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from the neighborhood he thought she was talking about. But that was all right; Alex knew which one she meant. And he also knew that none of the de la Paz witches or their extended families lived there. So who the hell were these strange young men she was talking about?
    Caitlin continued, “Matías was the tallest. He was probably about your height.” Then she hesitated and seemed to study Alex a bit more closely. “Well, maybe a little shorter. He was good-looking, I guess. Black hair and brown eyes. He had a snake tattooed around his neck.”
    “There’s no one in our clan with a tattoo like that,” Valentina said, her tone troubled. She shot a significant glance in Alex’s direction, one that he knew most likely meant she wanted to call his mother now, before this went any further. He supposed it made sense, since his mother was Maya’s daughter and the prima -in-waiting, and Maya was in Scottsdale, more than an hour away.
    Without taking his focus from Caitlin, he nodded slightly at Valentina. Murmuring that she needed to make a call, she headed out the back door, no doubt so she could get her cell phone out of her purse and make that necessary call.
    After she’d gone, Alex said, “What about the others?”
    “Jorge and Tomas? I guess you could say they were good-looking, too. Not as tall as Matías. They had tats, too — a bunch of symbols I’d never seen before. And Tomas had what looked like a ring of roses and barbed wire around one of his biceps.” For some reason, the recollection seemed to upset her; Alex saw her hand begin to shake again as she lifted the bottle of water to her lips.
    All good details — and he was sort of surprised she’d been able to remember that much, considering how shaken up she was, how much blood she’d lost. Even so, he could tell there was something else she didn’t want to talk about. Yes, she’d recognized that the young men who’d approached her and her friends were also witch-folk, but that didn’t explain how she’d sensed they were bad…and it sure didn’t explain the knife wound in her side.
    Maybe with Valentina gone, Caitlin would feel more like opening up, now that it was only the two of them in the room. He guessed she had to be a few years younger than he was, maybe as much as five, but they were still a lot closer in age than Valentina, who was old enough to be Caitlin’s mother.
    “And so…you said they felt wrong. How did you know that?”
    A blank expression seemed to settle on her pretty features. Her gaze shifted to the wall, to the calendar from one of their produce supply companies and the overly bright still life of pears it was showing for the month of March. “I just knew. I sensed it.”
    He got the feeling she didn’t want to say anything more than that, and he wasn’t going to push it. After all, he didn’t know her. He’d leave the poking and prodding to his mother, who was all too skilled at extracting information from her children and pretty much anyone else she set her focus on.
    “So you went to their house….”
    “Yes. The guys said they were going to make margaritas. Danica and Roslyn really wanted to go, and I could tell I wouldn’t be able to talk them out of it. Also, they were acting strange.”
    “Strange how?”
    With a nervous gesture, she reached up to push some of the heavy hair that hung over her shoulder back a little, so it wouldn’t be lying against her neck. Alex had a sudden flash of what it might feel like to have those silky dark copper strands running through his fingers, brushing against his face, and then frowned. Where the hell had that come from? Sure, she was pretty — beautiful, really, or would be, once she wasn’t so shaken and pale — but they had far more important things to focus on right now.
    “Strange like…almost like they were drugged or….”
    “Or under a spell?”
    A nod. “Yes. Like Matías had cast a spell on them. And I could feel it, too, or at least feel something ,