Badlands Witch: A Cormac and Amelia Story

by Carrie Vaughn

  Maybe he should read one of the books lying discarded on the passenger seat. They were Amelia’s: a history of Jerusalem in the twentieth century. The Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis. A Georgette Heyer novel. They read together. She used his eyes. Now, his eyes were his own again.

  He waited.

  He didn’t know if Gregory could do what he said he could or if he played the odds and hoped for the best. He had seemed confident. Cormac wasn’t sure, but what did he have to lose? Magic was influence, not science, Amelia always said.

  His phone dinged. Text message: now. Which meant Isabelle Durant had walked through the door.

  Cormac took a deep breath, got out of the Jeep. Closed the door, locked it. Patted his pockets for the charms Amelia always made him carry, protections against curses, magic, evil eyes, whatnot. Could never protect against everything, though, could you? He checked for a gun in a belt holster that wasn’t there, years after he had stopped carrying. Never mind. He’d strangle Isabelle Durant with his bare hands if he had to.

  Calmly, he walked around the block and up to the door of Tea on the Range. Couldn’t see much through the front windows, past the reflection of sky and street. He opened the door, strolled in, like he was just another customer on any average day.

  She was there at the counter, in tight designer jeans, tall boots, and a silk blouse, hair bound up with a jeweled clip, her face perfectly made up. This was just how she’d looked when she was with Lord Edgar. A brown packet of herbs or tea sat in front of her, while Gregory typed something into a tablet. They both looked up at his entrance; Gregory backed away a step.

  Durant’s eyes widened, and her hand went to her chest.

  Cormac moved toward her, away from the glare of the front windows. Just in case she hadn’t gotten a good look at him.

  “You,” she whispered in a choked voice.

  He grinned. “That’s right.”

  “No. . .”

  “Yup.” He advanced, intending to close on her.

  “You’re supposed to be dead!” she yelled, very much like she had seen a ghost. “I took your mind, why aren’t you dead!”

  He hesitated. “What do you mean, you took my mind?”

  She laughed, a mad giggle. “Death is too good for you, so I took your mind!”

  “You. . .” He had to stop and think. This. . .this suddenly all made sense. “You took it and did what?”

  “I took your mind!” She backed away, looking around wildly as if for a weapon or an exit. Out of the corner of his eye Cormac saw Gregory, hands under the counter. Did the guy have a weapon for this sort of thing?

  “What did you do with it?” Cormac demanded, the words raw.

  “I put you on my shelf, so you would be mine forever, mine to have and torture. It worked, the spell worked, I trapped you, how are you here!” She grew shrill.

  Almost, Cormac laughed. The pieces fell into place. She had a spell to take a mind, to trap it. . .and she had taken Amelia. Her spell took the wrong mind.

  He pressed toward her. “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to bring me that clay pot, and you’re going to put back what you took. Got it?”

  “No, no. . .”

  She hefted a chair from one of the bistro tables and swung it at him. He ducked, put up an arm to block and grabbed one of the legs. Yanked it out of her hands and closed on her. Durant didn’t try to struggle with him, just let go and ran for the front door. Disentangling himself from the chair took a moment; he shoved it out of the way, sent it clattering on the hardwood floor, and ran after her.

  Outside, he looked; she pounded down the block to the right. He followed. She was in a panic; he would catch her.

  She turned a corner. He grabbed the wall to haul himself around after her—

  She was gone. Here, the street led to an intersection, another pair of streets, and she hadn’t had enough time to turn again. She hadn’t needed to. While she probably didn’t have a spell to make her vanish outright, plenty of spells could cause someone to look away, so they couldn’t quite see her, or make her blend in, a kind of camouflage.

  “Fuck,” he muttered. He could keep running after her but would only look like an idiot.

  Back at Tea on the Range, Gregory was still behind the counter where Cormac left him. The guy held his hands steepled under his chin. “And who is the Queen of Swords?” he asked again.

  The question felt personal. “You got anything stronger than tea?”

  Gregory drew out a half-full bottle of some obscure, probably local, craft whiskey, which he set on the counter with a thunk. “Now, who is the Queen of Swords, and what did Isabelle Durant do to her?”

  Cormac wasn’t going to be able to handle this on his own. He’d already decided that. He might as well tell it all. “Amelia Parker. She needed a body and I loaned her mine. Durant thought she was trapping my mind and leaving my body to die. But she got Amelia instead.”

  If Gregory didn’t understand it he at least didn’t scoff. “Lucky for you, I guess. That’s some very unpleasant magic she’s dealing with.”

  Cormac snorted a laugh. “Amelia would be better at sorting this out than I am.” It should have been him. . .except he had no experience being a mind trapped in stone. She did. And she was trying to reach out. . . “I need to get her back.”

  “The pot. . .the reliquary, let’s call it. You need to find it. So you need to find where Durant is hiding.”

  “Yeah.”

  If Durant were smart, she’d leave town. Flee. Cormac would have a tough time finding her then. But maybe Durant wasn’t all that smart. She wanted Cormac, not Amelia. She’d be back. She’d find another way to take revenge on him. So yeah, she’d probably stick around.

  Gregory continued, “I’ve still got her hair, I could try some scrying—”

  “You have a map?” Cormac asked. He was a hunter, he’d been a hunter long before he’d known anything about magic. “Let’s start with a map first.”

  At the age of twenty Amelia Parker left her well-born family’s comfortable estate in Kent forever. She wanted to learn magic. All of it.

  She hadn’t started particularly well.

  A woman could travel alone, even at the turn of the last century, but she had to be prepared, to plan ahead. To walk with a certain swagger that no one could question. Having a lot of money to smooth the way didn’t hurt. Additionally, as young as she’d been she had had to remain on guard—primarily against a certain type of older gentleman, entrenched in colonial bureaucracy, who simply had to be helpful.

  She didn’t want help. She wanted power. So she buttoned herself up tight, put her hat firmly upon her head and kept her parasol close at hand, and set out, determined.

  And still, despite it all, she would find herself on foreign shores, in an exotic market, staring around her with wonder and thinking this was it, this was all she wanted. To be part of the world.

  At a market in Marrakech, only a few months into her journey, she grew drunk on the smells of spices and herbs, held back from pawing at baskets of dates and figs. Meat sizzled over braziers, and voices cried out, hawking their wares. This was just like she’d read about, exactly how she’d imagined traveling would be. The whole world was a market, but now that she was in the middle of it she didn’t know what to try first. She bought a packet of figs and another of almonds, and tried to simply take it all in.

  She mostly spoke French to get by, learned some basic Arabic. She searched for magic.

  When she found a series of medieval alchemical symbols carved into the wood frame of an awning outside one shop, she stopped and stared. So far she had seen Turkish eyes and blessings in Arabic, some Sanskrit and even a bit of Hebrew. Common prayers and blessings, no more remarkable than a cross in a Christian country. But she had not expected to see such an arcane set of writing here, like this. To the casual gaze the symbols did not stand out among the other whorls and arabesques of the decoration on the shop’s lintel. But to Amelia’s eye they blaz
ed, incongruous. This was not mere decoration. It was intentional, from another time and place and with its own meaning. It was a warding, for protection.

  This was magic in the wild, and the thrill of finding it rooted her to her spot.

  “Miss? Miss?”

  She started back to herself, gripping her parasol. She really needed to be more careful. The person who had spoken to her was a woman, shorter than Amelia, round of face and stout of body, long black hair with a few gray streaks touching it. She wore a printed blouse, full skirt and vest in wild colors, and seemed like exactly the sort of woman who would inhabit a stall decorated with an alchemical ward.

  “Are you all right, miss?” the woman asked in lilting English, and Amelia was a bit annoyed that she was so easily identified.

  “Do you know what that means?” Amelia asked, pointing at the markings on the lintel.

  The woman’s lips curled in a half smile. “I hope so, I put it there.”

  “I beg your pardon, but I had not expected to find such symbols outside of a book, ever. I’m quite astonished.”

  “I see that.”

  Amelia blushed, looked away. She wasn’t acting like a worldly woman of knowledge and consequence at all. She ought to be more circumspect. She had no idea what to say next. Only that she wanted to know everything this woman knew. But the shopkeeper wouldn’t just tell her, would she?

  “My name is Amelia Parker,” she said, and held out her gloved hand. “You have a very nice shop here.”

  “And you are interested in alchemy,” the woman said.

  “I’m interested in everything,” she confessed, a bit breathlessly.

  “Here, come in off the street. You draw a lot of attention.” The woman touched her arm and gestured into the warm, hazy interior of the shop. “My name is Mariam.”

  Amelia ought to have been careful, ought not to have trusted strangers. But she eagerly followed the woman in, and within moments was seated on cushions, at a low table, with a cup of sweet mint tea before her. Amelia drank, half expecting hallucinations, some magical concoction that would send her mind to another plane of existence—or knock her out entirely while the Mariam robbed her. She hardly cared, this was an adventure. But the tea was only tea, brightly flavored, a bit on the cool side.

  Mariam offered Amelia a job. At first, Amelia balked. She was a lady, an English lady, she did not work in market stalls in North Africa. But she quelled the old, stodgy sensibilities. That was her family talking.

  This was, she realized, a test. And so, for the next six months, she worked in Mariam’s tea and herb shop alongside her two young daughters, sweeping the floor, dusting tins and jars, cups and pots. Things got very dusty. Every now and then, Mariam asked her to translate a letter or part of a book. Amelia learned not to beg to be taught alchemy and magic. She learned to be grateful for whatever Mariam decided to teach her, which was, in the end, what Mariam decided she most needed to learn. A thing that could not be found in any book.

  How to be still. How to breathe. How to be inside one’s own mind.

  Imagine an apple. Don’t just think of an apple. Picture all aspects of it, the smooth texture of its skin, the weight of it in your palm. What color is it? Red, of course, yes? But no, it’s more than red. Once you can feel the apple in your hand, really look at it. It isn’t just red, as in a child’s drawing. It has shades, freckles, streaks. A bit of gold on the underside, a bit of brown around the stem. To imagine the apple one must be able to picture it in hand, turn it this way and that, feel it, hold it to one’s nose and smell the fruity sweetness of it. Or for a challenge, imagine it rotting. You hold the apple, and as you watch the flesh grows softer, spots appear, turn brown, weep fluids, until the whole of it is a sickly mash dripping through your fingers.

  Until one can imagine all of this, can one really work magic? Can you cast a spell, unless you can imagine exactly what you want the spell to do? When you cast a protective spell around your room, are you simply saying the words, or are you building a wall, a shield, a barrier that ill intent cannot cross? Can you see it?

  Magic is in the mind. So the mind must be sharp and specific. You must be able to create what you need with thought, when no other materials are at hand, when stress and violence assail you from without. When you have no other weapon but your mind, will it be sharp enough?

  The work was exhausting and thrilling.

  “Where did you learn all this?” Amelia asked Mariam one day, as they sorted a new delivery of teas into the right jars and tins. Amelia had shuffled off some of her staid English clothing, trading the high-buttoned blouse and long skirt for a tunic and loose trousers, a linen coat over all. She still kept her hair up and under a scarf, as if she was hiding. As a white woman, she still looked out of place here.

  Mariam smiled slyly and looked out to the market, which was busy in the hour before dusk, merchants closing up booths and workers hustling back and forth on errands. “I have very wise ancestors.”

  That could have meant anything. The answer was a deflection. “Then why would you pass such knowledge on to me? I’m an outsider. You owe me nothing.”

  “Good of you to notice,” Mariam said. “But you’ve learned to sweep the floors well.” Amelia blushed, ducked her gaze. More kindly, her mentor said, “Some little instinct tells me the world might have need of such wisdom, passed along through you. The world is changing from what it was.” This sounded like a mission, a directive: use what you have learned. Make the world better. The words felt like a burden.

  “I can never thank you enough.”

  “No, my dear, you can’t, but we all walk through life with debts. It comes out even in the end!”

  At the end of six months, Mariam announced she was closing the shop. Her mother, who lived in a village several hours away, was ill and needed care. If she wanted, Amelia could continue running the shop. Instead, she decided it was time to travel on. She still had so much to see and continents to cross. Mariam agreed that her path lay away from here.

  When she left, Amelia embraced Mariam and her daughters and promised to return to visit someday. She never did. She had not returned to visit any of the friends she had made on her journeys. When she emerged back into the world, she learned of computers and the internet and spent some time searching for the people and places where she had been. There was some small chance that Mariam’s daughters, or perhaps their children, yet lived. But the market in Marrakech was long gone and Amelia could not find them.

  That Amelia survived all that she had, she owed to Mariam and her teaching.

  Amelia knew how to build walls with her mind, to imagine the color of the stone, the texture of them, the strength of their foundations. She also knew how to break them down. Particularly the walls people built up in their minds to keep their inner selves hidden, their emotions in check, to function in the world. Or not, sometimes. She had driven people mad, beating down their walls.

  With Cormac, she finally had to simply ask him to let her in. And where was he, was he all right. . .

  Had he just walked away?

  When a presence tried to break down the wall she’d built to hold herself together, Amelia held fast. She had a century’s worth of experience doing this. She wouldn’t bend. The presence, however, was filled with rage, and this gave it power.

  Who are you who are you what are you who are you tell me tell me.

  Well. Something had happened, clearly.

  You are not him tell me who are you who are you who are you.

  Amelia couldn’t be expected to carry on a conversation with someone who had so little control. So she didn’t. She merely listened and tried to learn.

  It was supposed to be him in here, why isn’t it.

  Ah, the situation started to become clear. Amelia was the victim of an entrapment spell, a powerful and dangerous piece of magic derived from voudon traditions that sought to control a person’s spirit. Rather than focusing on control of the body, her assailant wanted to possess the mi
nd.

  The strike had been directed at Cormac. This was someone from Cormac’s past, then, seeking revenge? They hadn’t known that two souls resided in Cormac’s body. The irony was rather delicious, that rather than trap the oh-so-physical bounty hunter, this assailant had caught perhaps the one magician in all the world who was well equipped to deal with such captivity.

  Amelia very nearly relished the coming battle.

  Who are you who are you who are you.

  Amelia reached out, ever so slightly. Like plucking the branch a spider’s web was anchored to, to see what reaction she got from the spider. Donned a bit of a careless tone.

  “Got yourself in a bit of a fix, have you?”

  Screaming answered her. The shocked reaction of someone who had not expected her prisoner to have a voice. This was someone who had a plan, and the plan was not going well.

  “Ah yes. Would you like to talk about it?”

  More screaming. So no.

  To work magic one needed a sharp mind. One also needed a physical connection to the world. Amelia no longer had this. But she had a voice screaming at her. Wasn’t much of a wedge, but it would have to serve.

  Gregory pulled out a basic road map of the area and spread it on the counter. A pair of women came in, and he had to leave off to help them. They smelled about ten different teas each before picking one, and seemed delighted by everything about the experience, from the old-timey shop to the cute little teapots. Gregory charmed them. Cormac waited patiently and resisted an urge to break something.

  “If they were able to come in here, they needed something, even if it was to smell ten different teas and walk out with a smile,” Gregory explained.

  Durant was close enough that she could be affected by Gregory’s summoning spell and arrive in no more than an hour or so. The kind of magic she was working, she’d need to be isolated. Away from town, away from people. She was crazy enough to be neck-deep in weird, but not so crazy that she wouldn’t try to hide it. She was used to a certain standard of living, a high level of personal decorum, so she wouldn’t be camping in wilderness. That narrowed things down. Isolated vacation rentals, resorts. Cormac pulled up a map on his phone so he could look at satellite imagery. Separated town from wilderness, searched for dirt roads and isolated buildings, all within an hour or so. National forest surrounded Deadwood. East was open prairie and Badlands National Park. Southeast was the Pine Ridge Reservation. Durant would draw attention at any of those places, a random white woman off by herself working dangerous magic.