Free Protector (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 5) by Christine Pope Page A

them was truly there , as if their individual selves had either fled or were so deeply buried that they might as well not be there at all. Roslyn’s arms showed several cuts, but Danica’s were still unmarked. Maybe wherever the strange warlocks had fled wasn’t suited for a summoning, or maybe they simply hadn’t had enough time to redraw the circle and begin all over again.
    “Fucking puta ,” Caitlin heard Matías say, and even though she knew this was a vision, that the warlock was probably miles and miles away, she gasped. At once the image of that shabby living room, and of her two friends, faded away.
    “You saw them.” It was a statement, not a question.
    “Yes. I think — I think it must have been an apartment somewhere, although I couldn’t tell where. Both Roslyn and Danica seemed okay, but still….” The words seemed to evaporate into the air, since Caitlin couldn’t quite bring herself to say the word “enchanted.” No, they weren’t enchanted. That was far too pretty a term for what was being done to them. Hexed, or bespelled, or good old brainwashed? Any of those words seemed far more appropriate to the situation.
    “They are not themselves,” the de la Paz prima said.
    That was an understatement. “No. Whatever this hold is that Matías seems to have on them…it’s strong.”
    Maya’s thin, dry lips seemed to stretch even tighter as her mouth compressed. “He is using a kind of magic that has been forbidden for generations. And I know he is none of mine.”
    “So…where did he come from?” Caitlin asked, perplexed. The witch clans had their territories, and everyone more or less stayed in theirs, except in certain cases, and that was that. For a warlock of unknown origin to suddenly appear in de la Paz territory and begin wielding the sort of black magic that had been outlawed years and years ago was more than terrifying. It meant that the rules the witch clans had been following all these years had suddenly been abandoned.
    “As I have not seen him, or experienced the magic he uses firsthand, I can only guess.” Maya sighed, and Caitlin fancied she could hear that breath rattling in the older woman’s narrow chest. “But I fear very much that he is one of the California warlocks whom Angela and Connor fell afoul of several years ago, or at the very least is associated with them in some way. Símon Santiago does not keep as close an eye on the witches and warlocks in his clan as he should. True, it is difficult, with a territory as large as his, but….”
    This was the first Caitlin had heard of any trouble with warlocks in California. True, her prima and primus had been pretty well occupied for the past few years, what with first breaking the Wilcox curse and then having twins to raise, but you’d think they would have said something. Or maybe they did, and the elders — Caitlin’s mother among them — did know, and had decided for whatever reason not to pass that intelligence along to the next generation. It was possible they’d thought no trouble would come to them, with the Wilcox and McAllister clans now more or less joined, and California and its problems so very far away.
    But trouble had come, even if it had taken a few northern Arizona witches to go to Tucson before disaster struck.
    “Then shouldn’t you approach this Simón Santiago and let him know what’s going on?” Caitlin asked. Strange that the Santiago clan had a warlock in charge, when almost every clan save the Wilcoxes had a prima at its head. “Maybe, even if he couldn’t help directly, he would be able to give us some information on how to track down Matías. I mean, yes, I just saw him in a vision, but a crappy-looking apartment with a very ugly plaid couch isn’t a lot to go on.”
    Despite everything, Maya smiled slightly. Her expression turned grim quickly enough after that, though, as she replied, “I fear it is not quite so easy. You see, Simón is not actually the true head of the clan