Protector

Chapter 6-2

This wine, though…it was smooth and dark and rich, and sent a comforting warmth down her throat. Some of the tense, knotted-up sensation seemed to leave her neck and shoulders, and she pulled in a breath.

“Better?” Alex asked.

“Starting to be,” she replied, then sipped again before setting the glass down so she could get to work on that carne asada. Drinking too much on an empty stomach could be dangerous for a number of reasons. She sent a sidelong glance in Alex’s direction, but he seemed intent on his food as well, eating a forkful of black beans before returning to his own rolled-up tortilla filled with meat and roasted peppers.

They ate without speaking for a few minutes. He seemed to sense that she didn’t want to talk. Or at least, he was willing to sit back and let her initiate the next round of conversation, for which she was grateful. There were so many things she did want to talk about, but wasn’t sure how to begin the dialogue.

A few more sips of wine gave her the courage to ask, “Alex — what’s going on with your grandmother? I mean, I’ve heard Angela talk about her, and — ” Caitlin wasn’t sure how to say, and she sure never mentioned how sick your prima was, so she let the sentence break off half-finished.

But he seemed to know exactly how she had intended to finish the thought. Brows drawing together, he drank some more of his own wine, then replied, “We’ve been trying to keep it quiet. Most of the time there isn’t all that much interaction between our clans, so it wasn’t that difficult. And for the past few years my mother has been handling some of the ‘go-between’ kind of stuff for our prima anyway, so if Angela called to get permission for you and your friends to come down to Tucson and spoke to Luz instead of Maya, no one would think it was that strange.”

He paused, and Caitlin held herself still, waiting for him to go on. From the way his fingers clenched the stem of his wine glass, and the way he wouldn’t quite look at her, she could tell this was difficult for him. This wasn’t just his prima he was talking about, but his own grandmother.

“I suppose it started about four months ago…right after La Día de los Muertos.” The dark eyes slanted toward her. “You know what that is?”

“The Day of the Dead,” Caitlin said promptly, recalling the candles lit for loved ones now gone, the sugar skulls she and Roslyn had bought from a vendor at the Tlaquepaque Village event a few years ago. “They have a festival in Sedona for that. I’ve gone a few times, when it didn’t conflict with our Samhain observances.”

“Right. So some years my family would go up to Scottsdale to take part in the rituals there, and sometimes we would stay down here, depending on what everyone’s schedules were like. Last November we stayed in Tucson, mainly because there are more and more people who aren’t willing to make the drive, and my mother, as the prima-in-waiting, handles things here.” He toyed with the handle of his fork, but Caitlin could tell he didn’t seem terribly interested in eating right then. “The next day we got a phone call from my Aunt Francesca, who said my abuelita had had some kind of seizure and that the healer was with her but couldn’t seem to figure out what was wrong.”

“That must have been frightening.”

“It was. We all went up to Scottsdale, but by then the seizure had passed, and Maya seemed a little better.” He shook his head. “‘Seemed’ being the operative word. She had another seizure soon afterward, began growing weaker, and yet still the healer couldn’t find anything wrong. Valentina, who’s our healer down here in Tucson, couldn’t seem to figure it out, either. But she’s younger than Alba, who’s been the healer in the Phoenix area since long before I was born, and so she insisted that the prima go to a hospital for tests.”

In Jerome, the McAllisters had been without a healer for long enough that using civilian medical facilities was something no one thought twice about, but Caitlin supposed she could see why it might be an entirely different prospect for a clan that had never been forced to rely on modern medicine. Voice quiet, she asked, “Did they find anything?”

Another head shake. This time he abandoned the fork and picked up his wine glass instead, took a fairly healthy swallow. “Nothing. They tested for cancer, for epilepsy, for Parkinson’s and diabetes and a bunch of other things I can’t remember, and nothing. Not one of those tests turned up anything. At last she said it was enough, that she wasn’t going to be poked and prodded anymore. That was about a month ago. And since then….” He set his glass down and stared off into the distance, although it was dark enough by now that Caitlin wasn’t sure what he could be looking at. “Well, you saw her. That’s where it stands. She’s not getting better. Every day, she gets a little bit worse.”

And how horrible that must be for him. For his clan as well, but Maya was more than just his prima — she was his grandmother. Losing Great-Aunt Ruby had been terrible for the McAllister clan, but more because everyone knew their safety then depended on Angela, who’d been roughly the same age Caitlin was now when she had to take over as prima, than because it was a tragedy to lose someone at eighty-eight, someone who’d lived a full life. No, Angela’s youth had been the real issue; most of the time, a new prima was much older, had a family and a life of her own before she was asked to assume the role of leader of her clan. At least in the de la Paz family, Luz seemed ready to take over for her mother, even though she shouldn’t have had to worry about doing so for another ten or fifteen years.

“I’m so sorry,” Caitlin said, since anything else would have probably sounded like false platitudes. From what Alex had told her, it sounded as if Maya was dying. Not quickly, but in a way that made every day another one where they had to worry about how much more debilitated she would be, how much more she’d have to suffer. And if neither the healers nor the doctors could figure it out, there didn’t seem to be much hope for a cure, either.

“It is what it is,” Alex responded, then scowled. “Actually, I hate that saying. And I hate what’s happening to my grandmother. If it had been something sudden, like a stroke or a heart attack, it would have been terrible, but at least it would have been over.” His mouth pulled into a tight line. “But I guess that sounds terrible, too. It’s not that I want her dead, but — ”

“But you hate seeing her suffering,” Caitlin broke in, hoping he would hear the pity and compassion she felt. Growing up, she’d been very close to her paternal grandmother, who seemed to understand why her granddaughter spent so much time reading and dreaming about the world beyond Jerome, who never gave her pitying looks when it became clear that Caitlin had no defined magical ability — one she would admit to, anyway. Grandma Ellen was still very much alive and well, still making her beloved pottery and selling it in the local shops, and Caitlin didn’t want to contemplate what it would feel like when she finally lost her. More than once she’d been tempted to confide in her grandmother, tell her about her unwanted gift, but Caitlin had always worried that Grandma Ellen would find that a secret too big to keep, and so she’d held her tongue.

Alex shifted in his seat, turning his full attention back toward her, and she had to force herself not to look away. Something in those dark eyes seemed warmer now, approving. Despite the somber tone of their conversation, a thrill went through her. Had anyone else ever looked at her like that? She wasn’t sure. Admiring stares, sure, especially after she’d gotten through her awkward phase in junior high and her freshman year of high school, when she started to grow into her height and had begun to fill out a little. But now, in this moment, it seemed as if Alex was looking at her, not her hair or her eyes or her chest, or any one of the things she was used to having guys look at.

“Yes,” he said after a long pause. “That’s exactly it. And my abuela — she’s a strong person. She doesn’t complain. She doesn’t want people to see that she’s in pain. And…she worries.”

“Worries?”

“It’s one thing if a prima just…dies.” He swallowed, then appeared to gather himself so he could push on. “A clan can deal with that. It’s bad, but…it’s what happens, you know? There’s always someone waiting in the wings, ready to take over.”

Caitlin wondered how he felt about knowing his mother was next in line, that once she took over as leader of the de la Paz family, she wouldn’t exactly belong to him anymore. Yes, she’d always be his mother, but she’d also have to be there for the clan as a whole. And sometimes that could be difficult. Looking at him now, though, at the worry in those fine dark eyes, the tense set of his jaw, she knew she couldn’t ask him that question. Not yet, anyway.

“But this?” he went on. He reached for his wine glass and took another one of those healthy swallows. Another couple like that, and he would end up draining the glass entirely. She couldn’t blame him, now that she knew what he’d been going through with his grandmother. “When a clan’s prima is weak, the clan is weak. We’ve seen that same problem in California.”

“That’s where Maya thinks Matías and his g**g have come from,” Caitlin said quietly. She hadn’t had the opportunity to relay that information to Alex prior to this, and she watched as his eyes widened briefly before he nodded in understanding.

“That makes sense. Símon Santiago isn’t the best caretaker of that clan, and things have gotten out of hand. My grandmother’s strength was always enough of a deterrent to keep them away in the past, but now?”

“Now they’re moving in.” Despite the mild, gentle evening air on her skin, the feeling that this lovely patio and the shimmering pool beyond it seemed to exist in a world far from the evil of the magic she’d sensed earlier in the day, something deep within her went cold. How many of those rogue warlocks were there? Did they have any witches working with them? Caitlin hadn’t seen any, but that didn’t mean much. They could have been off someplace else…maybe at the shabby apartment with the ugly couch she’d glimpsed so briefly in that vision before it was torn away.

“It sure looks that way.” Alex picked up his neglected tortilla and took a bite, and she forced herself to do the same thing, even though her appetite seemed to have deserted her for the moment. “Which is why it’s so important that we find out where they are. It could be a lot more than just saving your friends — it could mean rooting out a cell of these bastards before it has a chance to take hold.”

Great. As if she wasn’t already feeling enough pressure. She set down her half-eaten tortilla. “I’m doing the best I can, Alex. I know right now that isn’t much, but — ”

At once he shook his head. “s**t, Caitlin, that’s not what I meant. I’m not trying to pressure you. I know you can’t force this kind of stuff. It’s just — ” He seemed to grit his teeth, then reached over and picked up the wine bottle, poured a good measure into his glass and another into hers, even though she hadn’t drunk nearly as much as he had. “I just hate the idea that these guys are over here in my clan’s territory, laughing at us because our prima isn’t strong enough to sense their presence and send them straight back to whatever hole they crawled out of.”

“I hate it, too,” she said. Almost without thinking, she laid her right hand on his left, where it was resting on the glass top of the patio table. He jerked a little at her touch, then relaxed as she squeezed his fingers gently before returning her hand to her lap. “And we will do something about it. The situation isn’t going to stay this way.”

“I know,” he replied, and again those dark eyes latched onto hers, holding her gaze. She saw trust there, a belief in her abilities that she sincerely hoped wasn’t misplaced.

It couldn’t be. Way too much was riding on those inconsistent dreams and visions of hers. All she could do was hope that the years she’d spent pushing them away, denying them, hadn’t weakened them beyond repair.