Darknight (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 2) (23 page)

“Oh, come on,” Lucas said, shaking his head. “That’s just a legend. You’re not suggesting — ”

“She doesn’t have to suggest,” I broke in. “Connor and I both saw it. A huge gray wolf…but with Damon’s eyes.”

Beside me, Connor shuddered, but he didn’t say anything to contradict me. Somewhere inside, he might have wished he could deny what we had seen. Luckily, he was not the type to challenge the evidence of his own eyes.

“Yes,” Marie said. “It is usually the eyes that give it away.”

Lucas looked baffled, scared, and angry all at the same time. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation — ”

Marie turned her cool gaze on him. “There is one, and it is that our
primus
has given in to a great evil. His was always a questing soul, and this time it sought power in the very worst place it possibly could.”

“So what do we do?” Connor asked, voice tight. “How do we help him, make him get better?”

“You cannot help him.” Her tone was implacable, impersonal as a judge handing down a sentence. “Once a man has destroyed the humanity within himself in exchange for these powers, there is no redemption. All we can do is stop him before he takes any more innocent lives.” At last she glanced down at Jessica’s prone body, expelling the smallest of breaths as she did so. Even as Connor shook his head in denial, she went on, “Would you hesitate to kill a rabid dog? That is what your brother has become, Connor.

“The only thing we can do is put him out of his misery.”

I
drove
us back to town, since Connor was in no shape to get behind the wheel. Lucas and Marie stayed behind at Damon’s house, calling for reinforcements to get the place cleaned up by any means necessary, magical or otherwise. Apparently they planned to have Jessica’s body moved to a location near one of the previous wolf attacks, to leave her there and have the authorities think she was just another victim, one who hadn’t been discovered as quickly as the others. It wasn’t so very far from the truth.

As Connor and I prepared to leave, though, I saw a flicker out of the corner of my eye, and realized it was Jessica, standing in the middle of the hallway and watching as Lucas and Marie began tidying up as best they could. Well, the one thing most of the ghosts of my acquaintance had in common was sudden, violent death. It shouldn’t have surprised me that Jessica remained in Damon’s house, her soul shackled to this world by the very obsession that had led to her death.

I wished I could speak to her, but she disappeared the second I turned toward her and our eyes met. Time for that later, maybe, although the thought of having to return to that house anytime soon made my flesh crawl. And I said nothing to Connor as I took the FJ’s keys from him and got into the driver’s seat. He had enough to deal with right now without being informed that his brother’s house was now haunted.

We were about halfway home when he finally spoke. “You’re not saying it.”

“Saying what?” I asked, although I thought I knew.

“‘I told you so.’”

“What good would that do?” I lifted one hand from the steering wheel, reached down to lay it on top of his where it rested on his knee. At least he didn’t try to move it away…but neither did he try to touch me in return, only sat there, not responding at all. A nervous quiver went through my stomach, but I told myself he was just in shock, trying to process everything we’d just seen and heard. “I’m so very sorry, Connor.”

“Are you?” he asked, staring straight out the window at the buildings and cars passing by. “I mean, you never liked Damon.”

Well, he didn’t give me much reason to,
I thought. I would never say such a thing to Connor, though. Not now. He loved his brother, and even if I couldn’t fully understand that love, I had to respect it. “I didn’t agree with his methods,” I said carefully. “But I would have been willing to meet him halfway, for your sake.”

A brief, curt nod, and Connor shifted in his seat, pulling his hand from beneath mine. I didn’t try to prevent him from doing so. The last thing he needed right now was me clinging to him. I was here, and I’d listen to anything he had to say, but I wouldn’t force myself on him. Somehow I knew that would only make things worse.

We pulled into the alley behind our building, and I parked the SUV. At least I was more or less used to driving the FJ by that point, so there wasn’t any fudging or having to back up and try again, which had happened once or twice as I was familiarizing myself with the vehicle and the cramped parking space I had to squeeze it into.

Connor got out and I followed him, trailing behind as he unlocked the rear door to the building and let us in. We walked upstairs in silence, and still said nothing as we entered the apartment.

In the back of my mind, I’d sort of been hoping that he might find some kind of equilibrium once we were back home and in familiar surroundings, but if anything, being in the apartment only seemed to worsen his mood. He unbuttoned his coat and flung it over the back of a chair rather than hanging it up properly. Not a big deal, of course, but I knew Connor, knew that he was usually careful about such things.

As I was taking off my own coat and putting it away, his gaze fell on a couple of paintings that he’d stacked up against the wall in the hallway. He’d brought them over from the studio the day before, wanting to see them from different angles and in different lighting. Now, though, his brow darkened as he stared at them, and before I could do or say anything, he’d driven his booted foot right through one of them.

“It’s all bullshit!” he growled, kicking away the ruined painting. “All of it! What the fuck was I doing, sitting here and making a bunch of fucking
paintings
when my brother needed me?”

Aghast, I could only stare at the wreckage of what a few seconds ago had been a summer-toned landscape of warm grass and tall, cool pines. “Connor — ”

I could tell he was about to do the same thing to the second painting. Without thinking, I reached out with my mind, whisked it out of harm’s way, sent it winging across the room until it settled safely against the wall under the windows.

“You’re getting pretty good at that, aren’t you?” he snapped. “Where did all this come from, anyway? Last thing I heard, about all you were good for was talking to ghosts.”

The rasp of his voice as he said those hateful words was so similar to Damon’s that I wanted to put my hands up to my ears so I wouldn’t have to hear it anymore. But that would be a childish gesture, and ultimately futile. I drew in a breath, then said, “It’s like I told you before — the
prima
’s power is there against the time when it’s needed.”

For the longest moment, he didn’t reply, only glared at me, and I couldn’t help wondering what his next attack would be, what burst of anger I would have to deflect. But something in him seemed to crumple, and all of a sudden his shoulders drooped. He raised his hand to his hair, ran his fingers through it as if somehow that would clear the fog of anger from his mind.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last.

Relief pulsed through me, and I went to him then, pulling him against me and wrapping my arms around him. He clung to me, and I whispered, “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Except I really didn’t think it would be.

I
made
us grilled cheese and tomato soup for dinner — ultimate comfort food — and we went to bed early. No lovemaking that night, but I held him close, tried to reassure him with my presence until he finally fell asleep in my arms. He’d had one terse phone call from Lucas saying that the house had been cleaned up and Jessica “taken care of,” which meant her body must have been left somewhere to be found.

Maybe once upon a time the Wilcoxes could’ve made a person evaporate in a puff of smoke or whatever, but these days everyone had too much of an electronic trail. Sure, people did disappear from time to time; of course they did. In Jessica’s case, though, there would have been a lot of questions asked. She was from a prominent and well-connected family, and she’d been seen in public with Damon. It wasn’t a risk the clan members were willing to take. After so many other young women had been killed, her death in exactly the same manner wouldn’t cause nearly as much uproar as a mysterious disappearance might.

Horrible that her poor body was just dumped somewhere, though. I didn’t want to think about that, nor her pale face watching me from the shadows of Damon’s entry hall. There had to be some way to get her to move on, to relinquish her hold on this plane of existence. That had never been my power, though. I could talk to ghosts, but they had to be the ones to decide it was time to move on. It had happened once or twice in Jerome, so I knew it was possible. I just had never been the one to help them make that transition.

Cleaning up the scene of the crime, however, didn’t help much with the ultimate problem of what to do about Damon. I’d vaguely heard the term “skin-walker” before, but hadn’t paid much attention to it, thinking it must be only a legend. What was happening here in Flagstaff was real, though, and I had to trust that Marie knew what she was talking about. Anyway, I had the evidence of my own eyes to prove that Damon had succumbed to some sort of horrible dark spell. Was the killing of the young women purposeful, to fulfill a black and needy magic, or was it the wolf striking out with no control, killing those who looked like the girl who’d thwarted his attempt to grasp even more power?

Lying there in the dark as Connor slept fitfully against my shoulder, I had the horrible thought that maybe it would’ve been better if Damon’s plan had worked, that he’d somehow managed to bond with me even though he was not my consort. At least that way only one life would have been ruined, not seven.
Eight,
I amended mentally, adding Jessica to the list of the wolf’s victims.

No.
The word resonated from somewhere deep within me, not sounding like myself at all. Then I would never have been with Connor, never felt the rightness of bonding with the one man in the world who was meant to be mine. All this was terrible, and I couldn’t see my way through to a happy ending, and yet I knew there had to be one, had to be some way for us to find our way past the darkness to one another.

With that thought to soothe my fears, I fell asleep at last as well, my warmth blending with Connor’s and wrapping around both of us, sheltering us, keeping us safe.

For now.

H
e was subdued
the next morning, but calm, as if the sleep into which he’d escaped had helped him to put some distance between himself and the terrible events of the day before. That calm was shaken a little when the morning news reported the discovery of an eighth victim. The reporters made special note of the fact that this young woman did not match the descriptions of the others, and no one was sure exactly what that meant.

They’d never figure it out, of course. All the policemen and sheriffs and fish and game officials in the world wouldn’t be able to hunt down this wolf. No, that task must fall on us.

Would you hesitate to kill a rabid dog?
Marie had asked. Most people would say no…but the question became a little more complex when the rabid dog in question was something that used to be a man. And not just any man, but the
primus
of the Wilcoxes, a dangerous warlock who already had more power at his disposal than anyone else around.

Except you,
I thought, and stirred my coffee uneasily. Connor and I were sitting in the living room, the TV on, although neither of us was paying much attention to it. He was staring out the window, at the blue sky peeking in between the blinds, as if wondering how the sun could be so bright and the sky so clear when the world had been turned upside down. His world, anyway.

I had wondered in the past why it was that a
prima
of my clan could hold back the power of the Wilcoxes when, to all outward appearances, they were so much stronger than we McAllisters. Now that the magic had been fully awoken within me, I thought I began to understand. It was a power called on only when needed, but no less potent because of that.

Damon Wilcox was the
primus
…and therefore only a
prima
could hope to defeat him.

The toast and eggs I’d just eaten churned uneasily in my stomach. Knowing you must do something didn’t make it any easier to take, especially when that something involved confronting a magically enhanced supernatural being who also happened to be your brother-in-law in everything but name.

Connor’s phone buzzed. He must have set it to vibrate the night before. I glanced over at him, expecting to see him lean over to pick it up, but he ignored it, gaze still fixed on the sky outside.

After a few more buzzes, it went silent. A second or two ticked by, and then it began buzzing again.

“Goddammit,” he said, and finally retrieved it. His eyes narrowed as he scanned the display, then lifted it to his ear. “What?”

His brusque tone seemed to indicate it must be someone in the family. I certainly couldn’t imagine him talking that way to Joelle, or any of his civilian friends. I knotted my hands in my lap and waited, hoping it was merely Lucas calling to give another progress report.

But then Connor said, “We’ll be over in an hour. See you then.” He ended the call, and tossed the phone back on the coffee table.

I winced as it smacked against the glass surface, but luckily neither of them seemed about to shatter. After waiting a second or two and realizing he wasn’t about to volunteer any information, I asked, “Who was that?”

“Marie. She wants us to come over.”

Great. Although I knew it was necessary to meet with her, since she seemed to have a better grasp of the situation than anyone else, I wasn’t really looking forward to it. Something about her set my teeth on edge.

Worse, though, was the realization that Connor had just told her we’d be there in an hour, and we were both sitting on the couch in assorted pajama bottoms and T-shirts and sweatshirts. No way I’d have time to wash my hair.

I stood up. “Well, I’d better shower, then.”

Before yesterday, such a statement would have led to him offering to join me at least half the time. Now he gave the barest of nods and said, “Okay.”

Since I knew better than to push it, I only nodded as well and went upstairs.

M
arie didn’t live
all that far away; we ended up walking, since her house was located on the northeast side of the downtown section. The homes here were mostly older, maybe not quite as old as the buildings in Jerome, but still probably constructed in the early years of the last century. I imagined it must be beautiful in the summer or in the fall as the leaves on all the tall old trees turned, but now they were still bare and forlorn. Spring came late to Flagstaff.

I’d somehow managed to keep myself from indulging in idle chitchat to fill up the terrible silence between us. With Connor so on edge, I didn’t want to do or say anything to set him off. As we walked, I couldn’t help brooding over what Marie wanted to say to us. Give us tips on how to kill a skin-walker?

Her house was a pretty two-story Craftsman painted a warm barn red. Funny, but somehow I hadn’t imagined her living in a place like this. Stark adobe seemed more her style.

We paused on the front porch, and she opened the door almost as soon as Connor rang the bell. Had she been staring out the window, waiting for us?

As always, she looked serene enough, but I saw the slightest narrowing of her eyes as she greeted her cousin and invited us in. The furnishings were simple — a brown couch and matching chair, although both had colorful pillows with southwestern patterns to liven them up a bit. Navajo weavings hung on the walls, although the floors were bare wood.