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

by Christine Pope

  By then we were almost at the Home Depot, so Jace didn’t say anything until after he’d pulled into the parking lot and stopped. “You mean someone’s been coming here and systematically taking the trucks and the four-wheel-drive SUVs?”

  “Well, I doubt I could prove it, but…yeah, something like that.”

  He shook his head and pulled the key from the ignition, then slipped it into his pocket. “In a way it makes sense, I suppose. Whoever and wherever the other survivors are, they’re going to have to do a lot more for themselves. So having vehicles that can tow things and haul things and get around on unplowed roads would be vital.” His brows had been pulled together as he pondered the conundrum, but then he seemed to relax, and although the air was sharp and cold, a flicker of warmth went through me as he gave me an admiring glance. “That was some pretty good detective work, Jess. I don’t think I would have even noticed.”

  “Well, it’s just a theory,” I said deprecatingly, trying to convince myself as much as him.

  “Better than anything I could come up with.” Then he hesitated, looking past me down the street that fronted the store. Of course it was completely deserted, but I could tell he was worried. “Maybe you should stay here. You know — keep an eye on the car.”

  I really didn’t want to do that, but if it turned out I was right about the way the abandoned vehicles were being cherry-picked, then it made sense for me to stand watch. At least this time I’d remembered to bring a sidearm. It was hanging in a holster against my hip, a reminder that we could never relax all the way when we came into town. Jace had one as well, the big S&W, which was better suited to his height anyway.

  “No problem,” I said. All right, so I didn’t sound terribly enthusiastic, but neither had I argued with him.

  He leaned down and kissed me on the cheek, his lips warm against my wind-chilled skin. “I’ll be less than five minutes. I just need some brackets and wire. It’ll be fast.”

  I nodded, and he reached into his pocket and pulled out the car key.

  “Just in case.”

  In case of what? I wanted to ask. I didn’t, though, only took the key from him and slid it into my coat pocket.

  After that, he turned away from me and headed into the store, walking quickly despite the patches of ice that lingered on the asphalt. I supposed I could have gotten back inside the Cherokee where it would be warmer, but I didn’t. Instead, I leaned against the driver-side door, my eyes scanning in all directions for…what? A batch of marauders out of a Mad Max movie, bearing down on me, intent on stealing my SUV?

  No sign of anything like that — no movement at all, except a crow that came flapping down the street and then perched on one of the tall lights in the parking lot. It shook out its wings and settled down, fixing me with a baleful yellow gaze.

  Crap on my car, and I’ll use you for target practice, I thought, but the bird didn’t move, only sat on the lamppost, surveying the parking lot. In happier days, it might have had some pickings there — the uneaten fries from some kid’s Happy Meal, a spilled Coke. Now, however, the lot was bare of anything except the abandoned vehicles that still remained there, waiting for owners who would never return, and some patches of unmelted snow.

  But even though I didn’t see anyone else, and I knew I was perfectly safe, I couldn’t help the wave of relief that washed over me when I saw Jace coming back out of the store, carrying several bags’ worth of supplies.

  “It looks like they — whoever they are — came back. More stuff is gone.” Jace handed me the bags, and I got the car key out of my pocket and gave it to him.

  “Stuff you needed?” I asked anxiously.

  “No, everything we came here to get is pretty esoteric. But now the batteries are totally cleared out, and the solar garden lights, and — well, just a lot of different things.”

  The batteries would have worried me, except that we had flats of the things back in our basement, both regular and rechargeable. And solar garden lights? Our property was outfitted with those, too. It seemed whoever was looting the Home Depot, they were coming from a place of a lot more need than either Jace or I.

  But we’d have to figure that out later. Or never. The weather seemed to be holding, and I had to hope it would stay that way for a few days, long enough so Jace could get the antenna installed. Maybe after that we could start to get some answers.

  Right then, though, it was a lot more important that we get home. We had no evidence to show that anyone knew of our hideaway, but leaving it unattended always made me feel nervous. Dutchie would bark up a storm, but I doubted her doing so would be enough to scare off anyone who was determined to break in and take what they could.

  Either no one had yet discovered the compound, or any survivors in the area had decided it was easier pickings in town, because once again we returned to find everything as we had left it. We gave Dutchie her usual greeting of some scratching behind the ears and a treat, and then Jace went to survey the area outside the office.

  “We’re in luck,” he said, after prodding at the mud and driving a piece of rebar down into the ground. “It’s not frozen.”

  “And that’s relevant because…?” I was standing a few feet from him, close enough to see what he was doing but not so close that I would be in the way.

  “Because I have to install a ground rod in addition to running co-ax from the antenna to the unit in the office.” At my blank look, he sort of grinned and shook his head. “It’s a little more complicated than sticking a TV aerial on your roof.”

  “Can you do it?” As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized that I probably should have asked that question before we went to all the trouble of getting supplies.

  “I think so. I’ve read over the instructions a few times. Good thing I learned to solder in my shop class in high school.”

  And here I’d thought all we’d have to do was install the antenna on the roof, run some wire, and voilà, we’d be chatting it up with survivors around the globe. I should have known nothing would be that easy.

  But he got to it in earnest after that, producing a ladder from the garage and climbing up to the roof, then letting me hand the antenna up to him from a point midway on the same ladder. I had to loiter there for some time, waiting so I could catch the bundle of coaxial cable as he tossed it to me once one end had been attached to the antenna. After he was done on the roof, Jace came down and fastened the wire to the exterior wall of the house with a series of brackets.

  “I can handle it from here,” he told me. “You’d better go inside — your lips are starting to turn blue.”

  “They are not,” I protested, although truthfully, it was fairly cold outside, probably only a few degrees above freezing.

  “I can see them. You can’t.” He grinned at me. “Really, I’ve got this. Isn’t it around time for you to be starting dinner anyway?”

  “Chained to the stove, just like I thought,” I remarked, but I leavened the tartness of my words by giving him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Don’t stay out so long that your lips start to turn blue.”

  “I won’t.”

  I had to be satisfied with that, so I went in the house and started rummaging around in the kitchen. Outside, the daylight slanted its way toward dusk, and before it got full dark, I heard Jace come inside, although he seemed to go straight to the office rather than stopping in the kitchen to check on the ETA for dinner. Since I was making quickie rabbit stew that didn’t really need babysitting, as it was now in the “let it sit in the pot until you’re ready to eat it” stage, I headed back to the office, where I found Jace under the table we’d designated as the ham radio workstation.

  “Everything okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” came his voice, somewhat muffled, since he was facing the wall. “Just need to make this last connection.”

  Since I really didn’t have anything better to do, I leaned against the doorframe and waited as he wrenched on something. A few minutes and a couple of muffled curses late
r, he was pushing himself out from beneath the table and getting to his feet.

  “I think that should be it.”

  “So let’s fire it up and see if we can find anything.”

  He set down the screwdriver he was holding and crossed his arms. “We don’t have to rush into this, you know.”

  “After you just spent all afternoon working on it?” I said, both perplexed and irritated by his reluctance to use the radio. “If you didn’t think it was a good idea, then why waste so much time and effort on it?”

  “I’m not saying that,” he replied, digging in his pocket for another of those interminable leather cords so he could pull his hair out of his face. I wondered why he hadn’t done that earlier, but maybe having his hair down on his neck had helped to keep him warm while he was up working on the roof.

  “Then what are you saying?” I crossed my arms and tried hard not to scowl. “I guess I just can’t figure out why you’re so reluctant to even attempt to find other survivors, especially since we wouldn’t be talking to them, just scanning to see if there is even anyone else out there.”

  A long pause. I could tell from the way his mouth tightened and he didn’t quite look at me that he wasn’t particularly eager to explain himself. Maybe not, but I wasn’t about to let this go.

  Finally, he jammed his hands into his jeans pockets and said, “All right, what if we listen in and find some survivors, then decide they sound all right and that we should reach out to them? What if they turn out to not be all right?”

  “‘Not all right’ as in…what?” I asked, wondering what he was driving at. I tried to think of the worst-case scenario and added, “Like, cannibals or something?”

  A grim smile touched his lips. “No, I don’t think cannibalism is going to be an issue, not with all the wild game to be had around here. More like….” The words died away, and he hesitated again. “More like, what if they turn out to be a bunch of good old boys who aren’t exactly thrilled to find an Indian shacked up with a white girl?”

  I stared at him. “That’s….” I’d been about to say, That’s ridiculous, but then I realized maybe it wasn’t. It should have been, but…I’d seen enough ugly incidents involving my friend Elena to know prejudice wasn’t exactly a thing of the past, even for someone who was beautiful and talented and came from a family with money. The worst incident had been at a frat party in college, when some drunk asshole told her, “Hey, chiquita, you’re pretty hot. Why don’t you come over here and suck my chalupa?” Luckily, Tori was standing right there and responded by dumping her cup of cheap keg beer over the guy’s head, but I’d never forgotten that scene. I knew Elena hadn’t, either, even though she’d blown it off at the time, telling us the guy was too wasted to know what he was saying. That wasn’t true, though…he’d known exactly what he was saying. And so had she, despite trying to act as if it was no big deal.

  So as much as I wanted to brush off Jace’s concerns as being completely unfounded, I knew they weren’t. Just because the calendar said it was the twenty-first century, it didn’t mean that everyone had gotten the memo.

  And while intellectually I could understand where he was coming from, I knew I’d never be able to feel that doubt, those misgivings, the way he did, because I’d come from a completely different world. I was a white girl. Sure, I had a Ute great-great-grandmother — if the family legend was even true — but that didn’t mean I could relate to his experiences as someone who’d grown up on the pueblo, who’d come at life in twenty-first-century America from a completely different angle than I had.

  “So you see what I mean,” he said quietly.

  “Yes.” His expression brightened a little at that, and I went on, “But…can’t we just try it to see if it works? No one will know we’re doing that if we don’t transmit anything, right?”

  At least he didn’t try to equivocate. “No, no one will know that we’re listening in. If there’s even anything to listen to. But we’ll give it a shot.”

  Jace went to the ham radio receiver and switched it on. When he’d set it up, he’d told me that it was designed to be portable, that if we could locate a different antenna setup, we could even take it along with us in the Jeep if we wanted. Why we’d want to do that, I didn’t particularly know, but it could possibly come in handy one day.

  “Well, here goes,” he said, pressing the power button.

  A soft hiss began to emerge from the small speakers set up to either side of the receiver. Jace began scanning along the bands, going slowly enough that he could stop if he came across something interesting. All I heard was that hiss, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, but even I knew it was all merely dead air.

  And then…what sounded like a faint, tinny voice, a single syllable. “Lo — ”

  It cut off with a screech and was replaced by more static. “Damn it,” Jace said, scanning back to the band where the sound had come from. But there was no voice this time, only an angry, crackling hiss.

  “What happened to it?” I asked, coming closer, as if somehow I thought my presence would help the tuner lock back on to the signal.

  “I don’t know.” He sounded irritated, and I didn’t blame him. All that work, for something that might or might not have been an actual person?

  “Keep scanning,” I suggested, and he expelled a breath and continued his slow sweep across the bands. Just more hissing, more static.

  My stomach clenched, and I told myself to calm down. Just because we weren’t picking up anything now didn’t mean there was no one out there. The other survivors might not have the skill to operate ham radio equipment, or hadn’t managed to set theirs up yet. It wasn’t as if Jace and I were alone on the planet — the missing supplies and those mysteriously vanished trucks and SUVs told me other people were out there somewhere, and, from the look of it, they seemed to be fairly well-organized. Sooner or later, we’d have to cross paths. Although now, after what Jace had confided in me about his misgivings on that score, I wasn’t sure meeting up with other people would be as beneficial as I’d previously hoped.

  “I’m not getting anything,” Jace said at last, then shut off the receiver before turning back toward me. “Maybe I screwed up something in the installation, but it’s dark out now, so I won’t be able to check until tomorrow morning.”

  “It’s fine,” I told him, even though I didn’t know if it really was. “I think you did have it working. I just think…no one’s transmitting.”

  “Still, I’ll investigate more tomorrow.” He glanced away from me, sniffed the air. “Smells like dinner’s ready.”

  “Almost,” I said, knowing that he’d changed the topic on purpose. Still, what did it matter? We weren’t getting anything out of that ham radio tonight.

  So we went to the kitchen, which was warm and smelled of good and savory things — proven by Dutchie, who was loitering much closer to the stove than she should be. I shooed her away, and then dished up our food while Jace got her some kibble. Just another normal night…or as normal as things could ever be now.

  That syllable was still rattling around in my head, though. Lo…. “Lo” what? The transmission had cut off so quickly that I didn’t even know whether it truly had been part of an actual broadcast of some sort, or merely a weird distortion that sounded like part of a word but was in fact only a nonsense note generated by a rogue sound wave or something.

  I didn’t speak of my concerns to Jace, though. The subject of the ham radio was a sore one already, and he had tried. I’d let it go for now, and maybe someday I’d learn if there truly had been someone broadcasting out there…or whether I was only imagining things.

  We checked the radio every day after that, but got nothing but static and hiss. It was frustrating — for me, anyway — but as there didn’t seem to be much we could do about the communications blackout, we put it aside so we could focus on more important things, like surviving the winter.

  Well, it wasn’t that bad, but I still could tell I hadn’t become acclimated to
the cold. Santa Fe probably averaged around ten to fifteen degrees colder than Albuquerque most of the time, but when that difference is between fifty-five degrees and forty, believe me, you can feel it. We had the wood stove in the sitting room going all the time, and the fireplaces in the living room and family room as well, but you could still sense the drop in temperature when you went out of the range of any of them. Jace got in the habit of going to our bedroom immediately after dinner and starting a fire so it would be comfortable enough to get undressed by the time we went in there.

  Of course it could have been much worse, and the conditions were certainly endurable, but all the same, I found myself missing the central forced heat at my parents’ house or even the wall unit in my studio apartment over the garage. That thing had heated up fast.

  But those appliances were long gone, along with a million other comforts and conveniences I hadn’t even appreciated until I didn’t have them anymore, and so I told myself not to worry about them, that I was damn lucky to be where I was now.

  Especially since I could be here with Jace.

  We talked about the coming spring, about what we might be able to plant outside the greenhouse to supplement the crops we grew there. Because of the goats, we’d have to build a separate enclosure for another garden, since otherwise it would get eaten before we had a chance to harvest anything, but Jace thought he could manage it, especially if the stores of lumber down at the Home Depot didn’t get pilfered by whatever survivors were still lurking around the area.

  And occasionally, after I was done hurriedly washing my face and brushing my teeth, because the heat from the fireplace in the main part of the bedroom didn’t quite reach into the bathroom, I’d pull out my packet of pills and hesitate before taking one. We hadn’t discussed that kind of future, but it seemed clear to me that Jace didn’t intend to go anywhere, that he was planning on a future with me in it. Was it crazy to consider starting a family? After all, someone needed to begin repopulating the earth.