The Witches of Canyon Road, Books 1-3

by Christine Pope

  Finally, the last Castillo cousin had come through the door, and Rafe excused himself and headed into the crowd in search of Daniel. Before he’d taken two steps, however, the phone in his jacket pocket buzzed. Who would be calling now, when he was already surrounded by so many of his family members?

  Thinking it might be a client, he ducked down the hallway into his mother’s study and pulled the phone from his pocket. At first he didn’t recognize the number on the screen. Then he realized it was from an Arizona area code, and a mixture of worry and annoyance churned in his gut.

  Angela…or possibly Connor. What the hell were they doing calling now, of all times?

  Ignoring them and letting it go to voicemail probably wouldn’t be a good idea, since he had the feeling they’d only keep calling him until he answered. Taking in a bracing swallow of air, he touched the phone’s screen to accept the call. “This is Rafe Castillo.”

  “Rafe.” Connor Wilcox’s voice, tight with repressed anger. “You want to tell me what this garbage is that your mother sent us this morning?”

  “Um…I don’t know, sir. What did she send you?”

  “An obviously doctored image that she claimed was from your wedding. But anyone with two eyes to see could tell it was pasted together — for God’s sake, the image of Miranda was one that your sister sent right before the ceremony. What the hell is going on?”

  Oh, shit. Shit. Rafe had known from the start that this insane idea of his mother’s was going to get them all in trouble, but he also knew he had no way of dissuading her. And what the hell had she been thinking, sending that thing the very morning of Marco’s funeral?

  She probably realized she needed to follow up, Rafe thought, and went ahead and sent it because she thought it was fine. He knew he should have asked to see the photo in question, but with everything that had been going on, such a minor detail had completely slipped his mind.

  “This really isn’t a good time,” he said, hedging while he tried to come up with some kind of plausible excuse. “I’m at the reception for my cousin’s funeral.”

  A brief silence. Then Connor said, sounding a little less angry, “I’m sorry to hear that, Rafe. Especially so soon after your wedding.”

  There was no missing the emphasis Connor had put on that last word, and Rafe couldn’t help wincing. “Um, about that — ”

  “What about it?”

  The steel underlying those three simple words made Rafe glad that roughly five hundred miles separated him from Connor Wilcox. “The wedding didn’t happen. Miranda teleported away, and, well, we don’t really know where she is.”

  As terrible as those words had sounded in his mind when he’d rehearsed what he might have to say to Connor and Angela, they sounded about a thousand times worse when actually spoken out loud. Rafe waited, gut clenched, for Miranda’s father to respond.

  Another of those long pauses. At last Connor said, “You mean my daughter has been missing for three days now, and you didn’t think to get in contact with us?”

  In the background, Rafe caught pieces of a furious whispered exchange, as though Angela and Connor were having a sotto voce argument they didn’t want him to overhear. “Well, we — ”

  “Rafe, tell us what happened.” Angela’s voice, sounding more worried than angry.

  “It’s complicated.”

  When she replied to that comment, her tone was noticeably sharper. “Everything’s complicated. You need to do better than that.”

  “There was something of a scene at the ceremony. My family and I believe I was caught in some kind of a mind-control spell or something. Miranda used her teleportation power to get away. I can’t really blame her for that.”

  “Wait…she teleported?” Shock was clear in Connor’s voice; of course he couldn’t have known about the strange, erratic powers Miranda had developed during her time here in Santa Fe.

  “Yes, sir. It, uh, it happened once or twice before that.”

  A long silence as Connor appeared to digest that piece of information. Then, “Who cast the spell?”

  “We don’t know. That is, I think it might be a warlock named Simon, but we don’t have much more information about him than that. We’re trying to track him down now.”

  “Unsuccessfully, I assume.”

  “So far. Look — ” Rafe gathered a breath and went on, “I suspect this guy might be a de la Paz warlock who had a crush on Miranda. Did you ever hear anything about something like that?”

  “No,” Angela said at once. “Miranda didn’t go down into de la Paz territory very often, so I can’t even think of how she might have attracted the attention of one of their warlocks. I also don’t know of anyone named Simon, but I’ll check with Zoe Sandoval to be sure.” A long pause, during which Rafe could hear another round of heated whispering between the McAllister prima and the Wilcox primus. “But since it seems you’ve managed to lose our daughter, Connor and I think we’d better come to Santa Fe and help with the search.”

  Oh, God. Genoveva would blow an absolute gasket if that happened, even though she’d basically brought this current crisis on herself. If she’d just held off on sending that goddamn doctored photo….

  Trying to keep his tone calm, Rafe said, “Unless you have a magical ability that lets you know where your daughter is at all times, I’m not sure how your being here is going to help. My cousin is a private detective and is running a search on Simon’s image as we speak. Once we find him, I’m pretty sure we’ll find Miranda as well.”

  “Why would she even go off with this person? If things went as badly at the wedding as you hinted, why didn’t she come straight home?”

  The accusation in those words was clear enough. “I don’t know for sure,” Rafe replied. “She had an acquaintance with Simon, but I don’t think she realized he was a warlock. He was friendly to her. Otherwise, I can’t really comment on her motivations.”

  Silence, followed by a slight rustle coming from the phone’s tiny speaker, as if Angela had handed off the phone to her husband. Sure enough, it was Connor’s voice Rafe heard next. “This all sounds extremely strange, Rafe. And now you say one of your cousins has passed away?”

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with Miranda’s disappearance,” Rafe said hastily. “Marco had a congenital heart defect.”

  “Oh.” A hesitation, and Connor went on, sounding slightly awkward, “Well, I’m sorry to hear that. And although our first instinct is to hop on the next plane and go to Santa Fe to look for our daughter, Angela and I know you’re right about one thing — we don’t know what we could do to aid in the search. Our combined powers are strong, but the one talent we’ve never been able to master is the Sight, and that’s about the only thing that’s going to do Miranda any good right now.”

  “Thank you for understanding, sir.”

  “Not so fast. You have two more days. If you don’t find our daughter by then, we’re coming to Santa Fe, even if it doesn’t seem as though it would do much good. But it would be better than sitting here and waiting and wondering.”

  Two days. Miranda had already been gone longer than that, but Rafe had to hope he’d find her before the deadline arrived. Something had to give.

  “I think we’ll find her before then. My cousin Daniel is very good at this kind of thing.” At least, Rafe had to hope he was. He didn’t know all that much about the sorts of cases his cousin handled, but a plush office like his seemed to indicate he did more than follow cheating husbands and wives around Albuquerque.

  “Let’s all hope he is. And when you find something, you call us. Immediately.”

  “I will.”

  “Until then.”

  The call ended there, and Rafe expelled a breath. He supposed it could have gone worse — at least he’d been granted a two-day grace period — but now more than ever they needed to step up the search.

  As he slipped his phone into his pocket, he headed back into the hall. He’d barely made it into the living room before he bumped in
to his oldest sister Louisa, the prima-in-waiting, who looked supremely irritated with him. In that moment, with her hair pulled up into a French twist and her mouth pressed into a thin line, she very much resembled their mother.

  “Just where the hell have you been?” she asked in an undertone.

  “I had to take a call.”

  “Now?”

  “It was Miranda’s parents.”

  “Oh.” The expression of annoyance vanished, to be replaced by one of concern. “What did they want?”

  “They weren’t too thrilled by that little Photoshop job our mother tried to fob off on them. I managed to talk them down, but if we don’t find Miranda soon, they’re going to be on our doorstep, breathing fire.”

  “Oh, hell.” Louisa tucked a stray strand of hair behind one ear, then glanced over her shoulder at the crowd in the living room. Genoveva and Eduardo stood near the fireplace, talking quietly with Sophia and an elderly cousin from Pecos. Seemingly satisfied that their parents were occupied for the moment, Louisa went on, “We can’t let that happen. You know how Mom thinks she can handle everything on her own. She’s going to go nuts if two of Arizona’s clan leaders suddenly show up here.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Privately, Rafe thought it might do Genoveva some good to get knocked down a peg or two by the northern Arizona prima and primus, but he knew better than to say such a thing to his sister. “I was actually going to talk to Daniel, see if he’s found anything yet.”

  “Okay. I think he was in the dining room the last time I saw him.”

  After delivering that helpful piece of information, Louisa moved back out into the living room, pausing to exchange a few words with a relative, then stopping to check in with her husband, who was clearly in charge of keeping an eye on their two children so she could be free to circulate. Watching her, Rafe thought again how she was the perfect choice to be prima-in-waiting. Her talents were strong, but more than that, she seemed to instinctively know how to handle people, to be in command. Or maybe it wasn’t instinct at all, but only a lifetime of watching her mother operate.

  Either way, he knew Louisa wouldn’t say anything to Genoveva about the phone call from Miranda’s parents — not yet, anyway. She’d wait to see how it all shook out before issuing any warnings.

  In the meantime, he needed to find Daniel.

  On his way to the dining room, however, he found himself waylaid by Tony, who grabbed him by the sleeve. “Hey, Rafe,” he said. “After this, a bunch of the cousins were going to go to Antonia’s brew pub, have kind of a wake for Marco. Say you’ll come.”

  It did sound like the kind of gathering Marco would have appreciated, a lot more than this quiet gathering with its finger sandwiches and pitchers of iced tea and crystal bowl of punch. But with everything that was going on, Rafe realized he couldn’t make promises he didn’t know if he could keep. “Maybe,” he allowed. “I’ve got some stuff I need to handle, but — ”

  “You should. It would look weird if you weren’t there.”

  That was only the truth. His cousins would expect Rafe to come to such a gathering — he’d been close in age to Marco, and they’d usually hung out when he came down to Santa Fe from Taos. They didn’t exactly share confidences, but they’d always gotten along. A sudden thought struck Rafe. “Hey, Tony — did Marco ever talk about a girl named Tess? An old girlfriend or something?”

  Tony appeared puzzled, then shook his head. “No. I mean, his last girlfriend was a civilian named Barrie. She lived in Arroyo Seco, just outside Taos. But they broke up about three or four months ago, I think. Why?”

  “Just wanted to make sure we didn’t leave anyone out when we were inviting people to the funeral,” Rafe said, which only made his cousin appear that much more confused. But before Tony could ask any more questions, Rafe had turned and begun to pick his way through the crowd, intent on locating Daniel.

  As he went, he thought about how he wished he could just get out of here, go someplace to clear his head. Being around too many people started to get on his nerves after a while, and the best cure was generally some time spent outdoors. Most of the fall color would be faded by now, but he’d always liked the old forest road that cut down from the ski area above Santa Fe to Tesuque.

  The second that thought passed through his head, Rafe came to a dead stop. Tesuque. Of course. That’s what Marco had been trying to tell him. He hadn’t been whispering the name of a former lover. He’d been trying his damnedest, using every bit of the meager strength that remained to him, to tell Rafe and Cat that Miranda was somewhere in Tesuque.

  Daniel forgotten for the moment, Rafe scanned the crowd of Castillos that filled the bottom floor of the house, looking for his sister. He needed to find her so he could get her car keys from her. Then he could go find Miranda.

  This prospect seemed a little daunting at first view, simply because, although Tesuque was a small village compared to Santa Fe, it still contained enough individual properties and small private lanes that tracking Miranda there wouldn’t exactly be a cut-and-dried proposition. However, at least he knew what to look for now. Rafe was sure that, having once detected the trail of evil Simon seemed to leave behind him, he could do it again. And once Rafe found it in Tesuque, he knew that trail would lead him right to Miranda.

  Ah, there was Cat over by the window, talking to two of the cousins who were supposed to be Miranda’s bridesmaids. Rafe hurried to her, then bent and murmured in her ear, “I need to borrow your car key.”

  “My what?” she responded, giving him a startled glance, even while Maria and Ylena looked on with some curiosity.

  “I think I know where Miranda is.”

  Cat’s eyes widened, and she said to Maria and Ylena, “Excuse me for a sec.” Taking Rafe by the arm, she led him away from the window, over to the foyer that separated the living room from the dining room. “What are you talking about?” she asked once they were safely out of earshot.

  “It just sort of came to me in a flash. Marco wasn’t trying to say a girl’s name that day in the hospital — he was trying to say ‘Tesuque.’”

  His sister didn’t look quite as impressed by this insight as Rafe had hoped she would be. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m not sure,” he snapped. “But it makes more sense than anything else we’ve been able to come up with.”

  “If Miranda is really with this Simon person, why would they be staying someplace so close to Santa Fe? You’d think the smart thing to do would be to get as far away from us as possible.”

  “I have no idea. That’s not the issue here. The issue is that my car is a mile away at my place, so I need to borrow yours and go take a look.”

  “And bail out in the middle of the reception? Mom will have your head on a platter.”

  “Right now, I really don’t care,” Rafe said. “We’ve already wasted enough time. I need to see if this hunch is correct or not. Now, are you going to lend me your car key, or am I going to have to call a Ryde to take me to my house so I can get the Jeep?”

  “Oh, all right,” Cat replied, both her tone and expression resigned. “It’s not as if I need it right now anyway.” She opened the small purse that still dangled from her arm, then pulled out the fob for her Mercedes SUV. “What am I supposed to tell Mom?”

  “With any luck, she won’t even notice I’m gone.”

  Cat pulled a face at that comment. “Give me a break, Rafe. She’s going to notice the second you step out the door.”

  “Make up something. I don’t care. Tell her there was something I left at my house that I’d meant to give to Tony. Whatever it takes.”

  “Okay.” She gave his arm a nudge. “Go ahead. I can tell you’re foaming at the mouth to get out of here.”

  Rafe shot her a grateful smile, then headed back toward the kitchen, figuring it would be less obvious if he slipped out by way of the back door. To his surprise, he nearly bumped into Daniel as he exited the kitchen, cell phone in hand and a grave expression on his face.r />
  “I was just about to come looking for you,” Daniel said. “I got a call, so I thought I’d better take it in here, where I wouldn’t be disturbing anyone. It was my secretary Gina. She wanted me to know she was sending a packet on Simon.”

  “You found something?”

  “The automated searches found something. As soon as it came in, she called, since I’d told her to let me know the minute we had any kind of update.” Face grim, Daniel extended his phone to Rafe. “You’re not going to like this.”

  Tense with foreboding, Rafe took the phone from Daniel and looked down at the screen. There was a picture of Simon, probably from a few years earlier. Underneath was a lot of text, apparently from an arrest for breaking and entering into an empty house. However, the crime itself wasn’t what made Rafe’s blood run cold. No, it was Simon’s full name, spelled out directly below the photo.

  Simon Luis Escobar.

  No. No way. Rafe glanced up from the phone and saw Daniel watching him, concern in his eyes. “I know. ‘Escobar’ is a name everyone hoped they would never hear again.”

  It couldn’t be a coincidence. But how?

  No, how didn’t matter right now.

  “I have to go,” Rafe said, his voice hoarse as he shoved the phone into his cousin’s hand.

  Then he was running across the kitchen, opening the back door and letting it bang shut behind. A voice in his head was shouting, Hurry, hurry, hurry….

  As he opened the door to Cat’s SUV and flung himself inside, he prayed that he wouldn’t be too late.

  17

  Echoes

  Miranda

  Mouth dry, all I could do was stare at Simon. “T-temple?” I stammered.

  “I know you saw it, Miranda.” He was still smiling, his entire attitude relaxed. Apparently, he wasn’t at all put off by my presence so close to his sanctum. “Would you like to go inside? I was going to show you at some point anyway…once I thought you were ready.”