Higher Ground, page 19
She set down her glass of water and came over to him, then snuggled against his chest. “I love you, Gabriel,” she said. “More than…well, more than I ever thought I’d love someone. Of course, I’ve cared about people, but this…this is different.”
Yes, it was. He’d never really expected to give his heart to anyone in such an open, unreserved way. For a long time, he’d suspected he wasn’t capable of pure, selfless love, the sort of thing one might read about in books. That wouldn’t have been so terribly strange, considering who his father was, the way he’d been raised.
But Ava had shone a light into his darkness, had shown him he was a very different person from the one he’d thought he was. She was so perfect, so pure, so unlike anyone he’d ever met before. Her sheer goodness made him hesitate, made him wonder if he should abandon his plans for revenge. Perhaps it would be better to stay here, to allow himself to become a part of the Castillo clan. At least that way, Ava would be safe…and now, with his powers restored, he actually had something he could offer her and her family, wouldn’t be a helpless beggar with nothing of any value.
“Are you okay?” she asked, eyes wide and dark as they caught his gaze and held.
He could have drowned in those eyes, but he made himself reply, “Yes, I’m fine. Possibly, I’m trying to rethink my priorities.”
“About going back to El Salvador?”
Amazing how she could go straight to the heart of what troubled him. Another person might have said she’d looked into his mind to discover the source of his current disquiet, but he knew Ava wouldn’t do such a thing. She’d taken such a peek with her mother only because she’d known Sophia was hiding the truth from them. Otherwise, Ava exercised an impressive amount of self-control when it came to her unique talent.
“Yes,” he said. “But let’s go sit down. No need to hover here in the kitchen.”
They took their glasses of water but left the plate of cheese behind. Once they were settled in the family room, Ava faced him where they sat on the couch, one leg tucked under the other so she could see him squarely.
“You were so adamant about going to El Salvador,” she said. “What’s changed your mind?”
You, he thought. You have changed everything.
However, he only replied, “Several things. For one, my guess as to what Vicénte will do next is only that — a guess. He may very well be satisfied with the situation as it is now, may have decided to marry again and have the family he’s always wanted.”
“He could be,” Ava allowed, although her tone sounded dubious. “But from the things Tony said about him, and the things you’ve told me, it doesn’t seem as if that’s too likely.”
“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. Yes, Vicénte’s history seemed to indicate that he wouldn’t be content to live a simple life, would always want more. And yet, he couldn’t know that for sure. People could change. Gabriel knew he had. He let out a breath and added, “I don’t want to take you down there on something that may very well be a fool’s errand.”
This remark was met by a considering silence. Ava wrapped a strand of wavy dark hair around one finger, playing with it as she appeared to ponder his words. “If this is all about protecting me,” she said at last, “then you can stop right there. You can’t let worry about me keep you from doing the right thing.”
Which was exactly what he’d been doing. Gabriel hesitated, trying to think of a way to explain himself without making it sound as though he was ready to abandon the brighter future he’d envisioned for the Escobars, just for Ava’s sake. And yet, he knew that was exactly what he’d been contemplating. It seemed far simpler to stay here in this charming — if haunted — house and let the Escobars take care of themselves. They’d survived hundreds of years of primuses, some worse than others. Surely they could survive his brother Vicénte.
“Is it the right thing, though?” he asked.
Another pause. Then she shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. I’ve never met your brother. I only have Tony’s account to go on, and the few things I saw in your mind when you let me in that one time. But what I saw didn’t exactly give me a good impression of him.”
No, probably not. Vicénte could be charming when he wanted to, but that surface charm was used only as a tool to mask his underlying ruthlessness. Even his desire for a wife and a son was not so he would have a woman to share his life, or a child he could love without reservation, but because he wanted to make sure the Escobar line continued.
“Would you like to see more of him?” Gabriel said.
She blinked. “You mean, you want me to look into your mind again?”
“Yes. I think it might help if you could see what I’ve experienced. Then we can decide together.”
“I’m not sure — ”
“Please, Ava,” he said. He put his hand on hers, adding, “It would mean a great deal to me.”
A long pause, during which she reached out with her other hand and lifted the glass of water to her lips so she could take a sip. That sip was followed by another. Eventually, though, she set down the glass and gazed back at him, her expression very solemn. “All right. If you think it will help.”
“I hope it will. We need to be very clear about the path we take next.”
She nodded, then said, “You don’t need to do anything. Just sit quietly while I take a look.”
Basically the same instructions she’d given him before, only this time they felt even more significant. As he sat there, Gabriel hoped he wasn’t making a very great mistake.
After all, she would look into his mind and see everything Vicénte had done…but she would also be able to see what he had done as well.
Usually, when Ava was allowed into someone’s thoughts, it was to pick out a single detail, to find a helpful memory that had been buried for too long. This time, though, Gabriel wanted her to see as much of his life as she could so she would have an accurate idea of his brother’s character. Or at least, as accurate an impression as this sort of thing could provide. She would be able to see what had happened to Gabriel over the years, but all those events would still be colored by his thoughts and emotions. In the end, she’d need to separate the pure facts from the beliefs.
As she went into his mind, she found herself surrounded by a kaleidoscope of images, a blur of memories and scenes that she had to fight to make any sense out of. This was the problem of not having a single target, one central goal to provide focus.
Okay, she told herself, try to do this chronologically. Go back to the beginning.
Or at least as far back as Gabriel remembered. She saw a man with a hard, yet strangely handsome face bending over him, and realized the man must be the infamous Joaquin Escobar himself. He was gone quickly, though, and didn’t return. Well, that made sense. Joaquin came to the U.S. and never returned to El Salvador. Actually, she was kind of surprised Gabriel had retained even that one memory, since she knew he’d been only a toddler when his father left Pico Negro.
A blur of different people then — several women who seemed to have acted as Gabriel’s caretakers, a squat little man who appeared to be one of the Escobar clan’s elders, more people who had to have been other members of the Escobar family, a few that Ava thought possibly were civilians from the neighboring village of San Matías.
And she saw Vicénte, a tall, swaggering boy of around thirteen or so, someone who walked around Pico Negro as if he already owned it. In a way, she supposed he did, since it seemed obvious enough that Joaquin had made it clear the boy was in charge, even if it was the elders who actually kept things quietly running in the background.
She saw, too, how Vicénte found subtle ways to torture his little brother, whether it was to hide his favorite toy, or to tear a page from a book he was reading, or to tell the elders about any minor transgressions, such as sneaking a ride on one of the goats when Gabriel thought no one was looking. Possibly none of these things were much worse than some of the ways siblings had been tormenting one another for millennia, but all added up, they showed a pattern of pure meanness, of making sure that his younger brother would never forget his lesser status in the clan. And once Gabriel got older and his truly amazing powers began to develop, Vicénte did what he could to treat his brother as little better than a servant, commanding him to carry out his orders rather than get his own hands dirty, although his reason was always that these things needed to be done for the greater good of the Escobar clan.
Gabriel’s memories also showed how Vicénte abused pretty much everyone around him. Even the woman he’d taken for his wife hadn’t escaped his harsh tongue and heavy hand. When she died in childbirth, it was called a tragedy, and yet Gabriel overheard the whispers of the healer and the woman who had assisted in the birth, how they’d said that Yolanda would not have perished if Vicénte had not struck her several days earlier, causing her to suffer a bad fall, one that started bleeding neither one of them could stop.
This last was more than Ava could bear, and she pulled herself out of Gabriel’s mind with a gasp, as though she’d been underwater for too long and needed to catch her breath. Their eyes met, and he stared at her soberly, expression calm and somehow resigned.
“So…?” he said at last.
Voice flat, she replied, “Your brother is a monster,” then got up from the couch and pushed her hands through her hair. For some reason, she felt dirty, as if some of the evil of Vicénte’s actions had managed to rub off on her.
Gabriel released a breath, his hands still lying limp on his knees as if he wasn’t sure what to do with them. “Yes.”
Faced with such a calm acknowledgment, Ava didn’t quite know how she should respond. She crossed her arms and stared down at him. “What should we do?”
“What do you think we should do?”
There was really only one answer to that question. Maybe Gabriel had entertained a fantasy of living a peaceful life here in Santa Fe, but she didn’t see how that would be possible with Vicénte still out there in the world. He might have been biding his time, letting himself recover from the loss of the grimoires, but that state of affairs couldn’t last indefinitely. Sooner or later, he’d begin to chafe at his circumscribed existence and would start to look again for whatever spell or artifact might give him an edge over all the other witch clans.
He had to be stopped before that happened.
“We have to go to El Salvador,” she said. “You have to take the Escobar clan away from him.”
No real response, except a slight slumping of Gabriel’s broad shoulders. He’d probably known exactly what she was going to say, just as he’d known deep in his heart that there was no running away from his responsibilities in El Salvador. Vicénte’s maneuvering — and the clan elders’ actions in stripping Gabriel of his powers — might have postponed the day of reckoning, but it couldn’t be avoided altogether.
“It will be dangerous,” he said.
“You’ve already told me that,” Ava replied, hoping she sounded a lot less rattled than she felt. That was probably the deepest she’d ever gone into someone’s mind, and her own thoughts were blurry and unfocused, as if they’d been overlaid by all of Gabriel’s memories and emotions. “It’s okay. What we need is a plan.”
Now he smiled, and patted the seat cushion next to him. “Then come and sit down, and let’s talk about it.”
She did as he asked, settling herself beside him. It did feel better to be this close to him, to have him drop an arm around her so he could pull her even closer. Ava had to remind herself that they’d made love only a half hour earlier, that they’d been as intimate as two people could be. A good deal of the afterglow from their encounter had been effectively erased by what she’d seen in his thoughts, and she desperately wanted it back.
“We’ll drive into Mexico, then take a train down to Guatemala. There, we’ll rent a vehicle and drive to San Matías.”
Ava lifted an eyebrow at him, wondering why in the world he’d want to take such a circuitous route when they could simply fly and get there in a few hours. “That’ll take days,” she pointed out. “It’s a lot easier to fly.”
“True,” he said, so quickly that she could tell he’d been waiting for her to make that argument. “But we will set off alarms if we fly into El Salvador, because the elders have warded the entire territory. If we come in by vehicle, I’ll be able to mask our natures in a way I couldn’t if we were flying.”
This explanation didn’t seem to make any sense. “But Tony and Cassandra flew there — ”
“Yes,” Gabriel cut in, so quickly that Ava guessed he’d been ready for that particular argument. “And we knew they were coming. Why do you think I was able to intercept them so quickly, even before the residents of San Matías could reach out and let me know there were strangers in the village? Of course, Vicénte tasked me with discovering what your brother and Cassandra Sandoval wanted, not knowing that I’d already planned to lure them to El Salvador in order to ask for their assistance in getting the grimoires out of my brother’s hands.”
“All right, that makes sense,” she said, then realized they’d been overlooking the obvious. Possibly her brain hadn’t yet caught up with the realities of Gabriel being once more in possession of all his powers. “I don’t understand why we can’t teleport in, though. I mean, you can send the two of us that far, can’t you?”
“Yes. But in this case, the element of surprise is one of the few things we’ll have going for us. If I use that much magic that close to Pico Negro, Vicénte will surely feel it. My brother thinks I am still safely stripped of my powers, no one who could possibly be a threat. We need him to keep thinking that way.”
Ava nodded. She’d have to remember that just because Gabriel was more powerful than his half-brother, it didn’t mean Vicénte didn’t have a few tricks in his own arsenal.
“Okay, I understand.” She still didn’t like the plan too much, but at least she realized that their best chance of success lay in flying under the radar and getting to Pico Negro without anyone in the Escobar clan realizing they were in El Salvador at all. “And after that?”
Gabriel’s expression grew grimmer. “I have to hope there are those in my clan who have also suffered at Vicénte’s hands, who will realize that their lives would be much better if he were no longer their primus. Only a few might be enough to turn the tide, since my powers are so much stronger than those of anyone else in the clan.”
“Might” being the operative word. That seemed an awfully big condition to be hanging their chances of success on, but Ava knew they didn’t have much of a choice. Besides, while she certainly hadn’t seen all of Gabriel’s life — luckily, she’d managed to avoid his encounters with civilian women, probably because none of those episodes would have involved Vicénte and therefore weren’t anything she needed to witness — she’d seen enough to tell her that the current primus was far from universally loved. She’d noticed the way the members of the Escobar clan rarely smiled around him unless he was gazing at them directly, how they seemed to mutter things to themselves when he wasn’t looking.
Whereas they’d seemed much friendlier with Gabriel in one-on-one situations, and he appeared to have always reciprocated, had laughed and joked and generally appeared to enjoy their company. Surely if they were given a choice, they’d pick him as their future primus, rather than be stuck with the heavy-handed, authoritarian Vicénte.
But first they had to be given that choice.
“Okay,” she said. “Any ideas of who you’re going to approach first?”
“Paz, our healer. She has no love for my brother…not after what he did to his wife.”
“And?” Ava prompted. “I mean, healers are super-important, but they’re not generally who you need watching your back in a fight.” And neither am I, she thought then. Her gift for reading minds came in handy sometimes, but she didn’t think it would be of much use in the sort of expedition they were planning.
That observation made Gabriel smile slightly. “Possibly not, but healers are very good people to have around after such a fight.”
“You have a point. Still….”
Obviously wanting to reassure her, he named a few other people in the clan, ones who seemed to have the kinds of offensive powers that would be useful for confronting Vicénte and the elders. That all sounded better, but one important detail continued to trouble her.
“What about the null?” she asked softly. “If your brother still has him in his back pocket, then none of the rest of this is going to do us much good.”
Gabriel’s expression darkened. “Alessandro is a problem, I know. He’s really the person we should approach first, but I’m not sure if that would help at all. Right now, he has a position of some importance simply because Vicénte uses him as a way of keeping the others in the clan in line.”
“But does he follow your brother willingly, or is he being coerced like all the rest?”
“I’m not sure.” Gabriel rubbed the dark stubble on his chin, eyes narrowed in thought. “He has suffered the wrong side of Vicénte’s tongue on more than one occasion, just like the rest of us. But I think lately he has been trying to keep on my brother’s good side for an entirely different reason.”
“What’s that?”
A small, bitter smile touched Gabriel’s lips. “You know how I have said that Vicénte has begun to think of taking another wife?”
“Yes,” Ava replied, not sure what that had to do with the null.
“Alessandro has a younger sister, Lara. She has grown into a beautiful woman in the past few years, and Vicénte has started to pay her particular attention. I think Alessandro fears what might happen to his sister if my brother should make her his wife.”
