An Ill Wind

by Christine Pope

  “I’ll try,” she allowed, then took a truffle fry from the pile in the bowl between them and munched it down.

  “I suppose that’s about all I can ask for,” he said. “At least it seems everything is still quiet on the home front — Ava texted me to say that my mother seemed about the same, but that’s all I’ve heard.”

  “Same here,” Cassandra said. “But then, the last my family heard from me, I was going to be staying in Santa Fe for the foreseeable future. I’ll probably need to check in at some point, but for now, it feels like I’m off the leash.”

  Which she should be. Her parents weren’t exactly the overprotective type — thank God — but she also knew they hadn’t been happy about her being sent off to New Mexico on her own. She had the feeling they’d both had to bite their lips and remind themselves that she was a grown-up of almost twenty-two, and so there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot they could do to stop her from going on this mission.

  Going to Santa Fe was one thing, however. She had a feeling they’d have a whole host of choice words on the subject of her tearing off to El Salvador with Tony Castillo in tow.

  “Do you have a plan?” he asked then. “I mean, a real plan, if this whole side trip to Tijuana pans out and we get the information we need?”

  “No,” she said frankly. “Because it’s kind of hard to make a plan for something when you don’t even know exactly where you’re going or what to expect once you get there. But I’m good at thinking on my feet.”

  For a few seconds, he didn’t say anything, only looked across the table at her. She could feel color rise in her cheeks and wished she’d inherited her father’s darker complexion. Well, there wasn’t much she could do about that.

  “Thanks for being honest,” Tony said. “I mean, it doesn’t make me feel that much better about tackling a bunch of Escobars, but at least you’re not blowing sunshine up my ass.”

  “I would never do that,” Cassandra replied, doing her best to look at him directly, even though it was harder than she’d thought it would be. “I’ll always tell you the truth.”

  His warm brown eyes caught hers, and held. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said softly.

  Oh, hell. While one part of her was all too happy to have Tony Castillo looking at her like that, the more rational side of her brain told her she really didn’t need these sorts of complications in her life.

  Especially not when they were sharing a hotel room.

  To cover up something of the awkwardness she felt, she reached for another fry and ate it, then washed it down with some wine. “There’s not much point in lying, is there?” she asked. “I mean, we both know we’re going in cold here.”

  For a few seconds, he was silent, his gaze still fixed on her face. However, it wasn’t a flirtatious kind of stare, but almost a measuring one, as if he was trying to get a feeling for what she would be like in a crisis situation.

  She wanted to think that she would be calm and cool, like her father. Or both her parents, really; neither of them was the type to easily get flustered or overreact.

  When Tony spoke, however, it was with a question that surprised her. “But you’ll lie to your parents, won’t you? About where you’re going, if it turns out that we will be going to El Salvador after all?”

  “I’m hoping the topic won’t come up,” she replied honestly. “Like I said, it’s not as if they’re checking in on me every five minutes. I’m not some kid who still lives at home and has to do what her parents tell her to do.”

  As soon as the words had left her mouth, Cassandra wondered if Tony might think she was indulging in some false bravado. If he did, there wasn’t much she could do about his opinion. However, she’d only told him the truth. She’d made it clear to her parents that she was taking on the mission to Santa Fe because her talent was the one best suited for recovering the grimoires. No babysitters, no one tagging along. Luckily, Zoe had sided with her on that one, because none of them wanted to attract attention, and a big de la Paz delegation to Castillo territory might have done exactly that.

  “I never said you were,” Tony replied, his tone oddly gentle. “It’s just…I know how it can be with our families. Most of the time, they don’t seem that big on independence for their kids. We’re supposed to go straight from the house we grew up in to starting our own families, with not a lot of opportunity to strike out on our own.”

  Well, that much was true, partly because witches and warlocks tended to meet their soul mates — for lack of a better term — when they were fairly young and settle down right away. She was kind of surprised that someone like Tony would still be unattached at twenty-five or twenty-six, even though it wasn’t unusual at all in the civilian population, where the average age for a first marriage hovered just below thirty.

  Why had he held out? Just hadn’t met the right person, or some kind of innate stubbornness that kept him from getting married and starting a family, doing all the things his clan expected him to do? She didn’t think it was because he was gay; she might be flattering herself, but she was pretty sure a gay man would never have given her the sorts of admiring glances that Tony had sent her way.

  “Luckily, my parents aren’t old-fashioned,” she said, thinking that was probably the safest way to reply. It was hard enough being around someone she knew she should treat as a partner on this quest and nothing more, even when she was realizing more and more how much she liked him, how well they seemed to get along together. The last thing she wanted to do was stumble into the awkward territory of marriage and family. “They always told me I could do what I wanted.”

  “You’re lucky,” Tony replied. He picked up his glass of wine and drank from it — a large swallow, probably bigger than Cassandra herself would have risked. Well, they’d walked here from their hotel; besides, Tony seemed like the kind of guy who had plenty of practice at holding his liquor. “Is it because your mother’s a civilian?”

  “Maybe,” she allowed, stealing a quick glance at the group of people drinking and sharing appetizers on the sofas just a few feet away. Good thing that they were laughing and talking, and apparently not paying any attention to anyone else in the restaurant. “I mean, she didn’t grow up with our culture, so she’s a little less likely to expect me to do something just because it’s what everyone else in the clan has always done. But my father’s pretty mellow, too — he was in his late thirties when he married my mother, so obviously he didn’t care too much about doing what was expected, either.”

  This piece of information made Tony nod in an approving way, as if he was glad to hear that people in the de la Paz clan weren’t quite as lockstep as the Castillos seemed to be. Although to hear her father tell it, he’d been under plenty of pressure to get married; he’d just ignored the subtle digs and gone on with his life, which Cassandra thought was a pretty good way to handle the situation. Whether all those people pressuring him to settle down had been exactly thrilled when he’d finally gotten married to a civilian was a matter for debate. She’d never felt like an outsider, despite being both mixed race and mixed witch/civilian, but that was probably more due to her father’s determined efforts to keep her from being exposed to that kind of prejudice than because it didn’t actually exist.

  “Anyway,” she went on, trying to steer the conversation away from the thorny topic of matrimony, “it’s not that I’m going to keep completely quiet if it really comes down to us going to Central America. My parents deserve to know where I’m going. But they also have no right to stop me.”

  “Except that whole part about not meddling with other clans unless your prima expressly commands you to do so,” Tony said dryly after swallowing the last bit of wine in his glass. He looked at it ruefully, then reached for the untouched glass of water by his plate.

  “Well, you could say that Zoe already told me to do this,” Cassandra pointed out, although she had a feeling she was stretching the definition of “permission” in this particular context to almost the breaking point. “She
told me to bring back the grimoires. That’s exactly what I plan to do — it just may require me to travel a lot farther than I’d planned.”

  He shook his head in amusement, but didn’t reply right away because he was busy flagging down the waitress so he could order another glass of wine. “You want one?” he asked as the waitress paused at their table.

  “No, I’m good,” Cassandra said. She’d only drunk about half her wine so far, and besides, she thought it was probably a good idea to take it easy. If she’d known Tony better, she might have told him to slow down a bit. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who got aggressive if he drank too much, but….

  Pushing those misgivings aside, she ate a few more fries and drank some water. Tony did the same, and remained quiet until the waitress dropped off his replacement glass of wine. Once she was gone, he spoke.

  “I’m not trying to get drunk,” he said quietly. “I can handle it.”

  “I’m sure you can,” she said, her voice carefully neutral. “But it’s only three in the afternoon.”

  “And I’ll stop after this one, and then we can wander around and look at the shops. I swear, I won’t touch another drop until dinner.”

  Despite herself, Cassandra felt her lips twitch. He’d looked so earnest, like a little kid promising he would behave so he wouldn’t be sent to bed without supper. But no, that wasn’t exactly right. Tony might have a perpetual boyish gleam in his eyes, but his features were strong and defined, not boyish at all. Rugged, leading-man kind of looks. It was kind of a shame that witches and warlocks had to stay away from the entertainment industry, due to the overwhelming need of their kind to remain hidden, because she thought he would have looked pretty damn good up on a movie screen.

  “It’s cool,” she said, adding, “I’m not your mother.”

  He grinned. “No, you’re definitely not.” A sip of his wine, and he went on, “You know, you don’t look very much like a de la Paz.”

  “That’s because my mom is a gringa.”

  His grin broadened. “Does she know you talk about her like that?”

  “Yes,” Cassandra replied, smiling in return. “Because I think the first time I heard the word, she was using it to refer to herself. Even she’s not sure where the red hair came from, though — hers is light brown.”

  “I like it,” Tony said. “I always was a sucker for a redhead.”

  Once again, his eyes were fixed on hers, now with a dancing light in them, as if daring her to give him crap for trying to flirt. And while part of her sort of did want to rebuke him for being so openly flirtatious when they were on an important mission — even if they were kind of hanging fire until they got his fake passport — the other part of her wanted to flirt right back. This would all have been a lot easier if he weren’t so damn good-looking…so easy to get along with.

  “I didn’t know there were that many redheads in Santa Fe,” she replied lightly.

  “There aren’t,” he said. “But we get a lot of tourists.”

  Was that how he handled his love life? Casual relationships were frowned on in witch clans; you were supposed to find your “one” and settle down as soon as possible. But Cassandra supposed Tony could have gotten around that conundrum by dating civilians. It would be easy, and maybe a little thrilling, to hook up with pretty women as they came to Santa Fe to visit and then were just as quickly out of his life. No muss, no fuss.

  Then again, she wasn’t sure she liked the idea of him being such a man-whore….

  “And you’re only too happy to show them around town, I suppose,” she said.

  “Sometimes,” he allowed, then added, that glint back in his brown eyes, “although probably not as often as you’re imagining, judging by the expression on your face.”

  Relief pulsed through her, which she told herself was just silly. It shouldn’t matter to her one bit how many women Tony Castillo had slept with…and yet she knew it did.

  He went on, “What, you didn’t offer to give any handsome civilians a guided tour of Tubac?”

  She shot him a pained look. “No. Besides, Tubac’s so small, a tour like that would probably last about twenty minutes, tops.”

  That reply made him chuckle, although he sobered almost immediately. He said, looking down into the glass of wine he held rather than at her, “So…you didn’t leave anyone behind there?”

  There was no way for her to pretend to misunderstand. He wanted to know if she was attached, simple as that. Obviously, there was no wedding band on her finger — or an engagement ring — but that didn’t always mean something.

  And while she could have told him it was none of his business, she knew, in a strange way, it was. They didn’t know each other very well yet, but they were both smart enough to realize that some kind of attraction had begun to build between them. Besides, if she was going to drag him along with her to Tijuana and anywhere else this hunt might lead them, then she needed to be truthful on this topic as well.

  “No,” she said. “I’m completely unattached. Anything else you want to know?”

  He didn’t take offense, only leaned back in his chair, looking relieved. “There’s probably a million things about you I’d like to know,” he replied. “But I’m okay with finding them out gradually. You can just tell me what you want to tell me. No pressure.”

  It had been her experience — limited, true, but still — that when a guy said “no pressure,” he often meant just the opposite. With Tony, however, she thought he wasn’t trying to play games. He was genuinely interested, but he also wasn’t the kind of aggressive asshole who would keep pushing even after she told him to let it alone.

  She reached for her own glass of wine, saying, “I’m not sure what to make of you, Tony Castillo.”

  “That’s okay,” he responded with another grin. “No one else does, either.”

  And to that comment, she had no ready reply.

  9

  It wasn’t that different from a lot of afternoons he’d spent with the civilian girls he met back home — having a drink and a snack, walking around and looking at shops and the local scenery — but somehow, the experience with Cassandra was entirely different. Tony found himself thrilling to every little thing about her, from the way the afternoon sun caught in her red hair and turned it to fire, to the sound of her laugh and those gorgeous little glints of gold in her hazel-green eyes.

  Maybe this feeling was simple lust. His last hook-up had been a while back now, nearly three months ago. In a way, it would be easier if this was just a biological itch that needed to be scratched. Problem was, he had a feeling it was a lot more than that. He might have only known Cassandra Sandoval for a few days, but she seemed both as natural and as magical to him as the sun rising in the morning.

  He had no idea what she might feel for him — if anything. Then again, when he’d asked her point-blank if she had anyone back in Arizona, she’d been honest with him. If she wasn’t feeling just the slightest bit of attraction…if she’d wanted to give him the brush-off…then she could have lied and said there was, and that would have been the end of it. All right, maybe not all of what he was feeling, because that wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you could turn off and on like a faucet, but still, he would have respected her enough to back off and try to be casual and neutral, nothing more than a partner in this crazy chase to find those stolen grimoires.

  Now they were sitting outside at a folksy barbecue restaurant in downtown Temecula, where everyone was seated at long tables and benches, like they were at a picnic or something. Cassandra had chosen the place, saying she was in the mood for barbecue, but Tony had to wonder whether she’d picked it out because it was the sort of establishment that made it impossible to have a private conversation. Sure, he had no problem falling into a discussion with the retired couple sitting next to them about all the different wineries in the area, because if he had a secondary gift besides his ability to call the wind, it was being able to talk to pretty much anyone anywhere, in any kind of se
tting, but he couldn’t help wishing that they’d gone someplace a little more intimate.

  The sun had set, and the air was getting chilly, but a bunch of big gas patio heaters kept the outdoor diners comfortable. And he had to admit that the food was good, filling and hearty, so he couldn’t really accuse Cassandra of bringing them someplace without caring about the quality of the cuisine offered. Even so, he knew exactly why they were here and not, say, the little Italian restaurant down the street, the one that looked like it might have offered exactly the sort of intimate experience he would have preferred.

  “So you’ve never been to Temecula before?” the older woman next to him asked, and Tony shook his head.

  “No — actually this is our first trip to California,” he replied, then glanced across the table at Cassandra. “Isn’t that right, hon?”

  Her mouth pursed slightly at his use of the endearment, even though they’d agreed beforehand to tell anyone who asked that they were boyfriend and girlfriend. It seemed way easier than saying they were a witch and warlock on the trail of some magical books that might or might not have been stolen by a bloodthirsty clan from Central America. “First time,” she agreed, then took a bite of her ribs. “Have you been to Temecula a lot?”

  The husband replied, “Oh, we come all the time. But then, it’s not that much of a drive for us — we live in Redlands. That’s up by Riverside,” the man added, as if belatedly realizing that a couple of tourists from New Mexico might not know all that much about Southern California’s geography.