“What?” he said out loud.
We cannot walk away from this.
“Yes, we can. I just did.”
He leaned back against the seat, tipped his head back, closed his eyes. He could fall asleep, right here. The bruise around his eye throbbed in time with his pulse. The headache didn’t dim.
If you won’t go back for Kuzniak’s book, the only way to learn more about Kuzniak and Crane is to go to the plateau and work the Sand Creek spell to re-create what happened, perhaps even summon Crane’s spirit—
“No. No more summoning. No more talking to dead people.”
One might think you were squeamish.
“I just know better than to go sticking my head where it doesn’t belong.”
You’re a coward.
Almost sounded like his father saying that. Time was, he’d start a fight over those words.
Cormac. Come and talk to me. Don’t shut me out like this, I can’t stand it.
He caught a whiff of fear at that. She argued because she was stubborn, but while she did she worried—how precarious was her place here, really?
Sometimes he thought about what it would take to get rid of her. If he thought hard enough, if he found the right spell or incantation—hell, if he ignored her long enough—could he eject her spirit? Just kick her out, to dissipate on the wind or astral plane or whatever happened to spirits that didn’t have bodies. Or would she find some other way to bother him. Haunting his Jeep, maybe, shorting out spark plugs whenever she disagreed with him. So yes, the situation with Amelia could be much more annoying that it was now.
Without her, the apartment would be very quiet.
Cormac. Please come and talk to me, face-to-face.
He let out a breath and fell into their mental space, his memory turned real. He was standing in the middle of a damp meadow, looking around for her. The place was cold this time. A sharp, wet wind was blowing, the kind that came through the mountains in autumn, smelling of impending snow. Cormac shivered, wondering why he couldn’t just make a wish and bring back summer. This was all in his head. But the bad weather reflected his mood. Both their moods.
The trees across the valley swayed in the wind, the trunks creaking.
Amelia appeared, just far enough away that she had to raise her voice to be heard. She stood primly, as if she were arguing her case in court. “Without Kuzniak’s book, without learning what happened to him, our options are limited.”
“I already told you the option I pick—quit the whole thing.”
“I think we should go back to the plateau.” She seemed unaffected by the chill, maybe because her old-fashioned gown with its thick wool and high collar kept her warm. Maybe because she didn’t have a body anymore, she couldn’t feel the cold. “I want to try my spell.”
“No. It’s not right. The dead should stay dead. Let them lie, don’t scare them up and try to talk to them, don’t bring back the past.” He looked across the way, studying the clouds rolling in from the west, gauging what the weather was going to do next. As if it were real weather.
Amelia moved around him, putting herself in his line of sight, trying to catch his gaze. He kept looking out to the wild, which he understood better.
“If I didn’t know you, I’d say you were having moral qualms. What are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid. It’s just wrong.”
“Are you afraid your own dead will rise up to speak to you? To berate you? How many people have you killed, Cormac? Including the monsters. You’ve never told me that. You never let that knowledge slip out.”
He’d never told anyone. Not even Ben knew all the hunts he’d been on, all the contracts he’d taken, the exact number of people he’d killed. He’d never asked. Amelia was the first person who had.
He knew the number without having to stop and count. “Eighteen.”
She didn’t seem at all horrified. Just nodded thoughtfully. “The first was the werewolf who killed your father, when you were sixteen? And the latest was the skinwalker, the one that put you in prison?”
“There was the demon back in prison. And the werewolf in Chinatown, the one I stabbed. He’s eighteen.”
“You count the demon as one of your kills?”