Defender (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 11)

by Christine Pope

  Thank God, Jack thought grimly. Caitlin is traumatized enough already without having to watch some monster rape the Santiagos’ new prima.

  Dead silence. Everyone knew exactly what must have happened next, but there was no way in hell any of them were going to say it out loud.

  Luz spoke first, her usually warm-toned voice taut, strained. “So the Santiagos have fallen. What do we do next?”

  “You should contact Connor and Angela,” Jack said. “They need to know what’s going on, because it may come down to all of us presenting a united front in order to defeat this bastard.”

  “Of course. What else?”

  There was a damn good question. Everything Caitlin had just related sickened him, even though, because of his work, he was used to seeing the worst that humanity had to offer. At the same time, his brain started picking through the facts at hand, trying to find the connections. What did the horrifying events in Southern California have to do with Jeff Nichols’ murder, or the hex on Kate’s car? Maybe nothing. Maybe they were all just a hideous coincidence.

  He didn’t believe that, though. If he could just figure out which thread to pull, then he might be able to unravel the whole sordid tapestry. In the meantime, the de la Paz clan had to hunker down and prepare for the worst — as did the McAllisters and the Wilcoxes. Jack supposed it was possible that, having accomplished his terrible goal, the null might rest on his laurels, would leave them all alone. He doubted it, however. The man had shown a ruthlessness on a level that even Jack hadn’t encountered before. There was something going on here, something he couldn’t yet figure out.

  Which meant Kate was still in danger. No, she didn’t have any magical talents that the null would wish to usurp, but, as her estranged husband’s death had proved, dark warlocks had uses for ordinary humans, uses conjured from their very blood and pain. If the null was seeking some strange form of revenge against the McAllisters or those close to them, then she still could be the next target. Which meant he had to do everything he could to keep her safe.

  How, though? Jack had the impression that the null — and anyone who might be working for him — possessed far more knowledge about his targets than he should. There was that hex on Kate’s car. How could they have known where it was being kept? It was as though they were being watched.

  Another seer? Maybe, but every single seer he’d met or known of experienced much the same problems as Caitlin in terms of controlling what they saw. This type of surveillance felt far more comprehensive.

  Everyone was watching him, waiting for him to answer Luz. The weight of their combined gazes, of their hope that he would offer a solution, was almost a palpable thing. Problem was, he didn’t have any answers right now. Just more and more questions. He wiped his damp palms on the knees of his khakis and said, “Well, for one thing, no one goes anywhere alone. Luz, call David and have him come here to be with you. Caitlin and Alex, make sure you’re never separated.”

  Alex stirred uneasily on the couch. “What am I supposed to tell them at work?”

  “Tell them whatever you want. Family emergency. I don’t care.”

  “Are you going to do the same thing?”

  There was a faintly challenging note to Alex’s question. Clearly, he didn’t appear too eager to follow instructions from someone who wouldn’t take his own advice.

  “Yes, I am,” Jack said firmly. “I’ll take a leave of absence.”

  “What about the investigation?” Kate asked. She was still huddled into a corner of the couch, clearly scared out of her mind, even though she was doing her best to look calm. But her hand shook slightly as she pushed back a lock of hair that had fallen over her shoulder, and her voice was too tight, too controlled.

  “Anything I would have been doing at the station would have been busywork. The real investigation is the stuff I’d have to follow up on after hours, because it would involve the witch world, not the civilian one.”

  She nodded at that reply, and went quiet. Good. Not that he didn’t want to speak to her, but they didn’t have time right now for arguments. Clearly, she understood what was at stake.

  “He cannot come after all of us,” Luz said then, her chin up and her eyes fierce. “The only way he could do so would be to rally all the Santiagos to follow him, and I don’t see that happening, not when he is responsible for the deaths of their prima and her consort, and the consort of the prima-in-waiting as well.”

  “Even if he threatens them with taking their magic away?” Kate asked in a small voice.

  “He cannot do such a thing. The null’s power only affects those in his immediate range. Yes, he is obviously a cold and practiced killer, but it is not as if he can reach across the miles and burn the magic out of a person. Even Connor and Angela had to have Matías Escobar and his cousins in their immediate presence to take away their powers. I am not saying that it would be easy to take out the null, because anyone who approached him would lose their own powers, but at least it would be a temporary loss.”

  “Where’s this house in Pasadena?” Kate sounded a little more in control now, possibly because she was trying to come up with a way to defeat the null, rather than sitting back and worrying that he was going to come after all of them. “Maybe the best thing to do would be to drop a bomb on it or something.”

  Jack studied her face. She was dead serious. On the surface, her suggestion did sound like a plausible solution. After all, a null’s powers were formidable, but even he probably wouldn’t survive a strike by a couple of carefully targeted missiles.

  A shake of the head, and Alex said, “We’re a witch clan, not the army. And even if we had the resources to do such a thing, we still wouldn’t risk it because of the collateral damage. Marisol lives in a house in Pasadena, not out in the middle of the desert somewhere. We’d be putting innocent civilians at risk.”

  “Oh, I knew you really wouldn’t do something like that. It’s just…if this guy can render all your magical powers ineffective, how are you supposed to get rid of him?”

  “I don’t know.” Alex glanced over at his mother, and then at Jack. “Do either of you?”

  “Not yet,” Jack said. “But we’ll figure it out. In the meantime, be careful. At least Caitlin knows what this man looks like. Can you give us some more details, Cate?”

  She knotted her fingers together and gave an uneasy swallow. Obviously, she wasn’t too keen to go back and study her memories of the null’s features in any detail, and Jack couldn’t really blame her. But she was the only one who’d seen his face.

  When she spoke, it was slowly, as if she needed to make sure of every detail before she passed it on to her watching audience. “Like I said, he looked as though he was in his middle or late forties. Hispanic. Dark wavy hair, sort of slicked back from his face. He was….” Her mouth twisted. “I hate to say it, but I guess, objectively speaking, you’d say he was attractive, for an older guy.”

  As someone who was only a decade away from being in his middle forties, Jack had to keep from smiling at Caitlin’s “older guy” comment. “Anything else?” he asked, doing his best to sound neutral.

  “Tallish but not super-tall. He has interesting eyes…sort of a diagonal crease over his eyelids, if you know what I mean. Deep-set dark eyes. His clothes were pretty plain — he had on khaki pants and a light-colored shirt, although I couldn’t tell if it was ivory or white.” She sighed, and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “And that’s about all I can remember.”

  “It’s very good. It’ll help a lot,” Jack told her, even as he wished he could bring her to the station so she could go over her description of the null with one of the sketch artists there. Subjecting her recollections to that kind of rigor would probably give them a much better picture of the dark warlock. Unfortunately, Jack knew that taking Caitlin to the police station would only raise a lot of questions he didn’t want to answer, and so he put that notion aside. The information she’d provided was still enough to let them know who — or w
hat — to avoid.

  The small shrug she gave in reply to his words told him that she wasn’t so sure, even though she didn’t look like she wanted to argue the point.

  “Well, then,” Luz said. “We know something of who this criminal is. I’ll call Connor and Angela. Alex, you might as well take Caitlin home — and go get your sister Alicia when you’re back in Tucson. I don’t feel comfortable having her alone in that dorm. She can stay in your spare bedroom.”

  “She’s not going to like that,” Alex remarked, to which his mother raised her eyebrows.

  “It’s not a matter of what she does or doesn’t like. If she doesn’t want to stay at your house, then you can tell her to come up here and stay with her father and me.”

  “Good one,” Alex said, smiling despite the seriousness of the situation. “Because I know she’d have a fit if she had to miss any classes when she was so close to graduating.”

  “My thoughts exactly. And since getting into veterinary school depends on her completing her undergraduate work, well, I am sure she will find herself sufficiently motivated to stay with you.”

  Jack couldn’t help but be impressed by the way his cousin managed that situation. If the null decided to go after Alicia for some reason, she might be safer with her brother. Yes, his protective magic wouldn’t work, but the kid was in good shape. He might be able to prevail physically, if not magically.

  “And I,” Jack said, “am going to take Kate back to my place and try to see if there’s a connection we’ve been missing.”

  Tilting her head to one side, Kate asked, “Aren’t you supposed to be on shift until seven?”

  So she’d made a careful note of that. Had she been counting the hours until he got off work? No, he’d better not flatter himself. “I am,” he said calmly. “But I was going to have to take off anyway. I’ll say it’s a family emergency, that a relative in California has been murdered. That’s both serious enough to warrant a leave of absence, but conveniently well out of the Scottsdale P.D.’s jurisdiction.” And, he thought, it was only a bit of a stretch. Someone had been murdered in California — three people, actually — and one might say that all witches and warlocks were connected in a way. Not family exactly, but close enough.

  His response appeared to satisfy Kate, because she nodded but didn’t say anything else.

  “All right,” Luz said. “I’ll start spreading the word, let everyone know what’s happened and what this null looks like. I have a feeling that Angela and Connor will probably want to discuss this in person. I’ll let you know, Jack, if they want to speak to you as well.”

  “Sounds good.” He got up from his chair and looked over at Kate, and a second later, she stood as well. Caitlin and Alex followed suit, and soon after that, everyone was moving for the front door. Jack paused at the gate and looked up and down the street, but he didn’t see anything more suspicious than someone driving by in one of those reverse-trike-style motorcycles.

  Kate said her goodbyes to the couple, and Jack waved as they headed to the Pathfinder and got in. Then he turned to the woman who stood a few feet away, clutching her purse and looking both frightened and somehow shy, like she’d just realized that she was going to be left alone with him again and didn’t know what the hell to do about it.

  Well, that made two of them.

  12

  Kate stared out the window as Jack drove them away from Luz’s house and to the northwest part of Scottsdale, where his apartment was located. Her heart kept giving odd little nervous thumps, although she honestly didn’t know whether that was because of the dreadful news she’d just heard, or because Jack Sandoval was sitting only a foot or so away from her.

  Which was really the dumbest damn thing to be focusing on. All this death, all these horrors, and yet her stupid brain kept obsessing over details like the fine outline of his profile, the strength of his hands as they gripped the steering wheel. Maybe it was only a way to distract herself…and Jack was pretty damn distracting. Kate thought it much better to fixate on the muscles under his dress shirt, rather than mentally go over the terrible things Caitlin had seen in her vision. All those people dead. A young woman forced to bend to the null’s will. And an entire clan with their leadership gone. A coup for sure, but definitely not a bloodless one.

  “Are you okay?” Jack asked after a while, casting a worried sideways glance in her direction before returning his attention to the road. Although it was barely midafternoon by that point, traffic had begun to thicken. Maybe there were a lot of parents on the road, heading out to pick up their kids from school.

  For some reason, that thought made Kate’s throat tighten. All these people going about their business, about their ordinary lives, with absolutely no knowledge of the evil that might lurk under the surface.

  Her brunch had to have been mostly digested by then, and yet she suddenly felt queasy. She wished she didn’t know about any of these things, either. She wished the world would go back to the way it had been two days ago, when the biggest worry in her life had been how Jeff would react when she finally did show up with the divorce papers.

  “I’m….” She let the words trail off, then shook her head and forced herself to start over. “Well, I can’t say I’m okay, because that would be a lie. But I’m holding it together. I think.”

  “I understand,” he said. And he did sound understanding, his voice calm and somehow soothing. Was that how he talked to the survivors at a crime scene? She couldn’t remember exactly how he’d sounded when he spoke to her. Too many upheavals must have rattled her brain. “It’s a lot to take in. Hell, I’m having a hard time with it, and I’m — ” He stopped then, as if he wasn’t quite sure what he’d meant to say.

  “You’re a warlock?” Kate asked. “You should be used to this kind of stuff?”

  “Well, I don’t know about ‘used to it.’ What happened in California…that’s unprecedented. Like we said, we can’t think of anything like this ever happening before, such a targeted strike at a prima and her family. Maybe back in the dark ages or something, when we were all killing each other with axes and swords and the deadliest spells we could cook up, but….”

  She shifted in her seat so she could get a better look at the expression he currently wore. Jack looked serious enough, but there was the slightest lift at the corner of his mouth, as though he might be joking just a little.

  Maybe.

  “How far back do your witch families go?” Kate asked.

  “As far back as we can remember. The de la Paz clan has been here in southern Arizona for hundreds of years, long before it was part of the United States. I don’t know as much about the Wilcoxes and the McAllisters, but I’m pretty sure they had a long history in England and Scotland before their families immigrated to America.”

  She thought about that for a moment. It made sense, of course — everyone had to have come from somewhere. Her father’s family had also immigrated to America from Scotland, whereas her mother was sort of a mutt, a mixture of German and Irish and English and a tiny bit of Welsh. “And you weren’t always as peaceful as you are now?”

  His shoulders lifted. “Actually, I was joking about throwing spells at each other…mostly. Back then, just like now, most witch-folk just wanted to fly low and avoid the radar. It’s never a good idea to let other people know that you possess magical powers. Nowadays we’d just get poked and prodded by doctors and scientists, I suppose — and possibly questioned by the NSA — but back then when the consequences of being found out included getting burned at the stake, well, our ancestors kind of wanted to keep things on the down-low.” He turned off Scottsdale Road and continued west before adding, “So anyway, witch clans tend to be respectful of one another’s territory, because the last thing any of us can afford is the sort of all-out war that would attract notice.”

  “How many clans are there?”

  “I have no idea,” he replied. Although he wasn’t looking at her, he seemed to register her surprise at his reply, becau
se he went on, “There are people in my clan who keep track of all the families and all their territories and such, but that’s never been something I paid a lot of attention to. We all stay where we come from, pretty much. Here in Arizona there’s some mixing of the clans, now more than there used to be, thanks to Angela and Connor joining the McAllisters and the Wilcoxes. In general, though we don’t cross state lines without permission. The Wilcoxes have been on friendly terms with the Castillos in New Mexico for more than a hundred years, though, so I think there must have been some travel involved between the two of them. Because we’re so territorial, it means we don’t have a lot of need to know everything about clans in states on the other side of the country…or the other side of the world.”

  “So you’re everywhere.”

  “Oh, yeah, witches are global. Everyone has their own particular flavor of magic, from what I’ve heard, but some things are universal, like the basic spells we all can do, and certain talents, like being a seer or a healer or someone like me, someone whose strength is defensive magic. Then you get the odd talents like Alex’s, or your sister-in-law’s overwhelming mind reading, some of which seem to be unique, and some which can skip generations before they crop up again.”

  “Like the null.”

  The small hint of a smile Jack had worn during the previous discussion disappeared immediately. “Yes, like him. I think a lot of people were probably hoping that particular talent had died out. Even when the person who was born with it was a decent human being, the null ‘gift’ still had so much potential to be misused.”

  Kate could see that. The temptation to use that talent to get back at your enemies, or to exert a little leverage on a business partner, or a spouse…she could see why it would have been much better to be consigned to the ash heap of history. It certainly seemed as if the null who had just gone on his killing spree in Southern California was on some sort of vendetta.