The Witching Hour: 11 Enchanting Novels Featuring Witches, Wizards, Vampires, Shifters, Ghosts, Fae, and More!, page 90
I blinked away the vision. When I looked at Leelee again, I saw her aura was shot through with the dark red of anxiety and guilt. She might not have known the exact provenance of her ring, but she was not entirely oblivious to the way her lover made his living.
“Welcome to Sangre de Cristo,” I said, rummaging through a pile of polished stones that I kept in a dish by the cash register, next to the jar of tamarind lollipops.
I picked out a smooth, triangle-shaped piece of rose quartz and handed it to her. “A house-warming gift for you.”
She took the stone and rubbed it. “Rose quartz is for healing emotional wounds, right?”
I was surprised. “You know your stones, too,” I said.
She smiled slightly. “I had a roommate in college who was into all that woo-woo stuff,” she said. “No offense.”
“None taken.”
She looked around the botanica, taking in the jars of herbs and vials of oils and silver and copper milagros and other charms for sale.
“Aixa Riley. I’ve heard the servants talking. They say you’re a witch,” she said suddenly. “For real?”
I nodded.
“Do you have any — ” She broke off as a young guy with a scar on his jaw stepped through the door. “Everything okay, Ms. Francis?” he asked, giving me the once-over.
“Just finishing up, Elvis,” she said lightly but I could see her aura pulse violet with stress.
I quickly slipped a sample of the beeswax-based lip balm I sell into a bag and handed it over. “Come again,” I said to her with a smile, which she returned.
“Nice to meet you, Aixa,” she said as she left with the guy. Elvis has left the building, I thought idly and watched as he opened the passenger door to the SUV and then got behind the wheel himself. Clearly, Enselmo kept Leelee on a short leash. The guy looked like muscle, and he’d looked pissed. I wondered how he’d gotten into town. Had he walked? Had some other employee dropped him off? I wondered just how many people lived in that big house on the edge of town.
I wondered what Leelee had been about to ask.
I hoped she managed a return visit soon. I got the feeling she needed my help.
“Be careful,” my dead abuela whispered in my ear, as she often did when I was about to do something stupid.
I waved away the warning as if dismissing a mosquito. Back in the day, my grandmother had known everything that went on in Sangre de Cristo, and she’d never hesitated to interfere in someone’s business if she thought they needed some guidance. I wasn’t quite as much of a busybody — oh, yes you are, I heard her say — but I don’t miss much, either.
I didn’t have much time to worry about Leelee Francis in the next few days, though, because Father Paz’s housekeeper found him unconscious on his bedroom floor when she came to clean his house and he was rushed to Hospital Angeles in Tijuana. I drove up there as soon as I heard, and when I entered his room, I found the old priest chatting with my grandmother as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be having a conversation with a ghost.
That told me how very close to death he was himself, because in all the time I’d known him, I’d never known Father Paz to be able to commune with the dead.
When he drifted off to sleep, my abuela turned her attention to me. “You need to get back to Sangre de Cristo,” she said, “as fast as you can.”
My grandmother didn’t usually give orders — she was more of a “strong suggestion” kind of person — so I didn’t waste time with questions like “why?” and only asked, “What?”
Instead of answering me, she just shoved me towards the door, her concern so urgent that it frightened me. “What?” I said again, but she wasn’t there any longer. Whatever else she had to tell me would have to wait until I returned home.
The sense of wrongness hit me almost as soon as I put my car in gear, and it got stronger the closer I got to Sangre de Cristo. At first it was just a mild sense of unease, but I couldn’t shake it, and by the time I parked in front of my house, the feeling had morphed into a physical ache, like I was recovering from a bad case of the flu. By the next morning, the ache had transformed into actual pain, and I’d still seen no sign of my grandmother. I did, however, see a steady stream of customers at the botanica, their complaints ranging from general discomfort to aches like my own.
It was a bright, sunny day that cast sharp shadows on the ground. And in some of those shadows I could see things moving if I looked too closely.
When I wasn’t tending to the needs of my customers, I was “recharging” the protective stones that guarded the botanica’s windows and doorway. Something was leaching their power away, and when I picked them up, all I felt was their cold dead smoothness.
Leelee came back early in the afternoon. She looked like hell, and all the concealer in the world couldn’t camouflage the bruises on her neck. Finger-shaped bruises. Elvis was only a few steps behind her. I muttered a quick distraction spell to make him wander off, and as soon as he was out of earshot, I leaned toward her. “How close did he come to killing you?” I asked, as neutrally as possible.
“Too damn close,” she said, surprising me, and then she glanced nervously in Elvis’ direction. “Enselmo’s getting tired of me,” she said quietly. “He already has my replacement lined up.”
“I’m guessing there’s not a severance package waiting for you,” I said.
“No,” she said, looking toward Elvis again, but he was absorbed by a display of scented candles arrayed on a low table in front of a window.
She looked at me. “So it’s true what they say about you? You can do things?”
I inclined my head, suddenly wary.
She might very well be what she appeared to be, a desperate woman who’d latched onto a bad hombre and who now wanted my help extricating herself from him. But then again…she might just be testing me, for reasons of her own.
“I’m a curandera,” I said. “If you have trouble with your period or can’t sleep at night, there are remedies I can recommend.”
“Don’t be coy, Aixa,” she said and I realized that in our previous conversation I’d already admitted to being a witch.
She was scared and her tone was sharp. She took a deep breath to calm herself before she continued. “You know I’m not talking about folk medicine here.”
I nodded, and she took that as an invitation to continue.
“Enselmo,” she said, and then she hesitated again, looking over at Elvis once again.
“Don’t worry about him,” I said. “He’s forgotten about you for the moment.” And that statement confirmed that the rumors she’d heard about me were true, and I could see golden and blue filaments of hope flickering in Leelee’s aura.
She leaned closer to me, pretending to examine the little copper milagros strung across the front of the display case.
“No one’s watching,” I added, and muttered another quick spell to make sure that no one in the store was looking and that Elvis was still engaged in the candle display. Leelee didn’t seem to know where to start, so I just jumped in. “Why don’t you just leave him?” I asked. “If he’s bored with you, why not make it easy for him by leaving?”
“It’s not that simple,” she said, and I sighed, thinking I was about to hear the familiar litany of the abused woman defending her abuser. But she surprised me.
“I’m undercover,” she said. “I’m a CI for the DEA.”
A confidential informant? The stomach pain I’d been experiencing off and on since returning from Tijuana suddenly flared up. It was a bad, bad feeling.
“Who’s your contact?” I asked, and she hesitated another long moment before naming a guy I’d never heard of.
“He’s here in Sangre?”
“No,” she said. “He operates out of Nuevo Laredo.”
That didn’t sound right to me. But before I could question her further, Elvis had reappeared at her side, looking alert and suspicious. I could sense magic coming off him like a bad smell and knew that my incantation had been countered by a stronger spell. Rosamara’s work again, I was certain.
“I don’t think we’ll be able to make it,” she said to me as coolly as if we were alone. “Enselmo has celiac disease, and I have yet to find a decent gluten-free tamale.”
There’s no gluten in corn meal, I thought.
“That’s too bad,” I said. “Esperanza’s sweet tamales are delicious.” I turned to Elvis as if sharing a confidence. “She only makes them for the church fundraisers. I think she has a secret crush on Father Paz.”
“How is he?” Leelee asked, as if she actually knew him, taking the conversational ball and running with it. Elvis was getting bored again, and I could feel his suspicion draining away.
“Not well, I’m afraid,” I said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “I look forward to meeting him. And we’d like to make a donation to the parish. Since we’re going to be living here for a while, I’d like to be part of the community.” She rummaged in her purse, her aura pulsing with fear but her voice rock steady. “I left my checkbook at home,” she said. “Can I use a credit card?”
“No,” I said, “but I could pick up a check if you’re going to be home later tonight.”
Her relief was almost tangible.
“You will have house guests tonight,” Elvis reminded her.
“I’ll just drop by for a second,” I said, pretending to be oblivious to the undercurrents passing between them. “That’s so generous of you and Enselmo,” I added.
“See you tonight,” she said brightly as she turned and left the shop. Elvis gave me a hard look before he turned and followed her out.
9
The Shadow Gathers
“That woman needs your help,” my abuela commented from the comfortable chair that had been her throne when she ran the botanica and was still her favorite place to sit. The thing was so ratty and threadbare I wanted to throw it out, but she wouldn’t let me.
“But it may already be too late,” she added.
I hated it when she said things like that, especially when she disappeared before I could get any details. And she still hadn’t told me why it had been so urgent I return home. When I asked her, she simply said, “You’ll know why when it happens.”
Dale stopped by a little later on the pretext that he had a bruised shoulder. “Got any more of that arnica salve?” he asked and then, “how’s Father Paz?”
“You should just buy it in the economy size,” I said because he bought about three pots of the salve a month. I didn’t want to answer his second question because I knew he would take the news hard.
“Aixa? How is he?”
“You need to go see him if you want to say goodbye,” I said. “Probably sooner rather than later.”
He nodded thoughtfully but kept his face empty.
Machismo. It’s not just a Mexican thing.
“You’ve got relatives in Austin, right?” he asked suddenly.
I raised my eyebrows. “You know I do.”
“You might want to pay them a visit,” he said. “Before next week.”
“Could you be more cryptic if you tried?” I said.
He looked me in the face, his blue eyes serious. “I mean it, Aixa. Things are about to get real ugly around here.”
So this is what my grandmother was talking about.
“I can’t leave, Dale.”
He sighed. “Why not?”
“Because things are already ugly here, and if all the people who can see that go away, then the people who can’t leave are going to get ground up like chorizo.”
Dale sighed again and ran a hand through his short blond hair in frustration. “You know Rosamara has you on her shit list, right?”
“Rosamara Quintana doesn’t scare me,” I said, and we both knew that was a lie. My abuela had called her La Araña, the spider, and it was an apt name for her. She had a web of influence that spread throughout the state and possibly north of the border as well.
She didn’t work, so far as anyone knew, but she had a studio attached to a huge house on the edge of town where she sculpted hideous constructions that she supposedly sold to galleries in Mazatlán. I could believe it. Tourists buy all kinds of crap when they’re on cruise vacations. I always wondered what happened when they got home with their oversized, neon-colored sombreros and their giant bottles of Kahlua. I mean, how many Black Russians can you really drink?
“There’s going to be a summit meeting here,” he said. “Some of the jefes are gathering to talk business. There’s talk El Señor might even show up himself.”
“Really?” I said. That would be good news for Dale. He’d been undercover too long, and I know he was worried his luck was going to run out. All it would take was some lowlife recognizing him from his previous life in El Paso, and that would be it.
My grandmother might have known something of what lay ahead for him, but she never told me who she saw on the road when she traveled between the land of the living and the land of the dead. She said that it’s not always better to know.
She could be right about that, but I wasn’t so sure. Prescience is not one of my gifts.
“Dale—" I started to say, but he interrupted me before I could finish my thought.
“Listen to me, Aixa. Even if he doesn’t show up, one of the items on the agenda is figuring out how to deal with the town’s…lack of enthusiasm…for the business opportunities his organization is offering.”
“Plenty of people are happy to take El Señor’s coin,” I said.
“But plenty more would do so if a certain curandera wasn’t so outspoken. One of the items on the agenda is you.”
My stomach clenched even tighter when I heard that. “I don’t have that kind of influence,” I protested. “I didn’t even vote for our current mayor.”
I’d hoped he would grin at that, but instead he gave me one of those sharp looks that turned his blue eyes to ice. “Don’t be disingenuous,” he said. “It’s been you and Father Paz against the cartel from the beginning. Threatening to excommunicate that bastard Acosta when he turned up last summer bought you both some time, but Enselmo’s made of stronger stuff. And besides, Simon won’t live to see Christmas, and when he dies you’ll be out of time, too.”
“I’m no threat to El Señor,” I said, thinking of Luis Acosta and his short-lived assault on the town before the really bad boys had moved in. He’d been more scared of Father Paz than any of the drug lords.
“We both know that’s not true,” he said. “No one really believes that Tomas Hernandez died of a heart attack.”
“Tomas Hernandez died of a heart attack,” I said evenly. “Probably brought on by too much smoking and bad food and his cocaine habit.”
My words sounded hollow, even to me.
“This is me you’re talking to, Aixa,” he said, and his voice took on a husky, intimate tone. “Tomas was a waste of DNA, and I’m not going to shed any tears over him. And I wasn’t there when he dropped dead of a heart attack after assaulting you.”
I wondered where he had gotten his information. Maybe from Tonio. It wasn’t like him to gossip, but he’d been pretty shaken up that night.
“Hazme un paro,” I said. “Do me a favor and drop it.”
“I would have killed myself for what he did to you,” he said quietly, his eyes locked on mine.
“Nothing happens in my house without my consent,” I said, moved by his declaration. “I invited Tomas to my home that night. He came looking for trouble, and he found it. It was meant to happen. I made it happen. ¿Me comprendes?”
He looked at me for another long moment, then sighed. “I’m just saying — people talk and El Señor listens, and Tomas Hernandez was part of his organization.”
“Which makes me wonder how smart El Senor could be, keeping someone like Tomas on the payroll.”
Dale finally did smile at that, his mouth turning up in just the slightest of smirks. “Good help is hard to find.” Then he sobered again. “I’m not kidding about you getting out of town.”
“You know who needs to get out of town,” I said. “Leelee Francis.”
“Little fish who swim with the sharks get eaten.”
“That’s cold.”
He shrugged. “You can’t save them all.”
“She says she’s a confidential informant for the DEA.”
Dale looked puzzled for a moment and then shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“Why would someone lie about that?” I asked, but I got that bad, bad feeling again. Something wasn’t right here, and the wrongness of it was getting worse and worse.
“Who knows what’s going on with her? But you need to stay far, far away from her. And Enselmo, too.”
“Um,” I said noncommittally, not about to admit that I intended to visit her that very evening. “Here’s your salve,” I added, handing him the jar. “Would you like a bag?”
“You have no regard for your personal safety,” he said, and my grandmother laughed.
“You’re not the first person to tell her that,” she said, as if he could hear her.
10
The Spider’s Web
The sun was starting to set as I drove up to the gate of the house Enselmo had rented. The place had been vacant because the previous owner had gotten himself killed in a business dispute, and his widow had made a run for the border with a suitcase full of cash that didn’t belong to her and had gotten killed, too.
The five-bedroom, four-bathroom house was the only dwelling in Sangre de Cristo that had a manned gate in the seven-foot wall circling the property, the only house that needed one. When I was a child, most people in town didn’t even bother to lock their doors.
Times had changed, but not so much that many people needed a gated wall around their houses.
You couldn’t access the keypad or intercom from your car, but had to get out and approach on foot, another security measure. Before I was within a foot of the gate, a young man appeared behind it.
