“How much longer to Tucson?” she asked.
He blinked at the non sequitur, then said, after glancing at the clock, “Another two hours, probably. I’m speeding as it is, but I don’t want to go too fast. The last thing we need is to get delayed because I got pulled over for a speeding ticket.”
She nodded at that reply. Her hands were clenched in her lap, he noticed, the fingers knotted into one another so tightly that he could see her knuckles standing out white against her already fair skin. A tear dripped from her eye, but she didn’t reach up to wipe it away, instead ignored it as it trickled down her cheek and then dropped onto her shirt, making a dark blotch on the pale green material.
Seeing that, he could feel the rage building in him as well. He’d never met Roslyn McAllister, but she was a friend of Caitlin’s, a young woman who should have had her entire life ahead of her. She didn’t deserve the fate she’d apparently just suffered. If Matías had suddenly appeared in the middle of the highway ahead of them, Alex would have floored it and let the Pathfinder turn the warlock into a dark spot on I-8. But it wouldn’t be that easy.
It was never that easy.
* * *
They were just entering the outskirts of Casa Grande when Alex’s phone went off — probably because they’d at last come in range of a decent cell tower. Sunken in misery, Caitlin startled, then watched as he reached over and lifted his phone from where it had been resting on the dashboard.
It felt as though someone else was watching him do that, though, because the only thing that kept echoing through her head was, Roslyn is dead, Roslyn is dead, Roslyn is dead, and she couldn’t seem to focus on anything else. How could Roslyn be dead — carefree Roslyn, whose voice and gift for music could have given her far more material success if she’d chosen it? But she didn’t care about money or fame, had loved singing in the local bars and restaurants and clubs, was friends with everyone she met, it seemed. If she’d ever had a secret, something dark and deep, Caitlin never knew about it. And somehow she didn’t think Roslyn ever had. Hers was too sunny and open a nature for that sort of thing.
Alex’s voice finally penetrated the fog in her mind. In sharp tones, he broke in, “Wait, Miguel — what?”
A long pause as he appeared to listen to Miguel’s reply, which seemed to be fairly involved. Then,
“When?”
Another pause.
“You’re sure of that?” Alex’s jaw tightened, and Caitlin watched as he drew in a deep breath that sort of hitched its way down, as if he was fighting a constriction in his throat. “Okay. Well, we’re in Casa Grande right now, so I was planning to be home in about an hour. But we can backtrack to Phoenix if — ”
He stopped then, as if Miguel had cut him off.
“My mother said that?”
Another pause.
“All right. I guess she knows where to find me. And I hate to bug you about that address, but it’s really urgent. Caitlin just had another vision, and…it’s bad. Roslyn — one of the girls — has been murdered. We’ve got to find Danica before it’s too late.”
Hearing the matter stated so baldly made tears begin to sting at Caitlin’s eyes again. She forced down a breath and told herself that weeping for Roslyn wouldn’t change anything. The best thing they could do now was hunt down Matías and stop him. What would happen after that, she honestly didn’t know. It was up to Angela to decide his fate, as Roslyn was a member of her clan. Somehow Angela didn’t really seem like the Old Testament, avenging-angel type, but she’d never been tested like this before.
In a way, it would be easier if they could simply find enough evidence to send Matías to prison, but the witch clans had always policed their own. Sending someone with their kind of powers to live in close quarters with civilian criminals was a recipe for disaster in and of itself, and for a warlock like Matías, it would be a thousand times worse. If he ever managed to get as far as an actual prison, he’d have the whole place from the warden down eating out of the palm of his hand within a few hours. No, Matías would have to face clan justice, whatever form it might take.
Alex ended the call, this time slipping the phone back into his pocket. His profile might have been carved out of stone as he stared forward, and Caitlin wondered what on earth Miguel had just told him.
Finally she got the courage to ask, “Alex? What is it?”
His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. Without looking over at her, he said, “Maya is dead.”
“What?” It was just too much. The passing of the de la Paz prima would have been blow enough, but like this, right after Caitlin had just seen her own friend murdered? And then her brain caught up what had really happened, and she realized Alex hadn’t just lost his clan’s prima, but his grandmother. “Oh, Alex, I’m so sorry.”