Strange Magic (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 9) Read online

  Strange Magic

  A Witches of Cleopatra Hill Novel

  Christine Pope

  Dark Valentine Press

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  The Arizona Witch Clans

  If You Enjoyed This Book…

  Also by Christine Pope

  About the Author

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  STRANGE MAGIC

  Copyright © 2016 by Christine Pope

  Published by Dark Valentine Press

  Cover design by Lou Harper

  Ebook formatting by Indie Author Services

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems — except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews — without permission in writing from its publisher, Dark Valentine Press.

  Please contact the author through the form on her website at www.christinepope.com if you experience any formatting or readability issues with this book.

  To be notified of new releases by Christine Pope, please sign up here.

  Created with Vellum

  1

  Zoe Sandoval entered her aunt’s house, then closed the front door behind her as she called out, “Aunt Luz? It’s Zoe.”

  Only silence met her ears, which was exactly what she’d hoped for. Yes, her aunt — and the de la Paz clan’s current prima — had said she was going down to Mesa to have lunch with Zoe’s cousin Alexis, who was expecting her first child, but those plans could have changed. Fortunately, though, the big pueblo-style house that had come to Luz after the former prima’s — and Zoe’s grandmother’s — death was absolutely still. Luz’s husband David would be at work, of course, and their daughter, the only one of their three children who still technically lived at home, was attending school down in Tucson, at the University of Arizona.

  Which meant Zoe had the run of the place, at least for the next few hours.

  On the surface, this didn’t seem so very odd. Almost as soon as Zoe’s aunt had become prima after Maya passed away, she had given her niece a set of keys to the house, saying that of course the prima-in-waiting should have access to the library there, to all the books and writings accumulated by more than ten generations of de la Paz primas. However, Zoe sort of doubted Aunt Luz would be very happy to discover the actual reason why her niece had slipped into the house while everyone was away. Well, once the clan had been presented with a done deed, they’d just have to accept what had happened and learn to deal with it.

  Six years earlier, when she’d first been informed by her grandmother Maya that she would be the next prima after Luz, Zoe hadn’t been exactly overjoyed to hear the news. She liked being a witch just fine, had loved exploring her talents with plants and potions and healing. It was a useful gift, one always needed in a clan as big as hers. But a prima couldn’t call her life her own, always had to be there for the family, couldn’t even choose her own husband, had to let the universe decide who would be her consort — the title given to a prima’s spouse.

  That part was the worst. All right, sometimes the whole consort thing worked out just fine, like the way it had with Angela McAllister and Connor Wilcox. Connor was smoking hot, and if Zoe could be assured of one day having a consort like him, she’d be a lot more resigned to the loss of her personal life that being prima entailed. But that kind of perfect match wasn’t always guaranteed. Whatever force or power dictated which man should be the consort of the prima seemed to be mainly concerned with choosing someone who could provide the necessary DNA to father powerful children. There was supposed to be some sort of soul bond involved, but unfortunately, it didn’t always work out that way, no matter what the witch clans’ traditions might claim otherwise.

  Although Zoe’s grandfather had died when she was only four, and therefore she couldn’t remember him very well, she did know that her grandparents’ marriage had been mostly a disaster. Her grandfather drank too much, and, from what Zoe had been able to gather, had cheated on Maya with a number of civilian — non-witch — lovers.

  But they’d had two daughters, with Luz turning out to be much stronger than her younger sister, and so she became Maya’s heir. Andrea, Zoe’s mother, hadn’t seemed very upset about being passed over, and who could blame her? She got to have a nice life with her warlock/lawyer husband, and a fancy house in Fountain Hills, while Luz had to do everything with the shadow of one day being prima hanging over her. It turned out that Luz’s children were decently talented, but her daughter Alicia certainly wasn’t strong enough to be the prima-in-waiting. So, as sometimes happened, the mantle went not to the prima’s daughter, but to Luz’s niece Zoe…whether she liked it or not.

  Even though Zoe knew the house was empty, she couldn’t help almost tiptoeing as she made her way from the grand two-story foyer and down the hallway that led to the library. Although it was early March, Phoenix had already begun to heat up, and so she could hear the faintest hum of the central air conditioning working away in the background. That was the only sound she detected, however — no worries about the housekeeper cleaning in another part of the home, or a gardener working with a blower outside. Zoe obviously had the place to herself.

  The library was a large room with built-in bookcases on every wall and a wrought-iron chandelier hanging over the round table in the center of the space. Off to one side was a leather chair with a matching ottoman, the perfect spot to put your feet up while you perused a book of spells or took notes from one of the old diaries on plant lore.

  Zoe didn’t intend to relax while she was here, though. She had something far different in mind.

  The book she wanted was on one of the higher shelves, but she didn’t have to waste time looking for a step stool. No, she merely extended her hand, and the book came floating down to her. Just one of the little powers that had appeared after she’d become the prima-in-waiting. She wouldn’t come completely into all her inborn gifts until she’d met her consort and bonded with him, but during the past year, ever since she’d turned twenty-one, she’d seen how these little parts of her talent had begun to awaken, how one day she would be able to command much more than merely an ability to work with plants and mix up cures for colds and hangovers…once she’d completed the necessary soul-bond with her consort.

  Her consort. There was the real problem. Almost as soon as she’d celebrated her twenty-first birthday, Zoe had been subjected to the consort search, which had to be the most demeaning ritual ever devised by witch-kind. The only way to know whether a guy was the “one” was to kiss him — and that had meant a whole lot of kisses with a whole lot of men she felt absolutely no attraction to.

  And the problem was, she didn’t have any basis for comparison. Both her mother and her Aunt Luz had assured Zoe that she’d just “know” as soon as she kissed the right candidate, but since she’d been prevented from having
any kind of romantic contact with a guy, she didn’t know the first thing about kissing, unless she counted what she’d seen in the movies or on TV…and she had a feeling those on-screen embraces didn’t exactly reflect reality.

  Not that some of the possible consorts hadn’t been handsome. It wasn’t as if Aunt Luz had gone out of her way to find unappealing candidates. She’d even reached out to the Wilcoxes and the McAllisters for help finding possible matches, which Zoe definitely appreciated. Those Wilcox warlocks tended to be pretty damn hot. The McAllisters less so, on average, but anything was better than getting hooked up with a distant cousin whom you’d been seeing at family gatherings ever since you were old enough to remember them.

  Unfortunately, no one had worked out so far. Not a Wilcox, not a McAllister, not some fourth or fifth cousin from the de la Paz clan. Although she’d never voiced the worry aloud, Zoe had begun to wonder if Matías Escobar’s attempt to kidnap her so he could take control of her powers had screwed up something inside, had made her unable to form the proper consort bond. True, Matías hadn’t kissed her — he’d probably been waiting to get her alone before he did such a thing — but still. The whole situation was so messed up that she didn’t know what to think.

  And that was why, about a month ago, as her twenty-second birthday loomed and she still hadn’t met any viable candidates, she had an unexpected and completely insane idea pass through her mind.

  What if I make my own consort?

  No, not in a Frankenstein sort of way. Zoe wasn’t so desperate that she thought digging up pieces of dead men and stitching them together to make her dream consort was a viable solution. But she’d seen the spells when she was going through the library, familiarizing herself with aspects of her family’s witchcraft that she’d never seen utilized so far, but might encounter on that far-off day when she herself became prima.

  Spells of summoning, of word and thought made form. Such things hadn’t been attempted in years and years, mostly because there was always a risk of the summoning turning out badly, but that didn’t mean those spells couldn’t work. Zoe knew she was strong, had felt her awakening powers thrumming within her over the past year. And as candidate after candidate came and went, and she still didn’t have a consort, she began to formulate her own desperate plan.

  She’d written down a list of all the ideal qualities she wanted from her consort — handsome, of course, and smart, and with a sense of humor. Chivalrous, but not condescending. After all, she would be the prima one day, the person in charge. That didn’t mean she didn’t want someone who would open doors for her, and pull out her chair at a restaurant. Maybe that wasn’t a modern way of thinking, but the de la Paz clan did tend to be kind of old-fashioned.

  So, someone really gorgeous, like telenovela stars Jencarlos Canela or William Levy. In fact, Zoe had printed out a bunch of images of William, since, after a good deal of hemming and hawing, she decided she liked him best. She’d brought those pictures with her today, a visual aid to use in her summoning. She set them down now on the round table in the middle of the room, and opened the book of spells. The spells were written in Latin, not Spanish, but she figured she could manage. Anyway, her Spanish wasn’t all that great, to be perfectly honest; the odd word might slip in here and there, but her parents always spoke English at home, and that meant Zoe and her brother Zander did as well. Some members of the clan were just the opposite, and only used English when they had to, like going out shopping and so on, but somehow they all managed to understand one another.

  Mostly.

  Fingers shaking with nervousness, Zoe flipped to the page that contained the spell she wanted to use. She’d heard the McAllister witches in particular were a little more freeform, and didn’t necessarily rely on books of spells to cast their magic, but in the de la Paz clan, if you were going to cast a big enchantment, you went back to the words that earlier witches and warlocks had set down. Those spells had worked in the past, so there was no reason to think they wouldn’t work now.

  All right. Her eyes scanned the page as she refamiliarized herself with the Latin words. For something so big, it was really a short spell, only four lines. Then she arranged the images of her ideal man on either side of the book, so the spell might draw its power from those pictures, take her thoughts and wishes and desires, and give them form.

  For a long moment, she hesitated. This was crazy. Deep down, she knew it was crazy. But her birthday was less than two weeks away. How in the world were they going to find a consort for her in that span of time, when the search had been going on now for more than eleven months? Sure, stranger things had happened, but did she really want to count on that? If she turned twenty-two and still didn’t have a consort, she’d never have the full use of her powers. She’d be crippled as prima when it was her turn to run the clan, and that would leave the de la Paz family far too vulnerable. Yes, the McAllisters were stalwart allies, and it seemed the Wilcoxes could be trusted as well, now that Damon Wilcox was no longer at the head of that clan, but one couldn’t say the same about the Santiago family in California, the clan that had spawned the warlock who’d tried to kidnap her.

  Almost unconsciously, she ran her hands over the skirt she wore, smoothing the cotton fabric. Back when Matías had tried to seize her from the Paradise Valley Mall, she’d been going through a rebellious phase, with silly T-shirts from Hot Topic and Doc Martens and that streak of bright pink in her hair, the one that had made her parents so angry when they’d first seen it. Afterward, she’d reassessed her appearance in terms of her future role in the clan and had realized that really wasn’t how a prima-in-waiting should dress. She got rid of the pink streak, the combat boots. Now she wore a lot of dresses and skirts, and sandals and flats. Her parents were relieved by the change in her style, and Zoe had to admit to herself that it actually had made her more comfortable. Jeans and lace-up leather boots could be damn hot in the depths of a Phoenix summer.

  She looked down at herself, at the full knee-length retro-style skirt with its pattern of a city skyline, accented with sequins, and the flat leather sandals she wore. Definitely girly, but wasn’t that something the dream man she was about to conjure would appreciate?

  There was only one way to find out.

  A deep breath. Another. In the back of her mind, a little voice was telling her to stop now, to put the book away and fold up the pictures of William Levy and stuff them back in her purse. She could clean up all evidence of ever being here, go out to her car, and call her friend Amber and see if she wanted to meet at the mall for a movie or something. You know, ordinary things, fun things that a girl of twenty-one would do.

  Not standing here in her aunt’s library and trying to conjure her perfect man out of thin air.

  “Coward,” she said aloud. The syllables seemed to ring in her ears. No way was she a coward. When Matías had tried to kidnap her, sure, at first she’d gone along because of that horrible mind-control talent he had, but as soon as she’d woken up enough to figure out what was going on, she’d tried to fight back. Would a coward have done that?

  No.

  So she breathed in again, and imagined exactly what would happen. She’d say the words of the spell, and her dream man would appear in front of her, smiling and handsome, admiration clear in his eyes. She would hold out her hands to him, and he’d take them. And then he would lean down and press his lips against hers, and all the wonder and fire and heat of a true consort’s kiss would run through her, and they’d be sealed forever. It would be perfect.

  Reassured by that rapturous image, she turned her attention back to the book and ran her index finger down the lines of the spell, once again mentally repeating the words. She’d translated them into English with the help of one of those online translators, and it was in English that those words echoed in her mind, even though the syllables that emerged from her mouth were the original Latin. Or at least she hoped the Latin was close enough, since she really wasn’t what you’d call an expert.

 
; From shadow to light

  From night to day

  From dream to reality

  Become what I say

  The air in the library shimmered, as if thousands of the world’s smallest fireflies had suddenly decided to appear there and perform an intricate dance. Zoe looked on, eyes wide with wonder. It was working. The spell was working. She could feel it, feel the heat and the hum in her veins as the magic she’d been born with moved outward and acted upon the real world.

  Golden light danced and waved, and then began to coalesce, slowly taking on the form of a tall man. No true details yet, only a glowing shape with broad shoulders, two arms, long legs.

  Was the head shifting toward her slightly, as if the glowing shape had just realized someone stood there and was watching as it grew more and more solid? Zoe’s mouth went dry, but she forced herself to stand her ground. True, she had thought her dream man would appear immediately, but it was fine if the process took a little longer than expected. Aunt Luz still wouldn’t be home for some time. By then, Zoe and her conjured consort would be gone. There would be a ton of explaining to do, but once everyone saw how happy they were together, how clearly made for each other — no pun intended — she knew that all would be forgiven.

  Since it — he — seemed to be looking at her, she decided she’d better say something. Maybe if he heard her voice, he would latch on to it like a lifeline, could use its encouragement to hasten his transformation.

  “I’m here,” she said softly, the words a little hoarse because her throat was still so dry for some reason. “I’ve been waiting for you. Please…come to me.”

  A blink. At least, she thought it was a blink, although since the shape didn’t have eyes yet, what she’d seen was more like a strange shadow passing over the two places where his eyes should be. And then it began to move toward her.