“We’ll see about that,” Cormac said, since he wasn’t able to manage a polite chuckle.
Trina slid the key across the counter, along with a strip of paper with a wifi code on it, because God forbid anyone have a mountain vacation without internet access.
“Anything else I can help you with? Need a place to eat? Maybe rent a mountain bike or something? Anything?”
Cormac gathered the Donner Trail Inn didn’t get a lot of business this time of year. Trina was leaning on the counter now, making it hard to look away from the low-cut scoop of her purple T-shirt. She wore a woven leather necklace and had a tattoo of roses on her left bicep.
Amelia seemed rather nonplussed, expressing roiling discomfort in the back of his mind. What. . .is she. . .what would you call it?
She’s flirting, he thought back. He pressed his lips into a thin smile, amused and a little annoyed. Trina was cute because she was young and bright eyed, but she wasn’t his type.
Do you have a type?
He had to think about that a minute. And realized he wasn’t sure he did. He liked what he liked.
“I’ll let you know,” he said, leaving without a backward glance.
The photocopied map she’d given him highlighted which unit was his. She’d also written her name down and circled the phone number for the front desk. Just in case.
“What do you think so far?” Cormac asked, back in the fresh air and sunlight, crossing the parking lot to the row of little cabins nestled among sparse pines. A raven sailed overhead, and chickadees called from the trees. “Is Donner Pass haunted?”
You mean other than Art Weber’s cabin? No sign at all. This place is so bright, it’s the opposite of haunted. After another moment of thought she added, You never hear so many birds around a place that’s haunted.
First thing they did—or rather Amelia did—was cast protective magic over the room. Just a basic spell to keep the bad stuff out, make sleeping at night a little easier. In her first life, when Amelia was traveling all over the world, she made a habit of protecting her room wherever she stayed. She’d taken up the habit again, with Cormac. He was skeptical that the magic did much good. It might keep out an angry ghost, but wouldn’t stop anyone who decided to drive a truck through the wall. The odds of either thing happening were pretty slim. But the spell didn’t hurt anything, so why not? The one time I don’t do this will be the one time something terrible happens.
They had an argument about whether lighting a sage smudge would violate the motel’s no-smoking policy—$250 fine for smoking in the cabin, a plastic sign on the nightstand declared. Cormac thought it probably would, Amelia didn’t much care, and when did Cormac worry about following the rules anyway? Answer: since he got off parole after his felony conviction. Given the unknown nature of what they were investigating, Amelia was adamant: they needed the spell, and the spell needed incense. They could add any fines to their list of expenses when they handed Domingo the bill.
You could probably persuade that very helpful young woman at the front desk to dispense with any fines, should the issue arise.
Cormac didn’t want to go near that conversation.
So they cast the spell, filled the room with haze from a smoldering bundle of sage, and hoped they wouldn’t need it. When Amelia murmured the last syllable of her chant, using his voice, Cormac felt something like a wall going up, a thin sheet of bluish light, invisible to anyone who didn’t know what to look for. He did breathe a little better when it was done.
Next, he wanted to have a look around town. He found a sporting goods store where he bought a detailed map of the area, and put a mark at the rough location of Art Weber’s cabin. The road it was on barely showed up as a faint dotted line. The woods around here probably had dozens of cabins tucked away on back roads, in addition to the ones prominently overlooking the lake. Still, the area had some remote stretches—part of the Pacific Coast Trail went through here. The Tahoe National Forest reached in all directions.
Amelia circled maybe a dozen or so areas equally spaced around the location of Weber’s cabin. She wanted to raise her pendulum and take readings at each spot—a magical survey. An almost scientific approach, taking measurements that would help them discover if whatever supernatural influence they’d located only affected that one spot—if this was an isolated event—or if that magical sink they’d sensed had appeared anywhere else.
They started in the woods around the state park visitor center and worked in a circle, west toward the glacial lake between the town and the mountain pass, east toward the town. It took longer than Cormac expected. Not every spot Amelia wanted to check was on a road or hiking trail. In a couple of spots he had to park at a trailhead then hike a mile or so to some grove of tangled underbrush or granite outcrop.
One of the spots was just a few feet off of a scenic overlook. A couple of other cars were parked there. None of the tourists made his nerves twitch, and they didn’t even stare when he left the pavement and went through the underbrush. When Amelia found the place she wanted, it turned out to have a view, looking out over a stretch of forested hills to the east, across the lake, to the town beyond. This was the view the Donner Party might have seen if they’d made it this far and bothered to turn around to look.
Weber’s cabin was visible from here only because Cormac knew where to look. Its brown shingled roof made an angular line at odds with the vertical trees around it. From here, it looked harmless. Normal. He didn’t sense anything like what he’d felt passing through the doorway.
Ready?
“Yeah.”
Amelia slipped into his limbs, taking charge of his nerves. She grounded them both, taking stock of the space around them as he uncoiled the nail pendulum. He expected it to swivel, then point decisively to the cabin. But just like at every other spot they’d tried so far, the nail shivered, then pointed straight down before going slack as if tired. Unlike at the cabin, the nails didn’t stay pointed. They jerked in the one direction, then returned to neutral. The farther from the cabin, the less the nail moved. The effect disappeared about five miles away in all directions—at least the directions they could check. He didn’t feel the need to climb the ridge that rose up south of the cabin. This much should give them something to work with.
I don’t like this, Cormac. It’s like some kind of bomb went off and flattened the atmosphere around it.
Back at their room, Amelia worked on the map, adding markings, interpreting what they found. She consulted one of her standard research books, one of the first things she’d asked him to track down when he’d gotten out of prison: a study of ley lines, maps marked with color-coded lines and dots that supposedly represented veins and roads of magic existing deep in the earth all over the world. According to these maps, a couple of lines passed through the area, and she copied their routes over her increasingly crowded markings.
When they sat back to regard the whole picture, they found a swirling mass of magical influences, flows of power saturating the area. Nothing indicated why Weber’s cabin should be the focus of whatever it was they’d discovered.
“Could what happened to Weber be connected with the Donner Party in any way?”