Badlands Witch: A Cormac and Amelia Story

by Carrie Vaughn

  The floorboards were worn from decades of feet passing over them. The ceiling was high, and had what must have been the original pressed-tin decoration. The sunlight coming in through the windows filtered hazily through dust that might have been hanging in the air for years.

  To his right, what must have once been a bar now served as a counter. An old mirror, worn and pitted, hung behind it, surrounded by shelves, which didn’t hold bottles of booze but rows of labeled tea tins, along with mismatched cups and saucers and mugs. A display case of pastries sat nearby. A half a dozen bistro tables and chairs spread out in the front half of the shop. The place was empty of customers.

  The back half of the store looked more like what he expected, what the back half of the Manitou Wishing Well looked like: shelves of books, handmade soaps and herbal sachets, crystals and tarot cards, all of it innocuous enough you could take it as seriously or not as you chose. Cormac looked around for the signs that he ought to take this place seriously: charms hanging above the doorway, spells worked into the signage. The pressed-tin ceiling was mostly made up of a flower motif that repeated, nothing mystical to speak of, but here and there a newer piece had been placed over the old, symbols that didn’t go with the other decoration.

  The whole place smelled of herbs and age.

  If at any point, some classic Old West town had had a shop like this, this is what it would have looked like. Then again, maybe there had been shops like this, full of books and herbs and esoterica, the equivalent of a New Age apothecary and fortune-telling emporium but with a historical patina. Maybe they hid in plain sight, that unassuming tea parlor or what not. Amelia had traveled the world, looking for magic, and had found it. Maybe it showed up in places just like this.

  Amelia would love this.

  A young-looking man stood at the counter, reading a book lying flat on the counter. He had brown skin, short-cropped curly hair, and wore a long-sleeved, button-up shirt, a vest, wire-rimmed glasses. As old-fashioned as the rest of the place. He had a leather cord wrapped twice around his right wrist, which might have been jewelry except it didn’t much go with the rest of his outfit. Might have been a spell.

  Cormac didn’t waste time and went up to the counter, putting his hand on the varnished wood. The guy looked up. His smile was perfunctory, the bland face of a customer service professional.

  “What can I get for you?” A chalkboard on an easel listed a menu: tea in three sizes, prices for the pastries.

  Cormac said, “Judi Scanlon said I should look you up. Might be able to help me with a problem.”

  The young man regarded him a moment. Sizing him up, and Cormac put up with it. Considered what he’d do if the guy denied knowing Judi, played dumb about the whole magic thing. But eventually he turned up half a grin. “She did, did she? I didn’t think you looked much like a tea drinker.”

  Amelia was. He drank it for her, when they couldn’t get coffee. “Don’t seem to be too many tea drinkers around here.” Through the windows, people passed by and never even looked at the shop.

  “Folks have to really want to find the place.” Which meant maybe Cormac was supposed to be here. That seemed to be enough for the guy. He closed the book and slipped it under the counter. Cormac caught just enough of a look to see that it was bound in stained leather, no title, no other markings. “And you are?”

  “Cormac,” he said. “You must be Gregory?”

  “And Judi thinks I can help you.”

  “You can call her and get her to vouch for me.”

  “That’s all right. You don’t go around dropping a name like that for the fun of it.” Cormac realized he really had no idea what Judi’s reputation was outside of the nice old lady who gave ghost tours in Manitou Springs. He wondered if he wanted to find out. Gregory continued. “What’s the problem?”

  “You know her?” He unfolded the sheet of paper with Isabelle Durant’s blurry, security camera picture and lay it on the counter. The man studied it, and his gaze narrowed in what might have been recognition. Cormac waited to see if he would deny it or dodge the question.

  He lifted his gaze. “Why are you looking for her?”

  Cormac’s lip curled. “I just have a couple of questions I need to ask her.”

  Gregory’s lip curled as well, a mirroring half smile, just as cynical. “That right?”

  “She’s probably laying low at the moment. She’s been working some powerful magic over the last couple of days. Or she might have hired someone to work the magic for her. Judi says you might have a sense of who around here might be capable of that.” Or that it might have been you. . .

  “Let me ask you a question. If you know enough to know about that kind of magic, and Judi Scanlon trusts you enough to send you to me, why can’t you find this person yourself?”

  “That’s just it, normally I would. And now I can’t. That’s what I need to ask her about.”

  The implications sank in—that Durant had done something to Cormac’s magical abilities. It wasn’t a lie, per se. Gregory raised a brow and blew out a breath.

  “Why don’t you step back to my office?” He went to the front door and turned over a painted wood sign from “open” to “closed.” In the back of the shop, Gregory gestured Cormac to a chair at a small, linen-covered table. “Yes, I’ve seen her. I don’t know her name but she’s been in a couple of times, picking up odds and ends. It’s not my place to ask my customers what they do with what I sell them.”

  “I’ve heard the same argument at gun shops,” Cormac said.

  “Yeah. Well.” From a nearby shelf he retrieved a silk bag and drew out a deck of cards, which he began deftly shuffling.

  “Tarot?” Cormac asked, smirking. “You think this will track her down, give me an address for her?”

  “This isn’t about her. I want to know what you’re about.”

  Cormac leaned back and crossed his arms. He didn’t much feel like being tested. On the other hand, he was kind of curious what the guy would come up with. This was just parlor tricks, though Amelia would say that in the right hands tarot could be more. And he wished he could stop thinking about Amelia. “If I pass your test, you’ll help?”

  “What’s your connection to this woman?”

  “Old grudge,” he said.

  “Mutual?”

  “Honestly, until today I’d completely forgotten about her.”

  Gregory glanced at him. “Scorned lover? You dump her at the altar or something?”

  “No. Never date anyone crazier than yourself, I’ve been told.”

  Gregory chuckled. It struck Cormac that he couldn’t really tell how old the man was, a weathered thirty or a youthful fifty. He seemed young but his manner was confident.

  He finished shuffling, squared the deck in the middle of the table. Cut it into two piles and turned over a single card from the cut. The image showed a woman with long black hair in an Old West get-up: pleated skirt, boots, a tailored jacket, wide-brimmed hat. She held a rifle. The pen-and-ink drawing was based on an old publicity photo of Annie Oakley.

  “Queen of Swords,” he said. He turned the deck over and fanned it out so Cormac could see the image in context.

  The whole deck was Old West themed. Not Rider-Waite or one of the traditional decks Amelia was familiar with but something you’d expect to find in a tourist shop in Deadwood, and not in the hands of a serious magician. Six-shooters and rifles, horses and stagecoaches, cow skulls and lightning strikes over rocky mesas. The suits were rifles, arrows, gold pan and sheriff’s star. The Major Arcana were famous figures and tropes of the genre. Tombstones and card tables, nooses and cactus. It was cheesy, and it made Cormac nervous.

  Gregory turned the cards face down and shuffled the deck again. Spread the whole deck out in a fan, face down. The art on the backs showed a pen-and-ink drawing of intertwined tumbleweeds. “Now you pick.”

  Cormac didn’t think. Reached out and put his hand on the first card he came to. Pulled it out and flipped it over.


  The Queen of Swords.

  That was just a little too pat. For all he knew Gregory was working with Durant. He met Gregory’s gaze across the table. The man swept up the deck, shuffled, fanned the cards again. “Choose.”

  Cormac did. The Queen of Swords. Annie Oakley, who’d been alive at the same time as Amelia Parker, who had the same thick black hair cascading over her shoulders.

  Gregory’s eyes widened. “I’m not stacking the deck.”

  Cormac knew he wasn’t. “Try it again.”

  He did so three more times, shuffling and cutting the deck differently each time, drawing from the bottom, the middle, laying a spread face down and turning up one. The Queen of Swords. The Queen of Swords. The Queen of Swords.

  “This is a message,” Gregory said finally, squaring the deck and leaning back from it.

  “Yeah,” Cormac said, uncertain what to do with the wash of relief. It made him almost light-headed. This was a message. This was Amelia.

  “You know what it means,” Gregory said, a statement. “Who is she?”

  “What would you say? If this was a reading and not. . .something else, what would you tell me?”

  He hesitated. “She’s important to you. She’s powerful. It’s not the woman in the picture you showed me.”

  Cormac smiled and glanced away.

  Gregory pushed away from the table. “I’m going to make myself some tea, you want anything?”

  “Just water,” he said. Cormac flipped the cards over, spread them out, studied the images. Found the Queen of Swords and pulled it front and center. The odds of a flipped coin coming up heads or tails was fifty percent, every time. The odds of drawing one card out of seventy-odd was the same, every time. But the odds of drawing that same card a half a dozen times in a row? This wasn’t about odds. It was, as Gregory had said, a message. A voice reaching out, but unable to speak.

  Cormac found the ace of the suit. Ace of Swords. A Winchester rifle, resting in a rack above a fireplace containing a blazing fire, in what looked to be a cozy cabin. He put this and the Queen next to each other. Not a message but intention.

  Gregory returned with a tray holding a glass of water, and a small steaming teapot with accompanying china cup, saucer, and sugar bowl.

  “Going to read tea leaves next?” Cormac asked.

  “No, I’m not sure I can take any more messages.” He looked at the cards Cormac had matched together. “Not the King?”

  He shook his head. He didn’t know what he was doing.

  Gregory sat and told him the story: Durant came in looking for some arcane ingredients. Way beyond the quartz crystals and sage smudges he sold to low-key kitchen witches. She was looking for powdered puffer fish, poison arrow frog, that kind of thing, which he didn’t have. Or at least wasn’t willing to sell to someone off the street. She’d bought some plain green tea and a couple of chunks of hematite, and left.

  “I need to find her,” Cormac said decisively.

  “She paid cash. Sorry I can’t help track her down via her credit card. You’re. . .not going to hurt her, are you?”

  Why not? She left him laid out on a road in the middle of nowhere. She had done something to him and Amelia was gone. Yes, he was going to try very much to hurt her. “I just need to talk to her.” He wasn’t sure Gregory believed him.

  “If she’s staying in the area she might come back. I can give you a call if she does.”

  Cormac didn’t want to wait. He thought for a minute, tried to imagine what Amelia would suggest. He’d learned a lot from her. Not enough, not for this. But maybe he didn’t need to go looking for her. Maybe he could draw her out. Set a lure. Not even a summoning spell. Just. . .a sign in the window. A text message, hinting that he knew what she’d done. That someone was watching her.

  “I can’t wait. I need a signal,” Cormac said. “Nothing big, not too powerful. Just. . .an urge to look inside.” He flicked a hand, an acknowledgement of how much of this relied on chance.

  “That kind of thing is real risky in retail,” Gregory said. “You cast ‘come buy me’ over your shop and before you know it you’re out of stock and everything is back-ordered and you have to close up. I cast things like safety and comfort so people feel at home here, wards so the drunk yahoos stay out, and the spending takes care of itself. This. . .”

  “Not a big spell. Just a suggestion. Just for one person.” He tapped Durant’s picture. “A message that there’s something here she wants.”

  “Why are you assuming I know how to do that sort of thing?”

  “Judi Scanlon wouldn’t have sent me to you if you didn’t.”

  He offered a wry smile. “All right.”

  “All right you can do it, or you will?”

  “I have an idea.”

  “I can pay—”

  “I want the whole story. I want to know who the Queen of Swords is.”

  The whole story. . .he’d never get that. This story had no boundaries, and Cormac didn’t know the end. “If this works, you will. Need anything from me?”

  “Oh, the usual. A hair.”

  Of course he did. If he was going to be handling this shit in Deadwood at least he could get into actual straightforward gunfight. Nothing in this magic business was ever straightforward. “You got a plan for that hair?”

  “It’s a test, mostly. To see if you trust me.”

  Cormac felt blind. He’d spent most of his life without Amelia looking over his shoulder, why did he feel so lost without her now? He ought to leave here, get away, go back to the life he would have had without her—

  Without her, he’d still be in prison, he was pretty sure.

  Amelia had become the voice of his conscience, the voice of reason. Even now he was waiting for her to tell him yes or no. He didn’t think he’d become so dependent. He reached above his ear, yanked on a brown strand. Barely long enough to matter.

  Gregory produced a glass vial as long as his finger and held it out. Cormac dropped the hair in, Gregory corked it, wrote something on it in Sharpie. The vial disappeared into his pocket and the shopkeeper seemed far too pleased with himself.

  What was Cormac getting himself in to?

  “Give me until tomorrow. I’ll need tonight to pull this together.”

  Now. He wanted to confront her now. “Durant might have protections—”

  “We’ll see.”

  “What exactly are you going to do? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  From a different pocket, Gregory drew out a different small vial. This one contained a long, coiled black hair. “Pulled it from the sleeve of her shirt while she was looking the other way. I had a feeling.”

  “Shit,” Cormac muttered, and Gregory chuckled. A powerful magician could do so much with just a strand of hair, as he’d already seen. If you had the hair of another magician their protections against your magic might not work. There were dark and powerful spells you could use to control someone, with just a bit of hair or a nail clipping. The cost to one’s own soul for such magic was generally pretty high and not worth it. Except that Durant had happily used such magic to impersonate Aubrey Walker. Turnabout was fair play.

  Isabelle Durant had been a servant to vampires. She didn’t seem to hold her own soul in much regard. He wasn’t too sure about Gregory.

  “I’ll text you tomorrow when I start things rolling,” Gregory said. “I’ll text again when she arrives. You’ll want to be close when she does. This will likely only work once.”

  Handing over his phone number seemed even more momentous than giving the man a hair. Well, why not? This whole thing was already too personal.

  “Till tomorrow then,” Cormac said, and walked out.

  Somehow, he had to sleep, but he didn’t want to close his eyes. He should probably find a room, but he didn’t want four walls around him. He wanted to be able to run, if he needed to. Run from what, and to where, he didn’t know. His own mind wasn’t secure, and he couldn’t do anything about it.

  He had stopped b
eing able to make decisions without that feminine voice adding her opinion. He had thought he resented that voice.

  Finally, he broke down and found a run-down motor lodge outside of Deadwood. The walls were thin and didn’t block the sound of motorcycles roaring down the highway. Sturgis was an hour away, and it didn’t seem to matter that the rally wasn’t for another month, the hills still filled up with the machines.

  He found some take-out Mexican, took a long, hot shower. He’d started smelling rank. Watched TV for the rest of the night, old movies on HBO that left no impression on him. He should sleep. But he didn’t want to sleep. Usually, at night, she talked to him.

  The only place he felt truly safe was in the mountains, so in his mind he came here, built up this memory of a valley ringed by a pine forest, a rocky creek tumbling down the middle, thick grasses where elk sometimes grazed. He could sit at the edge of the meadow and be calm. Back in prison, the memory had become the chink in his armor. This was how Amelia had reached him. He’d tried to keep her out, but when dark magic, a demon feeding on pain and blood, invaded the prison itself, they had to work together to defeat it. Since then, this valley in his mind became theirs. She would stand right there, by those rocks, her hands folded in front of her. . .

  Without her, it no longer felt safe.

  He could not see the sky overhead. It ought to be searing blue, he ought to feel the sun on his face. Before, he could always hear the rushing, trickling water in the creek, smell the pines. Feel the grass under his hands. Now, the vision became dreamlike, and not in a good way. Some form of vertigo overcame him, as he squinted out to a scene that wasn’t any clearer than a faded picture. He could not feel the ground under him.

  Several times that night he started awake and didn’t know where he was. Yesterday. It had just been yesterday that he lost her.

  In the morning, he found breakfast at a coffee shop. Around the same time, Gregory sent him a text message: trigger pulled.

  Cormac parked the Jeep in an alley the next street over from the tea shop, out of sight. Waiting gave him time to think. His mind felt empty and hollow, with nothing rattling around but his own neuroses. The trick to getting along was never giving himself time to look at his own head. He didn’t much like it in there.