Darkmoon (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 3) by Christine Pope Page A

I was going to, I swear it. But then Marie told me to wait.”
    “What?”
    “She did. I told her about ten days after I sent you back to Jerome that this was crazy, that I was going to call you and tell you I was an idiot, that I’d made a horrible mistake — and she said I needed to wait, that she’d seen you would contact me at a critical moment, and that it was very important I not say anything to you until then.”
    Marie. I’d never liked her, but in that moment I hated her, hated that she’d kept Connor and me apart for no apparent reason. “That’s just stupid,” I snapped. “What, did she say it was another of her goddamn visions or something?”
    “Well, yeah, more or less.”
    That did stop me. Despite my dislike for the woman, I couldn’t deny that her visions were true ones, her instincts stronger than those of anyone else I’d met. “What else did she say?”
    “That’s all.” He paused, then added, “Well, that I needed to wait, and then when we did reconcile, that we needed to speak to her immediately.”
    The last thing I wanted was to go talk to Marie. What I wanted was to drag Connor to the nearest hotel room for some make-up sex. But ignoring the seer when she obviously had something important to say was probably not that good an idea.
    “So, what, you want me to go with you to Flagstaff to meet with Marie right now?”
    A glint I knew all too well entered his eyes. “Well, what I want is to head over there” — he jerked a thumb toward the Los Abrigados resort — “and see if they have any rooms available, and forget about anything else for a while. But since Marie was pretty adamant about seeing her, I think we probably should do as she asks.”
    I found myself smiling, despite everything, because of the way Connor’s thoughts had run almost exactly parallel to mine. “Rain check on that hotel room?”
    The grin he sent me in reply was positively ferocious. “Damn straight.”
----
    I decided to follow him up to Flagstaff in my own vehicle, not because I thought I needed an escape plan, but because I didn’t feel comfortable leaving my brand-new Cherokee for an unknown amount of time in the Tlaquepaque shopping center parking lot. Connor’s eyes widened a bit when I went to the car and unlocked it.
    “That new?” he inquired.
    “Yeah,” I said casually. “What, did you think I was going to keep borrowing my aunt’s Jeep indefinitely?”
    “Guess not,” he replied, with another one of those grins. “I’ll call Marie from the road, and you can follow me over to her place.”
    That sounded workable; I’d walked to her house before but hadn’t driven there, and it was probably better to have Connor guide me in. And there was definitely more street parking at her place than at Connor’s.
    The last time I’d been in Flagstaff, spring hadn’t truly arrived, no matter what the calendar might have said. But today I could see only a few small patches of snow lingering on Mt. Humphreys’ north face, and while the wildflowers were sparse compared to what grew around Sedona and Jerome, the aspens and oaks and sycamores had leafed out, making the landscape a bit lusher than what I was accustomed to.
    Irises bloomed along the front walk of Marie’s house, not the usual purple-blue, but deep crimson and yellow and some that were almost black. I parked behind Connor’s FJ and got out, feeling the cool breeze catch at my hair. As usual, it was a good ten degrees cooler in Flag than it had been back in Sedona, but now the air just seemed refreshing rather than biting.
    “I take it you got a hold of her,” I said as I joined Connor where Marie’s walkway met the sidewalk.
    “Yeah. It was almost like she was waiting for my call.” He shrugged. “With anyone else I’d say it was a coincidence, but — ”
    “But in this case it probably wasn’t.”
    “Probably not.”
    I reflected then that the McAllisters’ current lack of a seer wasn’t necessarily all bad. Having