But it wants you to starve—
“No. This is about torture. It wants me to eat.”
He picked up the pocketknife, the ritual blade she’d had him set by the unlit fire. Yes, for this, the curse let him have free rein. No trouble at all moving for this.
He stabbed the knife into the ground next to him. His hand was shaking. He was gritting his teeth hard, and forced himself to unclench hi
s jaw.
Cormac. She was worried, with a sharp edge to her presence. Please, Cormac. What is this?
He looked at the knife. He looked at his thigh, the thick, fleshy stretch of muscle laid out just under the fabric of his jeans, just below the skin. Fresh, bloody meat.
Understanding dawned on them both.
All Cormac had to do was cut into himself. Then he could eat.
Amelia could do nothing.
The cruelty of the spell was breathtaking. No, upon consideration, much crueler tortures were possible—she could even think of some herself involving children, involving long roads of pain that only ended in death. Involving the kind of hopelessness that did not end in death at all.
This spell had an end to it, a decisive end that she preferred not to think of. The cruelty of this spell was obsessive—taking the fascinating horrors of the Donner story and turning them upon the victim. Amelia had no body. She was unaffected by the curse that had trapped Cormac, pinning him to the ground and sapping from him his will.
She had to do something, but she didn’t know what. She wanted to reach out, grab Cormac’s collar, shake him until his teeth rattled. She couldn’t. She couldn’t even scream in his ear, because he was drifting away. They were locked together in the same damned brain, and she could feel him losing focus as his energy faded. As he starved, the hunger of weeks compressed into moments. The pain gnawed at him; she watched from a small distance, as if behind glass.
If he died, she would lose her anchor to the world. She would be helpless, and the last part of her still living would dissipate.
This was magic. She knew magic, knew a thousand spells and the arcane lore that crafted them. She could solve this, counter it in a way that Weber and Bellamy couldn’t have hoped to. God, they must have been terrified, having no way to understand what was happening, thinking the curse of this place must truly be striking them down—
She pulled her thoughts back to the problem at hand. This was not natural, clearly. It was magic. So, what was the magic driving this? What was the power that had invaded their circle and struck Cormac down with so little warning?
A trap. It had waited for a target, then sprang to catch it, without mercy. If this had been old—some spell or curse from the previous century, some leftover magic, there would have been some warning. Some randomness. This was new, and malicious. And very likely the kind of trap that the more one struggled against it, the tighter it held.
They needed some kind of protection, and they needed to draw the perpetrator—the maker of this trap—into the open. Confront the person, turn the spell back somehow. She had charms—she was constantly filling Cormac’s pockets with charms and odds and ends, anything that might be useful, a magician’s toolkit. If she could remember what he had there, cast her own magic, hope it was strong enough—
And keep Cormac alive. This was all on her now.
This was what Weber and Bellamy had both faced. Lying paralyzed, one option open before them as they watched the skin draw back from their bones and felt their stomachs contract, the hunger of weeks collapsing into hours. All they had to do was eat the one unthinkable meal. Bellamy had dropped his knife rather than give in. Weber, the same. Neither one of them could do it. So, did that make them courageous, or cowardly?
“I could do it.” He wasn’t weak. He could do whatever he needed to survive. No one would blame him.
You will not, Amelia declared.
“I wouldn’t even die. Just a little piece. I could survive. Tell me why I shouldn’t.”
It’s not civilized. Her English accent was so prim, so offended, he had to chuckle. Right, then. He couldn’t do it because the prim English lady said not to.
You are very difficult.
His hands looked different. Thinner, more gaunt. The bones seemed more defined. He touched his face—did his cheekbones seem more pronounced? His life was draining away physically as weight vanished from him in defiance of all the laws of physics.
No you will not. You will not starve, I forbid it.
“I’m trying not to,” he murmured.
He was starving; she wasn’t. Would her spirit survive without a body, the way it had back in prison for a hundred years? Would she be able to find another body out here? Or would Donner Pass really be haunted now?
We must fight. It’s simple, really.