witches of cleopatra hill 06 - spellbound

by Pope, Christine

  “Forgive me for not getting up,” he said. In contrast to his frail appearance, his voice was still deep and resonant. “These old bones of mine don’t always want to cooperate some days.”

  “Oh, it’s fine,” Danica said at once. “Thank you for seeing me.”

  “Well, after my great-grandniece told me what you wanted to talk about, I knew I must speak with you.” The old man’s gaze flicked up at Andre. “We’ll probably need some water.”

  Andre smiled and disappeared through a door in the far wall, presumably on his way to the kitchen. Lawrence gestured toward the sofa. “Go ahead — sit down.”

  Danica did as instructed, setting her purse on the floor beside her. Although she’d wanted to talk to Lawrence, now that she was here, she couldn’t quite think of how to phrase her request. Too often, subjects that sounded reasonable enough in her own mind turned into outright lunacy when she had to utter them out loud.

  Luckily, Andre returned then with a couple of glasses of water. He set one down on the coffee table in front of Danica, then put the other on the TV tray next to the chair where Lawrence sat.

  “Thank you,” Lawrence said. “But I think Danica here would like to speak in confidence now. Andre, maybe you could go next door for a little while.”

  Andre didn’t appear at all annoyed to be dismissed so summarily after playing chauffeur. “Not a problem. I wanted to go through my supplies and get some more stone rough for cutting anyway. I’ll knock when I’m done and see if you’re ready.”

  He offered Danica an encouraging smile, then let himself out.

  She wished she felt encouraged. She glanced over at Lawrence, who was sitting quietly, dark gaze fixed on her. It seemed pretty obvious that he intended to wait until she spoke.

  “Well, um….” she began, then paused, not sure where she should begin.

  Come on, she chided herself. You made Andre drive you all the way out here, so get on with it already.

  “I suppose Angela told you about the ghost?”

  “She did.”

  “And she told you about my talent?”

  “Something of it. She was somewhat startled, because she’d never heard of such a thing before.” He’d been leaning forward slightly, but he settled back into his chair, letting out the slightest grunt as if the shift in position pained him. “Truthfully, Danica, I’ve never heard of a gift like that, either, although the magic of my people is different from the magic of your witch clans. But this must mean something.”

  Yeah, she thought. It means I’m a freak, even in a clan of witches.

  But she didn’t say anything, only nodded and hoped that she looked appropriately expectant and hopeful.

  “For you to have seen this spirit when no one else has…this means something as well. Especially when speaking with ghosts is not your particular talent.” Lawrence nodded to himself, and his black eyes, almost buried in wrinkles, glinted as a notion appeared to occur to him. “But when we speak of time, these things become more complicated. Time is a construct we place on the universe, so we can understand it. But the universe does not need time.”

  “It doesn’t?” Danica responded, hoping she didn’t look too puzzled. She’d taken enough physics courses to figure out her brain didn’t really work that way. Even if getting an advanced degree in physics might have impressed her parents, following in her cousin Damon’s footsteps when it came to a career choice probably wasn’t going to happen. Instead, she’d switched her major to biology. She still wasn’t sure what she would do with the degree…not that it mattered, since it didn’t look as if she’d be finishing up that bachelor’s anytime soon.

  Anyway, it sounded as if Lawrence was about to launch into the sort of quantum discussion that tended to make her feel as if her brain was about to cave in. But if that was what it took to make her talent do something new and unexpected….

  “Time is a human construct,” Lawrence said. “Which is fine. We need that order in our lives. But the universe doesn’t necessarily see time as something linear. And you’ll need to see it as something more than that, if you truly wish to go to this man’s time and right this wrong.” He stopped then and seemed to study her face, as if attempting to determine whether she actually believed a wrong had been committed.

  “I do,” she said quietly. “That is, I know something terrible happened to him. I went up into the woods yesterday, and I — I found his grave. No one would have buried a man out in the forest like that if they weren’t trying to cover it up.”

  “Ah.” For a few seconds, Lawrence was silent, expression abstracted. “This is a terrible thing, and it is good of you to attempt to make it right. But do you understand — truly understand — what it will take to accomplish this task?”

  Danica shook her head. Of course she didn’t. Time travel, and ghosts, and ancient murders — she had no idea what she was getting herself into. But then in her mind’s eye, she saw the stranger’s face, the sorrow there, and she realized she didn’t care that she was stepping off the deep end. She had to save him, no matter what.

  “How could I?” she asked, but not in a confrontational way. She just wanted Lawrence to know that she was way out of her depth here.

  He smiled. His teeth were very white, but oversized. Danica wondered if they were false.

  “Of course you can’t. This is good. If you had said you did understand, I would worry, because then you would be overconfident, and that can be dangerous. So,” he went on, and again she caught that glint in his black eyes, “show me this talent of yours.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How does it work?”

  “Well….” Really, there wasn’t anything that spectacular about it. She’d look up at the clock in her room, or the time display on her phone, think, I really need that five minutes now, and then she’d just sort of have it. She could finish blow-drying her hair or putting on her makeup or whatever, and when she was done, the clock wouldn’t have moved, and the display wouldn’t have changed.

  She explained all that to Lawrence as best she could, and he nodded. “Good. Do it now. Take your five minutes to go next door to talk to Andre.”

  That felt strange, since usually she took her five minutes in private, someplace where people weren’t around to see that something odd had just occurred in their universe. Technically, though, time should seem to be passing normally for Andre, as long as she was with him.

  Or would it?

  Only one way to find out.

  I need my five minutes.

  The clock on the wall behind Lawrence stopped ticking. The swamp cooler continued to hum away, though, so it wasn’t as if everything around her had been halted completely. Danica got up from the couch and went out the door, blinking against the glaring sunlight and wishing she’d thought to grab her sunglasses before she headed outside. She squinted as best she could and went over to the other house, which apparently had been Andre’s, and where some of his belongings still remained.

  He answered the door only a few seconds after she knocked. Looking down at her in some surprise, he asked, “Is everything all right?”

  “I don’t know yet,” she said. “I guess we’ll find out in a few minutes.”

  Her reply only seemed to puzzle him that much more, but he did step aside so she could enter the house. This place seemed much better furnished, and Danica wondered why Lawrence hadn’t moved in here, if Andre wasn’t using the place anymore. But maybe he liked his shabby old stuff.

  “It’s my talent,” she explained after Andre had closed the door. “I’m using my five minutes. It looks as if you’re experiencing them with me, because I’m with you, but Lawrence shouldn’t even be able to tell that any time has passed.”

  Surprisingly, Andre didn’t appear too confused by her remark. He nodded, saying, “Angela had mentioned you had some sort of gift of time, but she didn’t go into any details.”

  “There’s not much to tell. I get five minutes whenever I need them.”

  �
��And only five minutes? Nothing more?”

  “Not as far as I can tell.”

  He seemed to consider that response, then asked, “What if you, I don’t know, stacked them up against each other so you could make up even more time?”

  She’d honestly never tried that, because having just five minutes had saved her ass on multiple occasions. Besides, she’d always been taught that a talent was a talent. If your talent was changing the direction of the wind, then you couldn’t alter it to summon tornadoes, and if your skill lay in conjuring illusions, you couldn’t suddenly make those illusions become real.

  Then again, Angela had managed to shift her talent into something more, partly because of Lawrence’s guidance. It could also have something to do with her growing prima power, or the way that power had joined with Connor’s primus energy. No one had been able to say definitively for sure, and no one had done any real investigation. That had been Damon’s area of expertise…exploring witch powers, analyzing them, using them to create spells no one else had ever heard of.

  But Damon was gone, and she would have to figure this one out on her own. Well, not completely on her own. She had Lawrence to help her, and even if Angela couldn’t offer any real assistance in terms of figuring out how to stretch that five minutes to a hundred years or more, she did seem willing to keep her mouth shut about Danica’s activities. The only way her parents would ever find out was if Danica herself told them.

  And that’s not going to happen, she thought. At least not until all this is over.

  Andre was watching her with some curiosity, and so she shrugged. “No, I haven’t ever tried stretching out those five minutes. Maybe I will, to do…what I’m planning to do. But right now I’m just showing Lawrence how the basics work.”

  “Got it.” He glanced over his shoulder, toward a short hallway that connected the front room with the rest of the house. “I’m still sorting through my samples, but if you want to come along, you’re welcome.”

  Danica pulled her phone out of her jeans pocket. Best guess, she had about three more minutes to kill. “Okay.”

  So she followed him into what had once been a bedroom but now appeared to be a kind of workshop. Or at least it looked as if it once was a workshop; long tables lined the walls, but they were mostly bare, except for what looked like scars left from slips of a drill, and the odd burn mark here and there. But a few plastic bins still sat on the one table under the window, and some pieces of rough stone had been carefully laid out on the table’s surface in front of them. Danica guessed that was the rough Andre had mentioned before he went out.

  “So,” she said, as he went over and began sifting through the contents of one of the bins. “You cut and polish all your own stuff?”

  “Most of it,” he replied, lifting a greenish stone so he could hold it up near the window, in the light. “I always get a better feel for what a piece wants to be when I start from rough. Every once in a while I’ll trade one of the stones I’ve polished for one from a friend, but that doesn’t happen too often.”

  “That’s cool.” Then she wanted to wince. Did she have to sound so…banal? Problem was, she really didn’t know that much about jewelry-making, although she’d gotten the impression that Andre made a good bit of money from his work, that it had made its way into some of the higher-end shops in Flagstaff and Sedona.

  He didn’t seem to note the inanity of her reply, though, but only continued to work, setting pieces aside, occasionally stopping to put them in a leather bag he’d placed off to one side of the worktable.

  Wanting to redeem herself, Danica asked, “Where do you get the rough? Do you mine that, too?”

  A quick grin. In the flash of that smile, she caught something of the resemblance between father and daughter, although otherwise she wouldn’t have said that Angela and Andre looked all that much alike. “No, I trade for it, or go to local gem shows. Although this past year I was able to go to the Tucson gem show for the first time. That was a little mind-blowing. I had no idea it was so huge.”

  Danica had only vaguely heard of the gem show, but she guessed it had to be an eye-opener, if only because it probably was the first time Andre had ventured so far afield from Wilcox territory. No, wait…that wasn’t right. He’d gone to California to meet Angela’s mother. But it still was most likely his first time going that far since his self-imposed exile out here in Navajo territory.

  “It’s great you were able to go,” Danica said. “So much has changed….”

  And she trailed off then, because she realized how much really had changed since Angela broke the curse. Big things, like the Wilcoxes never having to suffer through the loss of another primus’s wife, with all its resulting tragedy, and small ones, like being able to travel to a gem show in another clan’s territory. And everything in between, like her own sister being married to a McAllister. If someone had told Danica a few years ago that her future brother-in-law was going to be a member of the Jerome witch clan, she would have told them to put down the crack pipe.

  “It has,” Andre agreed. “And all for the better.”

  Danica couldn’t argue with that. True, her own life had pretty much gone into the toilet after the Matías incident, but that had nothing to do with the Wilcoxes and the McAllisters. If she wanted to blame anyone, she supposed she could blame herself, since it had been her idea to go to Tucson in the first place. But no, her shrink had said it wasn’t her fault, that she hadn’t done anything wrong for wanting to enjoy spring break. All right, then maybe she should blame Simón Santiago, the nominal head of the witch clan in Southern California, for not warning Maya de la Paz that such a dangerous warlock had crossed over into her territory.

  But what good would blaming Simón do? Done was done. Now Danica only wanted to get past all of that, and focusing on saving her ghost sounded like a pretty good distraction.

  She pulled her phone out of her pocket again and checked the time. A hair past five minutes, which meant time should have started back up again for Lawrence and the rest of the world that wasn’t in this small bubble with her and Andre.

  “Looks like it’s time to head back over,” she said.

  “And what does that mean for me?” he asked. “That is, am I always going to be five minutes ahead of the rest of the world?”

  “No.” It was something that had puzzled her at first as well, although by now she was used to the odd little step out of time she took whenever she used her power. “It’s like…we get this five minutes, and I can see it passing on my phone, but then when it’s up, it’s sort of…up. Like now.” She held up the phone so he could see the display. “A few seconds ago, it said it was 11:42, but now it’s showing as 11:37. We had that five minutes to have our conversation, but now we’ve used it up.”

  “Fascinating.”

  He really did look fascinated, too; his eyebrows were drawn together in thought as he gazed at the time display on her iPhone, and his head was cocked to one side. It felt a little strange to be standing there with him studying her phone like that, so Danica shrugged and said, a little too quickly,

  “Well, I’d better get back to Lawrence.”

  “Sure,” Andre replied. “I’m almost finished with sorting these stones, but if you need more time, just let me know.”

  Time. There was the conundrum. She supposed she could go back over to Lawrence’s cramped little house and ask for another five minutes, then another, and another. Or maybe he wouldn’t want her to do that.

  Only one way to find out. She sent Andre a quick smile and headed back outside, then hurried over to Lawrence’s house. A knock at the door, and he was telling her to come inside. When she entered, she saw that he was gazing up at the dusty clock on the wall, dark eyes speculative.

  “So you had your five minutes, I suppose.”

  “I did.” She hesitated, then asked, “What did it feel like to you?”

  “Nothing. That is, it seems as if you went out that door only a minute ago, but of course it was mo
re than that.”

  “It was.” Danica advanced farther into the room and sat down on the little rush-bottomed chair, since it was closer to the leather one where Lawrence sat than the couch. “But…what am I supposed to do now?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  It felt as if they were speaking in circles…sort of like talking to her former shrink but without all the lying. Swallowing her frustration, Danica said, as evenly as she could, “I want to go back and save him. Whoever he is.”

  Silence for a long moment. The ticking of the clock seemed unnaturally loud, even against the background hum of the swamp cooler. It was dim enough in the room that she couldn’t quite decipher the old man’s expression. Empathy?

  “And are you so certain he is one who should be saved?”

  Well, there was a question. Danica didn’t have a ready answer for it, because she honestly didn’t know for sure. The stranger — the ghost — hadn’t seemed threatening in any way. She hadn’t sensed anything wrong or evil about him, and neither had Angela detected any sign of a negative presence on the property. But how much did that truly mean?

  “I — I think he is.”

  “But you don’t know. You say he was killed on your family’s property. What if your ancestors were merely defending their own against him? You have no way of knowing what happened.”

  No, I don’t, she thought miserably. Not unless I can figure out how to get there and see for myself.

  But even as that thought passed through her mind, she somehow felt the wrongness of Lawrence’s suggestion. This man was good. And, by all accounts, her Wilcox forebears weren’t exactly angels. True, it turned out that Jeremiah had never kidnapped his Navajo wife, had actually loved her, but caring for one person didn’t mean you weren’t still capable of doing some pretty underhanded stuff if it suited your purposes.

  “He was innocent,” she said, her tone firm. “I just know it.”