Darkmoon (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 3)

by Christine Pope

  “You know there is nothing to fear,” he told me, every line and hollow in his face etched by the flickering candles inside the house. This time we’d come at night, as he’d instructed, telling us that this sort of work was easier in the quiet, cool hours of the evening.

  Well, “cool” being a relative term. Yes, the sun had gone down and the temperature dropped a bit, but it still had to be hovering around ninety outside.

  “You have spoken with spirits, and know they mean no harm, even the ones who linger here out of fear or anger or resentment,” he went on. “So you may walk amongst them without doubt or worry. But it is easy to get lost there, and so you must always remember your body, waiting here for you. Remember as well that those who love you also wait for you here, and so do not linger.”

  So much for not worrying. But since I certainly couldn’t turn back now, I only nodded, Connor’s hand lying on top of mine, just a gentle pressure to show that he was there. His presence wasn’t enough to distract me, but it was a solid reminder that I was not a being of spirit and shadow, but a young woman who needed to return to her body before too much time had elapsed.

  When Lawrence spoke again, his voice was barely above a whisper. “It is time.”

  I breathed in deeply — not a gasp, but a full, rich breath that seemed to fill my lungs all the way down to the very bottom of my ribcage. Again I was lifting away, leaving the house and its occupants behind, but this time I had a destination. I floated over the dark landscape, the only points of light the highway and the trading post, coming ever closer. Lawrence had suggested that I go there, as it was more than a hundred years old and had its own attendant spirits.

  Moving silently as a ghost myself, I drifted toward the cluster of buildings. The parking lot was empty, save for a few cars belonging to people staying at the motel there; it was now a little after ten o’clock, and everything else was closed up for the night. Not that it mattered. I hadn’t come here in pursuit of the living.

  There was a garden behind one of the buildings, a little oasis shadowed under the half-light of a waning crescent moon. I knew in a few days there would be no moon at all, and although I had no real body, still I shivered.

  Dark shapes moved in the garden, then paused on one of the paths, staring up at me. Again a chill went through me, but I forced myself to keep going, to meet them. This felt very different from chatting up Maisie, with her blonde curls and big blue eyes.

  But as I drew closer, I could see the shapes were those of a man and woman. Probably a mother and son, as she was much older than he. They watched me with hostile dark eyes as I drifted along the pathway to meet them.

  “You are not supposed to be here,” the woman said, her English halting but clear enough. “Your world is that of the living.”

  “True,” I said, glad I could agree with her on that point. “But it’s necessary that I come here to the world of the spirits. I’m looking for a woman named Nizhoni.”

  At that remark, the man and woman looked at one another, and I thought I heard the man chuckle. However, his face was sober enough as he replied, “That is a common name among the Diné. But I know of no one with that name who lingers here with us.”

  Damn. I should’ve known it wouldn’t be that easy. Anyway, Lawrence had said Nizhoni was not an ordinary spirit, tied to one place. Her energy was more powerful, and yet more diffuse, than that. Anyway, if I recalled my history correctly, this place had been built about forty years after she laid down her curse and died. I’d never found out where she was buried, but I assumed it was somewhere in Flagstaff.

  “She would not be here,” I said slowly. “Her people might have come from around here, but I know she passed from this world down in Flagstaff. I’d just hoped that maybe you would have heard of her. She was taken away from here, married to a man named Jeremiah Wilcox.”

  The man and woman exchanged an unreadable look, although something in their stance seemed to indicate fear, mixed with disgust. “Ah,” the woman said at last. “Her people did come from farther up the river, beyond the trading post. But she is not here, and we would not want her.”

  Can’t say as I blame you, I thought. “But if she is not here, do you know where she might be?”

  The woman didn’t reply, but the man lifted his head, looking southward. “Sometimes an ill will blows with the south wind,” he said, somewhat cryptically.

  “So she’s down toward Flagstaff?”

  Again they shared an inscrutable glance. “You should not be here. This is not your place,” the woman said, and although she made no movement, it was as if I felt an invisible hand shoving against my chest, pushing me backward.

  I gasped, not stumbling exactly, but somehow I was now yards away from them, moving faster and faster, the trading post dropping away beneath me. I felt the pull of my body like the weight of a dead star, sucking me downward, and the next thing I knew, I was blinking my eyes open, clutching at Connor’s hand.

  “What’s the matter?” he said at once. “Are you okay?”

  After pulling in a ragged breath, I made myself nod. “Yes, I’m fine. I guess I just didn’t expect to meet resistance like that.”

  “Resistance?” he asked, his tone sharp. “What kind of resistance?”

  I glanced across the room to where Lawrence sat, watching me carefully. Next to him, my father looked on, his expression tense even in the dim flickering light of the candles, but he didn’t say anything.

  “You met the two at the trading post,” Lawrence commented finally. It wasn’t a question.

  “I did. They weren’t exactly what you’d call friendly.”

  “Why should they be? You cannot go into the world of the spirits and expect them all to welcome you, or help you. Did they do anything to hurt you?” His voice was mild, almost uninterested.

  “No, they didn’t hurt me,” I replied. “But they made it pretty clear they didn’t like my question.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Where to find Nizhoni.”

  He laughed a little, perhaps at my naïveté. “Ah, that is something I doubt they would tell you, even if they knew the answer. But they died many years after she did, when her name had become only an echo of malice.”

  “Well, they did tell me one thing,” I said, a little rankled by his amusement. “They made it pretty clear that she wasn’t to be found anywhere around here.”

  “Indeed? Because I’ve already said she’s not to be found anywhere at all.”

  “Maybe. But the man did tell me that an ill wind sometimes blows from the south, by which I assume he must mean Flagstaff. When…when the time comes, it seems logical to try there first.”

  “It is possible. Perhaps we should start from there, then, rather than here.”

  My father looked alarmed. “You mean…go to Flagstaff?”

  “You must face your past sometime,” Lawrence told him. “The time for hiding will soon be over.”

  I could tell my father didn’t like the sound of that at all, but he only nodded, face tight and still. What he was expecting from returning to his hometown, I wasn’t sure. After all, the person who had the most reason to tell him off was gone. Lucas had just texted Connor the day before to say he’d gone by to water her garden, and still no sign of Marie.

  Connor, on the other hand, appeared distinctly relieved that my perilous journey would at least have its starting point on his home turf. “From the house?” he asked.

  Lawrence shook his head. “No. It is too new. We’ll go to your apartment.”

  How he knew about the apartment, I didn’t know. However, it was clear enough that Lawrence knew a good deal he probably shouldn’t. At the moment, I was just glad that we hadn’t yet handed the keys over to Mason.

  And, like Connor, I was relieved I wouldn’t have to drive all the way out here on the solstice. It would happen at a little past ten o’clock at night three days from now, and blundering around in the darkness of the spirit world seemed infinitely preferable
if that journey could be initiated on familiar territory.

  “Okay, it’s a plan,” I said, trying to sound casual and probably not doing a very good job of it. “So we’ll all meet there on Saturday night, say, around nine?”

  Lawrence’s expression told me he wasn’t fooled by my tone. Luckily, all he did was incline his head ever so slightly, then reply, “We will be there.”

  And that, it seemed, was that.

  16

  Solstice

  Although in the intervening days I attempted to do my out-of-body meditations starting from the apartment, I never got any hint that this Nizhoni was anywhere around Flagstaff. I tried to not let myself be discouraged, but it seemed I should have been able to feel something…anything.

  But I didn’t, although I did make the acquaintance of two rather amusing bootleggers who’d shot each other in the middle of Leroux Street back in 1925. They didn’t seem to hold a grudge, though. Maybe spending eternity in one another’s company had mellowed them somewhat.

  “You’re sure you’ve never seen a young Navajo woman around these parts?” I asked them desperately on Friday night, knowing I was running out of options.

  “Nope,” said the taller of the two spirits, whose name was Isaac Ford. He scratched his thinning hair. “No Injuns.”

  I winced and tried to remind myself that racial sensitivity probably wasn’t too much of a thing in 1920s Flagstaff.

  “Me, neither,” said the short, round one, who called himself Clay Wilkins. “I’d remember.” He not-quite leered at me. “We don’t get enough pretty girls that we won’t remember the ones we do see.”

  Of that I had little doubt. He seemed like just the sort of ghost to pull the covers off attractive tourists as they slept in one of the nearby hotels. The problem was that, in the spirit world, I didn’t have a lot of choices when it came to finding someone willing to talk to me. I couldn’t force them — either they’d come to me naturally, or they wouldn’t. At least I hadn’t yet come up with a way to compel them to make contact.

  Since these two didn’t seem as if they were going to be of much assistance, I thought maybe I should try the second part of my plan on them, of convincing them it was time to move on. After all, I’d done a pretty good job of it with Mary Mullen.

  “Have you two ever thought that maybe you’ve stayed around here long enough?” I inquired. “There’s a whole new existence waiting for you in the next world. Staying stuck here can’t be that much fun.”

  “Will there be pretty girls in the next world?” Clay responded.

  Good question. “Um…probably,” I hedged.

  Isaac Ford shot a stream of brown tobacco juice out of one side of his mouth — luckily, the side farthest away from me. Don’t ask me how a spirit can spit tobacco. Just one of the afterlife’s little mysteries, I supposed. “But you don’t know for sure.”

  “Well, no.”

  “Then I’m stayin’ here,” Clay said, and Isaac nodded.

  “Yup. Why mess with a sure thing? I know there are pretty girls here.”

  “But — ”

  My protest died on my lips, because at that point they both tipped their hats to me and faded away — off to look for half-drunk pretty girls roaming the streets of downtown Flagstaff. It was a mild Friday night in June, so that probably wouldn’t be too difficult.

  I came out of that “spirit walk” frowning, and Connor peered at me, concerned. “You okay?”

  “Fine,” I said curtly, then relented. “I don’t know. I’m not feeling very optimistic. I mean, if I can’t get a couple of horny bootleggers to move on to the next world, how can I possibly handle this Nizhoni person?”

  “Horny?” Connor repeated, looking bemused. “How can spirits be horny?”

  “You don’t want to know,” I told him, and after taking a closer look at my face, he must have decided it wasn’t worth pressing the issue, because he took me home shortly afterward.

  * * *

  On Saturday we returned to the apartment around seven-thirty in the evening, since we’d decided to fortify ourselves with some tapas before Lawrence and my father showed up. I didn’t want to call it my last meal, because I thought that would be jinxing things before we even got started, but I couldn’t help feeling as if our little feast might be that very thing. Instead, I called it Connor’s birthday dinner, promising him that we’d do something more festive after…well, afterward. In fact, I made something of a show of getting us reservations the following evening at the Cottage, his favorite restaurant in town. All perfectly normal.

  Whether he saw through my pretense, I wasn’t sure, but he didn’t comment, only said that sounded great and it was only a birthday, nothing to get that fussed about.

  It had been sort of tricky, getting the chance to be here in the apartment, since both the Wilcox and the McAllister clans had solstice observances that they wanted us to attend, and Lucas had made some noises about a birthday celebration for Connor afterward. That wouldn’t work at all, of course, as we couldn’t possibly be anywhere except here. Pregnancy, however, allows you all sorts of built-in excuses for getting out of social events. Connor simply put it out there on the respective family grapevines that I was having stomach issues just short of projectile vomiting, and that closed down the matter pretty quickly. Never mind that, except for my adverse reactions to the smell of coffee, I was probably having the most nausea-free pregnancy on record. Luckily, we hadn’t really been spending that much time around most of our family members, except Lucas, and so no one found anything particularly odd about the excuse.

  So we ate mostly in silence, each of us brooding about what lay ahead. I did make Connor let me have half a glass of wine. That little surely couldn’t do any irreparable harm, and if I wasn’t coming back from this journey into the otherworld, then I wanted a few last sips of malbec to accompany me to the afterlife. I know, I really shouldn’t have been thinking that way, but it was how I felt.

  We’d had to eat off paper plates, since of course all of the dishes were at the new house. There wasn’t much clean-up to be done. After the last bit of trash had been shoved into the garbage can under the sink, Connor turned around and regarded me gravely.

  “It’s not too late — ” he began, and I went to him and laid two fingers against his lips, hushing him.

  “I’m not backing out now,” I said, raising my hand from his mouth. Oh, that mouth. As anxious as I was, the touch of his lips against my skin still sent warm little thrills all through me. How I wished it were just another night here, and that we could go upstairs and make slow, languorous love in the king-size bed. But this wasn’t our home anymore, not really, and besides, Lawrence and my father would be here soon.

  “I know,” Connor said, resigned. “You get this lift to your chin when you have your mind set on something, and you definitely have it now. It’s just….” He let the words die away, and I wrapped my arms around him, pressing my face into his chest, breathing in the warm masculine smell of him, soap and the slightest tinge of clean sweat, and something beneath that, something comforting that had to be the scent of his skin.

  “It’ll be fine,” I told him, knowing I was trying to convince myself just as much as I was attempting to convince him.

  “I’m trying to make myself believe that.”

  Just as I opened my mouth to reply, I heard a knock at the door, and knew it was my father and Lawrence. I disentangled myself from Connor’s arms, saying, “Showtime.”

  His mouth compressed, but he only nodded and went to the door. The two men stood outside, both wearing their usual loose-fitting light-colored shirts, my father in the inevitable cargo pants, Lawrence in Wranglers so faded I had to wonder if they were older than I was. My father held a small linen bag in one hand.

  “Come in,” Connor told them, his voice tight.

  I smiled at them as they entered and asked, “Do you want something to drink? We have bottled water, and there’s some cold tea — ”

  “Water lat
er,” Lawrence said. “But first we need to prepare the space.”

  “Um…prepare the space?”

  In reply, my father drew a sage smudge stick out of the bag. “We weren’t sure if Connor had cleansed the place lately.”

  Try ever, I thought. Smudging was something we McAllisters did a lot, but one thing I’d noticed about the Wilcox clan was that they didn’t seem to follow too many of the old ways, except for observing the solstice celebrations.

  “No, I haven’t,” Connor said, looking embarrassed, although I wasn’t sure if his embarrassment was due to the fact that he’d never done such a thing, or because he couldn’t believe the other two men had suggested doing it in the first place.

  But they were deadly serious, and so we spent the next twenty minutes or so following them from room to room as Lawrence chanted quietly in Navajo, touching the smudge stick to the four points of each chamber, tracing symbols I didn’t recognize above each window and doorway. By the time they were done, it was only a few minutes before ten. I could feel my pulse begin to race when I realized what time it was. Not good. I needed to be calm, in control.

  “It is time,” Lawrence said at last. “Where in this place do you feel most comfortable?”

  I was inclined to tell them it was upstairs in bed with Connor, but I had a feeling that wouldn’t go over very well. “In the living room,” I replied. That wasn’t even a lie. We’d spent lots of good moments in the living room, including a few memorable ones on the rug in front of the fireplace.

  Probably not a good idea to bring that up, either.

  Lawrence directed me to sit on the couch, with Connor beside me. That was good; I didn’t think Lawrence would separate us, not after we’d spent so much time with me practicing the meditations in Connor’s company, but my anxiety kept ratcheting up and up, and right then I really didn’t know what to expect.