Dark Divide (Cormac and Amelia 1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now here she was.

It’s beautiful, Amelia murmured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let’s go track down Annie Domingo.”

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

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

In the parking lot, a set of tired-looking parents leaned on the hood of their minivan and watched three squirrelly school-age

kids run around screaming, full of pent-up energy from riding in a car for hours. The dad had a camera in one hand but appeared to have given up trying to get everyone to stand still for a picture. Mom had a hand against her temple like she was nursing a headache. Years from now, this would be a treasured family memory. Or something.

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

He went inside to find Domingo.

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

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