Protector (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 5)

by Christine Pope

  “It’s not time yet.” That was Matías, his tone clearly irritated.

  The darkness behind her eyelids retreated, and Caitlin saw that the three warlocks were standing in a living room that had all its shabby furniture pushed up against the walls so there was room for the circle they’d drawn on the scarred wooden floor. Jorge and Tomas stood across from Matías, Roslyn between them. Seeing her, Caitlin wished she could scream, could cry out somehow, because that wreck of a person could not be her beautiful, vivacious friend.

  Roslyn’s long dark blonde hair hung lank, looking stringy and somehow thinner, where it had always been lush and full before, the kind of hair you might see in a shampoo commercial. Her arms were so criss-crossed with cuts, some still oozing blood, that Caitlin could barely make out the color of her skin. Shadows hollowed her eyes, and her cheekbones looked too sharp, too pronounced.

  Goddess, what have they been doing to you? Caitlin cried inwardly, but the despair coursing through her wasn’t enough to shut out the vision, and neither could she close down that inner eye so she wouldn’t have to see any more of the wreck of her friend.

  Jorge said, “I thought we were going to alternate. She’s going to be useless real soon.”

  “She’ll still be useful enough.” Matías shifted, bending down to draw a symbol Caitlin didn’t recognize along the edge of the circle. As he did so, she caught sight of Danica, who had been standing next to him. In contrast to Roslyn, who looked as if she’d spent the past two days being death-marched through the desert or worse, Danica appeared more or less unharmed, although her eyes were still glassy and unfocused, a clear sign of still being under Matías’ spell. Her hair was brushed, and it even looked like she might be wearing some mascara and lip gloss.

  Clearly, the dark warlock was saving her for something…but what?

  Tomas and Jorge exchanged a black look, but neither of them said anything. So they were still following Matías’ orders, at least for now.

  He straightened, then went back to Danica and slipped an arm around her waist. She smiled and bent in toward him, nuzzling against his neck. “Say it, mamita,” he told her.

  “I love you, Matías,” she murmured, the words partly muffled because she was trailing kisses up and down the skin of his throat.

  In that moment, Caitlin was glad she hadn’t eaten anything for hours, because otherwise she would certainly have vomited. Although she knew it wasn’t really Danica saying those things, but rather the spell Matías had cast on her, she couldn’t help feeling sick.

  “Good girl,” Matías said. He ran his hand down her hair, then pulled away from her slightly. He addressed his next words to his cohorts. “We’re keeping this one because she’s stronger. If we weaken her, too, we won’t be able to use her when we need more power. Got it?”

  “Yeah,” Jorge said, although he still sounded annoyed. “But that’s only because you let the strongest one get away.”

  Matías’ black eyes glinted with malice. “I didn’t ‘let’ her do anything. Yeah, she was stronger than I thought. But you know we couldn’t go after her — not when she ran straight into that nest of de la Paz witches.” For some reason, his mouth curved into a cruel smile. “Last laugh’s on them, though.”

  Tomas and Jorge both chuckled, and Tomas said, “Let’s do this thing.”

  He went over to a side table and picked up the knife that had been lying there, a long, wicked-looking thing with a slightly curved blade and a handle of some kind of black metal. Just seeing that knife in her mind’s eye was enough to make Caitlin’s blood run cold. There was something ceremonial about it, as if it had been designed for one very dark purpose. It was not the same as the knife she’d seen Jorge use before to cut Roslyn’s arms. That one had been a regular switchblade, as far as she could tell. She hadn’t known for sure, as she’d never seen one in real life, only on TV or in a movie.

  “Put her in the circle,” Matías commanded, and Tomas led Roslyn into the very center of the outline they’d drawn on the floor. She stared off blankly into space, as if she had no clear idea of where she was or why she was there. Maybe that was a blessing.

  Then Matías began to speak in a language Caitlin had never heard before. It wasn’t Spanish, and she didn’t think it was Latin, either. Something old and cruel, something that seemed to turn her blood to ice.

  Stop it! she cried out, but since the words were only uttered within her mind, they had no force, no way of preventing the dark warlock from performing whatever rite whose words he was uttering now.

  Tomas handed the knife to Matías, who lifted it to his lips and kissed it reverently. Then he hefted it in his hand and, with one blinding motion, slashed it across Roslyn’s throat. She collapsed to the floor, blood spraying the two warlocks, and across the circle itself. Once again the foul mist she’d first seen in that borrowed house a few blocks from the Trujillo store rose into the air, only this time it was dark, so dark, a black that was blacker than black, and seemed to billow and sway before it took on the vague outline of a man and went flying through a wall and disappeared.

  All that remained was Roslyn’s limp form, the life drained from her throat, and Danica standing by with a vague smile on her face. And the three wizards, wearing their own smiles, but of gloating malevolence.

  Caitlin screamed.

  17

  It was good that Caitlin could get some sleep. All this chasing around, on top of the worry about her friends that he knew continually weighed her down, couldn’t be good for her. And he liked looking over at her, seeing the dark crescents of her lashes against her cheeks, the way her head was tipped to one side and her wavy copper-colored hair flowed over her shoulders.

  Then her eyes snapped open, and she let out such a piercing scream that Alex’s hands jerked involuntarily on the steering wheel, sending them over the lane divider for a second before he could get hold of himself and yank the SUV back where it was supposed to be. The eighteen-wheeler behind him honked once, probably to wake him up in case that knee-jerk reaction had been caused by falling asleep for a split-second. It hadn’t, but between Caitlin’s scream and that honk, Alex figured he’d be awake for at least the next twelve hours.

  She was staring forward, eyes like saucers. The fingers of her right hand were clutching the handle of the passenger-side door as if it was the only thing connecting her to reality. Then tears began to trail their way down her cheeks. But she said nothing.

  “Caitlin? What is it?”

  No reply. Only that staring, white-rimmed look, like a spooked horse.

  “Caitlin!”

  At last she turned toward him. “She’s dead,” she whispered.

  “What? Who’s dead?”

  “R-Roslyn. I saw it. I saw it!” Then she began to weep in earnest, burying her face in her hands, her slender shoulders wracked with sobs.

  Oh, shit. This was bad. This was very, very bad. Her visions had never been wrong before, but Alex found himself compelled to ask, just in case there was even the slightest chance of a misunderstanding, “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure!” she flung at him. “I might as well have been standing there with the rest of them, I could see it so clearly.”

  “‘Them’?” Alex echoed, although he thought he already knew the answer.

  “Matías and Jorge and Tomas. They’d drawn another circle, and they slit her fucking throat! I saw it!”

  “Jesus.” His hands were shaking, and he tightened his grip on the steering wheel. What the hell were they supposed to do now?

  Keep going, he told himself firmly. Even if Roslyn’s gone, we still have to save Danica. And you can’t lose it now — you have to be here for Caitlin.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said at last. “We’ll find him. Don’t worry. We’ll find him, and we’ll make him pay.”

  “What good will that do?” she snapped, shifting in her seat so she was more or less facing him. “Will it bring Roslyn back?”

  “No,” he replied. Someh
ow he managed to keep his tone calm and even. What he really wanted to do was pull over so he could take her in his arms and hold her, give her the comfort she so desperately needed, but he knew that wasn’t a good idea. For one thing, it wouldn’t even be safe — there wasn’t a rest stop in miles — and anyway, now more than ever they needed to get to Tucson as quickly as possible. “But at least she would have some kind of justice.”

  Strangely, those words seemed to calm Caitlin down. She swallowed, then said, “You’re right. She’s gone, but Matías is still here, and he needs to face the consequences of what he’s done.”

  There was something very cold and hard in her voice, qualities he’d never heard in her speech before, but then again, even with everything she’d had to handle so far, this was the very worst of all, the one thing they’d feared but hoped would never come to pass. Alex risked a glance at her and saw that already the tears were beginning to disappear, and her pretty features were still, almost icy in their set fury.

  “How much longer to Tucson?” she asked.

  He blinked at the non sequitur, then said, after glancing at the clock, “Another two hours, probably. I’m speeding as it is, but I don’t want to go too fast. The last thing we need is to get delayed because I got pulled over for a speeding ticket.”

  She nodded at that reply. Her hands were clenched in her lap, he noticed, the fingers knotted into one another so tightly that he could see her knuckles standing out white against her already fair skin. A tear dripped from her eye, but she didn’t reach up to wipe it away, instead ignored it as it trickled down her cheek and then dropped onto her shirt, making a dark blotch on the pale green material.

  Seeing that, he could feel the rage building in him as well. He’d never met Roslyn McAllister, but she was a friend of Caitlin’s, a young woman who should have had her entire life ahead of her. She didn’t deserve the fate she’d apparently just suffered. If Matías had suddenly appeared in the middle of the highway ahead of them, Alex would have floored it and let the Pathfinder turn the warlock into a dark spot on I-8. But it wouldn’t be that easy.

  It was never that easy.

  * * *

  They were just entering the outskirts of Casa Grande when Alex’s phone went off — probably because they’d at last come in range of a decent cell tower. Sunken in misery, Caitlin startled, then watched as he reached over and lifted his phone from where it had been resting on the dashboard.

  It felt as though someone else was watching him do that, though, because the only thing that kept echoing through her head was, Roslyn is dead, Roslyn is dead, Roslyn is dead, and she couldn’t seem to focus on anything else. How could Roslyn be dead — carefree Roslyn, whose voice and gift for music could have given her far more material success if she’d chosen it? But she didn’t care about money or fame, had loved singing in the local bars and restaurants and clubs, was friends with everyone she met, it seemed. If she’d ever had a secret, something dark and deep, Caitlin never knew about it. And somehow she didn’t think Roslyn ever had. Hers was too sunny and open a nature for that sort of thing.

  Alex’s voice finally penetrated the fog in her mind. In sharp tones, he broke in, “Wait, Miguel — what?”

  A long pause as he appeared to listen to Miguel’s reply, which seemed to be fairly involved. Then,

  “When?”

  Another pause.

  “You’re sure of that?” Alex’s jaw tightened, and Caitlin watched as he drew in a deep breath that sort of hitched its way down, as if he was fighting a constriction in his throat. “Okay. Well, we’re in Casa Grande right now, so I was planning to be home in about an hour. But we can backtrack to Phoenix if — ”

  He stopped then, as if Miguel had cut him off.

  “My mother said that?”

  Another pause.

  “All right. I guess she knows where to find me. And I hate to bug you about that address, but it’s really urgent. Caitlin just had another vision, and…it’s bad. Roslyn — one of the girls — has been murdered. We’ve got to find Danica before it’s too late.”

  Hearing the matter stated so baldly made tears begin to sting at Caitlin’s eyes again. She forced down a breath and told herself that weeping for Roslyn wouldn’t change anything. The best thing they could do now was hunt down Matías and stop him. What would happen after that, she honestly didn’t know. It was up to Angela to decide his fate, as Roslyn was a member of her clan. Somehow Angela didn’t really seem like the Old Testament, avenging-angel type, but she’d never been tested like this before.

  In a way, it would be easier if they could simply find enough evidence to send Matías to prison, but the witch clans had always policed their own. Sending someone with their kind of powers to live in close quarters with civilian criminals was a recipe for disaster in and of itself, and for a warlock like Matías, it would be a thousand times worse. If he ever managed to get as far as an actual prison, he’d have the whole place from the warden down eating out of the palm of his hand within a few hours. No, Matías would have to face clan justice, whatever form it might take.

  Alex ended the call, this time slipping the phone back into his pocket. His profile might have been carved out of stone as he stared forward, and Caitlin wondered what on earth Miguel had just told him.

  Finally she got the courage to ask, “Alex? What is it?”

  His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. Without looking over at her, he said, “Maya is dead.”

  “What?” It was just too much. The passing of the de la Paz prima would have been blow enough, but like this, right after Caitlin had just seen her own friend murdered? And then her brain caught up what had really happened, and she realized Alex hadn’t just lost his clan’s prima, but his grandmother. “Oh, Alex, I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” He still stared forward, as if he risked losing his obviously shaky grasp on his composure if he glanced over and saw any expression of pity or sorrow on her face. “She didn’t suffer. At least, that’s what Miguel said.”

  “How…what happened?”

  Alex pulled his bottle of water from the cupholder next to him, took a long drink, then replaced the cap and set the bottle back in place. Maybe he really was thirsty, or possibly he wanted to think over his reply before he spoke. “I guess she had another seizure last night. It was bad, but not so bad that Valentina or Manuela thought she needed to be moved to the hospital. And my mother apparently agreed, because she could have overruled them if she had to. At first they thought they’d made the right call, since she woke up this morning and seemed to be a little better. But then this afternoon….”

  He was silent for a few seconds, and Caitlin could see his jaw working. She wished she could tell him that it was all right to cry, that he’d just lost someone very important to him, but she didn’t know if he’d really appreciate hearing that from a girl he’d only met a few days earlier, no matter what physical intimacies they might have shared. Instead, she folded her hands in her lap and waited.

  After a long moment, he continued, “This afternoon she seized again…and again. My mother called the paramedics, but…my abuelita was gone by the time they got there. There wasn’t anything they could do, so they left. I guess my parents are making the arrangements now.”

  And what a lot of arrangements those would be. When a prima passed, it wasn’t just a matter of calling the funeral home and setting that particular chain of events in motion. That was part of it, of course, but the entire clan network would have to be notified, and the prima-in-waiting would have to assume the title of head of the family and anoint her own prima-in-waiting. The young woman in question was always identified long before that, of course, as soon as the strength of her own powers made it obvious that she should be next in line, but it wasn’t made formal until the new prima assumed her role as head of the clan. Caitlin wasn’t sure how such things were handled in the de la Paz family, but with the McAllisters, becoming prima also meant taking ownership of the big Victorian house on Parad
ise Lane and living there. Angela had bent the rules on that quite a bit, as she spent at least half her time in a house she and Connor had bought up in Flagstaff. Was that what Alex’s mother would do now? Be in her own home in Tucson part of the time and in Maya’s the remainder of the year?

  The silence in the car was so thick, Caitlin was surprised she couldn’t see it surrounding them like a dense, choking fog, one that seemed to prevent her from speaking. She picked up her own water bottle and drank some, hoping that would help to clear the thickness in her throat. “Alex, I — ”

  “It’s okay,” he said. He sounded normal enough. Then again, she’d only known him for a couple of days. She had no idea what he was like when he was grieving. He didn’t seem like the sort of person to bottle things up, but maybe he was right now, just because he had something else even more pressing that he needed to focus on. “At least she can’t suffer anymore. We witches and warlocks all know that there is a next life to move on to, so it’s not as if she’s gone forever. I’ll see her again someday.”

  Maybe that was something you could be fatalistic about when discussing the death of an older person, someone who’d lived most of her life…although realistically, Maya should have been around for at least another ten years or so, depending on how long-lived the de la Paz witches tended to be. However, Caitlin couldn’t quite adopt that same attitude about Roslyn’s death. True, her friend had passed the veil and moved on to another world, a place where she would no longer be in pain. But that didn’t make it any less difficult for the people left behind, the friends and family who should have been able to see her grow into the woman she would have become…the man she might have fallen in love with someday and with whom she could have started a family of her own.

  Those thoughts only made Caitlin want to cry again. But if Alex was holding it together after learning that he’d lost his grandmother, then Caitlin would do the same, even if the hurt inside her was like an empty, gnawing ache that wouldn’t go away, no matter how hard she tried to ignore it.