3

Bennie pulled up to a worn-down apartment building that still looked like the hotel it had been fifty years ago. She glanced at Motheater, who was clutching the plastic bag that contained the thrifted clothes they were able to find in the closet.

“It’s small. So we’ll have to work around each other,” Bennie said, walking out of the truck and up to the second level. Motheater followed, back straight, looking around curiously.

Bennie opened the door to her efficiency apartment and let her in. She turned on the lights, illuminating the half-unpacked corner studio, a dozen novels stacked by a mattress that was meticulously made, despite the chaos around it. She had been here less than a month. A little mess was fine.

“Make yourself at home,” Bennie said cautiously as Motheater inspected the stack of books. Taking a deep breath, Bennie glanced behind her.

There, on the small table that folded down from the wall, were a dozen folders, carefully labeled, color coded, and assigned a date. Tacked to the wall above that was a map with red pins in it, looking like something out of a cop serial. Bennie chewed on her bottom lip nervously.

This was it. All the deaths, all the lives, all the people she never knew or had only heard of. Her eyes caught on the most recent pin, labeled with a neat “KAE.” Guilt tasted like a sour apple in her mouth. If she was going to move forward with this insane plan—get Motheater’s magic back, save the miners—she needed to commit.

“I want you to see this,” Bennie said, taking a step back and gesturing Motheater over. Her heart was pounding. She felt like she was standing on the edge of a steep face, trusting someone with all this, barely knowing them, barely knowing anything at all about them.

Motheater seemed to float over. She had been able to change into the oversized sweatshirt and long skirt at the church and looked less like someone you’d expect to see on Sister Wives. With her baggy clothes and choppy hair, she looked almost fashionable.

“About two years ago, my friend and I realized people were disappearing in Kire Mountain,” she explained. “Me and Kelly-Anne began to track all these deaths. We found accounts of miners disappearing for the past two decades.”

“Not like this,” Bennie insisted, pulling out clippings from one of the folders. “Not disappearing in ones and twos like this. Mining disasters are huge, Motheater. They take out . . . thirty, fifty, even two hundred people at a time.”

Motheater was tense, frowning deeply. Bennie could see her fingers digging into her sweatshirt, almost tearing the thin material. Bennie swallowed.

“Six months ago, Kelly-Anne . . . my best friend died,” Bennie said quietly. “She and I were working on this together. And then she went into Kire and never came out.”

Motheater began to breathe harder. Whatever horrible gut-churning guilt Bennie felt didn’t abate. She wasn’t doing this just for herself anymore. This was for Kelly-Anne. This was for everyone that had died. This was for everyone that was going to be killed because White Rock’s greed kept fucking spreading. She had to do this.

“I need to stop White Rock from mining in Kire.”

To her surprise, Motheater nodded immediately. “I reckon you do.”

“I’ve tried everything.” Bennie knew she shouldn’t be telling a stranger all this, especially a stranger as fucking strange as Motheater, but she had nowhere else to turn. “Kelly-Anne was the one everyone in town trusted. The union has filed grievances, but the company’s got too many lawyers. The police can’t do anything. Local activist orgs got they hands tied.”

Motheater’s face was dark, every part of her tense. Bennie knew she was rambling, but she needed this witch to believe her. She needed someone to believe her. She had lost her best friend, her job, and then the relationship that had brought her out to Kiron in the first place. Thinking about Zach still hurt—it had been less than a month since she moved out—but she couldn’t leave Kiron. Not like this. Not when more people would die if she did.

“You think the company killed ’em?” Motheater took a step forward, tilting her head.

“What?” Bennie glanced from the map to Motheater. “The company’s responsible for the miners in the mines. They’re dying in the mines, Motheater, of course it’s White Rock’s fault.”

Motheater hummed. “You know what lives in that mountain?”

The temperature dropped in the efficiency. Bennie shivered.

“Nothing lives in Kire Mountain.”

“Nothing you seen,” Motheater murmured.

Bennie swallowed. White Rock was killing people. The company was killing people.

But magic was real. She had seen it, she had felt it creeping up her hands like broken leather and dark intention. Magic was real, and she had a witch in her apartment, and the temperature was making her breath frost in front of her face.

What if there was something else killing miners in the dark?

Bennie tried to find the words to ask Motheater something, to say anything at all, but a buzz from her pocket distracted her. With a shaky hand, she pulled out her phone.

Fuck. It was Zach. He wanted to come over. She ignored him, instead sending messages to her mother about visiting next month and then a quick text check-in with her coworker at the hardware store. All very normal things, because this was a very normal day, and she was totally, completely normal and not looking to talk about how she had hauled a magic lady out of a stream. She glanced over and noticed Motheater staring at her, no longer observing the map of just over two dozen dead miners.

“You okay?” Bennie asked, eyebrows up.

“What’s that?” Motheater pointed at Bennie’s phone.

“My phone?” Bennie smiled a little. “Come on, you know what a cell phone looks like.”

Motheater shook her head, holding her hand out. “No.”

Bennie passed the phone over, almost automatically, not questioning why she was trusting this woman with her personal device. It didn’t seem like Motheater was about to do anything weird, but she was acting like she had never seen a touchscreen before. She pressed her finger against it hard, making colors flash over the display.

“Easy,” Bennie muttered. “It’s glass.”

“Oh.” Motheater managed to open a mapping application, turning the phone around. “It knows where we are?”

“Yeah, it’s got a little GPS.”

“A what?”

Bennie took a deep breath, finding patience. “Global Positioning System?”

Motheater blinked at her. Nothing registered; the words seemed to be little more than a foreign language Bennie was speaking.

“All right, come on,” Bennie groaned, rubbing her eyes. Magic was one thing—it felt reasonable to accept magic, as bizarre as that sounded. But not knowing about GPS felt like a stretch. “What’s going on?”

“I’m trying to put reason to it,” Motheater muttered, turning the phone over in her hands, the dirt under her nails putting a strange grammar against the screen. “I must have been kept somewhere before you pulled me from the river. I have a well in me, but I feel . . . old. In two places at once.”

Bennie steeled herself. What was one more mystery? As if her life hadn’t been consumed by a mysterious death rate for the past two years, as if she hadn’t been in a pained, misunderstood grief for months. She reached out to touch Motheater’s arm. Motheater flinched before taking a deep breath. She seemed much younger like this, dark eyes wide and lost. It was a far cry from the righteousness she wore when she was denouncing Delancey.

Bennie’s stomach leaped into her throat. Damn her bleeding heart. She shifted and moved to hug Motheater, rubbing her back gently. “I need to know my name,” Motheater murmured. “I don’t know myself.”

“We’ll get you back,” Bennie murmured. She realized that she was becoming a little obsessed. Motheater was endlessly fascinating, and Bennie had a bad habit of collecting the most broken, fascinating things, although they were not typically people. She thought about the cracked snail shells she collected from the edge of her grandmother’s porch as a kid, the blue eggshells with little bits of yellow stuck inside, and wondered if Motheater would fit in with those things, chipped-off teeth and all.

As Bennie rubbed her shoulder, Motheater shifted, laying her head against Bennie’s shoulder, sliding one hand up to hold onto her waist. It was the smallest acceptance of comfort. Bennie slowly ran her hand through Motheater’s short black hair, petting her. Motheater was going to help her bring down White Rock. Or stop the killings. Both, if Bennie had her way.

“I promise, all right? We’ll figure you out,” Bennie said softly. Her assurance came out easy. It was something, Bennie thought with the taste of a crab apple souring her mouth, that Kelly-Anne would have said.

It might have been exactly what she said.

When Bennie first moved to Kiron with Zach, they had bounced around apartments, trailer homes, and even basements for nearly four months. But Bennie had sworn that she owed it to herself to try with Zach. She loved him. That love was worth fighting for. Zach’s Uncle Trip had offered them a basement apartment, but she had only managed to stay under that roof for a few weeks before Bennie couldn’t take it anymore.

Living with Zach was fine; living with his white uncle, who was a few years shy of Zach’s age and asked stupid questions about her education and complimented her vocabulary, was becoming untenable. She was going to snap Trip’s neck. The irony of a man with an eighth-grade reading level thinking that she was smart, but not as smart as him, was not fucking lost on her.

Bennie had only been working at White Rock for a few months when she complained to Kelly-Anne during lunch. The two Black women had spotted each other in the cafeteria and immediately sat next to each other, becoming fast friends in a company that was mostly white and run by the men.

“There’s just nowhere to live that doesn’t have a leaky roof or a creepy landlord,” Bennie said, scanning Craigslist for the hundredth time. “How do y’all find anything around here?”

“Well, you’re looking online instead of in the local paper,” Kelly-Anne pointed out, smiling a little. “Why isn’t Zach helping?”

“Oh, he is,” Bennie insisted, still scrolling. “He’s just got low standards. If we’re sticking around here, I want a real home, not a basement.”

Kelly-Anne laughed, got up, and went to pick up a biweekly Kiron Gazetteer that someone had abandoned after completing the crossword.

“Here,” Kelly-Anne said, sitting next to Bennie. “Property.”

Bennie whistled, eyebrows up. Next to the houses and apartments were ads for massive swaths of land, some listed as “Mineral Rights Contingent.” “Well, shit.”

“This one is in my neighborhood.” Kelly-Anne pointed to an ad for a “cozy ranch, forest-side.” “I’ll take you after work.”

“I dunno if we’re in the market to buy a house . . .” Bennie said, hesitating.

“That’s fine, we’ll figure it out.” Kelly-Anne smiled, then whipped out a pen, writing her number and address under the ad. Bennie was touched by her openness, how she was so fucking earnest about this. Bennie wasn’t an imposition to Kelly-Anne—she was someone worth taking care of. “Here. Holler anytime. I’ll help as much as I can.”

Bennie’s phone vibrated loudly on the table, startling her. She pulled back from Motheater and checked the text, frowning.

Confused, Motheater glanced over. “What’s it doing?”

“Oh, fuck,” Bennie muttered. “My ex is here.”

“Yer what?” Motheater frowned as Bennie walked over to the door.

She took a deep breath to steady herself. There was no way she would be able to explain Motheater to him. And worse, knowing Zach, he might want to offer advice, or get involved somehow, or just try to help. Which he’d do selflessly, of course, and then she’d be the asshole.

“Don’t say nothing,” Bennie muttered as Motheater leaned against the counter next to the totality of her investigation. She decided there was nothing she could do about the map. She had left Zach a month ago over this murder mountain shit; he should know that she hadn’t given up.

Honestly, the breakup might have been worse if she didn’t have her conspiracy set up in her bedroom.

There was a knock on the door. Bennie glanced at Motheater. The witch just tilted her head, and Bennie took a deep breath before she opened the door. Taking up her doorstep was Zach Gresham, a young man with cornflower-blue eyes, pale skin, and shoulders that Bennie used to swoon over.

“You can’t just come over whenever you want to,” Bennie said, tightly.

“I wanted to drop some of your things off,” Zach offered, holding out a large canvas bag. He shifted on his feet, trying to look around Bennie into the small studio apartment. She knew he was curious about where she had ended up after she had left their house three weeks ago. Well, it was his house now. Fuck. She pushed that feeling of resentment down fast.

Bennie was grateful that the door prevented Zach from peeking in to see Motheater and the map on the other side.

“Thanks.” Bennie took the bag and placed it just inside the door. It was a bunch of knickknacks and souvenirs that Bennie definitely didn’t have room for now that she and Zach weren’t sharing a two-and-a-half-bedroom.

God, this was horrible. She was still hurting over losing Zach so completely. It didn’t matter that as soon as Kelly-Anne had died last fall, she knew it was over between her and Zach, but she had thought that maybe having to go to one of their friends’ funerals would convince him. It hadn’t.

She wanted to slam the door in his face and lock herself in the bathroom.

But Zach wasn’t moving from her doorstep. To his credit, he seemed to have showered after work before coming over. He was out of the White Rock uniform, which was a relief, as he absolutely knew how much Bennie resented the company, but Bennie wasn’t about to let a little bit of going tidy sway her. His dark blond hair was still a holy mess, sticking up in the back.

“I wanted to talk—”

“No.” Bennie eased the door closed a little more, not totally shutting it in his face, but getting close. She didn’t want to argue; she had other things on her mind. Magic, murder, dead best friends. She couldn’t deal with her ex, too. “Not now, all right.”

“Bennie—”

“Nope.”

Bennie took a step back, about to shut the door.

Zach spoke up quick. “I don’t want to talk about us.”

There was something in Zach’s voice that made her stop. He wasn’t trying to keep the door open, wasn’t pressing into her space, either. Zach had never been pushy, not when they had met at Tech years ago, and not now. Bennie had always felt an assurance of safety around him.

She took a look at him. His hands were worrying the brim of his trucker hat that she hated that he loved. There was something desperately charming about him still, and Bennie felt their years dragging her back. He was a good man, even if things hadn’t worked out between them.

“I have company.”

“Won’t take a sec,” Zach said, eyebrows up. “Please, Bennie.”

Bennie took a deep breath. Guilt echoed in her chest. She shifted on her feet, glanced at Motheater—still half-hidden by the door—and then gestured Zach inside, resigned.

“Thanks.” Zach stepped in and spotted Motheater, dressed in some acid-wash sweatshirt two sizes too big, her arms crossed, dark eyes narrowed. He froze, unsure. Zach might have been prepared for an old friend, but not a new face, especially considering the three-digit population of Kiron.

“Who’s this?” he asked, confused. Motheater seemed to uncurl like a snake, her expression strange.

“That’s a shitty way to introduce yourself,” Bennie snapped.

Zach pressed his mouth. He gave Bennie a sidelong look before stepping forward and offering Motheater his hand. “Sorry, long shift. I’m Zach.”

Motheater didn’t move, and Zach was left there with his hand out, waiting.

Bennie sighed. “She’s having a rough day.”

“Right.” Zach moved back and looked around, realizing for the first time that he wouldn’t have any privacy. The three of them stood awkwardly around, frustratingly still and silent.

Bennie gestured. “You have the floor, Zach.”

Zach hesitated, looking between the two of them. Bennie could tell there was something wrong here. This wasn’t like Zach. He was direct; he didn’t stumble over what he wanted to say.

“Sorry, I—” Zach paused and then stared directly at Motheater. She narrowed her eyes at him, a twitch around her mouth, like she wanted to tear at his throat. “You’re her.”

Bennie’s eyebrows snapped down. Her heart jumped. How did Zach know Motheater? “Excuse me?”

Zach had gone from nervous to rigid, his eyes fixed on Motheater.

“We pulled a body out of the mine today,” Zach said. “We pulled her”—he pointed at Motheater—“out of a coal vein, half in the bedrock of Kire.”

Bennie’s stomach swooped like she had taken a hairpin turn on a four-wheeler, just barely off-balance. She had pulled Motheater out of a stream that White Rock used for slough . . . Hadn’t she been looking for bodies? Hadn’t she hoped to find a body at the bottom of that creek? Her breath came faster, and she turned slowly to stare at the witch in her bedroom.

Motheater’s arms dropped, her fingers twitching. Bennie felt the temperature in the room plummet.

It was the same gesture that had dragged Bennie into the loam.

“Whoa, hey—” Bennie immediately stepped in front of Zach, in between him and Motheater. Bennie pressed down her fear and turned to the witch.

“You stand down,” she said, pointing at Motheater. Something in her voice must have startled the woman, because she blinked and her hands dropped. “You.” She looked at Zach. “What in the hell are you talking about?”

Zach took a step back, near the chair and mattress, sliding away from the conspiracy corner. He hadn’t looked away from Motheater. “Today, at work, during excavation, we unearthed a body from inside the mountain.”

Bennie glared at Zach. She believed him, she couldn’t believe him. She steadied her voice. “In the mountain?”

“In the mountain,” Zach repeated, still staring at Motheater, who was clenching her hands at her sides, looking murderous. He was pale, his breath coming fast, color along his hands and the back of his neck. He gestured at Motheater. “The body. That woman came out of the mountain, half dead, barely breathing.”

“I weren’t dead,” Motheater hissed. “I was waiting.”

Bennie could only stare, the accusations falling like a rockslide down a mountain, picking up more and more debris as it went.

Motheater was a strange creature, not quite human, leaning forward, leering at Zach, sharp teeth on display.

“You were in the mountain?” Bennie asked her, whispering.

“And he was biting into it,” Motheater snarled. “I remember the cold stone, I remember the tracks of coal that shackled me. I know little else, but I know now that I was buried for a reason, and you took me out.”

Zach stepped back, openly shocked and scared. The apartment was as cold as a mine shaft. Bennie couldn’t feel ashamed as he glanced over Motheater’s shoulder and went red as he recognized what she stood in front of.

He had just admitted he found a body in that damn mountain. He had just admitted that he had gotten rid of a body he had found in the mountain. Any sympathy Bennie had for him melted away. They were done. She was right to leave. For a few seconds, it felt like a bird’s wings beat inside of her chest instead of a heart. She took a deep breath, calming down.

Motheater tilted her head up, voice husky and soft. “I don’t know what I was doing, life limned in the heart of old Kire, but you were right when you spoke out ’gainst your foreman. You didn’t have no right to move me. Now I’m a lost witch with no memory, and you’re one of them that woke me up.”

The efficiency seemed to close in on the three of them. Motheater took another step forward, raising her hand, but Bennie grabbed her wrist, standing in front of her, getting in between Motheater and Zach again. Panic had made her stupid. Zach’s admission had made her resolute. She turned her hand to grasp Motheater’s tightly, leaning close.

“Calm down,” Bennie said, in the tone that she would take with her older sister whenever she began to start shit with their mom. “Not in my house.”

The vibration in the room shifted and Motheater hesitated.

Bennie’s grip was firm, trapping Motheater’s fingers. She held that tension with the witch a few more seconds, noting Motheater’s short lashes, her cheekbones like chopped crystal, stunning like a mountain ridge. Bennie knew her heart was beating fast, not just because she was scared. She turned to Zach.

“Go outside,” Bennie said, voice measured. “I’ll come out in a few minutes to talk.”

“Ben—”

“No, Zach.”

Zach, jaw tight, nodded. He looked over at Motheater again, but the witch was deliberately staring at the scuffed-up sneakers that she and Bennie had dragged out of the bargain closet.

“Fine,” he said. “I don’t know what . . .” His voice trailed off. He shook his head and left.

Bennie took a deep breath, closed her eyes, centering herself. Motheater tugged at their hands, not trying to pull away, but testing it.

“I’m remembering some.”

Bennie looked at Motheater. She seemed small, chastised, like she was used to being driven out in order to make others more comfortable. The oversized sweatshirt certainly made the woman look more like a child.

“The more I’m here, the more people I meet . . . It’s coming back to me. Who I was.”

Bennie squeezed Motheater’s hand again and then let go, walking into the bathroom. She splashed cold water on her face and pulled her braids back, keeping them away from her face with an elastic.

“Just stay in here, all right?” Bennie said as she went to the door. Motheater was still standing where Bennie had let go of her, like a lost puppy. “I’ll only be a minute.”

Motheater nodded, and Bennie slipped out of the efficiency, closing the door behind her. Zach was pacing back and forth on the porch. Bennie’s hurt was too fresh to let her feel anything but ache when she looked at him, hair tousled like wheatgrass, big hands unsure where to go.

He was about to speak, but Bennie held both hands up.

“I don’t want to talk about Motheater.”

“About what?”

Bennie groaned, putting her hands over her face. Why the fuck didn’t Motheater have a normal name? Any name, any fucking goddamn name.

“Okay, well,” Zach said, his tone going from disbelieving to worried, which was exactly what Bennie didn’t want. “Okay. I won’t ask, all right. I’ll just . . . I just needed you to know that I thought I pulled a dead body out of the stone today, and then it breathed. And then, I thought I had killed someone when my crew threw that same breathing body in the slough. You were right, there’s something rotten in White Rock, and I just—”

“I am absolutely not ready to be your friend right now,” she said sternly. “I can’t do it yet.” Especially not when all he could talk about was what White Rock was doing without apologizing. If this is what they did when they found living bodies, what would they do if they found someone dead? She felt her rage building, the hurt and horror and indignation. Where were the rest of the miners who had disappeared in Kire? Where did the bodies go? Where was Kelly-Anne Elliot? Did she need to walk all along that creek where she had found Motheater, poking at drowned critters until she unearthed something human?

He had just confirmed what she and Kelly-Anne had suspected about White Rock’s work in Kire. What she had ruined her reputation over, what had got her fired, what drove her to break up with him. This is what had killed her best friend, and he had just admitted that if it wasn’t an accident, at the very least he had just told her that White Rock had no compunction about covering up killings.

“I didn’t know, Bennie, I swear I didn’t,” Zach said plaintively. “This ain’t normal, and maybe it ain’t ever been normal.”

“Zach, stop, please.” Bennie’s voice nearly cracked. Had he come here to confess or get comfort? He thought he had killed somebody, and this was his reaction? She seethed. Bennie hated that mining had made him like this, that Zach had returned home and decided to stay in line to keep White Rock happy. He thought that he had a hand in killing a woman, and his reaction was to ask Bennie to take care of him? Not fucking likely.

“Yeah, all right.” Zach’s voice was soft, and Bennie knew he was hurting. “Still, I . . . I’m glad I came over. At least now I know I didn’t . . .”

Bennie let herself feel some amount of pity for him. He still hadn’t apologized, but she was choosing to ignore that. “Yeah, she’s fine. Fuck if I know how.”

“Right.”

“Right.” Bennie shivered and took a step back. There was a cold wind coming down from the mountains that surrounded Kiron. “I’m going inside. I’ll reach out in a few days, okay?”

Zach didn’t respond, big hands still worrying at his hat. The breakup hadn’t been easy on either of them; it had been drawn out and extended, and then finally shattered when Bennie realized that his lukewarm acceptance of her conspiracy theorizing would never materialize into actual support, even after Kelly-Anne’s death.

“Okay?” Bennie tried again.

She wasn’t convinced Zach knew how deeply he had hurt her when his steadiness turned to passivity. Did he really understand the depth of his betrayal when he had simply agreed not to stand in her way? How could they be together when he couldn’t separate love from loneliness?

Zach finally nodded. “Okay,” he repeated, looking up at her.

The silence, taut as a birch bending under winter, did nothing to convince Bennie that Zach had heard her. She nodded stiffly and went back into the efficiency, closing the door on him.