Darkmoon(27)

“What is it?” I asked. “If my driving makes you that nervous, I can pull over at the next rest stop, and we can switch.”

Immediately, he shook his head. “No, that’s not it…although you may want to let me drive once we get into the more populated areas of SoCal. I doubt you’re used to that kind of traffic.”

“And you are?”

“At least I spent four years in Phoenix.”

“True.”

He was quiet for a bit, watching the scrubby desert landscape flash past outside the window. “It’s California. I wish we didn’t have to go there.”

“What, you’re not into swimming pools and movie stars?”

“Not particularly, but that’s not what I meant.” Frowning a little, he shifted in the passenger seat so he was more or less facing toward me. “People might think we’re the wild west here in Arizona, but it’s really California that’s wild. Or Southern California, at least. Yes, the Santiagos are the clan in charge, but they’ve had some challenges to their authority.”

“Really?” I asked, surprised. Not that I’d paid much attention to what was going on with the clans outside my immediate area — the Wilcoxes had generally been enough to occupy my mind — but this was the first that I’d heard of any of this. “Like what?”

We’d bought some bottled water at the Safeway in Cottonwood, and Connor took a swig of his before replying. “About six years ago — just when I was working on transferring from Northern Pines to ASU — there was some trouble in California. It’s a big population, new people coming in, trying to integrate. It’s the same with the witch clans, I guess, although in this case it was more smaller subgroups, not whole clans. They were moving into Santiago territory, and there was a lot of friction. I think Maya de la Paz actually took a few in. There were even a couple who wanted to come up to Wilcox territory.” He frowned, putting his bottle of water back in the cup holder in the center console. “They weren’t too reputable, and I guess they thought they could come up to Flagstaff and do whatever they wanted. Damon disabused them of that notion pretty quickly, and that was the end of it, because even they weren’t prepared to go up against Damon. I’m not sure where they eventually ended up, but it wasn’t anywhere around here.”

This was disturbing news. I’d always been raised on the idea that clans and clan territories were immutable, that once you were born in one, you pretty much stayed put. True, tiny Jerome couldn’t handle the entire McAllister contingent, and so we spilled over into Cottonwood and Clarkdale and even Camp Verde, just as there were Wilcoxes outside Flagstaff in Williams and Winslow and points even farther east, all the way to the New Mexico border. But that was understood to be their land. It wasn’t as if they’d decided to pick up stakes and move into a whole other clan’s territory.

“So should I be offended that no one asked to move onto McAllister turf?” I inquired, smiling so he wouldn’t take my question seriously.

But that’s exactly what he did. “The McAllisters don’t control a lot of space, when it comes right down to it. You barely have room for your own people. We’ve got a lot of space up and down I-40, and of course Maya’s territory is huge. Some of them were okay, and I suppose it’s good that Maya took them in. But in general, you should count yourself lucky that they didn’t try to move in on your land.”

I could tell from the quiet, intense tone of his voice that he wasn’t joking. Even though this had happened more than five years ago, obviously it had made an impression. And while it probably was something that had been discussed by my clan’s elders and most likely a good number of the McAllister adults in general, it wasn’t a topic my aunt would have wanted to share with me, especially since I would have been sixteen at the time and embroiled in school. As I’d learned over and over again, the people around me in Jerome had been pretty damn good at keeping secrets.

“So anyway,” he continued, “that’s why I’m not all that thrilled about going to California. It’ll probably be fine — I mean, we’re going straight to Newport Beach, and we’re not going to be hanging around all that long. But I’ll be a lot happier when we’re on our way home, and crossing the border into Arizona and back into Maya’s jurisdiction.”

Well, in light of what he’d just told me, I couldn’t really argue with that. “Hey,” I said lightly, “we McAllisters are great at flying low and avoiding the radar. It’ll be fine.”