Protector (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 5) Read online

  Caitlin shifted in her seat so she could get a better look without actually appearing as if she were staring in their direction. At the same time, she felt a tingle along the back of her neck, her witch sense telling her that the guys in question must be warlocks. “Do you think they’re de la Pazes?”

  Taking another long sip of her margarita, Roslyn seemed to think it over. “Must be,” she said, then reached for a tortilla chip. “Tucson is still part of their territory, right?”

  “Well, I think we’re about to find out,” Danica said in an undertone. “Because they’re getting up and coming over here.”

  At once Roslyn abandoned her margarita and hastily rearranged her long honey-blonde hair so it draped gracefully over her shoulder. Caitlin forced herself not to react. Yes, from what she could tell in the dim bar, the guys were cute, but she wasn’t going to act like a complete moron just because they were headed in her direction.

  As they approached, though, the wrongness she’d been feeling all day seemed to coil in the pit of her stomach, making even the few sips of margarita she’d had so far burn like acid. Not sure what she should do, she reached for her water and drank some of that, telling herself that she needed to calm down.

  The trio of strange young men stopped a foot from their table. One of them stood slightly in front of the other two. He was extremely good-looking, with thick black hair and well-muscled arms. A tattoo of a snake wound itself around his throat.

  “Hi,” he said. “We couldn’t help noticing — ”

  “Neither could we,” Danica said in that casual yet take-charge way of hers. “We’re not trespassing on your territory or anything, though. Our families checked with Maya de la Paz, and she said it was fine — ”

  “Whoa,” the stranger cut in. “We’re not here to check your credentials or anything. It’s just that we hadn’t seen you before. You from up north?”

  “Yes,” Roslyn replied eagerly, toying with a lock of her hair. “Caitlin and I are from Jerome, and Danica’s from Flagstaff.”

  Might as well have given them our phone numbers and addresses, Caitlin thought sourly, but there wasn’t much she could do about it at this point. Roslyn never had possessed exactly the best judgment when it came to good-looking men.

  “Two McAllisters and a Wilcox,” the strange young man said. “We don’t see too many of you down here in Tucson.” He smiled, and although he had very straight, shining white teeth, something about that smile made a shiver go down Caitlin’s back. She wished she could think of some excuse to get herself and her two friends out of there. “I’m Matías, and this is Jorge and Tomas.” The other young men smiled as well, but Caitlin didn’t feel very reassured.

  “Hey,” Roslyn whispered to her, “scooch over so they can sit down with us.” Tilting her head to one side, she let her dimple show as she said more loudly, “Why don’t you join us?”

  Caitlin had no intention of “scooching,” but that didn’t really matter, because Matías said, “Actually, we were wondering if you’d be interested in coming back to our place. We won’t water down the margaritas like they do here, and we were going to barbecue some carne asada.”

  Alarm bells started going off in Caitlin’s head, and she opened her mouth to protest, to say that maybe it would be better if they just stayed here. But Danica and Roslyn were too quick for her, both of them saying that sounded like a lot of fun. What the hell? She could believe Roslyn going for such a scheme, but Danica? Usually she had way more common sense than that.

  But Danica was smiling up at Matías, too, her dark eyes shining as if she’d just seen the promised land. This was not good.

  And somehow they were gulping down their margaritas so they wouldn’t be wasted, then dropping a couple of twenties on the table so they could get out of there without waiting for the server to come back. Before she could really figure out what was happening, they’d emerged from the restaurant into the warm sunshine and were walking down the sidewalk, Matías in the middle, with Danica on one side and Roslyn on the other, and Caitlin sort of uncomfortably sandwiched between Jorge and Tomas.

  Every nerve ending was screaming at her to get away, which on the surface sounded completely ridiculous. Wasn’t this what spring break was supposed to be about — getting out and having fun, meeting guys, maybe hooking up if everyone involved was amenable and knew there wouldn’t be any strings attached?

  Never mind that the mere thought of kissing any of these guys, let alone going to bed with one of them, was enough to make her want to throw up.

  They passed the condo complex where the girls were staying and kept walking. Well, that wasn’t so very strange; there were a lot of complexes like that in the area, and the odds of the guys staying in the same one where they were renting were pretty low.

  “So,” Caitlin managed, even though she found it hard to get the words out past the tight knot of worry in her throat, “are you staying in a condo, too?”

  The guy on her right — she couldn’t remember if he was Tomas or Jorge — shook his head, looking amused. “Oh, no. We live here in Tucson. Our house is just down the next block.”

  House. For some reason, that sounded ominous. It seemed far more innocuous to be going back to a rented condo rather than a house they lived in. “Oh,” she said faintly. “So you guys are all roommates?”

  “Yeah,” he said, his gaze moving from her face to the half-revealed curve of her breasts in the lightweight top she wore. “Tomas and I, we’re brothers, and Matías is our cousin.”

  Caitlin forced down a breath. Maybe he really hadn’t been looking at her chest. Maybe she was just imagining things because she felt so crappy. “That’s cool,” she said, hoping she sounded casual and not as if she was about to gag. The sensation was pressing so heavily on her now that it felt as if she could barely pull in enough air to speak. “Roslyn and I, we’re cousins, too. Her dad is my mother’s older brother.”

  “Yeah, we witches, we’re all related somehow,” Jorge said, and for some reason Tomas seemed to find that amusing, because he began to chuckle.

  If only she had enough breath to ask him what was so funny. At the moment, she felt as if she were about to pass out at any second. And of course Roslyn and Danica weren’t paying any attention to her, were still staring up at Matías with that gaga expression on their faces, which didn’t make sense at all, because although he was good-looking, he wasn’t that good-looking. Not really.

  They turned a corner into a residential tract with modest one-story homes, most of them built in the Southwest style with flat roofs, and all of them with gravelly front yards planted with cactus and other drought-tolerant species. It all appeared relatively normal, if somewhat exotic to her eyes. She was used to the Victorian architecture in Jerome, or the wood-framed houses common in Flagstaff. But nothing here seemed particularly strange, especially for Tucson.

  It felt like it, though, worry running up and down her skin as if every ant within a square mile had started to march over her flesh. She knew she should be saying something, should be reaching out to her friends and grabbing them by the arms so she could pull them away from Matías, but for some reason she couldn’t give voice to her worry, couldn’t do anything except follow the group up the front walk to a stucco house painted a pale rosy tan color.

  Inside it was very clean and neat, decorated in a simple, neutral style that had hints of the Southwest without being kitschy. The place certainly didn’t look like a house that had three twenty-something guys living in it. Caitlin had been to Roslyn’s brother Adam’s apartment once or twice before he got together with Mason and moved to Flagstaff, and it sure as hell hadn’t been anywhere near as tidy as this.

  “Margaritas,” Matías announced.

  Everyone headed into the kitchen, which also showed no sign of anyone actually using it. Well, except for a bowl of limes on the counter, and a bag of tortilla chips. Jorge got some salsa out of the refrigerator while Matías got to work with the blender, and Tomas wandered off i
nto the next room. A few seconds later, some jaw-rattling hip-hop started to play, and Caitlin winced. She hated that crap.

  And she knew Roslyn hated it, too, and Danica only sort of tolerated it, and yet both of them were grinning like Tomas had just put on their favorite song. What the hell was going on?

  She stood off to one side as Roslyn chattered away about the house and how it must be so awesome to live in a part of the state where it was warm all the time, and the guys kept exchanging knowing grins that made the blood in Caitlin’s veins feel just about as frosty as the concoction inside the blender. But every time she took a breath and attempted to speak, the words got caught in her throat, choking her to the point where she began to cough.

  “Hey, let me fix that,” Matías said, sounding a little too solicitous. He handed her a margarita, and she set her purse down on the floor so she could take it from him.

  “Yeah, Cate, you okay?” Danica asked. The question seemed almost automatic, though; Caitlin couldn’t detect any real concern in her voice.

  “Fine,” she managed to croak. The margarita glass sat in her hand, cold, inviting. She’d just watched him mix the drink, so there couldn’t be anything wrong with it. And she needed to drink something to get that lump out of her throat.

  She lifted the margarita to her lips and swallowed, watching as Roslyn and Danica did the same. As soon as the frosty tang of it hit her stomach, though, Caitlin knew she shouldn’t have drunk it, that something was horribly wrong. Suddenly, it wasn’t cold at all, but burning, a strange, insidious heat that began to lick its way all through her, making her feel….

  “That’s better,” Matías said. He nodded at Jorge and Tomas, and they moved toward Roslyn and Danica, Jorge with his arm around Danica’s waist, Tomas with Roslyn, both of them pulling the girls toward them and kissing them hard, hands roaming upward to fondle their breasts. And neither of them reacted, did anything except moan and push closer to the guys manhandling them, when Caitlin knew that even Roslyn would have kneed anyone else in the nuts for pulling something like that on such a short acquaintance.

  And then Matías was coming closer to her, dark eyes glittering. “You sense something, don’t you?” he murmured. “It doesn’t matter. Soon, nothing much will matter at all.”

  His mouth was on hers, lips hard and hot, and although she knew it was wrong, knew she should be pushing him away, the signals her mind was sending to her body didn’t seem to be getting there. She let him kiss her, let him lead her out of the kitchen to a room attached to the back of the house, an empty space that probably had been intended as a sun porch. There was nothing in the room now, though, except an intricate tracery in colored chalks on the cement floor, a pattern that not only looked wrong, but felt wrong, the patterns off somehow, the arrangement of colored candles around its circumference wrong as well, although she couldn’t say why.

  Tomas and Jorge brought Roslyn and Danica in with them, both girls looking dreamy and flushed. Danica’s shirt was half unbuttoned, and Caitlin knew that was wrong as well, that Danica would never be standing there in front of a bunch of guys she didn’t even know with her bra showing and her breasts about to spill out.

  Matías smiled. “The blonde one first.”

  Tomas nodded and pulled Roslyn forward, positioning her at the edge of the circle. Silvery metal flashed in the bright light pouring into the room, and Caitlin realized then that he’d pulled a knife from somewhere, was pressing it against her friend’s exposed forearm.

  “No!” she screamed, somehow forcing the syllable past the constriction in her throat, past the strange fuzziness that seemed to have settled on her brain. Roslyn blinked at her, as if puzzled why Caitlin would have a problem with Tomas slicing her open with a knife.

  “Calm down, chica,” Matías murmured, his breath hot against Caitlin’s neck. “He’s not going to kill her. We just need something from her.”

  “You can’t….” She made herself gasp in a breath, hoping the extra oxygen would make her brain begin to work properly. “It’s wrong. We don’t — we don’t do that kind of magic.”

  “Maybe you don’t. But we do.” He nodded, and Tomas drew the blade across Roslyn’s arm, a quick, sharp cut, barely more than inch long. Deep crimson blood dripped from the wound onto the circle chalked on the ground.

  Faint tendrils of pale gray smoke began to drift upward. At the same time, Caitlin could feel the wrongness of the thing they’d drawn twisting through her, cold, hungry…strong. It was more than chalk on the ground.

  It was alive.

  “Roslyn!” she screamed. “Run!”

  But Roslyn only looked at her with foggy blue eyes, and Danica wasn’t watching at all, had her eyes shut as Jorge kissed her neck and stroked her bare arm. She didn’t seem to have heard Caitlin’s cry, or, worse, was ignoring it.

  “I don’t think they mind, chica,” Matías said, chuckling into her ear. “And you won’t, either, when your time comes.”

  Help. She had to get help. From where or from whom, she didn’t know, because she was in the heart of de la Paz territory, and here were three guys from that clan engaging in the sort of magic that had been forbidden for centuries. But she knew Roslyn and Danica were lost to her for the moment, and so the only thing she could think of to do was to run.

  The next part didn’t require thought, only instinct…and the strength to overcome the fog of confusion which had come with that margarita she’d sipped. But she’d only had a little. Besides, damn it — she was a McAllister.

  She twisted in Matías’ arms, bringing her knee up into his groin as hard as she could. He grunted, then cursed. Sharp pain flared in her side, and she saw he’d been holding a knife that whole time, had just plunged it into her. Because the angle was off, it barely penetrated more than an inch, but oh, Goddess, it hurt.

  Crying out, she brought her elbow up into his chin, connecting squarely. He cursed again, but, more importantly, he let go of her.

  That was all she needed. Mentally asking Roslyn and Danica for forgiveness, Caitlin bolted from the room, then ran through the house and out the front door. Without bothering to stop and close it behind her, she pounded down the walkway and back to the sidewalk, retracing her steps, knowing she had to get back out to the thoroughfare where the restaurant was located.

  Not that she was sure she could make it that far. The restaurant was blocks from where they’d turned into this residential district, but between here and there, she’d noted there were other businesses, places where people had to be working. Normal people. Ordinary people. They’d see she’d been hurt and call an ambulance. Surely she’d be safe in the hospital, wouldn’t she?

  Behind her, she heard running feet, but no shouting. No, that would probably draw too much attention. All she could do was run, glad that she hadn’t worn her flip-flops and instead had on a pair of ballet-style flats.

  Don’t look back, she told herself. The pain in her side was searing, but it seemed to clear her head, get rid of that horrible fuzziness. Or maybe it was just that she’d put enough distance between herself and Matías that whatever spell he’d cast — and it had to be a spell — wasn’t working as well anymore.

  And there was the street, and cars whizzing back and forth. She let out a sobbing little breath, thinking she’d never been so glad to see anything in her life. Something wet was dripping on her jeans, and she glanced down and realized the blood from her wound had flowed from her side and had stained all the way to her thigh.

  But she couldn’t think about that, think about how much it hurt. Now she had turned on to the sidewalk that paralleled the street, and it seemed harder and harder to keep running. She slowed to a walk, risked a look behind her. Matías stood on the corner, fists balled at his side, but he made no motion to come any closer. She guessed that he couldn’t, not with this many witnesses around. So his powers had some limits.

  Just up ahead was a large building, a store of some kind. Her vision was becoming blurry, so she couldn’t see wha
t its sign said. But there were cars in the parking lot, and people coming and going. And she couldn’t walk much farther. Surely someone here would help her.

  She pressed her hand against her side, attempting to conceal as much as she could of the blood that stained her clothing. Limping now, she staggered past the parked cars and went into the cool, air-conditioned interior of the building. Around her, she could hear gasps as the shoppers in the store appeared to take in her condition, but she couldn’t focus on any of them. Not really. Just up ahead was a tall young man in a white dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He looked handsome and friendly, with kind dark eyes.

  Summoning the last of her strength, Caitlin went to him, grasped his arm. Her hand left bloody prints on his white shirt. His eyes widened, even as he reached out to catch her.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Please help me.”

  The world went dark.

  2

  Alex Trujillo shoved the clipboard under his arm and went back to the stockroom. Just as he’d expected, the bags of rice Luis said he couldn’t find were stacked right where Alex had known they would be, on the rack on the west wall. He tried not to sigh. It probably would have been easier if Luis was actually that stupid. He wasn’t, though…just lazy. And because he was Alex’s cousin, Alex couldn’t exactly fire him.

  Just another day at Mercado Trujillo.

  For most of his life, Alex had known this was where he’d probably end up, but that didn’t mean he had to be happy about it. His one chance at escape had been that kiss with Angela McAllister. If he’d turned out be her consort, he would have been up in Jerome…doing what, he wasn’t sure…but at least it wouldn’t be managing the store that had been in his father’s family for three generations now.

  But he hadn’t been Angela’s soul mate. No, that role had gone to Connor Wilcox, of all people. Lucky bastard. It wasn’t as if Alex had thought he was in love with Angela or anything. He barely knew her. What he’d seen, he’d liked, and at the time he’d thought they could have been good together, if fate or the Goddess or whomever had seen fit to smile on their pairing. She’d been destined for other things, however, and so Alex had let it go. Mostly.