Maybe she should also be feeling relieved, but Zoe wasn’t quite ready to go there yet. She didn’t know anything about this Evan McAllister. He hadn’t been among the candidates sent to meet her, so he must be older. In her mind’s eye, she imagined some scowling middle-aged man who would read her the riot act about her recklessness before he bothered to say whether or not he could truly do anything to rid the world of the monster she’d unleashed upon it.
Anyway, she’d already had her talking-to. She wouldn’t bother to say she didn’t deserve it, because she did, but there had to come a time to set the scoldings aside and get down to business.
But it seemed as if Luz wasn’t quite done with her yet, because her normally full mouth pulled into a flat line as she looked at her niece, and she said, dark eyes flashing, “Don’t think just because one of the McAllisters is coming here to bail you out that this is the end of the matter.”
“Did I say I thought that?”
“Zoe,” her father said in a warning tone. The stern expression he currently wore was one she didn’t often see, since in general he tended to be fairly easygoing. Zoe didn’t much care to be on the receiving end of it.
Right then, she’d had enough. Even though she knew the enormity of her mistake dictated that she should just sit there meekly on the couch and take anything her family handed out, something in Zoe rebelled at the notion of being so passive. Why should they get to be so judge-y? Her mother hadn’t had to deal with the humiliation of kissing random guy after random guy in a stupid quest to find her ideal mate. No, she’d been able to meet up with her husband the old-fashioned way. You’d think Luz would be more sympathetic, since she’d been right where Zoe was standing now. But apparently Uncle David had been Aunt Luz’s first candidate, and they’d kissed and known they’d found the perfect person, so Luz wasn’t forced to look any further than that.
None of them understood what Zoe had been going through.
She got up from the couch and planted her hands on her hips. “Don’t you think I know I screwed up? But what none of you want to talk about is how I shouldn’t have been forced to cast that spell in the first place!”
“No one forced you to do anything, Zoe,” her father said. His tone was even enough, but his dark eyes flashed fire. Did he look like that when he was arguing a case in front of the judge? She didn’t know, because she’d never actually seen him at work in the courtroom. “You cast that spell because you were frustrated…and selfish.”
All right, true enough. Even though she knew how petulant the words sounded, she burst out, “And none of you understand what it was like, to have to kiss all those guys, whether or not I thought they were cute, just because of some stupid tradition!”
“Zoe!” Andrea Sandoval exclaimed, looking truly scandalized. In that moment, the resemblance between her and her older sister seemed particularly strong. “It is not a stupid tradition. It is because our primas have been with exactly the right man that we have stayed strong all these years.”
“Oh, like Grandpa was exactly the right man for my abuela?” Zoe shot back.
“Enough,” Luz said, and raised a hand. “We will not have that discussion about my mother — or my father, may they both rest in peace. What you did, Zoe, was perform an extremely dangerous piece of magic, one that has rightly been forbidden for hundreds of years. Believe it or not, I do understand something of your frustration. Do you think it gives your parents any joy to see you suffer disappointment after disappointment? Do you think it pleases me? We have all been on edge ever since Matías Escobar tried to kidnap you, because his actions pointed out how truly vulnerable you are. We would all be much happier if you had found your consort early on.”
For a long moment, Zoe said nothing. Her thoughts churned this way and that, because she knew that Aunt Luz was right, that they had come so very close to completely losing control of the situation. Sure, she’d been watched over since the day Maya had identified her as the prima who would succeed Luz, but she’d still managed to have something of a normal life. Boys were off limits, of course. Otherwise, though, she wasn’t that much different from the other girls she’d gone to high school with, participating in classes and extracurricular activities, and going to the movies and shopping and just hanging out. The only thing that had been strictly forbidden was going to parties alone, because Zoe’s parents knew kids drank at those things, and where there was drinking there were loosened inhibitions and all manner of risks. She’d always had a cousin tag along with her, just to make sure nothing went sideways.
Ever since Matías had tried to steal her away, though, she’d been watched even more closely. There were de la Paz cousins in her classes at Scottsdale Community College, and less obtrusive observers when she went out with Amber or some of her other friends to shop or eat or whatever. Zoe had even seen her Uncle Jack show up occasionally, which just made her want to shake her head. Not that she had a problem with Jack — he was her favorite uncle, the youngest of her father’s four brothers — but you’d think a detective with the Scottsdale police department would have better things to do with his time.
In fact, she was pretty sure someone in the clan had followed her when she’d driven here to Aunt Luz’s house to cast the fateful spell, but once they’d seen where she was going, they hadn’t bothered to stick around. Too bad, because maybe then there might have been a witness to see where the monster had gone.
Hoping she could steer the conversation elsewhere, Zoe said, “Maybe we don’t need Evan McAllister’s help at all. Maybe the thing just…disappeared.”
Luz shook her head. “No. I fear we are not that lucky.” She paused then, one hand lifted before her, the gesture she made when attempting to sense magical currents on the air. “I can tell it is still out there. Where exactly, I’m not sure, except that it’s somewhere in the area, possibly to the south of here. My senses aren’t strong enough to pinpoint it more than that. But there is definitely a wrongness, like running your hand over a piece of smooth silk and feeling a snag beneath your fingertips. We will require Evan McAllister’s talents to help us track it down.”
Deep down, Zoe had known it wouldn’t be that easy. She also knew she’d have to participate in neutralizing the spell, since the McAllister warlock apparently required some input from the original spell caster for his own gift to work properly. So she’d have to suffer the company of this Evan person, whoever he was, and hope that he wouldn’t turn out to be too much of a judgmental jerk.
Otherwise, attempting to locate the monster might prove to be even more problematic than conjuring it in the first place.
3
The drive down to Scottsdale was uneventful. Evan hit a little traffic once he turned onto the 101 Loop and headed east, but the majority of the cars were going in the opposite direction, traveling back to their homes in the western suburbs at the end of a long week.
He had to wonder what all these ordinary residents of Phoenix would think if they ever discovered that a large witch clan lived right in their midst, that some of their lawyers and teachers and cops had more about them than met the eye.
That would never happen, though. The de la Paz clan was just as careful as the McAllisters and the Wilcoxes when it came to hiding their true nature. However, it had to be a strain. He was used to the setup in Jerome, where more than half the town was part of the extended clan, and the civilians who did live there full-time were in on the secret. The arrangement allowed for a much more relaxed attitude when it came to using their powers, although the McAllisters still did their best to keep things on the down-low.
Even so, he knew he’d have to be careful while down here in the big city. His power wasn’t a showy one. On the other hand, just like every other witch or warlock out there, he also had the ability to unlock doors and summon fire and cause others to focus their attention elsewhere when he really didn’t want to be noticed, which meant he could perform magic spells that might raise a few eyebrows if any civilians happened to be lookin
g in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Of course, he thought, as he pulled off the highway onto Cactus Road and headed east toward the hills, if he really wanted to be unobtrusive, he probably should have rented a car, some boring subcompact thing. Even in this upscale area, he had noticed a few heads swiveling as he drove past.
Luz Trujillo’s house was on a quiet street of large, expensive homes on more generously sized lots than you might expect to find in this part of the world, where everything felt much closer together than most of the residential parcels in the Verde Valley. The prima’s home had been built in the traditional hacienda style, of stucco with a red tile roof. A dark gray Audi SUV was parked in the driveway, a small pale blue Fiat next to it. He had to pass through a gate into a courtyard where a fountain played and baskets of flowers brightened up the overhangs. The air here was warm, but not hot, a contrast to the chilly day he’d just spent up in Jerome.
Although he hadn’t seen anyone, Evan couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched as he paused in front of the large door of dark wood and knocked. Well, that wasn’t terribly surprising. The clan’s prima lived here, and so someone always had to be on their guard.
The door opened, and a tall, good-looking Hispanic man in his late forties looked out. When he saw Evan, his somewhat tense features relaxed into a smile. “Evan McAllister? I’m Luis Sandoval, Luz’s brother-in-law.”
“Hi, Luis,” Evan responded, and extended a hand. He’d known as soon as the door opened that a warlock stood before him, since he’d experienced the usual tingle on the back of his neck that he felt whenever he encountered another person with witch-blood for the first time.
“Come in,” Luis said, stepping aside so Evan could enter. “They’re waiting in the living room.”
They. So that meant it wasn’t just Luz who’d be present at this meeting. Good — he wanted to hear what had happened from the prima-in-waiting herself.
Evan followed Luis from the impressive two-story foyer down a hallway, and then into a large room with a big fireplace — unlit now, on this mild spring day — and a series of windows that looked out onto the courtyard. In that room were three women, two of them attractive and slender, also probably in their forties, with sleek dark hair and simple sleeveless dresses. They resembled one another enough that Evan guessed they must be sisters.
The third one, though….
She was much younger than the other two, early twenties, and so he thought she had to be the prima-in-waiting. However, to say she wasn’t what he’d been expecting would be a massive understatement. For some reason, he’d been picturing someone like his cousin Angela, who was pretty but not that concerned with her appearance, and who always seemed to go around in jeans and cowboy boots and the barest traces of makeup, if any at all.
This girl — well, for one thing, she was wearing a knee-length skirt that showed off her slim brown legs, and with the skirt a fitted scoop-neck T-shirt that didn’t do much to hide the curves of her body. Her eyes were big and brown, with lashes so long that at first he thought they must be fake. But no, they seemed to be all hers, just like the fullness of the breasts under the thin shirt. Silver gleamed around one slender ankle, and more silver shimmered from the charm bracelet on her right wrist.
And her mouth….
He had to tear his eyes away, because he knew he was staring, and the last thing he should be doing was gawking at the de la Paz clan’s prima-in-waiting the way a starving man might stare at a particularly juicy steak.
“Hi,” he said quickly. Too quickly, he thought, but he had to do something to distract himself. “I’m Evan McAllister.”
“Hello, Evan,” said one of the two older women. She’d been sitting in an armchair, but rose then and came to him, one hand extended. “I’m Luz Trujillo. This is my sister Andrea. And this” — she hesitated so briefly that Evan could have almost imagined that she hadn’t paused at all — “this is my niece Zoe, and our future prima.”
He nodded in her direction but didn’t trust himself to do much else. She was watching him, her eyes slightly narrowed, but otherwise her expression seemed almost blank, as if she wanted to make sure he couldn’t discern much of what she was thinking just by looking at her.
“Would you like to sit?” Luz asked. She gestured toward the chair she’d just vacated. “And there’s water, or lemonade.”
For the first time, Evan noticed a silver tray sitting on the large coffee table of dark wood. On that tray were a set of thick glasses with cobalt-blue rims, and two matching pitchers. His mouth did feel dry. Some water would probably be a good idea. “Water would be great.”
Andrea moved from her position by the fireplace to pour him a glass of water, then handed it to him. “We thank you for coming,” she said. Her voice wasn’t quite as low as her sister’s, but it still had the same slightly husky edge. Sexy, really.
Evan wondered if Zoe’s voice had that same quality. So far she hadn’t spoken a word.
“Not a problem,” he said easily as he made his way over to the chair Luz had indicated and sat down. “I’m here to help.”
“That means a good deal to us,” Luz said. “There was a time when our clans did very little to aid one another.”
No point in disputing her comment, because Evan knew it was only the truth. Yes, the de la Pazes and the McAllisters had been friendlier than most, but even their cooperation was a fairly recent development, brought about mainly because of the friendship between Maya de la Paz and the McAllister’s former prima, Ruby Lynch. In the past, it had been safer for clans to isolate themselves, since too much cooperation could open the door to activities that might be more easily detected by the civilian population.
So he just nodded, and ventured, “If you could tell me exactly what happened? Right now I’m not really sensing anything that needs to be fixed.”
Which in itself was odd. Usually when he was called to set a spell on the right course, or banish its effects completely, he could feel the wrongness as soon as he set foot in the place where the spell had been cast. Here, though, there wasn’t anything, except the faint whisper of magic he felt coming from both Luz and Zoe. That didn’t surprise him, because he could feel the same sort of gentle hum whenever he was around Angela or her husband Connor. Evan had always assumed it was simply because a prima — or a primus, or a prima-in-waiting — had more magic about them than the average witch or warlock. At any rate, it wasn’t bothersome, and tended to fade into the background after he’d been around them for a little while.
However, he guessed that the thrum he felt when he looked over at Zoe didn’t have much to do with his magic-sensing abilities….
After he asked the question about what had happened, she appeared uncomfortable for the first time. She shifted on the couch and studiously avoided looking at anyone in particular. The charm bracelet she wore jingled faintly as she pushed a lock of long dark hair over one shoulder.
Luz was the one who spoke then. “I’m afraid Zoe was feeling impatient. The search for a consort can be frustrating, and she became anxious. We were all anxious,” the prima added quickly. “But we had no reason to believe that the search wouldn’t have a satisfactory result.”
“I screwed up,” Zoe said. Her voice did, as he’d hoped, have that slight husky edge to it, a warmth that sounded more mature than the twenty-one he knew she must be. “I just didn’t want to wait anymore. My birthday is less than two weeks off. So I used this.”
Lying on the couch next to her, halfway hidden by the full skirt she wore, was an old book. She lifted it, and opened the volume to a place somewhere near the end, then held it out to Evan.
“See for yourself.”
He took the book from her, handling it gently because he could tell it was old and fragile. In fact, he experienced a little thrill at realizing that he held an actual book of spells, or grimoire. McAllister magic didn’t really work that way — each member of the clan used their magic based on their own inborn gifts and ab
ilities. Yes, they had some spells they used at common rituals, like the ones recited at the Samhain observance, or the Yule celebrations. Most of their enchantments, though, they made up as they went along, depending on the current need.
But clearly the de la Paz clan did things differently. It wasn’t that one method was good and one bad, more that they had descended from different traditions.
When he looked down at the page, though, Evan couldn’t help frowning. He didn’t know why he’d expected the words to be in English, but he couldn’t read what was there. Latin, he could tell that much. His foreign language experience was two years of German in high school, which wasn’t going to help much here.
Zoe seemed to note his consternation, because she said, “On the surface, it’s simple. ‘From shadow to light, from night to day, from dream to reality, become what I say.’” She spoke the words quickly and without inflection. That was the only safe way to utter the words of a spell aloud when you didn’t actually mean to cast it. The intention was everything. And it helped that she had said the words in English, not Latin.
“Sounds harmless enough,” he remarked.
Luz and Andrea exchanged a glance, and Luis spoke up. “Well, that’s the problem. Sometimes it’s the simplest-sounding spells that have the most potential to go wrong.”
“It went very wrong, I assure you,” Luz said. “Zoe was trying to conjure her perfect consort, but what appeared…wasn’t.”
The prima-in-waiting winced. Evan supposed it must have sounded even worse when put so baldly. But no wonder the spell had gone sideways. He couldn’t imagine anyone in his clan — not even Angela and Connor working together — attempting such a high-powered enchantment. To conjure a human being from thin air? Zoe had to be strong, or she wouldn’t be her clan’s next prima, but he had to wonder why she’d thought she could ever be successful at such a thing.
To his surprise, she was the one who spoke next. He’d assumed she would prefer to let her aunt do the talking for her. “It was a monster,” she said. “Shaped like a man, and around the same size, but its face — ” Her words faltered, and she pulled in a breath, as if to give herself strength to go on with the story. “Anyway, it looked completely solid, real, but it was able to go through the wall of the library as if it wasn’t there.”
Strange Magic (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 9) Page 3