Doe is a MEDICINE WOMAN WITCH with SPIRITUAL HEALING/HARM powers.
Doe is the eldest of Lee Solares’ children, and she’s always taken the responsibility seriously. Sweet-natured and dutiful, she’s devoted herself to the protection of her brother and the caretaking of her family–a title she extends to the workers, riders and cowhands of the Double Six ranch. Her predictability made her sudden disappearance–and reappearance, one month later–even more of a disturbing shock for those that loved her best. Her cheerful disposition remained unchanged, and her total refusal to explain both the absence and the pregnancy that resulted from it revealed a stubborn streak that had always run straight down to the bone. Plenty of people outside the family have trouble understanding how sullen, awkward Aracely came from bright and big-hearted Doe, but the Solares clan isn’t much surprised. Whatever the price for her only child, Doe paid it gladly.
Doli “Doe” Solares
Chooli “Lee” Solares
Lee is a MEDICINE WOMAN WITCH with PHYSICAL HEALING/HARM powers.
Chooli has been called a lot of things during her life. The least insulting of them is obstinate. From the moment she could walk, she either went her own way or refused to go another step. Fortunately, her talent for good medicine–health regained, curses lifted, balance restored–outweighed the frustration she otherwise caused her family and the rest of their band. They nurtured dreams of a powerful future for her as wife and mother and eventual elder, but Chooli always had a strong sense of bad things coming. She saw a darkness like a thunderhead on the horizon, and damned if she was going to stand still waiting for it. When her family refused to listen, she saddled up with a man who did: Jesus Santiago Solares, traveling east from California and looking to spend his mined gold on land and cattle. He wasn’t looking for a wife, but he did believe in the kind of magic that would bring the right woman walking out of the desert and into his arms. She was only seventeen when Jesus bought the land that would soon become the Double Six. Years later, when the Long Walk took her band, she was hundreds of miles away and safe in the arms of the family that she and Jesus had built together.
That family, and the ranch that sustains it, has grown into the love of her life. No matter the shortcomings of her children–and their children–she will defend them ferociously. Losing Jesus and gaining full ownership of the Double Six has only sharpened her resolve.
Aracely Solares
Aracely is a NAGUAL WITCH.
Aracely thinks she might be cursed. Animals have shied away from her for as long as she can remember; milk sours if she looks at it sideways for more than a second or two; fires won’t light in the stove or the hearth unless she leaves the room. Her mother, sunshine incarnate, says it’s just the magic in her blood working itself out. Her grandmother says she needs a good dose of balance. Aracely just wants the people in town to quit crossing to the opposite side of the street when they see her coming. If they knew about the visions of disaster that she’s started seeing in her dreams, they would like her even less.
Lucas Tsela Solares
Lucas is the youngest of Lee’s children, and no one in the family has ever let him forget it. Admittedly, that’s as much a result of his own behavior as his mother’s favoritism toward her daughter. He spent most of his early years causing trouble in one way or another–usually for his older sister, at first, and then for his father once he’d grown out of childhood mischief and into adolescent angst. Adulthood only reinforced the pattern. Doe was the family darling; he was the beloved rascal. Even he couldn’t take himself seriously. For years, he saw no reason to try. Nothing seemed likely to change. Under the circumstances, his father’s death struck him like a lightning bolt. It sent him reeling, dizzy as a planet knocked far out of orbit. When he finally regained his footing, everything had changed. He finally wants to stand up and take his place as the man of the family, but convincing his sister–and his mother–of that fact will be quite a challenge.