“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.