lucifer

Dinner that night, though excellent, was more than a little subdued. I guess it helped that Tobias was there; he chatted with Aunt Rachel about preparations for the upcoming Halloween festivities — Halloween was a big deal in Jerome — had a second and even a third helping of ranchero beef and rice and cowboy beans, and generally acted as if nothing untoward had happened earlier that afternoon.

I did like Tobias; he was the latest in a long string of my aunt’s “friends,” although since the two of them had been seeing each other for almost four years now, I’d begun to wonder if they had plans to make things more formal. Probably not; Aunt Rachel had always said she’d never get married, that she was too set in her ways to disrupt her life by having a man underfoot. There’d never been the barest trace of accusation or even regret in her tone when she made those comments, but I still couldn’t prevent the stir of guilt that went through me whenever I heard them. Would she have felt that way if she hadn’t gotten stuck with me from almost the time I was born? The subject of my mother didn’t come up much…or rather, Aunt Rachel gently headed me off at the pass whenever I tried to go down that road. No one came out and said it directly, but it was pretty clear to me that my mother was supposed to be the next prima, and she just couldn’t handle the pressure. Took off about a month after her twenty-first birthday, after going through a couple of candidates who obviously didn’t appeal to her. No word, no nothing, until she showed up a year later with a two-month-old daughter in her arms. If there had been recriminations, I wasn’t told of them. No, my aunt had taken her wayward sister and her infant daughter back into the house as if nothing had happened. This I heard from my Great-Aunt Ruby, the current prima, who had apparently taken pity on me and given me a few bare facts. Not many, but she claimed she didn’t have a lot she could tell me. My mother hadn’t said anything about my father, except that he was a “civilian,” as we liked to refer to those not in the witch clans. She said briefly that she’d gone to California, that she’d wanted to see the ocean, and that was the end of her revelations.

And then she’d left Aunt Rachel watching me one night, and had gone off to party and drink at the Spirit Room bar down the street, and ridden away on the back of some guy’s Harley after they’d had a few too many beers and whiskey shots. The winding two-lane road up to Jerome could be icy and treacherous in February, and they had crashed. Neither of them had been wearing a helmet. I didn’t really mourn her. How could I? I’d never even known her. All I had was a few photographs in one of Aunt Rachel’s albums. Maybe I looked a little like my mother — same oval face, same full mouth and arched eyebrows. My hair was darker, though, my skin paler. Did I resemble my father at all? Impossible to say. “…going to the Halloween dance?” my aunt was saying. I blinked. “What?”

She smiled, then repeated, “Are you and Sydney going to the Halloween dance?” “I think so. That is, we’ve talked about it. She’s excited, since this is the first year we’ll be able to go.” Every year on the Saturday closest to Halloween, a benefit dance was held at Lawrence Hall here in Jerome. The gathering was strictly twenty-one and over, and so neither Sydney nor I had been able to go before this year. Even being prima-in-waiting wasn’t enough to get the organizers to break that rule. In the past I’d helped with the decorating, partly because it gave me a chance to get a peek at what it might be like to actually attend, and partly because, as the next prima, I was sort of expected to pitch in and help out. True, Sydney was more excited about the whole thing than I was, but I suppose part of that was simply realizing that I’d thought I would have met my soulmate by now, and would have someone

someone to go with besides Sydney. It would still be fun. I’d heard great things about the dance at what we locals referred to as “Spook Hall.” More on the “spooks” later. “It’s a great party,” Tobias said. “I keep trying to get your aunt to go, but she keeps trying to fob me off with nonsense about it being for the kids or something. Which is b.s., and you know it, Rachel. At least half that crowd is over forty.” She shot him a mock-irritated glare and shook her head. “We can discuss that later. I don’t even know what I’d wear.” “Well, you’ve got two weeks to figure it out,” I told her, and helped myself to some more sweet potatoes. “I vote for a cheerleader costume,” Tobias put in with a wink. “Are you kidding? With these thighs?” “I happen to like your thighs.”

I cleared my throat. “Um, I’m trying to eat over here.” They both laughed, and Aunt Rachel tipped a bit more cabernet into my wine glass. Another part of being a grown-up, I supposed. Oh, she’d let me taste wine before, saying it couldn’t hurt for me to familiarize myself with the selections from the local wineries, since they were such a big part of the local culture. However, it wasn’t until I actually turned twenty-one that she got formal about it and let me have my own glass with dinner. A stickler for protocol, that was my aunt. But the silly banter did what I was sure my aunt intended it to do — get my mind off Mr. Number Forty-Four, and thinking about something fun to look toward, rather than the way the calendar was inexorably moving toward December and my twenty-second birthday. Well, all right, the conversation got my mind off that for a few minutes.

Later, though, as I sat in front of my mirror and brushed out my hair, all the worries and doubts began to seep back in. No, the world wouldn’t end if I weren’t safely paired off with my soulmate before December twenty-first, but it wouldn’t be good, either. It had happened a few times in the past, for various reasons, although never to the McAllisters. A prima who entered her twenty-second year without a consort found her powers greatly reduced. Aunt Rachel had never been able to explain that very well to me, except to say that there was something about the bond a prima and her consort shared that strengthened the magic within her, enhanced it somehow. “And what happens if the prima is gay?” I’d asked, thinking the whole setup seemed positively medieval. Maybe it was. We didn’t know for certain how far back some of these traditions went, only that we’d been following them for generations,

generations, had brought them over to America when the first group of McAllister witches emigrated here from Scotland sometime in the late eighteenth century. My aunt had shot me an irritated look. “I have no idea. It’s never happened before. Not that I’ve heard of, anyway.” Something in her tone told me I should drop it, so I did. Not that I was gay…I was inexperienced, but I knew who I was attracted to, and it definitely wasn’t other girls. But it had seemed a logical enough question to ask. I’d also wondered why, since my mother had blown her chance at being prima, someone else in her age group hadn’t become the heir apparent…even her own sister. That was a question I didn’t dare ask Aunt Rachel, but I’d broached the subject to other relatives, such as my cousin Rosemary, and she’d only waved a vague hand in the air and said, “Oh, there is only ever one in a generation. That’s why it’s so important to keep you safe.” And when I pressed as to what would happen if there was no one to inherit, she flashed me a look of genuine horror and shook her head, saying, “It would be the end of the clan.” I must have let out a shocked sound, because she hurried to add, “But that will never happen to us, Angela. You are here, and you will find your consort and inherit Aunt Ruby’s powers when the time comes. Everything will be fine.” At the moment, I wasn’t sure if everything was really going to be fine. While we certainly didn’t indulge in pyrotechnic magic battles — that whole “fly low and avoid the radar” thing — it still wasn’t good for a clan to have a weak prima. That made the clan vulnerable to more subtle forms of attack. Such attacks had happened before, in other clans, and there was no reason to think the McAllisters would be immune if the worst happened happened and I turned twenty-two before making that oh-so-necessary bond with my consort. I couldn’t let that happen. What was wrong with me, that not one of the more-or-less eligible young men I’d met had lit that spark in me, had made me know then and there that I’d met the person I’d spend the rest of my life with? Aunt Rachel kept insisting there was nothing wrong, that it would all work out in the end, but I wasn’t so sure. Only two months to go, and I was still as single as I’d been on my twenty-first birthday. And the clock kept ticking down. I might have magic running through my veins, but no witch in the world could stop the inexorable march of time.

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