The Witching Hour: 11 Enchanting Novels Featuring Witches, Wizards, Vampires, Shifters, Ghosts, Fae, and More!, page 91
“This is private property,” he said. I couldn’t read his aura at all, but his body language spoke plainly. Fuck you.
“Good evening,” I said pleasantly. “I’m here to see Leelee.”
He gave me a blank look. “I’m expected,” I added. “Aixa Riley.”
“Momento,” he said, and stepped away from the gate to confer with someone else. “Lo siento,” he said when he returned, “but no one is home this evening.”
“Really?” I said, and hoped the question sounded genuinely confused and not like a challenge to his authority. “I was under the impression that she and Enselmo would be entertaining guests this evening.”
That threw him. Before he could dig himself any deeper into the lie, Elvis appeared at the gate.
“Ms. Riley,” he said, as if delighted to see me. “I know Ms. Francis was looking forward to seeing you tonight.” he said as he stepped forward and thrust a paper rectangle at me. It was a check in the amount of a thousand dollars, signed by Enselmo.
“She left this for you,” he said with a smile that had no warmth in it at all.
I glanced at the check. “This is very generous,” I said.
“Señor Porras is a generous man,” Elvis said pompously, and then spoiled it by adding with a leer, “especially where beautiful women are concerned.”
I showed my teeth in what I hoped looked like a smile. “I’d love to thank him for his generosity personally,” I said. “Will he and Leelee be home later?”
“Ms. Francis has returned to Texas to deal with some family matters,” he said, “and unfortunately, Señor Porras is expecting some rather important guests in the coming week.”
He looked at me to see if I was buying the story. I made a sympathetic face. “Oh, I hope it’s nothing serious with her family,” I said. When Elvis didn’t offer anything more, I added, “Well, please thank them for me.”
I jingled the car keys in my hand and then looked up at Elvis as if struck by a sudden thought. “Would you mind giving me Leelee’s phone number? I know when I’m dealing with family stuff, it’s sometimes nice to hear a friendly voice. A neutral party, you know? Someone you can vent to who won’t judge.” I almost batted my eyes in my attempt to look and sound harmless.
To my surprise, he actually gave me her number. The minute I was out of sight, I pulled the car over and dialed it. I was not surprised when it went straight to voicemail.
“I told you it was probably too late,” my grandmother said as she materialized in the passenger side of the car.
I hated it when she did that, too.
My next call was to Dale, who sounded like I’d woken him from a deep sleep. He told me to go home and start packing, and that he’d be right over.
He showed up wearing a pair of jeans that looked like he’d had them since college and a T-shirt advertising the bogus gallery where he sold the folk art he “exported.”
Seeing him outside my door, the porch light making a halo of his hair, I felt a wave of desire roll through me. Dale was not my type at all. I went to college with a lot of guys who looked like him, handsome white boys who thought a quarter-inch of stubble made them look “edgy” and thought doing tequila shots on a Saturday night was a cultural experience.
I hadn’t been interested at all when he rolled into Sangre de Cristo with his lies and his truths, and his eyes so blue some of the locals had a bet he was wearing tinted contacts.
I hadn’t been interested at all, but I had been intrigued. He had the strangest aura I’d ever seen. It had been almost transparent when he arrived but now it was red, which can often mean a lot of negative personality traits, but his was shot through with silver. When he was with me, the red retreated and the silver expanded, which I took as a good sign.
Right now I could only see shiny veins of silver pulsing through the red. His emotions were close to the surface and it wasn’t just worry I saw, it was cold naked fear.
And then his aura blanked, as if someone had simply erased it.
And that scared me even worse because I didn’t know if he was shutting me out or if this was some kind of magical interference that was keeping me from reading him.
“Are you ready?” he asked without preamble.
“I’m not leaving,” I said.
“Leelee Francis is dead,” he said. “A car accident just outside of town. Burned beyond recognition.”
“Then how do you know it’s her?”
He gave me an impatient look. “She was still wearing that big honking ruby ring of hers. Whoever killed her wanted to be sure she’d be identified.”
A wave of nausea rose up. I had felt that she was dead, but hadn’t been sure.
“Whoever?” I asked, relieved he hadn’t said, whatever. Narco violence was bad enough, but if Rosamara was somehow involved in Leelee’s death, it meant that the cartel had stepped up their game. It meant that no one in Sangre de Cristo was safe.
Dale saw my expression and read it correctly. “You’ll be next,” he said, “if you don’t do the smart thing.” He walked over to the wooden wardrobe I use as an extra closet and flung it open. “Start packing,” he said and I bristled at his commanding tone.
“I appreciate your concern,” I said and I did, but if Dale thought I could be bullied into leaving, he really didn’t know me very well. I went over to the wardrobe and closed it.
Dale grabbed my wrist — not hard, but firmly enough that it got my attention. “Your being here is making things worse for the people you care about. You keep a pretty low profile, but people talk. There’s your grandmother’s friend, Esperanza. She’s telling everyone who’ll listen that if the narcos give anyone trouble, you’ll run them out of town.”
My heart sank at his words. Esperanza had worked at the botanica for years and had watched me grow up. My abuela had confided everything to her the day she discovered I could see the dead walking around town as easily as I saw the living.
“Esperanza is a foolish old woman,” I said, offering a mental apology for dissing her so brutally. She’d always been kind to me, and I loved her like a third grandmother.
“It’s not just Esperanza,” he said. “And they don’t just talk about the day you confronted Gustavo’s ghost in the graveyard.”
“I can’t believe you’re talking about this,” I said. “I’m not some little Goth girl who played with Ouija boards as a child and now thinks she can talk to spirits.”
He sighed in frustration. “I know you’re the real deal Aixa. I didn’t want to think so but I know,” he said. “Maybe it would be easier to swallow if I’d grown up in one of those crazy snake-handling cults, but I’m a Methodist from Abilene. We don’t do…Methodists don’t do the things you can do. And I’ve seen Rosamara do things with my own eyes. Things I can’t explain.”
“She’s a bruja,” I said flatly. “And she follows the dark path.”
“I know,” he said. And then, as if fighting some inner battle, he pulled up his T-shirt to show me the raised blister over his heart. Shaped like a spider, it was angry and red, full of fluid that looked poisonous.
Despite myself, I gasped. I’d never seen the mark before, despite seeing him naked more times than I could count.
More of Rosamara’s evil glamour, I assumed.
And just as quickly as he’d revealed the mark, it was gone and his skin smooth again. I could tell he was fighting her influence, and that it was costing him.
“When did she mark you?” I asked.
“About a month after I got here,” he said.
“You slept with her,” I said, and didn’t like the flame of jealousy that sparked in me at the knowledge, even though it had been before we got together.
“I wanted to know what she knew,” he said. “It seemed like the easiest way.”
I scoffed. Rosamara was a beautiful woman but nearly twice his age. Even a supremely confident woman would have been suspicious of someone crossing an age divide like that.
“And she figured out what you were doing,” I said, and it wasn’t a question.
“She knew what I was doing,” he confirmed. “She tied me up — pretending it was a game — and then she … did this.”
“Do you know what it means?”
“It means I’m on a short leash.”
“It means a lot more than that,” I said. “It means the spider holds your soul in her hands, and any time she wants, she can destroy it.”
I didn’t tell him the rest; I didn’t tell him it meant that she would have been hitchhiking on his soul from the moment he was marked. She would have seen everything he saw, heard everything he saw, felt everything he felt. It would have been easy for her to pass on information about his informants and the people he was talking to in the Shadow’s organization. Even if he hadn’t been working with Leelee, he’d have met with Steve Estevez. And she would have seen it.
And all the times he and I had been together, she had been there with us. I shivered as the full horror of that struck me.
The only reason Dale was still alive was that she wanted him alive, and having this conversation was probably the most dangerous thing he’d done since joining the DEA.
“Shut up,” I said and pulled him toward my bedroom.
He misunderstood my intention and reached for me.
“No,” I said, closing the door behind us and throwing up a cloaking spell as I lit a white candle and called on the saints to protect us.
My bedroom was the most secure room in the house, with rock salt embedded in the walls and along the door and window sills. I’d always felt completely safe there, but now? I could feel cold tendrils of dread seeking entrance. Something of my panic must have communicated itself to Dale.
“Can you…take it off? Remove the mark?”
“I don’t know.”
There were ways and I’d heard about them, ways involving blood magic. But that’s a dark path and it’s not one you “dabble” in, not when the consequences could damn the soul of someone you love.
I can’t say I’ve never been tempted by the dark side. What I’d done to Tomas Hernandez was as black as it gets, and ever since the night I’d killed him, I’d heard the dark call of black magic luring me into more acts of violence, tempting me to test my power and feel my strength.
“My abuela knew I had a thirst for the dark power,” I said. “She wouldn’t teach me certain things, said they were not things to be learned, that once they were learned I would want to use them.” I was silent for a moment, thinking of the argument that had ensued when she discovered I was taking lessons from a dark-path brujo I’d met in San Antonio.
“Why are you doing this?” she’d cried.
‘Because I want to know everything,” I’d said passionately. I’d been very young then and didn’t know that there are some things that we really aren’t meant to know, and that there really are things that once done can’t be undone.
I felt the weight of Tomas Hernandez’ death, but if I was honest with myself, I found myself relishing the thought of confronting more bad guys. And that scared me a lot more than the actual bad guys. Because if I couldn’t control my impulses, then I would soon find myself turning into someone like the Spider myself.
But if I stayed quiet, I would become a fly trapped in her web.
It was a dilemma.
But I knew I wasn’t going to run.
Not now that I knew Rosamara had claimed Dale for her own.
11
The Spider Bites
We made love in my bedroom as the white candle burned down. He had never been more tender or more attentive, but it felt off to me, and in the end, though he climaxed, I was left unsatisfied.
Dale slept afterward, which he almost never did, and as he slept, I pricked his ear with a golden needle and mixed a drop of his blood with mine as I crafted a spell for his protection. I could feel Rosamara’s magic resisting mine, but then I heard a crack like an eggshell being broken and in that instant, I felt my magic slip inside him.
I hoped it would be enough.
It was awkward between Dale and me when he woke, and his leave-taking was hasty and furtive. His breath was foul as I kissed him goodbye, and my mood was foul to match.
I had asked him if he could get me in to see the ring Leelee had been wearing. It was still possible that I might be able to pick up some impressions from it. Unfortunately, he told me, someone had taken it out of the evidence locker and the security cameras had mysteriously gone blank.
“Would a photograph of the ring do?” he asked.
“No. I don’t have that skill.”
“Sorry,” he said.
It turned out that Leelee had been a confidential informant but the man who was her handler had been so worried about her that he hadn’t entered her in the system. There’d been a secret bank account and the money she’d earned had been sent to her mother. Leelee’s employers had strongly urged her mother to take the money and go somewhere else, preferably out of Texas. They hadn’t had to tell her twice.
I hoped the money would buy Leelee’s mother some peace. I hoped her handler could deal with his grief and guilt over his CI’s murder. I’d caught a glimpse of him when he accompanied the hearse collecting her body. He’d been in love with her and she’d never known.
The jefes began arriving soon after, as Dale had warned they would. There was nothing subtle or clandestine about their movements. Orders of food and liquor were delivered to the gate of Enselmo’s house, and the mayor’s office sent representatives to make certain that all the guests were aware of the many delights our little town had to offer. Those who had no interest in dealing with the narco royalty kept their heads down, maintaining their daily routines but locking up their houses early and staying in for the night.
Three days after the summit began, every household in Sangre de Cristo received an invitation to Enselmo’s rented house. He was giving a party to introduce his business associates to his new neighbors.
Elvis had passed on my comments about Esperanza’s sweet tamales, and Enselmo had asked her to prepare the delicacies for his guests. “I’ve heard they’re quite the treat,” he said to her when he summoned her to his house to discuss the matter, and when she repeated the conversation to me, I could barely repress a shiver. I wondered if Leelee had already been dead when Elvis and I had had that conversation at the gate bout her visit home to her family.
“How many pans do you think I should make?” Esperanza had asked me worriedly. There was no question of her turning down the job. Enselmo had offered her a thousand U.S. dollars for her time, and that would pay her expenses nearly all winter.
“You should probably make twice as many as you think you’ll need,” I said. “You can always freeze them if there are leftovers.”
She drew herself up to her full five feet and looked at me haughtily. “No one ever leaves one of my sweet tamales on a plate.”
“Es verdad,” I said. I’d once seen Father Paz nearly stab a parishioner in the hand when they both reached for the last one on the table and a parish fund raiser.
As if I’d mentioned the priest out loud, Esperanza looked sad. “Simon likes my sweet tamales. You should take him some next time you drive up to see him.”
“You should come with me,” I said.
“No,” she said, blushing like a school girl. “That wouldn’t be proper.”
Esperanza had been widowed early, and she had not been lucky in love. Her husband had married her because she was a good worker and not out of passion—or even friendship. Theirs had been a lonely union.
They’d had four children, but only their youngest son had survived to adulthood. He lived in Albuquerque now with his American wife and two American children Esperanza had never seen. Miguel called her at Christmas and on Mother’s Day, and the conversations were awkward.
If he ever showed his face in Sangre de Cristo again, I intended to cast a spell on him that would make him call his mother every Sunday, whether he knew why or not.
It hurt my heart that Esperanza loved Father Paz but didn’t think she had the right to say goodbye to him.
“I’ll take him some tamales,” I said. “An early taste of heaven.”
She smiled at that, her cheeks dimpling with pleasure.
Everyone wanted to know if I was going to accept the invitation to the party.
I was more interested in knowing if Rosamara was going to be there.
I hadn’t seen much of her since she’d showed up at my grandmother’s funeral and attempted to cast a spell that would have chained my grandmother to the churchyard for all eternity.
Thwarting her will on that day had been the first real test of my powers, and though I’d managed to turn the magic aside, I’d spent the next week in bed, replenishing my psychic batteries. I really wasn’t looking forward to a rematch.
“I don’t think you should go,” Father Paz said, munching on one of Esperanza’s tamales and licking condensed milk from his fingers.
“I want to go,” I said.
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “We can’t always get what we want.”
“That’s all you’ve got?” I said, scoffing at him. “Fifty years a Jesuit, and the best you can do is quote Mick Jagger?”
“Sixty years,” he said, reaching for another tamale. “I was an altar boy. They got to me early.”
He continued to eat contentedly as I watched. He was a man at peace, enjoying a sweet and a visit from a friend.
I felt a stab of loss, as if he were dead already.
“If you had to do it all over again, would you still be a priest?” I asked impulsively.
He swallowed a last bit of pineapple before he replied. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve had doubts off and on, but I think that’s normal. And here in Mexico the history of the Church has been conflated with the history of the Spanish conquest, so it’s complicated. But I like the changes I’m seeing. This Pope Francis. I think he might be the best Pope we’ve had for the last hundred years. And maybe he’ll finally root out the rot with the pedophiles.”
