Right then I almost wished her ghost had taken to haunting that tricky curve partway down the mountain. Then at least I could have gone to her and demanded some real information. But apparently she’d seen no reason to stick around. Her spirit was long gone, and I’d have to find my own answers.
“Another thing,” I began, and the setting sun flashed off Connor’s teeth as he grinned.
“Just one?”
“Well, I figured I’d start with this one.”
He gave a slight nod of acknowledgment, so I went on,
“I’m also trying to figure out what his game was.”
“Game?”
I shifted in my seat and glanced up at him, wondering if he was being disingenuous. “Come on, Connor — think about it. Supposedly he was engaged to Marie, and yet he dumped her for some unknown reason, went to California, and just magically met the runaway McAllister who was supposed to be the next prima…before she chickened out and disappeared.”
“Okay, if you put it that way….” Even so, he shrugged, then pushed the visor up and out of the way. The sun was low enough now that the visor wasn’t doing him much good. “Maybe things weren’t working out with Marie, so he took off.”
“Do people in your family have a history of taking off and going to California?”
“Well, no.”
“It’s almost as if he knew who my mother was, even if the reverse wasn’t true.”
“I think that may be stretching it a bit.”
I wasn’t so sure. After all, what were the odds that two members of warring witch clans would meet so far from home? Pretty high, even if witches had a way of sensing others with similar powers. “And what about Marie?” I asked.
“What about her?”
“Do you think she’ll talk to us about Andre?”
At that question he did look away from the road and over at me, frowning slightly. The last reddish light of the sun painted the outline of his profile, making him look like some god who’d condescended to share a ride with me. His next words, however, were far from godlike. “Oh, yeah, I’m sure she’ll be plenty happy to tell us everything about the guy who dumped her more than twenty years ago.”
“I’m not asking as if she’d be happy — I’m asking if she would do it.”
For a long moment he didn’t say anything. Then, finally, “I honestly don’t know.”
* * *
We didn’t talk much the rest of the way, each of us absorbed in our thoughts as the long dusk finally gave way to night and a thin yellow crescent moon rose above the mesa to our right. By the time we pulled off at the 260 and began heading toward Cottonwood, I could feel my stomach protesting its current empty state. We stopped at the Denny’s in town because there wasn’t much else open at that hour, and ordered some burgers. After that it was back up the winding road to Jerome, back to the quiet Victorian house waiting for us on the hill.
By then I was completely exhausted, and it seemed that Connor was, too, because we fell into bed and only held each other, too tired for anything else. My sleep was heavy, deep and dark, quiet, until I heard a keening sound and realized it was the sound of gulls. Below that came the deep rhythmic murmur of the ocean crashing against the shore.
Well, I’d just come from the beach, so I supposed it wasn’t so odd that it had invaded my dreams as well. The image in my mind brightened, almost as if the sun was coming up over the water. But no, that had to be wrong, because in Newport the sun set over the ocean, not the other way around.
Not that dreams had to make any sense, of course.
Someone was walking down the beach, her loose hair whipping in the wind. As she got closer, I saw that she was slender, although her belly was rounded, in the later stages of pregnancy.
My mother.
I’d often wished I would dream of her. When I was younger, I used to sit and stare at the one picture of her my aunt kept on her desk, thinking that if I looked at my mother’s face long enough, memorizing her features and how they were similar to mine, then she’d have to appear in my dreams. She would come and talk to me, tell me she missed me and loved me. That never happened, though.
But she was here now. As she stopped a few feet away from me, I realized our eyes were nearly level. So I was dreaming this as my now-self, and not the wistful little girl I used to be.
“I’ve been waiting for you a long time,” I said.
“I know.” Her hand dropped to the curve of her belly, and she smiled. She was wearing a loose jumper-style dress with a T-shirt underneath it, and Mary Jane–style Doc Martens. Looking at her, I realized she was exactly the same age I was now.
In a way, it was eerie to watch her, to see in her face my own straight little nose and arched brows, the rather wide mouth. My hair was darker, my eyes brilliant emerald where hers were bright blue, but anyone seeing us in that moment would have thought we were sisters.
“Why did you come here?” I asked.
“Here?” she asked vaguely, looking around.
“California.”
“We’re not really in California, you know.”
I’d had these sorts of circular conversations in dreams before, so I knew the best thing to do was press on. “It looks like California. Close enough.”
“I wanted to see the ocean.”
“And that’s the only reason?’
Her dreamy expression cleared, and the look she gave me was almost sharp. “You of all people should know why I wanted to get out of Jerome.”
“I should?”
“Are you happy, being prima?”
The question took me aback. I hadn’t ever really stopped to think about it that way. Not that I’d had much of a chance to stop and think about anything, what with how crazy my life had been for the past six months. I was certainly happy with Connor, but that happiness wasn’t dependent on my being prima. In fact, things would have been a lot less complicated if I had just turned out to be your ordinary garden-variety witch.
“I don’t think it’s a question of being happy,” I said slowly. “It’s what I was born for, so…I guess I’m settling into it.”
“Rachel trained you well,” she remarked. “Making sure you were raised to be a good little prima. That wasn’t me.”
I didn’t bother to hide the bitterness in my voice. “Apparently not, since you took off at the first opportunity.”
“As I said, it wasn’t me. Their expectations were crushing me.”
“So you just left? And what about me? Having a baby was just something you did for kicks, like going to look at the ocean?”
In real life, she probably would have taken offense. In my dream, though, she only looked away from me, at the sun rising in the wrong place. “No. I wanted you. Or at least I thought I wanted you. Until….”
“Until you found out my father was really a Wilcox, and not whatever he told you?” A far braver question than I would have asked if she’d really been standing there in front of me. But I guessed that my subconscious understood this wasn’t real, and had decided to go for broke.
“Would you want a child of a Wilcox?” she asked frankly, blue eyes wide with guileless curiosity.
“I’m having the child of a Wilcox,” I pointed out. As I replied, I suddenly felt heavy, oddly off-balance, and I looked down to see that my belly was nearly as rounded as my mother’s.
“Unfortunately,” she said, laying a hand on my swollen midsection. Then, almost off-handedly, she added, “You might want to get that looked at.”
Then she was gone, disappearing as neatly as the ghostly Maisie or Mary Mullen ever had. I stood there on the beach, feeling the unaccustomed heaviness of late pregnancy. Something about that odd west-rising sun compelled me, and I began to walk into the water, hardly seeming to notice as it came up to my knees, then my waist, then my chest, and finally my mouth. Cool black surrounded me, and suffocated me, and I drifted away with the tide, letting it take me.
* * *
An urgent hand on my arm. “An
gela. Angela!” Connor’s voice.
I blinked, taking in the blackness of the space around me, my eyes gradually adjusting to see the faint glow of moonlight coming in from the window across the room. “Wha?” I said groggily.
“You were breathing really hard, gasping, almost like something was choking you.” He was turned toward me, leaning on one elbow as he watched me with worried eyes. “Bad dream?”
“Sort of,” I replied. My face felt oddly chilled, so I reached up to touch my cheek, only to find both it and my mouth wet, as if someone had splashed water on me. What the…? I wiped the moisture away, telling myself it could’ve been saliva. But I’d never been much of a drooler, and my skin was wet enough that it would’ve required a Great Dane to create that much slobber.
Walking into the black water, letting it rise up and over my head….
I shivered, and at once Connor was reaching out to me, taking me in his arms and holding me close. “Jesus, you’re freezing,” he said. “It’s not even cold.”
And it wasn’t. Late May and June were some of the warmest months in these parts, until the monsoon rains came with their blessed moisture and much-welcomed cloud cover. We almost always got a cool breeze at night in Jerome, but even so, the temperature in the room was probably in the low 70s.
“I dreamed,” I began, then shook my head. “It’s silly.”
“What?” When I didn’t answer, he brushed his lips against my hair and said quietly, “Angela, you’re the prima here. Even if you’re not a seer, even if you don’t necessarily have visions, your dreams still can be important.”
What he said was true, but I wasn’t sure I really wanted to acknowledge that fact. It would mean that in my dream I’d slipped into the astral plane, had left my body to walk in that otherworld. Events that happened there could affect one’s corporeal body, or so I’d been told. Until now, though, I’d never experienced that kind of psychic travel. What did it mean?
“And your hair is damp,” he added, sounding quite matter-of-fact, as if these sorts of things happened every day. Maybe they did in the Wilcox family. He’d never given me a great deal of detail on how Marie’s second sight really worked.
“I dreamed that I was talking to my mother, and she was pregnant with me. Then she left, and I walked into the ocean. Just walked straight into it, like I wanted to drown.”
For a few seconds he was silent, apparently processing this latest revelation. “And you woke up all damp, as if you really had gotten wet.”
“Yes.” Despite the warmth of his embrace, my teeth began to chatter, and I realized the tank top I wore was sticking wetly to my body. True, that could’ve been sweat, but it wasn’t quite warm enough in there for me to have been perspiring that much. “I need to get out of this top,” I told him.
He let go at once. I pushed off the covers and slid out of bed, then went to the dresser and got a clean top. As I pulled it on and tugged it down to mostly cover my underwear, my hand slid against my belly. Maybe the slightest roundness there, which could have had just as much to do with the enormous burger I’d eaten too soon before going to bed than the baby, which still couldn’t be much bigger than a fingernail at this point.
My mother’s words came back to me. You might want to get that looked at.
After locating a hair elastic on the dresser’s top and tugging my damp hair back into it, I turned to Connor. “I think we need to get that doctor’s appointment lined up as soon as possible.”
* * *
Whether any magical strings were pulled, I didn’t know for sure, but that Friday I was in Flagstaff at the office of Dr. Ruiz, the ob-gyn several of Connor’s cousins had recommended. I decided to leave aside the improbability of getting an appointment at all on the Friday before a long weekend, let alone with a highly in-demand doctor, and just be glad that I wouldn’t be left to stew over the holiday as to whether my baby was okay or not.
The medical assistant asked if I wanted Connor in the room with me while they did the ultrasound, and of course I said yes. This was the part that scared me the most — logically I knew it was just a baby and that everything should be fine at this point — but damn straight I was going to have Connor at my side as I got the first true confirmation that the baby was real. Okay, yes, I’d done the home pregnancy test, and had it confirmed at Planned Parenthood, but that wasn’t the same thing as hearing your baby’s heartbeat for the first time.
Dr. Ruiz was probably in her early forties, with her dark hair cut in the kind of sleek bob I envied because I knew I could never get my own half wavy/half curly hair to do anything that controlled. She also seemed always calm, always unhurried, even though her waiting room was full and she had to be chomping at the bit to get out of there and start her own long weekend…most likely praying that none of her patients would go into labor while she was attending a barbecue.
Probably because mine was a very low-risk pregnancy, she’d decided a transvaginal ultrasound wasn’t necessary at this stage. I lay there in a pink paper examination robe while she poured cold goo on my stomach and then began the procedure. Connor stood next to me, holding my hand.
“Okay,” she said, peering at the monitor as she moved the ultrasound wand slowly over my belly, “the baby looks good, just about the right size and in the right position. And there’s the heartbeat. Nice and strong.” But then she paused, a line appearing between her brows as she frowned.
“What is it?” I asked, worry pulsing like ice through my veins. “Is something wrong?” Connor’s fingers tightened around mine, but he didn’t say anything, just stood there, waiting.
“Just a sec….” She was moving the sensor back and forth over my belly, her dark eyes intent on the screen. “Wait…got it!”
“Got what?” I asked, thinking, Are there any congenital birth defects in the Wilcox family? No, that’s crazy…I’ve met most of them…they’re all fine….
Sometimes it would be really nice if I could just get my brain to shut up.
The worry line disappeared, and she smiled at us. “Well, you two are going to have your hands full. It looks like you’re carrying twins, Angela.”
“Twins?” I said blankly.
“Yes. One is mostly hidden by the other, so it’s hard to see right now. But look there.” She pointed at a blot on the ultrasound screen. To me it just looked like a paler blip against an amorphous darkness, with the faintest little trace of…something…behind it.
“That’s our baby…our babies?” I asked, reflecting it was a good thing I’d never had a burning desire to be an ultrasound technician. I had a feeling I wouldn’t have been very good at it.
“Yes. They look about the same size, which is good. And this explains why some of your blood test results came back so high. The hormones in your bloodstream are elevated because you’re carrying two babies, not one.”
“But everything else is okay?” Connor asked. His expression was, in a word, gobsmacked. Not that I could blame him. One baby was enough to handle, but twins?
“Perfectly okay,” Dr. Ruiz assured him. “They’re a good size, and their heartbeats are strong, in the 116 to 118 range. No reason why they shouldn’t be — Angela is a very healthy young woman.” Her gaze flicked back to me. “But because you’re carrying twins, you need to make sure you’re eating enough to properly nourish both of them — ”
“That’s not a problem,” Connor remarked with a grin. “She’s been eating her weight lately.”
I shot him a mock-severe glare, but Dr. Ruiz merely said, “That’s good to hear, although you should be putting on more weight than you are. Worry about losing the baby weight after you have the babies.”
Babies. Plural. It was such an alien concept that I still wasn’t sure exactly how to process it.
“I’ll do my best,” I told her. “But Connor’s right. I’ve been eating just about anything that isn’t nailed down. I’ve always had a fast metabolism, though.”
“Okay, we’ll keep an eye on it.” She turned to t
he medical assistant, who’d been hovering in the background during the procedure. “Lora, let’s have Angela back here in three weeks.”
That sounded like an awfully long time to go between appointments. I must have looked dubious, because the doctor went on, “Everything’s going well, so I don’t see any need to make you come in before that. However, if anything feels off to you, if you have any bleeding or severe nausea or cramps — any of that — call us immediately. Okay?”
I nodded, not liking the sound of that very much. But things did go wrong sometimes, and better to know someone was standing by, ready to dive in, so to speak, in case the unthinkable happened.
After that everyone went out, leaving me alone in the exam room so I could get dressed. As I did so, I tried to keep myself from panicking. Twins. Two babies. Two tiny little people growing inside me. I had no idea how that happened. Twins did not run in the McAllister family. Yes, my cousin Brady and his wife just had twins, but she was the daughter of a twin, and it sounded like they did pop up about every other generation in her family.
I slung my purse over my shoulder and went out to see the receptionist. My next appointment was set for June 12th, and Connor and I walked out of the office into the bright sunshine, both of us a little unsteady on our feet.
It wasn’t until we were on Route 66 and headed toward his apartment that he spoke. “Before you ask, no, twins don’t run in the Wilcox family. I mean, I’m the anomaly because I was born at all, since all the other heirs in Jeremiah’s line were only children. But we really don’t have any twins in the extended family, either.”
“Same with the McAllisters,” I said. Twisting in my seat so I could see him better, I added, “So what do you think it means?”
“I have no idea,” he confessed. “This is where I really wish Marie would get back to me.”
We’d come up to Flagstaff the night before, and Connor had tried calling her, saying he wanted to talk. She hadn’t responded, which, according to him, was strange. Usually she got back to him within the hour when he called.
Darkmoon (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 3) Page 12
