Table of Contents

Title Page

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Other Books by Carrie Vaughn

About the Author

Copyright

Something’s not right, Amelia murmured in the back of Cormac’s mind. Cormac scanned the depressing parking lot outside his apartment building, half-full of beater cars. Orange streetlights bathed the washed-out concrete walls. The roar of cars on the nearby highway beat at the air. His shoulders ached. They’d spent the afternoon putting up magical protections around a dog park on the other side of the city, which seemed weird to him but he didn’t question anyone willing to write a check. Amelia knew the spells, but Cormac did the work, seeing as how she didn’t have a body. That meant he’d been the one with his arms raised, waving sage and candles while walking around a couple of acres of territory. He was tired.

Amelia could only see what he saw, but she’d honed some magical instinct in him. When she said something wasn’t right, Cormac listened. Which meant he didn’t walk straight into the ambush at the base of the stairs.

Movement flickered, a shadow breaking away from the concrete and launching straight at him. He knew right off what it was. Nothing moved that fast, nothing was so at home in darkness. This was how vampires got the reputation of vanishing like smoke. You’d look and the vampire simply wouldn’t be there anymore. Cormac dived for shelter, hitting the asphalt and rolling under the nearest car, a sedan with busted fenders, while reaching inside his jacket for a stake. To think, some people made fun of him for carrying stakes everywhere.

A thump pounded the top of the car as he rolled out the other side, and the vampire came pouncing down on top of him. Cormac braced the point of the stake upward. The guy kicked it out of his hand, midair, then kneed him in the gut. Move like that shouldn’t have been possible, but then neither should vampires. Ignoring the pain, the air knocked out of his lungs, the shock in his back, Cormac writhed and kicked up, catching the guy in the nuts. That still worked on vampires at least.

The thing about fighting vampires, your defenses had to be solid. Not a crack. That was the only way you’d get a chance to strike back. They moved so fast, their reflexes were so sharp, they’d be on you and breaking your neck or ripping out your throat before you knew they were there. You couldn’t let them get close, bringing their power and experience to bear. Couldn’t let them catch your gaze, stare in your eyes, and immobilize you.

This one must have followed Cormac home. That was his mistake, thinking no vampire would ever be caught dead—undead— in this low-rent neighborhood off the Boulder turnpike. So he came home to the run-down two-story apartment block and relaxed before getting to his own front door.

Cormac recognized the guy. Sharp nose, long face, a flop of hair. The permanently offended snarl of a self-important minion. About ten years ago in Chicago, he took on a gang of vampires running a protection racket on a human neighborhood. He wouldn’t dignify the group with the label Family, though they were sure trying to act like one. They hadn’t been old enough, rich enough, or smart enough to avoid trouble. Cormac took out the leader of the bunch, a guy calling himself Lord Edgar, and half his followers. The rest had scattered, gone to ground.

Turned out, at least one of them had just been biding his time.

Cormac managed to shove himself out from under the guy, looked wildly around for the stake, raced for it—the vampire grabbed his ankle and he fell. Cormac immediately kicked, smashing the guy’s nose. Didn’t kill him. Not much would.

Nothing in Amelia’s magical arsenal could help them unless he could get away, get a little space and time for her to work a spell. But that was just it, vampires never gave you that time. She stayed quiet and let Cormac’s body and fighting instincts try to save them.

He ran. Didn’t think he could get to his front door and the safety of the threshold before the vampire caught up to him. He needed a weapon. The apartment building had exterior stairs leading up to the second floor. Cormac dodged behind the steel frame of the staircase and spotted the door to the janitor’s closet.

“You’ll pay for what you did!” the minion yelled, from the other side of the stairs.

“That was a long time ago,” he shot back, which was a stupid thing to say to a vampire, which was only part of why Cormac worried that he was getting soft.

He had one more stake tucked in his inside jacket pocket. Pulled it out, held it outstretched while the vampire ran at him. Alas, the vampire wasn’t stupid enough to just run right up it. He grabbed Cormac’s wrist and squeezed, causing him to drop the stake. He could have broken Cormac in half right there; instead, he paused, savoring the moment, leering with bared fangs and bringing himself closer, closer. . .

Cormac’s other hand was on the utility closet’s handle. He yanked open the door, fell in, knocking the vampire off balance and shutting the door behind him. As he hoped, a stack of mops and brooms lay piled up in the corner. He grabbed a broom with a wooden handle, set it under a foot and snapped it in half.

When the vampire opened the door, Cormac rammed the broken handle into his chest, right through his heart. The guy screamed, expression twisting with anguish.

The vampire couldn’t have been that old, a couple of decades at most. The body blackened, but it didn’t shrivel to a husk and turn to ash the way the old ones did, the rot of the grave if they had been allowed to rot in a grave. Becoming a vampire only delayed the inevitable. Vampires like this, throwing themselves on stakes for a Master who had been destroyed years before—what a waste. But nobody held a grudge like a vampire. They had the time to burn. Cormac let go of the stake, and the rotted body dropped at his feet.

Well, that was bracing.

Because the vampire didn’t turn to dust and blow away, conveniently disposing of itself, Cormac now had a body to deal with.

“I do not need this shit,” he muttered. Irate, he kicked it. The leathery skin made a disconcerting squishing sound.

It’s better than letting him kill you, Amelia stated, sounding nonplussed. But yes, it is a bother.

He dragged the body someplace where it would be exposed to sunlight before anyone found it. The apartment building’s dumpster had too much foot traffic, but behind the building lay a gravely stretch, a foot or two wide, between the building and a boundary fence. A couple of scraggily dead shrubs poked up through the rocks. No one went there, and it faced east. As soon as the rays hit it, it would burn to ash, then poof, gone. Hell, this was such a clear case of self-defense maybe he should call the police. Except no, not with a manslaughter conviction on his record. Besides, come dawn, there wouldn’t even be a body. Nothing to report.

Finally he got safely into his apartment and took a very long, hot shower to get the stink of dead vampire off him.

Explain it again, Amelia said when he finally got out of the shower. She’d at least given him some peace until he got clean. You went after an entire vampire Family by yourself?

“Wasn’t much of a Family. Most of them weren’t any older than that guy.”

You could have been killed.

“Turned out okay.”

There are times when I am grateful I didn’t know you earlier in your life. You seemed to have engaged in quite a lot of reckless behavior.

He barked a laugh. “If you only knew the half of it.”

She could know, if she wanted. But she was English, overly polite, and didn’t pry too much into the mind where she lived. That would be like rifling through the linen closet in the house where one was a guest, she insisted. Even though they were more like roommates.

Except with her, the door was always, always open. When he toweled off, she was there. When he slipped on sweatpants, so did she. Whatever he touched, she felt. They didn’t talk about it. Ignored it as much as they could. He avoided mirrors. When he needed to jack off, she pretended to leave the room, as if she could ever leave the room. And once in a while, he found himself in front of the mirror and hoping she was looking.

She wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.

Cormac slept and dreamed in their valley.

His father had taken him camping here, a high valley in the Colorado Rockies where a snowmelt creek cut down through a meadow bowl, bounded by a pine forest. The sky above was searing blue, smudged with white clouds. No air smelled cleaner than this. No place felt safer. He and Amelia had built this shared space—part guided meditation, part visualization exercise— where they could talk. She’d had a body, once. Here, she did again, resembling the single old sepia-toned photo he’d seen of her, with her serious demeanor, her hair in a prim bun, her clothing precise, long Edwardian skirt and high-necked blouse. He liked being able to see her, to talk to her.

He lay back in the grass, hands laced under his head, eyes closed. Sleep within sleep. He thought he heard chickadees in the pines up the hill.

She sat nearby, leaning against an outcrop of rounded granite. Her hand tapped nervously against her knee in what seemed to be an unconscious gesture. A disembodied spirit shouldn’t have nervous ticks. If she existed only as consciousness, could she be unconscious of anything? This was why Cormac avoided the philosophy of it all.

“What?” he asked brusquely.

“Would you like to apprise me of any other outstanding grudges we might encounter?”

“Not particularly,” he said. “I didn’t even remember that guy until he was hissing spit in my face.”

“You destroyed a gang of vampires. How can you forget something like that?”

She wasn’t going to like the answer, so he waited, but she remained expectantly silent. “Because I used to do a lot of that sort of thing,” he said finally, and she blew out a frustrated breath. “They usually don’t come back for revenge.”

“Usually. How are you meant to protect yourself from random vampires seeking vengeance?”

Do a better job of keeping stakes and holy water in his pockets. Live in a never-ending state of vigilance. “I figure one of these guys’ll get me, sooner or later.” These battles just delayed the inevitable.

“If you die, I die.”

“You already died.”

“You know what I mean.”

“We’ve talked about this.”

“Yes, I know. I just felt so. . .helpless.”

He hesitated. The chickadees had stopped calling. “I’m sorry you felt helpless.”

Her lips pursed in a tight smile, but her gaze remained troubled. “I died once, you’d think I’d be less frightened of it happening again. But I’m not.”

He straightened, sitting up with his arms around his knees. She rarely got this worked up. “I suppose I could get one of these guys to make me a vampire. . .”

“You’re joking.” She looked sharply at him. “You are joking?”

“Yeah.”

“Because I don’t think you becoming a vampire would stop anyone with a grudge from trying to kill you.”

“No, probably not.”

“Besides, I’m not sure I’d survive the transformation. I have no interest in attempting the experiment.”

“So you like being here?” He looked up, around. Quirked a smile.

“I suppose I do.”

“Could be worse, I guess.”

“Cormac, what did you ever do before you had me looking out for you?”

“Got myself sent to prison is what I did.”

“Ah, yes, see. That’s just the sort of thing I’d like to avoid.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Spiritually cleansing dog parks. Let’s keep to that.” She settled back against her boulder and closed her eyes.

Chuckling, he lay back in the grass and let a real sleep overtake him.

A few mornings later, their email delivered a more interesting proposal than magically protecting dog parks.

An archeologist at a dig in South Dakota had found an unusual artifact, a clay pot in a style and with markings that didn’t match any other pottery styles of the time and region. The archeologist, Professor Aubrey Walker, claimed to have some magical sensitivity, and believed that the artifact represented something otherworldly. Would Cormac please come and examine it, to see if he could tell if it was magical, or merely odd?

“‘Otherworldly.’ That could mean anything,” Cormac murmured.

I’m not sure we have the expertise to evaluate such an item.

“We can be up front about that. Walker has to be willing to pay travel expenses and a consulting fee, even if the answer is we don’t have a clue.”

We can’t guarantee an absence of magic. We can only state definitively if we do find something. It seems unsatisfying.

Amelia insisted on doing initial research to determine if they were even qualified to take on the job. Cormac did a web search on Walker and her credentials, and the trail of online breadcrumbs led to the home university of the archeology team and information about the dig, which was investigating hunting and camping sites of Plains Archaic cultures from about fifteen hundred years ago. So, there really was a dig, and their correspondent really was a scientist there. A scientist who wanted a magical consult.

Amelia was intrigued. An artifact such as intact pottery seems very incongruous with other information about the culture. You’d expect to find bones and fire pits, maybe a few tools, nothing more.

“Maybe that’s why she thinks it’s magical.”

If something magical, some sort of spellcraft, has survived from that era—that would be phenomenal.

So she was all for taking the job. Cormac replied to the email, laying out his requirements, a hefty fee, and the fact he couldn’t make any guarantees. A response came back almost immediately: that was fine, Walker had nowhere else to turn, and even a small amount of information would be better than nothing.

“Here’s the thing,” Cormac said to Amelia. “University archeology departments don’t usually have a lot of funding to spare for paranormal investigators and that’s a pretty big number we gave her.”

I doubt she even reported it to her department. She might be planning to pay out of her own pocket, to keep this out of the books.

That made sense. He checked the email again—it wasn’t a university address. So, keeping it really off the books. A serious archeologist wouldn’t exactly want to advertise that she was consulting with a paranormal investigator. It also made him nervous.

We will be careful, Amelia assured him.

They were always careful. At least, they always tried to be careful. But you couldn’t plan for all the things that might get you. The one that got you would be the one you didn’t expect.

So, we go with caution.

Always, always.

Getting to South Dakota took half a day of driving across an unending sweep of classic Great Plains rangeland, miles of rolling prairie and cattle country, driving on a grid of state highways set at right angles to each other, on and on, punctuated every now and then by some microscopic town that had looked exactly the same for the last fifty years. Cormac preferred the mountains, someplace to put your back against to see what was coming. Out here, there was no place to hide.

Amelia was riveted. This sky, look at it! This wonderful huge sky! I can almost see it curving around and under us to the other side. It’s like being under a bowl. Three hours into the trip, she still hadn’t gotten tired of it.

Walker had asked to meet them at a turnout on a county road near Badlands National Park. She had to give him GPS coordinates. Cormac wasn’t sure he’d still have a phone connection by the time they got there—in another two and a half hours of driving.

I never got to this region in my travels. I had meant to. I was so looking forward to seeing the great herds of bison.

“They’d mostly been killed off by your time,” Cormac said. Amelia had been so fascinated by stories of the American West, but by the early 1900’s that world had vanished.

Do you think we’ll see any bison?

“I don’t know.”

And Deadwood—do you know we’ll only be a couple of hours away from Deadwood? After we’ve consulted with Professor Walker, perhaps we can visit?

“What’s in Deadwood?” Cormac asked tiredly.

Calamity Jane’s grave. And Wild Bill Hickok’s. It’s where he was shot. There’s a museum there I’d like to see.

“Why?” he said curtly.

Well. Just to see it.

“We won’t have time—”

This meeting will surely not take very long, and since we’re already in the area—

“Can we talk about it later?”

She fell silent, finally, thankfully. He didn’t want to see Deadwood, he didn’t want to do anything but the job. The bison around here were probably all kept on farms. There wasn’t any point to it.

Cranky and sweaty after a day on the road was probably not the best way to meet a client, but he didn’t think the job would take more than an hour. Amelia would take a look at the artifact, decide it was nothing special, and they could turn around and go home.

No, she muttered. You will not. We’ll find a room, rest for the night, and explore tomorrow.

He’d see how they felt at the end of the day.

A room and a hot shower.

“We’ll talk about it later.”

Somehow, she managed to pout without having a tangible face to pout with. He felt her, testing. She could take over his body—if he let her. A good guest, she usually asked first. She hadn’t tried to take over since they’d first met, back in prison. He didn’t know if she ever thought about it. Or rather, he didn’t know how much she thought about it.

He squeezed the steering wheel. He was in control, he was driving. But Amelia had probably learned enough about driving by watching him to do it herself. . .

The turnout Aubrey Walker had directed him to was just west of the national park boundary, on a dirt road. She had explained in an email, “The actual dig site is restricted, and I have to be careful. If word gets out that I contacted you, I could get in trouble.”

I’m not sure if what she’s doing is entirely legal, Amelia observed. He was pretty sure this particular chunk of land was part of the Pine Ridge Reservation, so yeah, they were probably breaking some rules.

“As long as nobody steals anything or breaks anything, we’ll be fine.” He hoped. If things got weird he could always walk away.

The dirt road cut across a sagebrush plain, straight as a line. To the west, the Black Hills rose up like a crumbling wall, dark with the smudged color of forests. To the east, the badlands, desolate gullies and washes, pinnacles of eroded stone. Hard to believe anybody could live out here.

Up ahead, right where Walker had asked him to meet her, a Honda CR-V with mud-spattered Illinois plates was parked in a rutted turnout. A woman waited there, leaning against the driver’s side door. She was white, average height and build, had on khaki cargo pants, a shapeless sweatshirt, and dusty work boots. A plain baseball cap mashed down a mess of black hair pulled back in a bun. She looked like someone who’d been working on an archeological dig.

Cormac parked the Jeep alongside her. “Professor Walker?” he asked, stepping out, shutting the door behind him.

She brightened, smiling broadly. “You must be Cormac Bennett. Call me Aubrey. Thank you so much for coming.” She clicked open the back hatch of the SUV with her key fob. “You ready to take a look?”

Amelia definitely was. All this anticipation. He could almost picture Amelia straining forward to get a first look at the artifact.

He explained again, “You understand I may not be able to tell you much. It may be dormant or have some kind of protection on it.”

“Yes, I understand. I’ll be grateful for anything you can tell me.” Once the door was open, she stepped aside, gesturing. “Here it is.”

A beat-up cardboard box sat alone in the back. Inside was the artifact, a piece of dusty pottery, no packing material around it. All by itself, it seemed to lurk. The pot had a round body, a flat base, and a long, narrow neck with a small, spout-like opening. Maybe eight inches high, six wide. The reddish color made it look like a lot of Native American pottery from the Southwest, but the markings on it seemed more like Norse runes. The shape wasn’t like any tradition he—or Amelia rather—knew about.

“What makes you think it’s magical?” he asked. “Anything weird been happening around it? Anything that started when it was first excavated, or when people touched it?”

“Mostly it’s just the way it looks, the way it doesn’t fit with anything else from the time or region. Like it came from another dimension or something, you know? It just makes me nervous.” As if to emphasize this, she shivered and seemed to draw away from it.

That hardly seemed likely, but given some of the shit he’d seen in his time, he wouldn’t discount it. He nudged Amelia. Sense anything?

There’s definitely something. I can’t make it out in detail, though. Magical, yes, but I don’t know what it’s supposed to do. We could try some scrying spells, try to work out what it’s for.

He squinted at it from a couple of different angles. Leaned in to try to get a look down the neck, but he couldn’t see inside. The opening wasn’t wide enough. He’d need a penlight to look down in there.

“Well, what do you think?” the woman asked eagerly.

“Not sure,” Cormac said. “I need to spend a little more time with it.”

Let’s see if there’s anything inscribed on the bottom.

Cormac picked up the pot, turned it over.

And blacked out.

He woke up flat on his back with a raging, hangover-like headache that throbbed from the top of his skull and reached down to his gut. He rolled to his side but didn’t vomit. Felt like he wanted to, though. Resting a moment, he caught his breath, steadied himself. The headache dimmed a little. He squinted against westering sunlight—shadows stretched long over the sagebrush.

Amelia?

She didn’t answer. “Amelia?”

Nothing. Really nothing. He prodded that place in the back of his mind that he thought of as hers, where he usually felt her. It was open, blank, empty.

Amelia was gone.

The ground under Cormac seemed to tilt. How could his brain feel physically empty, an open warehouse echoing with the absence? He squeezed his hands over his ears, as if he had to hold his skull together. Grit his teeth. Swallowed back an incipient scream.

She’d just been knocked unconscious, like him. But nothing like this had happened before. She was nothing but consciousness, she couldn’t be unconscious. That would mean she was— He waited. The sun inched lower, toward dusk. Amelia was still gone. He kept thinking, What do I do? Amelia, what’s happening? The answering silence hurt his skull.

His Jeep was still parked here. Walker’s SUV was gone. In a panic he patted himself down, found his phone and wallet in his pockets where he left them. So he hadn’t been robbed. Just left for dead. This was a trap, a trick, and he’d walked right into it.

But what was it? What had happened?

Amelia was gone. Just gone.

He was free.

No more voice talking at him, no more presence looking over his shoulder. For the first time in years, his mind was clear, light. Alone.

He didn’t know what to do.

Just move. One step at a time. Something would come to him. Leaning against the Jeep’s rear bumper, he stood, swayed a bit. The ground still felt like it was trembling. Like an earthquake, but he was the only one moving. He waited until he felt steady, and eventually he could stand. He drew a deep breath into exhausted lungs.

He still wanted to scream.

The plain around him was empty. No cars traveled the straight road, not so much as a cloud of dust rose up. A wind blew, whispering through the brush. His face felt raw—sunburned. Walker had fled hours ago, leaving him lying in the dirt. Had she thought he was dead? Had she really tried to kill him?

What had happened?

Since he barely knew what Amelia was to start with, he couldn’t guess what had happened to her. Just that she was gone. Dead? For real this time.

Aubrey Walker knew what had happened.

Cormac took a long draw from the water bottle jammed in by the Jeep’s gear shift. It was hot, metallic, and made him feel a little better. But that gaping silence still bore down on him.

What do I do?

No one answered. He couldn’t seem to think on his own.

He tore out of the gravel pull-out and drove.

He ended up in Rapid City before he decided he couldn’t just drive around looking for that pale SUV, pulling into parking lots, studying every car, every license plate. Driving at random was stupid and he’d never get anywhere this way. But it meant he didn’t have to think. He didn’t want to think, because that meant turning to his own mind and acknowledging the silence.

“Fuck it,” he finally muttered, pulling into a McDonald’s parking lot and shutting off the engine. He could figure this out. He used to hunt people down for a living. He could find Aubrey Walker, and she would tell him what she’d done. Maybe Amelia was only asleep, maybe—

Find Walker. Then worry.

Using his phone he started hunting with a little more focus. The phone number Walker had given him turned out to be disconnected. He re-did some of the digging he and Amelia had done before, through her university and the sponsors of the dig she was working on. Her department’s website showed a picture of her, smiling, along with a group of grubby graduate students wearing hats and scarves against a bright sun, in the middle of a series of precise, squared-off pits. She looked so harmless, there.

He could call her department. Except it was after dark now, after business hours. He could spend all night driving around and it wouldn’t help. Morning, he would have to wait until morning to make calls, but that was too long. He needed to find her now.

The water bottle was empty; he hadn’t eaten all day. He stalked into the restaurant and got a burger, devoured it without thought. Drank something.

If Amelia could still speak to him, she would tell him to sleep. They had been arguing about whether to get a hotel room.

Cormac drove some more because he couldn’t think of what else to do. Finally, he found a dark corner of a box store parking lot. Tried to think, but his brain wasn’t working any better that it had been earlier. Sleep, Amelia would tell him. He could almost hear her.

He tipped back the seat and closed his eyes.

No sight, no sound, so sensation at all. Not even an echo, because echo implied space, and this. . .was confinement without space. She had no breath or heartbeat with which to monitor the passing of time.

This, this was death. Cormac was dead, she hadn’t noticed, and she was. . .trapped? But where? In his body. . .no, that she would have felt. Her consciousness would not have stayed in dead flesh. This. . .she had been here before, she knew this state. This nothingness, a consciousness with no anchor, residing in some solid prison. Trapped.

She screamed, or tried to, or would have if she still had a mouth. Cormac’s mouth. Where was Cormac? What had happened?

While her mind, her self, whatever this was, screamed, she could do nothing else and so waited for a small space in the panic she could wedge herself into and take stock. She could not scream forever, though she wanted to.

In this state, Cormac would take a deep breath and settle himself. She had no lungs, she had no breath. Panic returned, until she imagined lungs, imagined breath. Imagined stillness. Her mind paused. A firefly in a canyon, blinking where no one could see her.

She had no way to judge where she was, what she was. She could do nothing.

But no, her mind was hers. She could think, and if she could think, she had some small hope. Memory returned, slowly. They had met Aubrey Walker on a deserted road, and she showed them an artifact from an archeological dig. But no, there was no possible way that artifact had come from a Plains Archaic camp, not a thousand years ago, not yesterday. Which meant it was something else.

A trap. It had been a trap.

Amelia hadn’t been looking at the woman when Cormac reached out to pick up the piece of pottery. He’d dutifully focused on the target, so Amelia could study it. What would they have seen, if they had looked at the woman? The eagerness of a hunter closing in on her quarry? The bait had been so carefully laid and they had fallen for it. Amelia might have been furious, if she had blood and nerves for it. But she didn’t.

What had the trap done to Cormac? He might be dead. He certainly was not here. She was. . .she did not know, and without Cormac had no way to tell.

She tried futilely to scream, and what was left of her mind folded in on itself.

The exact dig location and its headquarters were confidential, to protect artifacts from black market dealers, which was apparently a real thing. So while Cormac could find out a bunch of information about Walker, the internet couldn’t give him a clue about where she was right now. He still had a few tricks, though. He picked up a pay-as-you-go phone from a local drug store and prepared to talk fast when he got the archeology department secretary on the line in the morning.

“Hi, yeah,” he said, putting on a clueless tone. “I’m here in Rapid City, I’ve got a delivery of bottled water for the dig out at Badlands but they didn’t give me real good directions for getting to the site, I wondered if you could help me out?”

“Oh, of course,” she said, and gave him precise directions.

People were so trusting. Yeah, he knew all about that, didn’t he? He thanked the secretary profusely and set out.

The dig’s headquarters was at the end of a pair of rutted tracks pretending to be a road. The only prominent structures were a single-wide mobile home that had seen better days and a couple of campers. Just two other cars were in the open space that served as a parking lot. Neither one was the tan CR-V.

He was still sitting in the Jeep, coming up with a good cover story for knocking on the trailer’s door and explaining himself to whoever was inside, and for why he needed to find Walker, when the woman herself appeared. She looked just like she did in her university photo, with the dark hair, floppy hat and ratty clothes. Olive-colored pants and a loose white T-shirt today.

She saw the Jeep and her gaze narrowed. Yeah, she was surprised see him, he bet. He got out of the Jeep, expecting her to make a run for it, to break down into some kind of panic when he approached. But she didn’t. She approached him.

“Can I help you?” she asked. “We don’t get too many visitors out here.” The suspicion in her tone was plain—visitors weren’t supposed to just show up here.

“I want to know what you did to me yesterday.”

She tilted her head. Now she looked confused. “I’m sorry?”

“Yesterday, you wanted me to look at a clay pot, and then you. . .you did something.”

“I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

He believed her. She spoke with such plain, stark truth, he couldn’t help but believe her.

“You left me for dead,” he said, trying again.

“I was here all day, until nightfall. Really, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She had begun inching back toward the trailer.

He clenched his fists against his head. What was going on here? “Do you drive a tan SUV?”

“You see a tan SUV here? Mine’s the blue Subaru.” She pointed.

“Well goddamn it,” he muttered. Walker—no, not Walker, someone pretending to be Walker. They’d needed credibility. Credentials. Someone Cormac would believe and agree to meet without question. So they’d borrowed her identity. Really borrowed it, using magic. He’d never even questioned.

“Do I need to call the cops? Because I will.” She’d taken out her phone and held her thumb poised over the phone’s screen.

“You actually get a signal out here?” he asked.

She frowned and put the phone away. “Who are you?”

“I’m a fucking idiot is who I am. I don’t suppose you have a twin sister?” He needed to think. Someone pretending to be Walker would still have some kind of connection to her. He could pick up that thread and follow it.

“No, why?” she said.

What were the odds she’d actually believe him? “I think there’s someone out there pretending to be you.”

Her confusion deepened. “Why would they do that? How would they do that?”

He shaded his eyes and looked around the lot, and the dusty trailer and camper. One bare-bones light post had a floodlight, just enough to cover the parking area. And a surveillance camera. “Where do you save your security footage? Mind if I take a look?”

“Do you really think someone is out there pretending to be me?”

“Yeah. And I need to find them.” He sighed. “My name’s Cormac Bennett, I got mugged on the side of the road and I’m just trying to figure out who did it.” No reason she should believe him. But she nodded.

“I’m Aubrey,” she said.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Okay. Just a minute.” She went to the Subaru, popped open the back hatch and rummaged around for a set of clipboards. He waited as patiently as he could. He really wanted to get on this woman’s good side.

With less hesitation than he expected, Aubrey invited him into the trailer. A fan sitting to the side and going full blast didn’t do much to move the air, which was hot, heavy, dusty. One half of the space was an office, a couple of card tables pretending to be desks, folding chairs, computers, and piles of paper. All of it looked temporary. The other half—that seemed to be where the real action was. Cormac stepped over to look. Cramped metal shelving held tubs, trays, and stuff. More tubs and trays sat on a table, where a couple of people worked with lamps, magnifiers, brushes, and tiny picks on pottery shards. Dozens of shards, stone tools, arrowheads, other bits and pieces, detritus. It all looked like junk but the pair of what must have been students or interns or something, as young they seemed, worked with a focus that suggested it was treasure.

Amelia would love this. Cormac shunted that thought aside. Best he not think about Amelia until he had a real plan of action. A target.

The people working here, grad students or archeologists or whatever, looked up at him, glanced over at Aubrey skeptically. “Everything okay, professor?” one of them asked.

“I think so,” she called back.

Aubrey was waking up one of the computers. “The security footage all comes through here. If we have someone sneaking around who shouldn’t be here, I’d really like to know about it.”

He pulled over a folding chair and sat next to her.

“When do you think this person was here?” Aubrey asked and brought up a list of video files.

The person impersonating Walker had contacted him a week ago, and he’d agreed to the job a couple of days after that. “About four days ago,” he said. “Let’s start there.”

She clicked open the file and fast-forwarded through the footage. Time zipped by on the screen, the sun rising, shadows in the parking lot shifting with the hours. Cars drove in, parked. People got out, gathered. The dig’s day seemed to begin at dawn with a group of people meeting by the front door, then they scattered to cars and drove, presumably to the actual dig site.

“You’d recognize a car that wasn’t supposed to be here?” he asked.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “We’re a pretty tight group. You just about have to be, working on a project like this all summer.”

She’d called him out straight off, so yeah, that made sense.

Nothing from the first day’s videos caught their attention. The second day—same cars, same people. Then—

“Wait,” Aubrey murmured and paused the playback. She rewound, played again.

In the middle of the day, when only her Subaru and another SUV were parked there, a tan CR-V pulled into the edge of the surveillance range. A woman got out, glanced around, and marched with purpose to Aubrey’s Subaru. Her features were obscured; she wore a coat and wide-brimmed hat even in the summer heat. But she was tall, svelte, and moved with confidence. Quickly, methodically, she popped the lock—she must have had some kind of tool to help her—and opened the driver’s side door.

The woman reached in and slipped something into an envelope she’d had in the pocket of her coat. She didn’t waste any time looking around, just closed the car door and walked away. The whole thing took no more than ten or twenty seconds. If no one had had a reason to review the footage, she might never have been discovered.

“What’s she doing?” Aubrey asked, leaning in, fascinated.

“She’s taking a hair off the headrest,” Cormac said. And with that hair. . .it would be a powerful, complex spell, using a hair to form the basis of a disguise. But it would also be a really good disguise when it was done.

Aubrey sat back in her chair, nonplussed. “A hair? That’s it? Why?” It wasn’t like she’d sabotaged the car or tried to steal artifacts. It must have seemed so harmless.

“She’s a witch,” Cormac said simply.

“Huh. Like, for real? Like eye of newt and magic wands and the rest?”

“Yeah, afraid so.”

He expected her to laugh, to express disbelief. A witch, for real? But she merely looked thoughtful. “And why me?”

“Credibility. She came after me. You just happened to be someone around here I’d listen to, so she used you. Sorry you got wrapped up in it.”

In the video, the woman looked around briefly before climbing back into her car. Cormac leaned in suddenly. He recognized her.

“Can we freeze that, blow it up?” he asked, and Aubrey slid the computer mouse to him. He backed up the footage, zoomed in. She had on sunglasses. Her dark hair was in a braid. The features were fuzzy in the low-res footage, but there was something about the tilt of her head, the way she moved, and the bright red lipstick she wore. “I’ll be damned.”

Amelia wanted to know how many people from his past might be holding grudges. He wasn’t expecting this one.

“You know her?” Aubrey asked. “Who is she?”

Maybe Cormac was wrong. This was a mistake. Maybe. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Is. . .is this going to be a problem?”

For him or for her? Best she not get involved. “You see her around here again, call me.” He wrote his number on a notepad tucked under one of the stacks of paper.

She never stopped with the skeptical sidewise glances, but she pinned the number to a nearby corkboard, next to diagrams of excavations and photos of broken pottery in dirt.

She walked him back to the Jeep, maybe to make sure he really left. She also studied him in a way that seemed academic. What sort of sense would an archeologist make of his T-shirt and jacket, brown mustache, sunglasses, and constant frown?

“What exactly is it you do, Mr. Bennett?”

“Travel. Look out for things.” He’d never been able to explain what he did, not since his days of hunting vampires and werewolves and everything in between. He’d gotten in the habit of delivering the vague and ready answer.

“Ah,” she said. Then put a thoughtful hand on her chin. “Would. . .you like to go get a cup of coffee or something? We don’t really have much here, but there’s a good diner back on the highway to Rapid City. I’d like to hear more about witches.” Her interest might have been merely academic.

The archeologist was cute, under the dust. Round face, bright eyes. She probably had some great stories. Maybe some other time. . . He shook his head. “I don’t really have time right now. Maybe later.”

She smiled wryly. “Good luck. If you find anything out about this impersonator, let me know.”

“Sure.” He walked out, ready to follow the next lead.

Driving away he thought: Amelia would have told him he should have gone for the coffee.

Clearly, he’d left too many threads hanging after that job in Chicago.

Lord Edgar hadn’t been the Master of Chicago. Chicago technically didn’t have a Master, as far as Cormac knew, though how the vampires themselves decided these things seemed arcane to him. But Lord Edgar aspired. What he wasn’t was discreet, and while running a protection racket to make money he’d been leaving bodies. Vampires usually policed their own, but Chicago didn’t have enough of a presence to manage it. That was exactly where folks like Cormac came in. Cormac had been hired to finish him by a local cop who knew and believed. He’d taken up a collection to pay Cormac.

Isabel Durant had been the primary human servant of Lord Edgar. She called herself a courtesan, but really, she was a human servant, which meant fetching and carrying in daylight hours and serving as a food source. Vampires didn’t really need or want sex. For them, physical desire was tied up with drinking blood. So she could claim to be his beloved mistress and sex object all she wanted, and that might be what she got out of the relationship. But really, a human servant had more in common with livestock.

Ten years ago, she’d been stunning. Model-beautiful, aristocratic features, impeccable taste, and a stately manner. A trophy a would-be Master vampire would keep hanging on his arm, another pretty thing to go with all his other pretty things. She had seemed to enjoy being kept. Maybe Edgar had even promised to turn her, after a suitable apprenticeship. Well, so much for that.

Once he got rid of Edgar, Cormac had left her alone. She hadn’t been a threat. That’d teach him.

Isabel Durant, from what Cormac knew of her, wasn’t a witch. So what was she doing taking hairs from other people’s cars? She’d either learned some witchcraft in the last ten years, or she’d hired someone. But why? If she’d wanted to leave him for dead she could have just shot him. She’d knocked him out, hadn’t robbed him, but Amelia was gone. No way Durant could know about Amelia to target her. Something wasn’t fitting together.

If Durant had been learning magic or had hired a magician, he ought to be able to track that. However, this was Amelia’s area of expertise. She was much better at it than he was. He had learned from her by watching, but not enough for this.

Some quick searching revealed that Durant had no internet footprint to speak of. She might have been savvy at keeping her information offline, or she might have been one of those fringe freaks so suspicious of technology they never left an imprint. Not surprising, hanging out with vampires. So how did he find her?

He went back to Rapid City, forced himself to eat another burger, downed a large coffee, and sat in his Jeep to make another call.

“Manitou Wishing Well, may I help you?” A kindly voice answered, which meant this was Judi. Her partner, Frida, was more brusque. They owned a souvenir shop in Manitou Springs that served as cover for more occult dealings. Judi also ran a ghost tour in the historical town. First time he’d met them, they spotted Amelia right off—Cormac had two auras, Frida insisted—and hadn’t batted an eye. He wondered what Frida would see in his aura now.

“Judi? This is Cormac Bennett. I could use some help.”

“Cormac, how nice to hear from you!” A muffled shifting sounded, as if she tilted away the phone and said over her shoulder, “It’s that tough fellow who knows Amelia Parker.”

“What’s he want?” Frida muttered back.

Judi came back on the line. “If I can help, I’ll certainly try.”

“You ever hear of someone named Isabelle Durant?”

“No, should I have?”

“Just thought I’d try. I think she’s either working some bad magic herself or hiring someone to do it for her. I spotted her in the Rapid City, South Dakota area. You know any witches out here who might be casting spells to impersonate someone using their hair?”

After a pause, Judi answered, her voice gone from cheerful to somber. “That’s some very unpleasant magic.”

“Yeah, it is. I’ve got a whole lot of unpleasant going on up here.”

“I see.”

“I know it’s a long shot but I thought you might know someone or have heard something, given your contacts.” Judi played the part of an unassuming dabbler, but she had serious chops. “I was hoping you could maybe ask around.”

He heard whispering—the two women in a hushed conference. He waited patiently.

Judi returned and asked, “Are you still there?” He murmured that he was. “Rapid City is it?” Yes. . . “You’ll want to talk Gregory at Tea on the Range, in Deadwood.” Tea on the Range? In Deadwood? Seriously? “I’m not saying he has anything to do with whatever trouble you’re mixed up in, he’s much too sensible for that. But if there’s something fishy going on, he might have caught the scent.”

He wasn’t quite able to keep the skepticism out of his tone. “Okay. I appreciate the tip.”

“I promise you, you won’t regret meeting him,” she said cheerfully.

“So do you guys have an organization of unassuming shop owners who are also magicians, or what?”

Judi deftly ignored him. “And how is Lady Amelia?”

Cormac hesitated, frowning. He wished he knew. “That’s part of my problem right now. I’m not really sure.”

“Oh, dear.” He could sense her worry. But then, he suspected Judi liked Amelia better than him.

“If. . .if you hear anything from her, can you let me know?” That was a long shot. He wasn’t even sure how that would work. But he would try anything at this point. He’d even ask for help.

“We certainly will. Good hunting.”

“Thanks,” he said, clicking off before she made him explain any more of what was happening, or worse, deliver any soothing platitudes.

Could Amelia be out there. . .somewhere? If so, would she be able to contact him? How? This was her area of expertise. He was at a loss.

A great deal of magic was imagination. Visualization. Picturing what one wished to accomplish. Ritual helped focus that intention; ingredients and symbols with inherent properties could be manipulated. But before any ritual could be enacted, one must know what one wanted to accomplish, specifically and with confidence.

Amelia still had that tool, at least. But so much of her thoughts were currently occupied in just keeping herself whole. She had gotten out of the practice of doing this.

Back at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility, when her physical body had been hanged for murder, she had transferred her mind, her consciousness, into the very foundation of the place and had stayed there for almost a century. She had learned to travel through brick and stone, to possess in a minimal way some of the people there. With practice, she could see and hear and feel, at least enough to plan. Finally, she had met Cormac, and he had let her in. He understood something of what she was, and they had been able to work together. When he left the prison, he took her with him.

Now, though, she didn’t even have those rudimentary abilities. She could sense no foundation, no pathways through stone or wood that could help her. There was no one here at all. Then, she had been disembodied. Here, she was entirely trapped.

Her mind would split apart if she kept screaming. So she stopped.

First, she must find some way, however small and slim, to reach the outside world. Second, she must discover what had happened to Cormac, learn if he was still alive and what had uprooted her.

He could not be dead. She refused to believe it.

More than a hundred years ago she had known she was dealing with dark, powerful, unpredictable magic. Had it been even more powerful than she thought? Had she somehow removed her own soul from the possibility of death? No, that wasn’t it. She still had form, boundaries. She was restricted in some physical, concrete way. Trapped. Her soul hadn’t been set loose—it had been put somewhere.

The clay pot. This had happened when Cormac picked up the artifact. Oh. . .this made sense. This was the anchor holding her in place. With this image firmly in mind she was able to collect herself and identify the boundaries trapping her, like some genie in a bottle. Her mind was contained, which meant she could use her thoughts for other things.

The woman, the archeologist, Aubrey Walker. She had not seemed magical to Amelia. She wore no charms or talismans and had seemed exactly as she appeared. But she had done this. She must have lured them out, set a trap—and captured Amelia.

But how could the woman have known about Amelia? Nothing about this made sense.

Unlike her time in the prison, she could not reach out to try to touch some nearby mind. To communicate, however little she was able. There was no one here, and the walls of this prison were secure.

Damn. Damn damn damn.

Impossible to tell how much time passed, without the body to mark heartbeats and breath, or eyes to watch sunlight come and go. She could count seconds ticking by, if she wanted to do nothing else. Amelia had spent years counting the seconds, in prison.

She had survived prison once and would do so again.

As it happened, she had not been abandoned here. She had been made captive. It stood to reason that a captor existed, and Amelia had only to wait for her captor to make itself known. And it came as lightning. A bolt of pain, scattering the self she had worked so hard to keep whole. The strike came once, a streak and flash launching through her prison. The second time it came, she was ready for it and was able to watch. The third time, she stood fast against it.

This was magic, it had to be magic. All that was left of Amelia was her magic, the soul of her that made magic possible. This was not physical torture; this was designed to tear at her soul. By the same token, one could not bind a soul as one could bind a body. She could resist in ways a tortured body could not. Magic was thought, was visualization, so she made herself a wall, a shield between herself and the torture. A prison within the prison, in a sense, but this one she controlled. The soul-blast came again, and Amelia was insulated. It did not touch her. Then it struck again, even more fiercely. Her shield held. Three more times, faster and harder, as if whoever cast the bolts was growing frustrated. As if they tried to shake Amelia out of her defenses.

Then the attacks paused. Amelia counted this as a victory and waited for the next assault. Her captor was active and meant to punish her. She would be ready.

The next attack came as heat, a slow simmering, as if she sat in a cook pot waiting for the water to boil. Clumsy and inelegant. The same defenses she had used before held.

Then came nightmares, but they were mere illusion, black swarms of demons, showers of knives, as insubstantial as she herself was. Amelia was able to step aside, detach herself from the onslaught directed at her, and observe.

Then came the voice. You can’t resist you can’t stop me how are you doing this how are you surviving. . .

So this was what it was like, having a voice in the back of one’s mind, nagging.

Her captor expected some reaction that Amelia was not delivering. This gave her satisfaction. But she knew nothing of her captor’s purpose, why the torture was happening at all. Her attacker expected her to be helpless, to have no experience of magic, of the occult practices that were required to stage such immaterial tortures.

If only Amelia could reach out, find some way to discover what was outside her prison. Think, she had to think. But she felt like she was a small fox hiding in an even smaller cave while the hounds bayed outside. If she moved, she was finished.

No, she was bigger than this, better. Whoever her torturer was, was clumsy, unskilled, using brute force instead of precision. Amelia represented a hundred years of magical experience. This was a duel, and she had the advantage, because her attacker didn’t know she had initiated a battle. That the lioness was unchained. Amelia rolled up metaphorical sleeves and got to work.

She imagined sending a message. She imagined all the ways she might scry, looking for such a message from the beyond, and then thought of the process in reverse, sending instead of receiving. Trying to control which way the runes turned up or how the tea leaves scattered at the bottom of the cup. If she could not reach any nearby minds, could she reach out to magic itself? Magic trapped her here; she was half magic herself. Surely she could use that. She must.

Trying anything was better than trying nothing. She would start with a simple S.O.S. A cry, I am here, I am still here. She did not know if Cormac was still alive to hear it. But they had other friends, other magicians who might be receptive to her call. If they heard her, they might be able to help.

For now, she only wanted to be heard. S.O.S., S.O.S., S.O.S.

Cormac expected, maybe he hoped for, a classic Hollywood image of an Old West town with dusty storefronts and maybe a tumbleweed or two rolling down the street. But he drove around the curve and into the steep, wooded gulch where the town lay, and his heart sank. Casinos, everywhere. Too many shiny new buildings, tour buses with tinted windows, dozens of weekend motorcyclists. Another mountain town turned into a tourist gambling center, just like Black Hawk back home. Place like this wouldn’t have enough magical savvy to fill a shoe. What was Judi thinking, sending him here?

A billboard hung on a corner of a building: Witness the Thrill of a Main Street Shootout! Realistic! Fun! Family Approved! Live shows three times a day recreating the murder of Wild Bill Hickok. Well, there was that, he supposed.

The address Judi gave him was at the end of the old main street, several blocks away from where the bulk of the casinos and T-shirt shops and crowds gathered. He parked, which was a challenge in itself in a town like this. He tried not to get annoyed. Trouble was, he’d started annoyed and was edging into rage.

Even though he knew exactly where it was, he walked past the place three times before realizing he’d arrived. The storefront was unassuming, weathered brown, with a closed door and dusty windows. A small sign hung above the front door, words painted in a touristy old-timey font: Tea on the Range.

The tourists walking up and down the sidewalk didn’t seem to notice it. No one went inside. Frowning, Cormac pulled open the door and entered.

The floorboards were worn from decades of feet passing over them. The ceiling was high, and had what must have been the original pressed-tin decoration. The sunlight coming in through the windows filtered hazily through dust that might have been hanging in the air for years.

To his right, what must have once been a bar now served as a counter. An old mirror, worn and pitted, hung behind it, surrounded by shelves, which didn’t hold bottles of booze but rows of labeled tea tins, along with mismatched cups and saucers and mugs. A display case of pastries sat nearby. A half a dozen bistro tables and chairs spread out in the front half of the shop. The place was empty of customers.

The back half of the store looked more like what he expected, what the back half of the Manitou Wishing Well looked like: shelves of books, handmade soaps and herbal sachets, crystals and tarot cards, all of it innocuous enough you could take it as seriously or not as you chose. Cormac looked around for the signs that he ought to take this place seriously: charms hanging above the doorway, spells worked into the signage. The pressed-tin ceiling was mostly made up of a flower motif that repeated, nothing mystical to speak of, but here and there a newer piece had been placed over the old, symbols that didn’t go with the other decoration.

The whole place smelled of herbs and age.

If at any point, some classic Old West town had had a shop like this, this is what it would have looked like. Then again, maybe there had been shops like this, full of books and herbs and esoterica, the equivalent of a New Age apothecary and fortune-telling emporium but with a historical patina. Maybe they hid in plain sight, that unassuming tea parlor or what not. Amelia had traveled the world, looking for magic, and had found it. Maybe it showed up in places just like this.

Amelia would love this.

A young-looking man stood at the counter, reading a book lying flat on the counter. He had brown skin, short-cropped curly hair, and wore a long-sleeved, button-up shirt, a vest, wire-rimmed glasses. As old-fashioned as the rest of the place. He had a leather cord wrapped twice around his right wrist, which might have been jewelry except it didn’t much go with the rest of his outfit. Might have been a spell.

Cormac didn’t waste time and went up to the counter, putting his hand on the varnished wood. The guy looked up. His smile was perfunctory, the bland face of a customer service professional.

“What can I get for you?” A chalkboard on an easel listed a menu: tea in three sizes, prices for the pastries.

Cormac said, “Judi Scanlon said I should look you up. Might be able to help me with a problem.”

The young man regarded him a moment. Sizing him up, and Cormac put up with it. Considered what he’d do if the guy denied knowing Judi, played dumb about the whole magic thing. But eventually he turned up half a grin. “She did, did she? I didn’t think you looked much like a tea drinker.”

Amelia was. He drank it for her, when they couldn’t get coffee. “Don’t seem to be too many tea drinkers around here.” Through the windows, people passed by and never even looked at the shop.

“Folks have to really want to find the place.” Which meant maybe Cormac was supposed to be here. That seemed to be enough for the guy. He closed the book and slipped it under the counter. Cormac caught just enough of a look to see that it was bound in stained leather, no title, no other markings. “And you are?”

“Cormac,” he said. “You must be Gregory?”

“And Judi thinks I can help you.”

“You can call her and get her to vouch for me.”

“That’s all right. You don’t go around dropping a name like that for the fun of it.” Cormac realized he really had no idea what Judi’s reputation was outside of the nice old lady who gave ghost tours in Manitou Springs. He wondered if he wanted to find out. Gregory continued. “What’s the problem?”

“You know her?” He unfolded the sheet of paper with Isabelle Durant’s blurry, security camera picture and lay it on the counter. The man studied it, and his gaze narrowed in what might have been recognition. Cormac waited to see if he would deny it or dodge the question.

He lifted his gaze. “Why are you looking for her?”

Cormac’s lip curled. “I just have a couple of questions I need to ask her.”

Gregory’s lip curled as well, a mirroring half smile, just as cynical. “That right?”

“She’s probably laying low at the moment. She’s been working some powerful magic over the last couple of days. Or she might have hired someone to work the magic for her. Judi says you might have a sense of who around here might be capable of that.” Or that it might have been you. . .

“Let me ask you a question. If you know enough to know about that kind of magic, and Judi Scanlon trusts you enough to send you to me, why can’t you find this person yourself?”

“That’s just it, normally I would. And now I can’t. That’s what I need to ask her about.”

The implications sank in—that Durant had done something to Cormac’s magical abilities. It wasn’t a lie, per se. Gregory raised a brow and blew out a breath.

“Why don’t you step back to my office?” He went to the front door and turned over a painted wood sign from “open” to “closed.” In the back of the shop, Gregory gestured Cormac to a chair at a small, linen-covered table. “Yes, I’ve seen her. I don’t know her name but she’s been in a couple of times, picking up odds and ends. It’s not my place to ask my customers what they do with what I sell them.”

“I’ve heard the same argument at gun shops,” Cormac said.

“Yeah. Well.” From a nearby shelf he retrieved a silk bag and drew out a deck of cards, which he began deftly shuffling.

“Tarot?” Cormac asked, smirking. “You think this will track her down, give me an address for her?”

“This isn’t about her. I want to know what you’re about.”

Cormac leaned back and crossed his arms. He didn’t much feel like being tested. On the other hand, he was kind of curious what the guy would come up with. This was just parlor tricks, though Amelia would say that in the right hands tarot could be more. And he wished he could stop thinking about Amelia. “If I pass your test, you’ll help?”

“What’s your connection to this woman?”

“Old grudge,” he said.

“Mutual?”

“Honestly, until today I’d completely forgotten about her.”

Gregory glanced at him. “Scorned lover? You dump her at the altar or something?”

“No. Never date anyone crazier than yourself, I’ve been told.”

Gregory chuckled. It struck Cormac that he couldn’t really tell how old the man was, a weathered thirty or a youthful fifty. He seemed young but his manner was confident.

He finished shuffling, squared the deck in the middle of the table. Cut it into two piles and turned over a single card from the cut. The image showed a woman with long black hair in an Old West get-up: pleated skirt, boots, a tailored jacket, wide-brimmed hat. She held a rifle. The pen-and-ink drawing was based on an old publicity photo of Annie Oakley.

“Queen of Swords,” he said. He turned the deck over and fanned it out so Cormac could see the image in context.

The whole deck was Old West themed. Not Rider-Waite or one of the traditional decks Amelia was familiar with but something you’d expect to find in a tourist shop in Deadwood, and not in the hands of a serious magician. Six-shooters and rifles, horses and stagecoaches, cow skulls and lightning strikes over rocky mesas. The suits were rifles, arrows, gold pan and sheriff’s star. The Major Arcana were famous figures and tropes of the genre. Tombstones and card tables, nooses and cactus. It was cheesy, and it made Cormac nervous.

Gregory turned the cards face down and shuffled the deck again. Spread the whole deck out in a fan, face down. The art on the backs showed a pen-and-ink drawing of intertwined tumbleweeds. “Now you pick.”

Cormac didn’t think. Reached out and put his hand on the first card he came to. Pulled it out and flipped it over.

The Queen of Swords.

That was just a little too pat. For all he knew Gregory was working with Durant. He met Gregory’s gaze across the table. The man swept up the deck, shuffled, fanned the cards again. “Choose.”

Cormac did. The Queen of Swords. Annie Oakley, who’d been alive at the same time as Amelia Parker, who had the same thick black hair cascading over her shoulders.

Gregory’s eyes widened. “I’m not stacking the deck.”

Cormac knew he wasn’t. “Try it again.”

He did so three more times, shuffling and cutting the deck differently each time, drawing from the bottom, the middle, laying a spread face down and turning up one. The Queen of Swords. The Queen of Swords. The Queen of Swords.

“This is a message,” Gregory said finally, squaring the deck and leaning back from it.

“Yeah,” Cormac said, uncertain what to do with the wash of relief. It made him almost light-headed. This was a message. This was Amelia.

“You know what it means,” Gregory said, a statement. “Who is she?”

“What would you say? If this was a reading and not. . .something else, what would you tell me?”

He hesitated. “She’s important to you. She’s powerful. It’s not the woman in the picture you showed me.”

Cormac smiled and glanced away.

Gregory pushed away from the table. “I’m going to make myself some tea, you want anything?”

“Just water,” he said. Cormac flipped the cards over, spread them out, studied the images. Found the Queen of Swords and pulled it front and center. The odds of a flipped coin coming up heads or tails was fifty percent, every time. The odds of drawing one card out of seventy-odd was the same, every time. But the odds of drawing that same card a half a dozen times in a row? This wasn’t about odds. It was, as Gregory had said, a message. A voice reaching out, but unable to speak.

Cormac found the ace of the suit. Ace of Swords. A Winchester rifle, resting in a rack above a fireplace containing a blazing fire, in what looked to be a cozy cabin. He put this and the Queen next to each other. Not a message but intention.

Gregory returned with a tray holding a glass of water, and a small steaming teapot with accompanying china cup, saucer, and sugar bowl.

“Going to read tea leaves next?” Cormac asked.

“No, I’m not sure I can take any more messages.” He looked at the cards Cormac had matched together. “Not the King?”

He shook his head. He didn’t know what he was doing.

Gregory sat and told him the story: Durant came in looking for some arcane ingredients. Way beyond the quartz crystals and sage smudges he sold to low-key kitchen witches. She was looking for powdered puffer fish, poison arrow frog, that kind of thing, which he didn’t have. Or at least wasn’t willing to sell to someone off the street. She’d bought some plain green tea and a couple of chunks of hematite, and left.

“I need to find her,” Cormac said decisively.

“She paid cash. Sorry I can’t help track her down via her credit card. You’re. . .not going to hurt her, are you?”

Why not? She left him laid out on a road in the middle of nowhere. She had done something to him and Amelia was gone. Yes, he was going to try very much to hurt her. “I just need to talk to her.” He wasn’t sure Gregory believed him.

“If she’s staying in the area she might come back. I can give you a call if she does.”

Cormac didn’t want to wait. He thought for a minute, tried to imagine what Amelia would suggest. He’d learned a lot from her. Not enough, not for this. But maybe he didn’t need to go looking for her. Maybe he could draw her out. Set a lure. Not even a summoning spell. Just. . .a sign in the window. A text message, hinting that he knew what she’d done. That someone was watching her.

“I can’t wait. I need a signal,” Cormac said. “Nothing big, not too powerful. Just. . .an urge to look inside.” He flicked a hand, an acknowledgement of how much of this relied on chance.

“That kind of thing is real risky in retail,” Gregory said. “You cast ‘come buy me’ over your shop and before you know it you’re out of stock and everything is back-ordered and you have to close up. I cast things like safety and comfort so people feel at home here, wards so the drunk yahoos stay out, and the spending takes care of itself. This. . .”

“Not a big spell. Just a suggestion. Just for one person.” He tapped Durant’s picture. “A message that there’s something here she wants.”

“Why are you assuming I know how to do that sort of thing?”

“Judi Scanlon wouldn’t have sent me to you if you didn’t.”

He offered a wry smile. “All right.”

“All right you can do it, or you will?”

“I have an idea.”

“I can pay—”

“I want the whole story. I want to know who the Queen of Swords is.”

The whole story. . .he’d never get that. This story had no boundaries, and Cormac didn’t know the end. “If this works, you will. Need anything from me?”

“Oh, the usual. A hair.”

Of course he did. If he was going to be handling this shit in Deadwood at least he could get into actual straightforward gunfight. Nothing in this magic business was ever straightforward. “You got a plan for that hair?”

“It’s a test, mostly. To see if you trust me.”

Cormac felt blind. He’d spent most of his life without Amelia looking over his shoulder, why did he feel so lost without her now? He ought to leave here, get away, go back to the life he would have had without her—

Without her, he’d still be in prison, he was pretty sure.

Amelia had become the voice of his conscience, the voice of reason. Even now he was waiting for her to tell him yes or no. He didn’t think he’d become so dependent. He reached above his ear, yanked on a brown strand. Barely long enough to matter.

Gregory produced a glass vial as long as his finger and held it out. Cormac dropped the hair in, Gregory corked it, wrote something on it in Sharpie. The vial disappeared into his pocket and the shopkeeper seemed far too pleased with himself.

What was Cormac getting himself in to?

“Give me until tomorrow. I’ll need tonight to pull this together.”

Now. He wanted to confront her now. “Durant might have protections—”

“We’ll see.”

“What exactly are you going to do? If you don’t mind me asking.”

From a different pocket, Gregory drew out a different small vial. This one contained a long, coiled black hair. “Pulled it from the sleeve of her shirt while she was looking the other way. I had a feeling.”

“Shit,” Cormac muttered, and Gregory chuckled. A powerful magician could do so much with just a strand of hair, as he’d already seen. If you had the hair of another magician their protections against your magic might not work. There were dark and powerful spells you could use to control someone, with just a bit of hair or a nail clipping. The cost to one’s own soul for such magic was generally pretty high and not worth it. Except that Durant had happily used such magic to impersonate Aubrey Walker. Turnabout was fair play.

Isabelle Durant had been a servant to vampires. She didn’t seem to hold her own soul in much regard. He wasn’t too sure about Gregory.

“I’ll text you tomorrow when I start things rolling,” Gregory said. “I’ll text again when she arrives. You’ll want to be close when she does. This will likely only work once.”

Handing over his phone number seemed even more momentous than giving the man a hair. Well, why not? This whole thing was already too personal.

“Till tomorrow then,” Cormac said, and walked out.

Somehow, he had to sleep, but he didn’t want to close his eyes. He should probably find a room, but he didn’t want four walls around him. He wanted to be able to run, if he needed to. Run from what, and to where, he didn’t know. His own mind wasn’t secure, and he couldn’t do anything about it.

He had stopped being able to make decisions without that feminine voice adding her opinion. He had thought he resented that voice.

Finally, he broke down and found a run-down motor lodge outside of Deadwood. The walls were thin and didn’t block the sound of motorcycles roaring down the highway. Sturgis was an hour away, and it didn’t seem to matter that the rally wasn’t for another month, the hills still filled up with the machines.

He found some take-out Mexican, took a long, hot shower. He’d started smelling rank. Watched TV for the rest of the night, old movies on HBO that left no impression on him. He should sleep. But he didn’t want to sleep. Usually, at night, she talked to him.

The only place he felt truly safe was in the mountains, so in his mind he came here, built up this memory of a valley ringed by a pine forest, a rocky creek tumbling down the middle, thick grasses where elk sometimes grazed. He could sit at the edge of the meadow and be calm. Back in prison, the memory had become the chink in his armor. This was how Amelia had reached him. He’d tried to keep her out, but when dark magic, a demon feeding on pain and blood, invaded the prison itself, they had to work together to defeat it. Since then, this valley in his mind became theirs. She would stand right there, by those rocks, her hands folded in front of her. . .

Without her, it no longer felt safe.

He could not see the sky overhead. It ought to be searing blue, he ought to feel the sun on his face. Before, he could always hear the rushing, trickling water in the creek, smell the pines. Feel the grass under his hands. Now, the vision became dreamlike, and not in a good way. Some form of vertigo overcame him, as he squinted out to a scene that wasn’t any clearer than a faded picture. He could not feel the ground under him.

Several times that night he started awake and didn’t know where he was. Yesterday. It had just been yesterday that he lost her.

In the morning, he found breakfast at a coffee shop. Around the same time, Gregory sent him a text message: trigger pulled.

Cormac parked the Jeep in an alley the next street over from the tea shop, out of sight. Waiting gave him time to think. His mind felt empty and hollow, with nothing rattling around but his own neuroses. The trick to getting along was never giving himself time to look at his own head. He didn’t much like it in there.

Maybe he should read one of the books lying discarded on the passenger seat. They were Amelia’s: a history of Jerusalem in the twentieth century. The Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis. A Georgette Heyer novel. They read together. She used his eyes. Now, his eyes were his own again.

He waited.

He didn’t know if Gregory could do what he said he could or if he played the odds and hoped for the best. He had seemed confident. Cormac wasn’t sure, but what did he have to lose? Magic was influence, not science, Amelia always said.

His phone dinged. Text message: now. Which meant Isabelle Durant had walked through the door.

Cormac took a deep breath, got out of the Jeep. Closed the door, locked it. Patted his pockets for the charms Amelia always made him carry, protections against curses, magic, evil eyes, whatnot. Could never protect against everything, though, could you? He checked for a gun in a belt holster that wasn’t there, years after he had stopped carrying. Never mind. He’d strangle Isabelle Durant with his bare hands if he had to.

Calmly, he walked around the block and up to the door of Tea on the Range. Couldn’t see much through the front windows, past the reflection of sky and street. He opened the door, strolled in, like he was just another customer on any average day.

She was there at the counter, in tight designer jeans, tall boots, and a silk blouse, hair bound up with a jeweled clip, her face perfectly made up. This was just how she’d looked when she was with Lord Edgar. A brown packet of herbs or tea sat in front of her, while Gregory typed something into a tablet. They both looked up at his entrance; Gregory backed away a step.

Durant’s eyes widened, and her hand went to her chest.

Cormac moved toward her, away from the glare of the front windows. Just in case she hadn’t gotten a good look at him.

“You,” she whispered in a choked voice.

He grinned. “That’s right.”

“No. . .”

“Yup.” He advanced, intending to close on her.

“You’re supposed to be dead!” she yelled, very much like she had seen a ghost. “I took your mind, why aren’t you dead!”

He hesitated. “What do you mean, you took my mind?”

She laughed, a mad giggle. “Death is too good for you, so I took your mind!”

“You. . .” He had to stop and think. This. . .this suddenly all made sense. “You took it and did what?”

“I took your mind!” She backed away, looking around wildly as if for a weapon or an exit. Out of the corner of his eye Cormac saw Gregory, hands under the counter. Did the guy have a weapon for this sort of thing?

“What did you do with it?” Cormac demanded, the words raw.

“I put you on my shelf, so you would be mine forever, mine to have and torture. It worked, the spell worked, I trapped you, how are you here!” She grew shrill.

Almost, Cormac laughed. The pieces fell into place. She had a spell to take a mind, to trap it. . .and she had taken Amelia. Her spell took the wrong mind.

He pressed toward her. “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to bring me that clay pot, and you’re going to put back what you took. Got it?”

“No, no. . .”

She hefted a chair from one of the bistro tables and swung it at him. He ducked, put up an arm to block and grabbed one of the legs. Yanked it out of her hands and closed on her. Durant didn’t try to struggle with him, just let go and ran for the front door. Disentangling himself from the chair took a moment; he shoved it out of the way, sent it clattering on the hardwood floor, and ran after her.

Outside, he looked; she pounded down the block to the right. He followed. She was in a panic; he would catch her.

She turned a corner. He grabbed the wall to haul himself around after her—

She was gone. Here, the street led to an intersection, another pair of streets, and she hadn’t had enough time to turn again. She hadn’t needed to. While she probably didn’t have a spell to make her vanish outright, plenty of spells could cause someone to look away, so they couldn’t quite see her, or make her blend in, a kind of camouflage.

“Fuck,” he muttered. He could keep running after her but would only look like an idiot.

Back at Tea on the Range, Gregory was still behind the counter where Cormac left him. The guy held his hands steepled under his chin. “And who is the Queen of Swords?” he asked again.

The question felt personal. “You got anything stronger than tea?”

Gregory drew out a half-full bottle of some obscure, probably local, craft whiskey, which he set on the counter with a thunk. “Now, who is the Queen of Swords, and what did Isabelle Durant do to her?”

Cormac wasn’t going to be able to handle this on his own. He’d already decided that. He might as well tell it all. “Amelia Parker. She needed a body and I loaned her mine. Durant thought she was trapping my mind and leaving my body to die. But she got Amelia instead.”

If Gregory didn’t understand it he at least didn’t scoff. “Lucky for you, I guess. That’s some very unpleasant magic she’s dealing with.”

Cormac snorted a laugh. “Amelia would be better at sorting this out than I am.” It should have been him. . .except he had no experience being a mind trapped in stone. She did. And she was trying to reach out. . . “I need to get her back.”

“The pot. . .the reliquary, let’s call it. You need to find it. So you need to find where Durant is hiding.”

“Yeah.”

If Durant were smart, she’d leave town. Flee. Cormac would have a tough time finding her then. But maybe Durant wasn’t all that smart. She wanted Cormac, not Amelia. She’d be back. She’d find another way to take revenge on him. So yeah, she’d probably stick around.

Gregory continued, “I’ve still got her hair, I could try some scrying—”

“You have a map?” Cormac asked. He was a hunter, he’d been a hunter long before he’d known anything about magic. “Let’s start with a map first.”

At the age of twenty Amelia Parker left her well-born family’s comfortable estate in Kent forever. She wanted to learn magic. All of it.

She hadn’t started particularly well.

A woman could travel alone, even at the turn of the last century, but she had to be prepared, to plan ahead. To walk with a certain swagger that no one could question. Having a lot of money to smooth the way didn’t hurt. Additionally, as young as she’d been she had had to remain on guard—primarily against a certain type of older gentleman, entrenched in colonial bureaucracy, who simply had to be helpful.

She didn’t want help. She wanted power. So she buttoned herself up tight, put her hat firmly upon her head and kept her parasol close at hand, and set out, determined.

And still, despite it all, she would find herself on foreign shores, in an exotic market, staring around her with wonder and thinking this was it, this was all she wanted. To be part of the world.

At a market in Marrakech, only a few months into her journey, she grew drunk on the smells of spices and herbs, held back from pawing at baskets of dates and figs. Meat sizzled over braziers, and voices cried out, hawking their wares. This was just like she’d read about, exactly how she’d imagined traveling would be. The whole world was a market, but now that she was in the middle of it she didn’t know what to try first. She bought a packet of figs and another of almonds, and tried to simply take it all in.

She mostly spoke French to get by, learned some basic Arabic. She searched for magic.

When she found a series of medieval alchemical symbols carved into the wood frame of an awning outside one shop, she stopped and stared. So far she had seen Turkish eyes and blessings in Arabic, some Sanskrit and even a bit of Hebrew. Common prayers and blessings, no more remarkable than a cross in a Christian country. But she had not expected to see such an arcane set of writing here, like this. To the casual gaze the symbols did not stand out among the other whorls and arabesques of the decoration on the shop’s lintel. But to Amelia’s eye they blazed, incongruous. This was not mere decoration. It was intentional, from another time and place and with its own meaning. It was a warding, for protection.

This was magic in the wild, and the thrill of finding it rooted her to her spot.

“Miss? Miss?”

She started back to herself, gripping her parasol. She really needed to be more careful. The person who had spoken to her was a woman, shorter than Amelia, round of face and stout of body, long black hair with a few gray streaks touching it. She wore a printed blouse, full skirt and vest in wild colors, and seemed like exactly the sort of woman who would inhabit a stall decorated with an alchemical ward.

“Are you all right, miss?” the woman asked in lilting English, and Amelia was a bit annoyed that she was so easily identified.

“Do you know what that means?” Amelia asked, pointing at the markings on the lintel.

The woman’s lips curled in a half smile. “I hope so, I put it there.”

“I beg your pardon, but I had not expected to find such symbols outside of a book, ever. I’m quite astonished.”

“I see that.”

Amelia blushed, looked away. She wasn’t acting like a worldly woman of knowledge and consequence at all. She ought to be more circumspect. She had no idea what to say next. Only that she wanted to know everything this woman knew. But the shopkeeper wouldn’t just tell her, would she?

“My name is Amelia Parker,” she said, and held out her gloved hand. “You have a very nice shop here.”

“And you are interested in alchemy,” the woman said.

“I’m interested in everything,” she confessed, a bit breathlessly.

“Here, come in off the street. You draw a lot of attention.” The woman touched her arm and gestured into the warm, hazy interior of the shop. “My name is Mariam.”

Amelia ought to have been careful, ought not to have trusted strangers. But she eagerly followed the woman in, and within moments was seated on cushions, at a low table, with a cup of sweet mint tea before her. Amelia drank, half expecting hallucinations, some magical concoction that would send her mind to another plane of existence—or knock her out entirely while the Mariam robbed her. She hardly cared, this was an adventure. But the tea was only tea, brightly flavored, a bit on the cool side.

Mariam offered Amelia a job. At first, Amelia balked. She was a lady, an English lady, she did not work in market stalls in North Africa. But she quelled the old, stodgy sensibilities. That was her family talking.

This was, she realized, a test. And so, for the next six months, she worked in Mariam’s tea and herb shop alongside her two young daughters, sweeping the floor, dusting tins and jars, cups and pots. Things got very dusty. Every now and then, Mariam asked her to translate a letter or part of a book. Amelia learned not to beg to be taught alchemy and magic. She learned to be grateful for whatever Mariam decided to teach her, which was, in the end, what Mariam decided she most needed to learn. A thing that could not be found in any book.

How to be still. How to breathe. How to be inside one’s own mind.

Imagine an apple. Don’t just think of an apple. Picture all aspects of it, the smooth texture of its skin, the weight of it in your palm. What color is it? Red, of course, yes? But no, it’s more than red. Once you can feel the apple in your hand, really look at it. It isn’t just red, as in a child’s drawing. It has shades, freckles, streaks. A bit of gold on the underside, a bit of brown around the stem. To imagine the apple one must be able to picture it in hand, turn it this way and that, feel it, hold it to one’s nose and smell the fruity sweetness of it. Or for a challenge, imagine it rotting. You hold the apple, and as you watch the flesh grows softer, spots appear, turn brown, weep fluids, until the whole of it is a sickly mash dripping through your fingers.

Until one can imagine all of this, can one really work magic? Can you cast a spell, unless you can imagine exactly what you want the spell to do? When you cast a protective spell around your room, are you simply saying the words, or are you building a wall, a shield, a barrier that ill intent cannot cross? Can you see it?

Magic is in the mind. So the mind must be sharp and specific. You must be able to create what you need with thought, when no other materials are at hand, when stress and violence assail you from without. When you have no other weapon but your mind, will it be sharp enough?

The work was exhausting and thrilling.

“Where did you learn all this?” Amelia asked Mariam one day, as they sorted a new delivery of teas into the right jars and tins. Amelia had shuffled off some of her staid English clothing, trading the high-buttoned blouse and long skirt for a tunic and loose trousers, a linen coat over all. She still kept her hair up and under a scarf, as if she was hiding. As a white woman, she still looked out of place here.

Mariam smiled slyly and looked out to the market, which was busy in the hour before dusk, merchants closing up booths and workers hustling back and forth on errands. “I have very wise ancestors.”

That could have meant anything. The answer was a deflection. “Then why would you pass such knowledge on to me? I’m an outsider. You owe me nothing.”

“Good of you to notice,” Mariam said. “But you’ve learned to sweep the floors well.” Amelia blushed, ducked her gaze. More kindly, her mentor said, “Some little instinct tells me the world might have need of such wisdom, passed along through you. The world is changing from what it was.” This sounded like a mission, a directive: use what you have learned. Make the world better. The words felt like a burden.

“I can never thank you enough.”

“No, my dear, you can’t, but we all walk through life with debts. It comes out even in the end!”

At the end of six months, Mariam announced she was closing the shop. Her mother, who lived in a village several hours away, was ill and needed care. If she wanted, Amelia could continue running the shop. Instead, she decided it was time to travel on. She still had so much to see and continents to cross. Mariam agreed that her path lay away from here.

When she left, Amelia embraced Mariam and her daughters and promised to return to visit someday. She never did. She had not returned to visit any of the friends she had made on her journeys. When she emerged back into the world, she learned of computers and the internet and spent some time searching for the people and places where she had been. There was some small chance that Mariam’s daughters, or perhaps their children, yet lived. But the market in Marrakech was long gone and Amelia could not find them.

That Amelia survived all that she had, she owed to Mariam and her teaching.

Amelia knew how to build walls with her mind, to imagine the color of the stone, the texture of them, the strength of their foundations. She also knew how to break them down. Particularly the walls people built up in their minds to keep their inner selves hidden, their emotions in check, to function in the world. Or not, sometimes. She had driven people mad, beating down their walls.

With Cormac, she finally had to simply ask him to let her in. And where was he, was he all right. . .

Had he just walked away?

When a presence tried to break down the wall she’d built to hold herself together, Amelia held fast. She had a century’s worth of experience doing this. She wouldn’t bend. The presence, however, was filled with rage, and this gave it power.

Who are you who are you what are you who are you tell me tell me.

Well. Something had happened, clearly.

You are not him tell me who are you who are you who are you.

Amelia couldn’t be expected to carry on a conversation with someone who had so little control. So she didn’t. She merely listened and tried to learn.

It was supposed to be him in here, why isn’t it.

Ah, the situation started to become clear. Amelia was the victim of an entrapment spell, a powerful and dangerous piece of magic derived from voudon traditions that sought to control a person’s spirit. Rather than focusing on control of the body, her assailant wanted to possess the mind.

The strike had been directed at Cormac. This was someone from Cormac’s past, then, seeking revenge? They hadn’t known that two souls resided in Cormac’s body. The irony was rather delicious, that rather than trap the oh-so-physical bounty hunter, this assailant had caught perhaps the one magician in all the world who was well equipped to deal with such captivity.

Amelia very nearly relished the coming battle.

Who are you who are you who are you.

Amelia reached out, ever so slightly. Like plucking the branch a spider’s web was anchored to, to see what reaction she got from the spider. Donned a bit of a careless tone.

“Got yourself in a bit of a fix, have you?”

Screaming answered her. The shocked reaction of someone who had not expected her prisoner to have a voice. This was someone who had a plan, and the plan was not going well.

“Ah yes. Would you like to talk about it?”

More screaming. So no.

To work magic one needed a sharp mind. One also needed a physical connection to the world. Amelia no longer had this. But she had a voice screaming at her. Wasn’t much of a wedge, but it would have to serve.

Gregory pulled out a basic road map of the area and spread it on the counter. A pair of women came in, and he had to leave off to help them. They smelled about ten different teas each before picking one, and seemed delighted by everything about the experience, from the old-timey shop to the cute little teapots. Gregory charmed them. Cormac waited patiently and resisted an urge to break something.

“If they were able to come in here, they needed something, even if it was to smell ten different teas and walk out with a smile,” Gregory explained.

Durant was close enough that she could be affected by Gregory’s summoning spell and arrive in no more than an hour or so. The kind of magic she was working, she’d need to be isolated. Away from town, away from people. She was crazy enough to be neck-deep in weird, but not so crazy that she wouldn’t try to hide it. She was used to a certain standard of living, a high level of personal decorum, so she wouldn’t be camping in wilderness. That narrowed things down. Isolated vacation rentals, resorts. Cormac pulled up a map on his phone so he could look at satellite imagery. Separated town from wilderness, searched for dirt roads and isolated buildings, all within an hour or so. National forest surrounded Deadwood. East was open prairie and Badlands National Park. Southeast was the Pine Ridge Reservation. Durant would draw attention at any of those places, a random white woman off by herself working dangerous magic.

That still left a lot of ground to cover, but not an infinite amount. Cormac knew what her car looked like, what she looked like. She would be on the defensive after their encounter. That was fine. He found a pencil and started circling spots on Gregory’s map. Old-fashioned footwork might just do the trick, no magic needed. That was the trouble with magic. Once you had it, you stopped using other tools.

“There,” Cormac said, tapping the page. “I bet she’s in one of those spots. I can probably check most of them before dark.”

Gregory studied the map as if checking his work, then rocked back, nodded sagely. “I guess you don’t need me.”

“Wouldn’t say that. I don’t drink tea, but Amelia does.”

“Well then. Let me know when I can brew a pot for her.”

Cormac slipped on his sunglasses, took the map, and walked out.

He thought of renting a different car so that Isabelle Durant wouldn’t see the Jeep coming and know it was him. Then he thought, fuck it. He knew his Jeep, relied on it, and this hunt was going to take him on some pretty sketchy roads. Let her see him coming.

The Black Hills were familiar territory, reminding him of the Rockies. Curving mountain roads cut through vast pine forests, tourist spots mixed with out-of-the-way farms, weathered ancient houses and more modern but no less weathered mobile homes. Cormac looked for public parks and abandoned lots, three or four turns off the main highway but not so out of the way that a parked car would draw attention. Every tan SUV he saw, he looked at twice.

Then he turned east, through Rapid City and to the prairie beyond. County roads stretched for miles. Along these he found a patchwork of farms and homesteads. He looked for the kinds of charms and runes and talismans a desperate magician might put up to keep someone like him out.

At one point he found himself on a rise, a hill that overlooked miles of sweeping prairie and winding gulches. He got out his binoculars and searched, as if he could spot a flare of magic boiling up like a wildfire. He could not.

He got out a thread and nail, Amelia’s magical pendulum that would point directly to powerful magic. Dozens of times, he’d held the thread, let the nail dangle and point, and Amelia had interpreted its movements. Now. . .the nail just hung there. He couldn’t tell anything.

Coming on sunset, he still hadn’t found signs of Durant and her car, but he still had a few more roads to drive down. Patience, always patience. He’d hunted tougher prey than this in his time.

Twenty miles north of Rapid City, flashing red and blue lights lit up his rearview mirror. They seemed particularly glaring in the half-light of dusk. And yes, they were targeting him, because no one else was driving on this stretch of road. He did not have time for this. . . He hadn’t been doing anything wrong, he was sure of it. He usually even kept to the speed limit, just so he’d never have to talk to cops again. That might have been his biggest goal in life, never talk to cops again as long as he lived. He considered punching the gas, running, but only for half a second. He was on a long, straight country road with no turns ahead and a line of sight that went for miles. No place to hide. Running would just hand them an excuse. Dutifully, lawfully, he pulled over, turned off the engine, kept his hands on the steering wheel. The window was already rolled down.

Two officers stepped out of the patrol car. Both male, white, on the young side. If they’d run his plates they’d already know about his record. At least they didn’t have their weapons drawn. Then again, Cormac was white, too, even if he was a felon.

The taller one had light hair, a bit of paunch. His buddy had dark hair and a sour expression. Cormac didn’t even try to smile. He waited for them to ask for his license and registration before moving to get them.

“Sir, please step out of the car,” the tall cop said.

His breath caught, and his hands tightened on the wheel. Cormac wasn’t prone to panic. He was used to being in control. This, the instant racing heart and sweat on his palms—this was trauma. Everything he’d been through, and what got him were a couple of regular cops standing outside his car.

Taking several slow breaths, he steadied himself. Kept his hands in view and moved slowly.

“Is something wrong?” he asked stupidly. Of course something was wrong.

“I just need you to step out of the car please, sir.” The voice was calm, professional. Arguing would do no good here. Cormac opened the door, climbed out. Steady. . .

“ID please?”

Slowly, always slowly, Cormac reached into his back pocket for his wallet and handed over his driver’s license. The taller cop perused it, handed it back. The second cop walked around the Jeep, studying the tires and wheel wells. Cormac tried not to watch him.

“Can you tell me where you were between three and six this afternoon?”

“Driving. Seeing the sights,” he said.

“Can anyone confirm that?”

They were trying to establish an alibi. What was going on? “I think I stopped for fast food in Rapid City. You can ask them.”

“But no confirmation for the rest of the time?”

Calmly, carefully, he asked, “What’s the matter, officer? What’s happened?”

“We’d like you to come to the station with us, to answer some more questions, if you don’t mind.”

Not enough calm in the world for this. “Am I under arrest?”

The cop regarded him a moment. He exchanged a glance with his partner, now standing near the Jeep’s left front wheel. The second cop shook his head ever so slightly.

“No, sir,” the taller cop said. Frewer, the name badge on his uniform read. “We just need you to answer some questions for us. You can follow us to the station in your Jeep.”

“Saves you having to tow it later, I guess,” Cormac said with a sour grin. Frewer matched it.

They were looking for something. Cop two, checking out the car—maybe a hit and run? No, they’d get his contact info and let him go for that. This was something else. Something worse. They drove off, and he followed in the Jeep just like they asked, nice and steady, with exactly enough space between them.

On the way, he called Ben, his cousin and sometime lawyer. Ben picked up on the first ring.

“Cormac. What’s wrong?”

Yeah, he guessed maybe he should call on birthdays or holidays or some time when he wasn’t in trouble. “I’ve just been pulled over by cops and I’m on the way to the police station in Rapid City, South Dakota.”

In the pause that followed, Cormac listened for background noise, but couldn’t make out anything that would tell him where Ben was, and what Cormac was interrupting.

“Okay,” Ben finally said. “How bad is it?”

“Don’t know yet. They say they want to ask questions, which probably means something’s happened.”

“And you’re the guy standing in the wrong place with a criminal record.”

“That’s what I figure. Just thought I should give you a heads-up.”

“Thanks,” he said wryly, almost but not quite chuckling. They’d had plenty of conversations like this before. Well, not just like this. More often than not, Cormac actually had done something that the police would be interested in. “And why are you in Rapid City, South Dakota?”

“It was supposed to be a job. Things aren’t going well.” Cormac blew out a sigh.

“Okay, if you want me to worry, I’m worried.”

“Let me see what these guys want. I’ll call you back and try to explain.”

“What’s Amelia say?” Ben asked.

He definitely didn’t want to talk about her just now. “Look, I can’t really talk. I just wanted to let you know where I am.”

“Do I need to drive out there?”

“No. Well, not yet.”

“Cormac. . .”

“Fine. It’ll be fine.” He clicked off before Ben could be any more admonishing.

At the station, Officer Frewer placed him in his very own conference room and offered a cup of coffee, which Cormac accepted. Was desperate to accept. He didn’t feel sharp, wanting only to wrap his hands over his head and shut out the world. Amelia, what would she say, where was she, what was happening to her. . .

He waited another twenty minutes before the door opened and a woman in a pantsuit entered, a couple of manila folders in hand. A detective with a case, looked like. This definitely didn’t look good. Cormac straightened and was determined to be as polite and straightforward as he possibly could. He needed to get out of here.

“Mr. Bennett?” the woman said in a business-like manner. She was average height and build, maybe forty. Her brown hair was pulled back in a bun, and she wore dark-rimmed glasses. “I’m Detective Nielson. I need to ask you a few questions.”

“Yeah, so I was told. What’s happened?”

Frowning, she looked him over. Sat across from him and set down the folders. “Where were you between three and six today?”

“I told Officer Frewer, I was driving. I don’t have any corroborating witnesses.”

“You sound like you’ve been questioned about this sort of thing before.”

She might have been making a joke. Then again, maybe not. He couldn’t win.

Opening one of the folders, she studied a page there. It was a show; she wouldn’t have come in without her questions already lined up. “You did time for manslaughter in Colorado?”

“I did,” he said, looking off to a corner of the room, wondering what he’d have to say to make this finish sooner. “Time off for good behavior even.”

“Hmm,” she murmured. “What brings you to Rapid City?”

“Work,” he said truthfully.

“What kind of work?”

“I’m a freelance investigator.” Also not a lie.

“Investigating what?”

He winced. Yeah, that was going to be the hard part to explain. “Usually stuff that no one else wants to investigate. Haunted houses, old cursed burial grounds.” He shrugged, as if it didn’t mean anything.

The way she stared, he couldn’t tell if she was a believer or a skeptic. “There a lot of that going around? Cursed burial grounds?”

“Google Cheesman Park in Denver. You’d be surprised.”

“Aubrey Walker hired you?” Nielson asked.

That made Cormac sit up a little straighter, and the skin on the back of his neck crawled. “That’s. . .a little complicated. Someone pretending to be Aubrey Walker hired me. Used Professor Walker’s credentials to get me to take a job. There was a mix-up.” How much of this was he going to have to explain? Because he wasn’t sure he could, not in a way that would make sense to a hard-assed police detective.

“But you met with Professor Walker yesterday?”

“I did, yes. She helped me figure out that someone was pretending to be her. A woman named Isabelle Durant. We tracked her down on the security cameras over at the dig headquarters.”

Nielson betrayed nothing, not so much as a flicker of understanding. “Have you seen Professor Walker since your meeting yesterday?”

“No, I’ve been trying to track down this Durant person, find out what she really wants.” Cormac was just about done being polite. “Detective Nielson, what happened?”

She pressed her lips together and drew a couple of eight-by-ten photos from the second folder. Crime scene photos showing Aubrey Walker’s dead body. She looked like she was on a gravel road, sprawled at awkward angles, legs bent, arms flung out, head to the side, eyes staring. Blood covered half her face, pouring from a combination of abrasions and a gash across her forehead. Her shirt was spattered with blood, her hair disheveled. Like she’d been hit by a car or something.

He closed his eyes. This wasn’t fair. This was wrong, and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. He hadn’t done the deed but he was pretty sure Aubrey was dead because of him.

“Aubrey Walker was alive the last time you saw her?” Nielson asked. “You’re sure?”

“What happened?” Cormac asked again, his voice rough. “She was hit by a car, wasn’t she?”

Nielson nodded. “Probably at high speed. She probably went over the top. Death would have been almost instantaneous.”

“People always say that like it’s a good thing.”

“Some of us don’t like to think about innocent people suffering. I very much want to know who did this.”

He flipped through the pictures, not spending much time on them. Aubrey had suffered, even if only for a few seconds. Nielson had to know that. One of the pictures set the scene, a country road, probably near the dig headquarters. Durant had known where the dig headquarters were. So did Cormac.

“Your patrol officers searched the outside of my car,” he said. “They didn’t find anything.”

“You could have washed it.”

“Go out and take a look at it yourself, I haven’t washed it in months.”

“I already did, Mr. Bennett. And you’re right. You really should give that thing a wash.”

That was why they let him drive here himself. He ran a hand through his hair, wondered what else Nielson was looking for. She was looking for a confession. For a missing piece that would give Cormac a reason to kill the archeologist.

Cormac couldn’t get arrested. He couldn’t go back to prison. He wouldn’t. He had to get out of this room, he had to—

“Mr. Bennett? Tell me about your contact with Aubrey Walker. From the beginning.”

“I’m not sure I can explain it. It’s. . .strange.”

“Even more reason for you to explain it.”

“You ever met a werewolf or a vampire, Detective? Or a witch?”

“Like. . .on that crazy radio show?”

The Midnight Hour. Kitty’s show. Cormac knew the talk-radio advice show well and had accidentally appeared on it a couple of times. “Yeah,” he said, chuckling. “Exactly like that.”

“There’s some weird stuff in the world, is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

He told the story as simply as he could, leaving Amelia out of it because that really would complicate things. He produced the printout of Durant’s picture from his pocket and smoothed it flat. Nielson studied it.

Cormac tapped the photo. “I think I’m being framed. Durant’s first hit against me failed. So now she’s trying something a little more dramatic.”

“And where is Isabelle Durant now?”

“I’d sure like to know.”

The photos of Aubrey’s body remained on the table. Cormac couldn’t not look at them. This woman was dead because of him. He’d come into her life and this was what happened.

Finally, Nielson collected the photos and other papers and slipped them back in their folder. “Mr. Bennett, I’d like you to give me a full accounting of your whereabouts, where you’ve been and anyone else you’ve talked to, since you arrived in the area.”

Which included hours and hours of sitting in the Jeep with no one to verify. “Am I being charged with anything?”

“Not yet. Finish that accounting and you can go.”

“Can I talk to my lawyer first? I have him on speed dial.”

She frowned; he was making her job difficult. “How about this. Just don’t leave town. You think you can do that?”

“You know I didn’t do it. But it would sure look good on paper to charge me with it. Durant’s counting on that.”

Scowling, Nielson drew a card out of her pocket and slid it across the table. “You think of anything you forgot to tell me, or if you get a lead you think I’d like to know about, you call me.”

“I can go?”

“For now.”

She was going to have a patrol car on him until he left the state, he was pretty sure. But at least she let him go.

Outside, away from prying ears, he called Ben back.

“They let me go,” he said in greeting.

“Are you going to tell me the whole story now?” Ben demanded.

Cormac started to. He intended to. But Ben would have too many questions. “It’s complicated,” he said, and Ben’s sigh of frustration on the other end of the line was obvious. “I’ve been told not to leave town.”

“That’s just in case they need to talk to you again. It doesn’t mean anything.” He didn’t sound convinced.

“There’s a body, Ben. Someone I had contact with a couple days ago. I didn’t do it.” What did it mean, that he had to say that out loud, even to Ben? “They don’t have any physical evidence. But my record’s raising eyebrows.”

“What’s the detective’s name? I’ll see if I can hit up my contacts, call Detective Hardin here, find out if we can pull any strings.”

“Put in a good word for me?”

“Something like that. Meanwhile don’t do anything that’ll get you in trouble. In any more trouble.”

He chuckled. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Call me if you need me out there. I’ll drop everything.”

A baby started crying in the background, which meant Ben was home, and Kitty and their son Jon were there, a nice domestic scene, and that was where Ben ought to be putting his attention. He shouldn’t be worrying about Cormac.

“You don’t need to do that,” Cormac said. “It’ll be fine.”

The baby cried harder. Cormac couldn’t imagine what must have been going on there. He still wasn’t used to the way babies could just wail.

“Cormac—I gotta go. Call me.” It was a command.

“Yeah.” The line clicked off.

Amelia skirted around her captor’s mind. This was not an orderly collection of thoughts. Cormac was perhaps not entirely stable, but he had structure, order. A predictable set of strategies by which he interacted with the world. He could converse.

This mind had none of that. It was all panic, all hate. But she learned what she could, watching at a distance.

This was a woman, not young but not old. Privileged, she was used to living in comfort. Used to doing what she needed to keep herself safe, usually under the protection of others. But she had nothing now. She felt herself wronged. The details of it weren’t clear. But knowing Cormac, Amelia could make a guess.

This woman, her nemesis, would destroy herself to take revenge on him.

Now, how could Amelia use that? Goad her into some kind of rash action? She almost relished the challenge. The woman kept the clay pot, Amelia’s prison, close. Her wild mind was never far away. Amelia could brush it. Breathe the equivalent of a soft sigh upon it. Her captor would feel it as a nagging instinct. That voice that tells you there’s something under the bed. Something hiding in the closet. It could just be a branch, knocking against the window. Or is it something else? Something dangerous? Her stomach would clench, her heart would race.

Amelia and Cormac had their place, their meadow, beautiful and calm, where she had first been able to speak with him. Approach him. Befriend him. This mind had no calm space, no safe refuge where Amelia might have a sensible conversation with her. How did this mind see itself? There had to be some kind of self-awareness, even if it had no visual component. Amelia needed to understand her, but however much she probed, she couldn’t find a center.

I am your friend, Amelia prompted, not hoping to be believed. She did not need to be believed. She merely needed a space where this mind might listen to her, if only for a moment.

Who are you? Show me. Take a breath. Picture yourself in the place you feel safe. What is under your feet, what is over your head? When you put out your hands, what do they touch? Build me this picture. Show me where you go when you need peace.

The reply came, There is no peace.

In spite of herself the woman showed her an image of which she was mostly unaware, rising out of her hindbrain. They were in a stone room with no adornment. A cobbled floor, narrow windows close to the ceiling, the dank smell of a cave. Amelia would have called it a dungeon, but it was a modern American’s imagined version of a dungeon, too wide and clean for its truly medieval predecessor. Amelia was not there, could not picture herself there, but she saw her captor.

She was a girl dressed in a froth of lace. Like the room, an adolescent conception of a historic romantic aesthetic. She was slim, long brown hair brushed to a soft sheen. Her hands were folded before her, and her head was bowed, contrite. She did not move, she did not speak. She might have been a statue.

“This is how you see yourself?” Amelia asked.

This is how I am for him. It was a thought, not vocalized. As if she had no voice, not even in her own mind.

“But how do you see yourself?”

I don’t.

Amelia sensed the captor had the experience and bitterness that only came with age. Something had happened to her, and her sense of self had not grown past this place, the prison. This was where the woman’s rage came from. She did not see herself without her master. She was doing what she believed her master wanted of her.

Oh Cormac, you would be able to tell me where this comes from, how it happens that someone so buries themselves within another. I do not understand. Amelia ought to try to help her. To free her. But she couldn’t afford to. She had to look after herself.

“What will you do, after you have taken your revenge.”

It doesn’t matter.

“Do you think. . .you might ever break free of this place?”

It’s too late. I killed her.

“Who—”

I have killed. I will kill again, to do what I must. The figure in the stone room never moved.

Amelia was missing information.

She had to get out of here.

Cormac got back to the motel for another hot shower and another sleepless night.

In the morning, he went back to looking for Durant’s car. Checked the rearview mirror frequently—and yes, as soon as he left town he had a tail, an unmarked car. Two men sat in front, one of them talking on a phone most of the time. Cormac stayed five under the speed limit just to annoy them.

He had a couple of spots left on his map and took his time with them. Some of it was rangeland, some of it out-of-the-way forgotten places with trailers and junked cars around. Cormac searched for the tan SUV. The cops kept their distance—letting Cormac do their work for them.

On a forested road in the choppy foothills, he found Durant’s car, seemingly abandoned. Parking some ways behind it, he got out, approached cautiously. It had been recently washed, so any evidence of the hit and run was erased. A forensics team might be able to get something. The inside was empty. Even the usual detritus that collected inside most cars—coffee cups and food wrappers—had been cleared out.

Another dead end. Well. Nothing to do but turn around and find the next road. He walked away without touching anything and called Nielson.

“You can tell the officers you’ve got following me that I found Durant’s car,” he said. “It’s been washed and looks abandoned. No idea where she could have gone.”

“Damn,” Nielson muttered. “I suppose you expect that calling me gives you points in your favor?”

“Naw, the fact you’ve got me doing your leg work is all the points I need. I’ll talk to you later, I’m sure—”

“Mr. Bennett.”

He hesitated. He could pretend he hadn’t heard and just hang up. But he answered. “Yeah?”

“If you find her, call me. Don’t confront her.”

“I’ll talk to you later, Detective,” he said and hung up.

He’d talk to her after he confronted Durant on his own terms, to get Amelia back.

Amelia could not save her captor. She should not need to. She wanted her body back. To do this she had to get the woman, the cage where she was keeping Amelia’s consciousness, and Cormac all in the same place. And she had to do it with no body of her own and no voice. By mere mental persuasion. She had to lay out a path and hope this woman followed it.

And then hope Cormac anticipated her. How well did the man know her, really?

Her captor had to sleep. No matter who she was, how mad she was, she had panicked herself to exhaustion and had to rest. This made her vulnerable, and Amelia came to her in dreams.

Tauntingly, Amelia’s mind whispered to hers, “You want him, not me. So how are you going to get him? Draw him out. Try your spell again—”

Too hard, too hard.

“Ah yes, a very dangerous, difficult spell. Where did you learn it? Very few who know such spells would dare to teach it.”

Paid. I paid.

Which meant somewhere in the world was a dangerous, unscrupulous magician selling their knowledge, unmindful of the risk. A problem for another time. “You might think of trying. You’ve come too far to give up, don’t you think? You would need to make a new vessel from scratch, enchant it, arrange another meeting it, get him to pick it up, except that he’ll be ready this time, cautious. On the other hand. . .”

What?

“You wouldn’t need to work the spell from scratch, perhaps. Perhaps. . .”

What? What?

“Oh that would never work,” Amelia thought slyly, prodding, withdrawing, pulling her captor closer.

What?!

“You could simply swap us out. Send me out and take him. It wouldn’t even be hard. I could show you.”

Her captor’s mind settled into something like planning. Strategizing.

“Lure him,” Amelia urged, gently as she could, trying to mask her own urgency. They both wanted the same thing, didn’t they? They both wanted her out of here. And to find Cormac, though Amelia didn’t know where he was, what he was doing. Her captor didn’t offer any argument so this must have been possible. Cormac was still out there. He must still be out there. He wouldn’t just leave Amelia here.

Would he?

“Set a trap.”

How?

“Send a message.” Amelia knew exactly what would get his attention, what would bring him into the open without raising her captor’s suspicions. “Tell him. . .”

Cormac had to eat, but he wasn’t happy about it. He was living on fast food because it was convenient. He ate better, with Amelia around. With Ben and Kitty looking after him. With friends. He wasn’t used to thinking of himself as a man who had friends. Especially not when all his meals for the last few days had been eaten in parking lots, in the front seat of his Jeep. Better off by himself, then no one got hurt, no one got killed because they just happened to be standing in the way—

His phone rang. Caller ID said Gregory from the tea shop. He shoved the burger wrapper aside and answered. “Yeah?”

“Hi, Cormac? Can you get over here?” His voice was on edge. The man always had an edge to him, watchful, as if always solving puzzles. This was different—anxious.

“What’s wrong?”

“I got a message.”

And wasn’t this interesting? “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

Back in Deadwood he parked a couple of blocks down from the main street. The shop’s sign was turned to “closed,” but the door was unlocked so Cormac went in. Gregory was sitting at the table in back, the Deadwood Tarot squared neatly on the table, a small piece of paper resting on the felt in front of him, along with a steaming cup of tea. He glanced up at Cormac’s approach and frowned.

“What happened?” Cormac asked, pulling out the seat across from the magician.

“Isabelle Durant came in. Threatened to burn the place down if I called the cops on her. I told her that’d be a little extreme, when all she did the last time she was here was throw a chair. But I take it something’s happened since then.”

“You could say that.”

Gregory waited for Cormac to explain, but he declined to. The man glared. “I’m going to have a word with Judi Scanlon about bringing you and this mess down on me.”

“Aren’t you the least bit curious about what all’s going on?” Folks who worked in the shadows like this loved a good mystery. Or even a bad one. “What did Durant do?”

“Said to give you this. What did you do to her to piss her off so bad? She wants to kill you.” He slid the folded paper across to Cormac.

“Yeah, I know. I—” He wasn’t sure how to put it. She had been a servant to vampires, guilt by association. But Gregory might not see it that way. “She lost her job because of me.”

“That must have been some job.”

“Yeah.” He read the message, written in sloppy cursive.

I can tell you how your father died. Be here, in the street, at midnight.

Why was it always midnight? These jokers never had any imagination. The rest of it confused him for a moment. He knew exactly how his father died—he’d been there, he’d witnessed it when the werewolf they’d been hunting mauled him to death. Cormac had killed the monster; it had been his first kill. He’d been sixteen.

But Durant. . .Durant didn’t know how Cormac’s father died. It would seem like a good mystery, wouldn’t it? Something sure to draw him out, if she believed that Cormac didn’t know and that he would want to.

Amelia. Amelia had given Durant that clue as a lure. It would fire up Durant, but Cormac would know it was fake. Amelia had somehow got a hook into Durant, and she had a plan. He crumpled the page in his hand and chuckled. For the first time since losing her, he felt back in control.

“What’s it mean?” Gregory asked.

“You read it?”

“Yeah. I mean, clearly she’s trying to set a trap for you. Do you really need to know how your father died that badly? Maybe you should just let it go.”

“Oh, it’s a trap all right, but not for me.” Cormac turned the deck over, intending to fan them out to find the card he wanted. But it turned out she was sitting right on top. The Queen of Swords. He tapped his finger on it. “She set the trap. I just have to spring it.”

Gregory stared at him, nonplussed, and Cormac relished his confusion. “Can I watch?” he asked finally.

“Yeah. I might need your help.” He went outside to make his next call, to Detective Nielson.

“Mr. Bennett?” she answered.

“Do you trust me, Detective?”

A pause, then, “I can’t say that I do.”

“I can give you Durant. But you have to promise to wait until I give the signal. I have some business with her first.”

“You can give her to me now, or I’ll charge you with obstructing justice,” she said evenly.

Yeah, he should have expected that. “She has something of mine.”

“We can get it from her once we know where to serve the search warrant.”

“It’s not. . .it’s not really a thing, it’s. . .it’s not really tangible. It’s weird, it’s crazy, I can’t explain it. But I just need a little time before you swoop in. Can you give that to me?”

“If what you say about her is true, Isabelle Durant is a very dangerous woman. And you’re just going to, what—ask her nicely?”

Not nicely. More nicely than he wanted, for sure. “We’ll see if that works.”

“If you’re having one over on me, there’ll be consequences. I know that means something to you.”

“Yes ma’am, it does. You know where Tea on the Range is, in the old part of Deadwood?”

She groaned. “For the love of God please don’t tell me you’re arranging a standoff on the streets of Deadwood.”

“Durant will be there out front.” He made a guess. Took a risk. “Ten minutes after midnight.” He had no doubt Nielson and her people would be there long before. He just had to hope that gave him enough time with Durant.

“Well, what have I got to lose, right?”

“You? Nothing. Thanks, Detective.” He hung up.

Gregory was waiting just inside the door, leaning close enough to the glass that Cormac was sure he’d been eavesdropping. His gaze had narrowed and turned appraising. “Are you sure you’re the one setting the trap?”

“I’m the one who knows where all the pieces are. Now, we just have to wait until midnight. I’ll be back around ten till.” He started walk away, when Gregory put up a hand to stop him. He held two cards. The Queen of Swords, and the Ace.

“Take them. For luck.”

More than luck, they might have been a lifeline. Magic was all about symbols and thought. Cormac might need a focus, and that card, the woman with the black hair and determined expression, weapon of choice in her hand, might do it.

His familiar valley was dark, overcast, only the milky light of the moon bleeding through. He could sense trees, imagine wind rustling the leaves. But the image, the scene that was so familiar and so comforting to him, was indistinct. He was losing it. He called out; the sound should have echoed. But his voice fell flat, as if the space had become small. Dead.

He was a better person with Amelia. His mind was a better place. This would work.

The night was warm, dry and sharp, smelling of smoke. Maybe campfires somewhere, or maybe a wildfire was burning up in the hills. It felt dangerous. Or maybe he was projecting.

A couple of old-fashioned streetlamps lit up the corners, that was it. The casinos further up the street were still jumping, but this part of town rolled up the sidewalks after dark. They had the block to themselves.

Gregory spent the last hour before Durant’s arrival walking three circles around his shop and marking all the doors and windows with runes.

“It’s me she’s after,” Cormac said. He was trying for reassuring but it came out sarcastic.

“Can’t be too careful,” Gregory replied.

He wasn’t wrong. The pockets of Cormac’s jeans were filled with talismans and charms, so it wasn’t like he was one to talk. But they hadn’t done much to protect him the last time Durant confronted him.

“I still don’t know who this is a trap for,” Gregory said, coming up alongside Cormac where he stood on the sidewalk outside the shop. The night had turned cold; the magician rubbed his hands together. “Do you trust this Queen of Swords?”

Amelia could be ruthless. She gathered power to her. She had driven men mad, she had made them kill themselves. She had a hundred years of history he knew very little about. But they were partners. A team. She’d said so herself.

He chuckled. “We’ll find out, I guess.”

Shortly before midnight a figure emerged from darkness. Like a vampire, it seemed to move in the shadows, hiding until it came into the circle of a light, then it marched toward them, up the middle of the street. Isabelle Durant, looking elegant in silk slacks and a tailored suit jacket. Her hair was loose but still perfectly styled, her makeup expensive. She looked so out of place here. Cormac might have taken everything from her when he killed her Master, but she didn’t have to look like it.

She held something cradled in her arms, covered with a woven, patterned scarf.

A mad glaze in her eyes, she caught sight of Cormac and gave him a weirdly flirting smile, looking him up and down like he was on a shelf at a store. She believed she had the power here.

“You came,” she said, haughty and condescending. “I wasn’t sure a man like you could be lured by such an emotional appeal.”

That she could be so wrong and so right at the same time. A harder man would not have been swayed by emotion and would have walked away from Amelia. Cormac was going soft, and maybe he didn’t mind so much after all.

When he didn’t answer, her smile turned brittle. “Well, aren’t you going to ask how your father died? Aren’t you going to ask how I know such a thing?”

Cormac said, “My father died when a werewolf ripped his throat out. I watched it happen. I’m not here for that. I want what you’re carrying there.”

Her expression crashed into hard, stony hate. She’d been tricked; that had to sting. But she still had what he wanted. Question was, what was she going to do about it.

With a flourish, she removed the scarf, revealing the clay pot. He studied it as best he could at this distance and was pretty sure it was the same pot. Same shape, color, and markings.

He started toward her, one slow step at a time.

“Back,” she ordered. “Stay back.”

He held up his hands. No trouble, no trouble at all. “A lot of people looking for you, Durant.”

Ignoring him, she set down the pot and drew something out of the handbag hanging off her forearm. The bag was stuffed full of who knew what. Cormac’s heart started pounding hard; he had to work to calm himself, to not march straight over and put his hands around her throat.

The pot drew his attention. He held his breath, listening—would he even know if Amelia was there? Could she reach him?

Durant had taken out a piece of chalk and drew a circle on the asphalt, maybe four feet in diameter. Biting her lip with concentration, she worked quickly, marking symbols around the circle. Messed up a couple of times and had to awkwardly rub out the mark and try again. This wasn’t second nature to her. She was acting like she was following someone else’s instructions. That arcane circle—that looked like Amelia’s work. Durant only thought she was working her own spell. Cormac had never had a harder time waiting for a trap to spring.

He tilted his head at Gregory. “What’s that look like to you?” he asked softly.

“That’s out of my league,” he answered. “That lady’s going to blow something up if she isn’t careful. Magically speaking, I mean.”

Nielson and her crew were probably here already, lurking. They were well hidden. Would they give Cormac the time he needed? And how much time was that. . .

“Durant!” He walked into the street. “Why come after me now? Why come after me at all?”

She wouldn’t look at him. “A good plan takes time to pull together. Darius wanted to just kill you and be done with it. I told him he’d never succeed. And he didn’t. My plan was better. It might have taken time to learn what I needed, but I can be patient. My Lord Edgar would be proud, don’t you think?”

Darius? Was that the vampire who’d come after him last week? And what would she say if he told her that he hadn’t thought about her, Edgar, or any of his vampires in years?

The chalk crumbled out of her fingers, all used up. She stood. Her hands were shaking. “She’s important to you, isn’t she?” she said, taunting, glancing at the clay pot. “You’d do anything to save her.”

“Just about.”

“Well. Come on. Pick it up.” Backing away, she nodded at the pot, which was sitting in the middle of the circle she had drawn. Both it and Cormac would be contained within its boundaries, if he stepped up to it.

Slowly, he approached. A sign, if Amelia could just give him a sign. . . No, he’d had plenty of signs. “How do I know this isn’t just going to knock me out again, or worse?”

“What you think doesn’t matter. If you want to save her, you’ll do it.”

“I’m not convinced you know what you’re doing.”

“Quit stalling,” Durant said. “Pick up the jar.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes.”

This was Amelia’s spell. Cormac was sure of it. Which raised a new question: how much did he trust Amelia? How much would she love to have his body without him to argue with over it? Maybe she didn’t need him. What would this spell do, really? Did he trust her? They had walked out of prison together. She had called them partners.

He flexed his hands. Tried to settle his mind. Be calm. Imagine the valley. Build up that space. That safety.

Durant pulled something else out of her bag. A 9mm handgun, pointed at him. “Pick it up!” she screamed.

In the end, he had only to ask himself one question. Which of them was stronger, Isabelle Durant or Amelia Parker? No question there, no question at all. He knelt by the jar and filled his mind with the thought: Amelia, I’m here.

He wrapped both hands around the pot.

Now. Now now now.

Imagine a rope and throw it to him. Cormac, grab hold. Grab hold, now!

They were now two minds with no body, and they needed an anchor.

He responded to her voice instantly.

Now imagine an anchor, holding them fast. Hold on to me, hold on.

I’ve got you, he said, and she could very nearly feel his arms around her. She almost laughed.

Where are we, where, where. . .

They stood in a valley, high in the Rockies. A pine forest bounded the grassy bowl through which a stream rushed and sang. Above them, blue sky. Home.

He stood before her, gripping her arms. His eyes were closed. She clung to him.

“Cormac,” she murmured.

His eyes opened. They darted, taking her in, all of her, and his hand cupped her cheek. “Amelia,” he breathed out.

She fell into his arms, laughing, and he held her tight. This was not real, this was only thought, but she felt him, a powerful embrace, full of desperation.

“What the hell happened?” he whispered to her ear.

“A bloody mess is what,” she answered, holding him. She didn’t want him to let go. May he never let go. . . “Where are we? Cormac, where are we?” She forced herself to pull away, but he kept his hands on her arms. An anchor.

“You don’t know?”

“There was a chance it could go wrong. Horribly, awfully wrong. I tried to anchor us to your body, but if I missed, if I got it wrong—” They might have ended up back in the jar. She tried to reassure herself that at least they would be together—

But Cormac donned a slow, sly smile. A hunter’s smile. “I think it’s time we have a word with Isabelle Durant.”

And he opened his eyes.

No more than a couple of seconds had passed. Durant was still standing here, backlit by washed-out streetlights, pointing the gun without conviction, waiting. She might have been holding her breath. Gregory waited in front of the shop, hands clenched into fists. The burnt smell of tension in the street was the same. Everyone waited to see what the trap had caught.

Cormac rubbed his fingers along the surface of the jar, its rough clay, the symbols in raised paint. It was inert now.

Amelia? he queried the back of his mind.

I’m here. Oh, I am here!

His mind felt right for the first time in days. He chuckled softly. Do you have anything you’d like to say to her?

Did she ever. He let her slip into control of his body, to use his voice. This was what Durant expected after all. Cormac’s body but not Cormac. Let her think she won, just for a second.

“Hello, Isabelle.” She caused Cormac’s body to stand, the clay pot resting in her hands.

Durant’s eyes lit up. She gasped a laugh. “It worked? It worked!”

Amelia, through Cormac, said, “Look at you. In so far over your head you don’t even know you’re drowning.”

Durant put her hand to her mouth, grinning. “He’s there, he’s trapped in the jar now, just like you said—”

“Oh, my child.” Amelia shook Cormac’s head. “You’ve no idea what just happened, do you?”

Durant’s smile fell. “What. . .what happened?”

“Exactly what I wanted.”

“Who are you?” Durant’s voice pushed to the edge of a scream.

Amelia retreated, leaving Cormac back in charge of his body and his voice. The timber of his speech changed, from Amelia’s clipped aristocratic accent to his flat midwestern. “Durant? You lose.”

He let the pot fall. It tumbled, and Cormac’s—and Amelia’s—heart lifted at the sight of it, all that trouble, the terrible trap. It smashed against the asphalt. Clay shattered. A thousand pieces, a cloud of shards and powder expanding. The cracking song of it rang out.

Durant screamed. It might as well have been a baby’s skull that shattered, so much anguish filled the sound. Cormac lifted his hands, brushed his fingers in a show of dismissal. He smiled, victorious.

“Put the gun down! Put down the weapon! Hands up!” Urgent, professional voices called out. From side streets Detective Nielson and what must have been every uniformed officer in the county closed in. “Put it down!”

She’d waited. Thank God and all magic she had waited.

Cormac stood very still, his hands raised and harmless. Durant looked around with the panic of a trapped animal. Then her gaze rested on Cormac, and some decision settled over her expression.

“No!” Nielson ordered. “Drop it, drop it now!”

He knew it would happen just as her finger tightened. Time slowed, and a strange confidence settled over him. Whatever was going to happen would happen, he could only do so much to stop it. But that little, he would do. He breathed out, watched her hand, saw the twitch. And he dropped, dodged, rolled to the side in a way that he hoped she would not anticipate.

The gun fired, the air exploded with the crack.

The bullet hit. Knocked back, he fell prone.

Cops shouted. Everyone shouted. Somebody wanted an ambulance. Cormac lay still. He couldn’t tell what got hit. He blinked up at sky.

Cormac? Cormac!

He passed out.

The scene was vague. Rushing water chimed nearby; birds sang. The air smelled of springtime, lilacs and warmth. He was in a boat, a small craft drifting lazily. He was unstable, but if he lay still, the soft movement lulled him, and he let himself drift. He wore a suit, something out of a Victorian movie, tailored and perfect, with a neat cravat. His mustache was trimmed. He was the dashing hero of a romantic novel. He lay with his head in someone’s lap. Gentle hands stroked his forehead. A woman, wearing diaphanous silk that frothed around her in a gown that was complicated and angelic. Her dark hair lay around her shoulders in waves. If he reached up, he could wrap a lock of it around his finger, and it would feel like satin. The woman, Amelia, pressed her hand to his face and gazed on him with such care and longing. He wanted to pull her down with him and hold her close, but it was all so impossible, and a thick haze blurred everything, and he couldn’t move, and the boat drifted on and on. Nothing here was right and yet he didn’t want to leave, this was too perfect—

“I will be here when you wake up, my heart,” the woman breathed, and she faded, until all was white silk and rocking waves and she was gone and there were other voices—

“Mr. Bennett? Cormac? Can you hear me? Open your eyes if you can hear me.”

Opening his eyes was a chore, but he did it, blinking into too much light, so that he winced and turned away. He was cold, his mouth tasted like metal, and the air smelled like a hospital.

“What. . .what happened. . .”

“Mr. Bennett, do you remember being shot?”

Oh yeah. He remembered that.

“Bullet hit your left shoulder. You’ve just come out of surgery. Everything’s fine, but you’ll be out of it for a while. Just rest, all right?”

“Amelia. . .”

“Amelia? Is that someone we should call?” The nurse seemed concerned that she might have missed something.

I am here.

He chuckled. “No. . .she’s already here.”

“Oh yeah,” the nurse chuckled. “You’re on the good drugs, aren’t you?”

Satisfied, he dropped back into the haze.

Ben came in not long after he’d been wheeled into a private room. His cousin, pushing forty like Cormac was, rough brown hair, shadows at his eyes clearly indicating he’d missed sleep. Cormac tried to figure out if he’d had enough time to drive here from Colorado and who might have called him to tell what happened, but that was all just a bit too complicated right now. Ben looked him over, in the bed and hospital gown, IV bag dripping into him, monitors clicking away. He sat heavily in a chair and folded his hands in front of his face.

“You didn’t have to come here,” Cormac said. His voice sounded kind of vague. A lot more than saline was dripping out of that bag, he suspected. He knew he ought to be in pain but he didn’t much care at the moment.

“Jesus.” Ben looked away, chuckling through his scowl. “You almost got Kitty and the Junior League, too. I talked her into staying home. But you should call her.”

Maybe he could just lie here a moment, not thinking of anything.

You owe Kitty a call.

Yeah. Okay. Later.

“Still—”

“Yes, Cormac, I had to come here. Practically our whole lives I’ve been waiting to get a call from the cops telling me you’re. . .that something had happened. Now here we are. It really did.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“You ever going to tell me what happened?”

“Maybe. . .maybe later.”

“And how is Amelia?” Ben and Kitty knew about Amelia and that whole history. They practically treated her like one of the family, which was weird if he thought about it too much. Then again, they were werewolves. They knew weird.

How are you, Amelia?

Tell him I am doing quite well now that the trouble is past, thank you, and it’s very kind of him to visit.

“She’s fine.”

Cormac. . .

“She says it’s very kind of you to visit.” Cormac shifted, trying to sit, then gave up. The needle in his arm was starting to itch. So was his shoulder, which was swathed in bandages. “Maybe it’s just as well you’re here. The cops are probably wanting to talk to me.”

“Yeah, I already met your Detective Nielson. Sensible woman, there.”

He chuckled. “She tell you what they’re charging Durant with?”

“A handful of breaking and entering and theft charges for her shenanigans at the dig site. Attempted murder for shooting you, and murder one for Professor Walker.”

“Not vehicular homicide?”

“They started with that. Then Durant explained in great detail how she planned it out, and why. So, it’s murder one now. I expect she may not be competent to stand trial. That’s where I’d go if I were her lawyer. But I’m not, thank God.”

“It’s my fault Aubrey is dead.”

Ben didn’t answer right away. He couldn’t deny it—if Cormac had never come here, the archeologist would still be alive. Finally, his cousin sighed. “I don’t think you need to carry that one around with you. You nailed Durant, and that matters.”

Woman nailed herself. If only she had just let it all go. Her Master, the man she was avenging? He hadn’t given a shit about her.

“When can I go home?” Cormac asked. Not that he could drive. Not that he actually felt like getting out of bed at the moment.

“They’ll spring you tomorrow if you promise not to be an ass about it and then see an orthopedist the minute you get home,” Ben said.

That sounded bad. “Yeah, I think I can do that.”

A knock came at the door. The way both he and Ben flinched, it was like they had people with guns coming after them on a regular basis. The door opened, but instead of a nurse, Gregory from the tea shop leaned in. “They said you were awake. Up for a visit?”

“Yeah,” Cormac murmured.

He looked like he hadn’t gotten any sleep, ashen around the eyes, moving carefully. But his clothes were neat and polished as ever. “I am glad to see you in one piece.”

“Mostly,” Cormac said. “This is Ben, my cousin. Ben, Gregory.”

They shook hands, exchanged pleasantries.

Who is this? Cormac had to quickly explain who Gregory was, the tea shop, all of it. As he expected, he sensed some faint jealousy from her—Tea on the Range was exactly the kind of place she loved. Then she said, We owe him a great deal, then.

Yeah. “Thanks,” he told Gregory, on her behalf. “We couldn’t have got through this without you.”

“We. You mean the Queen of Swords?”

“Amelia. Yeah. She’s happy to meet you.”

Gregory pressed his lips together, appearing thoughtful.

“Takes some getting used to,” Ben observed.

“Well, it’s worth it for the stories.” He drew a small, silk-wrapped bundle from his pocket. “I decided this wants to live with you. You seem to have a connection to it.”

Cormac rested the bundle on his lap, unwrapped it. The Deadwood Tarot deck. He flipped the first few cards up, the cow skulls and lightning strikes, barbed wire and six-shooters. Amelia let out a mental sigh of pure admiration.

“Thanks. Amelia loves it.”

“Good,” Gregory said.

I cannot wait to explore this. But what did he mean, the Queen of Swords?

It was a message, he told her. The card kept coming up. “Ben, my jacket. There should have been a couple of cards in the pocket.”

Cormac’s belongings had all been shoved in a plastic bag when he’d landed in the emergency room. The jacket was ruined—big hole in the shoulder, covered in blood. But they’d cleared out the pockets before throwing it out. Ben dug through the bag, now sitting at his feet, and found the two cards. Cormac reunited them with the rest of the deck, setting them face up where Amelia could see.

Annie Oakley. I sent an S.O.S. out to the universe. . .and this is what turned up? I am astonished.

So were we.

I saw her once, when I was a girl. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show came to London. I saw it. I saw her. I thought she was so beautiful.

I think she looks a little like you.

The Queen and the Ace. Is that what we are?

Maybe.

The valley was home again. Amelia was back home.

They both sat in the grass on a lazy summer day, taking in the warmth and not worrying too much about anything.

Amelia looked at him. “Do you have any more old enemies with deadly grudges you’d like to tell me about?”

“Honestly, I wasn’t expecting this one.”

“You must never again mock me for spending so much time on magical protections.”

“Never again,” he agreed. But it had been the gunshot that almost killed them this time, and what did she propose to do about that?

She grew pensive, uncertain. He thought he knew what was troubling her. Hell, they shared a brain, how could he not know everything about her? Maybe those hidden parts, what they couldn’t know about each other—that was what kept this interesting.

“What is it?” he prompted.

“Did you know? Could you guess what had happened, that she aimed for you and struck me instead, with that trap?”

“I knew it must have been something like that. She was shocked to see me walking around. She thought she’d left me for dead.”

“Yes, I think I know when that happened. We had. . .some sort of connection. Nothing like what you and I have, but she could sense me. I could push her.”

“I noticed.”

All in a rush she said, “You could have left me. You could have walked away. Your mind, your body could have been your own again. I know I have been a burden to you, and you were free at last—”

He got up from his spot and settled on the ground next to her. Right next to her. He moved with the intention of getting her to stop talking.

“But you didn’t walk away. . .” she continued. “You came back for me.”

He took her hand, which was just a little chilled, and maybe even trembling. He touched her chin. Leaned in, waiting for her to pull away. Expecting her to. But she didn’t, so he kissed her. Realized he’d been wanting to do that a very long time, just to see if he could.

She put her arms around him and kissed him back. The touch was a spark that shocked them both. They lay back together, cradled on the grass. Clinging to him, she pressed her head to his shoulder. Here, he wasn’t injured.

“I can feel you,” she whispered. “I don’t have a body, I am not real, how can we feel this?”

He rested his chin on her head. She tucked so neatly in his arms. “I don’t know.”

“Sensation is a response to stimuli detected by the brain. We can’t simply be telling our brains that we feel this—”

He could smell her hair, a scent like wheat in sunshine. It shouldn’t have been possible, but there it was. “I don’t know anything at all.”

“You came back for me,” she said again.

“You could have kicked me out of my own body, but you didn’t.”

“I would never.”

He held her close. “Neither would I.”

The valley wasn’t real. It wasn’t. But maybe it meant something that they imagined it together. The sunlight was warm, and Amelia felt solid enough in his arms. He wouldn’t ask questions.

Suddenly, she sat up on an elbow and looked down at him. “Might we go see the bison in Custer State Park on our way home? And Mt. Rushmore, we must see Mt. Rushmore.”

He hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. They’d probably need to get a ride home with Ben, which meant coming back for the Jeep, or towing it, or something. He didn’t want to think about it. He just wanted to be. “Didn’t we see bison when we went to Yellowstone a year or so back?”

“No, because we were there at night and too busy battling the hosts of Hell.”

He chuckled. Everything she’d seen and done, as powerful as she was, and all she wanted to do now was go look at buffalo. He couldn’t argue with that. “Fine. Okay, we’ll go see the bison.”

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.

Badlands Witch

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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