“Go ahead,” Loc replied, although there was a sadness in his tone that worried her. “I am ready to hear whatever they have to say.”
Miranda Castillo was not pleased, Loc could tell that much. Her arms were crossed and her full mouth was pressed into a flat line, and although she didn’t speak as Cat did her best to recount what had happened over the past few days, it was obvious that the Castillo prima had plenty of thoughts on the subject of Loc and his search for someone who could assist him in returning to his own world.
Actually, it was Rafael Castillo, her consort, who spoke first. Loc could see the resemblance between him and his sister, in the glossy near-black hair, the arched brows, the high cheekbones. He sat next to his wife on one of the couches in their large living room and directed his words to Catalina. “You didn’t think it was important for us to know that you had a demon lord staying with you, Cat?”
Her shoulders lifted. “Not really. I just gave him some crash space.”
Human slang for a place to stay. Loc could tell she hated being put on the spot like this; although he did not know her as well as he would like, he had come to realize that she was a private person, that there were many things in her past she hadn’t shared with anyone, not even the brother she fiercely loved.
“I know I was imposing on her,” he said. “But I could not think of where else to go.”
“You spent eight months wandering the world, and suddenly ran out of resources as soon as you got to Santa Fe?” the prima inquired, lip curling slightly. “I find that a little hard to believe.”
Of course it was difficult to believe, because it wasn’t so much that he’d run out of resources — he always had as much ready cash as he needed — but that he’d needed someplace to stop and catch his breath, so to speak. Unfortunately, Loc guessed that trying to explain how his soul had reached out for Cat’s would not go over very well with either Miranda or her consort.
He found himself shrugging, just as Cat had a moment earlier. “I realized I was in need of counsel. Cat offered me a place to stay, and I was grateful to accept.”
The prima — who was young and beautiful, but whose beauty did not seem to affect Loc at all — and her husband exchanged sideways glances, but neither of them said anything for a moment. When Miranda finally spoke, she seemed willing to leave aside the problem of Loc staying at Cat’s place and instead pushed on to what she plainly considered to be the heart of the matter. “Tell me about this Nicholas Toulouse. How much of a threat is he, really?”
“I don’t know for certain,” Loc confessed. “I believe he is quite powerful, but he is also just one man. And, unlike Simon Escobar, he does not have access to the spell books he desires. Also, from what I have been able to tell, he seems content to stay in his house in the Garden District. He draws what he wants to him, rather than leaving to seek it out elsewhere.”
“Well, that’s something,” Rafael Castillo said. “I’m not sure it’s enough, though. I mean, it was before my time, but I’m pretty sure Escobar’s father accomplished everything he did without the help of any spell books. Maybe this Toulouse character is the same way.”
“Possibly.” Loc couldn’t say one way or another, for of course he had not been in New Orleans when the dark warlock came on the scene, which had to have been many years earlier. “I haven’t seen any true demonstrations of his power, and so, as I told Cat, I don’t know for sure what powers he commands on his own.”
“Really, I just thought you needed to know he was out there,” Cat said. She rubbed her palms on the knees of her jeans, then clasped her hands together. Although she sat next to him on the couch, she made sure more than a foot of space remained safely between them, possibly so her brother would have no reason to comment on their proximity to one another. “And the books are safe, anyway, right?”
“Safe as we can make them,” Miranda said. “Rafe’s cousin thinks it’s better to have them here, since she doesn’t trust the de la Paz clan to guard them the way they should be, but at this point, I’m starting to wonder whether it’s better if we just send the damn things back. They should never have been our problem to begin with.”
Although Loc understood the truth of this statement — the grimoires were only in Castillo territory because Simon Escobar had brought them here — he wasn’t sure whether sending them back to their rightful owners was the best idea. After all, the de la Pazes hadn’t done a very good job of safeguarding them in the first place.
He also hadn’t missed the way Miranda carefully omitted the name of the cousin who was the books’ current guardian. Clearly, the prima still didn’t trust him, despite the aid he’d provided in their last desperate battle against the Escobar warlock. Not that Loc really blamed her; if their positions had been reversed, he wasn’t sure whether he would have trusted himself, either.
Cat spoke then, echoing what he had just been thinking. “It’s probably better if we sit on them for a while. I mean, from what you told Rafe and me, Simon made it sound as if it wasn’t too hard for him to steal them in the first place. What if the books go back to the de la Paz clan, and this Nicholas Toulouse person just goes there to steal them? At least now we know what’s going on. It’s been radio silence from the de la Pazes this whole time, hasn’t it? You’d think if they knew where the books were, they would have reached out to us by now.”
Judging by the way neither Rafe nor Miranda replied right away, Loc thought it fairly obvious that they’d already had this discussion, probably more than once, and had probably come to the same conclusion. As he gazed at their troubled expressions, an idea came to him, one so simple that he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.
“I can go to de la Paz territory and see if there are any signs that they have missed the books, or at least are looking for them. It is simple enough for me to slip in and out of a place without being noticed.”
The prima sat up a little straighter on the couch, even as Cat shifted where she sat and sent him a look of consternation. “You can do that? Go in and out of our territories with no one realizing you’re there?” Miranda asked.
“Yes.” It was easy to hide his nature from witches and warlocks, and equally as easy to make himself completely invisible, if that was what a certain situation required. “A little judicious spying is just what the situation requires, I think.”
Once again, Miranda and Rafe exchanged a glance. “If you’re sure….” Rafe began, then let the words trail off, as if he didn’t know whether to protest or simply say “thank you.”
“I am sure,” Loc said calmly. “This shouldn’t take me very long.”
And before any of them could reply, he took himself away, to the heat and the brightness of Phoenix — or, more specifically, to Scottsdale, the expensive suburb where the primas of the de la Paz clan had lived for nearly a hundred years now. Like the Castillo house, the home of Zoe Sandoval, the head witch of the family, was large and built in the hacienda style, although something about its architecture felt more friendly, more welcoming, although Loc couldn’t say precisely why.
What was not at all welcoming was the searing heat that greeted him as soon as he came into being in the courtyard of said house. A fountain splashed in the center of that courtyard, and bright flowers bloomed all around, and yet the air seemed hot enough to flash-fry anything it touched.
Not that he really had to worry about such things. His mind and spirit and body were here, but hidden to the eye — and to the special gift all witches and warlocks possessed, of being able to sense when they were in the presence of one of their kind.
But Loc was not one of them, and never would be.
He passed silently through the front door and found himself in an entryway with a red tile floor and dark-beamed ceilings overhead. Almost at once he heard the metallic “clack-clack-clack” of a hammer. It seemed to be coming from the garden at the rear of the house, and so that was where he headed.
As soon as he drifted through the back wall of the ho
use, he located the source of the hammering noise. The garden was large and quite beautiful, with beds of well-tended roses and another stately fountain off to one side, but nearly a third of it had been given up to a substantial addition to the back of the house. From what Loc could tell, most of the addition’s frame was now in place, and several workmen were in the process of nailing pieces of plywood over the frame.
Well, warlock workmen, that was. He could tell at once these were not ordinary humans, and neither were the man and woman who stood off to one side, observing the work as it was being performed.
They both appeared to be of some four decades or so, the woman exotically lovely with her long black hair and tip-tilted dark eyes, the man probably a little older, although there was no gray in his dark red hair. The power that emanated from both of them was quite strong, and Loc realized he was looking at Zoe Sandoval, the prima of the de la Paz clan, and her consort, who was a McAllister warlock but had left his clan to come live among his soul mate’s people.
Despite the obvious irritation on Zoe’s face, Loc noted the way the pair held hands as they watched the construction, the fond light in Evan’s eyes as he gazed down at his wife.
“You’d think in a clan the size of ours, we’d have more than three general contractors,” she said.
“It’s going up fast,” her husband replied. “I’m sure they’ll have it done by the end of the summer.”
“If they don’t fall over from heat exhaustion first.” She lifted her heavy black hair away from her neck with her free hand, as if to allow the breeze to cool her a bit, then let it fall back down again.
“They’ll be fine.” Evan looked away from her, over to the addition in process, and added, “But it does help that Jose’s talent is calling for a fresh breeze whenever they need it.”
“True.” Zoe was silent for a moment, studying the building before her. “You really think it’s going to be big enough?”
“We measured and did all the calculations four separate times. All the books are going to fit just fine.”
“I hope so. We need to make sure they’re safe.”
This exchange told Loc what he needed to know — that the de la Paz clan was all too aware of the books that had gone missing, and so they’d obviously decided to add a library onto their prima’s house, so that she could watch over those prized possessions and use her powers to make sure no more thefts such as the ones Simon Escobar committed ever happened again. And it also probably explained why the de la Pazes hadn’t said a word about the affair. They must have been embarrassed to have lost track of items as powerful and dangerous as the grimoires that had been taken, and so wanted to make sure they had a secure place to store the books once they asked for them back.
But even with warlock contractors working on the build, it didn’t look as though it could possibly be ready for a few more months, since once the outer structure was complete, they would still need to finish off the interior, install bookcases, and so forth. Loc would be the first to admit that he did not have any in-depth knowledge of human construction techniques, but he had inhabited enough different buildings in this world to know that most of them were more complicated than they appeared on the surface. At the same time, he wondered how many books would end up being stored here. The library addition looked large enough to store hundreds, if not thousands of volumes. The de la Paz clan must have a very large collection indeed.
It seemed clear enough to him that, even if Miranda and Rafael Castillo had been willing to send the books over now, the de la Pazes were in no real position to take them back. And really, even once the grimoires were ensconced here in the library that was being built expressly for them, they might not be any safer than where they were now. Loc did not know very much of Zoe Sandoval — except that once she, too, had dabbled in forbidden magic and faced some very unexpected consequences — but he knew there was no way her magic was any match for Miranda’s, Miranda who was the daughter of a prima and a primus, and who had also taken on the Castillo clan’s prima powers when it became woefully obvious that their true prima was not up to the task of defeating Simon Escobar.
No, it seemed Loc would have to return to Santa Fe and let them and Cat know that, while the de la Paz clan was gearing up to ask for their property back, they would not be doing so in the immediate future. Perhaps it would give the Castillo prima and her consort a modicum of relief to know they would not be the stewards of the grimoires indefinitely, but none of that solved the more immediate problem of Nicholas Toulouse.
If he even did anything at all. From what the witch in the jewelry shop had said, he seemed to delight in causing mental torment for others, and so it was entirely possible that the mere chance he might come to Santa Fe to wreak havoc was enough for him, knowing that it would cause the Castillos a good deal of worry and trouble.
Or he could be planning such a foray this very moment.
Since Loc knew he had seen enough here at the de la Paz prima’s home, he whisked himself away to New Orleans, back to the cloistered brick house in the Garden District, where the tall trees hid the darkness of what lay within those walls. This time, though, he did not walk up the front steps and knock at the door, but slid through the very bricks of the house, entering through one of the kitchen walls.
On the surface, the room looked ordinary enough, if rather stark with its whitewashed cabinets and white marble countertops and stainless appliances. Something bubbled in a large stainless-steel pot on the stove, and Loc moved closer, curiosity driving him to discover what the warlock was cooking for his next meal.
An acrid odor rose from within the pot, and when he looked inside, he saw a dark, viscous substance that filled it nearly halfway. Not soup, though.
Blood.
His nose wrinkled. Loc was certainly not what one could call squeamish — on many occasions he’d calmly dispatched demons who had somehow failed in their duty to him or otherwise showed that they were not worthy — but at least he had never made a soup of their blood, or worn the bones of his fallen enemies like beads around his neck. What precisely Nicholas Toulouse was doing with this blood, Loc didn’t know, but this was dark, dark magic, even if the blood in that pot had come from an animal and not a human being.
The kitchen door opened, and the dark warlock entered. His appearance was quite altered from the last time Loc had seen him — now strands of silver showed in his black hair, and his smooth brown skin was smooth no longer, but furrowed with lines around his eyes and mouth. For a second, he paused, his strange, pale eyes scanning the kitchen, but then he seemed to dismiss whatever had been bothering him and headed straight for the tall stock pot and its gruesome contents.
Had the warlock detected him somehow? Loc couldn’t be sure, although it appeared that even if he had sensed something strange about his surroundings, it hadn’t been enough to keep him from his original errand here. Toulouse retrieved a large silver ladle from where it had been lying on a spoon rest next to the stove, then dipped it into the pot as he murmured something under his breath. That near-whisper wasn’t loud enough for Loc to hear clearly, but he guessed it was some kind of incantation.
Spell recitation complete, the warlock lifted the ladle from the pot and blew on it gently, then swallowed a large mouthful of the hot blood. Almost at once, the silver disappeared from his hair, and the lines on his face smoothed themselves away. Now he looked much as he had when Loc first encountered him, although possibly even younger. Smiling, he drank down more of the viscous liquid, then went to the sink and rinsed off the ladle. However, he made no move to clean out the pot itself, but instead placed a lid on it and turned off the gas burner underneath.
These tasks done, he exited the kitchen with much more spring in his step than had been there when he first entered it, while Loc remained where he was, a frown pulling at his invisible brow.
Obviously, the blood and the spell combined in some sort of ritual to restore Nicholas Toulouse’s lost youth. Precisely how often he had
to perform this ritual, Loc didn’t know for sure. However, it was still helpful to know that the dark warlock relied on such a crutch to maintain his health and vigor. Such a reliance was a weakness.
And weaknesses existed to be exploited.
12
Loc reappeared as precipitously as he had vanished, and Cat startled. So did Miranda and Rafe, although Miranda recovered herself quickly enough and said, “Well?”
“The de la Pazes are building a library at their prima’s house, a library to store all their magical books,” he replied. His gaze moved to Cat for a moment, and she felt a flush touch her cheeks, even though the glance he gave her lasted only long enough for her to realize he was looking in her direction. “They obviously know what was stolen from them, but they have no wish to take the books back until they have a safe place to keep them.”
“Well, good,” Rafe put in. “I guess we can wait to hear from them. I suppose I should be glad they’re trying to be proactive, but I’d sure as hell like to know what took them so long.”
“It was probably harder than we think to figure out exactly what was missing,” Miranda said. Although she was frowning slightly, her tone was milder than Cat had expected. Then again, she knew some of the de la Paz witches and warlocks, because there had been a good bit of intermarrying between the southern Arizona clan and its northern counterparts. Probably, she was doing her best not to be too judgmental. “If those books were scattered amongst the various households, and if people didn’t keep very good records, I can see why it might take months and months to get everything sorted out.”
Rafe didn’t seem as if he was quite so inclined to be generous. A frown of his own creasing his brows, he said, “Still, it all seems pretty sloppy to me.”
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