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

  When she was done, Caitlin shifted on the couch, her mouth dry. She wished she could have some of the lemonade Alex and his mother were currently off drinking in the kitchen. Why Maya hadn’t offered her some, or at least a glass of water, Caitlin wasn’t sure. Maybe she’d intended the apparent oversight as a subtle show of power. If that were the case, Caitlin knew she wouldn’t allow herself to show any signs of discomfort. At least she was reasonably hydrated, considering the iced tea she’d finished off right before Alex parked his SUV in front of Maya’s house.

  “Ah,” Maya said, after a protracted pause. That could have meant anything…or nothing. The old woman lifted the glass of water from her lap tray and drank slowly before setting the glass back down. “Tell me, Caitlin McAllister…do you truly intend to keep hiding your gifts from everyone?”

  Her mouth was dry, and Caitlin wondered if she’d been too hasty in thinking she’d be above asking for a glass of water of her own to quench her thirst. Maya’s black eyes were fixed on her, far too penetrating, too keen.

  “What gifts?” Caitlin managed.

  A pair of sparse salt-and-pepper eyebrows drew together, and Maya responded, “You can lie to your family, and you can lie to yourself, but I will not allow you to lie to me.”

  Crap. Since she didn’t have a glass she could fiddle with, or a purse strap or anything else along those lines, Caitlin had to settle for knotting her fingers together and slipping them over one knee. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, I think you do.”

  The sharpness of Maya’s dark gaze disconcerted Caitlin. It could have been the contrast between their all-too-knowing gleam and her overall decrepit appearance. Once again Caitlin found herself wondering what had happened to Maya to cause such a degeneration. Surely no one in the McAllister or the Wilcox clans seemed to have an inkling of the sea change the de la Paz prima had undergone. Unfortunately, Caitlin knew she could sit here and speculate all she wanted, but in the end it wouldn’t matter — Maya wanted answers, and apparently seemed content to sit here and wait for as long as it took to get them.

  “I — ” Caitlin floundered, wishing she had a plausible lie to cover up the very obvious holes in the story she’d told Maya. None of it made sense if you didn’t factor in the seer abilities she’d tried so desperately to hide. And the prima, weak as she might be, was certainly no fool.

  “You what?”

  Desperation clear in her voice, despite her best attempts to hide it, Caitlin said, “I don’t know what gifts you’re talking about.”

  “Of course you do,” Maya replied calmly. Again she drank from her glass of water, although this time the palsy in her hand was far too evident as she set the glass back down on its tray. “No ordinary witch could have sensed the evil in those young men — certainly your friends did not. And no ordinary witch would have had the ability to see past the spell this Matías cast and strike out at him so she could get away.” The elderly witch’s gaze sharpened, and Caitlin wondered if those gleaming black eyes might actually bore holes right through her, so piercing they seemed. “You do not have to tell your family, if that is your wish. But you need to tell me.”

  No way out. Oh, she could keep on lying…and Maya would only continue to stare at her, every tightening of her lips and lift of her eyebrows handing those lies right back to her. Caitlin broke the eye contact and looked out the large triptych of windows on the opposite wall, which showed a view of the courtyard. The sun was beginning to drop toward the west, glinting and glittering in the falling water of the fountain outside.

  “They started about six years ago,” Caitlin said at last, not looking at Maya, but keeping her gaze focused on the way the water splashed and danced in the fountain, the way it caught glints of gold and copper and bronze from the westering sun. “I’d see things, and they’d come true. Or sometimes they’d be coming true at the same time I saw them. It’s not always consistent. But I do see things. I guess that makes me the McAllister’s next seer. But I don’t want to be that. I don’t want people always asking me for advice and wanting to know what their futures will be. Why would anyone want to know that? The future is scary.”

  She broke off then, hands still knotted where they rested on her knee. She didn’t want to look at Maya, see the disapproval on her face. No witch was supposed to deny the gifts that were her birthright, that ran as deeply in her blood as the genetic markers which dictated her hair color or the shape of her nose. No, those with witch blood were supposed to embrace those gifts, no matter what they might be. But Caitlin didn’t want to know the future, especially Maya’s, which was all but written in the weary lines of her face.

  Silence then, broken only by the faint ticking of the clock on the mantel. If Alex and his mother were talking where they waited in the kitchen, they must have been speaking in low tones, or were far enough away that their voices couldn’t carry all the way to the living room.

  At last Maya said, her own voice soft, “When they came to me and told me I would be the next prima, I didn’t want to believe it. My own mother, she was a strong witch — a curandera, a healer — but nowhere near strong enough to be prima. No, the title came to me from my cousin Luisa, and, like your own prima Angela, I was young when I had to take up that role, for although Luisa was my cousin, she was some thirty years my senior. I didn’t want it. I wanted to live my own life, choose my own man, and not have to take the consort fate decreed should be mine.”

  These revelations made Caitlin sit up a little straighter. She had never even stopped to think that perhaps Maya, the redoubtable head of the de la Paz clan, had not wanted to take on that role, because everything Caitlin had heard made it seem as if Maya had been born to it. In that same moment, she also wondered who that consort was, as Caitlin had seen no evidence of a husband here in the house, and neither had she ever heard anyone mention him by name. “But you didn’t say no.”

  “Of course not. Just as Angela did not say no when that mantle fell to her. She knew what she had to do and did not shrink from it.”

  Although Maya’s tone was mild, Caitlin couldn’t help thinking there was just a hint of disapproval in it. “So I’m a coward.”

  “Would a coward have fought back against a warlock such as Matías?” Maya shook her head, then went on, “‘Coward’ is too simple a word to use here, I think. I can understand why you would not want to tell anyone of the gifts that had come to you, for in some ways I think it is even more difficult to be the seer of a clan than to be its prima, or one of its elders. The visions can intrude when you do not wish them to, and everyone, even the prima herself, will be coming to you for advice.”

  “So what should I do?” Caitlin asked, and hated herself for the quaver of worry she heard in her voice.

  Maya smiled sadly, then reached out to touch Caitlin’s hand. Only briefly, and even that gentle brush felt more like the whisper of a frail, bird-like wing than actual fingers. “You will have to ask yourself whether the lives of your friends are worth revealing your gift to your clan. Because I will tell you, Caitlin McAllister, that this is only the beginning. You cannot hide what you are, or even a part of it. You must embrace it fully. It is your sight that can save them…if you’ll let it. For if you do not, nothing else on earth can save them.”

  This was the thing she’d feared all along, that the visions and feelings and vague sensations of foreboding were the only things that might somehow lead her to wherever Danica and Roslyn had been taken. And even then it might be too late, if Matías and his cronies determined that the powers they were summoning needed a greater sacrifice than just a few drops of innocent blood.

  “I don’t — I don’t know how to use it,” Caitlin whispered at last. “I’ve spent so many years trying to hide it that now…I guess I’m afraid to even try tapping into it.”

  “That’s not surprising,” Maya said, and instead of sounding disapproving, her tone was gentle, if a little sad. “But your gift wants to manifest itself, which i
s why you’ve had visions, even if you’ve tried to suppress them. All you must do is take down the barriers you’ve built up.”

  All. Caitlin thought of the past six years, of how she’d tried to close her mind down whenever those unwanted images began to pop into it. That didn’t always work, of course; instead, her gift had edged its way into her dreams, or the unguarded moments when she was thinking of something else entirely. But it had never abandoned her, and had even tried to protect her, back there at the bar when Matías and Jorge and Tomas approached her and her friends. If only she had trusted in it more.

  Seeming to sense her inner turmoil, Maya said, “Let it move through you now. Don’t try to direct it. Think of your gift as a river — it knows where it must flow. Trying to redirect it will only cause harm. And remember — always remember — that your gift is part of you. It is not some alien thing attempting to act on you from outside.”

  That was a little more reassuring. Even so, Caitlin didn’t quite know what she should be doing with herself. Should she close her eyes? Choose one object in the room and focus on it? Always before, the visions had come without her bidding them, without even knowing exactly where they had come from.

  But then it didn’t matter, because the room around her suddenly seemed to blank out. No, that wasn’t quite right. It was more as if another image overlaid the one she had just been seeing, obscuring the leather couch and the faded Persian rug on the floor, the dancing waters of the fountain outside in the courtyard. Instead, she saw a small room, around the same size as the living room in the apartment she shared with Danica in Flagstaff, similarly furnished in the kind of shabby hand-me-downs that Danica had referred to as “early Salvation Army.”

  And there was Danica herself, sitting on a truly hideous plaid sofa, with Roslyn next to her. Both girls had their eyes open, and yet Caitlin had the uneasy feeling that neither of them was truly there, as if their individual selves had either fled or were so deeply buried that they might as well not be there at all. Roslyn’s arms showed several cuts, but Danica’s were still unmarked. Maybe wherever the strange warlocks had fled wasn’t suited for a summoning, or maybe they simply hadn’t had enough time to redraw the circle and begin all over again.

  “Fucking puta,” Caitlin heard Matías say, and even though she knew this was a vision, that the warlock was probably miles and miles away, she gasped. At once the image of that shabby living room, and of her two friends, faded away.

  “You saw them.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Yes. I think — I think it must have been an apartment somewhere, although I couldn’t tell where. Both Roslyn and Danica seemed okay, but still….” The words seemed to evaporate into the air, since Caitlin couldn’t quite bring herself to say the word “enchanted.” No, they weren’t enchanted. That was far too pretty a term for what was being done to them. Hexed, or bespelled, or good old brainwashed? Any of those words seemed far more appropriate to the situation.

  “They are not themselves,” the de la Paz prima said.

  That was an understatement. “No. Whatever this hold is that Matías seems to have on them…it’s strong.”

  Maya’s thin, dry lips seemed to stretch even tighter as her mouth compressed. “He is using a kind of magic that has been forbidden for generations. And I know he is none of mine.”

  “So…where did he come from?” Caitlin asked, perplexed. The witch clans had their territories, and everyone more or less stayed in theirs, except in certain cases, and that was that. For a warlock of unknown origin to suddenly appear in de la Paz territory and begin wielding the sort of black magic that had been outlawed years and years ago was more than terrifying. It meant that the rules the witch clans had been following all these years had suddenly been abandoned.

  “As I have not seen him, or experienced the magic he uses firsthand, I can only guess.” Maya sighed, and Caitlin fancied she could hear that breath rattling in the older woman’s narrow chest. “But I fear very much that he is one of the California warlocks whom Angela and Connor fell afoul of several years ago, or at the very least is associated with them in some way. Símon Santiago does not keep as close an eye on the witches and warlocks in his clan as he should. True, it is difficult, with a territory as large as his, but….”

  This was the first Caitlin had heard of any trouble with warlocks in California. True, her prima and primus had been pretty well occupied for the past few years, what with first breaking the Wilcox curse and then having twins to raise, but you’d think they would have said something. Or maybe they did, and the elders — Caitlin’s mother among them — did know, and had decided for whatever reason not to pass that intelligence along to the next generation. It was possible they’d thought no trouble would come to them, with the Wilcox and McAllister clans now more or less joined, and California and its problems so very far away.

  But trouble had come, even if it had taken a few northern Arizona witches to go to Tucson before disaster struck.

  “Then shouldn’t you approach this Simón Santiago and let him know what’s going on?” Caitlin asked. Strange that the Santiago clan had a warlock in charge, when almost every clan save the Wilcoxes had a prima at its head. “Maybe, even if he couldn’t help directly, he would be able to give us some information on how to track down Matías. I mean, yes, I just saw him in a vision, but a crappy-looking apartment with a very ugly plaid couch isn’t a lot to go on.”

  Despite everything, Maya smiled slightly. Her expression turned grim quickly enough after that, though, as she replied, “I fear it is not quite so easy. You see, Simón is not actually the true head of the clan — his wife Graciela is the actual prima. But she suffered a fall some years ago, and while they have a healer, she is not a very strong one, and was unable to make the Santiago prima whole. Graciela has been in a wheelchair for twenty years now, and Simón more or less runs the clan. I was never able to learn precisely what his particular gift is, but whatever it might be, clearly it is not well-suited to him being in charge of the Santiagos’ territory.”

  “This just gets better and better, doesn’t it?”

  A rusty chuckle. “Yes, I fear that we will not have much luck going to them for help. Perhaps we will still have to try, if that is what the kidnapped girls’ parents and your prima and primus want.” Maya went still then, her dark eyes focused on the bright colors of the flowers in the courtyard, the fountain dancing in the last light of the afternoon, completely oblivious to the turmoil within the house. “And I will admit to you, Caitlin, that is not a phone call I will enjoy making. But it is my responsibility.”

  “Just as it’s mine to keep looking for Roslyn and Danica,” Caitlin said, and was gratified to see the de la Paz prima give her an approving look.

  “Yes, I fear that task will fall to you. The Wilcoxes have a seer — ”

  “Marie Begonie,” Caitlin supplied.

  “Yes, Marie. And no doubt she will wish to help, as one of her clan’s own has been taken as well.”

  It would be a relief to have Marie involved, even if Caitlin had to admit to herself that she’d never warmed to the Wilcox seer. Apparently she was miles friendlier than she used to be, now that she’d been reunited with the love of her teenage years, but even so, the woman could be awfully prickly at times. Somehow, though, Caitlin got the feeling that Marie wasn’t going to be all that much help here. For whatever reason, the universe seemed to have decreed that this task would fall on her own woefully unprepared shoulders.

  Her expression must have shifted, because Maya said, “But you don’t think Marie will be of much assistance.”

  “I — I’m not sure. But….” Caitlin lifted her shoulders. “I’m getting a feeling.”

  “And you should trust it.” With a trembling hand, Maya took her glass of water and drained the rest of its contents. “But now, I am afraid I will have to make some phone calls. If you could go to the kitchen and send Luz to me? It’s down the hall, toward the back of the house.”

  �
�Sure,” Caitlin said, rising from the couch. Maya’s request had made it clear enough that their audience was over. And although Caitlin experienced a slight stab of relief at being released from this interview, she was not looking forward to the inevitable fallout of those phone calls the de la Paz prima was about to make.

  Still, she’d worry about that later. For now, it was enough to make her escape.

  5

  “They’ve been in there a long time,” Alex said, glancing over at the digital clock on the microwave.

  “I imagine they have a good deal to talk about,” his mother replied, her tone somehow managing to be simultaneously mild and reproving. “It does no good to sit here and fidget.”

  He knew that, but he’d never been much good at sitting around and waiting. But since there wasn’t much else to do, he drank some more of his lemonade and wished it was something a little stronger. A shot or two of Reposado might go down pretty well right now. But his abuela didn’t keep spirits in her house, and even if she did, Alex knew better than to go in search of something he hadn’t been offered.

  If this wait felt torturous to him, he could only imagine what Caitlin must be going through. Getting grilled by Maya de la Paz was not something most people would particularly enjoy. Having to do it after being attacked by a trio of strange warlocks? No, thanks.

  Even so, he hoped his grandmother was having better luck at extracting information from Caitlin than either he or his mother had. The girl was hiding something; he could tell that much, even if he couldn’t quite figure out what it might be. That seemed like a foolish move on her part. How could he and the rest of the de la Paz clan help her get her friends back if she wasn’t willing to tell the entire truth of what had happened?

  Movement at the entrance to the kitchen caught the corner of his eye, and he shifted in his seat in the breakfast nook to see Caitlin standing there. For someone who’d just spent a good half hour having her story picked apart by his grandmother, the McAllister witch looked remarkably calm. She even smiled at Luz as she said, “Maya would like to talk to you now.”