of pain that only ended in death. Involving the kind of hopelessness that did not end in death at all.

This spell had an end to it, a decisive end that she preferred not to think of. The cruelty of this spell was obsessive—taking the fascinating horrors of the Donner story and turning them upon the victim. Amelia had no body. She was unaffected by the curse that had trapped Cormac, pinning him to the ground and sapping from him his will.

She had to do something, but she didn’t know what. She wanted to reach out, grab Cormac’s collar, shake him until his teeth rattled. She couldn’t. She couldn’t even scream in his ear, because he was drifting away. They were locked together in the same damned brain, and she could feel him losing focus as his energy faded. As he starved, the hunger of weeks compressed into moments. The pain gnawed at him; she watched from a small distance, as if behind glass.

If he died, she would lose her anchor to the world. She would be helpless, and the last part of her still living would dissipate.

This was magic. She knew magic, knew a thousand spells and the arcane lore that crafted them. She could solve this, counter it in a way that Weber and Bellamy couldn’t have hoped to. God, they must have been terrified, having no way to understand what was happening, thinking the curse of this place must truly be striking them down—

She pulled her thoughts back to the problem at hand. This was not natural, clearly. It was magic. So, what was the magic driving this? What was the power that had invaded their circle and struck Cormac down with so little warning?

A trap. It had waited for a target, then sprang to catch it, without mercy. If this had been old—some spell or curse from the previous century, some leftover magic, there would have been some warning. Some randomness. This was new, and malicious. And very likely the kind of trap that the more one struggled against it, the tighter it held.

They needed some kind of protection, and they needed to draw the perpetrator—the maker of this trap—into the open. Confront the person, turn the spell back somehow. She had charms—she was constantly filling Cormac’s pockets with charms and odds and ends, anything that might be useful, a magician’s toolkit. If she could remember what he had there, cast her own magic, hope it was strong enough—

And keep Cormac alive. This was all on her now.

This was what Weber and Bellamy had both faced. Lying paralyzed, one option open before them as they watched the skin draw back from their bones and felt their stomachs contract, the hunger of weeks collapsing into hours. All they had to do was eat the one unthinkable meal. Bellamy had dropped his knife rather than give in. Weber, the same. Neither one of them could do it. So, did that make them courageous, or cowardly?

“I could do it.” He wasn’t weak. He could do whatever he needed to survive. No one would blame him.

You will not, Amelia declared.

“I wouldn’t even die. Just a little piece. I could survive. Tell me why I shouldn’t.”

It’s not civilized. Her English accent was so prim, so offended, he had to chuckle. Right, then. He couldn’t do it because the prim English lady said not to.

You are very difficult.

His hands looked different. Thinner, more gaunt. The bones seemed more defined. He touched his face—did his cheekbones seem more pronounced? His life was draining away physically as weight vanished from him in defiance of all the laws of physics.

No you will not. You will not starve, I forbid it.

“I’m trying not to,” he murmured.

He was starving; she wasn’t. Would her spirit survive without a body, the way it had back in prison for a hundred years? Would she be able to find another body out here? Or would Donner Pass really be haunted now?

We must fight. It’s simple, really.

“Amelia. . . .”

Annie Domingo. Was she going through this now, right this minute? Had Peterson got her, too? Maybe there was still time. . . .

That’s right. We must fight so we can save Annie. There’s a spell. You hardly have to move, even.

“Or I could cut. Just a little. Then this all goes away.” A piece off the tip of his finger. He wouldn’t even miss it, and there’d be enough meat in that one bite, a bit of fat and enough blood to suck on to satisfy the monster—

Cormac! She had to shout at him.

He shook his head to clear his mind. He wasn’t thinking straight, he knew he wasn’t. He should throw the knife away, like Weber and Bellamy had. Or finally use it to cut, maybe a strip off the curved muscle of his forearm. . . .

No. Those two men had been stronger, to refuse that voice.

I daren’t ask you for a drop of blood, you’re liable to slice a whole limb off, the state you’re in.

“Blood sacrifice. That’s what you said, what all this is—someone needs sacrifices, that’s why Weber died, why Bellamy died—”

Yes. And if there is a sacrifice, there is someone performing the sacrifice. Someone who wants something.

“I’ve never been this weak.” He was lightheaded. His energy had fled, and his body was throbbing. It wasn’t pain so much as. . .need.

I know you haven’t. But so much of your strength is in your mind, my dear, we simply have to use it. Ignore the rest. Can you do that?

It was like he had Mary Poppins in his head urging him on. How could he say no? “Yes.”

I’ll help. Let me in, let me have your body so I can—

“No—you take over, you’ll be stuck too. We’ve done this enough, you can tell me what to do. But you need to stay safe.”

As long as you’re like this I am not safe.

“Amelia. Please. You don’t want to feel what I’m feeling. Just tell me what to do.”

How was it he imagined her taking a deep breath? Brushing her hands and rolling back her shoulders like she was about to push a boulder up a hill? She had no body. But she was as real and solid as if she stood next to him. He could almost feel her holding his hands, gazing into his eyes.

Show me what’s in your pockets.

The action seemed to take a very long time, far longer than it would have under normal circumstances. Every inch of movement seemed to require a renewed force of will. Move hand to jacket pocket. Put hand in pocket. Rest. Grab items, which amounted to simply closing his hand and keeping hold of what he could. Drop hand to his side, letting items spill. Repeat until he had everything out. Then on to the next pocket. No wonder the other victims hadn’t called for help.

Amelia was thinking faster than he was—her mind wasn’t clouded. She surveyed the pockets’ contents as he laid them out, recognizing them even in the near dark. His phone—drained and dead, of course. A bent nail. Matches. A couple of chunks of quartz. Black string, red string. A pillbox filled with dried clover. Paperclips. Feathers.

Black string, she said. Wrap it around your right forefinger. I’ll say the spell.

He focused on her words, but they were in another language, Latin maybe, so instead he let the sound of her voice flow through him and concentrated on the string, clasping it with his thumb and clumsily twisting his hand until the string looped around a couple of times. He didn’t have the energy for more, but when he finished, so did the words, and he could feel power rise up, a magical energy that hadn’t existed before, created by her words and securing him like a brace.

He took a deep breath—he was able to take a deep breath. He didn’t feel particularly stronger, but life had stopped draining from him. The spell was an anchor. Whatever happened next, his life would hold here for a little while. She’d bought some time.

Next, we draw out the killer.

This would be a summoning, she explained. Not traditional demonic summoning like in the stories. Rather, this would be like a fire alarm, a strobe light—a disruption, to force the target to look over. Shake the spiderweb to see what came out of hiding.

Cormac didn’t much like that metaphor. He was already caught—what was he supposed to do, when the spider approached?

Smash it, Amelia declared.

“I hope this works,” he murmured.

So do I.

She didn’t sound as sure as he would have liked.

Next, they’d be writing in the dirt, symbols and signs, messages sent to the ether. She wanted to use a stick to write; he didn’t have the strength or attention to look for one. Wasn’t sure he’d be able to hold onto it. He could use his finger just as well. Put whatever strength he had left into the spell.

I wish you’d let me do this.

“No. I need you in reserve.”

If you’re trying to spare me pain—

That was it exactly. No reason both of them had to suffer.

Cormac—

“Show me what to write.”

He closed his eyes to better focus on her presence, her disembodied voice calling to him. He didn’t sink all the way into their meadow, the space of their shared consciousness. But he could see what she wanted him to see, the patterns she needed written. Methodically, he scratched them into the dirt beside him. First left, then right. Then another, and another. She spoke a simple phrase with Cormac’s voice:

“Acclare! Acclare te ipsum!”

Silence returned. The nighttime forest was more still and ominous than a graveyard. Easy to remember, how many people had died just a few miles from here, and how horribly.

“What now?” he said.

A beam of light panned through the trees. A flashlight, accompanied by soft footsteps on the earth. The sudden motion was shocking, a jolt to his system that was almost painful. His heart raced, and it didn’t have the energy to work so hard. He looked, winced, figured out that someone was approaching, searching for the exact spot where he sat. Part of him grew hopeful, ready to call out for rescue. But he knew—this wasn’t rescue. This was a man come to see how his sacrifice was progressing. Maybe even alerted because things weren’t going the way they should. Someone had gummed up the works.

The light came to rest on him. Cormac squinted into the beam, only able to see a silhouette approach, a ghostly shape moving toward him. He felt worse than helpless, on the ground, looking up, barely able to move and no weapon to hand but a stupid knife.

Finally, as he came around to face Cormac the man lowered the flashlight, revealing himself: Elton Peterson.

“You’re dying, aren’t you?” Peterson asked, oddly toneless. “Starving. Just like they were. You can’t stop it. Now you know how it feels. Now you understand them.”

One thing at a time. This wasn’t over yet. Cormac said, “You hated Weber because he blocked your access to the park. Tried to keep you away from the Donner sites. Because you’re a nuisance. Bellamy—wouldn’t acknowledge your expertise.” And he hated Cormac just for hanging around. “What do you want, Peterson? What’re you doing all this for?”

The corona from the flashlight shone up, painting skull-like shadows on his face, like he was starving, too. “The usual reason. I want to live forever.”

Cormac chuckled. “Need a vampire for that. I know a couple who’d oblige. Or maybe not. They’d have to put up with your bullshit for eternity.”

Peterson sneered. “A vampire? Only awake at night, drinking other people’s blood? That’s not living. I said I want to live.”

“And you had a plan.” Statement, not a question.

“Yes. I will make myself a god.”

Well, Cormac hadn’t expected that. “I don’t get it,” he said, unable to hide his confusion. He hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but he was losing hold of himself.

“What happened here a hundred and fifty years ago was a stupid tragedy, the end of a long string of stupid mistakes—and yet everyone knows the name Donner. Everyone knows what happened here. And why? The fear. The power of it. Starvation is horrible because it’s slow, because you see it coming. And yet people die of starvation every single day. A whole country starves and a bunch of celebrities sing a song about it! That’s power! That power will make me a god. But it’s more than that, more than just going hungry—there’s what people will do to avoid it when they have to. A boat is lost at sea—did they do it? A plane crashes in the Andes and we all want to know—did they do it?”

Cormac coughed at the pain welling in his gut. “You want to be the god of cannibalism?”

“Of hunger,” he said, his eyes gleaming. “Of starvation. The thing that has the power to make people do the unthinkable.”

Ask him a question, if you will.

“What question?” he murmured, and Peterson looked at him strangely.

Ask him if the power he seeks to wield was already here, at Donner Pass, or if he had to raise it from scratch?

Cormac tried to think of a simpler way to ask this, and couldn’t, so just repeated it. “The power—was it already here at Donner Pass, or did you have to raise it from scratch?”

Peterson looked away. Chuckled, a bit madly. “That was the funny thing. I thought. . .all that pain, all that hunger—the place was famous for it. Here, here is where I would stake my claim, I would draw that power, that despair all to myself—”

“But?”

“There wasn’t any. There’s just. . .the bronze plaques and the tourist shops and the badly named restaurants. The tragedy didn’t leave a mark. Not a supernatural one.”

Ah, Roland did his work well. He’d be so pleased!

“So I had to do it myself. Make my own mark.” He grinned. “Shouldn’t be long now. You’re almost there. Thank you.”

“Yeah, fuck you too.”

There is one more symbol to etch, Cormac. The summoning isn’t finished. There’s more to this than Peterson.

She showed him the sign, a medieval hermetic symbol for strength, for truth. Carefully, line by line, he drew it in the earth at his feet.

“What are you doing?” Peterson asked.

Cormac ignored him. A vertical line, a widdershins curve—

“Stop that.” The man stepped forward like he might actually try to stop Cormac. Wouldn’t take much; he could probably just push him over. But Elton Peterson held back, acting like someone who’d lit a fuse and wasn’t sure what the explosion was going to look like.

Two more marks, dashes over the first line. Amelia murmured arcane words, and much like with other battles they’d fought together, he felt their spirits twist together and become something stronger than the sum of their parts. Her knowledge and age, his physical being anchoring them to the world—it shocked him every time. The first time they’d come together like this, back in prison, he’d almost flinched away, afraid of losing himself—and afraid of what he might accomplish. But he hadn’t. He’d reached out to Amelia, she’d grabbed hold, and they’d become powerful. Like they did now. A summoning went out, a flare without light. And then it was gone, finished.

Again, a pause, stillness.

Peterson gripped the flashlight hard and looked up and around like he expected to be attacked by a swarm of wasps. “You can’t stop this,” he declared in a tight voice. “You’re already dead! There’s nothing you can do to stop it, the power of your death is already mine—”

“Wait for it. . . .” Cormac murmured. He didn’t know what was going to happen but he expected it to be good. By some definition of good.

Right. . .about. . .now, I think.

There was a soft groan, then a rushing sound, a growing breeze blowing through the pines, which creaked at the pressure, the sound increasing until the breeze turned into a gale, tightly focused, whirling in a space with Cormac at its center. He ducked his head, and Peterson put up his arms to protect himself. The flashlight fell out of his hand and broke when it hit the ground. Somehow, though, the spot of forest remained lit by an indistinct glow.

Cormac knew this sound, these smells. The fierce, unnatural wind that suddenly whipped by, bending trees at dangerous angles, snapping branches. Dust rising up in a whirlwind, obscuring sight. The smell of something unnatural burning to death. This was a doorway from somewhere else opening up before them. Any moment, they would see what demon came through to their world.

Times like this, he missed his guns, even as he knew that none of them would help here. Instead, he wished for holy water and wooden stakes, silver bullets and crosses of gold. Anything.

Faith, Amelia whispered. Have faith.

Faith in what?

Faith that whatever is about to appear isn’t here for us.

A ritual sacrifice had three components: the person making the sacrifice, the thing being sacrificed—and the god or being the sacrifice was offered to. One figure in this tableau was still missing. Peterson had forgotten something important—he thought he was making sacrifices to himself. But power like that attracted attention.

Cormac missed the moment when the thing took form. The wind and swirling dust became a shadow, and the shadow gained mass. A huge animal came through the trees, stepping toward them. A medieval war horse, pitch black and massive, with steps that shook the ground. Its eyes, peering out from behind a thick fall of mane, were glints of obsidian, and it studied them with disturbing intelligence. Measuring them.

The rider was cloaked, billows of thick fabric falling around his saddle and legs, draped over his shoulders, as if he had come from a very cold place. Leather gauntlets on his hands, a close-fitting bronze helmet settled over his head. A bearded chin was all that was visible of his face, apart from another set of black, glinting eyes. In one hand he held the horse’s reins; in the other, a sword, but where the cross guard should have been was a set of antique scales. He could hold the sword vertical and measure the world in those bronze bowls.

Amelia quoted: And lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.

“That’s the Book of Revelation,” Cormac said softly. And this was the Third Horseman. Famine. What did it mean, that Famine should come to this place? “You have some kind of spell that’ll protect against this?”

If she had been standing beside him, she would have shaken her head slowly.

Peterson stood aghast, his eyes wide, arms spread. He seemed frozen, in shock. Then, incredibly, he laughed. The look of joy spreading over him seemed hideous.

“I’ve done your work! Haven’t I done it well?” he demanded of the figure.

Cormac somehow found the strength to prop himself up. Not quite standing, but enough to lean toward Peterson and point at him in accusation. “You wanted to be a god. You came up with some fucked-up ritual to do it, but you needed dead bodies. Starved bodies. What the hell kind of god did you think that would make you?”

“Famine,” Peterson said simply. Cormac was taken aback. “Famine, here, just like this, yes!” He was still smiling, with such a look of triumph.

“No,” a voice said. A deep, resonate voice, much like the clomp of a giant hoof on soft forest ground. At that, everything went still. The wind vanished, trees stilled. Cormac held his breath. He could feel Amelia with him, close as she’d ever been, with a mental gesture that was much like gripping his hand.

Peterson, gormless as he was, had the nerve to chuckle, confused, and ask, “What?”

Famine tapped his mount with his heel, and the horse stepped forward, closer to Peterson. It was such a human gesture, such a normal set of movements, Cormac was startled. That the Four Horsemen of Biblical legend might actually exist didn’t shock him—he’d seen some unbelievable shit in his time. What shocked him is that they—or at least this one—should be so human-like. With weight, with physicality. The fabric of the cloak rustled as the Horseman moved.

Peterson’s ecstasy seemed to be fading. The back of the horse was taller than he was, and the rider loomed over him. He maybe didn’t quite realize the powers he’d been messing with until just this second. Like the Donner Party, when the snow began falling.

“I. . .I thought it was just a myth. A story. I mean, it’s the Bible, no one takes it literally. . .do they? I was going to turn myself into the story—”

Peterson grappled with his pockets a moment, turning out some familiar items—matches, string, a piece of slate. Charms and scraps of spells. A couple of pieces of rib bone. Famine ignored them all.

“You think this suffering belongs to you,” the rider said in that rumbling voice, like a trumpet sounding from far away. “It doesn’t.”

The historian stammered, “I. . .I only wanted. . . .”

The Third Horseman grabbed Peterson by the throat. The man didn’t have a chance to cry out before he began to shrink, to desiccate. Skin turning bloodless, cheeks growing hollow, skeletal. Peterson clawed at Famine’s arms with increasingly bony fingers, but had no effect on his captor. His movements slowed, slackened, stilled. His shirt billowed over a gut that had gone concave. The fabric of his clothing disintegrated, fell away until the man was naked. The same curse, the same progression—starving, happening here in seconds. The pain must have been dire. He was gulping for air like a fish.

When Famine let go, the historian was a skeleton with a covering of skin, his hair dried up and falling away in clumps. He might have been dead for years and mummified.

But he still moved. Ghastly, yellowed eyes still blinked. The laddered rib cage drew in air. A leg twitched. A shaking arm reached. Somehow, Peterson was still alive, imploring his god and idol.

Peterson had tried to make himself something from a powerful legend, but he hadn’t believed enough to recognize: The job was already taken.

Offhand, Cormac wondered what the Fourth Horseman, Death, could do just by holding someone by the throat.

The black horse snorted, stamping a front leg a couple of times—right on top of Peterson’s body. That ended him, collapsing the rib cage, smashing the brittle skull. He lay still, a pile of bones and dried-up skin. He was done.

Cormac wasn’t sure if Famine had seen him. He wanted to run—he really ought to get the hell out of here. But he also didn’t want to draw attention to himself. He waited. . .waited. . . .

The rider shifted the reins; the black horse turned, pivoting on hind legs. The pair paused a moment, appearing to study this stretch of forest. Cormac couldn’t be sure; he couldn’t see the rider’s eyes. The horse wuffed a breath as if he’d smelled something he didn’t like.

Barely breathing, Cormac remained still, thinking over and over, he had nothing to do with this. He meant nothing to the Third Horseman. They could go their separate ways, no harm. Maybe it wasn’t magic, some kind of spell to turn away the evil eye. But maybe the hope would be enough.

Amelia added to the hope. Please, look away.

And then, they did. The horseman gave another nudge with his heel, and the horse moved off at a jog, weaving through the trees and vanishing in what might have been fog, or light, or a crack in the air, or nothing at all.

Cormac heaved out the breath he’d been holding. It echoed among the trees, dead quiet in the still air. His next inhalation smelled of pine, thick with vegetation and life. It was a good smell.

Peterson’s body lay crumpled, not ten yards away. Cormac looked away.

I think the sun is rising.

Looking up, squinting past the canopy of trees, he tried to see what she was seeing, and sure enough, the sky was the muffled gray of predawn. He hadn’t been paying any attention. But this—this was hope. In the growing light he held up a hand, turned it this way and that to study it. It wasn’t gaunt. It didn’t hurt. He tested more movement, pushing himself to his knees, pausing to take stock. Then, he stood, without dizziness, without trembling.

How do you feel? Amelia waited tensely for the answer.

“I feel. . .tired. But normal tired.” Not dying tired. He knew the difference now.

His stomach rumbled. He was still hungry. But not starving. That could wait, though. “We’ve got to find Annie,” he murmured.

But first, they scattered the remains of their spell, all trace of magic at the cabin. At Amelia’s direction, he went around the clearing, taking down all the bits and pieces of her spells, kicking dirt over the symbols etched into the dirt, burning the last bits of string and sage, then stomping out the ashes. He left Peterson’s body where it was—let that be someone else’s problem.

No one else would starve on Donner Pass. At least not like this.

He charged his phone and made calls as they roared down the mountain in the Jeep. Domingo’s phone still wasn’t picking up. But Trina’s was.

“Trina. You get ahold of Domingo?”

The girl sounded exhausted. “Yeah, yeah. I’m sorry, I tried to call but you weren’t picking up your phone.”

“Never mind, is she okay?”

“She’s okay. I mean, she was in bad shape when we got here, but she’s okay now.”

“I told you not to go near her.”

“But we had to, she was sick.”

Trina. Fluffy, happy, gossipy, heroic Trina. God. “You with her now? Tell me where you are.”

She gave him the address. He raced on.

Trina was making soup in the cozy, trim kitchen of Annie Domingo’s own Forest Service cabin, down near the visitor center. “My grandma’s soup,” she said, smiling. “Good for anything.”

The plain chicken broth was the perfect food for people who’d been starving.

Domingo had been struck after Cormac. She collapsed, and Trina and her neighbor found her curled up on the floor, groaning. And then. . .it had gone away. Cormac found a piece of rib bone on her front porch and smashed it under his heel.

Now, the ranger sat at her small kitchen table, wrapped in a blanket, regarding Cormac with confusion. Her cheeks were gaunt, her skin ashen, but growing more flush and lively by the moment. “I don’t understand.”

Neither did Cormac, really. He could explain what he’d seen, explain to her what she’d experienced. But that didn’t mean the explanation made any sense. Not to someone in a uniform who had to write a report about it.

“If you’re looking for a culprit, it was Peterson. If you’re looking for a cause of death—call it poisoning. Whatever it is, it won’t happen again.”

“You sure?”

“I’m not real sure about anything these days. But yeah, I think it’s done.”

“Wow,” Trina said from the sink, pausing in the middle of washing dishes. “That’s wild.”

Domingo smiled weakly. “Trina hon, you probably shouldn’t go telling this story around to everybody.”

She huffed. “Yeah, I know. Who’d believe it?”

Domingo scrubbed her hands over her face and sighed. “I don’t know whether to be relieved or disgusted. Peterson? Nebbish annoying Peterson? For God’s sake, why? Why would he want to kill anyone?”

“He wanted this,” Cormac said, gesturing around the cabin, and by extension to the land outside, the visitor center, all the bronze plaques and pine forests, the creeks and mountains around them. “He was obsessed. He wanted to be a part of it. Take some of the glory for himself.”

The ranger stared. “There’s nothing glorious about the Donner Party. What they went through—it was five months of hell.”

“But can you name a more famous set of settlers?” She pressed her lips together; she couldn’t. Very few people who knew about the Donner Party could name any of the other tens of thousands of people who’d made that journey west. However horrible their ordeal, it and the sensational reporting of it after had made them famous. “He thought their fame made them great. And he wanted it.” He’d made a mistake so many made: no one could understand this thing as well as he did, therefore it ought to be his.

Trina shook her head. “I knew something was off with that guy. He’s from Fresno.”

Domingo sighed. “Thank you, I suppose. The police will probably want to talk to you again—”

“I’d rather not.”

“But I’ll need to tell them—”

“Call it an anonymous tip. Someone found their bodies and left voice mail.”

After a moment, she nodded. “I may need to call in a favor or two, but I’ll leave you out of it.”

“Thanks.”

She went to a kitchen drawer, opened it, drew out a fat envelope, which she set on the table in front of him. It was full of cash, just like he asked. “I think I totaled up your expenses all right. Let me know if it’s short.”

“And the cabin?” Trina said. “Don’t worry about it. Free of charge. Just for, you know.”

He almost pushed the envelope back. He liked Domingo. What had happened here? That needed to be taken down. This wasn’t a job, this was a crusade for the public good.

Is that a little pride I sense, hm?

The altruistic thing would be to refuse payment and drive off into the sunset. But he took the money because the gas he’d burned to get here was more than he could afford. Besides, he deserved a little compensation for that nightmare. For facing Famine itself and living to tell about it. But he at least counted out what he would have spent on the cabin and gave it back to her.

“Thanks,” he said. Annie and Trina shared a wry smile.

“Anything else?” she asked.

He could ask her out to dinner. He could maybe stick around a couple more days. He could do a lot of things, he supposed. But he wanted to get back home.

“I’m happy I could help, Ms. Domingo,” he said, and offered his hand for shaking.

“I’ll call you if we get any other weird trouble around here, yeah?”

“You’ve got my number,” he said.

Amelia had one last task she wanted to perform before they took to the interstate to head out of the valley, so Cormac went to the supermarket up the road and bought a bouquet of flowers. Plenty of daisies this time of year, and Amelia liked daisies. Next, they drove out to the Alder Creek site, where the Donner family had camped. Camped, starved, and mostly died. Half the kids had survived. None of the adults did.

At Amelia’s direction, he stepped a few feet off the trail and found a likely spot, near a living pine and hidden in the grasses where a conscientious ranger wouldn’t be likely to see it right away. There, he laid the thin bouquet on the ground, and thought about Tamsen Donner.

Not just her, Amelia thought. All the mothers, really. If I was in the habit of praying, I would pray for them, trying to keep all those children alive through the nightmare. It’s the women of the camp I mourn.

They couldn’t change anything. The prayers, the flowers—they were never for those who’d died. They were for the living, who wanted to help but couldn’t, not a hundred and fifty years later. So you lay down flowers and try not to think of what you’d have done if it had been you in that camp.

He stood for a moment enjoying the clean air, the pure morning sun blazing down. Soaking in some of that elusive peace. If he felt a hand in his, giving a comforting touch of pressure, surely it was his imagination.

I think it’s far past time we leave this place and go home.

Cormac knew she was right.

Kitty and Ben stared at Cormac across the table, and the longer they did the weirder this got. Obviously he hadn’t explained things very well, but he wasn’t sure what else he could say to make his trip out to Truckee sound more reasonable. They’d wanted to know what happened. Maybe he shouldn’t have told them.

Finally, baby Jon fidgeted in Kitty’s arms, and that distracted them from their astonishment. He still wasn’t used to seeing the couple with a baby, but that was another issue. Babies were something that happened to other people, not anyone he knew.

“Famine? The Third Horseman of the Apocalypse Famine?” Ben said.

Cormac shrugged. “Don’t know that I’d swear to it in court. But it was pretty convincing.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Kitty said. “Why am I even surprised? The shit we’ve seen? Sorry, pardon my language, don’t learn that word.” She kissed the baby’s fuzzy head, and he yawned.

Ben was Cormac’s cousin and sometime lawyer. Kitty, he’d planned on killing the first time they met. Now, in one of the stranger mysteries in Cormac’s life, they were friends. The couple were both werewolves. Cormac had introduced them to each other, and. . .well. That had turned out all right, in the end.

Today, they occupied a corner booth at Wild Things, Kitty and Ben’s new café slash coffee shop venture. More upscale than these places usually were, the café gave the impression of being part of the atrium of a modest country house, refined yet homey. Well lit and furnished, it had a good selection of art on the walls, books in scuffed bookshelves, and inviting sofas, chairs, and tables distributed throughout, with enough space in between that people weren’t likely to jostle each other moving around. Werewolves were territorial and sensitive to that sort of thing.

Cormac still kept a silver-laced penknife in his pocket, just in case.

“But it’s okay?” Ben asked. “It’s. . .not going to follow you or try to take revenge.”

“No, I think it got whatever revenge it needed when it killed Peterson.”

And good riddance. Let that be a warning if we ever tend toward hubris, hm?

“So why do you still look worried?”

Cormac gave a quick, wry smile which vanished almost instantly, and looked away. “I’m always worried.”

Kitty got that look, then. The focused one that meant she was studying him, getting ready to ask a question he wouldn’t be able to dodge. But Jon fidgeted again, emitting a spectacular amount of drool, and she grabbed a napkin to stop the flow.

They are a bit like alien creatures, aren’t they?

Cormac had never held a baby in his life until this one came along. Kitty had insisted. “You’re his godfather. Just hold him once, so you can say you did. Maybe Amelia wants to hold him, ask her.” And, surprisingly, Amelia—whom Kitty had gleefully dubbed the fairy godmother—did. Just to see what it’s like, she’d said. The baby had been surprisingly solid in his arms, a firm weight pressing against him. Cormac had held his breath, hoping the baby didn’t wake up, that he didn’t drop him, and that Jon would grow up to be nothing like himself. Cormac as godfather was a terrible mistake. At the same time, he knew, in some fundamental and horrible way, that he would do anything in his power to protect this small life. They were a pack, Kitty liked to say. So, he now had a godson to go along with his cousin and whatever the hell Kitty was. And Amelia, whatever she was. It was illogical. It was family. Strange and comforting, all at once.

“So what’s different this time?” she asked. “Something’s different. If this wasn’t bothering you, you wouldn’t have told us about it.”

He almost hadn’t. He didn’t want them to worry, not about him. They had more important things to worry about. Like that kid. “I don’t know. We thought we’d seen it all. I’ve never felt like I crossed a line I couldn’t handle before. Then this happens.” Maybe he was just getting old.

“You’re not thinking of quitting, are you?” Kitty asked.

He hadn’t meant to hesitate, but he took an extra breath. And another. The couple exchanged one of those couple-glances, worried and full of questions as well as secret, silent plotting. Like they were thinking, No, you say something. . . .

We aren’t quitting, Amelia said. Then added, more softly. Are we?

“Amelia says no,” Cormac says. “And no, we aren’t.”

“Well, good,” Kitty said, decisive. “Because the both of you have a really unique set of skills.”

Yes. Exactly. And we must use those skills. You understand, don’t you?

He could almost imagine Amelia sitting next to him, explaining. Persuading. He chuckled.

“Now what?” Ben said. “This isn’t funny, this is some kind of Biblical shit—”

“Language,” Kitty said.

“Kitty, hon, he’s six months old—”

“And I swear if ‘shit’ ends up being his first word—”

Jon grinned and burbled something that was, fortunately, incomprehensible.

“Maybe that’s it,” Cormac said. “There’s some crazy stuff out there and we have these skills. . . . I just never had, I guess you’d call it purpose before. Not like this.”

“Well,” Kitty said. “Purpose seems to suit you.”

“I was worried,” Ben confessed. “When you put the guns away, if you’d find something else. And here you are.”

Cormac smirked and looked away. This was getting too serious for him. “We’ll see.”

In a meadow in his mind, Amelia smiled.

Cormac and Amelia travel to South Dakota, where an archeologist has hired them to examine an artifact for possible magical qualities. Cormac is skeptical, Amelia is intrigued. And it turns out – the whole thing is a trap. Who from Cormac’s past is out for revenge, and can he survive?

Pre-order Badlands Witch now!

To read more about Cormac and Amelia, look for “Long Time Waiting,” available as part of

Kitty’s Greatest Hits.

Coming in 2020

Discover the thrilling, deadly chronicles of the noble immortal who becomes Rick, ally of bestselling author Carrie Vaughn’s fan-favorite werewolf, Kitty Norville.

Ricardo de Avila would have followed Coronado to the ends of the earth. Instead, Ricardo found the end of his mortal life, and a new identity—as the Immortal Conquistador.

For over five hundred years, Ricardo keeps unwillingly upsetting the established order. He has protected his found family from marauding demons, teamed up with a legendary gunslinger, appointed himself the Master of Denver, and called upon a church buried under the Vatican. He has tended bar and fended off werewolves.

Life for a vampire is long, but it is never simple.

Pre-order The Immortal Conquistador now

Other Books by Carrie Vaughn

Carrie’s Website

www.carrievaughn.com

Carrie Vaughn is best known for her New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty who hosts a talk radio show for the supernaturally disadvantaged. Her latest novels include a post-apocalyptic murder mystery, Bannerless, winner of the Philip K. Dick Award, and its sequel, The Wild Dead. She’s written several other contemporary fantasy and young adult novels, as well as upwards of 80 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado.

Dark Divide

Copyright © 2019 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC.

All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. All characters, names, locations, and events portrayed in this book are fictional or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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