More than that, it was open a crack. As if the driver had moved the handle but hadn’t had the strength to push the door any further. Cormac opened it. The man’s hand flopped down. A sour smell came out—a sickroom reek, as when someone had been ill for a long time.
The driver, Ford Bellamy, was dead. Clearly dead, his eyes open and clouded, his cheeks sunken, his body slumped in a limp, familiar manner. Nothing looked quite like a dead body. His stylish, expensive clothes hung off him as if they were too large, and seemed to drape around a too-thin frame. The bones of his hands stood out, skeletal, the flesh shrunken away.
He looked like he had starved to death.
He can’t have; he’s only been missing a day. Half of a day. A body like this—he would have had to be starving for weeks. Months, even.
“Your spell,” he said. “The one that lets you talk to the dead—”
I fear there isn’t enough body left to hold a soul. Besides—do you think he understood what was happening to him?
Cormac guessed he didn’t, that the man had been overcome with—whatever it was that overcame him. Probably in the middle of driving back down the mountain. When he tried to open the door, to get out, to escape—he’d been too weak to do even that much. He must have been terrified, though the desiccated features didn’t reveal any dying expression.
A phone rested in a drink holder between the front seats. Cormac checked it—the battery was dead. Like something had sucked away all the energy in the car, not just Bellamy’s life. He put the phone back, just like he’d found it. He did some more searching—and found a keychain-sized Leatherman dropped on the floorboard at Bellamy’s feet. Knife blade open, ready to use and then abandoned, just like at Weber’s cabin.
On the dash, tucked right up against the glass, a piece of bone. A bit of rib, the length of his thumb.
The cabin—we must get there immediately.
“No. We need to get the hell out of here. Get back home,” Cormac said. His first job, always, was keeping themselves safe. He was ready to hit the freeway and never come back.
We can’t do that.
Whatever this was. . .it wasn’t going to stop. Was Domingo already dead too? Cormac tried to call her again—and couldn’t get signal.
We help her by stopping this at the source—the cabin. You aren’t one to run. I know you.
When you have the skills, when you have the tools—you need to use them. His father had taught him that. Should have applied to carpentry, not. . .whatever this was. And his father had died young. “I usually know what I’m up against when I stay to fight.” Whatever this was. . .could they even fight back?
Sacrifices, Amelia murmured finally, from the back of Cormac’s mind. Thinking out loud, as out loud as she could. He’s making sacrifices.
“What kind of sacrifices? I don’t get it.”
A sacrifice presumes that the deaths will end when the perpetrator attains whatever goal is aspired to. But then what is the goal? To feed whatever got fed a hundred and fifty years ago when the Donner Party was stranded here? But what did that accomplish? All those people died, and for what?
“Fame,” Cormac murmured. “A hundred and fifty years later, we’re still talking about them.”
He felt Amelia give a frustrated huff, and could picture her brushing the fabric of her skirt in irritation. The wrinkle to her brow, the lines around her mouth. There are easier ways to achieve fame, even as a killer. Jack the Ripper didn’t go through this much trouble.
“Maybe this isn’t about fame as a killer.”
That leaves us back where we started. These deaths are sacrifices. They’re fueling something. But what?
“Do we go back down the mountain to tell someone about Bellamy, or check out the cabin?”
Cabin. While the scent is fresh.
So be it then. Report the body later.
Sometimes Cormac really hated magic.
Me as well, Amelia said, which surprised him, and she explained. It never occurred to me to use magic to hurt anyone. I only observed so many inexplicable details in the world, and I wanted to know more. I wanted knowledge. And yes, power. But I hoarded my power like treasure. I didn’t have a purpose for it. Not like this. Any purpose that could be derived from this must be terrible. We are moving toward a very dark place, Cormac.
Wasn’t the first time. They were better equipped than most to go there. “So let’s do it,” he muttered.
What made it hard, they weren’t looking for an assailant, an artifact, a thing. A target he could hunt and kill. Instead, they were looking for a curse, a black hole, a free-floating area of ill intent. Invisible, deadly, that also seemed to have intent and a vast capacity for evil. This force wanted to kill painfully. Vampirically, almost. Not consuming blood or energy or spirit, but the basic physicality necessary for life. It was vicious in a way that most people wouldn’t think of. Not even someone like Cormac. There were faster, nastier ways of killing.
If only they could set out a net to catch the thing, like a bird.