Protector

Chapter 1-2

Maybe she should have begged off and stayed up in Flagstaff, or come home to Jerome to spend a few days with her family, the way her mother had wanted her to. At the time, though, the trip to Tucson had seemed like a good idea. The plans had been made long before she began to get these vague feelings of unease. And, once those plans were made, she didn’t want to be the one to back out, since she was sort of the glue that held the other two together. Roslyn and Danica got along, but they were friends because they’d each been friends with Caitlin first.

“The little sister brigade,” Adam had called them once, and it was true. All three of them were the youngest child in their families. It was something else they had in common, something that helped them to bond. Roslyn probably had it worst, since she was the youngest of three, but even so, they all knew what it felt like to not be taken all that seriously half the time.

“Especially since Mason is such an overachiever,” Danica had complained once. “She can call fire out of the air and could make a river reverse its course if she wanted to, but of course that’s not enough — she has to get married and be working on her master’s degree at the same time. So I figure I’ll have to hang on and get a Ph.D. in physics or something before my parents take me seriously.”

At the time, Caitlin had just grinned at her friend’s exasperated expression, but she understood. Her own brother had always possessed an innate sense as to which flavors worked well together, a subtle magic, but one that had gotten him a chef position at one of the hottest new restaurants down in Cottonwood. He’d always known exactly what he wanted to do, whereas she….

Well, she’d been lying to everyone, including herself, for the past six years.

By the time they reached the outskirts of Phoenix, Danica relented and switched the station to one that played the sort of Top 40 pop Roslyn preferred. Caitlin wasn’t overly thrilled with the switch, since she preferred more alternative stuff, but she decided not to protest. They only had an hour to go, and if it really started to drive her crazy, she could dig the earbuds out of her purse and listen to Pandora on her phone.

The readout on the dash said it was eighty-one degrees outside. She shook her head, always surprised by the difference in the weather between Flagstaff and Phoenix, or even Jerome and Phoenix. This time of year, Jerome was still lucky to reach the mid-sixties, and sometimes you got hard frosts even into May. But Phoenix? It never seemed to cool down. Not really.

Their destination was even farther south, but because of its elevation, it tended to be a couple of degrees cooler than Phoenix. Big deal, Caitlin thought. Like you can really tell the difference between seventy-nine and eighty-one degrees.

In contrast to the bright, sunny day outside, she felt cold all over. It could have merely been that Danica was blasting the air conditioning…or it could have been something else entirely. She reached over and shut the vent that was blowing on her. It helped, sort of.

Then they were at the condo, retrieving their keys from the resort office, unloading the Land Rover and getting everything situated. It was a full one-bedroom, not a studio, so there were two queen beds and a fold-out couch. They flipped for who would get the couch, and Roslyn lost.

“You swear you didn’t put a whammy on that quarter?” she asked, giving Danica the side-eye.

“Witch’s honor,” Danica replied, putting her fingers in an upside-down “V” near her nose.

“I think it’s supposed to go the other way,” Caitlin said, although she wasn’t completely sure. Her mother didn’t think reruns of Bewitched were a very good viewing choice, considering how the show’s portrayal of witches was completely unrealistic. But Caitlin hadn’t really watched it because of the way it portrayed witches, but because she was fascinated by the styles and the technology (or lack thereof), and the sense of it taking place so very long ago.

“Is it? I haven’t seen that show since I was a little kid. Talk about giving me a skewed sense of what it means to be a witch. I kept trying to wiggle my nose and have a unicorn show up in the backyard or something, but it never worked.”

They all laughed at that, then decided it was late enough that they could justify going out for margaritas. After doing some quick research on Yelp, they found a Mexican restaurant within walking distance that sounded decent and headed over.

“Ah, this is heaven,” Roslyn sighed as she took a long pull on her strawberry margarita, once they’d all settled themselves in a booth. “And it feels so good to be able to wander around in flip-flops. My toes have been yearning for freedom.”

“Well, they look pretty free now,” Caitlin said, after taking a quick look under the table and noting her friend’s bright turquoise polish, complete with sparkly flowers on her big toes. Although her own classic margarita on the rocks tasted great, Caitlin still was feeling prickly and on edge. Never mind that a brightly decorated Mexican restaurant in Tucson was probably one of the last places she’d expect to meet any kind of trouble.

“Mmm…look over there,” Danica murmured, giving the slightest jerk of her chin toward a table with three young men around their own age, maybe a few years older. “Tasty, huh?”

Caitlin shifted in her seat so she could get a better look without actually appearing as if she were staring in their direction. At the same time, she felt a tingle along the back of her neck, her witch sense telling her that the guys in question must be warlocks. “Do you think they’re de la Pazes?”

Taking another long sip of her margarita, Roslyn seemed to think it over. “Must be,” she said, then reached for a tortilla chip. “Tucson is still part of their territory, right?”

“Well, I think we’re about to find out,” Danica said in an undertone. “Because they’re getting up and coming over here.”

At once Roslyn abandoned her margarita and hastily rearranged her long honey-blonde hair so it draped gracefully over her shoulder. Caitlin forced herself not to react. Yes, from what she could tell in the dim bar, the guys were cute, but she wasn’t going to act like a complete moron just because they were headed in her direction.

As they approached, though, the wrongness she’d been feeling all day seemed to coil in the pit of her stomach, making even the few sips of margarita she’d had so far burn like acid. Not sure what she should do, she reached for her water and drank some of that, telling herself that she needed to calm down.

The trio of strange young men stopped a foot from their table. One of them stood slightly in front of the other two. He was extremely good-looking, with thick black hair and well-muscled arms. A tattoo of a snake wound itself around his throat.

“Hi,” he said. “We couldn’t help noticing — ”

“Neither could we,” Danica said in that casual yet take-charge way of hers. “We’re not trespassing on your territory or anything, though. Our families checked with Maya de la Paz, and she said it was fine — ”

“Whoa,” the stranger cut in. “We’re not here to check your credentials or anything. It’s just that we hadn’t seen you before. You from up north?”

“Yes,” Roslyn replied eagerly, toying with a lock of her hair. “Caitlin and I are from Jerome, and Danica’s from Flagstaff.”

Might as well have given them our phone numbers and addresses, Caitlin thought sourly, but there wasn’t much she could do about it at this point. Roslyn never had possessed exactly the best judgment when it came to good-looking men.

“Two McAllisters and a Wilcox,” the strange young man said. “We don’t see too many of you down here in Tucson.” He smiled, and although he had very straight, shining white teeth, something about that smile made a shiver go down Caitlin’s back. She wished she could think of some excuse to get herself and her two friends out of there. “I’m Matías, and this is Jorge and Tomas.” The other young men smiled as well, but Caitlin didn’t feel very reassured.

“Hey,” Roslyn whispered to her, “scooch over so they can sit down with us.” Tilting her head to one side, she let her dimple show as she said more loudly, “Why don’t you join us?”

Caitlin had no intention of “scooching,” but that didn’t really matter, because Matías said, “Actually, we were wondering if you’d be interested in coming back to our place. We won’t water down the margaritas like they do here, and we were going to barbecue some carne asada.”

Alarm bells started going off in Caitlin’s head, and she opened her mouth to protest, to say that maybe it would be better if they just stayed here. But Danica and Roslyn were too quick for her, both of them saying that sounded like a lot of fun. What the hell? She could believe Roslyn going for such a scheme, but Danica? Usually she had way more common sense than that.

But Danica was smiling up at Matías, too, her dark eyes shining as if she’d just seen the promised land. This was not good.

And somehow they were gulping down their margaritas so they wouldn’t be wasted, then dropping a couple of twenties on the table so they could get out of there without waiting for the server to come back. Before she could really figure out what was happening, they’d emerged from the restaurant into the warm sunshine and were walking down the sidewalk, Matías in the middle, with Danica on one side and Roslyn on the other, and Caitlin sort of uncomfortably sandwiched between Jorge and Tomas.

Every nerve ending was screaming at her to get away, which on the surface sounded completely ridiculous. Wasn’t this what spring break was supposed to be about — getting out and having fun, meeting guys, maybe hooking up if everyone involved was amenable and knew there wouldn’t be any strings attached?

Never mind that the mere thought of kissing any of these guys, let alone going to bed with one of them, was enough to make her want to throw up.

They passed the condo complex where the girls were staying and kept walking. Well, that wasn’t so very strange; there were a lot of complexes like that in the area, and the odds of the guys staying in the same one where they were renting were pretty low.

“So,” Caitlin managed, even though she found it hard to get the words out past the tight knot of worry in her throat, “are you staying in a condo, too?”

The guy on her right — she couldn’t remember if he was Tomas or Jorge — shook his head, looking amused. “Oh, no. We live here in Tucson. Our house is just down the next block.”

House. For some reason, that sounded ominous. It seemed far more innocuous to be going back to a rented condo rather than a house they lived in. “Oh,” she said faintly. “So you guys are all roommates?”

“Yeah,” he said, his gaze moving from her face to the half-revealed curve of her breasts in the lightweight top she wore. “Tomas and I, we’re brothers, and Matías is our cousin.”

Caitlin forced down a breath. Maybe he really hadn’t been looking at her chest. Maybe she was just imagining things because she felt so crappy. “That’s cool,” she said, hoping she sounded casual and not as if she was about to gag. The sensation was pressing so heavily on her now that it felt as if she could barely pull in enough air to speak. “Roslyn and I, we’re cousins, too. Her dad is my mother’s older brother.”