Magic in the Desert: Three Paranormal Romance Series Starters Set in the American Southwest

by Christine Pope

  Fridays were always fairly busy in Jerome. People came to spend a long weekend, or drove in from neighboring towns to shop and eat and sightsee. So I knew that sitting in my room and brooding over my failure with Mr. Number Forty-Four was not an option. Probably just as well. At least by working in the store I could keep myself occupied until it was time to go out with Sydney.

  The shop had once been a general store, but over the last fifteen years my aunt had transformed it into an eclectic space filled with Jerome-related memorabilia, local pottery and baskets, some antiques, books, music, and jewelry. My jewelry, to be exact.

  I was about twelve when I first started playing around with stones and settings. It was easy enough to pick up those sorts of things in Jerome, a place inhabited by artists and artisans. Luis Sandoval, a local designer, though not a member of the clan, began to show me how to work with metal — how to use a soldering torch, to set stones, to twist pieces of delicate wire to make intricate and unique settings. Once I’d mastered those skills, I began to experiment with creating pieces based on the resonances of the stones they contained, of making them harmonious as well as beautiful. After that I also began to make talismans, some of which were purchased by tourists who had no idea of their real power, only that they were somehow attracted to them.

  Two or three days a week I would work in my studio — well, a converted spare bedroom — and create new pieces to sell in the shop. Friday through Sunday I helped out behind the counter. Working weekends all the time wasn’t much fun, but I owed my aunt that much. Besides, the shop closed at six unless there was a special event going on that would keep people around later at night, so it wasn’t as if being there Saturdays and Sundays seriously impinged on my social life.

  Not that I really had much of a social life.

  That Friday was especially busy. October in our part of the world was generally mild and lovely, a good time to sightsee and go antiquing and visit the wineries. I didn’t have much of a chance to chat with my aunt that day, which maybe was just as well. Telling her about a new and somehow frightening twist in my dreams of the mystery man would only make her that much more worried. And what could she do about it? She was a powerful witch in her own right, and had kept me safe for more than twenty years, but even she didn’t have the ability to prevent the dreams from forming.

  So I smiled at the tourists, and pulled earrings and pendants and the odd talisman out of the showcases as requested, then escaped at noon to grab some lunch. At twelve-thirty my aunt went to get some lunch, then came back at one, just as we always did. Something in her features seemed troubled, as if she’d seen worry surface in my expression, despite my attempts to act as if everything was fine. Luckily, she didn’t ask any questions. Maybe she would later; the store was way too public to be discussing anything remotely sensitive, and she knew it.

  It seemed that she didn’t want to do anything to upset my evening out with Sydney, though. We went home, made a few comments about it being a good day, and then she headed to her own room to primp a little before Tobias showed up to take her to dinner. That was their own ritual — she might cook for him the rest of the week, but on Friday nights he always took her out. Most of the time they stayed right here in Jerome, although occasionally they’d head down into Cottonwood or even Sedona if they wanted something different.

  I changed out of my T-shirt and Levi’s into a tighter pair of jeans and a slinky dark green top that Sydney had picked out for me as a birthday present last year. My footwear consisted of cowboy boots and work boots for the winter and flip-flops for the summer, so I had to make do with cowboy boots, but at least they were pointy and shiny black and looked good with the jeans tucked into them. Some turquoise jewelry, some lip gloss, and I had to admit I didn’t look half bad. Not runway-model material, that was for sure, but going out on the town in Cottonwood wasn’t quite the same thing as going out in New York or L.A.

  Or so I supposed. It wasn’t as if I’d actually been to either of those places, and I guessed I never would.

  “I’m leaving,” I called out as I descended the stairs. “Taking the Jeep!”

  “Don’t be too late,” was her reply, but she didn’t emerge from her room.

  Considering the shows at Main Stage didn’t even start until nine-thirty, that was a silly request, but I thought I knew what she was trying to say. Be careful, be vigilant, don’t get a wild hair about driving off to Sedona or anywhere except Cottonwood or maybe Clarkdale.

  Like I would. It might have been tempting, but I knew better than to go outside the immediate area without backup. That would change once I had found my consort, but until then my world would have to remain as closely guarded and circumscribed as that of the most sheltered nunnery-raised medieval princess.

  I went out the back door to the carport where the Jeep waited. My aunt and I shared it, since it was silly to have two cars when we walked to work and only went down the hill for groceries about once a week. Even so, I always experienced a fleeting sense of freedom when I was able to get away alone, to drive down the winding highway into Cottonwood, even if it was only to get gas or pick up some extra toilet paper or whatever.

  The sun had gone down behind Mingus Mountain by the time I pulled into an open space on Main Street in the old-town section of Cottonwood. There weren’t too many of those parking spaces left; the tasting rooms stayed open later on Fridays and Saturdays than they did the rest of the week.

  I found Sydney leaning up against the bar in the Fire Mountain Winery tasting room, a position guaranteed to give Anthony, the object of her interest, a really good look at her cleavage. It was working, too; I noticed how he kept having to jerk his eyes upward toward her face. Just past her were a couple in their thirties with a selection of the winery’s offerings in front of them. The woman didn’t look too thrilled with Sydney or Anthony at the moment, and I hoped Sydney’s flirting wouldn’t get him in trouble with his manager.

  “Hey, chica,” she said, and waved for me to come stand next to her at the bar. “Nice top.”

  “Yes, it is,” I said coolly, and turned toward Anthony. “Hi, Anthony — a glass of the Fire, please.”

  “You got it,” he replied, clearly glad to have something to distract him from Sydney’s rack.

  “You trying to get that boy fired?” I asked in an undertone, and she just grinned.

  “Of course not. I’m just trying to get him to ask me out.”

  “You know, you could ask him.”

  “Hell, no. I’m too old-fashioned for that.”

  Since I couldn’t really think of an adequate retort, I settled for sending her a disbelieving stare, at which she only smiled more broadly.

  Anthony came back with my glass of wine, giving me the perfect opening. “Hey, Anthony,” I began.

  “Yes?”

  “What time do you get off work? Because Sydney and I are going over to Main Stage after dinner tonight. Want to come hang out?”

  Sydney raised her eyebrows and gave me her best “oh, no, you didn’t” stare, even as Anthony replied, “We close at nine, so I should be able to make it by nine-thirty.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “Meet us there?”

  “Sure.” He was trying hard to sound casual, but I could tell he was looking forward to it.

  At that moment the man from the couple next to Sydney waved Anthony over, so he was spared having to make any other comment.

  “What the hell?” Sydney whispered fiercely.

  “Well, he’s too shy to make the first move, and you’re just being stupid with that whole ‘old-fashioned’ thing, so I took care of it for you.”

  “Oh, really? And what if he thinks he’s going there to meet you and not me?”

  “He isn’t,” I told her. “He didn’t look at my chest once.”

  She shook her head. “You’re impossible.”

  It was my turn to grin. “Well, I try to be.”

  We went out for pizza at Bocce after that, and had a few more glasses of
wine. Well, Sydney did; I nursed one all through dinner, knowing we’d have more once we were at Main Stage.

  “I figured out the perfect costume for you for the dance,” she announced midway through demolishing a piece of pesto chicken pizza.

  “What is it?” I asked in guarded tones. Visions of the cheerleader costume Tobias had suggested to Aunt Rachel danced in my head.

  Either Sydney didn’t pick up on the wariness in my voice or, more likely, she simply decided to ignore it. “You know how my friend Madison does all that crazy ballroom dance stuff? Well, she can only wear her costumes once or twice, and then she usually sells them on eBay to get rid of them. But she said I could have a couple if I wanted.”

  “Aren’t those things really skimpy?”

  Sydney let out a sigh. “Jesus, Angela, you’re worse about that stuff than Melanie Baxter, and she’s Mormon.”

  Maybe that was true, but I just didn’t feel comfortable letting it all hang out, as it were. Talk about old-fashioned, but there it was. Still, I knew Sydney was trying to help me out, so I asked, “Okay, what are the costumes?”

  “I’ll take the skimpy one. I think she used it for a rhumba or something, but since it has sparkly fringe all over it, I think I can turn it into a flapper dress. But the other one she wore when she was dancing a pass double, or paso…paso….”

  “Paso doble,” I supplied. She shot me a look of surprise, and I added, “Strictly Ballroom is one of Aunt Rachel’s favorite movies.”

  “Oh. Okay, so anyway, it looks like a Spanish flamenco dancer’s dress or something. It’s long. Yes, there’s probably some boobage involved, but that’s historically accurate, isn’t it?”

  Maybe. I didn’t know for sure, since historical costume was sort of outside my field of expertise. I could ask Maisie about it, I supposed. Maisie was the “spook” of Spook Hall, one of Jerome’s most famous ghosts. She didn’t like to come out when the tourists were around, but Monday mornings were pretty quiet in Jerome, so I could talk to her then.

  I just lifted my shoulders, so Sydney plowed ahead. “And we’re all more or less around the same size, so it’ll work out perfect. You’ll need better shoes, though,” she added, with a dark glance toward the cowboy boots hidden under our table.

  “I’ll figure out something,” I said, making a mental note to dig through Aunt Rachel’s collection to see if she had anything that would work. It wasn’t that I couldn’t afford to get myself some shoes for the occasion…more that I really didn’t see the point for something I’d only wear once. Jerome’s uneven streets and steep hillsides made most “girly” shoes even less practical than usual.

  She nodded, and we went on to talk about her cosmetology course — she’d be finishing in the spring — and whether she should get her own place once she was working full-time, or whether she should hang on at her parents’ house and save up for a while first. This whole conversation made me a little sad, partly because I was limping my way through an online bachelor’s degree in communications at the University of Phoenix and not enjoying it very much, and partly because Sydney, for all her outward craziness, had a pretty clear plan for what she wanted to do with her life. Finish her certificate, get some experience at a local salon, and then open her own place, preferably in much ritzier Sedona, where she could earn a lot more.

  Whereas I…well, I couldn’t even do the one thing that was expected of me, and get a consort in place before my next birthday.

  I must have let out a sigh, because she stopped abruptly and laid an encouraging hand on my arm. “It will be fine,” she said. “I know you’re bummed because it didn’t work out with this last guy. But you know, I’ve been thinking about it, and maybe you guys have been going about this all wrong.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, your aunt is doing all this work finding guys from other clans or whatever, but maybe that’s not where you should be looking. Maybe the answer has been under your nose all this time.”

  “If you’re suggesting Adam — ” I began in warning tones, and she shook her head at once.

  “I’m not stupid. Of course I know he isn’t the one, or the guy, or whatever you call him.”

  “The consort,” I said wearily. Stupid name, really. Made me sound like the Queen of England or something instead of some girl from Jerome, Arizona. Anyway, Adam McAllister was my third cousin once removed. Or maybe it was twice removed. I could never keep that stuff straight. He was two years older than I, and had been convinced from the time he was seventeen and I was fifteen that we should be together, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. That is, I wasn’t attracted to him, and even if I were, it didn’t matter, because he’d goaded me into a “test kiss” not long after my eighteenth birthday, and absolutely nothing happened. Definitely not consort material.

  “Right, the consort.” Sydney finished off the rest of the tempranillo in her glass and looked wistful for a second or two, then perked up, as if realizing more would be on the way once we got to Main Street. “Anyway, you’ve been hiding yourself away…barely even talked to a guy during high school…just because you thought this mythical person was going to show up and put the glass slipper on your foot or something. But maybe he’s actually right here in Cottonwood!”

  “I doubt it,” I replied. “The prima almost always marries someone from her own clan, or at least a clan her own is connected to by marriage or treaty. They don’t go around marrying….” I trailed off; I didn’t want to insult her by calling anyone not in one of the witch clans a “civilian.”

  “Normal people?” she finished for me. “But you said ‘almost always.’ So there’ve been exceptions, right?”

  “A few. But it doesn’t happen very often.”

  “It doesn’t have to happen often, just now. So maybe that’s why you haven’t met him, because you’ve been looking in all the wrong places.”

  It didn’t sound right, but I didn’t know for sure that she was wrong, either. And at this point I was willing to try just about anything. The regular process sure wasn’t working for me.

  “Okay,” I said, and finished my wine as well. “I’ll give it a try. Let’s go to Main Stage and see if we can find my Prince Charming.”

  At first glance, Main Stage seemed about the last place where I would bump into the man of my dreams. Not that there was anything wrong with the club itself; it was actually pretty classy inside, with its dark walls and low couches and tall vases filled with tree branches accented with white fairy lights. It was definitely not a crummy cowboy honky-tonk or anything like that. But face it, with a population of barely 12,000 people, Cottonwood didn’t exactly boast a large pool of possible candidates.

  Even so, I couldn’t help scanning the crowd there, trying to see if there was anyone who remotely fit the bill of prospective future consort. Not anything too promising at the moment; I saw a few hipster-looking guys nursing cheap beers, and the requisite number of barflies sitting at the counter. You’d think they were too old for a place like this, but I supposed Main Stage was just another stop on their tour of the local watering holes.

  I let out a sigh, and Sydney poked me in the arm. “Oh, come on — the band doesn’t start for another twenty minutes, and I bet that’s when people will really start showing up. Let me buy you a drink.”

  “You don’t have to do that — ”

  “I know I don’t have to. I want to. You can buy the next round if you want.”

  “All right,” I replied, and followed her over to the bar.

  Of course the men sitting there gave her the hairy eyeball, despite most of them being old enough to be her father. She ignored them, and asked the bartender for a couple of glasses of wine. Usually when we went out, Sydney stuck to mixed drinks, but since we’d already had wine with dinner, she appeared to be playing it safe. I had a feeling she didn’t want to repeat the experience of her own twenty-first birthday, when she’d mixed everything but the kitchen sink and then spent half the night throwing up all those mojitos
and martinis and beers and tequila shots.

  “Here,” she said, and handed me a glass. “I see a free table over there — let’s snag it before it gets too crowded in here.”

  I nodded and headed for the table in question. It had four chairs around it, which I guessed we didn’t need. I draped my purse’s strap over the empty seat next to the one I took, and Sydney sat down next to me.

  “To fate,” she said, and lifted her glass.

  “To fate,” I repeated, although I wasn’t sure if fate had been particularly friendly to me lately. Still, I supposed it never hurt to offer a libation to the gods and hope they might be listening.

  The wine wasn’t as good as what we’d had with dinner, but it would do. At the rate Sydney was gulping hers, she’d be done before I got halfway through my own glass.

  “Hey, there’s Anthony!” She set down her wine and started waving. “Anthony! Over here!”

  So much for her irritation at me inviting him along. I looked where she was waving and saw that Anthony wasn’t alone, that he had someone else with him, a guy around my age, maybe a few years older.

  Tall…dark-haired…. I couldn’t see the color of his eyes because of the dim lighting in the building, but even so my heart began to beat a little faster. No way it could be this easy….

  “Hi,” Anthony said as he approached the table. “This is Perry. I figured you wouldn’t mind if I brought a friend, so we wouldn’t turn out lopsided.”

  “No, that’s great,” Sydney said at once, giving me a significant look. “I’m Sydney, and this is Angela. Hi.”

  “Hi,” Perry said, his gaze shifting toward me.

  I found my voice. “Hi,” I replied. “Um, let me get that purse off that chair — ”

  “It’s cool,” he said. “Looks like you two have already got your drinks, so my man Anthony and I’ll go get our own and be back in a few.”

  “Okay,” Sydney and I said together, and the guys grinned and then headed off toward the bar.