A groan. “Not again!”
“Yes, again.” I wiggled my toes, and wished I’d grabbed a glass of water or iced tea from the kitchen before I came upstairs.
“Was he cute?”
“What difference does it make?”
“Was he?”
I knew she’d keep asking until I told her everything. “Yes, he was cute. But it doesn’t matter, because he wasn’t — ”
“Yeah, I know. The mystery man. The man of your dreams. The one beside whom all others pale. The — ”
“Okay, I get it.” Sometimes I really wished I’d never told Sydney about him. But weren’t you supposed to be able to tell your best friend everything?
She knew about me…knew about the McAllisters. Her family had lived in Cottonwood almost as long as the McAllisters had been in Jerome, and they were some of the few whom we trusted with our secrets. Long-timers around here, they knew about my clan, about its traditions…its powers. Well, its purported powers, anyway. There hadn’t been a public display for more than eighty years, not since the time Henry McAllister caught a recently laid-off miner attempting to steal the contents of his cash register. The miscreant was held upside down, suspended in midair, until the sheriff came to claim him. Spectacular, sure, but the clan elders made it clear that such exhibitions of power would not be tolerated.
Fly low and avoid the radar — that’s our motto. Attracting attention was not a good thing. And so, I more or less confided in Sydney, knowing that she came from people who knew how to keep their mouths shut. In her case, this was something of a miracle, since she seemed able to rattle on at length about pretty much any other topic.
“Who’d believe me anyway?” she’d asked once, and I’d had to shrug and smile. This part of the world had a high-per-capita instance of psychics, witches, energy healers, you name it. Calling us out as witches would have earned a yawn at best. Most people didn’t realize that there were witches…and then there were witches.
“So what now?” she asked. “Does your aunt have the next one lined up yet?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, how many guys can there be who are my age and from a suitable clan? She’s already had to cast pretty far afield.” As far as California, and Oregon, and Colorado. Not New Mexico, though. The clans there were connected with the Wilcoxes. I shivered, then added, “I’m sure she’ll be on the phone tomorrow, though, scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
A little pause. “Well, since you’re not getting bonded to your soulmate after all, you want to go to Main Stage with me tomorrow night? I’ve heard the band is supposed to be pretty good.”
“Who’s playing?”
I could almost see her shrug. “I don’t know their name. Does it matter, as long as it gets you out of the house?”
“True that.” It would be good to get out. And Cottonwood was safe territory. I didn’t have to worry about anything strange happening down in Cottonwood. “Dinner first?”
“Drinks and dinner. They have got the cutest new guy working at the Fire Mountain tasting rooms….”
Envy surged through me. How I wished I could go out and flirt and look at good-looking guys, maybe give my phone number to someone who seemed particularly interesting. That was never going to happen, though. I was the next prima of the McAllisters. I was supposed to meet my soulmate, get married, and use my powers for good, an agenda that didn’t exactly lend itself to casual hook-ups. As usual, I’d have to settle for living vicariously through Sydney.
“Okay.” I knew arguing was pointless. She might not be a witch, but Sydney did have an almost magical talent for getting her way.
“Real clothes,” she said in warning tones. “Girl clothes.”
“Yas’m,” I replied. “I’ll meet you in old town at…?”
“Seven. Don’t be late.” She hung up then, and I hit the “end” button on my phone and tossed it onto the coverlet.
I doubted that a girls’ night out would magically heal all my woes, but I figured I had to start somewhere.
Dinner that night, though excellent, was more than a little subdued. I guess it helped that Tobias was there; he chatted with Aunt Rachel about preparations for the upcoming Halloween festivities — Halloween was a big deal in Jerome — had a second and even a third helping of ranchero beef and rice and cowboy beans, and generally acted as if nothing untoward had happened earlier that afternoon.
I did like Tobias; he was the latest in a long string of my aunt’s “friends,” although since the two of them had been seeing each other for almost four years now, I’d begun to wonder if they had plans to make things more formal. Probably not; Aunt Rachel had always said she’d never get married, that she was too set in her ways to disrupt her life by having a man underfoot. There’d never been the barest trace of accusation or even regret in her tone when she made those comments, but I still couldn’t prevent the stir of guilt that went through me whenever I heard them. Would she have felt that way if she hadn’t gotten stuck with me from almost the time I was born?
The subject of my mother didn’t come up much…or rather, Aunt Rachel gently headed me off at the pass whenever I tried to go down that road. No one came out and said it directly, but it was pretty clear to me that my mother was supposed to be the next prima, and she just couldn’t handle the pressure. Took off about a month after her twenty-first birthday, after going through a couple of candidates who obviously didn’t appeal to her. No word, no nothing, until she showed up a year later with a two-month-old daughter in her arms.
If there had been recriminations, I wasn’t told of them. No, my aunt had taken her wayward sister and her infant daughter back into the house as if nothing had happened. This I heard from my Great-Aunt Ruby, the current prima, who had apparently taken pity on me and given me a few bare facts. Not many, but she claimed she didn’t have a lot she could tell me. My mother hadn’t said anything about my father, except that he was a “civilian,” as we liked to refer to those not in the witch clans. She said briefly that she’d gone to California, that she’d wanted to see the ocean, and that was the end of her revelations.
And then she’d left Aunt Rachel watching me one night, and had gone off to party and drink at the Spirit Room bar down the street, and ridden away on the back of some guy’s Harley after they’d had a few too many beers and whiskey shots. The winding two-lane road up to Jerome could be icy and treacherous in February, and they had crashed. Neither of them had been wearing a helmet.
I didn’t really mourn her. How could I? I’d never even known her. All I had was a few photographs in one of Aunt Rachel’s albums. Maybe I looked a little like my mother — same oval face, same full mouth and arched eyebrows. My hair was darker, though, my skin paler. Did I resemble my father at all? Impossible to say.
“…going to the Halloween dance?” my aunt was saying.
I blinked. “What?”
She smiled, then repeated, “Are you and Sydney going to the Halloween dance?”
“I think so. That is, we’ve talked about it. She’s excited, since this is the first year we’ll be able to go.”
Every year on the Saturday closest to Halloween, a benefit dance was held at Lawrence Hall here in Jerome. The gathering was strictly twenty-one and over, and so neither Sydney nor I had been able to go before this year. Even being prima-in-waiting wasn’t enough to get the organizers to break that rule. In the past I’d helped with the decorating, partly because it gave me a chance to get a peek at what it might be like to actually attend, and partly because, as the next prima, I was sort of expected to pitch in and help out.
True, Sydney was more excited about the whole thing than I was, but I suppose part of that was simply realizing that I’d thought I would have met my soulmate by now, and would have someone to go with besides Sydney. It would still be fun. I’d heard great things about the dance at what we locals referred to as “Spook Hall.”
More on the “spooks” later.
“It’s a great party,” Tobias said. “I
keep trying to get your aunt to go, but she keeps trying to fob me off with nonsense about it being for the kids or something. Which is b.s., and you know it, Rachel. At least half that crowd is over forty.”
She shot him a mock-irritated glare and shook her head. “We can discuss that later. I don’t even know what I’d wear.”
“Well, you’ve got two weeks to figure it out,” I told her, and helped myself to some more sweet potatoes.
“I vote for a cheerleader costume,” Tobias put in with a wink.
“Are you kidding? With these thighs?”
“I happen to like your thighs.”
I cleared my throat. “Um, I’m trying to eat over here.”
They both laughed, and Aunt Rachel tipped a bit more cabernet into my wine glass. Another part of being a grown-up, I supposed. Oh, she’d let me taste wine before, saying it couldn’t hurt for me to familiarize myself with the selections from the local wineries, since they were such a big part of the local culture. However, it wasn’t until I actually turned twenty-one that she got formal about it and let me have my own glass with dinner. A stickler for protocol, that was my aunt.
But the silly banter did what I was sure my aunt intended it to do — get my mind off Mr. Number Forty-Four, and thinking about something fun to look toward, rather than the way the calendar was inexorably moving toward December and my twenty-second birthday. Well, all right, the conversation got my mind off that for a few minutes.
Later, though, as I sat in front of my mirror and brushed out my hair, all the worries and doubts began to seep back in. No, the world wouldn’t end if I weren’t safely paired off with my soulmate before December twenty-first, but it wouldn’t be good, either. It had happened a few times in the past, for various reasons, although never to the McAllisters. A prima who entered her twenty-second year without a consort found her powers greatly reduced.
Aunt Rachel had never been able to explain that very well to me, except to say that there was something about the bond a prima and her consort shared that strengthened the magic within her, enhanced it somehow.
“And what happens if the prima is gay?” I’d asked, thinking the whole setup seemed positively medieval. Maybe it was. We didn’t know for certain how far back some of these traditions went, only that we’d been following them for generations, had brought them over to America when the first group of McAllister witches emigrated here from Scotland sometime in the late eighteenth century.
My aunt had shot me an irritated look. “I have no idea. It’s never happened before. Not that I’ve heard of, anyway.”
Something in her tone told me I should drop it, so I did. Not that I was gay…I was inexperienced, but I knew who I was attracted to, and it definitely wasn’t other girls. But it had seemed a logical enough question to ask.
I’d also wondered why, since my mother had blown her chance at being prima, someone else in her age group hadn’t become the heir apparent…even her own sister. That was a question I didn’t dare ask Aunt Rachel, but I’d broached the subject to other relatives, such as my cousin Rosemary, and she’d only waved a vague hand in the air and said, “Oh, there is only ever one in a generation. That’s why it’s so important to keep you safe.”
And when I pressed as to what would happen if there was no one to inherit, she flashed me a look of genuine horror and shook her head, saying, “It would be the end of the clan.”
I must have let out a shocked sound, because she hurried to add, “But that will never happen to us, Angela. You are here, and you will find your consort and inherit Aunt Ruby’s powers when the time comes. Everything will be fine.”
At the moment, I wasn’t sure if everything was really going to be fine. While we certainly didn’t indulge in pyrotechnic magic battles — that whole “fly low and avoid the radar” thing — it still wasn’t good for a clan to have a weak prima. That made the clan vulnerable to more subtle forms of attack. Such attacks had happened before, in other clans, and there was no reason to think the McAllisters would be immune if the worst happened and I turned twenty-two before making that oh-so-necessary bond with my consort.
I couldn’t let that happen. What was wrong with me, that not one of the more-or-less eligible young men I’d met had lit that spark in me, had made me know then and there that I’d met the person I’d spend the rest of my life with?
Aunt Rachel kept insisting there was nothing wrong, that it would all work out in the end, but I wasn’t so sure. Only two months to go, and I was still as single as I’d been on my twenty-first birthday.
And the clock kept ticking down. I might have magic running through my veins, but no witch in the world could stop the inexorable march of time.
2
Meeting Mr. Wrong
Of course I dreamed of him that night.
His face was never distinct enough that I would be able to pick him out of a lineup. Tall, yes, and with sooty dark hair, almost black, longish and pushed back from his brow. Eyes green, but not my brilliant emerald, a shade that invariably had at least one person a week asking me if I wore contacts. No one else in my family had eyes that shade. A gift from my unknown father? Maybe. But the stranger’s eyes were darker and cloudier, like deep nephrite jade, or the layered and shifting hues of moss agate.
We never interacted in these dreams. I would see him standing at the end of the street, or across a crowded room. In my dream I would begin to run toward him, but it was as if my feet were mired in quicksand and I couldn’t move. Or suddenly the street would impossibly lengthen so it seemed as if a mile separated us instead of only a few yards. Either way, I could never reach him, could never get close enough to see his face clearly.
This time I was running, pounding down Main Street, in a spot as familiar to me as my own face. He stood at the far end of the road, just before it curved past the fire station, his profile to me. And he didn’t move, actually seemed to be getting closer…and then from the clear sky snow started to drift down, blanketing the pavement, covering everything in a blurry veil of white. I slipped and fell to my knees, wincing in pain, and began to slide down the street away from him, moving faster and faster, screaming, knowing the ice would kill me just as it had killed my mother.
I sat up in bed, cold sweat gluing my T-shirt to my body, hands trembling as I grasped the covers and pulled them closer to me, trying to erase some of the chill of that nightmare. That’s what this one really had been, the first of the dreams I could call a nightmare. The others had been frustrating, had made me wake almost shaking with need, but not like this.
What had changed?
Shivering, I got out of bed and went to the little altar I had set up on top of my bookcase. Time to light the white candle, to summon the protection of the light. Since no one was watching me, I didn’t bother with matches, but only touched the tip of my finger to the wick. “Spirits of air and light, I summon you,” I murmured, and the candle instantly came to life, a warm glow filling the room and sending the shadows away, bringing with it the comforting scent of vanilla. Somehow that didn’t seem to be enough, however, and I grasped the chunk of iron pyrite that sat on the altar, holding it, allowing its protective influence to surround me and fill me, and keep me from harm.
That was a little better. I still felt cold, though, so I shoved the pyrite in the pocket of my yoga pants, then went to my dresser and pulled out a beat-up old sweatshirt with the legend “Jerome, the Wickedest Town in the West” written on it. I pulled the sweatshirt over my head and made myself take a deep, calming breath. Nothing here could harm me, especially not the lingering dregs of nightmare. Our property, and indeed Jerome itself, was ringed with circles of quartz, charged with powers of protection during rituals shared by all the members of the clan. No one who intended me any harm could intrude here.
That was one of the reasons my world was so narrowly focused. Here in Jerome I was safe, and in Cottonwood down the hill as well, although that town was too large to have the protective circles built there. But it was still
within our sphere of influence, and negative forces would have a difficult time gaining a foothold there. The farther afield I went, the more problematic the situation, although Prescott and Payson were still more or less safe as well. Even so, I never went to either of those towns unless accompanied by my aunt, and on longer journeys, such as our semi-annual trips to Phoenix to stock up on things we simply couldn’t get locally, it wasn’t just Aunt Rachel who came along, but Tobias and Margot Emory, the youngest of the clan elders and the one best-suited to handle a long drive.
They weren’t being unnecessarily paranoid. Years and years ago, when Great-Aunt Ruby was the same age I was now, a prima-in-waiting on the cusp of coming into the fullness of her powers, the Wilcoxes had tried to kidnap her, to have her bond with their own primus. Such a pairing would have made the Wilcox clan immeasurably powerful…if it had worked. She’d sensed their ill intentions and sent out a warning. This had happened on Samhain Eve all those years ago, and we thought maybe the Wilcoxes had chosen that day because of the dark power that surged around Samhain. Thank the Goddess they hadn’t been successful.
Things had been more or less quiet since then, but we’d never let down our guard. Not when the Wilcoxes were involved.
Another shiver passed over me, and I reached into my pocket and wrapped my fingers around the chunk of iron pyrite. A small tingle went up my arm, as if the stone was telling me that it was here for me, was lending its powers of defense to those of the quartz crystals embedded in the very foundation of the building, to the prayers of protection my aunt offered up every evening to the Goddess and the Triple God and all the smaller, yet still powerful, entities who inhabited the very trees and stones and streams of our mountain town.
I had to hope it would be enough.
Magic in the Desert: Three Paranormal Romance Series Starters Set in the American Southwest Page 2
