Stop it! she cried out, but since the words were only uttered within her mind, they had no force, no way of preventing the dark warlock from performing whatever rite whose words he was uttering now.
Tomas handed the knife to Matías, who lifted it to his lips and kissed it reverently. Then he hefted it in his hand and, with one blinding motion, slashed it across Roslyn’s throat. She collapsed to the floor, blood spraying the two warlocks, and across the circle itself. Once again the foul mist she’d first seen in that borrowed house a few blocks from the Trujillo store rose into the air, only this time it was dark, so dark, a black that was blacker than black, and seemed to billow and sway before it took on the vague outline of a man and went flying through a wall and disappeared.
All that remained was Roslyn’s limp form, the life drained from her throat, and Danica standing by with a vague smile on her face. And the three wizards, wearing their own smiles, but of gloating malevolence.
Caitlin screamed.
17
It was good that Caitlin could get some sleep. All this chasing around, on top of the worry about her friends that he knew continually weighed her down, couldn’t be good for her. And he liked looking over at her, seeing the dark crescents of her lashes against her cheeks, the way her head was tipped to one side and her wavy copper-colored hair flowed over her shoulders.
Then her eyes snapped open, and she let out such a piercing scream that Alex’s hands jerked involuntarily on the steering wheel, sending them over the lane divider for a second before he could get hold of himself and yank the SUV back where it was supposed to be. The eighteen-wheeler behind him honked once, probably to wake him up in case that knee-jerk reaction had been caused by falling asleep for a split-second. It hadn’t, but between Caitlin’s scream and that honk, Alex figured he’d be awake for at least the next twelve hours.
She was staring forward, eyes like saucers. The fingers of her right hand were clutching the handle of the passenger-side door as if it was the only thing connecting her to reality. Then tears began to trail their way down her cheeks. But she said nothing.
“Caitlin? What is it?”
No reply. Only that staring, white-rimmed look, like a spooked horse.
“Caitlin!”
At last she turned toward him. “She’s dead,” she whispered.
“What? Who’s dead?”
“R-Roslyn. I saw it. I saw it!” Then she began to weep in earnest, burying her face in her hands, her slender shoulders wracked with sobs.
Oh, shit. This was bad. This was very, very bad. Her visions had never been wrong before, but Alex found himself compelled to ask, just in case there was even the slightest chance of a misunderstanding, “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure!” she flung at him. “I might as well have been standing there with the rest of them, I could see it so clearly.”
“‘Them’?” Alex echoed, although he thought he already knew the answer.
“Matías and Jorge and Tomas. They’d drawn another circle, and they slit her fucking throat! I saw it!”
“Jesus.” His hands were shaking, and he tightened his grip on the steering wheel. What the hell were they supposed to do now?
Keep going, he told himself firmly. Even if Roslyn’s gone, we still have to save Danica. And you can’t lose it now — you have to be here for Caitlin.
“I’m so sorry,” he said at last. “We’ll find him. Don’t worry. We’ll find him, and we’ll make him pay.”
“What good will that do?” she snapped, shifting in her seat so she was more or less facing him. “Will it bring Roslyn back?”
“No,” he replied. Somehow he managed to keep his tone calm and even. What he really wanted to do was pull over so he could take her in his arms and hold her, give her the comfort she so desperately needed, but he knew that wasn’t a good idea. For one thing, it wouldn’t even be safe — there wasn’t a rest stop in miles — and anyway, now more than ever they needed to get to Tucson as quickly as possible. “But at least she would have some kind of justice.”
Strangely, those words seemed to calm Caitlin down. She swallowed, then said, “You’re right. She’s gone, but Matías is still here, and he needs to face the consequences of what he’s done.”
There was something very cold and hard in her voice, qualities he’d never heard in her speech before, but then again, even with everything she’d had to handle so far, this was the very worst of all, the one thing they’d feared but hoped would never come to pass. Alex risked a glance at her and saw that already the tears were beginning to disappear, and her pretty features were still, almost icy in their set fury.