She still hesitated for a second, then said, “I know this is going to sound terrible. But it’s what really happened to me…and is still happening to my two friends.” From there she launched into a terse retelling of how Matías and his two friends had lured her and Roslyn and Danica from the restaurant bar, and what had happened afterward.
During this entire narrative, Olivia’s face had grown paler and paler. Alex had never seen Matías in person, so he didn’t know if they shared any of the same features — whether the wide, slightly almond-shaped eyes were similar, or the straight, chiseled nose. But he knew their expressions could never have been similar, because there was nothing hard or cruel about the way she looked. By the time Caitlin was done, the other young woman had what appeared to be tears shining in her dark eyes.
“I am so sorry,” she said at last. “He wasn’t a bad brother to me when we were really small, but as he got older and his talents started to appear….” A shake of her head. “It was bad. And even worse when it became obvious I wasn’t intended to have any true magic at all, except for the smallest, most useless things. He’d bully me, make fun of me…and then after that, he ignored me as if I didn’t exist. I embarrassed him. He was meant for more, he told me. He was going to do great things.” Her mouth twisted. “Yeah, like get the clan leader’s daughter in the sack. Matías didn’t skate out of that one quite like he’d intended. He’d thought Simón would make Lucinda marry him. But instead Simón told Matías to get out of our territory, and even Matías wasn’t strong enough to take on the clan leader and the witches and warlocks in his inner circle, the ones who guard our prima against harm.”
“So where did he go?” Alex asked.
The baby started making the little meeping and mewling noises that were generally a precursor to a crying fit, and Olivia went over and picked him up, jouncing him on her hip so he’d quiet down. “He went to Phoenix first, but he didn’t like being that close to the de la Paz prima…he said he thought she could smell him or something. So he headed down to Tucson. He’s been there for a few months.”
“Do you have an address?” Caitlin’s voice was tense, worried. They’d been denied that urgent piece of information so many times.
“No,” Olivia replied, denying them once again.
Shit.
“But,” she went on, “he gave me an address for one of those mail drop places, just in case I needed to send him anything. I don’t know if it will help, but I can get that for you at least.”
It was better than nothing. Besides, all those mailbox businesses required you to give a proper address when you rented a box. Maybe Alex could get his cousin Miguel on it, see if he could pry the actual address out of someone at the mail drop place.
“That would be great,” he said. “It could help a lot.”
Olivia smiled, appearing relieved that she’d been able to help them a little, if not as much as they might have hoped for. Baby still on her hip, she went over to a side table that had a small drawer and pulled out an address book. She flipped through it with her left hand and got to the correct page, then came over to Alex.
“At the top of the page,” she instructed, holding the book open for him.
Sure enough, there was “Matías Escobar,” written in a neat, rounded hand, followed by a box number and a Tucson zip code. Alex pulled his phone out of his pocket and entered the information in his notepad app. “Thanks,” he said when he was done.
Caitlin was still standing a few paces off, a troubled expression on her face. “Yes, thank you for helping us, but….”
“But you’re wondering why I would help you at all?” Olivia went to the side table and replaced the address book in the drawer before turning back to face them. The baby began to fuss, so she lifted him from her hip and leaned him up against her shoulder. A soothing hand running up and down the child’s back, she said, “Matías is my brother, but I know he’s not a good person. And when he fell in with Jorge and Tomas, he just got that much worse. I’m not sure what their talents are, but I know they’re not as strong as my brother. But they do seem to…I don’t know…encourage him.”
“So they are brothers?” Caitlin asked, the strain clear in her voice. Alex guessed she was remembering that terrible vision of the two warlocks having sex with Roslyn.
“No. Cousins — first cousins. Not cousins in the way the witch clans tend to use the word, where we all say we’re cousins even though the connection may be four or five generations back.”