Darkangel, Christine Pope [ebook reader screen .txt] 📗

My Aunt Rachel paused at the doorway to my room. “He’s here,” she announced — unnecessarily, since I’d heard the doorbell just a few minutes earlier.

“Okay,” I replied, and didn’t bother to keep the reluctance out of my voice. Neither did I bother to turn away from the table where I sat, which functioned as both a computer desk and dressing table. At the moment my laptop was closed. I should have been primping in front of the mirror, but really, what was the point?

Up until that moment my aunt had worn her usual cheery expression. But I saw her mouth compress slightly, even as she gave my jeans, black T-shirt, and black cowboy boots a sideways glance. “Angela, it might help if you at least looked as if you were making an effort.”

I lifted my shoulders. “What difference does it make? If we’re fated to be together, then he really shouldn’t care what I look like, should he?”

“That’s not the point — ” She broke off, really looking at me this time, instead of my outfit. Voice gentler, she said, “He’s nice-looking, this one.”

Their looks generally weren’t the problem. My aunt knew I hated this ritual, knew how much I hated not being free to make my own choice, and so I got the impression that she quietly filtered out the candidates who were awkward or plain or had acne or whatever. Even so, a depressing number of hopeful young men had passed through our door in the months since I’d turned twenty-one.

Forty-three, actually. The one waiting for me downstairs would make forty-four. That was a hell of a lot of blind dates.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” I told her.

Another one of those pauses, and then she nodded. But, since she was my Aunt Rachel, she couldn’t seem to keep herself from adding, “Just a little lip gloss, dear,” before she turned and went back down the stairs, silver bangles jingling, skirt swishing. Unlike me, my aunt dressed in a jumble of multicolored broomstick skirts and ethnic jewelry, alternating from tanks and tees in hot weather to long-sleeved T-shirts and sweaters in the winter. Her attire wasn’t really that unusual for this part of the world, which had more than its fair share of New Age practitioners of various persuasions.

The difference between all those New Age types and my aunt — and everyone in my family, actually — was that we really were witches.

Scowling, I opened the little carved box from India that I used to store my meager supply of cosmetics. A tube of soft peach-colored lip gloss stared up at me, but I ignored it and instead took out a tube of Burt’s Bees lip balm and applied some of that instead. After all, what was the point of putting on gloss when it was just going to get kissed off in a few minutes anyway?

Rubbing my lips together, I went down to meet the latest candidate.

His back was to me when I entered the living room. All I saw was someone tall, with dark hair, and for a second my heart leapt. Maybe it’s finally him….

But then he turned toward me. Dark eyes met mine, and my heart fell, just as it had every other time the candidate was someone tall and dark-haired, but also definitely not the man who had been haunting my dreams for the past five years.

My aunt smiled at the stranger, then at me. Deep down, I had to admire her for being able to summon a real-looking smile after all these disappointments. “Angela, this is Alex Trujillo.”

“Hi,” I said, and managed a smile of my own. I had a feeling it wasn’t quite as believable as my aunt’s.

“Hi,” he said.

I could tell he was looking at me but trying not to seem as if he was looking at me. By that point I was more or less used to it, even though I didn’t like it very much. These encounters never lasted long enough for me to ask what the young men were looking for, precisely, although I had a feeling most of the time they’d been expecting more from the McAllister clan’s prima-in-waiting. My friend Sydney had tried to tell me more than once that I could be beautiful if I just worked at it a little, which made no sense to me. Either you were beautiful, or you weren’t.

Judging by the studiously neutral expression on this Alex Trujillo’s face, I guessed he thought I fell in the second category.

“Well, I’ll leave you two to get acquainted,” my aunt said, and disappeared down the hall that led to the kitchen. Some truly amazing smells were drifting through the hallway and into the living room.

Poor Aunt Rachel. Every time we went through this whole song and dance, she had a big meal going, just in case this candidate would turn out to be the one and so would need to stay for dinner. Good thing her “friend” Tobias came by regularly to eat with us, or there would’ve been a heck of a lot of roasts and chili and tamales piling up in the freezer.

You’d think after doing this forty-three times, I’d be a little better at it. I cleared my throat and said, “So, um, Alex…where are you from?”

The first five or six times I’d tried poking around on Facebook and using Google to dig up as much background information about the candidate as possible, wanting to be forearmed. Then I realized if I already knew everything about the guy, we wouldn’t have anything to talk about. So these days I just went in blind and hoped for the best.

Alex shifted his weight from one foot to the other. With the exception of my cowboy boots — he was wearing black Chucks — we were dressed a lot alike, both in jeans and black T-shirts. His skin was warm olive, and Aunt Rachel was right…he was good-looking. If it weren’t all so awkward and strange, I wouldn’t have minded kissing him, even if he wasn’t the man of my dreams.

Literally.

“Tucson,” he said at last.

Which meant, despite his last name, that he was part of the de la Paz clan. Maya de la Paz was the prima of that clan, which counted both Tucson and Phoenix as part of their territory. Compared to that, we McAllisters, with our little corner of northern Arizona, were pretty small potatoes. This was the first time a de la Paz had been offered as a candidate, and I wondered why they’d bothered at this point. Alex had to be a more fringe relation…or maybe not. The McAllister clan was not as powerful as the de la Pazes, but then again, I wasn’t just any witch.

I was the next prima.

“So you’re one of the de la Pazes?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. “And Maya de la Paz is your…?”