Somehow, she managed to pout without having a tangible face to pout with. He felt her, testing. She could take over his body—if he let her. A good guest, she usually asked first. She hadn’t tried to take over since they’d first met, back in prison. He didn’t know if she ever thought about it. Or rather, he didn’t know how much she thought about it.
He squeezed the steering wheel. He was in control, he was driving. But Amelia had probably learned enough about driving by watching him to do it herself. . .
The turnout Aubrey Walker had directed him to was just west of the national park boundary, on a dirt road. She had explained in an email, “The actual dig site is restricted, and I have to be careful. If word gets out that I contacted you, I could get in trouble.”
I’m not sure if what she’s doing is entirely legal, Amelia observed. He was pretty sure this particular chunk of land was part of the Pine Ridge Reservation, so yeah, they were probably breaking some rules.
“As long as nobody steals anything or breaks anything, we’ll be fine.” He hoped. If things got weird he could always walk away.
The dirt road cut across a sagebrush plain, straight as a line. To the west, the Black Hills rose up like a crumbling wall, dark with the smudged color of forests. To the east, the badlands, desolate gullies and washes, pinnacles of eroded stone. Hard to believe anybody could live out here.
Up ahead, right where Walker had asked him to meet her, a Honda CR-V with mud-spattered Illinois plates was parked in a rutted turnout. A woman waited there, leaning against the driver’s side door. She was white, average height and build, had on khaki cargo pants, a shapeless sweatshirt, and dusty work boots. A plain baseball cap mashed down a mess of black hair pulled back in a bun. She looked like someone who’d been working on an archeological dig.
Cormac parked the Jeep alongside her. “Professor Walker?” he asked, stepping out, shutting the door behind him.
She brightened, smiling broadly. “You must be Cormac Bennett. Call me Aubrey. Thank you so much for coming.” She clicked open the back hatch of the SUV with her key fob. “You ready to take a look?”
Amelia definitely was. All this anticipation. He could almost picture Amelia straining forward to get a first look at the artifact.
He explained again, “You understand I may not be able to tell you much. It may be dormant or have some kind of protection on it.”
“Yes, I understand. I’ll be grateful for anything you can tell me.” Once the door was open, she stepped aside, gesturing. “Here it is.”
A beat-up cardboard box sat alone in the back. Inside was the artifact, a piece of dusty pottery, no packing material around it. All by itself, it seemed to lurk. The pot had a round body, a flat base, and a long, narrow neck with a small, spout-like opening. Maybe eight inches high, six wide. The reddish color made it look like a lot of Native American pottery from the Southwest, but the markings on it seemed more like Norse runes. The shape wasn’t like any tradition he—or Amelia rather—knew about.
“What makes you think it’s magical?” he asked. “Anything weird been happening around it? Anything that started when it was first excavated, or when people touched it?”
“Mostly it’s just the way it looks, the way it doesn’t fit with anything else from the time or region. Like it came from another dimension or something, you know? It just makes me nervous.” As if to emphasize this, she shivered and seemed to draw away from it.
That hardly seemed likely, but given some of the shit he’d seen in his time, he wouldn’t discount it. He nudged Amelia. Sense anything?
There’s definitely something. I can’t make it out in detail, though. Magical, yes, but I don’t know what it’s supposed to do. We could try some scrying spells, try to work out what it’s for.
He squinted at it from a couple of different angles. Leaned in to try to get a look down the neck, but he couldn’t see inside. The opening wasn’t wide enough. He’d need a penlight to look down in there.
“Well, what do you think?” the woman asked eagerly.
“Not sure,” Cormac said. “I need to spend a little more time with it.”
Let’s see if there’s anything inscribed on the bottom.
Cormac picked up the pot, turned it over.
And blacked out.
He woke up flat on his back with a raging, hangover-like headache that throbbed from the top of his skull and reached down to his gut. He rolled to his side but didn’t vomit. Felt like he wanted to, though. Resting a moment, he caught his breath, steadied himself. The headache dimmed a little. He squinted against westering sunlight—shadows stretched long over the sagebrush.
Amelia?
She didn’t answer. “Amelia?”
Nothing. Really nothing. He prodded that place in the back of his mind that he thought of as hers, where he usually felt her. It was open, blank, empty.
Amelia was gone.
The ground under Cormac seemed to tilt. How could his brain feel physically empty, an open warehouse echoing with the absence? He squeezed his hands over his ears, as if he had to hold his skull together. Grit his teeth. Swallowed back an incipient scream.
She’d just been knocked unconscious, like him. But nothing like this had happened before. She was nothing but consciousness, she couldn’t be unconscious. That would mean she was— He waited. The sun inched lower, toward dusk. Amelia was still gone. He kept thinking, What do I do? Amelia, what’s happening? The answering silence hurt his skull.