They turned a corner into a residential tract with modest one-story homes, most of them built in the Southwest style with flat roofs, and all of them with gravelly front yards planted with cactus and other drought-tolerant species. It all appeared relatively normal, if somewhat exotic to her eyes. She was used to the Victorian architecture in Jerome, or the wood-framed houses common in Flagstaff. But nothing here seemed particularly strange, especially for Tucson.
It felt like it, though, worry running up and down her skin as if every ant within a square mile had started to march over her flesh. She knew she should be saying something, should be reaching out to her friends and grabbing them by the arms so she could pull them away from Matías, but for some reason she couldn’t give voice to her worry, couldn’t do anything except follow the group up the front walk to a stucco house painted a pale rosy tan color.
Inside it was very clean and neat, decorated in a simple, neutral style that had hints of the Southwest without being kitschy. The place certainly didn’t look like a house that had three twenty-something guys living in it. Caitlin had been to Roslyn’s brother Adam’s apartment once or twice before he got together with Mason and moved to Flagstaff, and it sure as hell hadn’t been anywhere near as tidy as this.
“Margaritas,” Matías announced.
Everyone headed into the kitchen, which also showed no sign of anyone actually using it. Well, except for a bowl of limes on the counter, and a bag of tortilla chips. Jorge got some salsa out of the refrigerator while Matías got to work with the blender, and Tomas wandered off into the next room. A few seconds later, some jaw-rattling hip-hop started to play, and Caitlin winced. She hated that crap.
And she knew Roslyn hated it, too, and Danica only sort of tolerated it, and yet both of them were grinning like Tomas had just put on their favorite song. What the hell was going on?
She stood off to one side as Roslyn chattered away about the house and how it must be so awesome to live in a part of the state where it was warm all the time, and the guys kept exchanging knowing grins that made the blood in Caitlin’s veins feel just about as frosty as the concoction inside the blender. But every time she took a breath and attempted to speak, the words got caught in her throat, choking her to the point where she began to cough.
“Hey, let me fix that,” Matías said, sounding a little too solicitous. He handed her a margarita, and she set her purse down on the floor so she could take it from him.
“Yeah, Cate, you okay?” Danica asked. The question seemed almost automatic, though; Caitlin couldn’t detect any real concern in her voice.
“Fine,” she managed to croak. The margarita glass sat in her hand, cold, inviting. She’d just watched him mix the drink, so there couldn’t be anything wrong with it. And she needed to drink something to get that lump out of her throat.
She lifted the margarita to her lips and swallowed, watching as Roslyn and Danica did the same. As soon as the frosty tang of it hit her stomach, though, Caitlin knew she shouldn’t have drunk it, that something was horribly wrong. Suddenly, it wasn’t cold at all, but burning, a strange, insidious heat that began to lick its way all through her, making her feel….
“That’s better,” Matías said. He nodded at Jorge and Tomas, and they moved toward Roslyn and Danica, Jorge with his arm around Danica’s waist, Tomas with Roslyn, both of them pulling the girls toward them and kissing them hard, hands roaming upward to fondle their breasts. And neither of them reacted, did anything except moan and push closer to the guys manhandling them, when Caitlin knew that even Roslyn would have kneed anyone else in the nuts for pulling something like that on such a short acquaintance.
And then Matías was coming closer to her, dark eyes glittering. “You sense something, don’t you?” he murmured. “It doesn’t matter. Soon, nothing much will matter at all.”
His mouth was on hers, lips hard and hot, and although she knew it was wrong, knew she should be pushing him away, the signals her mind was sending to her body didn’t seem to be getting there. She let him kiss her, let him lead her out of the kitchen to a room attached to the back of the house, an empty space that probably had been intended as a sun porch. There was nothing in the room now, though, except an intricate tracery in colored chalks on the cement floor, a pattern that not only looked wrong, but felt wrong, the patterns off somehow, the arrangement of colored candles around its circumference wrong as well, although she couldn’t say why.
Tomas and Jorge brought Roslyn and Danica in with them, both girls looking dreamy and flushed. Danica’s shirt was half unbuttoned, and Caitlin knew that was wrong as well, that Danica would never be standing there in front of a bunch of guys she didn’t even know with her bra showing and her breasts about to spill out.