The Witches of Canyon Road, Books 1-3

by Christine Pope

  To the naked eye, of course, the flat looked immaculate. But Cat was looking at the place with an entirely different kind of eye. Although she wasn’t precisely a medium or a psychic, her gift for speaking with ghosts had given her a certain sensitivity to these sorts of things. And, considering the scent of dark magic he’d picked up when he’d prowled the area in coyote form, he thought she must also be sensing what he’d found, only experiencing it in a different way.

  “I’m glad you can feel it, too,” he said. “Because when I first came here, I wasn’t totally sure, had to wonder whether I was manufacturing that residue because I needed to believe that something was very wrong about this place.”

  “No, there’s something definitely here.” Cat put her hands on her hips and surveyed the room, a faraway look in her dark eyes. “Actually, I think it’s stronger in the bedroom.” She crossed over to the short hallway, then went through the first door on the right. “Yes, I can feel it more in here.”

  Rafe followed her. He couldn’t precisely smell the wrongness the way he had a few days earlier, but a weird crawling sensation began on the back of his neck. If he’d been in coyote form, he probably would have wrinkled his nose and snarled.

  Again, the room looked ordinary and completely in order, the quilt in lively southwest colors lying smooth on the bed, the prints of past art and wine festivals all hanging perfectly straight on the walls. But there was something terribly wrong about it.

  “Over here,” Cat said, laying a hand on the dresser. “It feels even stronger here.”

  He went to her and began opening drawers, doing his best to ignore that creepy crawly sensation, which had now begun to move down his spine. “They’re all empty,” he said, after he was done with his inspection.

  “Maybe not in it.” His sister paused for a moment, surveying the simple oak piece of furniture with the sort of concentration usually reserved for observing a particularly nasty bacteria under a microscope. “Maybe behind it.”

  Because the dresser was empty, it was easy enough to move out of the way. At first the wall behind it appeared unmarked, untouched, but….

  “Do you see that?” Cat asked.

  Rafe squatted down so he could get a better look at the portion of wall in question. Yes, it looked as though someone had wiped it down, but not thoroughly enough. If you squinted and looked at it at just the right angle where the light from the window slanted against the plaster, you could see traces of strange diagrams etched with lettering he didn’t recognize.

  “What the hell is that?”

  Her lips thinned. “I’m not totally sure, because this isn’t the sort of thing I’ve ever really studied, but those look like sigils for some kind of spell casting — and not the good kind.”

  Well, her explanation seemed to reinforce Rafe’s theory that they were dealing with some kind of dark warlock here. “Who would know for sure?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Cat replied, looking flummoxed. “Castillos don’t practice this kind of magic. I mean, one time I found some old books in the library at home that had probably belonged to Grandmother — or maybe even Grandmother’s grandmother. Anyway, I was just a kid and I was interested, so I started leafing through one. The book I found had diagrams like this in it. I didn’t know what they meant, but man, when Mom caught me, she totally chewed me out, said I wasn’t to look at those kinds of books ever again. And the next time I checked, they were all gone. She must have locked them up somewhere.” Cat let out a breath, then shook her head. “Maybe there’s someone in the family who’s studied these kinds of dark spells, but the only person who would know for sure is Mom, and you know she wouldn’t tell us…and she’d demand to know why we were asking in the first place.”

  Rafe couldn’t argue with that assertion, because it sounded exactly like something his mother would do. He raised himself up from his squatting position and said, “Well, at least we know there’s some bad juju going on here.” He paused, then asked, “Should I get a couple of pictures?” And he brought out his phone, ready to get some images of the patterns on the wall.

  At once, Cat put her hand on his arm. “I wouldn’t.”

  Puzzled, he stared down at her. “Why not?”

  “Things like this…they have power. Even as digital images stored on a phone. I don’t think you want that kind of energy traveling around with you.”

  A creepy little shiver wandered down Rafe’s spine. He’d never thought about it like that, but she had a point. After returning his phone to his pocket, he said, “Okay. Then let’s put the dresser back, and go down and see if we can find your ghost, pick her brain.”

  Cat appeared relieved by this suggestion, and that he hadn’t argued with her about taking pictures. If the flat was giving him a crawling sensation all over, Rafe didn’t want to know what it might be doing to his more sensitive sister. One thing was for sure, though — he didn’t care how it might look to the owner if she came snooping around, but he sure as hell wasn’t about to spend the night in this place. That duffle bag was going right back in his house with him.

  They moved the dresser back to its original spot and headed downstairs to street level, then walked the half block to Burro Alley. It was a quaint spot popular with tourists, with a large bronze statue of its eponymous burro standing guard at the entrance, making sure only foot traffic got past. Luckily, since it was late afternoon on a weekday in early November, that foot traffic was at a minimum, making it easier for his sister to reach out to the ghost of the girl who’d killed herself over forbidden love for a priest.

  “Annalisa!” Cat called out softly. “Are you there?”

  A long pause.

  “Annalisa?”

  Another long, agonizing moment. A couple a few years older than Rafe walked past, carrying bags from the wine tasting room around the corner. They gave Rafe and Cat a single curious glance before continuing on their way.

  “She’s here,” Cat murmured to Rafe. Then she said, “Annalisa, can I ask you if you saw someone here in the last day or two?” A few seconds of quiet, and she went on, “I’m not sure what she would have been wearing, but she’s a few years younger than I am, with long wavy brown hair, almost to her waist. Very pretty, with green eyes. Slender, not too tall…you have?”

  The relief that coursed through Rafe at hearing those two words was so strong, he almost didn’t catch the next part of the exchange. But then he forced himself to focus, because clearly Annalisa wasn’t done yet.

  “Two days ago. She left with someone? Who?”

  Rafe’s pulse quickened, and he could feel his hands knot into fists at hearing Miranda hadn’t been alone when Annalisa spied her.

  “A young man with black hair and eyes, tall and slim,” Cat said. From the way she spoke, Rafe guessed she was repeating Annalisa’s words so he could hear them for himself. “They went around back to the alley and got in a white vehicle and drove away.”

  “Did she get the license plate number?”

  Cat narrowed her eyes at him, obviously not pleased by this interruption. “Did it look like he was forcing her to go with him?” A long pause. “Oh, so she got into the car herself and shut the door behind her. Anything else?” Cat appeared to wait, then told Rafe in an undertone, “That was all Annalisa saw. But she doesn’t think Miranda was being coerced or anything.”

  Unless the guy had her under a mind-control spell. Once someone started playing around with black magic, it was really hard to know what was possible and what wasn’t.

  The description of the dark warlock kept echoing around in Rafe’s head, though, teasing him, as if it should make more sense than it did. Young, and tall and slender. Black hair and black eyes.

  Black eyes. Eyes so dark you couldn’t see where the pupil ended and the iris began. Looking into those eyes was like looking into a black hole, a darkness without end.

  The shudder that went through Rafe right then was so intense, Cat looked at him in alarm. “What’s the matter?”

&n
bsp; Memory came flooding back. The flat above the wine-tasting room. The voice telling him what he had to say to Miranda, hideous words designed to tear them apart, to send her running into the dark warlock’s arms.

  Voice tight, Rafe said, “I know who Miranda is with.”

  13

  Dinners

  Miranda

  I didn’t know whether there was a witch or warlock somewhere who possessed the kind of magic that would make meal prep a breeze, who could simply snap his or her fingers and conjure a casserole or a soufflé. Or maybe a spell existed in a grimoire someplace that could do the same sort of thing. I supposed it didn’t really matter, because I knew my Great-Aunt Rachel would kill me if she ever caught me taking those sorts of shortcuts in the kitchen.

  Because a few clouds had begun to gather toward sunset, and I could already feel the temperature dropping, I thought I’d make a big pot of spaghetti for dinner. Something about the aroma of homemade spaghetti sauce and garlic bread always made a house feel cozy. Besides, it would give Simon and me leftovers for the evenings when I didn’t feel like making something from scratch and we also didn’t feel like going out. And although he’d protested that he didn’t want me to do all this work, I insisted. I liked to cook. It was relaxing and sort of zen when I got in the groove, and right then I wanted to focus on something that was completely nonmagical.

  Despite my reassurances that I enjoyed the process, Simon couldn’t help watching with some bemusement as I added tomato paste and wine and herbs in careful proportions to the large saucepan, with nary a cookbook in sight. “Where did you learn to cook like this?”

  “My great-aunt,” I replied, then picked up the bowl of onions and bell peppers he’d chopped for me earlier so I could sauté them lightly before adding them to the sauce. “I mean, my mother is a pretty decent cook, too, because Rachel taught her when she was younger than I am now. But I know Rachel liked me to come over and learn directly from her, and I always thought it was fun. My older sister wasn’t really into it, and Rachel never had any children of her own, so I think she appreciated me learning what she had to teach me.”

  “That’s cool,” Simon said. “My mother was always a ‘frozen meal from Costco’ or pizza night kind of person. I didn’t get home cooking much, except at the holidays when we’d get a bunch of homemade de la Paz tamales to bring home.”

  I’d had that opportunity once or twice growing up, when my mother’s cousin Caitlin came up from Tucson with a platter of tamales from her husband Alex’s aunt. Those de la Pazes definitely knew their way around a tamale, or at least, quite a few of them did. Rachel had taught me how to make tamales, and mine were pretty damn good, but they were still missing a certain something I detected in the de la Paz version of the traditional dish and could never seem to replicate.

  “Those are good. I’ve had them once or twice.”

  “Right. From Caitlin?”

  “Exactly.”

  He smiled, and a certain happy warmth passed through me. After all the magical exertions of the morning, it felt good to be doing something as ordinary as making spaghetti sauce. And it also felt good to be here in the kitchen with Simon, to chat about normal family things like cooking and holiday meals. When we’d gotten back from our little excursion to Los Alamos, I’d sent another text to my mother, just to let her know I was doing fine and would be making spaghetti for dinner. I thought she’d like to hear that, because it would let her know I was someplace with access to a kitchen and was able to do pretty much what I wanted.

  I hadn’t waited for her reply, but figured I’d check the phone once I had the sauce simmering away. Really, it should have been doing that for most of the afternoon, allowing the sauce to gain in richness as the hours passed. I had to hope it would still come out okay, even though I was sort of rushing things.

  Watching me sauté the onions and peppers, Simon remarked, “You know, I really didn’t bring you here so you could cook for me.”

  “I know,” I replied, then shot him a grin. “But we both have to eat, and I like doing this. Really, it’s good to give my brain a break. Magic is amazing and exhilarating, but….”

  “It can be kind of exhausting. I know.” He seemed to pause and think for a moment before adding, “I don’t know much about them, but I wonder whether you should try making potions at some point. With your cooking background and your natural talents, you might be able to come up with some interesting stuff.”

  I’d never thought of that. Well, again, why would I, when before a few days ago, I had no idea that I had any magical gifts at all? Before, I’d had barely any alternatives to work with, and now I had almost too many. There weren’t a lot of people in the McAllister clan who dabbled in potions, mostly because they did have an enormous potential to go wrong if you messed up something. However, I remembered that Zoe Sandoval, the prima of the de la Paz clan, was something of an expert.

  “Does your prima do much of that anymore?”

  “Much of what?” Simon asked, looking rather confused.

  “Make potions. Wasn’t that her talent, back before she even became prima?”

  “Oh, right,” he said quickly. “I’d forgotten about that. I guess it’s because I always just thought of her as our prima and didn’t think much about what her gift had been before she took over the de la Paz family.”

  I supposed that made some sense. Even with my own mother, I’d always thought of her as prima first and someone who could talk to ghosts second. And of course she had that grab bag of other abilities she could access as necessary, thanks to her bond with my father.

  “Well, I’ll think about it,” I said, eyeing the onions and peppers in the pan. Since they looked cooked enough, I began to slide them into the rest of the sauce. “It’s too bad it’s late fall, because one talent I would have liked to try is coaxing growing things along. There were several witches in Jerome who had that green thumb, so to speak. It’s a handy talent, but I don’t much see the point in making plants grow now, when the next frost will just come along and kill them.”

  “Unless you kept it away.” Simon had been standing on the other side of the island as I worked, presumably to stay out of my way, but now he came closer and leaned up against the counter a foot or so away from the stovetop. “You’ve already shown you can change the weather. You could create a warm zone where the frost never forms, or the snow never comes. If it was small enough, it wouldn’t upset the overall balance of the weather in a certain area, but it would give you more time to grow things.”

  His suggestion was something else I’d never considered, but I didn’t think I would want to do something like that. It felt far too much like open interference. Nature had its own patterns, and I knew better than to mess with them much more than causing a few random rainstorms.

  “I could do that,” I allowed. “But I think I’d better not. It’s probably safer that way.”

  “Okay. I get it.” Then his dark eyes sparkled with some inner mischief. “I guess we’ll just have to think of something else to try.”

  “I suppose I can sleep on it.” I turned the burner way down, then glanced at the clock on the oven behind me. Five-twenty. The sauce needed to simmer for at least an hour. More would be better, though. “Dinner at seven? I want to go see if my mom responded to my text, but — ”

  “Go ahead,” Simon said with a smile. “How about we meet back around six-thirty to get the pasta going?”

  “And the garlic bread,” I added. “Don’t want to forget about that.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  Still smiling, he let himself out the side door. A brief glimpse of him as he headed down the walkway that led to the caretaker’s house, and then he was gone.

  I felt a smile on my lips, too, and then shook my head. It was easy to be with Simon, partly because, while he of course was interested in exploring my talents, he knew when to back off and take it easy, seemed to know when I needed some time to myself.

  A girl could get used t
o that sort of thing.

  After double-checking that the sauce wouldn’t simmer too high while I was gone, I went to my bedroom and picked up my phone from where I’d left it sitting on the dresser to charge. Sure enough, I had a new message from my mother.

  I’m glad to hear that you sound so settled and happy. Your father and I still wish you would tell us where you are, but I won’t press you on that. Take care, and keep in touch.

  I texted back, Thanks, Mom. Maybe soon. I’ll let you know.

  Because really, it seemed clear to me that I could handle just about any kind of magic I put my mind to. At this point, it was all about practice and control, but I could work on that just as well back home in Arizona as I could here. Of course, there was something secure and sheltered and safe here, in our little getaway in Tesuque, but this idyll couldn’t last forever anyway. This place was expensive…very expensive. Simon and I could pool our resources, and we still wouldn’t be able to afford even a tenth of what it probably cost.

  Anyway, it was probably a little early to be contemplating buying a house together. But we could go back to Arizona, and I could show my parents that my sleeping magic was now fully awakened, and then Simon and I could decide what to do next. He didn’t sound all that attached to Tucson, so I didn’t think it would be too hard to convince him to stay in Jerome with me. Of course, housing was always tight there, because the town was so tiny, but we could live in Cottonwood or Clarkdale for a while until something became available….

  And you are getting so far ahead of yourself, it’s not even funny, I thought, shaking off daydreams of Simon and me moving into one of the big Victorian houses on Paradise Lane, up where my parents lived part-time. Just because things didn’t work out with Rafe, there’s no reason to jump into the picket fence and the cat and the kids with someone else.