Badlands Witch (Cormac and Amelia 2)

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.