Darktide

by Christine Pope

  “Do you think he’ll try to come after me again?” Hayley asked then. “I mean, now that Levi isn’t here to protect me.” Her voice broke slightly as she spoke her lover’s name, but she made herself continue the sentence. “Not that I really care,” she added, “it’s just that I could see why Escobar might want me to help amplify some of the people’s powers that Lucinda just mentioned.”

  A legitimate concern, and something we’d have to make sure never happened. Connor clearly agreed with that sentiment, because he said, expression grim, “He’ll have to get through us first. And we have you with the two of us. When Angela and I work together, we can achieve some pretty amazing things. I think even Joaquin Escobar would have second thoughts about trying to take us on if we have your gift amplifying our prima and primus powers.”

  Hayley looked almost relieved by that statement, although the worry never completely left her eyes. “You’re right — I hadn’t really thought about it that way. Do you even know the extent of your combined gifts?”

  “Not really,” I said. “We were able to strip Matías of his powers, and that’s something I’m pretty sure no one else would have been able to do.”

  “Not even Levi?” Lucinda asked. “I mean, it sounds as though he has access to almost every witchy powers that’s ever manifested.”

  Connor and I looked at each other. Good question, but…. “Levi’s still just one person,” I told her. “Neither Connor nor I on our own could have taken away Matías’ powers, or the powers of Jorge and Tomas. Also, it’s kind of hard to describe, but a prima’s gifts — or a primus’ gifts — aren’t quite the same as those of an ordinary witch or warlock. It’s more like they’re overlaid on the talents we already have. I’m pretty sure Levi isn’t able to use those sorts of powers.”

  “Even if that’s true, he can still do a lot of damage,” Hayley said. Now her arms were crossed, as if she was trying to hold on to herself so she wouldn’t lose the control she was so desperately attempting to maintain. “I mean, he wouldn’t do it willingly, but….” Her big blue eyes sought mine, imploring, wanting me to tell her something that would put her mind at ease. Unfortunately, I didn’t have those sorts of answers.

  Voice as gentle as I could make it, I said, “According to what Caitlin saw in her vision, it seemed pretty clear that Escobar’s null powers were enough to negate Levi’s gifts. If that’s the case, then it’s not too big a leap to believe that Escobar can also use his talent for persuasion to keep Levi in line, to make him do his bidding.”

  “We don’t know for sure, of course,” Connor added, clearly wanting to do something to change the stricken expression that crossed over Hayley’s features as I made my remark. “But I think it’s better to assume the worst. The good news is that, once we have Levi back, we shouldn’t have to worry about ‘deprogramming’ him or anything. As soon as Joaquin Escobar’s influence is cut off, then Levi should return to himself.”

  “And how are we going to get him back?” Lucinda asked. “He was able to teleport into my house to get me out, but I assume that if he was the one taking on that job the last time, then you don’t have anyone in your clan who can do something similar.”

  Both Connor and I shook our heads. “Not in the McAllisters, or the Wilcoxes, although I’ve heard it was once a Wilcox gift,” I replied. “Maybe in the de la Paz clan, although I kind of doubt it. I’ll check with Luz, though.”

  “In the meantime,” Connor said, his tone deliberately soothing, “we all have to keep calm. Escobar’s all about disruption, about making us feel off-kilter. He’s not going to hurt Levi — he’s way too valuable. It’s pretty obvious that he went out of his way to capture him.”

  “Was it a trap?” Hayley asked then.

  The thought hadn’t even occurred to me before she said those words, but then I realized it must have been. How Escobar had done it, I didn’t know, but it now seemed kind of obvious that he must have set up something he knew would lure Levi in.

  Or rather, Joaquin Escobar had guessed that if he gave us a sufficiently difficult puzzle, we’d send in Levi to check it out. After all, he was sort of our ace in the hole, our deus ex machina.

  And now he was gone.

  “It might have been a trap,” I said slowly. “But if that’s the case, then we’ll just have to figure out how Escobar managed to do such a thing…and make sure he never does it again.”

  7

  Jack Sandoval

  His phone was vibrating as Jack came into the house, pleasantly warm and just slightly buzzed from sitting on the patio and sharing a pitcher of margaritas with his girlfriend Kate. Maybe now wasn’t the best time to be tying one on, after everything that had been happening lately, but no one had reached out to him for help, and they’d both felt like having a little something to help them relax.

  Jack’s first instinct was to ignore the phone. After all, it was pretty clear that Luz and the other members of the clan were doing their best to give him and Kate a little space as they grew into their new relationship, and he doubted the call could be all that important. From what he’d been able to tell, things had pretty much quieted down right after Levi killed off Matías Escobar. Jack doubted the situation would stay this way forever, but he might as well enjoy the calm while he could.

  In the end, though, years of training won out, and he picked up his iPhone from the spot where he’d left it charging on the kitchen counter. A frown pulled at his brows as he saw the number. Not Luz, nor anyone in the de la Paz clan.

  No, it was his former supervisor, Larry Jansen, of the Scottsdale P.D.

  Well, this should be interesting.

  Jack pressed his finger against the phone’s screen to accept the call. “Hey, Larry.”

  “Hey, Jack. How’s retirement treating you?”

  At that moment, Kate came into the kitchen from the patio, their empty margarita glasses in her hands. The early afternoon sunlight flooding through the French doors touched her warmly tanned shoulders, bare under the strappy sundress she wore.

  “Retirement is good.” Very good, Jack thought. Or at least it would be, if it weren’t for the prick of unease that was already starting somewhere around the nape of his neck. It wasn’t even precisely a warlock thing, just the instincts gained from fifteen years on the force. “What’s up? You miss me already?”

  “Hardly. It’s been all peace and quiet, smooth sailing ever since you left.”

  Jack highly doubted that. Scottsdale definitely wasn’t anything close to the crime capital of the country, but in any big city, you always had your share of petty larceny, home break-ins, domestic assaults, and too many other transgressions to list…including murders, although they weren’t nearly as numerous as the residential crimes. Comments like the one Larry had just made were his way of trying to get under Jack’s skin.

  “So what is it, then?”

  “Well, you know how you told me to let you know if I heard of any developments regarding the Aguirre cousins?”

  The prickly sensation Jack had begun to experience a moment earlier just increased tenfold. Had Joaquin Escobar broken them out? It had seemed as though the dark warlock was content to let them sit in jail and rot, since apparently they were of no further use, but maybe he’d changed his mind and decided he needed as many lackeys as possible now that his son was gone. “Yeah,” Jack replied, doing his best to keep his tone carefully neutral. “What about them?”

  “They’re dead.”

  Suddenly, sounding neutral didn’t seem like an option. “What?”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “Well, yeah. Last I heard, they were being model citizens, maybe hoping for time off for good behavior. Now you’re saying they’re dead?”

  “Yeah.” A pause, followed by a clicking sound, probably Larry pulling up some information on his computer. “It looks like they both died five days ago.”

  Five days? “Thanks for letting me know so quickly.”

  “Hey,” Larry replied, sounding w
ounded, “this just crossed my desk today. It’s not like it was marked as top priority or anything. I just let some people know — who let other people know — that I was kind of keeping track of those two. Things have to go through channels, you know.”

  Yes, Jack did know. He didn’t miss the petty intricacies of the judicial system’s bureaucracy, that was for sure. And as he watched Kate go over to the sink and rinse out their margarita glasses, then give him an inquiring glance, one eyebrow lifted, he was gladder than ever that he’d walked away from it all. He’d thought he might go stir crazy, being isolated out here in their desert hideaway, but the truth of it was, they had plenty to keep them busy, just doing things around the property, taking day trips to local wineries if the mood struck them.

  Enjoying life. What a concept.

  After tilting his head at Kate, indicating that he’d fill her in after he was done with his phone call, Jack cleared his throat. “It’s fine. So what did you hear?”

  “Both of them were found in their cells — hundreds of miles apart — with no physical signs of trauma. The coroners in both cases did a full autopsy, because that’s what you have to do when you have two healthy males in their twenties drop dead for no reason.”

  “They find anything?” Even as he asked the question, he somehow knew what Larry’s answer would be.

  “Nope. Nothing. No drugs, no foreign substances of any kind. No marks on their bodies. It’s like their hearts just stopped.”

  Great. While Jack didn’t know of any spell off the top of his head that would kill so quietly, so efficiently, that didn’t mean much. His gift was defending against dark magic, not using it. No one in his clan practiced those kinds of black enchantments.

  But Joaquin Escobar sure as hell did.

  Larry went on, “You know what the real kicker is?”

  “No.”

  “They both died at almost exactly the same time — somewhere around 3:00 in the morning. Of course it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact minute, but they definitely died within an hour or so of each other.”

  Jesus. That sounded like the darkest of magic — not only to kill two people so silently, but to choose that hour of the morning? It was fairly well known that practitioners of the black path liked to do things in threes, in a mockery of the Holy Trinity, which was why so much dark magic was cast around three in the morning. Or rather, Jack knew that fun fact because he’d had to read up on such things when working to strengthen his defense spells.

  Escobar had to have done it. But why? Had he decided that the Aguirres were a liability, that even though their powers had been stripped from them, they might at some point say the wrong thing to the wrong person?

  Jack couldn’t think of another reason for their deaths. His time working in the homicide division had helped him get inside the criminal mind a bit more than your regular person on the street, but Joaquin Escobar wasn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill criminal. Truth be told, Jack didn’t want to get inside that guy’s mind — it was probably an abattoir of filth and blood and deep, dark hatreds.

  “That is pretty messed up,” he said, knowing that Larry was waiting for some kind of a response.

  “Yeah.” A pause, and then Larry added, “You have any idea what could have happened?”

  “Not a clue,” Jack said at once. “If they’d had some trace of drugs or poison in their systems, I would have said they must have managed to make some kind of long-distance suicide pact, but if toxicology came back clean — ”

  “It did. They could’ve gotten their hands on some drugs if they wanted to, I suppose — our prison system is like a sieve when it comes to that kind of thing — but they were both clean as a whistle.”

  “Maybe they willed themselves to die.”

  Larry made a disgusted sound. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Not necessarily. There are documented cases of that sort of thing. You got a better explanation?”

  “No.” Through the speaker came a sound that might have been a sigh, although Larry had never been the sighing type. “Anyway, I just thought you should know.”

  It was a gruesome question to ask, but Jack knew he couldn’t avoid making the inquiry. “What happened to the bodies?”

  “No family came to claim them. Safford doesn’t have a cemetery, so they were buried side by side in the prison graveyard in Florence.”

  A better fate than they probably deserved. At least the cousins were reunited in death.

  “Makes sense. Well, thanks for the update.”

  “No problem.” A hesitation, as if Larry could sense that he was leaving about a hundred unasked questions on the table. However, Jack knew his former supervisor was not the type to delve too deeply into the unknown. He could be dogged on a case, but he didn’t like anything that had even a whiff of the weird about it. He wanted everything cut and dried. Because of that, he wasn’t going to pursue this. He’d called Jack and provided the information, just as he’d promised he would, but at this point, he just wanted to be able to say he’d done his duty and then walk away.

  Which was for the best. Jack still didn’t know exactly what was going on here, but it sure as hell wasn’t anything good. At this point, the best thing to do was end the call, get off the phone. “Actually, Kate and I were just on our way out when you called — ”

  “Oh, sure. Enjoy your day. ’Bye.”

  Larry hung up then. Had there been the faintest hint of accusation in his voice during that last remark, as though he was slightly jealous that Jack would be able to go on and enjoy his day, now that he didn’t have to come into work anymore?

  Possibly. But that was Larry’s problem, not his. Actually, Larry could take early retirement if he wanted to, but Jack knew his former supervisor was probably going to hang on until he was forcibly thrown out. It wasn’t so much that he loved the job, more that he wouldn’t know what to do with himself once he didn’t have a reason to go to work every morning.

  Jack set down his phone. Kate was still waiting by the sink, although now she leaned against the counter. “What was all that about?” she asked.

  “More Escobar-related weirdness,” he replied. “Tomas and Jorge Aguirre — the two cousins who helped Matías kidnap Roslyn McAllister and Danica Wilcox — were both found dead in their prison cells. No verifiable cause of death. They both died at approximately the same time, as far as the coroner was able to determine.”

  Kate’s hazel-green eyes widened. She was tanned now from her time in the sun, and the contrast between her eyes and her skin was striking. “Um, that’s pretty strange, isn’t it?”

  Beyond strange, really. Even so, Jack lifted his shoulders as he said, “Yeah, it is. I have to think that Joaquin Escobar had something to do with what happened to them, but what, exactly? I can’t begin to guess what purpose their deaths might have served, except to make sure their mouths were permanently kept shut.”

  A frown, and Kate tilted her head to give him a quizzical glance. “Do you really think they would have told anyone about who they were?”

  “No. They’d already been in prison for a couple of years. If they were going to spill the beans, they probably would have done so already.” Jack shrugged, then went over to where Kate stood. At once she put her arms around his waist and pulled him close. She wasn’t wearing a bra under that sundress, and just the sensation of her full breasts pressing against him was enough to make him harden slightly. Unfortunately, he knew he couldn’t allow himself to get distracted. Something very strange was going on.

  He needed to call Luz.

  Because he didn’t want Kate to think he was rejecting her, he bent and kissed her, tasted the sweet-sour tang of the margaritas they’d drunk earlier on her full lips. God, he really wished he could take her into the bedroom.

  Those sorts of diversions would have to wait, though.

  Reluctantly, he pulled away, but he did reach up to touch her hair, to feel its softness under his fingertips. “I have to make a phone call.”
r />   She didn’t look disappointed. More…resigned. “Luz?”

  “Yes. I’ve been kind of out of contact the past few days anyway, so this new information just gives me another reason to check in.”

  “Okay. I need to go take a look at the shade cloth in the garden anyway, make sure those winds we had last night didn’t loosen anything.”

  Jack sent her a grateful smile and watched as she let herself back out onto the patio before she disappeared around a corner of the house. The garden had been her idea; he hadn’t really thought they’d be able to do much out here on this stretch of dry desert land, but she’d had him help her set up the shade cloth to protect their little garden patch, had bought plants from a Home Depot in Tucson because it was already too late in the growing season to get started with seeds. So far the garden of tomatoes and squash and peppers was doing pretty well, as was the little box of herbs that sat on the kitchen windowsill. Whether they’d actually be able to make their own salsa, the way she’d promised…well, he supposed he’d find out in a month or two.

  For now, though, he needed to ignore such pleasant endeavors. Expression turning grim, he picked up his phone again, found Luz in his contacts list, and then pressed the phone icon to connect the call.

  She answered almost right away. “What is it, Jack?”

  Her voice was tense, almost clipped. Clearly, she hadn’t been spending the same kind of relaxing day that he had, and he wondered what had been going on in the wider world while he was playing at domestic tranquility with Kate. “I just talked to my former boss. He wanted to let me know that the Aguirre cousins are dead.”

  “What?”

  Basically my same reaction, he thought with a flash of grim humor. However, judging by the way she sounded, Jack guessed that Luz wouldn’t find anything particularly funny about the situation. “They died five days ago, in their prison cells. The coroner wasn’t able to find a cause of death.”