The Witching Hour: 11 Enchanting Novels Featuring Witches, Wizards, Vampires, Shifters, Ghosts, Fae, and More!, page 94
“I have a few questions, Aixa.”
I looked at him in disbelief. “Seriously, Tonio? Half the cartel just left here without you even getting their names, and you have questions for me?”
He didn’t like that. “I was here all night, Aixa. I know all their names.”
“Okay,” I said, calming down a little, “ask your questions.”
“Just take me through what you remember.”
It didn’t take me long to tell my story. As I spoke, I fingered the black tourmaline around my neck. It felt hot, which meant it was absorbing all the negative energy in the room. Or at least as much as it could. It would have to be recharged in salt and sunlight when this was all over.
Tonio listened without interrupting, but I could see a skeptical look growing stronger and stronger on his face.
“Rosamara Quintana shot Enselmo?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Describe her again,” he said, so I did.
“You saw Rosamara Quintana shoot Enselmo?” he repeated.
“Yes. What’s the problem?”
“You and Elvis are the only ones who say they saw her, Aixa. “Elvis says he was shooting at her to protect his boss.”
“She shot Enselmo and then Elvis pulled his gun. ”
Tonio’s lips thinned. “Everyone else says Elvis shot him. No one heard a shot before that.”
“What?” I stared at him in shock. “That’s just…no. Tonio no, that’s not what happened.”
“You’re the only one besides Elvis who says that. Maybe he did it for you?”
“Why would — ?”
“You had a reason. After what happened to Dale.”
I looked at him through narrowed eyes. Dale and I had kept our relationship on the down low, so why did everyone suddenly know all about us?
It could only be thanks to the Spider.
“It was her,” I whispered, Rosamara wanted Enselmo dead, so she’d manipulated Elvis into killing him.” Even to me the words sounded like the complaint of a petulant child. I decided to go on the offensive. “Who put you in charge, esé?”
Now it was Tonio’s turn to narrow his eyes. He looked away from me, took in the crime scene. “Things are going to be different in Sangre de Cristo,” he said. “We’re on the cartel’s radar now. They’re going to be coming for us, and there’s nothing you or Father Paz can do to stop them.”
“Tonio—" I began, but he held up his hand.
“Get out of here,” he said. “If I need to ask you any more questions, I’ll come by the botanica.”
That sounded good to me, so I left.
I was at my front door when I realized that there was someone behind me. I whipped around with my keys in my fist and found hatchet-faced Jonah Biden standing in my tiny yard.
“May I come in?” he asked, as if it wasn’t an odd thing to ask a stranger in the middle of a night of murder and mayhem.
“It’s late,” I said.
“It’s important,” he said.
“Who are you?”
He paused for a long moment. “I’ve already told you my name.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said. There was no way I was letting him across my doorstep until I knew more about him.
He read my face and said, “Yo estoy de parte de los ángeles.” I didn’t respond. “I’m one of the good guys, Aixa. I worked with Dale back in Texas.”
“He wouldn’t have told you about me,” I said. “He didn’t know me when he worked in El Paso.”
“He isn’t the one who told me about you.”
As I stared at him, my grandmother said from inside the house, “Let him in, Aixa. He is an angel of darkness, but he means you no harm.”
I hesitated for another moment, and then Jonah said, “Buenas, Marisol. It’s been a long time.”
I stared at him in shock. If he could see my grandmother’s ghost, he wasn’t just some random guy who’d come up to me at a party. And if he knew my grandmother well enough to call her by her first name, then there was a story there I wanted to hear. He caught my look and shrugged. I stood aside and let him enter. I turned to give my grandmother a WTF? look, but she had disappeared.
When I looked back at Jonah, he was standing at my fireplace, playing with the milagros strung across it.
I took a deep breath. “Are you the Shadow?”
He looked startled for a minute, then answered, “No.”
“No? That was some Jedi-level shadow magic in there tonight.”
“I’ve had a lot of practice with shadow magic.”
“Too bad your protection spells weren’t as strong as your shadow spells.”
He met my gaze. “They protected the one I meant to protect.” He let me think about that for a minute before adding, “You’re still here, aren’t you?”
I thought about saying, I can protect myself, but decided against it. There’d been wild magic flying around in that living room tonight, and wild magic is unpredictable. So what I said was, “Thank you.”
He nodded absently, accepting the half-assed apology, his attention focused on the milagros. “You have this place well-warded,” he said, “but you are way outgunned in the magic department if you’re thinking of going after Rosamara Quintana.”
“You know her?”
He nodded. “We’re old acquaintances,” he said.
“How old?”
“Old. Have you got anything to eat?”
I was surprised he was hungry. I’d seen him with a plate full of barbecued beef and chicken tamales. I guess all that magic left him famished.
I shook my head at the question and tried to think of the last time I’d shopped for groceries. “I don’t think so,” I said. He looked disappointed, so I went into the kitchen to forage, wondering why I was taking the trouble. “There’s stuff to make a salad,” I said. “And a mango.”
“Bueno,” he said. “You got a chopping board?”
I pointed it out to him, mentally giving him points for not expecting me to prepare his snack.
“There’s enough here for two,” he observed.
“I’ll eat the leftovers tomorrow,” I said, sitting down at the table to watch him as he rinsed the tomatoes and peppers and started chopping them with seriously “cheffy” moves.
“How do you know my grandmother?” I finally asked.
He didn’t look up. “That’s a long story.”
“I don’t think I’ll be getting much sleep tonight,” I said.
He sighed, and put the knife down. “I met her when she was about your age. You ever seen pictures of her as a girl?”
I bristled at the word “girl,” but nodded as he continued, “She was so beautiful. That dark red hair and those dark brown eyes. I wanted her from the moment I saw her.”
A prickle of unease went through me.
“So you had a fling?”
He looked at me gravely. “You could say that,” he said.
Oh, no, I thought. Oh, hell no.
“It was before she met Roberto,” he said. “And I was away when she found out she was pregnant with Luz.” I tensed, but said nothing as he continued. “Luz was such a pretty little baby with her fuzz of red hair.”
“Did Roberto know?”
“That he wasn’t her father? Yes. It didn’t matter — he adored Marisol and doted on your mother.”
I felt my heart flip over. My grandfather Roberto had died before I was born. I’d never heard a word about this American stranger before. But maybe he knew other things I didn’t know. So I asked him the question my mother had died without answering, the question that had plagued me all of my life.
“Are you the reason my mother left Tom Riley and came here to have me?”
I’d never known the reason why my mother had fled Texas in the last month of her pregnancy. The official story was that she’d wanted me to be born in Mexico so that I’d be a citizen of both countries. I’d always suspected that the truth was something a little different.
“Yes,” he admitted. “I came to see her in Austin, and I told her who I was. She came here to confront your grandmother, went into labor, and—"
“And died,” I finished for him flatly. “You son of a bitch.”
He took the insult without flinching and without denying it, either.
“Why?” I asked him. “Why?” I wasn’t even sure which question I was asking — Why did you leave my grandmother? Why didn’t you stay in your daughter’s life? Why did you show up in her life without warning? Why have I never heard of you?
He sighed and used the edge of his hand to push the chopped vegetables into the big bowl I’d put before him.
“I’m older than I look,” he said.
“That’s nice and cryptic.” I wasn’t in a mood to indulge him. I wanted answers.
He gave me a look. “Have you ever heard of the Chupícuaro?” he asked, as if certain the answer was going to be “no.”
“Pre-Hispanic culture,” I said, “Hunters-fishers-gatherers. Developed between 500 BCE and 300 CE.”
He nodded to encourage me to continue, but that was pretty much all I had.
“The name means ‘blue place,’” I finally added, “and they’ve found a bunch of pyramids nobody’s explored yet because the whole site’s underwater.”
“Most of them are tombs,” he said. “They practiced a cult of the dead. Piled their altars with trophy skulls and weapons.”
“And you know this how?”
“I trained as an archaeologist,” he said. “When everyone else was doing Egypt, I was fascinated by Mesoamerica.”
“And by everyone else you mean…?”
“Howard Carter and his crew.”
“Howard Carter? The King Tut Howard Carter?” Mierda, I thought. “So you are a lot older than you look.”
He shrugged. “You have any salad dressing?”
“There’s oil and vinegar in the pantry.” I pointed with my chin.
He continued to talk as he rummaged through the little cabinet for the ingredients to dress his salad. “I was doing research in Mexico City when I found an old manuscript, The Codex of the Red Spider.”
I didn’t know why, but the name gave me a chill. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“And you never will,” he said. “I burned it.”
And that was all he said until he finished eating. Finally, he pushed the bowl aside.
“The Codex was pure evil,” he said. “Even just reading it once….” His voice trailed off as he focused on some inward truth. “It’s the reason I’m still alive after all these years.”
“So it was some kind of a grimoire?” I asked.
“No. A grimoire is just a recipe book,” he said. “The Codex is more like….” He fumbled for words and then said, “A grimoire is like Saruman — the Codex is like Sauron.”
“Lord of the Rings metaphors,” I said. “Really?”
“That’s really the only way I can explain how dangerous it was,” he said. “Or how dangerous it would be to anyone who came across it.”
“So you’re a witch hunter?” I said, and it wasn’t a question.
“There was more than one copy of the Codex,” he said, deflecting. “And two years after I burned my copy, I started hearing rumors about two powerful witches living in a little Mexican border town. One a raven-haired beauty, they said, the other with hair like fire. So I followed the rumors, and that’s how I met your grandmother.”
“And Rosamara,” I said, suddenly sure I was on the verge of learning something I’d unconsciously known all my life.
“Yes.”
“And did you take the Codex from Rosamara?”
“No,” he said. “She wasn’t the witch who possessed it.”
What?
He saw the realization in my eyes and nodded to confirm it. “Marisol was the one who had taken the other Codex, and by the time I caught up to her, she’d already destroyed it herself.”
“And Rosamara?” I asked.
“And Rosamara never forgave Marisol for doing that.”
My grandmother’s feud with Rosamara had never made sense to me, and now suddenly it did. If Jonah was right and the Codex was as powerful as he believed, Rosamara would have stopped at nothing to possess it, and would have been insane with frustrated jealousy when my grandmother destroyed it.
But that still left questions. “So you’re a witch, too?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“But you were hunting witches. To kill them?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t? Why?”
A look I couldn’t identify passed over his face. Grief? Shame? “Rosamara hadn’t read the Codex, so I didn’t think she was dangerous. She was so beautiful that people exaggerated her abilities. I didn’t think she was a real threat.” He looked down and said so quietly I almost didn’t hear him, “That’s on me.”
“And my grandmother?”
“She had held the book in her hands and still destroyed it. She had turned away from the dark path and stayed in the light. I knew how hard that was to do, so I knew she had the strength to handle the knowledge she possessed.”
“So you spared her? Who gave you the power of life and death?” He didn’t answer. Frustrated, I asked another question. “Did you love her?”
“Yes.”
“But you left her.”
“Yes,” he said again, without offering any explanation or excuse.
“Why are you back now?”
“Because there’s a shadow rising in Sangre de Cristo. Rosamara draws power from blood and chaos, and the turf war she’s just incited by killing Enselmo Porras is going to draw out her greatest adversary.”
“The Shadow?” I asked, confused.
He looked at me with pity. “No Aixa. She’s the Shadow, she always has been, hiding in plain sight, camouflaged by the sexist belief that a woman can’t have real power.” He let me think about that for a moment.
“So who is her greatest adversary?” I asked, dreading the answer.
“Her greatest adversary is you.”
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“Nice to meet you, too,” I said, reeling from this information.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“If you’ve been hunting witches all these years, why don’t you just kill her and have done with it?” I asked.
“I’m not sure I can anymore,” he said, and that admission shocked me. Was she really so powerful?
“You need me,” I said, realizing.
“I do.”
“Did you really work with Dale back in Texas?”
“No. That was a lie. I needed you to listen to me.”
“And you didn’t think you could just talk to me like an adult?”
“I was wrong to lie to you.”
“You think?” We glared at each other for a long moment. Finally, I said, “Tell me one thing, and tell the truth. Why didn’t you stay with my grandmother?”
There was no mistaking his expression now. It was pure anguish. “I’d killed other witches, some of them with vengeful kin who were hunting me. I knew if I stayed with her, she’d be a target. I thought if I stayed away, she’d be safe.”
“But she wasn’t?”
“No.”
And suddenly I connected the dots. It had never made sense to me that my mother had died in childbirth. Her pregnancy had been normal. After her death, my father had bullied her doctors into turning over their medical records so his own doctor could review them. She was a perfectly healthy twenty-four-year-old woman who’d died for no good reason giving birth to her first child.
“It was a spell?” I said, and again it wasn’t a question.
He nodded. “Rosamara attacked Marisol in the way she knew would hurt her the most. You were collateral damage.”
The pain hit me like a physical blow, doubling me over as I fought to catch my breath. “No,” I said and it came out a howl. “No. No. No.”
I stood up blindly, and he rose, too. He took two steps to my side and put his arms around me as if he could somehow restrain the emotion that was exploding from me He spoke no words of comfort because…what could he say?
He held me until I stopped crying, and then he handed me a crisp white handkerchief. I looked at it in disbelief. Who carries a handkerchief anymore?
Finally, when I had myself under control again, I said, “What do we do now?”
“We take her down,” he said. “Together.”
He left soon after that, promising to get in touch with me the next day, and the moment he was out the door, my abuela appeared in the living room again. She saw my face and held up her hand to stop me. “We’ll talk later, mija, but you need to shower now. You need to wash the stink of evil away.”
As I stood under the sputtering shower, I suddenly felt Dale’s presence in the tiny tiled cubicle with me. I closed my eyes and leaned back against the solid flesh that was achingly familiar; I felt his hands exploring my body, cradling my soapy breasts, kneading between my legs.
I could smell his scent, that mixture of musk and nicotine and need.
I felt tears slip beneath my lashes as I luxuriated in his touch, knowing it wasn’t possible, knowing it wasn’t real, and yet lost in the sensation. I felt his hardness against me and turned so I could face him.
And the moment that I did, the illusion evaporated and he was gone, the withdrawal so abrupt that I cried out. Throbbing with unfulfilled need, I fingered myself to orgasm, coming so hard I had to brace myself against the tile wall to keep from falling.
I stayed in the shower until the water ran cold, crying for my lover, crying for the mother I had never known, and crying for myself.
I came back into the living room to find my grandmother sitting in her favorite chair and watching a rerun of her favorite telenovela. She pretended to ignore the look on my face.
“Emilio está loco de remate,” she said, gesturing toward the screen. “Pilar should never have married him.” It took me a moment to understand she was commenting on the telenovela.
“Forget Emilio and Pilar,” I said. “We need to have a talk.”
She looked at me. “There’s no talking to you when you’re in one of these moods,” she said, and then she disappeared.
