Badlands Witch: A Cormac and Amelia Story Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Other Books by Carrie Vaughn

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Something’s not right, Amelia murmured in the back of Cormac’s mind. Cormac scanned the depressing parking lot outside his apartment building, half-full of beater cars. Orange streetlights bathed the washed-out concrete walls. The roar of cars on the nearby highway beat at the air. His shoulders ached. They’d spent the afternoon putting up magical protections around a dog park on the other side of the city, which seemed weird to him but he didn’t question anyone willing to write a check. Amelia knew the spells, but Cormac did the work, seeing as how she didn’t have a body. That meant he’d been the one with his arms raised, waving sage and candles while walking around a couple of acres of territory. He was tired.

  Amelia could only see what he saw, but she’d honed some magical instinct in him. When she said something wasn’t right, Cormac listened. Which meant he didn’t walk straight into the ambush at the base of the stairs.

  Movement flickered, a shadow breaking away from the concrete and launching straight at him. He knew right off what it was. Nothing moved that fast, nothing was so at home in darkness. This was how vampires got the reputation of vanishing like smoke. You’d look and the vampire simply wouldn’t be there anymore. Cormac dived for shelter, hitting the asphalt and rolling under the nearest car, a sedan with busted fenders, while reaching inside his jacket for a stake. To think, some people made fun of him for carrying stakes everywhere.

  A thump pounded the top of the car as he rolled out the other side, and the vampire came pouncing down on top of him. Cormac braced the point of the stake upward. The guy kicked it out of his hand, midair, then kneed him in the gut. Move like that shouldn’t have been possible, but then neither should vampires. Ignoring the pain, the air knocked out of his lungs, the shock in his back, Cormac writhed and kicked up, catching the guy in the nuts. That still worked on vampires at least.

  The thing about fighting vampires, your defenses had to be solid. Not a crack. That was the only way you’d get a chance to strike back. They moved so fast, their reflexes were so sharp, they’d be on you and breaking your neck or ripping out your throat before you knew they were there. You couldn’t let them get close, bringing their power and experience to bear. Couldn’t let them catch your gaze, stare in your eyes, and immobilize you.

  This one must have followed Cormac home. That was his mistake, thinking no vampire would ever be caught dead—undead— in this low-rent neighborhood off the Boulder turnpike. So he came home to the run-down two-story apartment block and relaxed before getting to his own front door.

  Cormac recognized the guy. Sharp nose, long face, a flop of hair. The permanently offended snarl of a self-important minion. About ten years ago in Chicago, he took on a gang of vampires running a protection racket on a human neighborhood. He wouldn’t dignify the group with the label Family, though they were sure trying to act like one. They hadn’t been old enough, rich enough, or smart enough to avoid trouble. Cormac took out the leader of the bunch, a guy calling himself Lord Edgar, and half his followers. The rest had scattered, gone to ground.

  Turned out, at least one of them had just been biding his time.

  Cormac managed to shove himself out from under the guy, looked wildly around for the stake, raced for it—the vampire grabbed his ankle and he fell. Cormac immediately kicked, smashing the guy’s nose. Didn’t kill him. Not much would.

  Nothing in Amelia’s magical arsenal could help them unless he could get away, get a little space and time for her to work a spell. But that was just it, vampires never gave you that time. She stayed quiet and let Cormac’s body and fighting instincts try to save them.

  He ran. Didn’t think he could get to his front door and the safety of the threshold before the vampire caught up to him. He needed a weapon. The apartment building had exterior stairs leading up to the second floor. Cormac dodged behind the steel frame of the staircase and spotted the door to the janitor’s closet.

  “You’ll pay for what you did!” the minion yelled, from the other side of the stairs.

  “That was a long time ago,” he shot back, which was a stupid thing to say to a vampire, which was only part of why Cormac worried that he was getting soft.

  He had one more stake tucked in his inside jacket pocket. Pulled it out, held it outstretched while the vampire ran at him. Alas, the vampire wasn’t stupid enough to just run right up it. He grabbed Cormac’s wrist and squeezed, causing him to drop the stake. He could have broken Cormac in half right there; instead, he paused, savoring the moment, leering with bared fangs and bringing himself closer, closer. . .

  Cormac’s other hand was on the utility closet’s handle. He yanked open the door, fell in, knocking the vampire off balance and shutting the door behind him. As he hoped, a stack of mops and brooms lay piled up in the corner. He grabbed a broom with a wooden handle, set it under a foot and snapped it in half.

  When the vampire opened the door, Cormac rammed the broken handle into his chest, right through his heart. The guy screamed, expression twisting with anguish.

  The vampire couldn’t have been that old, a couple of decades at most. The body blackened, but it didn’t shrivel to a husk and turn to ash the way the old ones did, the rot of the grave if they had been allowed to rot in a grave. Becoming a vampire only delayed the inevitable. Vampires like this, throwing themselves on stakes for a Master who had been destroyed years before—what a waste. But nobody held a grudge like a vampire. They had the time to burn. Cormac let go of the stake, and the rotted body dropped at his feet.

  Well, that was bracing.

  Because the vampire didn’t turn to dust and blow away, conveniently disposing of itself, Cormac now had a body to deal with.

  “I do not need this shit,” he muttered. Irate, he kicked it. The leathery skin made a disconcerting squishing sound.

  It’s better than letting him kill you, Amelia stated, sounding nonplussed. But yes, it is a bother.

  He dragged the body someplace where it would be exposed to sunlight before anyone found it. The apartment building’s dumpster had too much foot traffic, but behind the building lay a gravely stretch, a foot or two wide, between the building and a boundary fence. A couple of scraggily dead shrubs poked up through the rocks. No one went there, and it faced east. As soon as the rays hit it, it would burn to ash, then poof, gone. Hell, this was such a clear case of self-defense maybe he should call the police. Except no, not with a manslaughter conviction on his record. Besides, come dawn, there wouldn’t even be a body. Nothing to report.

  Finally he got safely into his apartment and took a very long, hot shower to get the stink of dead vampire off him.

  Explain it again, Amelia said when he finally got out of the shower. She’d at least given him some peace until he got clean. You went after an entire vampire Family by yourself?

  “Wasn’t much of a Family. Most of them weren’t any older than that guy.”

  You could have been killed.

  “Turned out okay.”

  There are times when I am grateful I didn’t know you earlier in your life. You seemed to have engaged in quite a lot of reckless behavior.

  He barked a laugh. “If you only knew the half of it.”

  She could know, if she wanted. But she was English, overly polite, and didn’t pry too much into the mind where she lived. That would be like rifling through the linen clo
set in the house where one was a guest, she insisted. Even though they were more like roommates.

  Except with her, the door was always, always open. When he toweled off, she was there. When he slipped on sweatpants, so did she. Whatever he touched, she felt. They didn’t talk about it. Ignored it as much as they could. He avoided mirrors. When he needed to jack off, she pretended to leave the room, as if she could ever leave the room. And once in a while, he found himself in front of the mirror and hoping she was looking.

  She wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.

  Cormac slept and dreamed in their valley.

  His father had taken him camping here, a high valley in the Colorado Rockies where a snowmelt creek cut down through a meadow bowl, bounded by a pine forest. The sky above was searing blue, smudged with white clouds. No air smelled cleaner than this. No place felt safer. He and Amelia had built this shared space—part guided meditation, part visualization exercise— where they could talk. She’d had a body, once. Here, she did again, resembling the single old sepia-toned photo he’d seen of her, with her serious demeanor, her hair in a prim bun, her clothing precise, long Edwardian skirt and high-necked blouse. He liked being able to see her, to talk to her.

  He lay back in the grass, hands laced under his head, eyes closed. Sleep within sleep. He thought he heard chickadees in the pines up the hill.

  She sat nearby, leaning against an outcrop of rounded granite. Her hand tapped nervously against her knee in what seemed to be an unconscious gesture. A disembodied spirit shouldn’t have nervous ticks. If she existed only as consciousness, could she be unconscious of anything? This was why Cormac avoided the philosophy of it all.

  “What?” he asked brusquely.

  “Would you like to apprise me of any other outstanding grudges we might encounter?”

  “Not particularly,” he said. “I didn’t even remember that guy until he was hissing spit in my face.”

  “You destroyed a gang of vampires. How can you forget something like that?”

  She wasn’t going to like the answer, so he waited, but she remained expectantly silent. “Because I used to do a lot of that sort of thing,” he said finally, and she blew out a frustrated breath. “They usually don’t come back for revenge.”

  “Usually. How are you meant to protect yourself from random vampires seeking vengeance?”

  Do a better job of keeping stakes and holy water in his pockets. Live in a never-ending state of vigilance. “I figure one of these guys’ll get me, sooner or later.” These battles just delayed the inevitable.

  “If you die, I die.”

  “You already died.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “We’ve talked about this.”

  “Yes, I know. I just felt so. . .helpless.”

  He hesitated. The chickadees had stopped calling. “I’m sorry you felt helpless.”

  Her lips pursed in a tight smile, but her gaze remained troubled. “I died once, you’d think I’d be less frightened of it happening again. But I’m not.”

  He straightened, sitting up with his arms around his knees. She rarely got this worked up. “I suppose I could get one of these guys to make me a vampire. . .”

  “You’re joking.” She looked sharply at him. “You are joking?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because I don’t think you becoming a vampire would stop anyone with a grudge from trying to kill you.”

  “No, probably not.”

  “Besides, I’m not sure I’d survive the transformation. I have no interest in attempting the experiment.”

  “So you like being here?” He looked up, around. Quirked a smile.

  “I suppose I do.”

  “Could be worse, I guess.”

  “Cormac, what did you ever do before you had me looking out for you?”

  “Got myself sent to prison is what I did.”

  “Ah, yes, see. That’s just the sort of thing I’d like to avoid.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Spiritually cleansing dog parks. Let’s keep to that.” She settled back against her boulder and closed her eyes.

  Chuckling, he lay back in the grass and let a real sleep overtake him.

  A few mornings later, their email delivered a more interesting proposal than magically protecting dog parks.

  An archeologist at a dig in South Dakota had found an unusual artifact, a clay pot in a style and with markings that didn’t match any other pottery styles of the time and region. The archeologist, Professor Aubrey Walker, claimed to have some magical sensitivity, and believed that the artifact represented something otherworldly. Would Cormac please come and examine it, to see if he could tell if it was magical, or merely odd?

  “‘Otherworldly.’ That could mean anything,” Cormac murmured.

  I’m not sure we have the expertise to evaluate such an item.

  “We can be up front about that. Walker has to be willing to pay travel expenses and a consulting fee, even if the answer is we don’t have a clue.”

  We can’t guarantee an absence of magic. We can only state definitively if we do find something. It seems unsatisfying.

  Amelia insisted on doing initial research to determine if they were even qualified to take on the job. Cormac did a web search on Walker and her credentials, and the trail of online breadcrumbs led to the home university of the archeology team and information about the dig, which was investigating hunting and camping sites of Plains Archaic cultures from about fifteen hundred years ago. So, there really was a dig, and their correspondent really was a scientist there. A scientist who wanted a magical consult.

  Amelia was intrigued. An artifact such as intact pottery seems very incongruous with other information about the culture. You’d expect to find bones and fire pits, maybe a few tools, nothing more.

  “Maybe that’s why she thinks it’s magical.”

  If something magical, some sort of spellcraft, has survived from that era—that would be phenomenal.

  So she was all for taking the job. Cormac replied to the email, laying out his requirements, a hefty fee, and the fact he couldn’t make any guarantees. A response came back almost immediately: that was fine, Walker had nowhere else to turn, and even a small amount of information would be better than nothing.

  “Here’s the thing,” Cormac said to Amelia. “University archeology departments don’t usually have a lot of funding to spare for paranormal investigators and that’s a pretty big number we gave her.”

  I doubt she even reported it to her department. She might be planning to pay out of her own pocket, to keep this out of the books.

  That made sense. He checked the email again—it wasn’t a university address. So, keeping it really off the books. A serious archeologist wouldn’t exactly want to advertise that she was consulting with a paranormal investigator. It also made him nervous.

  We will be careful, Amelia assured him.

  They were always careful. At least, they always tried to be careful. But you couldn’t plan for all the things that might get you. The one that got you would be the one you didn’t expect.

  So, we go with caution.

  Always, always.

  Getting to South Dakota took half a day of driving across an unending sweep of classic Great Plains rangeland, miles of rolling prairie and cattle country, driving on a grid of state highways set at right angles to each other, on and on, punctuated every now and then by some microscopic town that had looked exactly the same for the last fifty years. Cormac preferred the mountains, someplace to put your back against to see what was coming. Out here, there was no place to hide.

  Amelia was riveted. This sky, look at it! This wonderful huge sky! I can almost see it curving around and under us to the other side. It’s like being under a bowl. Three hours into the trip, she still hadn’t gotten tired of it.

  Walker had asked to meet them at a turnout on a county road near Badlands National Park. She had to give him GPS coordinates. Cormac wasn’t sure he’d still have a phone
connection by the time they got there—in another two and a half hours of driving.

  I never got to this region in my travels. I had meant to. I was so looking forward to seeing the great herds of bison.

  “They’d mostly been killed off by your time,” Cormac said. Amelia had been so fascinated by stories of the American West, but by the early 1900’s that world had vanished.

  Do you think we’ll see any bison?

  “I don’t know.”

  And Deadwood—do you know we’ll only be a couple of hours away from Deadwood? After we’ve consulted with Professor Walker, perhaps we can visit?

  “What’s in Deadwood?” Cormac asked tiredly.

  Calamity Jane’s grave. And Wild Bill Hickok’s. It’s where he was shot. There’s a museum there I’d like to see.

  “Why?” he said curtly.

  Well. Just to see it.

  “We won’t have time—”

  This meeting will surely not take very long, and since we’re already in the area—

  “Can we talk about it later?”

  She fell silent, finally, thankfully. He didn’t want to see Deadwood, he didn’t want to do anything but the job. The bison around here were probably all kept on farms. There wasn’t any point to it.

  Cranky and sweaty after a day on the road was probably not the best way to meet a client, but he didn’t think the job would take more than an hour. Amelia would take a look at the artifact, decide it was nothing special, and they could turn around and go home.

  No, she muttered. You will not. We’ll find a room, rest for the night, and explore tomorrow.

  He’d see how they felt at the end of the day.

  A room and a hot shower.

  “We’ll talk about it later.”

  Somehow, she managed to pout without having a tangible face to pout with. He felt her, testing. She could take over his body—if he let her. A good guest, she usually asked first. She hadn’t tried to take over since they’d first met, back in prison. He didn’t know if she ever thought about it. Or rather, he didn’t know how much she thought about it.

  He squeezed the steering wheel. He was in control, he was driving. But Amelia had probably learned enough about driving by watching him to do it herself. . .