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“We were wondering if you’d noticed—” Zack began, but the Bruja held up a commanding hand, then bowed her head and began to pray.
“Ave Maria, gratia plena…”
It took Jo several more lines to recognize the Latin version of the “Hail Mary.” At the end, Zack crossed himself when the witch did.
Jo tried crossing herself, but—not being Catholic—sensed that she’d done it in the wrong order. She glanced at Zack, who shook his head. Then she glanced uncertainly back at the witch—
Whose head snapped up so suddenly, Jo stiffened.
“The Virgencita shows me great evil,” announced the Bruja in a hollow voice.
Could She could be a little more specific? Since that would come out more sarcastic than she meant it, Jo kept her tongue.
Zack asked, “Can the Holy Virgin help us learn more about this evil?” Look who’d just grown some people skills!
The older woman’s words sounded hollow, distant. She rocked slightly on her bench, as if focusing on something only she could see. “You will not find your way to this malvado, this evil, through Nuestra Señora La Guadalupana, nor of her angeles or santos. This is not of their working. This hides from their light. They can only provide protection for you.”
“That’s nice,” said Zack. “Protection from what, exactly?”
The old lady startled Jo again by suddenly grabbing her hand. The Bruja’s hand felt dry, strong for her age. “You wear the disguise of a marimacho,” she murmured. “But you are not evil. You think because you were robbed, you have nothing, but Guadalupana sees the truth in your heart. She wants for you what all virtuous women want.”
“That being…?” asked Jo, wary. She didn’t know the word, marimacho. She wasn’t sure how she’d been robbed. Diego…?
But the old woman was turning to Zack, using her free hand to take his. “You too were robbed of your life,” she murmured, still rocking. “But you, you chase it. You are a good husband, but you seek too far, too deep into the darkness. You strain even the protections of Nuestra Señora in this chase.”
Jo felt torn between concern and confusion. Zack had been robbed of his life?
“Still, Guadalupana smiles on you both,” the woman continued. “For you must face this darkness together.”
Zack slanted a look down toward Jo, less than enthusiastic.
“I will make you a protection,” announced the Bruja, releasing their hands. Even her normal voice felt tinged with power. “By the grace of Nuestra Señora and her santos and her angeles, a powerful protection against the evil you seek.”
“Thanks for that,” said Zack, while she stood. “But what we could really use is some idea of who or what we’re hunting.”
Doña Maria lit a candle, murmured a prayer over it, then set to work. She took a wooden bowl from her cupboard and began to add ingredients from unlabeled jars. She measured the way Jo’s grandmother had cooked, by practice and guess. A pinch here. A dollop there. “You are facing a diablero.”
“A devil,” translated Jo uncertainly. “The devil? No, that would be a diablo, right?”
“The diablero works the magic of El Diablo,” explained the older woman, still mixing and measuring. Jo only half watched, not wanting to know if any dead hummingbird got added.
“So it’s human, anyway,” said Lorenzo, as if that had even been in question. Or maybe it had.
“Perhaps,” hedged the Bruja. “Or no. Hombres son brutos.”
“Men are beasts,” translated Jo, trying not to grin.
“Thanks a lot,” said the P.I.
The older woman finished her mixture, then measured dollops of it into two squares of red silk, tying them with red cord.
“Keep these with you,” she instructed, giving a pouch to both Jo and Zack. “Pray the Ave Maria on them every night and morning, and together you may carry enough of the Lady’s light to shine upon and destroy this evil. You understand, si?”
“Sure.” But Zack warily sniffed the pouch.
“Si,” agreed Jo politely. “We understand.” Then she mouthed at Zack, Pay her. Which he did.
As they moved to leave, the Bruja stopped Jo with a hard grip. “For you,” she whispered, pressing a second pouch into her hand. This one was made of white silk.
“What is it?” asked Jo, watching Zack go ahead.
“A charm of love,” murmured the witch. “Pray to lead him from his darkness.”
To lead…Zack Lorenzo?
“Oh no,” said Jo quickly. “I mean, that’s nice of you, but I’m not interested….” The woman’s dark eyes brooked no deception. “Not in that way,” Jo qualified weakly.
Watching the man’s body and feeling safe around him had nothing to do with loving him or leading him from darkness!
“Hombres son brutos,” repeated the Bruja. “But this strengthens them, si? Protecting us, it raises them from the animals. It is our calling to keep them holy in return.”
Jo looked more closely at all the photographs lining the kitchen, almost covering the front wall. School pictures. Family portraits. Clearly that was how Doña Maria had led her life, witch or not. But Jo had once tried for a normal life, once let a man protect her.
Never again.
“Say the prayers,” insisted the Bruja, releasing Jo’s hand.
“I’m not even Catholic.”
“Do not be afraid of life, marimacho.”
“Hello?” called Zack, partway to the car. The Ferrari chirped and flashed its headlights as he approached it. That’s when he stopped still.
Jo awkwardly thanked the woman, then hurried to catch up—until Zack said, “Stay where you are.” Even over the unending Texas wind, she heard the sharpness in his voice.
“Why…?”
But then she heard the snake.
Chapter 5
Zack had always thought rattlesnakes rattled. This one buzzed, coiled in front of the Ferrari—way too close to him. It was the biggest snake he’d ever seen outside the zoo.
At least he stood between it and the women.
“Stand still,” advised Jo, approaching from behind. Great. If anything, the snake buzzed more loudly. “No sudden movements.”
“You’re the one who’s moving,” he said, slowly reaching under his outer shirt.
“You might shoot the car.”
“I buy the insurance for a reason.” He aimed. The Ferrari was just beyond the snake.
“We’re over thirty miles out of town,” Jo reminded him. “And I don’t see any other cars here.”
She was getting closer! “Will you stay the hell back!”
“I know rattlesnakes,” she continued, low. “You don’t.”
Okay, that was it. Now he was pissed. So Jo hadn’t let the old witch shake her? Kudos for her bravery in the face of grandmotherly Brujas. This was a freakin’ rattlesnake, and he didn’t need her showing off how tough she could be just now!
Besides, men were beasts, right? He liked killing things that threatened his life.
“Just leave it alone a minute,” Jo soothed, now right beside him, “and it should go away. It’s a lot more frightened of us than we are of it.”
“Oh,” he challenged. “So you’re scared of it, huh?”
He felt her stiffen beside him. “Not particularly. But it would make sense if you were. Being a city boy and all.”
Right. Like cities didn’t have snakes right alongside the rats. “News flash. First, I’m no boy. Second, I’m not exactly crumbling under the pressure here. I’m just trying to keep you out of harm’s way while I calculate how to avoid the gas line.”
But when Jo touched his wrist, staying him, he knew she would get her way. Wasn’t that just like a woman? He couldn’t aim his pistol now without shaking her off, which he was pretty sure counted as a “sudden movement.”
For a moment they just stood there, facing down a snake that was clearly more frightened of them than they were of it, since it turned out neither of them was scared. Jo continued to hold his wrist, her hand soft and steady, and Zack noticed again that she was smaller than he generally thought she was. Not that he had reason to think about her. Incense from the Bruja’s sanctuary clung to Jo’s short, shiny hair. The Texas heat felt magnified, with her so close, despite the wind. He began to feel flushed.
It didn’t seem to have anything to do with the rattler.
Finally, just as the sheriff had predicted, the snake’s buzzed warning softened. It began to lower its triangular head.
Then, in a sudden whiplike movement, it slithered right at them. It was not scared!
Zack elbowed Jo away from him to raise his pistol, but she was already stepping between him and his target—damn it!—and stomping.
Like that, she was standing with a cowboy boot firmly planted on the snake’s head. She crouched, a jackknife in her hand. In a sure, firm movement, she cut right through its neck.
Zack lowered his pistol to point at the desert floor and started to breathe again.
Backing away, Jo lifted one foot to wipe her blade on the sole of her boot first and then—the worst gone—on her jeans. If she’d had hair of any real length, the cocky little lift of her head when she looked at him would have tossed it. “There.”
She’d blocked his shot, risked her life, and that’s all she had to say? There?
He stared at her, short and solid and smug. More protests than he had words for pushed up into his throat before he gave them up and stalked past her to the dead reptile. He knelt, picked up the long, headless body, and stood. The thing was so thick around, his fingers didn’t meet his thumb as he held it. It had to be at least five feet long. Unless he held his arm up almost shoulder height, its rattle dragged in the sand.
He’d seen a lot of postcards about everything being big in Texas, but—Jesus, Mary and Joseph!
“Watch out for the head,” cautioned the sheriff, behind him. “The fangs are still poisonous.”
Her words were tough, but her voice was still a woman’s.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Zack demanded, turning on her. “It could have killed you!”
“Not likely,” she assured him, slipping her knife back into her pocket. “There’s antivenin in town.”
“But possible. And what happened to it going away? Maybe I’m just some dumb city guy, but I’ve got to ask—do snakes normally charge at people like that?”
Jo had the grace to look uncomfortable. “Actually…no.”
He waved the headless snake closer to her. “Exactly!”
To her credit, she didn’t flinch from the gory trophy. Any of his sisters would. Gabriella would’ve fainted by now; she’d always needed him to deal with the creepy-crawlies.
Then again, Jo was the one who’d beheaded the thing.
“You know,” she murmured, leaning closer to the reptilian corpse, “that was exactly what a snake shouldn’t do. Snakes don’t get rabies, do they?”
He shrugged. “Like I should know?”
Then their gazes met. They both knew who might. Ashley Vanderveer.
Doña Maria strolled past, startling them both. The old woman, her white skirts not quite brushing the rocky ground, bent low over the abandoned snake head.
Zack considered warning her that the fangs were still poisonous, but she lived out here. She probably knew.
When she produced a large cooking knife and skewered the thing, lifting it on the point of the knife, he was just as glad he’d kept his mouth shut—unlike some women he could name.
“Señora,” said Jo after a moment, following as the Bruja carried the snake head back toward her adobe house, “Do you—or the Holy Mother—consider snakes as evil omens or anything?”
Since it was a good question, Zack followed. Besides, who knew what trouble the sheriff might get into otherwise?
“No,” assured Doña Maria, circling the house. “Spiders, si. Wolves. But snakes, they are medicine animals.”
Well, that’s a relief, thought Zack—until they rounded the corner of the house and saw the old shed back there, its wooden wall papered with nailed strips of what he realized were snake-skins, undulating in the constant breeze.
There had to be…ten…thirty…fifty…?
How many snakes had the old lady skinned? And why?
“But these,” continued the Bruja, moving the lid of a large, clay jar and dropping in the fanged head. “These have been called, I think. They answer the diablero.”
Zack said, “Our diablero?”
“Say your thanks to Guadalupana for protecting you,” Doña Maria suggested, heading back to the house.
“But what about the snakes and the diablero?” asked Jo.
The old woman went into her house and shut the door behind her. So much for that line of questioning.
“Is…?” Zack looked over his shoulder at the wall of reptiles. “Never mind.”
