If "Later" remained as an available option.
Kate eased the truck to a stop behind a big white Ford Explorer, switching the engine off to creaking silence, blocking escape for a trespasser in Kate's temple — on this single-lane road, even that SUV couldn't sneak past without some major logging. But it shouldn't have been able to find and follow the road at all. Unless you believed Aunt Alice, believed in an Inca brujo wearing a Rowley body, carrying Rowley blood. Rowan-lea blood.
Kate sat for a minute, shoulders and eyes tense, staring through the windshield at that big inscrutable SUV. Nothing happened.
Caroline pulled her Glock, Aunt Alice's Glock, really, since her own was back in Arizona, shoved a magazine in the butt and chambered a round, and reached for the door. "I'll check it out for you."
Kate shook her head. "She's my daughter. Grew in my belly, sucked on my breasts. I raised her. If it comes to killing, I'm the one who has to kill her. Maybe the only one who can. At least in this place."
They'd talked about it, all afternoon. Chewed on it, had about as much effect as a puppy with a rawhide toy. The only plan they'd been able to come up with was come out here and wing it. That scared Caroline as much as anything. She wanted a script.
Aunt Alice's voice whispered in Caroline's head, "A time to kill and a time to heal," one of her favorite quotes from Scripture. God, Aunt Kate looked bleak, worse than Aunt Alice in the depth of one of her Edith Piaf depression phases. No question, Kate had cause. And then Kate pulled a huge Colt revolver from under the seat, a long-barreled Dirty Harry .44 magnum, and loaded it from the cartridge box Aunt Alice had just given her. Silver bullets. Enough raw power there to drop a were-moose in its tracks.
Caroline climbed down on her side of the truck and crouched behind the open door. An extra added attraction of the rebuild was fiber ballistic panels in the body, doors and firewall and cab back, that were heavy enough to stop slugs from an AK-47. Where the hell had Aunt Alice scrounged those? Caroline kept her Glock aimed through the Explorer's rear window, backup, ready to blast off an entire magazine if all hell broke loose.
Kate moved like a TV cop, her weapon in both hands, crouched low below the windows of the Explorer and then snatching looks where her truck headlights shone in through dark tinted glass. She smashed the driver's side window with the butt of her Colt, tempered glass exploding in a rain of tiny cubes, reached inside, and popped the electric locks. To hell with little things like search warrants, that was Kate all over. She opened each door and finally the tailgate, weapon at the ready. Stepped back.
"Empty. We're too late." Now she really looked bleak. Stone-faced.
Caroline checked her watch. "Moon won't rise for another hour and a half. Jeff's still safe."
"Says who?"
"Says Aunt Alice. A place like your circle will be strongest under the full moon. It's not a question of lining up stones or gaps at solstices and equinoxes; those are calendar marks to aid the farmers. For power and focus, the moon is the key. And the brujo needs all the Power he can draw. If he can get enough Power all at once, he can heal the damage and erase those scars. Right now, he's just holding even. Blood sacrifice on the altar at the rising of a full moon, that's the kind of Power he needs. He won't take chances with anything less."
Caroline hoped that speech had convinced Aunt Kate. Aunt Alice hadn't written it — Caroline had extrapolated and expounded on a theme, stuff her aunt had said before they'd even been sure about the brujo, much less Jackie. Some of it was stuff that hadn't even been about Kate's circle.
And it had to be the right blood sacrifice, someone dear to Rowley blood if not actual Rowley blood. That would draw the greatest Power. But Caroline didn't mention that.
It sounded a little thin and conjectural from her end, something that would never pass muster as an oral defense of her doctoral dissertation. Her hands shook, and she set the Glock's safety with extra care. She didn't want to duplicate Jane's goof.
Kate switched off the truck's headlights to avoid drawing moths or curious eyes. Working by the dome light, fixed for the first time since as far back as Caroline could remember, Kate pulled a speed loader from under the seat, emptied the standard cartridges from it, and replaced them with Lone Ranger specials. Snapped its carrier onto her belt. Did the same with a second.
Three full cylinders from a .44 magnum. God, is she planning to fight a revolution?
Caroline shrugged. Well, she could play Pancho Villa with the best of them. She slung a canvas bandoleer across her chest and pulled the ancestral shotgun from Kate's gun rack, hooks where the big woman usually carried a builder's level. It was a trench pump gun from The Great War, the bluing worn off the steel, the finish worn off the wood, and walnut black with the sweat and oil of generations of Haskell hands waiting in the dark for trouble to come calling. Caroline started pulling shells from the bandoleer and stuffing them into the long tubular magazine. The gun took a lot of shells. Weapon of war, nothing sporting about it.
Aunt Kate reached across, long body and long arms stretching the full width of the truck, and caught Caroline's hand in a gentle gesture that asked permission. Then she took one of the shells.
"Brass shotgun shells?"
"Yeah. Antiques, old as the gun. You can reload them damn near forever, and they hold their shape against the magazine spring."
Kate hefted the shell, as if comparing it with others in her memory. "Don't tell me, let me guess.
