“I don’t think so,” she replied slowly, shuffling through her memories as she spoke. “It might have been in the garage. Or maybe they parked it a few streets over so they wouldn’t be obvious.”
“If they did that, there would’ve been more chance of someone noticing them taking Danica and Roslyn to it.” He shifted slightly, and Caitlin realized he was getting his phone out of his pocket. “Do you mind if I email my mother, send our ideas along? For all I know, Miguel’s already thought of it, but….”
“No, please, go ahead,” Caitlin broke in. If nothing else, at least it would show that they’d done something today besides spin their wheels. Not that going out to the studios with Alex hadn’t been fun, but it hadn’t exactly gotten them any closer to finding Roslyn and Danica, either. On the way back into town, she’d closed her eyes for a bit, tried once again to empty her mind of everything and let the visions pour through her. It hadn’t worked. Nothing came to her at all, and she could only hope that Alex had thought she was merely resting her eyes instead of proving what a crappy seer she was turning out to be.
While she sipped at her sangria, Alex tapped out an email, fingers moving with surprising dexterity on the tiny screen of his phone. Maybe it had really good auto-complete software. She wouldn’t know, because she tended to get by with bargain-basement Android phones, not the gleaming silvery iPhone Alex currently held.
“All done,” he said, then slid the phone back into his jeans pocket. “Here’s hoping that’s an angle they haven’t thought of yet.”
She nodded, but the memory of her failed attempt at forcing another vision still nagged at her. “Alex, what are we doing?”
“Having dinner?” he joked. But when she didn’t smile, he told her, “We’re doing what we can. It’s like I told you earlier today — beating yourself up the whole time isn’t going to help your friends. And awful as it is, thinking about what might be happening to them, they’re still alive. Matías needs to keep them alive for that magic he’s performing.”
Just the mere memory of the strange circle and its unnatural symbols, the way Roslyn’s blood had dripped onto it and made that horrible mist rise into the air, curdled Caitlin’s stomach. Ignoring the sangria, she picked up her water glass and took a large swallow. It helped a little.
“What do you know about that, anyway?” she asked, pitching her voice low and shooting a wary glance at the couple sitting at the table next to them. Luckily, it looked as if they were on their first date or something, as they seemed to be doing the standard “what shows do you watch? Oh, you liked that movie, too?” sort of thing people tended to do when they were getting to know one another. At any rate, they didn’t seem to be paying any attention to her or Alex, or to their conversation.
He obviously didn’t miss that quick, sideways darting of her gaze. Lowering his own voice, he said, “Not very much. I mean, we all have slightly different flavors to our magic — the de la Paz clan came here from Mexico, so we use some rituals that are different from yours, just as you came from Scotland and follow a more Wiccan tradition. But dark magic, blood magic — it was outlawed everywhere centuries ago. We might be descended from the guys who used to throw human sacrifices off pyramids, but I promise we haven’t done anything like that lately.”
Caitlin couldn’t prevent herself from smiling at that remark. “No, I guess that would be kind of conspicuous, wouldn’t it? The problem is, that makes us fly even more blind, really, since we don’t know for sure what they were doing, or why they needed blood for their spell.”
His gaze didn’t quite meet hers. “Well, we may not know, but I can guess.”
She crossed her arms. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Not that I know firsthand or anything, but there are witches and warlocks in our clan who do know something of that kind of magic — not because they practice it themselves, but because it’s important to know what your enemies might be up to.” He drank some more of his sangria, and this time his eyes did flicker back toward hers, troubled and dark. “The doings of the Santiago clan haven’t always been entirely on the up and up. Not as bad as this, at least not that I know of, but I’ve heard rumors. We’ve tried to be vigilant. The McAllisters are far enough away that the Santiagos’ doings weren’t much of a concern. Same with the Wilcoxes. Anyway, the Wilcox clan had a bad reputation for long enough that even the Santiagos wouldn’t have wanted to tangle with them.”