Darkangel (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill) (14 page)

I figured we might as well head toward the music. “Let’s see what’s going on over there,” I said, and pointed more or less in the direction of the guitar player.

Adam nodded, and we set out, winding through the crowd, trying not to stare at all the sights around us. Tourists in fanny packs and sweatshirts, naturally, and boho Sedona types in long skirts and Navajo jewelry, and couples with babies in strollers and people walking their dogs. But I also saw people wearing Mexican costume, with their faces painted like
calaveras
, or skulls, and women in long skirts and shawls wrapped around their hips, clearly dressed for flamenco dancing. It was all fascinating, and I tried not to stare too hard at the sights around me.

We came out into a courtyard with a fountain in the center, and everywhere I looked I saw little glass containers with candles inside them, and labels stuck on the outside with short messages or the names of relatives who had passed away. Against one wall was a huge altar with more offerings and bouquets of flowers and fruit.

“Look,” said Adam, who was taller than I and therefore could see better. “It looks like there’s a place over there where you can buy the candles. Let’s get one for Great-Aunt Ruby.”

I agreed that sounded like a great idea, and we picked our way through the crowd, trailed by the bodyguards, until we got to a little pavilion on the far side of the courtyard where you could make a donation and get a candle. Since the donations went to benefit the local animal shelter, I pulled out a twenty and dropped it in the donation jar, then waited for the man handling the candles to fetch one for me, along with a sticker and a Sharpie so I could write down my message.

“What are you going to say?” Adam asked, once we’d shuffled over to one side to make room for the next people wanting to get their own candles.

Good question. I’d come here with the idea that we would be paying tribute to Ruby, but the carnival atmosphere had my brain a little muddled. Not that I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t what I’d been expecting. I’d thought it would be a little quieter, somehow, a little more introspective. But that was probably my own fault for not reading up on it before I came.

I was here now, though, so I tried to focus. I knew my great-aunt wouldn’t want us to mourn. No, I wanted to write something that paid tribute to her without being all weepy about it. Finally, I bent over the table and wrote on my sticker,
Ruby, your strength inspires all of us, and you will live in our hearts forever.
There wasn’t really room for anything more than that, so I showed it to Adam, who nodded his approval.

“I think she’d like that. Now, where do you want to put it?”

Hmm. Already candles covered almost every available level surface — crowding the altar I’d spied earlier, ringing the fountain in the center of the courtyard, even running along the edges of the stucco and concrete planters. But then I noticed off to the side a smaller altar with a few open spots in front of it.

“How about over there?”

He peered through the crowd. “That looks good. Better hurry before someone else fills it up.”

No kidding. Everywhere I looked I saw people hunting for the perfect spot for their own candles. I put the sticker on the glass container — the man who’d given us the candle had prelit it for us — and then pushed through the crowd to set it down in one of the few remaining spaces. The flame flickered a little, but then stood up straight and tall, strong the way my great-aunt had been almost until the day she died.

“Okay, now what?” Adam asked, once I straightened and stood next to him.

Why he was asking me, when it had been his idea to come here, I didn’t know. Maybe he just thought as
prima
I should be the one calling the shots. I decided it wasn’t worth arguing about and pointed to the next courtyard over, which was where the flamenco music seemed to be coming from.

It wasn’t quite as crowded in that spot, although there were still plenty of people milling around. Here I spied some tables with chairs around them, and a second or two later I saw the reason why: the restaurant at the far end of the courtyard had an outside stand where they were selling margaritas and sangria.

Now that we’d paid our respects to Great-Aunt Ruby, I didn’t see why we couldn’t have a little fun. She certainly hadn’t been above having a drink or two, although her poison of choice was gin martinis.

“Buy you a drink?” I asked, and Adam grinned.

“Sure.”

We went over to the stand and waited for the couple ahead of us to finish their transaction. I stepped up to the pretty Hispanic woman who was taking the orders and said, “A sangria and…” I trailed off, since I hadn’t asked Adam what he wanted.

“Regular margarita — on the rocks, not blended, please.”

She smiled and said, “Just a minute,” then poured our drinks. “That’ll be fifteen dollars.”

I handed over a twenty and told her to keep the change. Her eyes widened a little, but she just thanked me before going on to assist the next set of customers who were waiting for drinks.

Truth be told, it was probably a little chilly to be drinking either sangria or a margarita, but I found I didn’t mind too much. The sangria was good, too. I knew there was probably a lot more to go see. For some reason I wanted to linger here for a while and listen to the guitarist in the center of the courtyard playing intricate Spanish tunes that matched the architecture around me, the white stucco walls and the red tile roofs and the balconies and overhangs of dark wood. The bodyguards had paused a few yards off, pretending to be looking at a display of fine art photographs in a gallery window.

A half-familiar voice said from over my left shoulder, “Angela? Angela McAllister?”

I turned and saw him. All right, not
him
him, not the man of my dreams, but a close second — the Zorro from the Halloween dance a week ago. I blinked, certain I must be hallucinating. Or maybe that sangria was a lot stronger than I’d thought it was.

“Hi, um….” I managed, realizing that I’d given him my name, but I still didn’t know his.

He grinned, even as I felt Adam shift irritably next to me. “Sorry about that. We didn’t get to the formal introductions. I’m Chris Williams.”

“Hi, Chris.” Then, realizing that I really shouldn’t neglect Adam, I added, “And this is my cousin Adam.”

“Hi,” Chris said, extending a gloved hand. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought he looked almost relieved at the word “cousin,” as though he’d been worried that Adam was my boyfriend or something. Or maybe I was just flattering myself.

Adam looked like he really didn’t want to shake Chris’s hand. After I slanted him a sideways glance through my eyelashes, though, he reached out and took his hand, saying, “Nice to meet you.”

“So what brings you up here?” I asked Chris, figuring I’d better step in and keep the conversation going in more or less innocuous directions. From across the way I could see the guardians pause and give him their own inspection, relaxing visibly when they sensed that he was just a civilian, no one to worry about.

“I’m not stalking you, I swear,” he replied with a small laugh. Seeing him like this, in the last of the afternoon light, I thought he was even better-looking than I remembered. I could see that his dark eyes were surrounded with a heavy fringe of lashes, now that they weren’t hidden behind the Zorro mask, and he had nice strong brows that balanced the slightly long nose and high cheekbones. “A friend of mine is getting his master’s in anthro, and he wanted to come up here and check out the festivities. I’d heard about it but hadn’t been before.”

“So where’s your friend?” Adam asked, tone not quite brusque enough to be called rude…but close.

“Over in the next courtyard, taking pictures of one of the altars there.”

I noticed that besides the gloves, Chris was wearing a heavy leather jacket over a sweater, and he had a wool scarf around his neck. “Planning to go up to Flagstaff or something?” I inquired, with a lift of my eyebrows toward the cold-weather gear.

He startled slightly, then grinned and shook his head. “I’m from Phoenix, remember? If it gets below sixty-five degrees, we break out the snowshoes.”

Despite myself, I chuckled. I also found myself wishing I didn’t have Adam there, glaring at me like a chaperone in one of those Victorian novels where the heroine can’t even step out on the veranda without having her actions questioned.

“Have you been to this before?” Chris asked, and I shook my head.

“No, I — that is, we lost our great-aunt last weekend. That’s actually why I had to run out of the dance like that. Family emergency.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said at once, the little smile he’d been wearing abruptly disappearing.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “That is, she lived a great life. It was sad to lose her, but not entirely unexpected. She was eighty-eight.”

“A good round number.”

“Exactly.” I smiled up at him, wishing more than ever that we could be alone together. Then again, what good would that do me, except to frustrate me further?

If only he weren’t so damn good-looking….

He seemed to notice my edginess and glanced over at Adam. “Mind if I borrow your cousin for a minute?”

Adam looked as if he wanted to say he minded very much, but he seemed to collect himself and shrugged. “Sure,” he replied, and took a sip of his margarita before glancing over at the flamenco guitarist, as if scrutinizing his intricate fingerwork was the only thing on his mind right then.

Maybe I should’ve been relieved, but I couldn’t help wondering what exactly Chris wanted. He moved off down the walkway that led from the courtyard out to an open area behind the buildings, then paused once we were more or less out of earshot, if not eyeshot.

“I am sorry to hear about your great-aunt,” he said quietly, “but in a way I’m kind of glad.”

“You are?” I couldn’t quite figure out what he meant by that.

“Not that your family lost her. I mean, I’m glad you didn’t disappear like that last Saturday because of something I did.”

“Oh, no. Not at all.”

He hesitated, looking down into my face. I was very glad that I’d taken a little more care with my hair than usual and had put on some lip gloss. Not that my current fresh-faced look wasn’t a far cry from the diva I’d appeared to be at the Halloween dance. Even so, he didn’t seem too fazed by the alteration in my appearance.

“Do you get down to Phoenix often?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I think I might have mentioned I don’t get out much.” An expression of disappointment passed over his features, and I quickly continued, “But we do go down in early December every year for holiday shopping and to stock up on some things that we have a hard time getting up here.” Of course I had no idea whether we were going to uphold that tradition this year, what with everything that was going on, but if it was in my power to make it happen, then it would.

“Okay, that sounds a little more promising. I need to get back to my friend, though. And school’s going to be kind of crazy between now and the end of the semester, so I don’t think I’ll be able to get back up here. But I’d really like it if you’d call me when you’re in town.”

“I don’t have your number,” I told him.

“Well, that’s easy to fix. Can I borrow your phone?”

I dug it out of my purse and handed it to him. He went to the contacts screen and entered his information. I took another sip of my sangria while I waited, then took my phone back once he was done, slipping it into a pocket in my purse.

“I’m not sure when we’ll be down,” I said. “We usually go mid-week, though, to avoid the crowds.”

“You don’t work?”

“Of course we do. I mean, my aunt has a store up in Jerome and I help out there, and I also make jewelry.”

“You do?” he inquired. The note of interest in his voice sounded genuine. “So you’re kind of an artist, too, then.”

“I guess so.” For some reason my cheeks heated as he gazed down at me in admiration. “But anyway, it’s not that big a deal for us to close down in the middle of the week if we need to.” I didn’t bother to add that a lot of the shops in Jerome had rather lackadaisical schedules. If you wanted to close up for the afternoon to go shopping or get your toes done, why not? No big deal when your storefront was more of a hobby rather than your bread and butter.

“Well, good.” He sent me another one of those knee-melting smiles, then said, “I really have to get going before Tyler thinks I was kidnapped by aliens or something. But don’t forget to call if you do make it down to Phoenix.” With that he lifted a hand in a small wave, then turned and headed toward the next courtyard. Because it was so crowded, he disappeared from view pretty quickly. Even so, I stood there watching in the direction he’d gone for at least another minute, hoping to catch a glimpse of his dark head above the others in the crowd. But he was well and truly gone, and I sighed, knowing I needed to get back to Adam.

Don’t forget to call.
Like that was even a possibility.

Smiling suddenly, I drained the last of my sangria and tossed the empty cup in a nearby trash can.

Things were starting to look up.

“
H
oly crap
,” Sydney said as she stood in the foyer of my new home and looked up at the brass and crystal hanging from the ceiling, two stories up. “What are you going to
do
with this place?”

“I have no idea,” I said wearily. The day before, Tobias had come over with his truck and moved my meager belongings into Great-Aunt Ruby’s house. Okay, my house. I was staying in one of the spare bedrooms at the moment, because no way was I sleeping in the bed she’d died in. Her spirit certainly wasn’t hanging around the place, I could tell that already, but even so I had my limits.

“How big is it?” Sydney had moved from the foyer into the dining room and was gawking at the long table with its accompanying twelve chairs and matching sideboard.

“A little over three thousand square feet.”

“That’s kind of a lot of house for one person, don’t you think?”

I couldn’t agree more. Then again, I did have the “bodyguards” lurking around, so technically I supposed there would be at least four people there at all times. I didn’t feel like explaining that to Sydney, especially since they’d made themselves scarce and were upstairs in the library-slash-study, ostensibly cataloguing the books there but really just trying to stay out from underfoot.

“Yes, but it’s tradition for the
prima
to live here, so….” I shrugged. “And normally I would’ve been moving in with my consort, but since he has yet to materialize, it’s just me.”

“Maybe you should get a dog.”

There was an idea. I was horribly allergic to cats — not a good allergy for a witch to have, I know — and Aunt Rachel hadn’t wanted the responsibility of a dog in a house with no yard, so I’d been pet-less my entire life. But this house had a small yard off the side, where there was an even tinier plot of grass and a few flowerbeds. It wasn’t big enough to keep a German shepherd happy, but maybe a smaller dog, one I could adopt from the Humane Society or something.

“Maybe,” I said. “Although I’ve probably got enough on my plate right now without adding a dog to the mix.”

“I suppose.” Sydney had walked back into the foyer and crossed over into what Great-Aunt Ruby had always called the parlor, although really it was just the living room. It had a massive fireplace with a mahogany mantel and furniture that looked as if it should be in a museum. The floral wallpaper was positively eye-crossing. “So can you…I don’t know…change it at all?”

“Um, I’m not sure.” Actually, I hadn’t even stopped to consider that. I’d gotten the impression that when Ruby inherited the house, she and Patrick basically moved in and didn’t alter much of anything, except to update the kitchen appliances. Of course, now those “updates” looked like museum pieces themselves. “I guess so…I mean, it’s mine now, right?”

“You should.” Planting her hands on her hips, she looked up at the ten-foot ceilings with their crown moldings. “I bet you could do a lot with it. That is….” She trailed off, looking hesitant…for her. “It would probably be kind of expensive.”

“That really isn’t an issue.” I’d already had a fairly substantial chunk in the bank, just because living at Aunt Rachel’s hadn’t cost me anything (well, besides chipping in for groceries, which I’d insisted on after I turned eighteen). So my monthly McAllister dividend and the money I earned from my jewelry mostly went into my savings account, since I wasn’t spending it on clothes or cars or going out to clubs, or any of the other things a girl my age might conceivably spend her money on.

“So you inherited more than just the house?” Her tone sounded envious. If only she knew that being
prima
wasn’t just living in a big house and having apparently unlimited funds.

“Some,” I said cautiously. “Enough that I could do a few things to this place if I wanted to.”

“Good. Because that wallpaper has got to go.”

I laughed at that, and we went on from room to room as I gave her the grand tour of the place. By then Lionel and Joseph had already removed all of Great-Aunt Ruby’s personal effects, so her clothes and jewelry and family photos and all that were gone. It didn’t feel quite so intrusive to walk through the house with those personal touches taken away, but even so I couldn’t help feeling like a trespasser. I hoped that sooner or later I’d be able to wrap my head around the fact that this was now my home.

Even so, I had a feeling Sydney was right. I really should be doing something to make it feel like mine, and not just a place where I was camping out.

“
C
hange it
?” Aunt Rachel said blankly at dinner that night. She’d insisted that I come back to the apartment to eat, and I wasn’t about to argue. The transition didn’t feel so abrupt when I could still indulge in the familiar ritual of sitting down to eat at her dining room table. “I guess I never thought about it.”

“Place could do with an update,” Tobias said around a bite of cornbread. My aunt had made chili verde that night.

“That’s what I was thinking,” I said, shooting him a grateful smile. “I mean, I’m not going to make it totally modern or anything, but all that floral wallpaper and all those fussy antiques are just not my style.”

She was silent for a moment, pushing the chili around in her bowl. “Well, I
suppose
you could. You probably should speak to the elders first, just to make certain.”

“I will,” I said, although I wasn’t looking forward to that discussion. What was I supposed to do if they said no? All those florals and chintz would probably make my head explode.

To my surprise, though, they seemed mostly uninterested in the subject. “It’s your house now — all we ask is that you not alter the exterior,” Margot Emory informed me, and that seemed to be the end of the matter.

Well, almost. I was walking back up to the house when Jocelyn Riggs, the clan’s strongest medium, came hurrying after me. I turned to her, surprised, wondering if she was going to tell me that the elders had changed their minds and that I was going to drown in chintz to the end of my days.

But she only fixed me with a steady gaze and said, “I have a message for you from Great-Aunt Ruby.”

“You do?” I wasn’t sure whether this was a good thing or not.

Normally Jocelyn was a rather pinch-faced woman. She was a few years older than my Aunt Rachel, but she looked more like a decade separated them. Now, though, she shot me an incongruous smile and said, “Yes. She wants me to let you know that you can do whatever you want with that house. Her exact words were, ‘Tell Angela that I’ve no more use for that house now than I do those old bones they buried in the Cottonwood cemetery. So tell her to stop fretting and get on with it.’” Jocelyn’s pale gray eyes glinted. “I get the impression that she’s rather curious to see what you do with the place. Good afternoon.”

And she turned and went back down the hill, heading for the far more modest cottage she called home. I stared after her for a minute, then grinned and shook my head.

I of all people was not someone to disregard messages from beyond the grave.

T
he distraction
of redoing the house was a welcome one. Still no sign of that mysterious dark being, no more assaults in my dreams…no nothing. I hadn’t even dreamed of
him
lately, which I wasn’t sure was entirely a good thing. Better that, though, than another visitation from the unwelcome shade that had visited my aunt’s store.

I hired a decorator from Sedona and told her that I wanted to keep something of an antique feel but with less fussy furniture…and no wallpaper. She swept through the house with swatches and paint chips, made suggestions, and generally took over. I was okay with that, though. She was a professional, and I was just a girl who up until that point had never had to decorate anything bigger than a ten by twelve room. She used her own crew, for which I was grateful. Having Adam there every day to help with steaming off wallpaper or sanding the floors could have been awkward.

Through all this, I was adamant that the other family members have first pick of the furniture I didn’t want to keep. Even so, there were a few pieces that hadn’t found a home, but Leila, the decorator, assured me she would be able to sell them with no problem, including the huge Eastlake-style bed from Great-Aunt Ruby’s room.

“I know a couple in Prescott who’re doing over a Victorian who’ll take that, no problem,” she told me, and the next day some movers came to haul it away.

The bed went for so much that I was able to buy a whole new set of bedroom furniture to replace it. That was good, because I did want that room to be mine — it had the same view as my old bedroom at Aunt Rachel’s place, albeit a few hundred feet higher up the hill. I was once again able to look out over the Verde Valley, and see the red rocks of Sedona. By then, only a week before Thanksgiving, all the fall color was in full swing, and the blaze of the trees was somehow a comfort to me, telling me that even though everything else in my life had changed, the world would still follow its familiar old cycles.

The room still smelled of fresh paint. I’d chosen a warm terra-cotta color for the walls, and the ceiling was a soft parchment hue. My new furniture was dark-stained oak, more Spanish hacienda than Victorian mansion, but it worked with the new color scheme. I settled down on the bed after pushing back the heavy turquoise and warm red patterned duvet cover, and took in a deep breath.

Really, if I hadn’t known I was sitting in Great-Aunt Ruby’s old room, I would never have guessed I was in the same place. The colors were warm and rich, the furniture simple and sturdy. Leila had put up a lot of the old wall decorations from my former bedroom, and added more in the same style, along with Mexican mirrors and heavy wrought-iron sconces on the walls. The place was intimate, welcoming. The only thing missing was someone to share that big bed with me.

I didn’t quite let myself sigh, although I wanted to. Somewhere in the daydreams I’d had about the man who’d be my consort, I’d thought about making a home together and doing all the things I’d had to do on my own: buying furniture, deciding on paint colors, figuring out what went where. Not that I’d imagined it happening in this house, necessarily. Moving here had always felt like something that would happen far in the future. But there were always places coming available when needed — a bungalow farther down the hill, a loft apartment over a store. Those were the places I’d imagined making a home with my consort, not this huge echoing relic.

Even so, it felt good to have a lot of the house done already — I’d put off the kitchen and bathrooms until next year, since those were massive projects and I didn’t feel like having the place that torn up over the holidays. Despite all that, there was something missing…the man who should be lying here next to me. That king-size bed felt awfully empty, especially since I’d spent my whole life sleeping on a twin bed.

Through the whole process, I’d also had a hard time keeping myself from thinking about Chris. I knew I shouldn’t, that it was a lost cause, but attraction was a harder thing to control than I’d thought it would be, mainly because I’d never really experienced it like this before. Of course there were guys in high school I had thought were cute, although even then I’d known all I could do was look, but that was not the same as this almost aching need I felt for him. We’d exchanged maybe a hundred words, so I knew I was being silly. How could I miss someone I’d barely spent ten minutes with?

I didn’t know, and there wasn’t really anyone I could talk to about it, either. Aunt Rachel would give me hell for even thinking about a civilian like that, and Sydney would only encourage me and tell me to call. Yes, he’d asked me to call him, but only if I was down in Phoenix. That seemed a little strange to me, since I didn’t see the harm in talking beforehand. Then again, he’d said he would be really busy for the next month. Maybe he didn’t want the frustration of talking if he wasn’t sure he would even see me again.

Frowning, I gave the lamp on the nightstand one of those quick mental flicks, and the room went dark at once. And it was really dark, too. It was a new moon tonight, and clouds hung over the town, making it seem as if I were adrift in a well of blackness. Normally that sort of thing wouldn’t bother me, but in that moment I felt more alone than I ever had, even though that night’s bodyguards were sitting down in the living room, watching movies on the shiny new flat-screen in the sitting room. Well, it used to be the sitting room. Now it was the family room, I supposed, although whether this house would ever be filled with a family, I wasn’t sure.

Probably I should stop torturing myself. True, it was less than a month until my twenty-second birthday, and the window of opportunity was rapidly closing, but stressing about it wasn’t going to do me — or anyone else — any good. And there was a new candidate coming in the next day, so that was something. Not that I was expecting much. Somehow the thought of kissing a stranger was even less appealing than usual.

Because it won’t be Chris Wilson
, my mind whispered at me.

I shut that thought down right away. Truthfully, I didn’t really know what would happen when/if I went down to Phoenix, or, even if we did go, whether I’d have the courage to call him. He’d seemed interested in me, so I didn’t think I’d be impinging. Goddess knows I was interested in him, but that didn’t matter in the long haul. He was off-limits.

That time I did let out a sigh. Telling my brain to shut up and leave me alone, I turned over on my side, closed my eyes, and tried to convince myself that the bed didn’t feel quite as cold and empty as I thought it did.

N
one
of my failed attempts at finding a consort had been exactly pleasant, but this one was definitely the worst. For one thing, I didn’t have the buffer of Aunt Rachel there to take the edge off, only the dubious comfort of that day’s bodyguards, who pretended to be immersed in a discussion of the upcoming “lighting up the mountain” festivities next weekend, but who I could tell were trying to eavesdrop on everything the new candidate and I were saying to one another.