Darkmoon (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 3) (25 page)

Lawrence shook his head. “No. It is too new. We’ll go to your apartment.”

How he knew about the apartment, I didn’t know. However, it was clear enough that Lawrence knew a good deal he probably shouldn’t. At the moment, I was just glad that we hadn’t yet handed the keys over to Mason.

And, like Connor, I was relieved I wouldn’t have to drive all the way out here on the solstice. It would happen at a little past ten o’clock at night three days from now, and blundering around in the darkness of the spirit world seemed infinitely preferable if that journey could be initiated on familiar territory.

“Okay, it’s a plan,” I said, trying to sound casual and probably not doing a very good job of it. “So we’ll all meet there on Saturday night, say, around nine?”

Lawrence’s expression told me he wasn’t fooled by my tone. Luckily, all he did was incline his head ever so slightly, then reply, “We will be there.”

And that, it seemed, was that.

A
lthough in the
intervening days I attempted to do my out-of-body meditations starting from the apartment, I never got any hint that this Nizhoni was anywhere around Flagstaff. I tried to not let myself be discouraged, but it seemed I should have been able to feel something…
anything
.

But I didn’t, although I did make the acquaintance of two rather amusing bootleggers who’d shot each other in the middle of Leroux Street back in 1925. They didn’t seem to hold a grudge, though. Maybe spending eternity in one another’s company had mellowed them somewhat.

“You’re sure you’ve never seen a young Navajo woman around these parts?” I asked them desperately on Friday night, knowing I was running out of options.

“Nope,” said the taller of the two spirits, whose name was Isaac Ford. He scratched his thinning hair. “No Injuns.”

I winced and tried to remind myself that racial sensitivity probably wasn’t too much of a thing in 1920s Flagstaff.

“Me, neither,” said the short, round one, who called himself Clay Wilkins. “I’d remember.” He not-quite leered at me. “We don’t get enough pretty girls that we won’t remember the ones we do see.”

Of that I had little doubt. He seemed like just the sort of ghost to pull the covers off attractive tourists as they slept in one of the nearby hotels. The problem was that, in the spirit world, I didn’t have a lot of choices when it came to finding someone willing to talk to me. I couldn’t force them — either they’d come to me naturally, or they wouldn’t. At least I hadn’t yet come up with a way to compel them to make contact.

Since these two didn’t seem as if they were going to be of much assistance, I thought maybe I should try the second part of my plan on them, of convincing them it was time to move on. After all, I’d done a pretty good job of it with Mary Mullen.

“Have you two ever thought that maybe you’ve stayed around here long enough?” I inquired. “There’s a whole new existence waiting for you in the next world. Staying stuck here can’t be that much fun.”

“Will there be pretty girls in the next world?” Clay responded.

Good question. “Um…probably,” I hedged.

Isaac Ford shot a stream of brown tobacco juice out of one side of his mouth — luckily, the side farthest away from me. Don’t ask me how a spirit can spit tobacco. Just one of the afterlife’s little mysteries, I supposed. “But you don’t know for sure.”

“Well, no.”

“Then I’m stayin’ here,” Clay said, and Isaac nodded.

“Yup. Why mess with a sure thing? I know there are pretty girls here.”

“But — ”

My protest died on my lips, because at that point they both tipped their hats to me and faded away — off to look for half-drunk pretty girls roaming the streets of downtown Flagstaff. It was a mild Friday night in June, so that probably wouldn’t be too difficult.

I came out of that “spirit walk” frowning, and Connor peered at me, concerned. “You okay?”

“Fine,” I said curtly, then relented. “I don’t know. I’m not feeling very optimistic. I mean, if I can’t get a couple of horny bootleggers to move on to the next world, how can I possibly handle this Nizhoni person?”

“Horny?” Connor repeated, looking bemused. “How can spirits be horny?”

“You don’t want to know,” I told him, and after taking a closer look at my face, he must have decided it wasn’t worth pressing the issue, because he took me home shortly afterward.

O
n Saturday
we returned to the apartment around seven-thirty in the evening, since we’d decided to fortify ourselves with some tapas before Lawrence and my father showed up. I didn’t want to call it my last meal, because I thought that would be jinxing things before we even got started, but I couldn’t help feeling as if our little feast might be that very thing. Instead, I called it Connor’s birthday dinner, promising him that we’d do something more festive after…well, afterward. In fact, I made something of a show of getting us reservations the following evening at the Cottage, his favorite restaurant in town. All perfectly normal.

Whether he saw through my pretense, I wasn’t sure, but he didn’t comment, only said that sounded great and it was only a birthday, nothing to get that fussed about.

It had been sort of tricky, getting the chance to be here in the apartment, since both the Wilcox and the McAllister clans had solstice observances that they wanted us to attend, and Lucas had made some noises about a birthday celebration for Connor afterward. That wouldn’t work at all, of course, as we couldn’t possibly be anywhere except here. Pregnancy, however, allows you all sorts of built-in excuses for getting out of social events. Connor simply put it out there on the respective family grapevines that I was having stomach issues just short of projectile vomiting, and that closed down the matter pretty quickly. Never mind that, except for my adverse reactions to the smell of coffee, I was probably having the most nausea-free pregnancy on record. Luckily, we hadn’t really been spending that much time around most of our family members, except Lucas, and so no one found anything particularly odd about the excuse.

So we ate mostly in silence, each of us brooding about what lay ahead. I did make Connor let me have half a glass of wine. That little surely couldn’t do any irreparable harm, and if I wasn’t coming back from this journey into the otherworld, then I wanted a few last sips of malbec to accompany me to the afterlife. I know, I really shouldn’t have been thinking that way, but it was how I felt.

We’d had to eat off paper plates, since of course all of the dishes were at the new house. There wasn’t much clean-up to be done. After the last bit of trash had been shoved into the garbage can under the sink, Connor turned around and regarded me gravely.

“It’s not too late — ” he began, and I went to him and laid two fingers against his lips, hushing him.

“I’m not backing out now,” I said, raising my hand from his mouth. Oh, that mouth. As anxious as I was, the touch of his lips against my skin still sent warm little thrills all through me. How I wished it were just another night here, and that we could go upstairs and make slow, languorous love in the king-size bed. But this wasn’t our home anymore, not really, and besides, Lawrence and my father would be here soon.

“I know,” Connor said, resigned. “You get this lift to your chin when you have your mind set on something, and you definitely have it now. It’s just….” He let the words die away, and I wrapped my arms around him, pressing my face into his chest, breathing in the warm masculine smell of him, soap and the slightest tinge of clean sweat, and something beneath that, something comforting that had to be the scent of his skin.

“It’ll be fine,” I told him, knowing I was trying to convince myself just as much as I was attempting to convince him.

“I’m trying to make myself believe that.”

Just as I opened my mouth to reply, I heard a knock at the door, and knew it was my father and Lawrence. I disentangled myself from Connor’s arms, saying, “Showtime.”

His mouth compressed, but he only nodded and went to the door. The two men stood outside, both wearing their usual loose-fitting light-colored shirts, my father in the inevitable cargo pants, Lawrence in Wranglers so faded I had to wonder if they were older than I was. My father held a small linen bag in one hand.

“Come in,” Connor told them, his voice tight.

I smiled at them as they entered and asked, “Do you want something to drink? We have bottled water, and there’s some cold tea — ”

“Water later,” Lawrence said. “But first we need to prepare the space.”

“Um…prepare the space?”

In reply, my father drew a sage smudge stick out of the bag. “We weren’t sure if Connor had cleansed the place lately.”

Try ever,
I thought. Smudging was something we McAllisters did a lot, but one thing I’d noticed about the Wilcox clan was that they didn’t seem to follow too many of the old ways, except for observing the solstice celebrations.

“No, I haven’t,” Connor said, looking embarrassed, although I wasn’t sure if his embarrassment was due to the fact that he’d never done such a thing, or because he couldn’t believe the other two men had suggested doing it in the first place.

But they were deadly serious, and so we spent the next twenty minutes or so following them from room to room as Lawrence chanted quietly in Navajo, touching the smudge stick to the four points of each chamber, tracing symbols I didn’t recognize above each window and doorway. By the time they were done, it was only a few minutes before ten. I could feel my pulse begin to race when I realized what time it was. Not good. I needed to be calm, in control.

“It is time,” Lawrence said at last. “Where in this place do you feel most comfortable?”

I was inclined to tell them it was upstairs in bed with Connor, but I had a feeling that wouldn’t go over very well. “In the living room,” I replied. That wasn’t even a lie. We’d spent lots of good moments in the living room, including a few memorable ones on the rug in front of the fireplace.

Probably not a good idea to bring that up, either.

Lawrence directed me to sit on the couch, with Connor beside me. That was good; I didn’t think Lawrence would separate us, not after we’d spent so much time with me practicing the meditations in Connor’s company, but my anxiety kept ratcheting up and up, and right then I really didn’t know what to expect.

My father sat down in the matching armchair, but Lawrence remained standing, his back to the cold hearth. I wondered if he was going to maintain that position the entire time I was off in my trance…meditation…whatever. But he probably had a much better idea of what he was doing than I did, so I didn’t ask.

The clock ticked away, and I cast a worried glance up at it. Four minutes after ten. Almost there….

“Breathe,” Lawrence said. “Reach out, and sense the powers at work this night.”

As simple as that, and I knew it was time to begin. I gave a brief nod, then reached out and laid my hand on top of Connor’s just before I shut my eyes and drew in a deep breath.

I could feel it, almost as soon as I shut out the physical world around me. This longest of days was coming to an end and would begin to tilt back toward the dark, even as the earth blocked out even the slightest trace of the moon’s light. Their energies, wildly opposed and yet somehow working in concert, seemed to crackle on every side.

This time I drifted out the big windows overlooking the street as if they weren’t there. The sidewalks below me were crowded with people; after all, to them this was just another Saturday night, another excuse to get out and party. I thought I caught dual shimmers of energy that were Clay and Isaac, moving through the throngs, but of course they were not my goal tonight.

Here in downtown I could feel nothing, no whisper of an alien presence that might be Nizhoni’s. I wanted to curse, but I knew that would only break my focus.
No need to be impatient,
I told myself.
Time doesn’t work the same way in the world of the spirits.

No, it didn’t. It could speed up, or slow down. During some meditations it would feel as if I’d only been gone for five minutes, when in reality nearly an hour had passed. Other times I’d think I’d been away for hours and hours, and would return only a minute or two after I shut my eyes. So I couldn’t allow myself to worry about how much time this was all taking. It would take what it took, and not a second more or less.

I’d spent a little time the past few days doing research on early Flagstaff, and so I knew the downtown area, though old, had still been built decades after Nizhoni had been taken to be Jeremiah Wilcox’s reluctant bride. The original settlement was to the north and west of here; when the railroad came through, that was when most people picked up and moved to what would be downtown’s current location.

So although this was a good starting point, I knew I’d have to range farther out, to the approximate place where the first Wilcox clan members had settled in the area. Leaving aside the cheerful crowds and busy restaurants and bars of downtown, I drifted over dark residential neighborhoods, past the observatory on Mars Hill, heading in roughly the same direction where Damon Wilcox’s house was located, although not nearly as far.

As I moved, I began to feel…something. At first I thought maybe it was my own nerves playing tricks on me, raising my anxiety level even more, but this was different. It felt wrong, like an instrument played out of tune, almost masked by the sound of the rest of the orchestra…but not quite.

Beneath me was a dry creek that cut between housing developments. As I watched, though, I saw the stony stream bed disappear, hidden by dark water flowing over it. On either side the houses faded away, becoming insubstantial as mist before they evaporated altogether. In their place were stands of ponderosa pines, interspersed with mountain meadows.

Icy sweat trickled down my back, but I ignored it. The perspiration wasn’t real, was only a manifestation of my worry. And what I saw around me wasn’t real.

Or was it?

I saw her then, standing by the side of the creek, long hair blowing like raven silk in an unseen wind. Her back was to me, but I could see she wore a dress of dark calico with a modest bustle, probably quite fashionable for 1870s Flagstaff. I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t been expecting that; in my mind’s eye I’d always thought of her wearing some kind of native dress, although if I’d stopped to think about it, I should have realized Jeremiah Wilcox probably wouldn’t have allowed his wife to go around wearing deerskin.

She turned around, and I had to catch my breath. Probably because of the way her curse had echoed down the generations, bringing such evil with it, I hadn’t stopped to think that she might have been beautiful.

But she was, with that long black hair and tip-tilted dark eyes, those high cheekbones and full mouth. No wonder Jeremiah Wilcox had wanted her.

“Angela,” she said, startling me so much that I dropped to the ground with an ungraceful thud.

Was someone traveling in the otherworld supposed to make a thud like that? I didn’t know. It felt too real, just as the soft grass beneath my feet did, the cool mountain air against my skin. It didn’t feel like high summer in this place, wherever it was; the wind had a bite to it, but I couldn’t tell for sure if it was supposed to be early fall or late spring.