Darknight (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 2)

by Christine Pope

  “Luck?”

  “Not about everything. He’s never been married, always says he hasn’t met the right one yet. I know he’s had a lot of girlfriends, both civilians and not, but it never works out. Not that he doesn’t keep trying.”

  “Like trying to pick up my cousin Margot?”

  Despite everything, he flashed a quick grin at me. “Never thought I’d say I was glad to see a McAllister being so standoffish. She never even gave him a chance to get close, and thank God for that. We’d already had enough scenes that evening.”

  That was true. It was hard for me to even imagine someone thinking of Margot in that way, but I had to remind myself that being a clan elder was all about power, not age. She was probably a little younger than Lucas. “You were saying about his luck?”

  Connor shrugged and went into the kitchen, then extracted two bottles of water from the fridge and handed one to me. I smiled my thanks at him; it was cold, but very dry, and all that talking had irritated my throat. “But with money, finances? He has a sense. He just knows. The Wilcoxes have always done well for themselves, but the last thirty years more than ever. When things went sour with the last stock market crash, he’d told everyone in the family to move their investments into safer things like T-bills a month before it happened. I was in college, but I remember friends dropping out because their families had just lost everything and couldn’t afford to keep paying tuition. But we Wilcoxes? We sailed through it like nothing happened.”

  “That is a pretty handy gift,” I admitted. “Better than talking to ghosts, that’s for sure.”

  “Yeah, you could say that. So you can see why my brother would want to keep Lucas around. And also, with Lucas there’s no agenda. As you said, he seems like a nice person — because he is one. When you’re always looking over your shoulder the way my brother is, having someone like Lucas around makes a lot of sense. He’s always been very loyal to Damon. You and I know that he’s too good a person to really turn you into some kind of burnt offering, but Damon doesn’t. He’ll believe that his friend is doing his best to help him out.” A grimace twisted Connor’s mouth, and he added, “If Damon is even capable of rational thought anymore. I can’t imagine that he would knowingly have killed any of those girls. Especially Jessica. He might not have loved her, but he would have been protective of her.”

  I shivered. Yes, I could see that. Jessica was willing to sacrifice herself to provide a Wilcox heir, and Damon would respect that, would take pains to make sure she was safe. The skin-walker spell truly had to have driven him out of his mind for him to kill her.

  “So,” Connor continued, “logically I know Marie’s plan makes sense. And I know why we have to do it, but….”

  The hopelessness in his voice broke my heart. I set my bottle of water down on the kitchen table, then went and put my arms around him. “I’m sorry, Connor,” I said, and I meant it. No one should have to go through this torture. Not even Damon Wilcox.

  It seemed that Connor heard the sincerity in my tone, or maybe he simply felt it vibrating through our bond. Whatever it was, this time his arms went to encircle me as well, and he crushed me against him, clinging to me the way a man might cling to a life raft in a storm-tossed ocean. I stood there and offered whatever wordless comfort I could.

  In that moment, it was the only thing I could do for him.

  17

  Equinox

  It was not quite nine the next morning when Connor’s phone rang. We’d both gotten up early, our sleep restless even after making frenzied love sometime after midnight, when he’d woken me and pulled me to him, clearly needing the reassurance of my flesh against his. Of course I didn’t protest; I needed his touch just as much as he needed mine.

  We were tired and preoccupied, but at least we’d already showered and dressed. No TV this morning; we were sitting at the dining room table and nursing another round of coffee when the call came through.

  The hesitation before he reached for the phone was obvious, but after the third ring he picked up, handling the phone as if it had been infected with some sort of highly contagious virus. “Marie,” he said. A pause as he listened for a moment. Then he asked, “Are you sure?” Another pause. “Okay, we’ll be out there as soon as we can. I’ll need to get Lucas’s car from him.”

  I stared at Connor, mystified, as he ended the call and set the phone back down on the tabletop. Finally I asked, “What was that about the car?”

  “Marie said they’d guessed wrong — Damon…the wolf…whatever…anyway, he did come back to the house last night. He’s still there now. So we need to go.”

  “And you need to take Lucas’s car so the illusion will be complete.”

  A mirthless smile. “Something like that.”

  “How did she know? A vision?”

  He nodded. “Yes. She said she meditated on the problem last night, and as she lay down to go to sleep, she saw the wolf come back to the house, sniff around the perimeter, and then go inside.”

  Frowning, I asked, “Wasn’t it locked up?”

  A lift of his shoulders. “The clean-up crew made sure every door and window was locked. But I guess locks are no big deal for a skin-walker.”

  Somehow I managed to repress a shiver. Facing down a large, angry wolf was bad enough. One with magical powers? I didn’t want to think about it. “Well, that’s…convenient, I guess. I mean, at least we don’t have to go wandering around in the woods, trying to find him.” And it’s not so strange after all, I thought. Wolves do tend to return to their lairs. “So now we have to go get Lucas’s car, then drive out there?”

  “Yeah. Not sure how I’m going to explain that.”

  “He’s not in on the plan?”

  Connor shot me an unreadable look. “No. I don’t know for sure that he would try to stop us…but I don’t know that he wouldn’t, either. So I’ll have to figure out some sort of excuse for needing his car.”

  I didn’t envy him that task. But, as it turned out, that part wasn’t so difficult. Connor called Lucas and said he’d screwed up and forgotten that he had a meeting with the gallery owner down in Sedona, and Angela had a doctor’s appointment that she couldn’t cancel, and if Lucas could help him out?

  Of course Lucas agreed, and Connor said we’d be over right away to get the car.

  “Doctor’s appointment?” I asked, arching an eyebrow at him as we went down to get in the FJ.

  “First thing I could think of. Besides, I know everyone’s wondering when you’re going to get pregnant. A doctor’s appointment just sort of feeds into that, you know?”

  I nodded, although I couldn’t help but feel grimly amused at the subterfuge. Connor and I knew there was no chance of a pregnancy, thanks to the charm I used every time we were intimate, but his family wouldn’t have any clue about that.

  A late storm had dropped some snow the night before, but it had already begun to melt. Still, the roads were slick and treacherous, and I wasn’t looking forward to driving Connor’s SUV back to the apartment after he picked up Lucas’s car. Hard to believe it was almost spring.

  No, wait. Things had been so insane lately that I hadn’t been paying much attention to the actual date, although earlier that week downtown Flagstaff had been even livelier than usual, since it was Saint Patrick’s Day. But today was the twentieth. The vernal equinox, sometimes called Ostara. Not quite there, as that moment of perfect balance between shadow and light was due to arrive later this morning.

  It was a day of power. Not the same strength as the solstice, but I tried to take heart in that. Perhaps I could harness the power of balance in my confrontation with Damon. After all, what he had done was a perversion of nature, of the order of things. It wasn’t that huge a leap to think that maybe the universe would lend me a hand in restoring the balance to what it should be.

  We pulled up in front of a house not quite as large as Damon’s, but still pretty impressive, wood and stone, sitting on a lot that had to be almost an acre. The other homes in th
e neighborhood were equally large and well-kept. If there were any poor Wilcoxes, I had yet to meet one.

  Connor got out and came around to the passenger side, then helped me down to the ground, holding my hand firmly as we negotiated our way up the icy front walk. Or maybe he was holding on to me for reassurance, just as much as providing a steady hand so I wouldn’t slip.

  It took a moment for Lucas to answer the door after we rang the bell. I knew he’d been expecting us, but the house was big enough that I thought it could possibly take him a good chunk of time to get to the front door, depending on where he’d started from. When he did finally open it, though, he smiled at us, cheery as ever.

  I had a feeling he wouldn’t be quite so cheery if he knew the real reason why we were there.

  But since he didn’t, he gave us a hearty greeting, invited us in. Even though the place was just a little smaller than Damon’s house, something about it felt cheerier, more intimate. The colors were warmer — honey oak floors, walls a soft parchment color. And he had a fire going, sending the sweet scent of wood smoke through the building.

  “Thanks so much for this, Lucas — ” I began, but he just waved me off.

  “No worries. It’s not like you’re leaving me stranded. I’ve got the Beemer SUV as a backup if I need to go out.”

  I raised an eyebrow at Connor, wondering what the hell Lucas’s primary car was if the Beemer was merely a “backup.” He didn’t respond, though, and only said to Lucas, “No, we do appreciate it. With everything going on….”

  The cheerful expression quickly faded from Lucas’s face. “I know. But we all have to keep up appearances, and that means not missing any appointments, right?”

  “Right,” Connor agreed, although I thought I saw him wince slightly, and knew he must be thinking about a certain dark appointment we needed to keep out at Damon’s house.

  “Well, here you go,” Lucas said, and held out a key with a leather fob to Connor. He took it, holding it as if he wasn’t sure what to do with it. “I’ll go open up the garage for you. Heading to Sedona, huh? Oak Creek Canyon might be slippery.”

  “Oh, I’m going to take the 17, even if it’s going the long way around. I figured that would be safer.”

  Lucas nodded, appearing a little relieved. I couldn’t blame him; that road was twisty and treacherous on a good day. On a morning like this, where you’d be more likely than not to come upon sudden patches of ice? Not the sort of place I’d want someone driving my borrowed car, that’s for sure.

  “Well, we need to get going — ” Connor began.

  “Oh, sure. Come on. And Angela, you can just let yourself out the front door.”

  “Thanks, Lucas,” I said again, no less awkwardly, and waited as Connor gave me the key to the FJ. After that I headed back out to the SUV, walking gingerly on the icy flagstones of the front path, and sighed in relief as I let myself in and slid behind the steering wheel. Since it was cold and I wanted to get the heater going, I went ahead and put the key in the ignition and started up the engine.

  A flash of red in the rearview mirror told me Connor was backing out of the driveway and about to start heading toward downtown. I squinted at the car he was driving, and my mouth fell open slightly. It was — well, I didn’t know what it was, since sports cars weren’t something you saw a lot of in Jerome. There was slightly more flash in Flagstaff, but more along the lines of Damon’s Range Rover or the Audi SUV that one obnoxious client of Connor’s had driven. Whatever the sports car might be, I was just glad Connor was the one driving it, not me.

  I headed back into town, feeling my stomach clench as a pale sun slowly rose higher in the sky. It was easy to distract myself with thoughts of cars. That way I wouldn’t have to think about what was coming next. How on earth could I possibly survive another confrontation with Damon…with what Damon had become?

  But I couldn’t completely lose it, because I had to stay focused on getting back to the apartment in one piece. I’d already passed one fender-bender at the intersection of Butler and Route 66 where someone obviously lost control and slipped into the intersection, getting sideswiped by a pickup that couldn’t quite maneuver out of the way in time. Luckily — or not, depending on how you looked at it — I made it to the alley without incident, then pulled into our designated parking space. Connor hadn’t told me to do that, but I figured it made the most sense, since we’d be leaving right away in Lucas’s car.

  I was just getting out of the FJ when Connor emerged from the building’s back door. He must have parked on the street in front and come through the access hallway on the ground floor. In one hand he held his phone, but he slipped it into his pocket as he saw me.

  “That was Marie. Damon’s still at the house, so we need to go.”

  The lump that had been steadily growing in my stomach seemed to balloon to twice its size. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

  “You have to.” His green eyes bored into mine. “If I can, then so can you. Besides, there’s no one else. If we don’t — ”

  “Then more people will die. I get it.” I gulped in a breath of icy air, and although it bit at the back of my throat, it also seemed to brace me, give me the strength I needed to get moving. “Okay. Okay. Let’s go.”

  He led me back through the building, through the hallway that always smelled like an odd mixture of dust, beeswax, and mildew, and out to the street. The red car was sitting at the curb, looking very out of place against the dirty snow piled on the sidewalk.

  “What the hell is this thing, anyway?” I asked, after he’d opened the door for me and then gone around to get in the driver’s seat.

  “‘This ‘thing,’ Angela, is a Porsche Cayman.”

  “I’m surprised he gave it to you to drive instead of the BMW.” Not that it really mattered, but discussing the car seemed safer than just about anything else.

  “I think he wanted me to impress Eli.”

  I supposed that made some sense. “It doesn’t seem very practical for Flagstaff,” I said, almost primly, as he edged out onto the street and then pointed us back toward Route 66.

  “Probably not, but Lucas likes his toys. You should see his stereo.”

  Midlife crisis? I wondered. Not that I thought Lucas was quite old enough for one of those. He was a couple of years older than Damon, but not yet forty. “I can imagine.”

  Connor even smiled a little, but it disappeared as we began heading northwest toward Damon’s house. “Might as well do it now,” he murmured.

  “What — ?” I began, turning toward him.

  But then his features began to shift, not a great deal, as Lucas had the same long nose and high cheekbones as most of the Wilcox men, but still, in a few seconds, the man sitting next to me wasn’t Connor anymore, but his cousin, right down to the laugh lines in the tanned skin around his eyes and those first faint patches of gray at his temples.

  I swallowed. “That’s…still kind of amazing. And disconcerting.”

  He shrugged. When he spoke, even his voice sounded different. It had the slight lilt to it that I’d noticed in Lucas’s inflection, as if nothing could suppress his inner joie de vivre. “I’d say you’d get used to it, but really, I hope I don’t have to use this power often enough for you to get to that stage. I hate it.”

  “It feels like lying,” I thought. Connor’s words to me only a few short weeks ago. And how much worse now, when he was using it to perpetrate the worst lie of his life, the one that would fool Damon into thinking this man was coming as a friend?

  Breathe in, let it out. I did this again, and again. My aunt had taught me this technique to center myself, to keep my energies clear and unflagging. Despite my efforts, a sudden worry surfaced, and I shifted uneasily on the leather seat. “What if — what if Damon still figures out it’s not Lucas? What if you, I don’t know, don’t smell right or something?”

  “It’s a possibility. But the way Marie explained it, he’s taken on the shape of a wolf, but he’s not actually a wolf.
His senses aren’t the same. Sharpened, yeah. Better than a regular man’s, but still not close to those of a real wolf.”

  I had to hope she was right. Or this could turn out very, very badly.

  For us, that is. After all, if everything went according to plan, it was going to be a very bad day indeed for Damon Wilcox.

  * * *

  For all its low-slung sportiness, the Porsche handled the snow-slick roads out to the property very well, and I began to revise my initial estimate of its impracticality. The problem was, since Connor didn’t have to drive all that slowly, we got there a lot faster than I would have liked.

  He downshifted as we approached the driveway, hand white-knuckled on the gearshift. “Angela, I don’t think I can do this.”

  I’d halfway expected this reaction. How could I not, when we were about to go in Damon’s house and, in Marie’s words, “put him out of his misery”? I licked my dry lips, then said, “All you have to do is get me in there. I’ll do everything else.”

  “And what will you do? Do you even know how to fight him?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know now. But I will when the time comes.”

  “That’s…crazy. That’s no plan.”

  I shifted in my seat, staring at the face of Lucas Wilcox, and hoping to see something of the man I loved beneath those features. Of course I couldn’t; the glamour was perfect. It had to be, for this to work. “Connor, all of this is crazy. The only thing I know for sure is that I love you, and I wish with all my heart that we didn’t have to be here doing this. But I also know we’re the only hope of stopping Damon. Stopping the killing.”

  As those words left my mouth, Connor twitched, as if recalling again why we were doing this. It wasn’t simply that Damon had dabbled in forbidden magic. That could have been overlooked, if it had caused no lasting harm…or at least no harm to anyone except himself. But, as much as he might love his brother, Connor couldn’t allow any more innocent blood to be shed. Whatever the cost, he knew that had to stop, here and now.