Darkmoon(61)

“You mean after the curse kills me?” I asked harshly. “No point in mincing words.”

“Angela!” Connor and Bryce both burst out, even as Allegra recoiled and Margot watched all of us in silence, her expression grim. Lucas said nothing, only sat still in his chair, his dark eyes troubled.

“Why avoid talking about it? It’s not that we aren’t trying to do what we can about the curse, but seeing as we’ve hit sort of a dead end — ”

“I’m working on that,” Lucas cut in, his voice strained. “My own contacts didn’t give me any leads on finding Andre’s mother, so I hired a private investigator.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask why there wasn’t a magical solution to tracking down my missing grandmother, but maybe no one in his clan had that kind of talent. None of the McAllisters did, either; my cousin Becca was great at finding lost keys, earrings, and items like that, but people? Not so much.

“Well, then,” I said. “We’re doing what we can, but we always need to plan for contingencies, right? And if something happens to me” — pausing, I swallowed before pushing on — “then it’s important that Connor and I have a proper home together in his own territory. You can fight about which clan has which rights, but in the end the children should be with their father. Now they’ll have a good place to live, and if the curse decides to take me out, well, I won’t be happy about it, but at least I know I won’t have to worry about them being safe.”

An uneasy silence fell. I supposed none of them really wanted to argue with what was, in effect, a spoken last will. Finally, Connor spoke.

“But we’re not going to let that happen. We have months and months to figure this out, and we will. Angela — that is, we — just wanted to let you know where things stood with us. Her ob-gyn is in Flag, so as time goes on and her appointments come closer together, then we may be spending more time there than here. I hope you’ll understand the reason why.”

He said this last with a challenging note in his voice, as if daring one of them to protest. But although the three elders exchanged uneasy glances, none of them said anything for a few seconds. At last Allegra replied, “That does make sense, Connor. Thank you.”

The tense line of his jaw relaxed slightly. I could tell he’d been expecting them to put up more of a fight on that point. Maybe they were just tired. I knew I was.

Since that seemed as good a point in the conversation as any to wrap things up, I told everyone, “The inspector went over the house yesterday and didn’t find any issues, although we’re waiting on the final report. That means we may be ready to move in as early as the end of next week, depending on how the title search goes. I’m going to talk to Rachel, of course, but I’d appreciate it if the rest of you could spread the word and let everyone else know that I plan to divide my time between here and Flagstaff.” Exactly how, I wasn’t sure. Spending the summer up amongst the cool pines at seven thousand feet seemed infinitely preferable to the heat of the Verde Valley, but I knew I couldn’t disappear for that long a stretch. Oh, well, we’d work it out somehow.

“We’ll do that, prima,” Margot said formally.

They left after that, giving only a token goodbye to Connor and Lucas, whose gaze seemed to follow Margot as she went out to the foyer. I couldn’t help giving a rueful shake of my head. Yes, he’d been on his best behavior, but that hadn’t seemed to earn many points with her.

Not that I had time to worry about that now. I had enough problems of my own to deal with.





11





Distant Relations





“Are you serious?” Sydney squealed into the phone. “You bought a house?”

“Yes,” I said, wincing a little and wishing that I’d turned down the speaker volume before I called her.

It was late Saturday afternoon, a few hours after the elders had departed. Connor and I had left Lucas to watch TV at the house for a while so we could go and talk to Rachel, tell her about the house and the twins…and Andre Wilcox. We’d brought up those subjects in basically that order, so by the time we got to Andre, my aunt was already looking a little glassy-eyed. “A Wilcox?” she kept repeating. “Your father is a Wilcox?” And I’d had to tell her that yes, we were almost positive, but that we were still trying to see if we could track him down somehow, just to confirm. Since she appeared so shell-shocked, I decided not to mention that we were also looking for him in case he knew something to help with breaking the curse. A long shot, but I couldn’t forget Marie’s words about going back to the beginning. He was my beginning…or at least the only part of my beginning still alive. Maybe. We really didn’t have positive confirmation either way.