Page 1 of Stolen Time

1

INTO THE DARK

“I dare you to go in,”my friend Bellamy said, and I shot her a side-eyed glance.

“What is this, fifth grade?”

She only grinned, unfazed by the dig. We were standing at a boarded-up shaft to the abandoned United Verde Mine above Jerome, Arizona, a site that was off-limits to pretty much everyone…not that the “keep out” signs and the barbed wire stopped members of the McAllister witch clan from coming up here and poking around from time to time, or merely checking on the isolated spot to make sure no wayward tourists had gone out of bounds and started wandering around where it wasn’t safe.

Bellamy had lived her whole life in the former mining town — her two dads owned the sweet shop down on Main Street, and I had to believe the United Verde was old hat to her by now. But since I’d only arrived in Jerome a month ago, much of it was still new to me, even though, like most other members of the Wilcox witch clan, I’d come here to visit and explore at least once a year throughout most of my childhood, depending on what my family’s vacation schedule looked like.

After I graduated from Northern Pines University at the end of May, I really hadn’t known what I wanted to do with myself. When I heard that Rachel McAllister, who’d run McAllister Mercantile in the heart of Jerome for longer than a lot of us had been alive, was looking for some additional help at her store, I decided to go for it. Why she’d chosen me when I had to believe there were plenty of other McAllisters who might have wanted the job, I still wasn’t sure.

I hadn’t asked too many questions, though. It was enough for me to be living in Jerome — I’d lucked out and was able to rent the same darling little bungalow my cousin Lucas’s wife Margot still owned, just a block south of Main Street — and to allow myself to be on autopilot for a while. My parents weren’t entirely thrilled that I’d decided to bail on Flagstaff, but it wasn’t as if I’d moved to Africa or something.

Not that I could have done anything so extreme even if I’d wanted to. Witches stuck to their clans’ territories, and the only reason why things were a little different here in Arizona was that theprima— head witch of the McAllisters — just happened to be married to theprimus— head warlock — of the Wilcox family. We were also on friendly terms with the de la Pazes, who lived in the Phoenix area and points south of that, so at least we could wander around the state pretty much as we liked, and even into New Mexico as well, since they’d come to our aid back before I was even born, when all the Arizona clans had been fighting the dark warlock Joaquin Escobar and had been on the brink of losing…until the Castillos stepped in to lend their assistance.

Bellamy was Rachel’s other shop assistant, and the two of us hit it off right away. It probably helped that she was only a year younger than I, although she had decided against going to a four-year university and was instead getting her certification in enology at the local community college.

“More future in that kind of thing around here anyway,” she’d told me not too long after I came to work at the store, which was true enough. The wine industry was positively hopping in the Verde Valley, and since the area had gained AVA — “American Viticultural Area” — status, it was becoming almost as popular as Napa or Sonoma.

She also worked two nights a week at the tasting room down the block from Rachel’s store, so it had become a hangout of mine as well, a place where we could continue our chats, except she got paid for doing so.

This particular Thursday night, however, she didn’t have a shift at the tasting room, which was why she’d suggested we go take a look at the abandoned United Verde mine. At first, I’d demurred — when I was a kid, maybe around eight or nine, my parents had taken the family to the Gold King Mine just outside Jerome, which had once been a separate settlement, and I didn’t see the point in visiting something that seemed way too similar — but Bellamy had told me that wasn’t the reality of the situation at all.

“The Gold King is just a tourist attraction,” she said. “I mean, it was a mining settlement once, but it’s been defunct a lot longer than the United Verde, which was a working mine until the 1950s. When it was closed…it was just closed, and that’s it. Most of it was open pit mines, and there isn’t much to see. But there are also some exploratory shafts they dug and then boarded up, and those are kind of creepy.”

I had to admit I wasn’t sure whether I was in the mood for “creepy.” People had always told me Jerome was super-haunted — and Angela, the McAllisterprima,had a special talent for talking to ghosts, which probably had been handy while she was growing up there — but even though I’d been living in the former mining town for almost a month now, I hadn’t seen even a single sign of a ghost. True, Margot had told me no one had ever diedin her bungalow, at least as far as she knew, and I had to admit Rachel had so imprinted her presence on the big brick building her store occupied that I doubted any ghost would have the guts to try haunting the place.

But it had been awfully hot this past week…June in the Verde Valley was often like that…and I thought going up to the mine and checking out one of those abandoned shafts might be a little cooler than trying to sit on a patio somewhere and have drinks.

Which was why Bellamy and I now stood outside the shaft she’d said was the easiest to access. I had to admit it didn’t look very inviting; my brain had manufactured images of a gaping hole in the steep hillside, but of course, that wasn’t how it was set up at all. No, the entrance had been covered with some weathered boards, and barbed-wire fencing provided an additional perimeter about a dozen feet back from the actual opening.

That barbed wire hadn’t offered too much of a deterrent, since Bellamy had gone unerringly to a section off to one side and stepped down on the bottom strand of wire and deftly pulled up the one above it, showing that she — and probably generations of other McAllisters — had been doing that very same thing for a long time.

While the fence hadn’t proved to be much of a barrier, I couldn’t say the same for the boards that concealed the opening to the mine.

“Even if I wanted to, how am I supposed to get in there?” I asked, and she just grinned. She had long hair in the bright copper shade that showed up in the McAllister clan from time to time, although I supposed it might also have come from the egg donor who had been her mother. Obviously, Kirby and Matthew couldn’t have children on their own, and they’d known Kirby would need to be their child’s biological father, or there wouldn’thave been any chance of the baby inheriting the McAllister clan’s magic.

Bellamy had been perfectly frank about her situation, as if it wasn’t any big deal, and I supposed it wasn’t. After all, she might not have known who her mother was, but I had my own craziness in my family tree, considering how my father, Robert Rowe, had been born in the eighteen hundreds but had come to live in the twenty-first century after my mother rescued him when she time-traveled to 1884 and brought him back to modern-day Flagstaff with her.

“Like this,” Bellamy said, and stepped forward so she could grasp one of the plywood boards and pull it away from the opening.

Clearly, the majority of the nails that had been holding it in place were just for show. With the sheet of plywood set off to one side, I now could see the dark opening that yawned in the hillside, and a shiver went down my back despite the lingering heat of the day. With Mingus Mountain towering above us, Jerome and part of Clarkdale and Cottonwood below were already in shadow, although the sun wouldn’t actually set for at least another forty-five minutes or so.

“You’ve really gone in there?” I asked, knowing how dubious I sounded.

“Lots of times,” she said blithely. “My cousins and I would come here and play Truth or Dare, or just sort of hang out when we needed a place to be away from everyone else. And it’s kind of a thing to go in the mine and stay there alone for at least an hour, just to prove you can do it.”

That sounded like a kind of whack rite of passage to me, but I supposed every clan had its quirks. Also, while I thought Jerome was absolutely darling, with its various hundred-plus-year-old houses and buildings and sloped sidewalks and absolute lack of anything resembling a true right angle, I had to admitthat it probably didn’t offer much to do except go exploring. Growing up there would have been very different from my own childhood; the big house in Flagstaff where I’d been raised was less than a mile away from shopping and a movie theater and a variety of diversions.

“So if I do this,” I asked, “does that make me an honorary McAllister or something?”

Bellamy’s grin only broadened. “I’d say you already are, kind of, since you’re working at Rachel’s store.”

The question had been dancing around in my mind anyway, so I figured I might as well go ahead and ask it. If nothing else, prolonging our conversation would postpone the moment when I had to go into that dark, gaping hole in the side of Cleopatra Hill.

“Why did Rachel hire me, anyway?” I said. “I mean, there must have been plenty of McAllisters who wanted the job.”

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