Badlands Witch: A Cormac and Amelia Story Read online

  The turnout Aubrey Walker had directed him to was just west of the national park boundary, on a dirt road. She had explained in an email, “The actual dig site is restricted, and I have to be careful. If word gets out that I contacted you, I could get in trouble.”

  I’m not sure if what she’s doing is entirely legal, Amelia observed. He was pretty sure this particular chunk of land was part of the Pine Ridge Reservation, so yeah, they were probably breaking some rules.

  “As long as nobody steals anything or breaks anything, we’ll be fine.” He hoped. If things got weird he could always walk away.

  The dirt road cut across a sagebrush plain, straight as a line. To the west, the Black Hills rose up like a crumbling wall, dark with the smudged color of forests. To the east, the badlands, desolate gullies and washes, pinnacles of eroded stone. Hard to believe anybody could live out here.

  Up ahead, right where Walker had asked him to meet her, a Honda CR-V with mud-spattered Illinois plates was parked in a rutted turnout. A woman waited there, leaning against the driver’s side door. She was white, average height and build, had on khaki cargo pants, a shapeless sweatshirt, and dusty work boots. A plain baseball cap mashed down a mess of black hair pulled back in a bun. She looked like someone who’d been working on an archeological dig.

  Cormac parked the Jeep alongside her. “Professor Walker?” he asked, stepping out, shutting the door behind him.

  She brightened, smiling broadly. “You must be Cormac Bennett. Call me Aubrey. Thank you so much for coming.” She clicked open the back hatch of the SUV with her key fob. “You ready to take a look?”

  Amelia definitely was. All this anticipation. He could almost picture Amelia straining forward to get a first look at the artifact.

  He explained again, “You understand I may not be able to tell you much. It may be dormant or have some kind of protection on it.”

  “Yes, I understand. I’ll be grateful for anything you can tell me.” Once the door was open, she stepped aside, gesturing. “Here it is.”

  A beat-up cardboard box sat alone in the back. Inside was the artifact, a piece of dusty pottery, no packing material around it. All by itself, it seemed to lurk. The pot had a round body, a flat base, and a long, narrow neck with a small, spout-like opening. Maybe eight inches high, six wide. The reddish color made it look like a lot of Native American pottery from the Southwest, but the markings on it seemed more like Norse runes. The shape wasn’t like any tradition he—or Amelia rather—knew about.

  “What makes you think it’s magical?” he asked. “Anything weird been happening around it? Anything that started when it was first excavated, or when people touched it?”

  “Mostly it’s just the way it looks, the way it doesn’t fit with anything else from the time or region. Like it came from another dimension or something, you know? It just makes me nervous.” As if to emphasize this, she shivered and seemed to draw away from it.

  That hardly seemed likely, but given some of the shit he’d seen in his time, he wouldn’t discount it. He nudged Amelia. Sense anything?

  There’s definitely something. I can’t make it out in detail, though. Magical, yes, but I don’t know what it’s supposed to do. We could try some scrying spells, try to work out what it’s for.

  He squinted at it from a couple of different angles. Leaned in to try to get a look down the neck, but he couldn’t see inside. The opening wasn’t wide enough. He’d need a penlight to look down in there.

  “Well, what do you think?” the woman asked eagerly.

  “Not sure,” Cormac said. “I need to spend a little more time with it.”

  Let’s see if there’s anything inscribed on the bottom.

  Cormac picked up the pot, turned it over.

  And blacked out.

  He woke up flat on his back with a raging, hangover-like headache that throbbed from the top of his skull and reached down to his gut. He rolled to his side but didn’t vomit. Felt like he wanted to, though. Resting a moment, he caught his breath, steadied himself. The headache dimmed a little. He squinted against westering sunlight—shadows stretched long over the sagebrush.

  Amelia?

  She didn’t answer. “Amelia?”

  Nothing. Really nothing. He prodded that place in the back of his mind that he thought of as hers, where he usually felt her. It was open, blank, empty.

  Amelia was gone.

  The ground under Cormac seemed to tilt. How could his brain feel physically empty, an open warehouse echoing with the absence? He squeezed his hands over his ears, as if he had to hold his skull together. Grit his teeth. Swallowed back an incipient scream.

  She’d just been knocked unconscious, like him. But nothing like this had happened before. She was nothing but consciousness, she couldn’t be unconscious. That would mean she was— He waited. The sun inched lower, toward dusk. Amelia was still gone. He kept thinking, What do I do? Amelia, what’s happening? The answering silence hurt his skull.

  His Jeep was still parked here. Walker’s SUV was gone. In a panic he patted himself down, found his phone and wallet in his pockets where he left them. So he hadn’t been robbed. Just left for dead. This was a trap, a trick, and he’d walked right into it.

  But what was it? What had happened?

  Amelia was gone. Just gone.

  He was free.

  No more voice talking at him, no more presence looking over his shoulder. For the first time in years, his mind was clear, light. Alone.

  He didn’t know what to do.

  Just move. One step at a time. Something would come to him. Leaning against the Jeep’s rear bumper, he stood, swayed a bit. The ground still felt like it was trembling. Like an earthquake, but he was the only one moving. He waited until he felt steady, and eventually he could stand. He drew a deep breath into exhausted lungs.

  He still wanted to scream.

  The plain around him was empty. No cars traveled the straight road, not so much as a cloud of dust rose up. A wind blew, whispering through the brush. His face felt raw—sunburned. Walker had fled hours ago, leaving him lying in the dirt. Had she thought he was dead? Had she really tried to kill him?

  What had happened?

  Since he barely knew what Amelia was to start with, he couldn’t guess what had happened to her. Just that she was gone. Dead? For real this time.

  Aubrey Walker knew what had happened.

  Cormac took a long draw from the water bottle jammed in by the Jeep’s gear shift. It was hot, metallic, and made him feel a little better. But that gaping silence still bore down on him.

  What do I do?

  No one answered. He couldn’t seem to think on his own.

  He tore out of the gravel pull-out and drove.

  He ended up in Rapid City before he decided he couldn’t just drive around looking for that pale SUV, pulling into parking lots, studying every car, every license plate. Driving at random was stupid and he’d never get anywhere this way. But it meant he didn’t have to think. He didn’t want to think, because that meant turning to his own mind and acknowledging the silence.

  “Fuck it,” he finally muttered, pulling into a McDonald’s parking lot and shutting off the engine. He could figure this out. He used to hunt people down for a living. He could find Aubrey Walker, and she would tell him what she’d done. Maybe Amelia was only asleep, maybe—

  Find Walker. Then worry.

  Using his phone he started hunting with a little more focus. The phone number Walker had given him turned out to be disconnected. He re-did some of the digging he and Amelia had done before, through her university and the sponsors of the dig she was working on. Her department’s website showed a picture of her, smiling, along with a group of grubby graduate students wearing hats and scarves against a bright sun, in the middle of a series of precise, squared-off pits. She looked so harmless, there.

  He could call her department. Except it was after dark now, after business hours. He could spend all night driving around and it wouldn’
t help. Morning, he would have to wait until morning to make calls, but that was too long. He needed to find her now.

  The water bottle was empty; he hadn’t eaten all day. He stalked into the restaurant and got a burger, devoured it without thought. Drank something.

  If Amelia could still speak to him, she would tell him to sleep. They had been arguing about whether to get a hotel room.

  Cormac drove some more because he couldn’t think of what else to do. Finally, he found a dark corner of a box store parking lot. Tried to think, but his brain wasn’t working any better that it had been earlier. Sleep, Amelia would tell him. He could almost hear her.

  He tipped back the seat and closed his eyes.

  No sight, no sound, so sensation at all. Not even an echo, because echo implied space, and this. . .was confinement without space. She had no breath or heartbeat with which to monitor the passing of time.

  This, this was death. Cormac was dead, she hadn’t noticed, and she was. . .trapped? But where? In his body. . .no, that she would have felt. Her consciousness would not have stayed in dead flesh. This. . .she had been here before, she knew this state. This nothingness, a consciousness with no anchor, residing in some solid prison. Trapped.

  She screamed, or tried to, or would have if she still had a mouth. Cormac’s mouth. Where was Cormac? What had happened?

  While her mind, her self, whatever this was, screamed, she could do nothing else and so waited for a small space in the panic she could wedge herself into and take stock. She could not scream forever, though she wanted to.

  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.

  What were the odds she’d actually believe him? “I think there’s someone out there pretending to be you.”

  Her confusion deepened. “Why would they do that? How would they do that?”

  He shaded his eyes and looked around the lot, and the dusty trailer and camper. One bare-bones light post had a floodlight, just enough to cover the parking area. And a surveillance camera. “Where do you save your security footage? Mind if I take a look?”

  “Do you really think someone is out there pretending to be me?”

  “Yeah. And I need to find them.” He sighed. “My name’s Cormac Bennett, I got mugged on the side of the road and I’m just trying to figure out who did it.” No reason she should believe him. But she nodded.

  “I’m Aubrey,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Okay. Just a minute.” She went to the Subaru, popped open the back hatch and rummaged around for a set of clipboards. He waited as patiently as he could. He really wanted to get on this woman’s good side.

  With less hesitation than he expected, Aubrey invited him into the trailer. A fan sitting to the side and going full blast didn’t do much to move the air, which was hot, heavy, dusty. One half of the space was an office, a couple of card tables pretending to be desks, folding chairs, computers, and piles of paper. All of it looked temporary. The other half—that seemed to be where the real action was. Cormac stepped over to look. Cramped metal shelving held tubs, trays, and stuff. More tubs and trays sat on a table, where a couple of people worked with lamps, magnifiers, brushes, and tiny
picks on pottery shards. Dozens of shards, stone tools, arrowheads, other bits and pieces, detritus. It all looked like junk but the pair of what must have been students or interns or something, as young they seemed, worked with a focus that suggested it was treasure.

  Amelia would love this. Cormac shunted that thought aside. Best he not think about Amelia until he had a real plan of action. A target.

  The people working here, grad students or archeologists or whatever, looked up at him, glanced over at Aubrey skeptically. “Everything okay, professor?” one of them asked.

  “I think so,” she called back.

  Aubrey was waking up one of the computers. “The security footage all comes through here. If we have someone sneaking around who shouldn’t be here, I’d really like to know about it.”

  He pulled over a folding chair and sat next to her.

  “When do you think this person was here?” Aubrey asked and brought up a list of video files.

  The person impersonating Walker had contacted him a week ago, and he’d agreed to the job a couple of days after that. “About four days ago,” he said. “Let’s start there.”

  She clicked open the file and fast-forwarded through the footage. Time zipped by on the screen, the sun rising, shadows in the parking lot shifting with the hours. Cars drove in, parked. People got out, gathered. The dig’s day seemed to begin at dawn with a group of people meeting by the front door, then they scattered to cars and drove, presumably to the actual dig site.

  “You’d recognize a car that wasn’t supposed to be here?” he asked.

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “We’re a pretty tight group. You just about have to be, working on a project like this all summer.”

  She’d called him out straight off, so yeah, that made sense.

  Nothing from the first day’s videos caught their attention. The second day—same cars, same people. Then—

  “Wait,” Aubrey murmured and paused the playback. She rewound, played again.