Badlands Witch (Cormac and Amelia 2)
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.