A Canyon Road Christmas
The Witches of Canyon Road: Book Four
Christine Pope
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.
A CANYON ROAD CHRISTMAS
Copyright © 2018 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.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Also by Christine Pope
About the Author
1
Miranda McAllister-Castillo
Rafe set his phone down on the kitchen table and said, “The bishop can squeeze us in on Friday the twenty-third.”
I leaned against the back of the hard chair where I sat and gazed across the table at Rafe, at his coffee-brown eyes and the heavy lock of black hair that always fell forward onto his forehead no matter what he did to force it to behave. As much as I loved looking at him, I wasn’t feeling as excited by the news he’d just delivered as I knew I probably should be.
Did I really want our wedding to be “squeezed in” anywhere? It felt as if the entire month that had just passed had been a squeeze in and of itself, thanks to moving into the enormous old hacienda-style mansion that had been the home of the Castillo primas for generations, and helping Rafe’s father Eduardo relocate to Rafe’s house, which was located less than a quarter-mile away. My father-in-law seemed settled enough now, although I wished we could have persuaded him to stay with us for just a bit longer. However, he insisted that Rafe and I should be able to settle into our new lives on our own, and not be forced to share the house with anyone.
Frankly, I didn’t feel as though I was being forced. Eduardo had been my father-in-law for only a month, and I already loved him as though he was my own father…although I had to admit that I couldn’t think of two men who were more different. But Eduardo brushed aside our protests and moved his things to Rafe’s former home — and set about refurnishing it and having some of the rooms repainted. Already it felt far more homey than it had when it was Rafe’s bachelor pad, mostly because Rafe didn’t care about interior decorating and tended to choose items because of their usefulness, and not because they were aesthetically pleasing. As much as that particular quality might exasperate me sometimes, I had to admit that it did keep the arguments about my own redecorating of the prima’s house to a minimum.
Not that I’d done a lot of that yet. I was still trying to get used to my new role as prima of this clan, although I hadn’t really been called upon to do anything more earthshaking than preside over the christening of the newest Castillo, Rafe’s cousin Arthur and his wife Casey’s daughter, named Maria Genoveva in honor of Rafe’s late mother. I’d felt nervous enough performing that minor task, mostly because I hadn’t been raised Catholic and only had the foggiest idea of what was going on.
To be honest, I’d kind of been hoping that everyone would let Rafe’s and my sketchy courthouse wedding slide, and that we could go on with our lives without getting embroiled in all the preparations that a big ceremony at the cathedral involved. Unfortunately, the older generation — aided and abetted by Rafe’s Aunt Rosa — put their foot down and said we must have a real wedding. They might have been deprived of being able to attend their prima’s funeral…at the time, Rafe and I had both thought it was too dangerous to have a large gathering like that, with the dark warlock Simon Escobar still on the loose and all too willing to take advantage of such a tempting target…but they were not going to let their new prima avoid a big wedding ceremony at Loretto Chapel.
Which was why Rafe had been on the phone with the bishop, trying to find an opening for us during one of the church’s busiest seasons. I probably should have been grateful that he could fit us in at all, but right then I felt more tired than anything else, and possibly a little apprehensive. After all, even though Simon was dead and no longer capable of casting dark spells that could confuse the mind and cause a person to utter the dreadful words Rafe had said to me while we stood at the altar, I couldn’t quite push aside the niggling fear that something else might go wrong this time as well. We were already married, and as far as I was concerned, something that wasn’t broken didn’t need any fixing.
That argument wouldn’t wash with Aunt Rosa and the rest of the Castillos, unfortunately, so here we were.
“Okay,” I said wearily, knowing there was no point in wasting any energy on protests. “Sounds like Cat and I need to go dress shopping.”
If Tess Diaz, the woman who owned the wedding boutique, wondered why I was back at her shop to purchase another gown only a little more than a month since I’d bought the last one, she didn’t give any sign of it. By that time, most of the people who lived and worked in the heart of Santa Fe knew of Genoveva’s passing, even if the circumstances of her death had to be hidden from the civilian — nonmagical — sector of the population. Her obituary said she had died of a brain aneurysm, which, for all I knew, was no more than the truth. Of course, that explanation left out the small detail of that aneurysm being caused by a dark warlock’s even darker spell, but we couldn’t exactly go spreading that news around town.
No doubt some gossip had filtered through the community about the big wedding at Loretto Chapel that ended in disaster, but I’d already determined to stonewall my way through this if necessary. Luckily, it seemed that Tess was more interested in staying on the Castillos’ good side than she was picking my brain about my first abortive wedding ceremony, because after getting some sparkling water for Cat and me, she excused herself to go pull some dresses for me.
“Hopefully, different ones than what I tried on last time,” I murmured to my sister-in-law Cat as we sat on a pair of elegant velvet-upholstered side chairs. “Because I got the only one I really liked from that bunch, and it’s long gone.”
Well, to be fair, the dress wasn’t exactly gone forever. I just couldn’t bring myself to go back to the house on Cienega Creek where Simon had taken me after I’d agreed to go with him in order to prevent any further violence, but several senior Castillo witches and warlocks had gone there so they could sweep the place of Simon’s belongings — and remove his body, which now lay in an unmarked grave in a corner of Rosario Cemetery. I hadn’t asked where that grave was; I really didn’t want to know.
Anyway, in addition to Simon’s clothes and other effects, they found my first wedding dress, which had been in my bags when I ran away from Rafe after the first horrible ceremony at Loretto Chapel, but had disappeared somewhere along the way. Now I knew where it had been — hanging in the closet of the house where Simon had been holding me, cleaned and pressed, as if it was waiting for another chance to be worn. Had Simon kept the dress because he thought he would convince me one day to marry him? That seemed the most plausible explanation, even if it was enough to give me shivers even now.
“I’m sure Tess will come up with something,” Cat replied, not lo
oking terribly concerned about the situation.
Maybe she was thinking we only had to find something that would be passable, that didn’t have to be held up to her mother’s exacting standards. I supposed that was true enough, but I still wanted to look beautiful for Rafe. I didn’t want him to think I was half-assing this thing because I’d been pressured into it by the family. Besides, this wedding ceremony would include my relatives as well, since we no longer had Genoveva handing down her ridiculous edicts, including insisting that no McAllisters or Wilcoxes attend my wedding to her son. Now that I knew I had family coming, it only made sense that I would want to look my best for everyone.
While Cat probably would never have admitted it, I guessed that some — if not most — of her current relaxed state had something to do with not having her mother around to nag her night and day anymore. She did look far more serene than I’d yet seen her, a calmness to her big dark eyes that I hadn’t observed before, her lovely features untroubled by a frown. No one could say that Cat didn’t love Genoveva, but the former prima had been a very domineering person. At last Cat was free to make her own choices, first of which was moving out of the big house where she’d grown up and into a luxurious vacation rental only a few blocks away. How she’d managed to land that place when pretty much everything in the downtown area had already been booked for the holidays, I didn’t know. Maybe some of her father’s magical talent for having things always go his way had rubbed off on her.
Tess came back into the dressing area, towing a rack of gowns behind her. Although white dresses tended to blend into each other, especially when all hanging in a row like that, it didn’t seem as though any of the ones she’d brought out were repeats of the gowns I’d tried on the last time I was in the shop.
That was somewhat encouraging, even though climbing in and out of a series of wedding dresses was not normally the way I preferred to spend my afternoons. Still, since I had already agreed to this whole enterprise, there wasn’t much I could do except go ahead and get this over with as soon as possible.
Possibly because we’d already been through this once before, it did seem as though Tess had done a better job of dialing in my preferences. She knew I liked embroidery but wasn’t a fan of too much frou-frou, and that while I was all right with something strapless, I didn’t want something with a mermaid-style silhouette. Even so, I tried on and rejected three gowns before I knew I’d found the one.
It was silk organza, with an elegantly draped bodice and bead and crystal ornaments at the shoulders and the waist. That was it for decoration, but the dress really didn’t need anything more than that, because the way it fit was so perfect, you’d have thought it had been custom made for me, instead of something I was buying off the rack.
“Oh, wow,” Cat said as I stood on the little dais in front of a bank of mirrors, turning this way and that, listening to the soft whisper of the silk fabric. “That is really stunning.”
“It just came in a few days ago,” Tess informed us. “So you wouldn’t have had a chance to try it on the first time you were in.” She seemed to realize she’d slipped into dangerous territory, because she went on hastily, “That is…it’s a new line.”
“It’s fine, Tess,” I said. “I know the circumstances are a little unusual.” She still looked a bit discomfited at her gaffe, and so I added, “The dress is beautiful. I don’t think I need to try on anything else.”
“And a veil and tiara?” she asked.
“No tiara,” I replied firmly. I’d already gone down that road, and I still had all-too-vivid memories of sitting in the Airbnb vacation rental Simon had passed off as his apartment and turning the tiara from my first wedding over and over in my hands, wondering what the hell had gone wrong between Rafe and me. “And no veil, either.”
“Seriously?” Cat put in. “You are getting married in Loretto Chapel, you know. Aren’t you going to feel underdressed?”
“No,” I replied. “It’s going to feel strange enough anyway, considering Rafe and I are already legally married. I’ll have an updo and some crystal pins in my hair or something. It’ll still look nice.”
“Oh, I’m sure it will,” she said. “But you know how Aunt Rosa is.”
“I can deal with Rosa.” My tone sounded firm and confident, although privately I wondered exactly what I would do if Rosa really decided to get into it with me about showing the proper respect for the chapel and the ceremony itself.
“Mm-hmm,” Cat responded. She didn’t say anything else, though, probably because she knew it wasn’t a very good idea to be airing too much Castillo dirty laundry in front of a civilian.
Tess, who’d probably seen more than a few family tiffs during her time in the wedding business, said in the most neutral of tones, “I’ll go ahead and get the gown rung up, then. It doesn’t need any alterations, so you can take it home with you today.”
“Perfect.” I smiled at her and disappeared behind the decorative screen in the corner of the room so I could get back into my street clothes — just jeans and a jacket and boots, since I no longer had to worry about trying to impress Genoveva Castillo. Selfish as the thought might be, I knew that deep down I was grateful that Rafe and I could face our future together without having to deal with her interference.
The dress turned out to be just a hair under ten thousand dollars, once the sales tax was added in. I had no idea how much my first wedding gown had cost, since of course Genoveva had handled that transaction. Even though I knew that amount of money was a mere drop in the bucket compared to the Castillo clan’s wealth, I couldn’t quite ignore the dry feeling in my mouth as I handed over my shiny new platinum Visa card. Ten grand was a hell of a lot of money for something I’d wear for maybe five hours, tops.
Well, I’d make sure the dress was stored carefully, and maybe someday my own daughter would wear it for her wedding. Would that future daughter also become prima of the Castillos one day? I really couldn’t say for sure. Maybe if my powers were passed on to her, and if people were willing to wait for that day. There wasn’t any real hard and fast rule about when a prima selected her prima-in-waiting; although the conventional wisdom was to choose someone fairly early on so there wasn’t a lot of time when the prima didn’t have any backup, so to speak, it didn’t always happen that way. My own mother went without a prima-in-waiting for years because there wasn’t anyone in the clan strong enough to take on that role, and I heard it was a relief to everyone when my older sister Emily began to show her powers early on, making it clear who the McAllisters’ next head witch should be.
Whether or not the Castillos would be that accommodating, I didn’t know. Then again, they of all people should recognize the hazards of choosing a prima-in-waiting just because of tradition, and not because she was really the right person to take on that role. I was only prima because Rafe’s oldest sister Louisa had realized she wasn’t up to the task of defeating Simon Escobar, and so had passed her powers on to me. None of us — myself included — wanted a repeat of that scenario.
I took the wedding gown in its designer garment bag, thanked Tess, and went with Cat to get into her Mercedes SUV. Sooner or later, I’d need to get a car for myself, I supposed, but there hadn’t been a lot of time available for those ordinary sorts of tasks. I’d already had to waste the greater part of a day at the New Mexico motor vehicle department getting a new license, and that was enough to last me for a while. Maybe after the first of the year, Rafe and I could go car shopping. Right now, I just wanted to get past the one-two punch of this wedding and the holidays.
As she started the car, Cat said, her tone both shy and excited, “I think I found a place.”
“You did?” I shifted in my seat so I could see her expression better. She wore a half-smile, but there was also something almost nervous about the way she engaged the vehicle’s auto-drive, how she kept looking around even though the Mercedes’ computer automatically swept the immediate area for any other vehicles or for people suddenly crossing into th
e street before it would let the vehicle start moving. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“The text came in while you were trying on dresses,” she explained.
“So…what is it?”
I knew that Cat didn’t want to stay in Santa Fe, that she’d been looking for someplace out in the countryside where she could have some land of her own. What she intended to do with it, I had no idea; she certainly wasn’t a farmer or even a hyper-enthusiastic gardener. Her main vocation — aside from being a Castillo witch — was as a fiber artist, specializing in intricate tapestries that incorporated many different types of materials. She sold her work in local shops and had won quite a few awards, but that kind of experience still didn’t exactly prepare her for living off the land.
“It’s the old Luna Rio winery,” she said as the SUV pulled out from the curb and began to take us back toward the house that was now mine and Rafe’s. “Up in Pojoaque. Dad heard about them closing from one of his suppliers. I guess the owners decided they didn’t want to be in the wine business any longer, and so they’re selling.”
“You don’t know anything about winemaking,” I pointed out.
She grinned — a genuine grin this time, nothing hesitant about it. “I know. I’m not planning on making wine. I just want the property. The current vineyard manager wants to stay on, but what I can do is sell the grapes to other local wineries rather than try to make wine of my own. That way, the property can still be self-sustaining.”
“It sounds like you’ve thought about it a lot,” I said.
“I guess I have, even though I only heard about the possibility of buying the place a few days ago. I put out some feelers to the owners, and they’re willing to deal. When they texted, they were asking if I was free to come out tomorrow and take a look around, maybe make them an offer.” Cat glanced over at me, a hopeful light in her dark eyes. “Would you and Rafe come with me?”
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