Darker Paths (The Witches of Canyon Road Book 2)

by Christine Pope

  Simon thanked the man and took a valet ticket from him before leading me slightly downhill to the restaurant’s entrance. As soon as we were inside, I saw a large fireplace almost exactly opposite the door, and an elegant little bar off to my left. I didn’t have time for any more of an inspection than that, however, because a girl around my age approached Simon and me, asked about our reservation, and then guided us to an intimate little room toward the back of the restaurant.

  I noticed he hadn’t given his own name for the reservation, but an alias — Robert Marquez. Probably just trying to be careful, although I wondered how he was going to reconcile the discrepancy between the name on the reservation and the name on his credit card. Well, Simon had been very careful so far, and so I had to believe that he already had all the logistics planned out.

  As the hostess brought us to our table, though, a tingle at the back of my neck told me that the occupants of the table over by the window were also of witch-kind — a man and a woman I didn’t recognize, probably around my parents’ age. Of course my first instinct was to panic, but Simon only put a reassuring hand on my arm, presumably to help guide me into my seat. However, I knew what he was really doing was making sure I didn’t react in a way that would draw their attention.

  Heart pounding, I sat down on the banquette up against the wall, then murmured a thank-you to the hostess as she handed me a menu. Looking completely calm, Simon sat down as well, and accepted another menu from the hostess. She told us that our server would be with us shortly, then left the room.

  I opened my menu and pretended to be perusing its contents, but really, I was only using it as cover so I could murmur to Simon, “What the hell are we supposed to do now?”

  “Have dinner,” he replied, looking magnificently unperturbed by the situation. “They haven’t noticed anything, have they?”

  Shooting the couple in question a quick glance from the corner of my eye, I shook my head. “Not that I can tell.”

  “And they won’t. It’s going to be fine.”

  Easy for him to say. Or rather, this was all easier for him because the worst that would happen if we were caught was that he’d be sent packing back to Arizona. I, on the other hand, would have a mountain of explaining to do.

  The witch at the table did glance over at us, but after a panicky second in which I felt my heart begin to race again, I realized she wasn’t looking at me at all, but instead had bestowed a single admiring look on my companion before returning her attention to the warlock opposite her, who was probably her husband. I supposed I couldn’t blame her too much; my cousin Jason’s looks attracted attention wherever he went, something I probably should have considered before I decided on him as Simon’s avatar.

  He smiled. “Better decide on what you’d like to eat, so we can choose a wine.”

  Fine. My panic began to subside, mostly because it seemed as though the pair of Castillo witches at the other table didn’t have a clue that more of their kind were sitting only a couple of yards away. The spells seemed to be working. I couldn’t ask for much more than that.

  I looked over the menu quickly and decided on the filet mignon. Simon said he wanted the ribeye, and so that made the wine choice fairly easy. When the waiter appeared to take our order, Simon asked for one of the restaurant’s Bordeaux wines, pronouncing the name of the winery with a lot more ease than I would have expected.

  “You speak French?” I asked after the waiter had gone.

  “Not really,” Simon replied, reaching for his water so he could take a sip. “But it never hurts to teach yourself some of the pronunciation so you don’t sound like an idiot when ordering at a fancy restaurant.”

  I supposed that made some sense, although it wasn’t the sort of reply I normally would have expected from a guy my age. Then again, Simon wasn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill twenty-one-year-old.

  Because of the presence of the witch couple seated across the room from us, we couldn’t really talk about my work with magic, or anything that might give away the fact that Simon and I were no more civilians than they were. Luckily, he went right into talking about the latest release in what he said was his favorite superhero movie franchise, coming out at Thanksgiving, and other commonplaces. He seemed to notice how tense I was, and so carried the bulk of the conversation himself — a relief to me, since all I had to do was smile and nod my way through most of it.

  The wine was excellent, the food even more so…and I was finally able to relax just as I was having the last few bites of filet, because the pair of Castillo witches got up from their seats and left. It took all my effort not to hold my breath as they passed our table, but then they were gone, seemingly without noticing anything strange about the young couple sitting in the corner.

  “Thank the Goddess,” I breathed once they were gone. “When they ordered dessert, I thought I was going to lose it.”

  “But you didn’t,” Simon replied, still looking completely unperturbed. “And now they’re gone…and I think they proved my point.”

  “What point?” I asked, still feeling a little off center, thanks to our near-miss.

  “That you can maintain two enchantments at the same time without breaking a sweat. And while enjoying a very good Bordeaux. You truly are a marvel, Miranda.”

  I’d wanted to be annoyed with him for putting me in such a position in the first place, but it was hard to be too mad at someone who called you a “marvel.” Still, I tried to sound nonchalant as I said, “Well, I don’t know about that, but it wasn’t quite as hard as I thought it might be.”

  He smiled. Right then I wished I could remove the enchantment, because it did feel strange to be having an intimate dinner like this with my cousin. However, I knew I didn’t dare lift the illusion until we were safely home. “It’s because you’re so powerful. Most witches and warlocks couldn’t have done anything close.”

  “Well, thanks.” I toyed with my fork before setting it down against the rim of my plate. “All the same, I’ll be glad to get out of here.”

  “You aren’t enjoying your dinner?” he asked, eyes widening in mock astonishment.

  “It’s very good, but….”

  “It’s all right,” he said, apparently relenting. “This has been a test, and tests are always kind of stressful.”

  “So we can go home once we’ve finished our wine?”

  His lip curled. “No dessert?”

  “No,” I told him firmly. “We have ice cream at the house, if you want it.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  And after that Simon did take pity on me, because he finished his last few bites of steak and the last sips of wine in his glass, then asked the waiter to bring us the check. No dillydallying with a credit card, either — he dropped four hundred-dollar bills on the table, then extended a hand to help me up from where I sat.

  “Ready?”

  I nodded. Well, that was one way to get around the credit card conundrum, I supposed.

  He had one “test” left, however. After we had the valet bring the car around and had climbed in, Simon turned so we were driving right past the Castillo compound, moving slowly.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I demanded. “This is the last place we should be.”

  “No,” he replied calmly, hands wrapped around the steering wheel even though the car was doing the driving. “You need to know that she doesn’t have any power over you. Genoveva Castillo is a raging bitch, but she’s also a very powerful witch. She should know you’re here. And if she did know, what would she do?”

  “Come out to confront us,” I replied, my voice hardly more than a whisper. Adrenaline was sending spiky jolts of energy through my body, urging me to run. And yet I knew that if Genoveva really had been able to sense me, she would be here already.

  Which meant she didn’t know I was here. We were crawling past her house, her sanctum, and yet we might as well have been a couple of civilians for all she was able to sense our presence.

  “Exactly.
You see? You don’t have anything to fear from her, or any of the other Castillos. You’re more powerful than she is, Miranda.”

  A shiver went through me. I was just an ordinary witch. I wasn’t supposed to be stronger than a prima. And if I was…?

  I didn’t know what to do about that.

  “Take me home,” I whispered.

  14

  Identities

  Rafe

  Cat was staring at him in consternation. “What do you mean, you know who Miranda is with?”

  No wonder Rafe had kept having those strange spells where he knew he had to be missing something obvious, something right under his nose. It was because of the enchantment — or curse, or whatever you wanted to call it — that Simon had cast on him, making him forget. The spell had been broken at last, however.

  “This guy called Simon,” he said curtly. “Someone Miranda met on the Railrunner when she was coming up from Albuquerque.”

  “You didn’t say anything about that to me.”

  No, he hadn’t. Now Rafe wondered at the omission, wondered why he hadn’t asked for his sister’s advice when it came to dealing with this unexpected interloper. He couldn’t say for sure, except that maybe he was embarrassed at having a rival for Miranda’s affections — Miranda, who should have been a sure bet, bound to him as she was. Just another aspect of the whole situation that he’d managed to screw up royally. If he’d said something to Cat about Simon, they could have come to the truth a lot sooner, since Simon’s spell didn’t seem to have affected anyone else in his family.

  “We need to talk,” Rafe said, then gave a quick glance around them. Burro Alley was quiet enough now, but it certainly wasn’t the sort of place for an intimate conversation. “But not here.”

  “Upstairs?”

  That would have made the most sense, since the Airbnb was only half a block away. However, Rafe immediately rejected that notion. The flat might have been empty, but it was still polluted by the residue of whatever foul magic Simon had used. For all Rafe knew, some kind of spell lingered there, sending every word spoken there back to its former occupant. Rafe had never heard of such a thing, but he didn’t know much about dark magic. Better to play it safe. Besides, he’d already mentally vowed never to set foot in the place again.

  “No, let’s go back to my house.”

  Cat looked resigned at this suggestion, as though she wasn’t terribly thrilled about heading back to his place when she’d barely gotten downtown but also wasn’t going to protest. Like him, she must know that it was probably best to spend as little time in that Airbnb as possible. They’d already gotten the information they needed anyway.

  “See you there,” was all she said, and she hurried across the street to the parking structure, taking advantage of a small break in traffic.

  Rafe went to retrieve his Jeep from the parking space behind the flat, then drove home. This was a time when he would have welcomed a self-driving mechanism in his car, just because he knew he was distracted, attempting to figure out how in the hell a powerful warlock like Simon could have slid in under his family’s nose without anyone noticing. Miranda hadn’t said anything about her acquaintance being a warlock, which meant she hadn’t known. Which also meant that Simon must have had a way of hiding what he was from everyone, including her.

  Son of a bitch.

  Luckily, there wasn’t too much traffic to worry about, and he was home in less than five minutes. Cat was knocking at the front door as he came down the hallway from the garage, and he hurried to let her in.

  “Okay,” she said without preamble, moving past him to go sit in the living room. “Now can you tell me what the hell is going on? Who is this Simon person?”

  “Like I said, this guy Miranda met on the train. Only I have a feeling that meeting was planned. Simon had to be lying in wait for her.”

  “Why?”

  Good question. It had to be more than Miranda simply being a beautiful unaccompanied witch. Yes, she had turned out to be stronger than anyone had thought — Rafe sure didn’t know anyone who could teleport like she did — but was that the only reason?

  “I don’t know for sure,” he said. “I’m doing my best to piece the whole thing together. But they met on the Railrunner, and they met again after that time she stormed out of our lunch at La Fonda. Miranda said that was just coincidence, that she’d gone into the wine tasting room for a drink and realized he worked there, but — ”

  “The wine tasting room under the Airbnb apartment?” Cat broke in. “Why didn’t you say something while we were there? We could have gone in and asked about Simon, found out what they knew about him.”

  “Do you think someone who was able to hide the fact that he was a warlock, who cast some sort of funky spell on me to say those horrible things to Miranda, would have told a bunch of civilians the truth about himself?”

  “Well, I guess not,” Cat said, looking deflated. “So where does that put us?”

  “I don’t know.” Rafe scrubbed a hand over his bristly cheek. One of these days he should probably shave. “I mean, at least I know what the guy looks like, but I don’t know how much that’s going to help. I kind of doubt he’s hanging around Santa Fe if he has Miranda with him. He’d want to make sure he was well out of our orbit.”

  “True.” His sister seemed to think for a moment, idly playing with the straps of the backpack she used for a purse, her fingers running the heavy fabric between them as if they were the weft threads of her loom. “Still, if you know what he looks like, that’s something. He’s a warlock, so he had to have come from a clan somewhere. Tell me about him.”

  The last thing Rafe felt like doing was analyzing Simon’s appearance, but he knew it was something that needed to be done. “He’s around Miranda’s age. Tall, but not quite as tall as I am, and thinner. Hispanic. Black hair and eyes — really black eyes, the darkest I’ve ever seen.”

  “He’s Hispanic?” Cat asked, perking up a bit. “Well, that narrows it down. He’s not one of ours, obviously, but what other clan could he have come from?”

  “The de la Pazes, maybe?” Rafe rubbed his chin. That would make the most sense. He remembered thinking that Simon could have been someone who had a long-distance crush on Miranda and hadn’t wanted to let her go. Maybe that’s all this was — some kind of puppy love gone out of control. True, Miranda had claimed that she’d never met Simon before she saw him on the Railrunner, but maybe she was trying to cover up for him. Since Rafe knew he hadn’t acted the most even-tempered around her, he could see why she might have been trying to protect her friend. “Or the Montoyas in Texas, but that doesn’t make as much sense, since their paths wouldn’t have crossed before now.”

  “Maybe you should contact Miranda’s parents, ask if they know of anyone in the de la Paz clan who had a crush on her.”

  Rafe knew Genoveva would freak out if he got in touch with Angela and Connor, since they were supposed to be maintaining radio silence and pretending that everything was fine and he was off on his honeymoon with Miranda. Not that he cared too much about his mother’s reaction. The lie was going to come out eventually, no matter what they did.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s probably the best thing to do.” He dug his phone out of his pocket, went to his contacts lists, and then paused with his finger hovering over the number in question.

  “What’s the matter?” Cat inquired, clearly noticing his hesitation.

  “I don’t know. I’m just wondering whether we should go directly to the de la Paz prima and ask whether she knows if anyone from her clan has left their territory for an extended time recently.”

  “I think they’re pretty tight with the McAllisters and Wilcoxes,” Cat pointed out. “If you go around asking questions like that, I have a feeling it’s going to get back to Connor and Angela pretty quickly anyway.”

  His sister was probably right. Rafe knew that part of his hesitation was probably simple cowardice. The second he talked to Miranda’s parents, they’d kn
ow that something had gone terribly wrong, that the very people who were supposed to be their daughter’s new family had been lying about her disappearance in order to avert an inter-clan war. Or maybe not war, but he had a feeling that relations between the northern Arizona witch families and the Castillos was going to be pretty frosty if he didn’t get this straightened out soon.

  With a sigh, he shoved his phone back in his pocket. Cat looked at him in alarm.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “We need to fix this ourselves,” he said. “I mean, if it becomes inescapably obvious that we’ll never be able to find Miranda without her parents’ help, then yeah, we’ll get in touch with them. Right now, though, we have a little grace period. They still think she and I are on our honeymoon. So let’s use that time to our advantage, and think this thing through.”

  Cat still appeared dubious, but at least she stopped fiddling with the straps of her backpack and pursed her lips, obviously running through their options. “If you’ve seen Simon and know what he looks like, then maybe we should give Daniel that description along with any other information you have, see what he can come up with.”

  “Because he found out so much last time.”

  “He didn’t have as much information to work with,” Cat pointed out. “I’ll bet he knows a police sketch artist or someone like that who could do a drawing for us. It’d be a lot easier when I talk to my ghosts, for instance. I could show them the sketch and see what they have to say.”

  Although Rafe wasn’t completely on board with this proposition, it did make him think of something. He hated to even make the suggestion, but…. “What about Marco?”

  At once her brows drew together. “What do you mean, ‘what about Marco’?”