My first reaction was to say no, I wouldn’t, but that would be childish. Setting aside the off-putting undercurrent in Marie’s reaction to me, everyone else had been very friendly. Maybe too friendly, because of course it didn’t take much for me to start wondering just why they were being so nice. I’d worry about that later, though. I was certainly in no imminent danger, except maybe from indigestion after eating my way through everything from chili cornbread to Swedish meatballs.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, and hoisted my plastic cup in his direction. “You just gave me a refill, remember?”
“Right.” The corners of his eyes crinkled as he smiled down at me, and he bent and kissed me quickly, a soft touch of his lips at the edge of my mouth. “Don’t eat too much, though. I don’t want you so full that we can’t have a repeat engagement when we get back to the apartment.”
“Not a problem,” I said. “I’ll have, what, a whole twenty minutes to digest even if we left right now?”
He shook his head and moved away, heading toward a hall I’d noticed earlier, although I didn’t know which rooms branched off from it. The bathroom at least, obviously. Or one of them, as a place this big had to have at least three or four.
I took a few steps toward the fireplace. This room had its own hearth, not as grand as the one in the living room, but still imposing, made of more stone and reaching up to the wood-paneled ceiling. The crowd had ebbed away, most people seeming content to let the food they’d eaten settle a bit before they came back for seconds or thirds.
“Enjoying yourself?”
Damon Wilcox’s voice. Something in those silky tones sent an icy shiver down my spine. My fingers tightened on the clear plastic cup I held, and I had to tell myself to relax before I crushed it and spilled wine everywhere.
I took a breath, then forced myself to turn around. He stood a few paces away, watching me, black eyes hooded. He wore a gray houndstooth jacket over a white button-down shirt and jeans, an outfit that seemed calculated to present the perfect image of a college professor relaxing at home.
“Very much,” I said coolly. “You have a beautiful home.”
“You like it?” he inquired. “It could have been your home as well.”
My heart thumped uneasily, and I told myself it was fine. He couldn’t do anything to me here in front of all these people.
What, the same people who stood by and watched while he tried to force the primus bond on you? my brain mocked me. All right, maybe the presence of the Wilcox clan members wasn’t as big a safeguard as I’d thought.
But Connor had just gone down the hall and would be back at any second….
“I’m fine with Connor’s apartment, actually.”
“Are you?”
I paused, then forced myself to meet those piercing black eyes. He can’t do anything to you now, I reassured myself. You’re bonded to his brother. You’re useless to him. He’s just messing with you because he can, and because he’s still pissed that he didn’t get what he wanted.
“More than fine. I mean, I have everything I could possibly want. My consort has turned out to be the man I’ve been dreaming of for years. What girl wouldn’t be thrilled by that?”
His lips thinned. “Sometimes dreams can be nightmares.”
“I know that,” I retorted. “Because you sure did your damn best to screw up mine, didn’t you?”
At least he didn’t try to deny that he’d been meddling with my dreams. “It was an interesting experiment, that’s true. Dreams have…a fascinating energy.”
At that moment I saw Connor approaching from behind his brother. Judging by the look on his face, Connor was not exactly thrilled about the primus swooping down on me the second I was left alone. “Damon,” he said, his voice tight.
Damon allowed his gaze to linger on me for another second before he turned to greet his brother. “Oh, hello, Connor. Angela and I were just having a nice chat.”
Jaw tight, Connor moved past Damon to stand next to me. “Were you?”
No way was I going to challenge Damon here on his home ground. Besides, I’d always been taught that causing a scene at a family get-together was in extremely poor taste. “Oh, yeah,” I said airily. “I was just complimenting Damon on his lovely house. Wasn’t I, Damon?”
Instead of looking annoyed, he merely smiled and said, “Yes, you were. Connor, it seems your little prima here appreciates the finer things in life. You might want to reconsider that cramped apartment of yours.”
Hearing this, Connor looked irritated enough for the both of them. “Actually, I think we’re fine where we are.”
“Oh, definitely,” I chimed in, and wrapped my arm around his waist, snuggling up against him. “I wouldn’t want a place so big that I didn’t have this guy within arm’s length at all times.”
That shot seemed to have found its target. “Oh, so now you’re in love, are you?” Damon sneered. “Well, enjoy it while you can.”
He left us to stew over that as he stalked off toward the living room. As I watched, I saw a young woman around Connor’s age approach him and smile. She stood out amongst the Wilcoxes, her hair a warm honey blonde, unusual in this crowd of brunettes. Damon glanced down at her, seemed to hesitate, then offered her a smile before reaching out and winding his arm around her waist.
I didn’t really want to know what that was all about. Then again, having someone else around for the primus to focus his attention on could only be a good thing.
Connor noticed, too — I could tell by the slight narrowing of his eyes as he watched his brother. However, puzzling over the young woman’s identity wasn’t enough to distract me from what Damon’s words — “enjoy it while you can” — had meant. It was a horrible truth I’d kept buried at the back of my mind, since I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it, acknowledge that I might one day share the same fate as all the other wives of Jeremiah Wilcox’s line.
Connor’s green eyes seemed to glow with anger. He stood there, body hard and unmoving under the arm I still had wrapped around his waist. Very slowly he pulled away from me, then said, “You want to get out of here?”
Relief flooded through me. “I thought you’d never ask.”
8
Revelations
For the first few minutes as we drove away from Damon’s house, Connor was silent. It was still light out, but the sun had begun to slip behind the hills to the west. It would be dusk by the time we got back to the apartment.
Finally he let out a sigh and said, “He wasn’t always like this, you know.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to try to defend his behavior.”
“No.” His gloved fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “I’m not going to do that. But you don’t know what he’s been through.”
“What, besides losing his mother at thirteen and his father twelve years later? You went through the same stuff, and it didn’t turn you into a raging asshole.”
He almost smiled. Almost. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. Okay, that’s true, I suppose. But have you ever wondered why he kidnapped you, wanted to make you his consort?”
Of course I had. It was one of the roughly ten thousand questions I’d wanted to ask Connor but hadn’t quite dared to. I knew it had something to do with my being prima, but I’d never been able to figure out why he though that was so important, other than the obvious benefit of adding a McAllister prima’s stock to the Wilcox gene pool. “You mean it wasn’t my outstanding beauty and charm?”
This time he really did grin. “Besides that.”
“All right, yes, I did wonder. That is, I figured it was partly to try to do what Jasper hadn’t succeeded in doing with my Great-Aunt Ruby. And that all of it was to increase the powers of the Wilcoxes by bonding a primus with a prima.”
“That might have been Jasper’s reasoning, but it wasn’t Damon’s…at least, not the primary reason. No, he thought that by joining with a prima he would finally have the power to break the curse.”
A bette
r reason than creating a race of über-warlocks, I supposed. “So that’s supposed to make me forgive him?”
“Of course not.” Connor tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, then slowed to a stop as we came to a four-way intersection. There wasn’t anyone around for miles, or so it seemed, so after the barest of pauses, he pulled out onto the two-lane road that would lead us back to town. “It wasn’t his first attempt at breaking it. I think after what happened with our mother….” He let the words die away and hang in the air for a moment. “Anyway, he knew that would be his fate as primus if he didn’t make some attempt to change it. So when he got married — ”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “You mean he was married once?”
“Yes.”
I digested that for a moment. No point in asking what had happened to her, either. Fate wasn’t kind to the wives of Jeremiah’s line.
“They met in grad school,” Connor went on. I noticed that he’d flicked on his headlights, even though there was still plenty of light to drive by. “She was a civilian.”
That did shock me. “Seriously? I can’t imagine a Wilcox primus stooping to marry a civilian. I mean,” I went on hurriedly, since I could see Connor beginning to frown, “I know a lot of the people in your family marry civilians. Actually, the McAllisters do, too, and probably for a lot of the same reasons. But never the prima. I just figured you had sort of the same…traditions…in your clan.”
“Normally, we do. But Damon got it in his head that maybe having a civilian wife would change things, render the curse ineffective.”
“So he just picked some poor civilian girl to be his guinea pig?”
“She wasn’t a guinea pig.” Connor’s tone was faintly reproving. “She was smart and beautiful, and he loved her. He did. Not that he came out and told me that, because, well, we didn’t have those sorts of conversations. I was in high school when they got married. Felicia. She was getting her master’s in psychology, and she worshipped him.”
I had a hard time imagining anyone worshipping Damon Wilcox. Then again, if he and this Felicia had gotten married when Connor was still in high school, all this had happened some time ago. “Did she know about the whole…magic thing?”
“He told her. That’s a pretty big secret to keep from your wife, and he knew she wouldn’t be able to have much contact with the clan if he didn’t tell her. But she seemed to take it in stride. I don’t think he told her everything about the curse, though…just that there had been some tragedies in our family. But you could probably say that about most families.”
I thought that was pretty hard on Felicia, and not precisely fair. She deserved the truth, deserved to know what lay in store for her. I didn’t say anything, though, because I wanted to know what had happened to her. Well, the details. Since she wasn’t around now, it was pretty clear that the curse had hit her, just as it had every other wife of a Wilcox primus.
“Everything seemed fine for a few years. She was getting a practice going as a family counselor, and Damon got the associate professorship position here at Northern Pines. I was off at school in Tempe by then, so I wasn’t around to see them much except for a weekend here and there, but they seemed happy. Then Felicia got pregnant.”
Uh-oh. That did seem to be the death knell for the Wilcox wives.
Connor stared straight ahead as he spoke. I didn’t know if he was avoiding my gaze so he couldn’t see my own worry, or whether what was coming next was so painful that the only way he could tell it was without looking at me.
“It was January. I’d just gone back to ASU after winter break. I got a phone call one evening. I think it was a Thursday.” A shake of his head. “Like it matters what day of the week it was. There’d been a car accident. The roads were icy. She was driving home from her office when some tourist lost control at an intersection and T-boned her car. Just slammed right into the driver-side door. They got her to the hospital, but there wasn’t much they could do. She was gone, and the baby.”
My fingers tightened around the purse I held on my lap. A wave of pity rolled over me. Feel sorry for Damon Wilcox? In that moment I did.
“He changed after that. Sold the house they’d been living in, bought this place, and moved way out here. And he started obsessing over how he could end the curse forever.”
I reached over and squeezed Connor’s arm. Briefly, not enough to distract him from his driving, but merely to let him know I was there.
For just a second or two the tight set to his mouth softened a bit. But then I could see his jaw tense again as he said, “That was when he started obsessing about you. The first time he brought it up — it was over the summer, about five years ago now — I told him he was crazy, that he needed to let it go. I mean, bad enough that he should contemplate such a thing at all, considering you were only sixteen at the time and he was past thirty.”
“Definitely disgusting,” I agreed. It actually made my flesh crawl to realize Damon Wilcox had been thinking of me that way even when I was underage.
“Pretty much what I said. And he told me that modern scruples shouldn’t be coming into it, and besides, of course he wouldn’t touch you until you were twenty-one and your prima powers had begun to awaken. Then he sort of dropped it for a while, and since I was busy with school, I let it go as well.” At last he looked over at me. Quickly, so he wouldn’t endanger us while driving or anything, but enough so I could see the warmth in his eyes. “Besides, soon after that I began dreaming of you, and I realized that eventually Damon’s plans were going to come crashing down around him anyway.”
“So you knew all along who I was?” I demanded. “That’s not fair. I never got to see your face in my dreams. Not that I would’ve known who you were, even if I’d been able to get a good look at you.”
“Well, I did know what you looked like, since Damon had people surveilling you for some time.”
Now, that was creepy. “You’re kind of freaking me out, Connor.”
“I thought you should know the truth.”
Just another way he was so very different from his brother. Damon seemed to have only a casual acquaintance with the truth, as far as I could tell. “So, um…surveilling me how, exactly?”
“No family members. Your elders would have sniffed out a Wilcox the second he or she crossed the wards you have set up. But being a college professor does give you access to a bunch of civilians, students who go on day trips all over the place, including Jerome. It didn’t have to sound sinister or anything — he could do something as simple as mention he was thinking of vacationing there, and could they take some photos so he could make a decision that wasn’t based on a B&B’s website marketing copy? You were out in plain view, working at your aunt’s store on the weekends. It was easy to get a picture.”
I thought of the groups of kids around my age who’d come in and out of the store, who’d joked and messed up our stacks of T-shirts and taken loopy Instagram pictures with the javelina figurines in the background. How many of them had been Damon’s unwitting spies?
“That’s messed up, Connor.”
“You think I don’t know that?” The area around us was becoming more populated as we headed south, and he had to slow abruptly as a Dodge truck pulled out almost in front of us. I felt the tires slip a little on the icy road before they caught again. “Asshole,” he muttered under his breath.
My fingers had unconsciously tightened on the edge of the seat. Driving in these kinds of road conditions was not something I enjoyed, even though Connor clearly knew what he was doing. Something he’d said nagged at my mind, though. “So if our wards should have alerted us to your presence, how did Damon and his little band of commandos get past them?”
“You’d have to ask him that. I told you he’s been experimenting with spells, changing them, making them stronger, altering them. I don’t know the details.” He lifted his shoulders, and a frown creased his brow. “I do know he’s frustrated because, although he’s done some amazing work with spellcraft, he has
n’t made any headway with the curse. He made a comment not too long ago about investigating alternative magic, but when I tried to get him to tell me more, he said he was only in the preliminary stages of his research, and there wasn’t much to tell.”
That didn’t sound very reassuring. Damon using his physics knowledge to somehow twist spells into something different, something new, was bad enough. But if even that wasn’t enough for him, what could this “alternative magic” possibly be?
I shivered, and Connor must have misinterpreted my reaction, because he added, “Anyway, I didn’t even go with him to Jerome…I was waiting back at Lucas’s house with the others.”
So it was Lucas whose house had the basement rec room, the one where they’d turned the pool table into an altar. I wondered why they’d done it there, and not out at Damon’s house, which seemed secluded enough. Maybe they wanted someplace that was easier to get to.
And for some reason, I was irrationally relieved that Connor hadn’t gone on the Jerome raid. Yes, some people would say he was complicit just by waiting at Lucas’s house, but I didn’t see it quite that way. He’d known we were meant to be together, that Damon’s plan would ultimately fail, but it was still important for him to be there at the moment of truth, so Damon would turn to Connor to make the binding.
Plots and plans, twisting around one another. This latest ploy of Damon’s hadn’t worked, either, but I couldn’t help wondering how long it would be before he came up with something else.
“Are we almost home?” I asked.
Connor’s eyebrow lifted at the word “home,” but he replied with hesitation. “About five minutes.”
“Good,” I said. “Because I want you to do everything you can to scrub the last few hours from my brain.”
* * *
And he did, more or less — when we got in, he scooped me up in his arms, took me upstairs, then laid me on the bed, slowly removing every article of clothing until I was naked, while he looked down at me, still fully dressed.
Darknight (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 2) Page 12