Strange Magic (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 9)

by Christine Pope

  Despite her best efforts to remain where she was, she couldn’t help taking a step backward. No, that was absolutely the wrong thing to do. She needed to welcome this apparition, not act as if she was afraid of it.

  Although, in that moment, she realized she was afraid. No, she couldn’t be afraid. She’d brought it — him — into being. She was just nervous, faced with something entirely outside her normal experience. Anyway, he seemed to be growing more solid as he stared at her, features gradually taking shape even while she watched.

  No. No.

  Because the face that had begun to emerge wasn’t anything close to the telenovela star she thought so handsome. It was twisted, misshapen, a face put together by someone who didn’t really know what a human being was supposed to look like.

  She took another step backward, frantically thinking of what she could do to reverse the spell. Something had gone terribly wrong, that much was clear. She had to send this thing back to wherever it had come from.

  Its arms reached for her, and she let out a frightened little squeal. Her mind raced, trying to come up with a counter-spell. But she couldn’t think of anything. She’d been so certain this would work….

  “Zhoooooo…” it said, and all her veins seemed to turn to ice. Was it trying to say her name?

  Madre de díos….

  Maybe a banishing spell? She had to try. “Unwanted spirit, leave now. Leave this space. Go back whence you came. Only light and healing energy are allowed in this place!”

  It paused, staring at her. Now it did seem to have some sort of eyes, but they were only black pits in that lumpy caricature of a face. For the longest moment, it did not move, but at least it had stopped heading toward her. Then its slash of a mouth parted in a snarl, and it reached out with one hand, fingers curved into claws.

  No time for spells. No time for anything except a burst of her own raw energy, dragged up from deep inside and flung at the creature. A flash of pure white light soared outward and hit it in the chest. It let out a cry of pain, but it did not fall back.

  Shit, Zoe thought. Shit, shit, shit.

  But she’d hurt it. She didn’t even know exactly how she’d managed to hurl that ball of light at the thing, but the action had seemed almost instinctive, as if the prima power buried within her had known exactly what to do, targeting the creature without damaging any of their surroundings.

  Well, she’d have to do it again.

  Another flare of light, this one bigger and so bright that Zoe was half-blinded by the flash when it exploded against the monster’s chest. This time it did stagger backward as it released a roar of pain. And then it turned and ran, melting into nothingness, slipping through the wall of the library as if the thick adobe didn’t even exist.

  For a long moment, Zoe only stood there, her breaths ragged, adrenaline sharp and spiky along every nerve ending. Yes, she’d managed to banish the thing…but where had it gone?

  She knew she should go after it. Unfortunately, her legs refused to obey her as she tried to move toward the place where it had melted through the wall. She realized her body was probably just trying to protect her. Who knew if she’d be successful at driving it off a second time?

  All right. Only one thing she could do. With trembling fingers, she reached for her purse where she’d left it sitting under the table and pulled out her cell phone. Went to her contacts list and pushed the entry for Luz Trujillo. As the call connected, she thought,

  I am in so much trouble….

  2

  Evan McAllister dropped the hood on his ’70 Barracuda and wiped his hands on the rag hanging from the back pocket of his jeans. Changing out the spark plugs on the beast was a real pain in the ass, but he’d refused to alter a thing about the car’s original equipment — hadn’t switched the carburetors over to EFI, hadn’t swapped out the ignition system. About the only concession he’d made to comfort was installing an aftermarket A/C unit, but that was because Verde Valley summers could be brutal, and he didn’t much enjoy sweating to death every time he had to stop at a light, thus eliminating even the slight relief the open windows provided when he was actually in motion.

  Working on the car helped to keep his mind off a whole host of things, up to and including his ex-wife. No doubt egged on by her new lawyer husband, she’d been making noises about how she thought the hush money she’d received from the McAllister clan just wasn’t enough, and that they’d better cough up some more if they didn’t want her telling the whole world about the witches in their midst.

  Scowling, Evan threw the dirty rag into the metal container he reserved for anything that might combust. He knew the elders would work it out somehow, but in the meantime, her latest salvo just meant more judgmental looks from members of the clan who hadn’t approved of his marrying Kelly in the first place. Yes, the divorce had been final for almost two years now, but some people just didn’t want to let it go.

  After letting his eyes run over the sleek, dark lines of the Barracuda, and reassuring himself that he hadn’t left any oil smudges behind, Evan went into the house and washed up at the kitchen sink. The silence around him seemed too hollow, even though he’d been living there alone ever since Kelly took off. Maybe he should have sold the place after all. He knew Bryce McAllister, one of the elders, wasn’t too thrilled about the way he’d stayed down here in Cottonwood instead of moving back up to Jerome after the marriage fell apart.

  But at first Evan had hoped Kelly would change her mind and come back, and after that — well, his flat in Jerome felt too small after living in the house, and anyway, the flat didn’t have a garage. In Jerome, he would have had to beg garage space so he could work on his car. Besides, the flat was more than earning its keep as an Airbnb destination, and since Evan paid his cousin Kirby a stipend to keep an eye on things so he wouldn’t have to keep coming up to Jerome to check on the flat, he really didn’t see any reason to change the setup.

  Just as he was about to throw the paper towel he’d used to dry his hands into the trash, Evan’s cell phone began to buzz. A frown creased his brow, and for a second or two, he contemplated not answering it at all. Right then he just wanted to get a beer from the fridge and sit down and relax. His back ached a little from spending so much time bent over the engine compartment of the car, and he could use the downtime.

  But he didn’t get that many calls, and when he did, it was usually either one of his parents, checking in on him, or maybe one of his cousins calling to see he wanted to go over to Main Stage and play pool or something. Evan had to smile at the calls from his parents; you’d think he was some kid out living on his own for the first time, instead of a grown man of almost thirty.

  The third type of calls were the ones he didn’t get very often, but when he did, he never knew what to expect. His talent was an unusual one, a gift that witch-kind didn’t see in every generation, the way you usually had a healer and a seer and a weather-worker. Most people called him “the fixer,” which was close enough, since he had the ability to track down spells that had gone awry and exert his powers on them so they’d be rendered harmless.

  Luckily, he wasn’t called on to use his gift all that often, because the members of the McAllister clan were pretty circumspect with their magic and didn’t tend to make the kind of mistakes that would require his services. Even so, he knew he could expect to hear from the elders on “official” business at least a couple times a year.

  If his phone was ringing because of the third kind of call, then it didn’t really matter whether he ignored it or not. They’d just keep trying until he eventually picked up.

  So he went over to the table in the breakfast nook, where he’d set down his phone before heading out to the garage. A quick glance at the phone’s display told him that the caller was Tricia McAllister, one of the clan’s elders.

  He didn’t quite sigh, but he could feel himself let out a breath as he picked up the phone and swiped the button to take the call. “Hi, Tricia. What’s up?”

&nb
sp; No greeting. Just a tense, “The elders need to talk to you. How soon can you be at my place?”

  “Twenty minutes,” he replied. It didn’t actually take that long to get from his house up to Jerome, but he’d need to change out of his sweaty T-shirt and greasy jeans before he went to meet with the elders. He might have known them all his life, but he still needed to show them the proper respect.

  “See you then,” Tricia said, then hung up.

  That was kind of strange. Usually when these sorts of things came up, whoever was calling him would at least provide a general idea as to why he might be needed. But Tricia hadn’t let slip a single detail. What, was she worried that the NSA was snooping on their phone calls or something?

  Come to think of it, maybe that wasn’t such a crazy idea after all. But if the government did actually know anything about the secrets the witch clans had been hiding all these years, its sure didn’t give any sign of possessing that knowledge. Anyway, he had enough to worry about without dragging those kinds of conspiracy theories into the situation.

  He headed down the hall to the bedroom and paused at the foot of the bed so he could strip off his T-shirt and jeans, then toss them into the hamper. Someone else might have thrown them on the floor, but Evan hated messes and kept his house neat — neater, actually, than when Kelly had lived here, since she tended to leave a trail of empty glasses and discarded shoes behind her.

  The day was fairly chilly, despite the sweat he’d worked up while laboring on the Barracuda. He got a long-sleeved henley-style T-shirt from one of the drawers and pulled that on, along with one of his less faded pairs of jeans. The elders would just have to live with his work boots, since the only other shoes he owned were a pair of dress lace-ups that hadn’t seen the light of day since his parents’ anniversary dinner last fall, and some flip-flops for those truly brutal Arizona heat waves.

  He headed back out to the garage and started up the car. It roared to life with a satisfying, throaty growl, and he nodded in satisfaction. Maybe the Barracuda did take a lot more work than a more modern vehicle, but a new Honda or Toyota wouldn’t have the same soul.

  Besides, it wasn’t as if he had much else to do with his spare time.

  The day had clouded up while he was working in the garage, and he hoped it wouldn’t rain. That would mean another session in the driveway once the storm had passed, doing another three-step wash to get rid of the spots.

  Yeah, ’cause that’s not obsessive or anything, he thought as he backed out of the driveway and headed down toward Main Street. It’s just a car.

  Blasphemy.

  Maybe. His parents had given him the car on his eighteenth birthday, and Evan and his father had spent countless hours restoring it, looking up matching-numbers parts to rebuild the engine, doing the prep work to smooth the body before it was sent in for its new coat of shiny black paint. Stephen McAllister, Evan’s father, was a sculptor who specialized in big welded pieces, so he knew a thing or two about working with metal.

  Anyway, all that effort was probably a sign that Evan obsessed over the car more than he should. But it just seemed to him that if you put that much love and attention into something, then you should care what happened to it.

  It was getting toward four o’clock, which meant some people were already on their way home from work, and others were headed into old town Cottonwood for a drink at one of the wine tasting rooms, or to a restaurant to catch the first part of happy hour. He drove carefully and slowly, ignoring the admiring stares from some of the people out on the sidewalks. The Barracuda did tend to attract a lot of attention, but he was used to that sort of thing by now.

  The growl of the Hemi engine as he headed up the winding highway into Jerome helped ease the tension in his neck. He didn’t know what was going on, but he’d helped his clan with dozens of these problems before, and he had no reason to believe this time would be any different. Someone got a little over-zealous with a weather spell, or maybe tried forbidden love magic and attracted the wrong person. It didn’t really matter what it was, since his talent seemed capable of unraveling even the worst magical knots.

  Luckily, Tricia’s big Victorian had a nice driveway, so he was able to park there rather than on the street. Almost as soon as he knocked on the pale blue front door, she was there, opening it. Unlike a lot of the McAllister witches, she was neatly and stylishly dressed, in slim jeans and a short light green cardigan. With her carefully bobbed hair, Tricia had always looked to Evan as though she should be the head of the PTA or maybe the social committee at a country club, rather than the elder of a witch clan.

  “Come on in, Evan,” she said, gesturing him inside.

  The interior of the house was as neat as Tricia herself, although it had been decorated with Victorian antiques that seemed a little fussy to him. Maybe she’d tried to match the decor to the house.

  She led him into the living room, where Bryce and the third McAllister elder, Allegra Moss, already waited on the couch. Unlike Tricia, Allegra looked every inch the distracted witch, from the mousy, graying hair piled untidily on top of her head to the flowing dark skirt she wore with her baggy sweater.

  “Hi, Bryce, Allegra,” Evan said as he headed over to the wing chair where he usually sat during these meetings. They’d done this often enough that it had become something of a ritual by now.

  However, he realized as he looked at the elders that they appeared uncharacteristically grim. That is, Allegra and Tricia, who had also just sat down on the couch, appeared far grimmer than usual. Bryce pretty much looked that way all the time.

  “Evan,” Bryce said, his tone brisk, “Angela asked us to handle this, since she’s up in Flagstaff right now, and she didn’t want us to have to wait while she drove down here.”

  It had to be fairly important if Angela was involved. Usually the McAllister prima was fairly hands off, unless something particularly big had happened. “Okay,” Evan said, tone cautious. “So exactly what is going on?”

  The elders exchanged glances. Allegra nodded at Tricia, as if encouraging her to speak.

  Tricia smoothed her bright red bob with one hand. “About a half hour ago, I got a call from Luz Trujillo.”

  Evan felt his eyebrows go up. “The de la Paz’s prima?”

  “Exactly. It seems they’ve run into a bit of a problem, and they need our help. Or, more specifically, your kind of help.”

  As far as he knew, the de la Paz clan didn’t have anyone with his kind of gift, so the request didn’t seem that strange. What did feel sort of odd was that they’d waited this long to ask for his particular help. Surely they must have had spells go awry over the years.

  But then, witch clans tended to be fiercely independent. The lines had started to get a little more blurred lately, true. Even so, Evan wondered what in the world had gone wrong that they’d be reaching out for help now.

  Bryce snorted. “‘A bit of a problem’? Sounds like their little prima-in-waiting might have placed the entire clan in jeopardy.”

  “Bryce, we don’t know that for sure,” Allegra put in, her voice so mild that the interjection was just barely a rebuke. She turned her watery blue gaze on Evan and continued, “But it does sound as if she’s gotten in over her head by using a spell that was forbidden for a very good reason. Now they need our help. I’m actually very encouraged that they reached out to us. It says a lot about inter-clan cooperation and all that.”

  “Well, that and knowing I’d find out eventually, since Caitlin is married to Luz’s son,” Tricia remarked dryly.

  Right. Evan had almost forgotten that Tricia’s daughter had married Alex Trujillo, the son of the de la Paz prima. It wasn’t as if he’d gone to their wedding. Back then, about six months ago, he’d still been too angry about Kelly’s abandonment and their subsequent divorce to have any desire to attend a wedding, especially one all the way down in Tucson. No, he’d stayed home and worked on his car. “What kind of spell?” he asked.

  Again the three elders glanced
at one another. This time, it was Bryce who replied. “They want to talk to you in person about that. Considering that their future prima is involved, we have to respect their wishes. So we need you to drive down to Scottsdale and meet with Luz Trujillo.”

  “Just Luz?” Evan knew he’d have to meet with the prima herself, but he also would need to speak with the prima-in-waiting, too, if she was the one who’d cast the spell.

  “She didn’t say,” Bryce replied. “I suppose that’s for them to decide. But we said you’d be happy to help.”

  Of course you did, Evan thought sourly. That’s how it works — you snap your fingers, and I come running.

  That wasn’t precisely fair. It wasn’t as if the elders had ever made an unreasonable request of him. But sometimes it was kind of rough to be the only person with your particular kind of gift, because you didn’t have the option of calling someone in to be your relief pitcher, so to speak. You had to do it all on your own.

  “Okay,” he said, after a short pause. “I’ll need to go by the house and get a few things, but you can let Luz Trujillo know that I’ll be down there in a couple of hours.”

  The elders probably noticed his hesitation but decided not to comment on it. What could they say? He’d agreed to take on the task.

  As for all the mystery surrounding this “forbidden” spell the de la Pazes’ future prima had cast — well, he’d find out the truth soon enough. For now, he just needed to get going.

  Zoe sat on the worn leather couch in her aunt’s living room, hands clasped together. Both her parents stood by the fireplace, looking angry and worried and nervous all at once. Aunt Luz ended the call and set her phone down on the side table next to the arm chair that faced the sofa.

  “He’s on his way,” she said.

  Both Andrea and Luis Sandoval visibly sagged with relief. “And he’ll be able to help?” Luis asked.

  “The McAllister elders seemed to think so.”