Badlands Witch (Cormac and Amelia 2)

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.