The Witches of Canyon Road, Books 1-3

by Christine Pope

  He smiled. Right then I wished I could remove the enchantment, because it did feel strange to be having an intimate dinner like this with my cousin. However, I knew I didn’t dare lift the illusion until we were safely home. “It’s because you’re so powerful. Most witches and warlocks couldn’t have done anything close.”

  “Well, thanks.” I toyed with my fork before setting it down against the rim of my plate. “All the same, I’ll be glad to get out of here.”

  “You aren’t enjoying your dinner?” he asked, eyes widening in mock astonishment.

  “It’s very good, but….”

  “It’s all right,” he said, apparently relenting. “This has been a test, and tests are always kind of stressful.”

  “So we can go home once we’ve finished our wine?”

  His lip curled. “No dessert?”

  “No,” I told him firmly. “We have ice cream at the house, if you want it.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  And after that Simon did take pity on me, because he finished his last few bites of steak and the last sips of wine in his glass, then asked the waiter to bring us the check. No dillydallying with a credit card, either — he dropped four hundred-dollar bills on the table, then extended a hand to help me up from where I sat.

  “Ready?”

  I nodded. Well, that was one way to get around the credit card conundrum, I supposed.

  He had one “test” left, however. After we had the valet bring the car around and had climbed in, Simon turned so we were driving right past the Castillo compound, moving slowly.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I demanded. “This is the last place we should be.”

  “No,” he replied calmly, hands wrapped around the steering wheel even though the car was doing the driving. “You need to know that she doesn’t have any power over you. Genoveva Castillo is a raging bitch, but she’s also a very powerful witch. She should know you’re here. And if she did know, what would she do?”

  “Come out to confront us,” I replied, my voice hardly more than a whisper. Adrenaline was sending spiky jolts of energy through my body, urging me to run. And yet I knew that if Genoveva really had been able to sense me, she would be here already.

  Which meant she didn’t know I was here. We were crawling past her house, her sanctum, and yet we might as well have been a couple of civilians for all she was able to sense our presence.

  “Exactly. You see? You don’t have anything to fear from her, or any of the other Castillos. You’re more powerful than she is, Miranda.”

  A shiver went through me. I was just an ordinary witch. I wasn’t supposed to be stronger than a prima. And if I was…?

  I didn’t know what to do about that.

  “Take me home,” I whispered.

  14

  Identities

  Rafe

  Cat was staring at him in consternation. “What do you mean, you know who Miranda is with?”

  No wonder Rafe had kept having those strange spells where he knew he had to be missing something obvious, something right under his nose. It was because of the enchantment — or curse, or whatever you wanted to call it — that Simon had cast on him, making him forget. The spell had been broken at last, however.

  “This guy called Simon,” he said curtly. “Someone Miranda met on the Railrunner when she was coming up from Albuquerque.”

  “You didn’t say anything about that to me.”

  No, he hadn’t. Now Rafe wondered at the omission, wondered why he hadn’t asked for his sister’s advice when it came to dealing with this unexpected interloper. He couldn’t say for sure, except that maybe he was embarrassed at having a rival for Miranda’s affections — Miranda, who should have been a sure bet, bound to him as she was. Just another aspect of the whole situation that he’d managed to screw up royally. If he’d said something to Cat about Simon, they could have come to the truth a lot sooner, since Simon’s spell didn’t seem to have affected anyone else in his family.

  “We need to talk,” Rafe said, then gave a quick glance around them. Burro Alley was quiet enough now, but it certainly wasn’t the sort of place for an intimate conversation. “But not here.”

  “Upstairs?”

  That would have made the most sense, since the Airbnb was only half a block away. However, Rafe immediately rejected that notion. The flat might have been empty, but it was still polluted by the residue of whatever foul magic Simon had used. For all Rafe knew, some kind of spell lingered there, sending every word spoken there back to its former occupant. Rafe had never heard of such a thing, but he didn’t know much about dark magic. Better to play it safe. Besides, he’d already mentally vowed never to set foot in the place again.

  “No, let’s go back to my house.”

  Cat looked resigned at this suggestion, as though she wasn’t terribly thrilled about heading back to his place when she’d barely gotten downtown but also wasn’t going to protest. Like him, she must know that it was probably best to spend as little time in that Airbnb as possible. They’d already gotten the information they needed anyway.

  “See you there,” was all she said, and she hurried across the street to the parking structure, taking advantage of a small break in traffic.

  Rafe went to retrieve his Jeep from the parking space behind the flat, then drove home. This was a time when he would have welcomed a self-driving mechanism in his car, just because he knew he was distracted, attempting to figure out how in the hell a powerful warlock like Simon could have slid in under his family’s nose without anyone noticing. Miranda hadn’t said anything about her acquaintance being a warlock, which meant she hadn’t known. Which also meant that Simon must have had a way of hiding what he was from everyone, including her.

  Son of a bitch.

  Luckily, there wasn’t too much traffic to worry about, and he was home in less than five minutes. Cat was knocking at the front door as he came down the hallway from the garage, and he hurried to let her in.

  “Okay,” she said without preamble, moving past him to go sit in the living room. “Now can you tell me what the hell is going on? Who is this Simon person?”

  “Like I said, this guy Miranda met on the train. Only I have a feeling that meeting was planned. Simon had to be lying in wait for her.”

  “Why?”

  Good question. It had to be more than Miranda simply being a beautiful unaccompanied witch. Yes, she had turned out to be stronger than anyone had thought — Rafe sure didn’t know anyone who could teleport like she did — but was that the only reason?

  “I don’t know for sure,” he said. “I’m doing my best to piece the whole thing together. But they met on the Railrunner, and they met again after that time she stormed out of our lunch at La Fonda. Miranda said that was just coincidence, that she’d gone into the wine tasting room for a drink and realized he worked there, but — ”

  “The wine tasting room under the Airbnb apartment?” Cat broke in. “Why didn’t you say something while we were there? We could have gone in and asked about Simon, found out what they knew about him.”

  “Do you think someone who was able to hide the fact that he was a warlock, who cast some sort of funky spell on me to say those horrible things to Miranda, would have told a bunch of civilians the truth about himself?”

  “Well, I guess not,” Cat said, looking deflated. “So where does that put us?”

  “I don’t know.” Rafe scrubbed a hand over his bristly cheek. One of these days he should probably shave. “I mean, at least I know what the guy looks like, but I don’t know how much that’s going to help. I kind of doubt he’s hanging around Santa Fe if he has Miranda with him. He’d want to make sure he was well out of our orbit.”

  “True.” His sister seemed to think for a moment, idly playing with the straps of the backpack she used for a purse, her fingers running the heavy fabric between them as if they were the weft threads of her loom. “Still, if you know what he looks like, that’s something. He’s a warlock, so he h
ad to have come from a clan somewhere. Tell me about him.”

  The last thing Rafe felt like doing was analyzing Simon’s appearance, but he knew it was something that needed to be done. “He’s around Miranda’s age. Tall, but not quite as tall as I am, and thinner. Hispanic. Black hair and eyes — really black eyes, the darkest I’ve ever seen.”

  “He’s Hispanic?” Cat asked, perking up a bit. “Well, that narrows it down. He’s not one of ours, obviously, but what other clan could he have come from?”

  “The de la Pazes, maybe?” Rafe rubbed his chin. That would make the most sense. He remembered thinking that Simon could have been someone who had a long-distance crush on Miranda and hadn’t wanted to let her go. Maybe that’s all this was — some kind of puppy love gone out of control. True, Miranda had claimed that she’d never met Simon before she saw him on the Railrunner, but maybe she was trying to cover up for him. Since Rafe knew he hadn’t acted the most even-tempered around her, he could see why she might have been trying to protect her friend. “Or the Montoyas in Texas, but that doesn’t make as much sense, since their paths wouldn’t have crossed before now.”

  “Maybe you should contact Miranda’s parents, ask if they know of anyone in the de la Paz clan who had a crush on her.”

  Rafe knew Genoveva would freak out if he got in touch with Angela and Connor, since they were supposed to be maintaining radio silence and pretending that everything was fine and he was off on his honeymoon with Miranda. Not that he cared too much about his mother’s reaction. The lie was going to come out eventually, no matter what they did.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s probably the best thing to do.” He dug his phone out of his pocket, went to his contacts lists, and then paused with his finger hovering over the number in question.

  “What’s the matter?” Cat inquired, clearly noticing his hesitation.

  “I don’t know. I’m just wondering whether we should go directly to the de la Paz prima and ask whether she knows if anyone from her clan has left their territory for an extended time recently.”

  “I think they’re pretty tight with the McAllisters and Wilcoxes,” Cat pointed out. “If you go around asking questions like that, I have a feeling it’s going to get back to Connor and Angela pretty quickly anyway.”

  His sister was probably right. Rafe knew that part of his hesitation was probably simple cowardice. The second he talked to Miranda’s parents, they’d know that something had gone terribly wrong, that the very people who were supposed to be their daughter’s new family had been lying about her disappearance in order to avert an inter-clan war. Or maybe not war, but he had a feeling that relations between the northern Arizona witch families and the Castillos was going to be pretty frosty if he didn’t get this straightened out soon.

  With a sigh, he shoved his phone back in his pocket. Cat looked at him in alarm.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “We need to fix this ourselves,” he said. “I mean, if it becomes inescapably obvious that we’ll never be able to find Miranda without her parents’ help, then yeah, we’ll get in touch with them. Right now, though, we have a little grace period. They still think she and I are on our honeymoon. So let’s use that time to our advantage, and think this thing through.”

  Cat still appeared dubious, but at least she stopped fiddling with the straps of her backpack and pursed her lips, obviously running through their options. “If you’ve seen Simon and know what he looks like, then maybe we should give Daniel that description along with any other information you have, see what he can come up with.”

  “Because he found out so much last time.”

  “He didn’t have as much information to work with,” Cat pointed out. “I’ll bet he knows a police sketch artist or someone like that who could do a drawing for us. It’d be a lot easier when I talk to my ghosts, for instance. I could show them the sketch and see what they have to say.”

  Although Rafe wasn’t completely on board with this proposition, it did make him think of something. He hated to even make the suggestion, but…. “What about Marco?”

  At once her brows drew together. “What do you mean, ‘what about Marco’?”

  “Well…you talk to ghosts….” Rafe let the words trail off, hoping she would get the hint.

  Which she seemed to do, although she looked even less thrilled with him than she had a moment earlier. “Just because someone dies unexpectedly, it doesn’t mean they’ll become a ghost. I didn’t feel anything of Marco at the hospital after he died. I think he’s moved on…and that’s a good thing, Rafe. Do you really want to think of Marco’s soul being in torment like that?”

  Of course he didn’t. Rafe wished he hadn’t brought it up, but it was a question that needed to be asked. And of course he should be glad that Marco had been enough at peace with his life that he had moved serenely on to the next world. Being able to talk to his ghost might have made the search for Miranda a lot easier, though.

  “No, of course not,” he replied. Because he could tell she didn’t want to pursue the topic any further, he decided he’d better let it go. Anyway, she’d looked so charged up about the prospect of working with a sketch artist that Rafe figured they might as well give it a try. Cat could be right. Visual aids often came in handy.

  “Okay,” he said, trying to sound more enthusiastic than he actually was. The last thing he wanted to do right then was go haring back down to Albuquerque, but he didn’t think they had much of a choice. It wasn’t as though they had any other leads to follow. “Let me call Daniel.”

  The sketch artist was a woman in her late thirties, pretty in a thin, intense way. She set up her supplies in Daniel’s empty meeting room and then asked Rafe to describe Simon as carefully as he could.

  “Um, he’s tall and thin,” he began.

  “How thin?” she inquired. “Like, one-forty, one-fifty?”

  “Probably more than that,” Rafe allowed. “He had some muscle on him. He’s just thinner than me. Maybe around one-sixty, one-sixty-five?”

  “Okay,” she said. “Start at the top. Hair?”

  “Black.”

  “Eyes.”

  “Black.”

  “Complexion?”

  “A little darker than mine.”

  “Face shape?”

  Good question. The guy was thin — what else did the artist need? However, from the way she was looking at him expectantly, Rafe could tell she wanted a little more than that. “His face is thin, too. Um…his cheekbones aren’t as prominent as mine. I think his jaw was a little wider than his cheekbones.”

  “Good,” the artist said, working away on her large sketchpad. “Tell me about his eyes.”

  “Um, I already said they were black.”

  An annoyed little huff escaped her lips. Across the room where Daniel and Cat were seated, Cat also looked exasperated. Rafe got the feeling that if she’d been any closer, she probably would have smacked his arm and asked him whether he’d ever watched any police procedural shows.

  To which he would have answered no, because those sorts of things didn’t really interest him. But he knew he needed to be as accurate as possible now, or the sketch would be worthless. “His eyes are kind of deep set, but not too deep set,” Rafe offered. “And his brows are fairly straight, but lift a little toward the ends.”

  “Do they meet in the middle?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Eyelashes?”

  “Sorry — I don’t pay much attention to men’s eyelashes.”

  To Rafe’s surprise, the artist smiled a little. “No, I don’t suppose you do. All right, what about his nose?”

  “Longish. Straight.”

  “Wide nostrils?”

  “No.”

  A few seconds of silence while the artist worked on her pad. “Okay. Mouth?”

  “Not wide. I remember it kind of curled, like he was smirking at me.”

  “Thin or full?”

  “Um…sort of in the middle? I think his l
ower lip was fuller than his upper lip, but I can’t remember for sure.”

  “That’s good, Rafe,” she said, her tone encouraging. What, did she think he was some kindergartner who had to be coaxed into doing a good job? He wanted to catch this guy. “How does he wear his hair?”

  “It’s a little shorter than mine, kind of wavy.” Rafe closed his eyes for a moment, trying to remember. “I don’t recall seeing a part. I think he might have combed it straight back, but I can’t say for sure.”

  “That’s all right. It’s still enough for me to work with.” She sketched in silence for a moment. “Any tattoos, earrings?”

  “No earring. If he had any tattoos, they weren’t any place that showed.” Rafe scowled slightly. Again, that wasn’t something he really wanted to think about…especially if the asshole did have tattoos somewhere under his clothes, tattoos that Miranda might have seen by now.

  That thought needed to get right out of his head. He and Miranda might have parted on the worst of terms, but he didn’t want to think that she would go immediately into Simon’s arms, no matter how hurt she was.

  At least, he hoped she wouldn’t. But Miranda and Simon had been together for several days now. Who knew what was going on between them?

  Anger flared in him, and Rafe tamped it down, practically visualizing himself stomping on it the way you might stomp on the last stubborn embers of a campfire to put them out. He didn’t have the luxury of anger right now. If he didn’t stay focused, he might never find Miranda.

  “I think that’s it,” the artist said. She turned the pad around toward him so he could see the sketch she’d made. “What do you think? Close?”

  Brooding dark eyes stared at Rafe from under level brows. The mouth of the man in the sketch was curled slightly, as if he were laughing at some private joke. Well, Rafe couldn’t argue with that — the joke was definitely on him, considering Simon had managed to steal Miranda right out from under his nose.

  “Yes, it’s close,” he said curtly. Too close. Just looking at the sketch awoke the anger in him again, and once more he had to push it aside. “It’s very good. Thank you.”