Darkmoon (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 3) (26 page)

The sky was spangled with stars, but here, as it had been back in my own world, in my own time, no moon shone overhead. Not that it appeared to matter, because everything around me seemed to have a faint glow, the waters in the creek glittering so brightly that they might as well have been reflecting the sun.

“You have come a long way for nothing, Angela Wilcox,” Nizhoni said. Her English was good, although spoken slowly, as if she had to consider each word before she pronounced it.

“My last name is McAllister, not Wilcox,” I told her, a little surprised at my own boldness.

Her shoulders lifted. “Is the Wilcox
primus
not your intended husband? Is your own father not a Wilcox?”

“Well, yes, but — ”

“Then you are a Wilcox, no matter what you may call yourself, and so I have nothing to say to you.” Turning, she began to walk away from me, up the stream toward a stand of cottonwoods that clustered around the water.

“Wait!” I called, feeling like an idiot, and ran after her. I was dressed here exactly the same as I had been when I went into this meditation, and so I had on a pair of flip-flops. Not the best footwear for tearing along a rocky creek bank, and once or twice I slipped and nearly lost my balance. What would happen if I did a face plant here? Would I wake up back in my physical body sporting a new black eye?

But I didn’t slip, and because I was running while she was only walking, albeit with a purposeful stride, I did manage to catch up with her a minute later. She looked at me with scornful eyes and said, “I have nothing to say to you. Go back to your world, and learn to accept your fate.”

“I don’t think so,” I snapped. “I’m not going to accept this stupid curse of yours, because that’s what it is…stupid. Pointless. Hateful.”

At that last word, I thought I saw her mouth tighten slightly, but she didn’t reply, only stared at me, stony-faced.

“Whatever happened between you and Jeremiah Wilcox, it was between the two of you. I’m not saying it was right, and I’m sorry you had to go through that, but it doesn’t give you the right to curse a bunch of innocent women, just so you can indirectly hurt the Wilcox
primus
.”

“If a woman is with the
primus,
then she is no innocent,” Nizhoni retorted.

“Oh, really? So what does that make you?”

Her eyes narrowed, turning to slits hidden by her thick lashes. “You have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Then enlighten me,” I said, crossing my arms. “Because I don’t see why I should have to drop dead at twenty-two or twenty-three just because Jeremiah Wilcox was an asshole.”

The profanity startled her, I could tell — her eyebrows lifted, and she pulled in a breath. I supposed anyone who counted herself a lady back in the day wouldn’t have talked like that. But I was certainly beyond caring what she thought of me.

“Look,” I said, attempting to soften my tone, “you can’t right past wrongs by creating new ones. It doesn’t work that way. You’ve stayed here, hanging on to your hatred, for far too long. What good is it doing you? Has it brought you peace? Acceptance? There’s no dishonor in realizing enough is enough and moving on. Whatever Jeremiah did to you, you’re only giving him more power by not letting it go. Can’t you see that?”

The silence stretched out so long I was beginning to think she wouldn’t answer me. Finally, she said, the words spoken so softly that I could barely hear them, “You don’t understand. Not any of it.”

“Then tell me,” I begged her. “Please. I want to know. Help me to understand.”

Silence again, and then her face darkened with fury. The wind picked up, causing her long hair to snap like whips, blowing loose twigs and branches and leaves toward me. I raised my hands to protect my eyes. Was she doing this? It seemed so.

“Stop it!” I cried. “This isn’t helping!”

“Good!” she flung at me. “Leave me alone!”

“No!” True, she’d been a witch so powerful Jeremiah had wanted her for his own, and she’d had all these years to brood and let her malice build, feeding her strength, but I wasn’t exactly helpless myself. Reaching for my own power, I let it radiate out from within, golden light surrounding me, forming a barrier against which the branches and twigs and a few stray pinecones bounced off and fell harmlessly away.

Her eyes glittered when she saw the shield I had raised, but that didn’t stop her. If anything, the hail of debris against me only increased, dirt flying now as well, so that I could barely see her through the whirlwind of forest detritus swirling around me. Biting my lip, I let my own energy surge forth, pushing against the spell-summoned tornado. At last the strain was too much, and the branches and leaves and pinecones exploded away from me, scattering in every direction.

Nizhoni, however, seemed untouched. Frowning, she said, “You are strong.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, trying not to pant, since that would sort of ruin the impression I was trying to give. “Care to go for round two?”

Her eyebrows pulled down at that. Clearly, she didn’t get the reference.

“Okay,” I went on, taking her silence as a tacit invitation for me to keep talking, “we can stand here and have magical battles like two characters out of a Harry Potter book, or we can talk like rational adults. Which is it going to be?”

“I do not know this ‘Harry Potter’ of which you speak.”

“Never mind.” I reached up and pulled a twig out of my hair. My cheek twinged, and I realized at least one piece of debris had gotten through, because when I touched my finger to my cheek, it came away smeared with blood. Ignoring the pain as best I could, I said, “Look, Nizhoni, I’m not here to hurt you or upset you. I just want you to move on to a place where you can be at peace. Don’t you realize that the people you loved are waiting for you?”

“Not all,” she said, in an undertone, looking away from me, and in that instant I thought I understood.

All that rage, all that hatred — it hadn’t come from being taken to be Jeremiah Wilcox’s wife. It had come because she must have loved him on some level, and hated herself for it. And that hatred had twisted in on itself, made her curse all Wilcox wives to come, because she thought herself cursed by a love she hadn’t wanted.

“Oh, Nizhoni,” I murmured then. “It’s no weakness to love.”

That made her whirl around, black eyes blazing. “I did not love him!”

And the skies cracked open, storm clouds rushing in from nowhere, lightning lancing down and hitting the ground only a few yards away from us. The sharp scent of ozone stung my nostrils and I blinked, seeing dancing reddish echoes of the lightning bolt etched into my eyelids.

This was not good.

I summoned the energy, praying it would be enough, and scared shitless that it wouldn’t be. The forest flared with light again, the bolt this time hitting the tree directly behind me, splitting it with a
cra-ack!
so loud my ears began to ring. Even with the golden light enveloping me, I cowered, my hands up to protect my face against any further hurt. How in the world was I supposed to fight this? She was so strong. This wasn’t like going up against Damon. He’d been driven nearly mad, but even using some of the darkest magic known to any witch, he was still just a man.

Nizhoni had once been a woman, but she wasn’t that any longer. Now she was a vengeful, angry spirit, and clearly nothing I could say or do would convince her to change, to understand that she had no reason to stay here anymore.

Connor,
I thought in despair, reaching out to where he was waiting for me in the mortal world, and sensing nothing of him. That frightened me more than anything, because I’d always been able to sense him during my previous journeys to the otherworld. But still I flung the thoughts outward, hoping against hope that he’d somehow be able to hear me.

I love you so much. I was wrong. I can’t do this. I don’t know how.

Forgive me.

And the clouds rumbled overhead, and the lightning surged once more, and I gathered every bit of strength I had, pushing it out to surround me, to fight her hostile power with my shielding energies. Even so, I didn’t think it would be enough.

Actually, I knew it wouldn’t.

L
ight seared
through me and I screamed, pain shrilling along every vein, every nerve ending. Was I going to die being burned from within?

Then I heard a man’s voice, commanding and deep. “Nizhoni.”

It was as if I had been on fire, and someone had thrown a bucket of water over me. I blinked, then looked down, expecting to see burns from Nizhoni’s lightning running down my bare arms. But the skin was smooth and untouched, lightly brown with the faint beginnings of my summer tan.

And then I glanced up to see who had spoken, and saw a tall man walking toward us through the trees. His hair was as black as Nizhoni’s, though cut short and slicked away from his face. In his features I could see an echo of the Wilcox men I knew today, the fine strong nose and chin, the well-cut mouth. Unlike most of the men of his time, he was clean-shaven, but otherwise he looked a lot like the historical re-enactors I knew who did Wild West demonstrations: long black frock coat, band-collared shirt, dark vest, dusty boots.

He stopped a few feet away from us. His gaze flickered toward me. “Are you all right, Angela?”

I guessed we were all on a first-name basis here in the otherworld. “I’m fine…Jeremiah.”

Instead of being put off by the familiarity, he grinned, showing teeth better than I would’ve expected from someone not blessed with the gifts of modern dentistry. “Not for a lack of Nizhoni’s trying, I’m sure.”

I shook my head and glanced over at her. She was standing so still she might have been a statue. The wind she had summoned was gone, and now her hair didn’t move at all, only hung straight as a skein of black silk down her back. And she was staring at Jeremiah as if she couldn’t believe the evidence of her own eyes.

“Why?” she said at last, the word barely a breath.

“Why?” Jeremiah repeated.

“Why now, after all these years?”

“Because you’ve finally admitted it.”

“I have admitted nothing,” she replied, chin up, dark eyes flashing.

“You should listen to this girl,” he said. “What did she say? ‘It’s no weakness to love’? She has the right of it, Nizhoni.”

She didn’t respond, only stood there, her chest moving as she heaved an angry breath.

“Look, Nizhoni,” I began. It still frightened me a little to have her looking at me with those furious dark eyes, but Jeremiah had deflected her energy away from me, and I had to believe he would do so again if necessary. Why exactly he’d defended me, I wasn’t sure — family loyalty? — but I wasn’t going to worry about that now. I took a breath and continued, “It can’t have been easy to find that you had feelings for him after he went and stole you from your people, but — ”

“I did what?” he demanded, staring at me in disbelief. “Where did you hear that?”

“Well, uh…from someone in my clan,” I faltered. Jeremiah looked equal parts angry and shocked, but I didn’t think that anger was directed at me. Not exactly, anyway. “Um…that’s not what happened?”

“I suppose it’s not that great a surprise, that the McAllisters might twist the tale.” He reached up to push away a lock of hair that had fallen over his brow, and the gesture was so like one of the gestures I loved about Connor that I pulled in a startled little breath. The Wilcox blood really did breed true. “Do you want to tell her the truth of it, Nizhoni, or should I?”

She glanced away from him then, not meeting his eyes, and remained silent.

“Ah, then, I’ll do it.” His gaze lingered on her for a second or two more, and at last he returned his attention to me. “I don’t know what you were told, but we came here in 1876, the year of the great centennial. There had been some trouble back in Connecticut — ”

“You were practicing dark magic,” I cut in.

“More McAllister lies.”

“We don’t lie.”

His raised eyebrow indicated his disbelief, but he only said, “Very well. Let us say ‘misinterpretation of history’ and leave it at that. It was more that we were experimenting with magic, and the
primas
of the surrounding clans took exception to our work. So we left and headed west, where we thought we’d be allowed more freedom. All that open land, and no one looking over your shoulder.”

Yeah,
I thought,
that sounds like heaven to a Wilcox.

“There had been some thought of pushing on to California, but we came here and saw the snow on the mountaintops and the pine forests, and knew we didn’t want to go any farther.” He glanced over at Nizhoni, but she was still standing there without moving, without speaking, although I could tell she was listening intently. Fine by me. If she’d decided to hang on Jeremiah’s every word, it meant she most likely wouldn’t be flinging any stray logs at my head. “We built a small settlement here, my brothers and my sister and their families, and started over. And after we’d been living here for a few months, we began to hear rumors of a powerful young witch who lived in the desert lands north of here, among her people.

“You have to understand that for the Diné” — he pronounced it correctly — “the word ‘witch’ does not mean the same thing that it does to us. Shamans and healers and medicine men and women, those they had, but they were not called witches. ‘Witch’ is a bad word to them, meaning one who practices evil magic.”

“It was not evil,” Nizhoni said proudly, speaking for the first time. “I tried to tell them this, but they did not understand.”

“No, they didn’t,” Jeremiah agreed, before directing his attention back to me. “You must understand, Angela, that there were not so many of us Wilcoxes back then. A little more than twenty, when you numbered all the children of my brothers and sister, but my wife had died on the journey here, and I had no children of my own. I thought that I would like to meet this young woman, because if she was as powerful as the rumors claimed, then she would do better to be here with us, with people who understood her powers.”

“And because you just happened to need a wife,” I said dryly.

He did not appear offended by my comment, replying, “I will not lie and say the thought did not cross my mind. So my brother Samuel and I rode for three days, journeying to Navajo lands, and we met with Sicheii, Nizhoni’s father, who had very good English, as did his daughter. He was suspicious at first, but soon realized I could be of some assistance to him.”

I raised an eyebrow, and Jeremiah went on, “In my ignorance, I didn’t realize the Diné did not have the custom of the bride price the way some other tribes practiced it, and Sicheii saw no reason to correct my mistake — not when he could be rid of the daughter who had been causing trouble in his tribe and be three horses and five bars of silver richer at the same time.”

To me that didn’t sound like all that much to exchange for a human being, but apparently Nizhoni’s father had thought differently. “So…you didn’t steal her.”

“No.” Another of those quick looks in his wife’s direction. She was still standing in the same place, but now her arms hung relaxed at her side, and her head was tilted slightly, as if she had been listening intently. “And she did not seem unwilling to come back to the settlement with me.”

“I was not,” she said. “It was in me to know more of this white man’s magic, and I knew I could run away later if I wanted to.”

“But you didn’t,” I guessed.

Her chin went up at that, and I tensed, wondering if she was going to launch another one of those attacks. Then she seemed to deflate, head drooping as her hair fell forward to conceal her face. “No, I did not.”

Jeremiah paused, his gaze moving from me to her and then back to me again. “In time she became my wife in more than just name. She learned from me, just as I learned from her. A little more than a year after she came to live with us, she gave me a son.”

“Jacob,” I supplied, recalling the name from the one and only time Connor had ever spoken of his long-ago forebears.

“Yes, and then you had all you needed from me, didn’t you?” Nizhoni spat.

For a few seconds he didn’t reply, only watched her from hooded dark eyes. “That is not true.”

She shook back her head. “You may speak untruths to this girl, and she may believe them, but I was there. I know.”

“You know what you have told yourself, but that doesn’t mean it’s the truth,” Jeremiah told her. Surprisingly, his voice was calm and even a bit sad. “The world was a different place then, and men did not speak of their feelings as freely as they do now. That does not mean those feelings did not exist. I will be honest and say I did not love my first wife. She was a cousin my father urged me on his deathbed to marry, and I was a good son and followed his wishes. But she had suffered from ill health for some time, and in the end she succumbed to a fever as we were traveling down out of Colorado. I buried her there, and mourned for a life cut short, but I did not feel any great loss.”

Kind of tough for her,
I thought, but I didn’t say anything. I had no experience of living in that kind of world with those sorts of expectations, so I thought it better not to comment.

“But Nizhoni,” he began, then shook his head. His eyes met hers, and it was almost as if a spark jumped between them. Oh, yes, something still lay there smoldering, even after all these years, even after all the resentment and misunderstandings. “There was much made over Jacob, I know, because finally the
primus
had an heir, and so perhaps Nizhoni felt overlooked.”

Glancing over at her, I could see that her expression had grown blank and cool again. Never a good sign.

I wasn’t sure if Jeremiah hadn’t seen the look on her face or was ignoring it, because he continued, “And then when Jacob was only four months old, typhoid fever struck our settlement and many others in the area. We fared better than most, as my sister Emma was a healer. But then the fever took Nizhoni, and it seemed that Emma could do nothing for her. You have perhaps seen this even now, with your science. If someone doesn’t have the will to live….”

Something else Margot had gotten wrong. At the very least, she’d been given the wrong information, but I realized I shouldn’t be that surprised by how the story might have gotten twisted over the generations. When you came right down to the point, I supposed it was a fine line between killing yourself outright and not wanting to live anymore.

“Why should I have continued to live?” Nizhoni demanded. “When you saw me only as a vessel to bear you powerful children?”

His mouth tightened, but his tone was even as he went on, “At the end, she was not herself, raving in a fever. It was very dangerous, that someone with her power should be in so little control of herself, and my brother Edmund was forced to put a spell of binding on her, so that she could not hurt anyone in the family. She cursed me then, cursed me with her last breath, saying I should have no joy of any of my wives, nor would any child of my line. At the time I thought little of it, for, as I said, the fever had quite put her out of her mind.”

During this speech Nizhoni wore an odd expression on her face, a strange half grimace, as if she were recalling those hours of pain and delirium. “Do I look mad to you?” she said at last.

“Now, no, but then was a different matter. You were so wild, screaming in both English and Diné, that half the time we didn’t know what you were saying…not until later, anyway.” His gaze shifted toward me, although I could tell it was difficult for him to look away from his wife. “She died just before dawn, and was buried in a little stand of cottonwoods down near the stream.”

Cold flooded through me as I realized that was where we stood now. Somewhere beneath my feet were Nizhoni’s bones. No wonder she had lingered here, haunting this quiet spot, for almost a hundred and forty years.

“We all did mourn her, but life goes on. I had a son to raise, and I did not wish him to be without a mother his entire life. A little more than a year later, I married a woman from one of the neighboring settlements. That…did not go well.”

“She died?” I ventured.

“Yes, four months gone with our child.” His jaw tightened. “I tried to tell myself that these things sometimes occurred, but….”

“But you married again, and the same thing happened.”

“Not precisely the same thing, but yes, she did not survive six months of marriage to me.” During all this he had seemed remarkably calm, but for the first time I saw a flash of anger in his dark eyes as he looked at Nizhoni, cold and calm, listening but saying nothing. “I understood then that Nizhoni’s dying curse had contained all her power within it, and there was no escape from it.” He drew in a breath then, spreading his hands wide. “And that, Angela McAllister, is the truth of what happened.”

“Your truth,” Nizhoni said, and I shook my head wearily.

“Everyone’s truth is a little different,” I told her. “Are you going to fight for another hundred and forty years over whose truth is better?”

She didn’t answer, but looked away, her gaze apparently fixed on the unnaturally sparkling stream a few yards away.

“It seems to me,” I went on, thinking I really hadn’t signed up to be some sort of afterlife marriage counselor, but knowing I had to do something, “that you two were always misunderstanding one another. I suppose it’s not that strange, since you came from very different worlds.”

Not that it really excused either of their behavior. As much as I wanted to shake both of them for their stubbornness, for their refusal to reach out to one another and tell the other person the true nature of their feelings, I knew that really wasn’t going to help. What was done was done, as Aunt Rachel liked to say. All I could do was try to make sure the future didn’t carry with it these dark echoes from the past. And, whatever I might think of the way they’d been so horribly at cross-purposes, I hadn’t been there. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it must have been like to live back in that place and time, when societal pressures on men and women were so very different from what they were today.

But love was love, whether it was experienced now or in 1876. Maybe getting them to admit that would be enough. I pulled in a breath, then spoke. “Jeremiah, I just want to ask you one simple question.”