Darkmoon (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 3)

by Christine Pope

  Here, too, the swamp cooler was blasting away, but the windows only had thin paper shades, so it felt much brighter than the other house. The furniture looked newer, too, although still plain — a couch and chair covered in plain brown canvas, Navajo rugs on the floor.

  Actually, it reminded me of Marie’s house, although much smaller, of course. Maybe those two really had been meant to be together.

  Thinking of that just made me uncomfortable, though, because it reminded me of how artificial my father’s relationship with my mother actually had been. He’d said he’d come to care for her, but how much of that feeling was good old-fashioned guilt?

  I paused, standing in the middle of the living room.

  “Some more water?” my father asked.

  “No, thanks.” Now that we were alone together, I began to wonder if this had been such a good idea. The tension between us seemed thick enough that it lay as heavy as the heat outside on my skin. I pulled in a breath, then said, “What did you fight about?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Since I’d asked the question out of nowhere, I supposed his look of bewilderment was understandable. “We talked with Linda Sanderson, the woman who lived next door to you in Newport Beach back when you were…with my mother. She said you two had a huge fight a few days before I was born, and that you drove off and didn’t come back. So what was the fight about?”

  He pushed up his sleeves, a nervous gesture, since they weren’t in any danger of sliding back down past his elbows. “Linda. I hadn’t thought about her in years. She’s still in the same house?”

  “Yes. I got the address of the place you and my mother were renting from my birth certificate. Connor and I drove out there, looking for answers.”

  Like me, my father was sort of hovering in the middle of the room, ignoring the couches and chair as if they weren’t even there. At last he said, “We fought because your mother found out about Marie.”

  “So my mother didn’t know anything? Who did she think you were?” What lies did you tell her? was my unspoken question, and from the twist of my father’s mouth, I got the impression he’d picked up on the unvoiced query loud and clear.

  “She thought I was one of the Santiagos.”

  “Because that’s what you told her.”

  “Yes.”

  “And none of the real Santiagos figured out that there was a Wilcox living in their midst?”

  The hazel eyes, so similar in shape to my own, were full of anguish. “Things are bad now in California, but they were bad then, too. So many witches and warlocks coming there without permission, and the Santiagos trying to police them all — well, let’s just say I slipped in under the radar. Of course I knew better than to use my powers, do anything to attract attention. Lawrence had seen your mother going to Newport Beach, and that’s where I found her. She was standing on the sand, watching the sunset. Most of the other girls on the beach were wearing bikinis or tank tops and shorts, but Sonya, she had on a pale blue sundress and her hair was blowing in the breeze.” He paused then, obviously attempting to choose the right words. “I guess I hadn’t expected her to be that pretty.”

  So she had been, at least from the few photos I’d seen of her. Had he looked at her, that day on the beach so long ago, and thought perhaps the duty he’d been tasked with carrying out wouldn’t be quite as bad as he feared?

  “So you…hooked up.”

  A frown touched his mouth. “Well, that’s not what people called it back then, but…yes. Not that she needed much persuading. It was as if she’d gone there determined to lose her virginity at the earliest opportunity.”

  As much as I really didn’t want to think that about my mother, I knew it was only the truth. The best way to avoid bonding with her consort and becoming prima was to throw away that virginity as soon as she could. No one in Jerome or Cottonwood or Clarkdale would have touched her, knowing what was at stake, but a handsome stranger she met on a beach in California was a completely different story.

  “And so….”

  “And so…we were together. She was staying in a little motel down on the peninsula. We spent a few weeks there, and then we thought we’d try renting a house together.”

  “Her idea or yours?” I asked, knowing the question had come out more sharply than I’d intended.

  He didn’t blink. “Mine. To be honest, I don’t think she had a real plan. She’d gotten away, gotten out, and made damn sure she wouldn’t be the McAllisters’ newest prima. Maybe in her head she’d thought she would just go back to Jerome after that. But she was having fun in Newport and decided she might as well stay for a while. And then….” The words died away, but I knew what he’d been about to say.

  “Then she got pregnant.”

  “Yes. And we were together, and I didn’t see that changing anytime soon. Lawrence hadn’t been all that clear on exactly how everything was supposed to pan out, whether I was supposed to stay with Sonya, be with her to raise our child or what, so I had to wait and see how things developed. We were doing pretty well, until the argument.”

  “Yeah, that.” I hooked my thumbs in my belt and shifted my weight to one leg, considering him. My father’s expression was still troubled, although that could have simply been from dredging up memories he would rather have forgotten. “How did she find out? I mean, obviously you kept things secret for a good chunk of time, considering you had that blow-out only a few days before I was born.”

  “I got sloppy.” He didn’t exactly sigh, but his lips parted slightly, the slightest gust of breath escaping them. “It was right before Yule, of course, right before the holidays. I did care about your mother, but I’d loved Marie since I was barely fifteen years old. I’d brought a picture of her with me, one I kept hidden in my wallet. Your mother wasn’t the nosy type, so it wasn’t as if she was snooping or anything like that. But I’d pulled out the picture to look at it, wondering what Marie would be doing back in Flagstaff, with the two of us so far apart for the holidays, and your mother walked into the bedroom and saw me holding it. Naturally she wanted to know who it was. I tried to shrug it off, say it was a cousin — which wasn’t even a lie, of course — but she could tell I wasn’t telling the whole truth. Funny how she saw through that one, when I’d managed to convince her I was a Santiago for all those months.”

  “So she never knew you were a Wilcox?”

  “No. She thought I’d been cheating on her. I tried to explain that I hadn’t seen Marie for almost a year, but she didn’t believe me, said if that were really true, then I wouldn’t be carrying around another woman’s picture. And the more I tried to talk to her, the more upset she got. She didn’t want to listen. It almost felt as if she wanted an excuse to get rid of me.”

  “Why would she feel that way?” I asked, sending him an accusing glance. Not that I really suspected him of doing anything worse than lying to her about who he was, but I had a hard time imagining a woman nine months pregnant who’d want to be left alone to have her baby by herself. Then again, my relationship with Connor was very different from whatever it was that my mother and Andre Wilcox had shared. Their entire history together was built on lies. Maybe Connor’s and my relationship had started out that way, but things had changed dramatically for us. I knew he would never lie to me again. I trusted him implicitly.

  After a heavy pause, my father said, “I don’t know what she was thinking. Maybe she was tired of being out in California and wanted to go home to her family, and the only way she could think of to do that was without me. I think maybe she was scared about raising a child so far away from the support structure she knew. She did talk about her sister Rachel from time to time, almost as if she wished her sister was around so she could help with the baby and Sonya could get back to what she was best at — partying and having fun.” He stopped himself there, as if he were about to say more but didn’t want to be seen as maligning my mother to my face.

  It wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before, though. “Don’t worry,”
I told him. “My Aunt Rachel has made it pretty clear what she thought of her my mother’s character flaws. And it’s not as if I’m going to nominate for sainthood someone who went out drinking only a few months after her baby was born and managed to get herself killed because she was riding on the back of a Harley with no helmet.”

  “I am very sorry about that,” my father said quietly. “When Lawrence told me what happened, I wanted to go to Jerome, go fetch you and bring you back here, but he said that wasn’t right, that you would be the next prima, and as much as it hurt, I had to leave you to be raised by your McAllister relatives.”

  He might have lied to my mother, but I could tell he wasn’t lying now. “And so…you just stayed out here, and took your grandmother’s family name? You never went back to Flagstaff?”

  “Never. What I had done needed to be hidden from both the McAllister and Wilcox clans. I did send one note to my mother, so she would know I wasn’t dead…too.” The last word was tacked on, and I could tell how much it still bothered him that he hadn’t been there when his father had passed away, and had to stand by and do nothing while his mother turned her back on that part of her past, repudiating the witch clan her husband had come from.

  “So…what have you been doing all this time?” Besides waiting, that is….

  He gestured for me to follow him, and we left the living room and went down a short hallway. Through one open door I spied what must have been his bedroom, with a full-size bed and one dresser, and not much else. But our destination was the other bedroom, now turned into a workshop. I recognized the assortment of pliers on the large table, and the boxes of polished stones — mostly turquoise, with some coral and sugilite and lapis mixed in, and the long bands of silver and copper used for bezels in cabochon settings. There were also chunks of raw stones, which meant he probably did his own gem-cutting as well. His jewelry-making equipment was more elaborate than mine, though, since I could see he also had a kiln for lost-wax casting, something I’d never attempted. On the shelf were various carvings he’d done for ring and pendant settings; a few half-finished pieces still sat in the middle of the worktable, along with a ring that looked ready to be sold.

  “You make jewelry?” I asked, trying not to sound too flabbergasted. After all, what were the odds that both my father and I would end up with the same vocation? “That’s amazing. I mean, I make jewelry, too.”

  “I know,” he said.

  Of course he did. He knew a good deal about me, whereas I knew hardly anything about him. But I was learning, and however I might fault him for staying away, no matter what any prophecy might say, I had to admit that he’d been very honest with me today, even when he knew some of the things he’d be telling me would put him in a bad light.

  “Anyway, this was the trade I took up. I have some pieces down at the trading post, and the rest goes to the co-ops that run the roadside stands. It hasn’t made us rich, but the tourists like Navajo jewelry. They don’t need to know that I’m only a quarter Navajo.”

  “It’s very beautiful,” I said. I took a few steps over to the table and then picked up the ring that sat there, a piece of beautiful pure blue Sleeping Beauty turquoise with a fine rope bezel and detailed flowers and leaves encircling the entire piece.

  “It’s yours,” he said, coming to me and closing my fingers around the ring.

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t — ”

  “Angela,” he said quietly, and something in his tone made me stop and look up at him. His gaze was earnest, pleading. “I’ve done so little for you. Please, let me do this.”

  My protests died on my lips. I nodded, and he let go of my hand, watching as I slipped the ring onto my middle finger. “Thank you.”

  He smiled then, just a little, a smile that slipped away as he said, “I suppose we should go back so your fiancé doesn’t think you’ve completely abandoned him.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  So we headed back to Lawrence’s house, where Connor looked very relieved to see us. He shot a questioning look in my direction and I nodded slightly, indicating that I’d gotten some answers, if not all.

  “Come back the day after tomorrow, and we’ll begin our work then,” Lawrence told me.

  Although I knew it was important to be as prepared for the confrontation with Nizhoni as I possibly could, I wasn’t really looking forward to coming back out here, partly because I wasn’t sure what this “work” would really entail, and partly because I had a new house full of boxes that weren’t going to unpack themselves.

  Now, there would be another handy magical skill to have.

  But I promised I would be back on Tuesday afternoon, and after that Connor and I said our goodbyes and went back to the car. It wasn’t until we’d gone back through Cameron and were heading south on 89 toward Flagstaff that he asked,

  “So, what do you think?”

  I think my head’s beginning to hurt. But I said, “I think they’re telling us the truth. And my father was pretty honest about what really happened with my mother. I’m not saying I like it — finding out your father never loved your mother and was only with her to fulfill some sort of prophecy isn’t exactly fun. But my not liking it isn’t the same thing as not believing them. Because I do.”

  Connor was silent for a bit, eyes fixed on the road. Late afternoon sunlight slanted through the car, bringing out unexpected glints of copper and mahogany in his dark hair. Finally he spoke. “I get that feeling, too. And I kind of have to respect someone who’s patient enough to wait twenty-plus years for his plans to pan out. But still….” He lifted his right hand from the steering wheel and rested it lightly on my thigh, as if to reassure himself that I really was sitting there next to him. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared about what’s coming next.”

  “I know,” I told him. “I don’t even want to think about it. But somehow, knowing how patient they’ve been about waiting for the correct time to arrive, for me to grow up and be ready…well, in an odd way it actually helps. I’m not going to let them down…or us, either.”

  His fingers tightened on my thigh, squeezing slightly. Then we went over a jarring bump, and he returned his hand to the steering wheel.

  As I watched him, something struck me. “But you want to know what’s really strange?”

  “Beyond what’s already happened?” he asked, mouth curling a bit.

  “Yeah, beyond all that.” I mentally ran through the conversations with my father, both the one he and I shared in private, and what we’d discussed at Lawrence’s house. “In that whole time, my father didn’t ask one question about Marie. Not about where she was, or what she was doing. Doesn’t that seem a bit odd?”

  Connor shrugged. “Maybe he wasn’t sure how you would react to that kind of question, so he decided to leave it alone for now.”

  Possibly, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to it than that.

  15

  Spirit Walk

  I realized when we were halfway home that neither my father nor Lawrence had asked for our phone numbers, or offered theirs. Maybe they didn’t have phones. Crazy as that sounded to me, I’d noticed that I had basically zero cell reception out at the house, and it didn’t seem to me as if they were doing well enough financially to afford a satellite phone. I asked Connor about it, and he told me quite a few people on the reservation used CB radios to keep in touch, since they were cheap and reliable.

  So, even if I’d wanted to change my mind about going back out there on Tuesday, there wasn’t any way to back out politely. And actually, there wasn’t as much work to be done at the new house as my brain had manufactured. By the time Monday evening rolled around, we were fairly settled. I almost wished we weren’t, because at least unpacking the kitchen and the bedroom stuff meant I was occupied with figuring out where things should go, and therefore not brooding over what this training with Lawrence might entail.

  I was relieved to see that by Tuesday it had cooled down a bit, which meant the te
mperature might not be past the century mark out at the compound where my father lived. We headed out after lunch, Connor bringing the iPad with him, since he’d gotten the distinct impression he was going to be doing a lot of sitting around while Lawrence worked with me. Of course there was no Internet out there, but you didn’t need connectivity to read a book or play a game locally.

  I was wearing the ring my father had given me, proudly displacing the much plainer turquoise piece I’d bought back in high school. On my other hand glittered Connor’s diamond. Looking at them, I thought of how they represented both my past and my future.

  And I was going to make damn sure that future extended farther than just another year.

  Both Lawrence and my father came out to greet us this time, the two of them looking about the same as when we’d first met them, although today my father’s shirt was a sand color that almost matched the house, the front streaked with rusty stains that I guessed were from the jeweler’s rouge he used to polish his sterling silver pieces. They guided us back to Lawrence’s house, where we all sat down once more.

  “It is simpler than you might think,” he told me after my father had once again brought us water. “All of us have a stillness at our center, but most have forgotten how to find it. Once you locate it, always remember what it feels like, since that calm, that quiet, is what grounds you to who you are, where you have come from. It is easy to get lost in the otherworld if you don’t remember to hold on to yourself.”

  “Are we — are we traveling to the otherworld today?” I asked, wishing my voice didn’t sound so tight, so frightened.

  Chuckling, he shook his head. “No, I will not ask that of you on your first day. Now it is only about meditation. You are afraid, but there is nothing to fear. You, Angela, know more than most people that this world is one of many, and passing from it is nothing more than walking from one room to another. For now, think on these words: