Magic in the Desert: Three Paranormal Romance Series Starters Set in the American Southwest

by Christine Pope

  Besides, it couldn’t hurt to do a bit more exploring while Connor was still out of the apartment.

  As soon as I stepped out of the room and shut the door behind me, I froze. Standing in front of me was a woman maybe ten years or so older than I. A frightened little squeak formed in my throat, then disappeared as I took in her clothes and hair. Plain drop-waisted dress, Mary Jane–style shoes with chunky heels. Auburn hair carefully finger-waved around her head.

  This was no girlfriend left behind, or a stray relative.

  This was a ghost.

  She looked me up and down, then remarked, “You’re new.”

  I found my voice. “I am?”

  “Yes. I haven’t seen you here before.”

  My brain started to add things up. “Um…does Connor have a lot of girls here?”

  Her head tilted to one side as she appeared to consider my question. “He did. That is, I suppose I haven’t seen anyone here lately. That’s why I was surprised to see you.”

  All right, so maybe Connor wasn’t a total man-whore. That knowledge shouldn’t be enough to justify the wave of relief that went over me. To cover my irritation at myself, I asked, “How long has it been since someone else…another girl, I mean…was here?”

  “I’m not sure.” Her brow puckered. She was very pretty, in a sort of porcelain-doll way, with her thin penciled brows and Cupid’s bow of a mouth covered in dark red lipstick. “I don’t pay much attention to time, I’m afraid.”

  I’d heard that sort of thing before, from Maisie. Just because ghosts hung around in our world didn’t mean they were tuned into the ebb and flow of days, weeks, months. Judging by her dress, the woman before me must have been haunting this building for at least eighty years, maybe more. Differences in a few months or even a few years might not have registered much with her.

  “What’s your name?” I asked. Generally, I liked to be more personal with ghosts, if they allowed it.

  “Mary Mullen,” she replied. “I lived here once…such a lovely apartment. My husband made it real nice for me, with furniture shipped all the way from Chicago. But then the girls caught diphtheria, and so did I. They went first, and when it was my turn, I thought I should stay here, to make sure my husband was all right.” She frowned again. “But then he went, too, and I was still here. Have you seen any of them?”

  I shook my head. I wanted to tell her that they must have moved on, that there was no reason for her to remain here, but I wasn’t sure she was ready to hear that…even after eighty years. Maybe later, if I had a chance to speak with her again. Not that I really wanted to have the opportunity, since that would mean I’d be stuck here for a lot longer than I wanted to be.

  She didn’t appear upset, only resigned. “I thought I should ask, since you’re the first person I’ve been able to talk to since…well, since. And you have a kind face.”

  That was the first time anyone had ever said anything like that to me. “Um…thank you. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you more.”

  “It’s all right. You take care…and take care of that boy, too. He’s lost, that one.” And she disappeared then, just as Maisie always did. Here one second, gone the next.

  I waited for a moment, just in case she decided to come back, but she seemed to have left this plane for the time being.

  A frown of my own etched my brow as I continued downstairs.

  What did she mean, Connor was lost?

  You can purchase Darknight at your favorite online bookstore.

  Chosen

  The Djinn Wars: Book 1

  Chapter One

  The Dying began on my twenty-fourth birthday. Even now I truly believe that was nothing more than a sad coincidence, but if nothing else, the synchronicity helps me to remember when the end began. September twenty-sixth. There was a certain crispness in the air, a bite after the sun went down that told me fall was on the way, and winter soon to follow. We didn’t get as cold in Albuquerque as they did in Santa Fe, but we could feel the shift in the seasons even so.

  I was out with friends doing tequila shots at Zacatecas when the first reports about a strange illness in New York showed up on the evening news. Maybe I caught a glimpse on the TV in the bar, but I don’t think so. To be blunt, I was pretty wasted. Getting plowed like that wasn’t in my usual repertoire, but my friend Tori kept ordering round and after round, and since I wasn’t driving, I didn’t try too hard to stop her. Maybe in the back of my mind I was thinking that this year I was twenty-four, and twenty-five would come sliding along soon enough, and I might as well party with abandon while I still could. Sooner or later I’d have to be a good, responsible adult, but not on my birthday.

  The next day was a Saturday. No school or work for me; I was getting my master’s in English, mostly because I couldn’t really figure out what else to do with myself, and staying in college for as long as possible seemed pretty attractive compared to what awaited me in the real world. Since I’d been lucky enough to snag a T.A. position teaching lower-division English classes, I didn’t have to worry about dragging my sorry hung-over ass into work, either. I had until Monday to recover.

  Around noon I finally wandered into the kitchen, after taking a shower so long the hot water began to run out. Good thing we had a separate water heater for the little apartment over the garage where I lived, or I probably would have heard about it from my mother. All right, so I was still living at home, but the apartment gave me at least the illusion of independence, if not the real thing. It also allowed me to pay much lower rent than I would have otherwise. My parents didn’t want to charge me anything — well, not my mother, anyway — but I’d insisted. It was a pittance, but it did cover the utilities and helped give them some extra wiggle room.

  My mother had the little white TV on the kitchen counter turned on and was frowning as she watched some cable news talking head go on about a new illness that had begun appearing in New York and Los Angeles the day before. Reports were also coming in from up and down both coasts about this unnamed disease, which left its victims hospitalized with extremely high fevers.

  “More Ebola?” I asked, blinking against the too-bright light in the kitchen and making a beeline for the fridge, where my mother always kept a pitcher of iced tea, even in the dead of winter.

  “No, Jessica,” she said, that little pucker of worry still showing between her brows. “Something else. They don’t know what it is.”

  “Mmm.” In that moment, I was far more concerned with getting some caffeine into my bloodstream ASAP than worrying about the disease du jour. Those sorts of things never seemed to affect us here in Albuquerque. I wouldn’t say we were exactly the city that America forgot, but if it weren’t for Breaking Bad, I doubted most people would have spared my hometown a second thought.

  From the side-eye my mother was giving me as I downed the iced tea, I guessed that the makeup I’d carefully applied earlier wasn’t doing much to hide the evidence that I’d had, as they say, a gaudy night. But because I hadn’t been driving and was more or less ambulatory this morning, she seemed to be giving me a pass.

  “Dad have a shift today?” I inquired, after refilling my glass of iced tea and taking a few more gulps. Since I felt fortified enough to eat at that point, I popped the pitcher of tea back into the fridge and got a package of English muffins out of the breadbox.

  “Yes.” She didn’t exactly sigh, but I could tell she wasn’t thrilled, either.

  My father was an officer with the Albuquerque police department. Still a beat cop after twenty-five years, too. He never had any interest in riding a desk, liked to be out on the streets. How my mother lived with it, day after day, I didn’t know. My brother and I generally took our father’s occupation in stride, since it had always been a part of our lives. But I knew my father had gone through the academy after he and my mother got married, and so it hadn’t been an irretrievable fact of life when they were starting out as a couple. I know she wished he was more interested in becoming a detective so he wouldn�
��t be so much in harm’s way every day. That wasn’t my father, though — even at fifty-two, he was lean and fit, and could probably put guys half his age through a wall if necessary.

  At the time, the department was chronically short-handed, so my father picked up a lot of extra shifts. My mother never protested, since she knew he was doing it for us, putting more money in the bank, but she couldn’t help worrying. Sometimes I wondered if my father knew exactly how stressed she was every time he left for work. I didn’t think that would’ve stopped him, though, because as much as he loved her, he also loved his job and thought he was doing some genuine good.

  “Well, at least it’s a daytime shift,” I told her, then put the two halves of the English muffin I’d just broken apart into the toaster oven.

  “I know.” The worry line was still there, and it seemed to deepen as she returned her attention to the TV. The talking heads had been replaced by a doctor, a woman in her late forties who probably would have been pretty if she hadn’t look so tired.

  “The illness manifests as a very high fever, spiking as high as 106 degrees. We’re having difficulty controlling the fever, even with analgesics and ice packs.” She paused, pushing a strand of dishwater-blonde hair back behind her ear. Obviously, she hadn’t bothered to primp before going to make her statement in front of the cameras. “No other symptoms have been observed at this point. If you or someone in your family comes down with a fever above 103, please call your doctor or go to the local emergency room.”

  The camera cut to the reporter interviewing the doctor. “Dr. Leviton, any word on where this illness has come from? Is it connected to the doctors returning from West Africa?”

  “No,” Dr. Leviton replied at once, looking almost annoyed. “None of the victims brought in to Mount Sinai or any of the other hospitals in the city appear to have any connection. Most of them haven’t even left New York during the past few months. Of those who have traveled, they’ve returned home from destinations as diverse as Tahiti, Paris, and Australia. Again, there doesn’t seem to be any connection.”

  At that moment, a nurse came up and whispered in the doctor’s ear. Her expression shifted from annoyance to outright worry before she said quickly, “I’m sorry — a patient needs me. That’s all I can tell you right now.” And she turned away from the cameras and began hurrying down the hallway almost at a run, the nurse right behind her.

  The camera panned back to the reporter, who was wearing what he probably thought was a look of measured concern…but to me, he just looked scared. I wonder what the nurse had said to the doctor.

  Whatever it had been, the reporter didn’t mention it. He only said, “That’s the latest from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Again, as Dr. Leviton stated, seek medical assistance immediately if you have a fever in excess of — ”

  My mother turned off the TV. I arched an eyebrow at her, and she shook her head. “It’s always something,” she said. “I shouldn’t even have turned it on, I suppose, but I was hoping to catch some weather.”

  “You’re not worried?”

  “No.” She had her own glass of iced tea sitting on the counter, and she sipped from it as she watched me take the English muffin from the toaster oven and start spreading some butter on it. “Cable news always needs something to feed the monster. And unexplained diseases are a great way to keep people watching for updates.”

  That was something I loved about my mother — she wasn’t afraid to call a spade a spade. Critical thinking was very important to her, which made sense, since she taught advanced composition and AP English at the same high school I’d attended. She made my father look like a starry-eyed dreamer.

  “True,” I said, munching away at my English muffin. My abused stomach was all too glad of the carbs, which should help to soak up the remnants of the tequila I’d downed the night before. Good thing I only indulged like that every once in a great while. Most of the time I was more a mixed-drink kind of girl.

  “They’ll play it up, and then it’ll quietly disappear, just like everything else they try to make a big deal of.” My mother finished the last of her tea and set the glass down on the counter. “Anyway, I’m about to go to the store. Anything you need?”

  Mouth full of English muffin, I shook my head.

  “Make sure you wipe down the counter when you’re done,” she admonished me, then picked up her purse and went out, apparently not concerned at all by what we’d just watched.

  If only she’d been right. But it turned out that the worry of the doctor — and the scared-looking reporter — was not misplaced.

  The next morning, the news was full of reports of people getting sick up and down both coasts, and cases had been reported in the Midwest as well…Chicago…Detroit…St. Louis. And the disease, whatever it was, hadn’t confined itself to the borders of the U.S. People were sick in London and Munich and Moscow and Singapore. Hospitals were filling up.

  My father sat in his wing chair in the family room and watched the news with narrowed eyes. My mother seemed to be doing her best to ignore the television, and was instead trying to worm the latest details about his football practice schedule out of my brother Devin, who was far more interested in texting with his girlfriend than watching TV or explaining why he would have practice four days this week but five the next. A senior in high school, he was hoping his record as running back for the school’s team might help him to eke out a scholarship or two when he went to college next year. We were doing okay, but college was expensive — as I knew only too well, with loans piling up every semester, loans I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to pay back. Supposedly having a master’s would put me on a higher rung of the salary ladder when I did have to go out into the real world, but jobs were scarcer than the college counselors wanted us poor schmucks stuck in loan limbo to believe.

  “Have you seen any sick people yet?” I asked my father. I was sitting at the game table in the corner of the family room, attempting to give my paper on gender representation in gothic novels a final read-through in hard copy to catch any typos. Unfortunately, my brain was jittering this way and that, worried about the reports on the news, praying they were exaggerating and fearing they were not. I couldn’t even say why I was so worried, since most of the time I ignored these sorts of reports, knowing the diseases they discussed rarely touched us here in our little corner of the Southwest. Something about the speed with which this one had spread bothered me, though. It bothered me a lot.

  My father pointed the remote at the TV and turned down the volume, then shook his head. “Not with this thing. I’ve seen meth heads puking in back alleys and heroin addicts with the shakes because they couldn’t get a fix, but this one? I don’t think it’s here.”

  The word “yet” hung in the air, unspoken, but no less ominous for that. More and more people were getting sick, and the first deaths had been reported on the East Coast. Not a lot, not yet, but although the news was trying to sugarcoat things, rumors had already begun to swirl across the Internet that no one who contracted this new disease survived. Which was crazy. Even Ebola — hell, even pneumonic plague, which had an insane mortality rate when not treated — wasn’t one-hundred-percent fatal. That just wasn’t possible.

  “Maybe it won’t,” I said, although I knew even as I said them that the words were mere wishful thinking. “Maybe it’ll just…blow around us, or burn out before it gets here.”

  “Maybe,” he agreed. His eyes wouldn’t meet mine, though, and I knew what he must be thinking.

  I knew, because it was the same thing I was thinking. This wasn’t a matter of if, but rather when.

  On Monday when I arrived at school, I noticed the parking lot was noticeably less full than a university lot had any right to be this close to the beginning of the semester. And as I got out of my car and locked it, I saw that at least half the students walking around on campus wore surgical masks, the white disposable kind the news reports showed people in China wearing on days when the smog was particularly
bad.

  Apparently, I hadn’t gotten the memo. Nothing I could do about it now…except hope that a lot of the students in the Writing 1A class I was teaching that semester had decided to bail completely.

  Most of them had, except for a couple of the over-achievers. Well, at least the kind of over-achievers I’d get in a Writing 1A class, which wasn’t exactly packed full with people who’d gotten 5s on their AP English exams.

  I scanned the empty seats and tried not to frown, reminding myself that I’d get my T.A. stipend no matter how many butts were in those chairs on a particular day. “Okay,” I said, surprised at the slight tremor in my voice, “on Friday we were just starting to get into the difference between a topic sentence and a thesis statement….”

  Taylor Ortiz, who was sitting in the front row, blinked at me in apparent incomprehension. For the first time, I noticed the beads of sweat standing out on her forehead, the way she seemed to be swaying in her seat. Beneath her warm-toned skin, she looked dead pale.

  “Taylor, are you all right?” I asked.

  She blinked again. “Um….”

  Next to her, Troy Lenz lurched to his feet. “Holy shit! She’s got it!”

  “Troy — ” I began, maybe meaning to reprimand him for swearing in class, possibly intending to tell him to sit down, but I was fairly certain neither of those admonishments would have had any effect. All around the class, those few students who’d been brave enough to show up shot straight out of their seats, looking at Taylor as if she’d just started vomiting pea soup or something. Never mind that vomiting was not one of the symptoms of “the Heat” — the street nickname given to the disease because of the extreme fevers it caused.