“No,” Rafe replied. “At least, I never heard that she was. Her talent is color, I guess. That’s why she became a painter. She can see a color once and always replicate it, always match it. She once joked that she probably should have been an interior decorator, because she would have made more money at it.”
I thought of the rectangle of pure black that sat on Nina’s easel and shuddered. No color matching going on there, that was for sure. But I could see evidence of what Rafe was talking about in the room around me — the shades of the throw pillows on the beige couch coordinated exactly with the colors of the paintings that hung on the walls. More of Nina’s work, I guessed, if the painting in the entryway was hers as well. The styles were the same, a sort of impressionism that bordered on the abstract.
And I vaguely recalled Rafe saying once that they didn’t have any seers in the Castillos, although I couldn’t remember the context of the conversation. Not that seers were the end-all, be-all when it came to being forewarned. They were often helpful, but, if the experience of my cousin Caitlin was anything to go by, it was more like the visions controlled her rather than vice versa. Even if the Castillos had had a seer, it wasn’t as though we could have gone to her — or him, although seers tended to be female — and asked for the exact location where Simon was holed up, or to clarify just what the hell Rafe’s cousin Nina meant when she kept saying, They’re coming.
It felt sort of horrible to have left her in that room, adding more and more black paint to her canvas. On the other hand, she appeared otherwise safe and unharmed, and Cat was our more immediate concern.
She blinked, then opened her eyes. At first, they didn’t seem able to focus on anything in particular, but then she blinked again and frowned slightly at Rafe.
“Where am I?”
The question was such a cliché, I almost wanted to break into nervous laughter. Then again, I could see why she would be confused. Even though she’d been to this house before, I got the feeling that she didn’t exactly hang out here.
“We’re at Nina’s house,” Rafe said, relief clear in his expression. After what had happened to Malena, he was probably expecting the worst. “You passed out. Do you remember anything?”
Cat pushed herself up to a sitting position, then rubbed her forehead. “I think I was feeling that pressure again, although it was worse than before. It felt like I couldn’t breathe. It’s still not gone completely, but at least I don’t feel like I’m going to faint again.” She looked around the room. “Where’s Nina?”
I glanced up at Rafe. His mouth tightened slightly, but since he didn’t tell me not to say anything, I guessed it was all right to give a truthful answer to Cat’s question. “She’s in her study. She’s…in a fugue state or something. You don’t remember the black canvas, the way she said ‘they’re coming’?”
“No.” Cat frowned, this time with her fingers pressed against her temple, as though her head still hurt. “Or…I kind of remember the canvas. I just don’t remember what happened next.”
“We’re not really sure what’s going on,” Rafe said slowly. His gaze moved from Cat to me. “Miranda, could it be another spell?”
“Maybe,” I replied, then added, “Probably. I don’t know why or how, though. I guess the best thing to do is cast a protection spell and see if it stops?”
“Yes, try that.”
I closed my eyes briefly, visualizing a protective bubble encasing the house and its occupants, driving away any negative energies and preventing new ones from penetrating the shield the spell created. Almost at once, I felt better, as though some faint, foul smell had been driven from the room, even though I really hadn’t noticed it previously.
“That’s better,” Cat said, almost as soon as I opened my eyes. “It’s gone completely now.”
Despite this promising development, Rafe still looked troubled. “Well, I guess that proves that your protection spells work, and Malena’s really didn’t. Which means we still have a lot of work to do.”
I nodded, and held back a sigh. The strain of the day was already getting to me, and we still had a lot of houses to visit. But I couldn’t shirk my duty. About all I could do was hope that the protection spells cast by other members of the clan were more effective than Malena’s. The Castillos had more than a hundred households here in the greater Santa Fe area. It would take me several days to get through them all…and I didn’t know if we had that much time.
Just as Cat began to ease her legs over the side of the couch so she could stand up, Nina entered the room. The oversized chambray shirt she wore was smeared with black paint, and she wore an expression that was just about as confused as I felt. She blinked when she saw us gathered in the living room. “Rafe? Cat? What — ?”
“It’s okay, Nina,” Rafe said quickly. “We brought Miranda over to place a protection spell on the house.”
Nina’s brows drew together. She was a pretty woman in her forties, slender and not very tall, her black hair pulled up into a messy knot on top of her head. “Malena did that yesterday.”
“It’s just a precaution,” I said. “We weren’t sure if her spell was strong enough.”
“Oh.” Nina blinked again, then looked down at her stained shirt. “Do any of you know what happened to my canvas? It’s covered in black paint, but I don’t remember how it got there.”
“Um, no, we don’t,” Cat replied. She stood up and tugged at her sweater, then smoothed her skirt as best she could. I could tell she was annoyed at having to wear such proper attire, which I had to admit wasn’t very well suited to collapsing in hallways. “Maybe you were experimenting?”
“Maybe,” Nina said, still in that same bemused-sounding tone. Her gaze slowly wandered to me. “Did you cast the spell?”
“Yes. Everything should be fine now.” I had no idea whether those words were true or not, but I had to believe it would be okay. After all, Rafe and I were fine, as were Eduardo and Cat. That is, Cat had fainted, but not when she was in her own home, which was already protected by one of my spells.
“And we have other houses to go to,” Rafe added. “But maybe it would be a good idea if you took a break for a while, Nina. I think you’ve been in there painting for too long today.”
“Possibly,” she said absently. “I did start right after breakfast. Well, it was nice meeting you, Miranda.”
And then she drifted out of the room, back down the hall toward her studio. So much for taking a break.
“Should we do anything?” Cat murmured in an undertone, although I guessed that Nina was already out of earshot.
Rafe gave a helpless shrug. “What can we do? She seems okay, just a little out of it. And maybe her disorientation will go away the longer she’s protected by Miranda’s spell and the more time she has for the dark magic to wear off.”
Cat looked down the hallway where Nina had disappeared, then tucked a lock of hair behind one ear. “Maybe. I guess we can ask Yesenia to look in on her, too.”
“That sounds like a good idea.” Rafe took me by the hand. “Are you ready, Miranda? We’ll need to do this a few more times.”
“Hopefully not exactly like this,” I replied, thinking again of that black canvas, the urgent murmur of they’re coming…they’re coming….
“Hopefully not,” he agreed.
But of course there was only one way to find out.
To my relief, though, we didn’t have any more uncanny encounters after that. Everyone seemed a little puzzled by my coming around to perform the same spell that Malena had done just the day before, but no one seemed inclined to argue. Also, by the time we got to the last few houses, it was obvious that the word had gone out about Malena’s condition, because people stopped asking about why I was casting these spells, and instead told Cat and Rafe they hoped their sister would have a speedy recovery.
At last we were done and headed back into the heart of town to take Cat home. When we got there, I was relieved to see that José and Rosa’s Subaru was nowhere in
evidence. While José seemed like a kindly soul, Rosa would have been a bit much to handle after the afternoon I’d put in. I guessed that Eduardo had sent them home, since there wasn’t much for anyone to do except wait for Genoveva’s funeral services the following morning.
Actually, I didn’t see Eduardo’s Mercedes, either. When we went inside, Rafe found a note on the table in the foyer, saying that Eduardo and Louisa and Oscar were all at Malena’s, keeping watch. Yesenia had determined that it was all right for Malena to remain at her house rather than be sent to the hospital, since she seemed stable enough.
“It’s just like Dad to leave a note rather than send a text,” Cat said, setting the piece of paper back down on the table. “But I’m glad they didn’t have to take Malena to the hospital.”
“Well, we all know how well that worked the last time we tried it,” Rafe replied darkly. “They probably didn’t want to risk having her there.”
I thought of how Simon’s magic had killed their cousin Marco, even though he’d been in the intensive care ward at St. Vincent’s. All those doctors and nurses hadn’t been enough to save him. That realization only made the tension knot itself more tightly somewhere in the pit of my stomach, and I swallowed.
Cat nodded, arms wrapped tight around herself. She looked very cold, although the house itself was actually fairly warm. “I guess you two will be going home, then.”
The words weren’t exactly a plea, but I read between the lines. Cat didn’t want to stay in this big gloomy place by herself, and I couldn’t blame her.
Rafe had obviously also picked up on the subtext, because he said, “I think it’s better if we stay with you until Dad comes home. We’ll order some takeout.”
“And have some wine?” she asked hopefully.
“Absolutely,” I replied. I couldn’t speak for the other two, but I definitely needed a drink.
“Perfect,” Cat said.
After a bit of back and forth, we decided on Thai, since none of us had had it for a while. Rafe placed the order, and Cat and I set the big table in the dining room. As she laid down the last plate, she shook her head.
“It’s going to be weird eating in here without Mom, even though we haven’t had a lot of sit-down dinners lately.”
I wished I knew her better, because Cat looked like she needed a hug right then. Maybe she would have been okay with an outward gesture of affection, maybe not. Even the brief time I’d spent around them had told me that the Castillos weren’t the most demonstrative family in the world.
“It’s hard, I know,” I said. The words sounded horribly inadequate.
She shrugged. “What’s bothering me is that it’s not as hard as I thought it would be. Maybe it’s just all this other craziness going on. I mean, I’m sad about my mother, and angry at Simon Escobar, but….” She let the words trail off, then looked up at me, a rueful smile tugging at her lips. “Maybe it just means I didn’t love her as much as I thought I did.”
This time I did go over and give her a quick hug. She looked startled, but I only said, “I’m not sure that’s it at all. I mean, your mother was a difficult person, so I can see why your feelings would be complicated.”
“‘Difficult.’ There’s an understatement.” Cat went over to the sideboard and got out some silverware, setting it down next to the plates. That silver was heavy and ornate, obviously a family heirloom. Possibly a bit much to go with Thai takeout, but then, maybe it was Cat’s way of feeling connected to her Castillo heritage. “She and Rafe fought more. I mostly tried to stay out of the way.”
“Well, I just think you shouldn’t be too tough on yourself.”
This time she smiled a little, dark eyes crinkling in amusement. “I could say the same thing about you.”
“Which is what?” Rafe asked, coming into the room as he tucked his phone into his pocket.
“That we all need to be a little nicer to ourselves, especially now,” Cat told him. “Food ordered?”
“It’ll be here in about ten minutes.”
Thank the Goddess for delivery. While we were waiting for the food to show up, we went and checked out the wine cabinet, deciding on a pinot noir. We chatted about wine, about Chinese food versus Thai, about anything except the way Malena lay in a coma at her house, or how we’d all be attending Genoveva’s funeral the next morning.
Maybe it was wrong to pretend everything was normal, but I could tell we all desperately needed to feel that way, even if we understood that we were putting on a façade and nothing more.
And even after the food arrived and we were all sitting down, eating cashew chicken and pad thai and chicken fried rice, we focused more on the oddities of the day — that weird pressure Cat kept feeling, Nina’s strange behavior, the possible reasons why my protection spells worked when Malena’s didn’t — than on Rafe and Cat’s losses. It felt better trying to solve puzzles than come up with platitudes for something we couldn’t fix or change.
Eventually, Eduardo came home, looking weary but pleased to see us all gathered there — and, most likely, relieved that none of us had come to any harm. We all went into the living room to hear his news. Malena was stable for now, really more in a deep sleep than a coma, albeit a sleep she couldn’t seem to wake from. And Louisa and Oscar had gone home, satisfied that Malena wasn’t in any immediate danger.
“And we should go home, too,” Rafe said. The table had been cleared, the leftovers put away. I didn’t know about him and Cat, but I had a faint wine buzz going, just enough to smooth down the sharp edges of an extremely rough day. He looked over at his father and sister, who occupied the pair of matching chairs opposite the couch where we sat. “It’ll be another hard day tomorrow.”
Yes, there was still the funeral to get through. At least it would be a quiet ceremony, just the four of us, plus Louisa and Oscar and maybe José and Rosa, although I hadn’t heard for certain whether they would be attending or not. John wouldn’t leave Malena’s side, which I supposed was the right thing to do. All of Genoveva’s other children would be there, after all.
We said our goodbyes and headed back to Rafe’s place. He’d barely shut the door behind us before he was pulling me to him, kissing me. I knew part of his urgent need was only his desire to reassure himself that I was safe, that we were both still okay. I welcomed his touch, because I was feeling the same thing. We needed to be together, to make sure our bond was as strong as it could be.
Upstairs then, to the bedroom we now shared. Our clothing fell to the ground piece by piece, and then we were on the bed, skin to skin, lips locked together even as our bodies joined in furious intercourse. No foreplay this time; no, this was raw animal need, an affirmation of our life forces, the strange bond that connected us even though we weren’t husband and wife yet. That didn’t matter, though. The only thing that mattered was the man who held me, whose body was locked together with mine.
And afterward, we slept entwined in one another’s arms, knowing that here, together, we were safe.
Part of the reason my shopping at Dillard’s had taken a little longer than planned was that Cat and I had both realized I needed to get something to wear to her mother’s funeral, in addition to the everyday stuff required to replace the clothing I’d left behind at the Tesuque estate. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror in the master suite at Rafe’s house and scrutinized my appearance, hoping that no one would find fault with the modest black dress and matching sweater I wore, or the pumps with the low kitten heels. Growing up in Jerome, I’d worn flats all the time — the streets there were way too uneven to even think about stilettos — and so I’d never learned to walk in anything higher than about an inch heel.
At least I’d been wearing my jewelry when I fled Simon’s hideout, so I still had my tourmaline earrings and silver bracelet and ring. I supposed if I’d had nothing, I could have asked to borrow a few pieces from Cat, but I was glad I could wear my own jewelry.
“You look fine,” Rafe said, giving me a quick glance. “No one�
�s going to be paying much attention to what we’re wearing, anyway.”
He didn’t add, Since it was always Genoveva who worried about that sort of stuff, but I got the vibe anyway. True, Eduardo and Louisa would probably be too occupied with their grief to notice much. Even so, I wanted to make sure it looked as though I was paying the proper respect to their late mother, that I understood the customs and rituals of this old, old clan.
Rafe looked pretty proper himself, in a charcoal gray suit and subdued tie in shades of gray and slate blue. In fact, the whole ensemble was so out of character that I guessed his mother must have chosen it for him, or maybe his father. I went over and straightened his tie, then went on my tiptoes to give him a quick kiss.
“You’re looking pretty fine yourself,” I replied. “I like a man in a suit.”
He shot me a pained glance. “Don’t get too used to it.”
Pure Rafe. However, considering we were just about to leave for his mother’s funeral, I decided it was probably better to hold back any retorts. Instead, I shrugged, then said, “We should probably get going.”
A huff of breath, followed by a reluctant nod. “I wish we didn’t have to.”
“It sounds as though it’s going to be pretty quiet.”
“I know, but even a quiet Catholic funeral is still long. And….” The words drifted into silence, and he jammed his hands into his pants pockets, his gaze avoiding mine.
“It’s so final. I know.” I touched his arm, hoping he could feel how much I loved him, how much I hated to see him going through this.
“‘Final.’ Yeah, that’s a good word for it.” He paused for a few seconds, gaze moving around the room even though I really didn’t know what he was looking for. “Okay, let’s go.”
We headed downstairs, then out to the garage so we could get in his Jeep. Neither of us spoke on our way over to the church. It was a pretty Spanish-style building, much less grand than the chapel where Rafe and I were supposed to get married, but also much friendlier in feel. There were only a few cars in the parking lot — Eduardo’s Mercedes sedan, the Volvo I recognized as Louisa and Oscar’s. I didn’t see any sign of Rosa and José’s Subaru, so I assumed they weren’t coming after all. Possibly José wanted to make sure everything was ready at the funeral home once the service was over.
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