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…?”

“Grandmother,” he supplied at once.

A direct relation, then. Interesting. Probably I should have known that, but trying to keep track of all the twigs and branches in my own family tree was work enough without delving into those of the other clans. Aunt Rachel reveled in that sort of thing, and kept detailed lists and charts. Handy, I supposed, when so many in a clan were related to one another in some way.

Not that witches and warlocks couldn’t marry outside their clans, of course. It was good to bring in fresh blood — or else I wouldn’t have Alex Trujillo standing in front of me right now — but there were still a lot of third and fourth cousins married to one another even so. And now that I thought about it, I seemed to recall a McAllister marrying into the de la Paz clan a few generations back, so Alex and I still might be related, if only tangentially.

But I knew I was letting my thoughts wander so I wouldn’t have to think about the task at hand. This would be a lot easier if we could both share a drink or two first and get a little tipsy, let our guards down a bit. Custom dictated, however, that we go into this clear-headed and wide-eyed. Otherwise, our reactions could be clouded by the alcohol, and that wouldn’t do at all.

“So she’s okay with this?” I asked. Probably not all that tactful, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

A lift of the shoulders. Nice, broad shoulders. Although our conversation was limping along, I couldn’t help wishing this encounter might have a different conclusion. He really was awfully good-looking….

“Of course,” he said immediately. “It’s a big deal, to be the consort of the prima. Even from a clan — ” He broke off then, as if he’d just realized he was about to stick one of those size-twelve Converse high-tops right in his mouth.

“Even from a piddly little clan like the McAllisters that lives in the middle of nowhere, right?”

“I didn’t mean that.”

I was pretty sure he did. I let it go, though. Kissing a next-to-perfect stranger was hard enough without getting into an argument beforehand. “It’s okay,” I said. “I know we’re not much compared to the de la Pazes. But we like it that way.”

Alex nodded. “It is pretty cool up here. I’ve never been to Jerome before.” His dark eyes fastened on mine, and he moved a few steps closer. A new warmth in his expression made an excited little shiver go down my spine, even though I knew this wasn’t going to end the way he wanted it to. “I think I could get used to it here.”

Another step, and another, and then he was standing right in front of me. He smelled good, too, of some citrusy aftershave or cologne, something fresh and clean.

“You could?” I managed.

“Yes,” he replied, then reached up and took my face in his hands, fingers warm and strong against my cheeks. He pressed his lips against mine, and…

…and nothing.

I’d known that was what would happen, but even so a sharp wave of disappointment washed over me. It didn’t matter that he was gorgeous and smelled good and seemed more or less friendly. Whatever it was — whatever that spark was that should flare into a raging fire once a prima kissed her intended consort — well, it just wasn’t there. He wasn’t the one.

For a second or two he continued to kiss me, as if he thought I was on a delayed-reaction fuse or something. But he could kiss me for the next ten years, and it wouldn’t make a speck of difference.

Gently as I could, I pulled away. I didn’t say anything at first. Then, “I’m sorry, Alex.”

His dark brows pulled down as he frowned, but then he gave a philosophical lift of the shoulders and stepped back a little. “My abuela warned me that this wasn’t a sure thing.”

I forced a chuckle. “Oh, she did?”

“Angela, you’re sort of legendary. Forty-three candidates — forty-four now, I guess — and not one suited you?”

“It’s not as if I have a choice — ”

“Oh, I know.” To my surprise, he bent down and kissed me again, only this time on the cheek. “It’s sort of like buying a lottery ticket for us candidates, I guess. We all know the odds aren’t very good, but we all hope that we might be the one.” He grinned, a flash of white teeth, and said, “Hasta luego, Angela.” Then he went out the door that led to the hall, and from there to the front door.

Well, technically, it was the back door, as our house was a two-story apartment above my aunt’s store, and so the private entrance was off the alley and not the main street, but still. Either way, he was gone. Adios, number forty-four.

I had no idea who number forty-five was going to be, but I had a feeling he couldn’t possibly be as cute as Alex Trujillo.

Aunt Rachel appeared a minute or so later, wooden spoon dangling from her hand. “No?” she asked, in weary but unsurprised tones.

“Nope,” I replied. It bothered me that it still hurt so much. By this point, shouldn’t I have gotten numb to the whole process?

But I hadn’t. Each time the hope would surge, even though my mind always told me the new candidate couldn’t be the one, because he wasn’t him.

Since she was my Aunt Rachel, she didn’t sigh. Maybe she allowed herself the smallest twitch of her mouth, or lowering of her eyebrows, but that was all. She gave tilted her head to one side, appearing to consider my expression. “There’s still time, Angela. No need to worry.”

“Who’s worried?” Before she could reply, I added, “I’m going upstairs. Unless you need me to help with dinner?” That was the last thing I felt like doing at the moment. Even so, I didn’t hesitate to ask, since that was what I was expected to do.

I’d gotten really good at doing that, what was expected of me.

My aunt shook her head. “No, sweetie, I’m fine. You take some time for yourself.”

I murmured a thank-you and fled upstairs. Most days my room felt like a refuge, a place I could go to escape the weight of all those expectations. Today, though, it felt more like a cage, even with the breathtaking view that looked out over my hillside town, perched on Cleopatra Hill, and down into the Verde Valley, past the red rocks of Sedona, and all the way to….

It was a clear, cool day in mid-October, with visibility of fifty miles and more. Much more, actually, as I could see Humphreys Peak in Flagstaff, nearly a hundred miles away. On days like this, it seemed as if I could almost reach out and touch it…if I were crazy enough to do such a thing. Flagstaff was forbidden territory.

Flagstaff was where the Wilcox clan held sway.

I didn’t have any time to think about the Wilcoxes, though, or their myriad sins, because right then my cell phone rang. For a second or two I considered ignoring it, even as I wished we were back in the summer’s monsoon season, when my cell phone tended to crap out any time we had a decent thunderstorm. At least when that happened I didn’t have to make a conscious decision to avoid looking at the caller ID so I could let it roll over into voicemail without feeling guilty.

But since I had a fairly good idea of who it was even without glancing at the display, and since I knew she’d only keep calling until I picked up, I decided to forestall the inevitable. After grabbing the phone, I went and settled on my bed. I knew this was probably going to take awhile.

“Hi, Sydney.”

No preamble, just a drawn-out, “Sooooooo?”

“So nothing,” I replied, and kicked off one, then the other of my cowboy boots. I might have been twenty-one, legally an adult and able to drink and vote, not to mention being the clan’s next prima, but Aunt Rachel would still give me hell if I put my boots on the expensive embroidered duvet cover she’d gotten me for my birthday last year.

A groan. “Not again!”

“Yes, again.” I wiggled my toes, and wished I’d grabbed a glass of water or iced tea from the kitchen before I came upstairs.

“Was he cute?”

“What difference does it make?”

“Was he?”

I knew she’d keep asking until I told her everything. “Yes, he was cute. But it doesn’t matter, because he wasn’t — ”

“Yeah, I know. The mystery man. The man of your dreams. The one beside whom all others pale. The — ”

“Okay, I get it.” Sometimes I really wished I’d never told Sydney about him. But weren’t you supposed to be able to tell your best friend everything?

She knew about me…knew about the McAllisters. Her family had lived in Cottonwood almost as long as the McAllisters had been in Jerome, and they were some of the few whom we trusted with our secrets. Long-timers around here, they knew about my clan, about its traditions…its powers. Well, its purported powers, anyway. There hadn’t been a public display for more than eighty years, not since the time Henry McAllister caught a recently laid-off miner attempting to steal the contents of his cash register. The miscreant was held upside down, suspended in midair, until the sheriff came to claim him. Spectacular, sure, but the clan elders made it clear that such exhibitions of power would not be tolerated.

Fly low and avoid the radar — that’s our motto. Attracting attention was not a good thing. And so, I more or less confided in Sydney, knowing that she came from people who knew how to keep their mouths shut. In her case, this was something of a miracle, since she seemed able to rattle on at length about pretty much any other topic.

“Who’d believe me anyway?” she’d asked once, and I’d had to shrug and smile. This part of the world had a high-per-capita instance of psychics, witches, energy healers, you name it. Calling us out as witches would have earned a yawn at best. Most people didn’t realize that there were witches…and then there were witches.

“So what now?” she asked. “Does your aunt have the next one lined up yet?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, how many guys can there be who are my age and from a suitable clan? She’s already had to cast pretty far afield.” As far as California, and Oregon, and Colorado. Not New Mexico, though. The clans there were connected with the Wilcoxes. I shivered, then added, “I’m sure she’ll be on the phone tomorrow, though, scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

A little pause. “Well, since you’re not getting bonded to your soulmate after all, you want to go to Main Stage with me tomorrow night? I’ve heard the band is supposed to be pretty good.”

“Who’s playing?”

I could almost see her shrug. “I don’t know their name. Does it matter, as long as it gets you out of the house?”

“True that.” It would be good to get out. And Cottonwood was safe territory. I didn’t have to worry about anything strange happening down in Cottonwood. “Dinner first?”

“Drinks and dinner. They have got the cutest new guy working at the Fire Mountain tasting rooms….”

Envy surged through me. How I wished I could go out and flirt and look at good-looking guys, maybe give my phone number to someone who seemed particularly interesting. That was never going to happen, though. I was the next prima of the McAllisters. I was supposed to meet my soulmate, get married, and use my powers for good, an agenda that didn’t exactly lend itself to casual hook-ups. As usual, I’d have to settle for living vicariously through Sydney.

“Okay.” I knew arguing was pointless. She might not be a witch, but Sydney did have an almost magical talent for getting her way.

“Real clothes,” she said in warning tones. “Girl clothes.”

“Yas’m,” I replied. “I’ll meet you in old town at…?”

“Seven. Don’t be late.” She hung up then, and I hit the “end” button on my phone and tossed it onto the coverlet.

I doubted that a girls’ night out would magically heal all my woes, but I figured I had to start somewhere.

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 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, 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 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.