- -
- 100%
- +
She continued jogging, her focus on Jonquil’s tail ahead of her, the full moon above, her grip on the dagger Alessande had given her. If the thing, the Other, whatever it was, returned, it would not catch her unaware. She didn’t run with an iPod, because it interfered with situational awareness, and now, especially, she needed access to all six senses. She would recognize the warning signs this time: the whoosh of wind, the drop in temperature, the quieting of the cicadas. This time she would be ready. She had always been good with a knife.
Don’t be stupid, girl. That man’s words reverberated in her head. Stupid? She was in her element out here. Running was her passion, and these roads were as familiar to her as her home. No one was going to scare her off her own turf.
Her thoughts returned to the man. He wasn’t in the least attractive, and yet there was something about him that she found … magnetic. Perhaps it was his confidence. There was nothing sexier. Or maybe her strange wanton reaction was due to the moon, just risen, perfectly full. It was in Scorpio, the most carnal sign of the zodiac, and yesterday had been Beltane, the ancient Celtic celebration of fertility. A trifecta of sexual energy.
Even so, that man … who was he and why was he privy to Elven inside information? He knew more about the current crisis than she did, and he was nothing. He was merely mortal.
Or was he?
She stopped in her tracks and Jonquil stopped, too, curious. Of course. It was so obvious, she was embarrassed to have been almost oblivious to it. The attack must have thrown her off her game, affecting her powers of observation. Sailor had seen the shimmering effect enough, witnessed her cousin Barrie practice her own shifting skills. How could she not have recognized it? “Vernon” was merely a costume, a convenient face and body to house a man—or woman—who was a shapeshifter. Or, like Barrie, a Keeper of shifters. Although that was less likely. She doubted a Keeper could sustain a shift for half an hour, especially a shift into human form. Humans, Barrie said, were tough.
So Alessande hadn’t been altogether straight with her, and some shifter out there was also playing her. Some shifter with powerful sexual energy. And, of course, the entire Elven Council—excluding the dead guy in San Pedro and the idiots in the Antelope Valley. And she mustn’t forget the winged Other that had attacked her. There were a lot of people withholding information. She would need a flowchart to keep them straight.
But she knew whom to find first. As soon as she changed clothes and did something to disguise her eyes.
She reached Laurel Canyon and took the lead, hugging the shoulder to avoid the traffic, knowing Jonquil would do the same. They were running downhill now, practically at a sprint, and within two minutes Lookout Mountain was in sight and they were taking a right onto the private road that led to the House of the Rising Sun, high on the hill. Her home.
The House of the Rising Sun was actually a compound with three houses, built early in the twentieth century by Ivan Schwartz, a magician who went by the stage name of Merlin. Sailor had grown up in the main house, which her mother had always called the Castle House. Sailor’s cousin Barrie lived in Gwydion’s Cave, the residence Merlin had built for their grandfather. And Rhiannon, the third cousin, occupied Pandora’s Box, the original guesthouse. Merlin, who had long since passed from this world to the next, nevertheless preferred to stay on at the House of the Rising Sun—as a ghost.
A Tiffany lamp burned in the main hall, giving Castle House a ghostly glow. Had she left it on? Maybe. She did tend to be careless….
She followed Jonquil to the kitchen and filled his water bowl, watched him lap it up, then refilled it. The kitchen was old, with beat-up soft wood floors and knotty pine paneling installed in the 1950s, which was decades before she was born, but she knew the history of the estate going back to the 1920s. The house was old even when it was new, Mediterranean Gothic in style, with as many antiques as its owner could fill it with. Sailor loved all of Rising Sun, but especially Castle House, and especially the kitchen. She’d grown up in the oversize room, baked cookies with her mother, done homework at the old pine table, warmed herself near the wood-burning fireplace, napped on the ratty sofa covered with homemade quilts. She thought of Alessande’s kitchen, with its polish and new appliances. If there was an opposite to state-of-the-art, this was it.
She looked out the window over the sink and saw a light on in Pandora’s Box. Apparently Rhiannon was home. Out the back door she saw Gwydion’s Cave illuminated, as well, which meant Barrie was there, probably writing. The three houses were connected by tunnels, one of the estate’s many splendid oddities, but as adults, the cousins mostly stayed aboveground. For the moment Sailor had Castle House to herself, and could shower and map out what she would say to her cousins before—
A door slammed open. A gust of wind came through the kitchen. Already spooked by the lamp, Sailor reached for the dagger she’d set down.
“Sailor! You home yet?” a voice called, and a door slammed shut. “Where are you?”
“Kitchen,” she called back, and looked around for a dish towel to throw over her bloody shirt, but too late, because her cousin Rhiannon was walking through the archway, accompanied by Wizard, a dog so large he made Jonquil look dainty. Sailor clutched the shirt close and reminded herself not to make eye contact with her gorgeous relative.
“You’ve been out all this time?” Rhiannon reached down to pet Jonquil, who greeted her and Wizard with enthusiasm bordering on hysteria, as though he hadn’t seen them both a few hours earlier. Rhiannon glanced at Sailor. “Are you slaughtering something for dinner?”
Sailor looked down at the dagger in her hand and set it on the butcher block in front of her. “Oh, I—This is just—”
“Very slasher movie, that thing.” Rhiannon frowned at it. “Listen, Dad called. Mine, not yours. Apparently the rumor that we missed paying one lousy electric bill—or, okay, two bills—”
“Three.”
“Three lousy electric bills, fine. So somehow he heard that they turned off the power because—and you’ll love this—the alarm system is wired to his computer, and he happened to check in and was able to see that the system was down, so he called the company, who ratted us out, and—” She stopped, taking in her cousin again. “What have you got all over yourself? Paint?”
There it was. Could she talk about the attack without divulging everything else? Probably not. “It’s nothing. Go on.”
“That’s it.” Rhiannon picked up an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter and peeled off the sticker. “My dad and his gadgetry. You’d think he could relax the surveillance, knowing that I’m engaged to a cop, but no.” She rubbed the apple on her sweater, apparently an alternative to washing it, and took a loud, crunching bite. She peered at Sailor as she chewed. “You’re a mess.”
“You’re looking a bit ‘circus refugee’ yourself,” Sailor replied, with a sideways glance. Rhiannon’s lanky body was draped in plaid flannel pants, a tie-dye T-shirt and an argyle sweater, everything in colors so at odds with her flame-colored hair that Sailor felt nauseous.
“Cleaning closets,” Rhiannon explained. “Carving out space for Brodie. Trying on stuff before I hand it off to the Goodwill, in case I still like it. It’s insane how tiny the closets are in Pandora’s Box. How come nobody in the 1920s believed in storage space? It’s like junk wasn’t invented until 1985. Never mind me. Look at you. Your shirt’s filthy. What did you do, fall down the hillside?”
“Yeah, something like that. Listen, Rhi, I just need to take a shower and—”
“It’s like you got run over. And the dagger—is it antique? Let me see that.”
Sailor, in proffering the dagger hilt-first, let go of her own shirt.
“Sailor!” Rhiannon shrieked. “What in God’s name happened to you? Look at your chest.”
“What?” another voice called. “What did I miss?” And into the kitchen sauntered Barrie, the third cousin.
Barrie was petite by Gryffald standards, but the toughest of the cousins in many ways. When she saw Sailor’s state, however, she turned tender. “You poor thing. What did you do to yourself?”
“It’s not a big deal,” Sailor said. “Just a jogging … incident. Accident. Happens all the time on the trails. I’m clumsy.”
Rhiannon took Sailor’s hands in her own and turned them over. “Really? So you trip and fall, but you don’t skin your knees or scrape your palms, you fall directly on your sternum?”
“She probably ran into a tree,” Barrie said.
“With arms outstretched,” Rhiannon said.
“Very common among runners,” Barrie added. “It’s why they don’t route marathons through forests.”
The two women looked at Sailor expectantly, and for the first time got a good look at her face.
“Holy hell!” Rhiannon screamed. “What’s with your eyes?”
“Good God,” Barrie said. “Are those … colored contact lenses?”
“No. But if you have a spare pair, Barrie, I need to borrow them.”
“If you want to borrow anything,” Barrie said, “start explaining.”
Sailor sank into the sofa as a wave of weakness rolled over her. “I need coffee.”
“I’ll make coffee, you talk,” Rhiannon said, walking across the kitchen.
Barrie plopped down on the sofa alongside Sailor. “This isn’t some extreme ploy to get the night off work, is it?”
“Damn. Work.” Sailor sat up on the sofa. “What time is it?”
“Eight-twenty.”
“Okay. I’ll make this fast. Something happened tonight, which—”
“Is it to do with us?” Rhiannon asked.
“Tangentially, yes. It has to do with the family business.”
“Oh.” This time the two spoke in unison.
The cousins were all Keepers. Born in the same year, one red-haired child to each of the Gryffald brothers, the girls came into the world with the birthmarks of their fathers. Barrie’s destiny was to oversee the shapeshifters, Rhiannon’s the vampires. The girls had shared childhood memories, holidays and vacations, then gone separate ways as adults. Now they were back together and living in the family compound rent-free, if not expense-free. Their Otherworld work didn’t come with a paycheck, and all three of them had real-world professions—for Sailor, acting. Which meant, at the moment, waitressing.
“The thing is,” Sailor said, “I’m not sure I should talk about it.”
“Screw that,” Barrie said.
“Okay, but what if I tell you what I know and you feel you’re honor-bound, as a Keeper, to discuss it with—”
“Who?” Rhiannon asked from across the kitchen.
“Whom,” Barrie said. She was a journalist, and she believed in precision.
Sailor shook her head. “Shifters. Vamps. Your fellow Keepers.” She looked at Rhiannon. “Your fiancé. Especially him. You tell Brodie, he’s going to want to talk to me, and he’s got to stay away from me. Because he’s Elven.”
Rhiannon frowned. “What’s that got to do with—”
“You know what I hate?” Sailor continued. “Someone swears you to silence and tells you something, and then it turns out they themselves were sworn to silence, which means they’re expecting more of you than they expect of themselves.”
“You hate that?” Barrie asked. “Because I don’t have a problem with it. Everyone does it.”
“But isn’t it much better,” Sailor persisted, “if someone were to ask you later, to be able to say, ‘Golly, I didn’t know anything about it’?”
Barrie nodded. “Yes, if I were the sort of person who’s ever said ‘golly.’”
“I’m going with Barrie on this one,” Rhiannon said. “Screw that. We’re family.”
Sailor took a long look at her cousin Rhiannon in her strange clothes and another look at her cousin Barrie, and the two of them looked back at her with Gryffald eyes.
After a deep breath, she told them the story of her evening.
Declan Wainwright stood outside the gates of the House of the Rising Sun. He’d parked off Lookout Mountain and hiked the few hundred yards to this spot, where he could see into the main house—Sailor’s house—one of several on the compound and the only one showing movement. He counted three people and assumed they were the Gryffald cousins. He was waiting for Sailor to be alone, to pass out from fatigue, as Alessande had predicted, so that he could make his way into her bedroom and extract some blood. He’d worked his way through college as an EMT, so that would be easy. If she was deeply asleep, she wouldn’t even wake. He would return in the morning to get her to Kimberly’s lab, recruiting her cousins to help, if necessary. But for now, he needed her blood.
And, to be honest, he needed to see that she was safe.
He wasn’t used to waiting. Harriet excelled at expediting things for him, a perk of money and power. He’d spent the past hour texting with her, rearranging his calendar, rescheduling meetings planned for the next morning and setting up two for tonight. One was with Kimberly Krabill, the physician, and the other was business. He glanced at his watch.
He would have to break in. If there was as much magic here at the House of the Rising Sun as Alessande had indicated, he couldn’t do it by shifting. He’d once become a sparrow and encountered an enchanted force field so strong that he’d lost his shift energy, felt his wings fail and fallen twenty feet to the ground. Better to take his chances as a normal burglar. The grounds had a dilapidated aura, suggesting that nonmagical security was minimal. Declan liked trespassing anyway; it made him feel like a kid again.
At the age of ten he’d told his foster parents that he would rather eat what came out of a garbage can than what came out of their frying pan, which had resulted in a hard kick to his gut. “Compared to what that drugged whore of a mother fed you,” his foster father had bellowed, “this is the dining hall of the Q.E. Two.”
Declan had waited until nightfall, climbed down the fire escape and made his way to Southampton’s docks, which he knew well enough, his mother having numbered a few sailors among her client base. When he’d found the Queen Elizabeth II in her berth, his curiosity grew.
He’d turned himself into a swallow and flown aboard.
The ship had delighted him. He’d reverted to human form and stayed aboard and in his body all the way to New York. For him, it was second nature to steal food, sleep in small places and keep out of the way of grown people. He could do it all without resorting to his abilities, most of which he didn’t understand, a few of which scared him. His mother, in one of her lucid moments, had told him that there were others like him, maybe not in Southampton, but in big cities and also in America, quite a lot of them. Keepers, she’d called them. With birthmarks like his.
She’d been right. America was filled with them. Keepers and shapeshifters and Others of all sorts, creatures that looked human but had other qualities and talents, magical, fascinating, at times frightening to a ten-year-old.
Few things frightened him now.
The lights in the house went out. A door opened, and he could hear two people saying goodnight to one another. That would be Rhiannon and Barrie, he thought. They all lived on the compound, so it was likely they’d left Sailor in the main house and were heading to their own. Their voices trailed off, along with the sound of footsteps on a stone path. When it was quiet, he scaled the wall easily and made his way to the main house.
Entering the house—a small castle, really—required only the removal of a window screen and crawling through. He used his cell phone flashlight to look through a stack of mail on the kitchen table, confirming that it was Sailor’s house. Then the dog appeared—Jonquil, she’d called him—greeting him like an old friend. Apparently he and “Vernon Winter” smelled the same.
“Where is she?” he whispered, scratching Jonquil’s soft ears. “Upstairs? Asleep?”
Jonquil, as if he understood, bounded up the winding staircase. Declan followed, his footsteps disturbingly loud on the creaking stairs. He searched each room, and while he found Sailor’s bloodstained jogging clothes on the floor of the master bedroom, he did not find her.
Where the hell was she?
Chapter 3
Sailor made it to the Hollywood Bowl, resplendant under the full moon, in seventeen minutes. Parking was a nightmare, of course, but she would be leaving long before the rest of the crowd, so she blocked someone’s Acura and left her Jeep, moving fast before parking security could bust her.
She was determined to see Charles Highsmith, the head of the Elven Keeper Council.
Learning Highsmith’s whereabouts had been simple: a call to his office pretending to be a veterinary assistant concerned about one of his polo ponies had yielded the information that he was at the Hollywood Bowl, had been there since six at an open-air preconcert “business picnic” and was unreachable. Of course, one person’s “unreachable” was another’s piece of cake, Sailor decided. The Hollywood Bowl wasn’t the Staples Center; because the criminal element was less addicted to the Los Angeles Philharmonic than to the Lakers, security was lax. She was prepared to use her limited powers of Elvenry and her considerable powers of lying to make her way in, but the usher guarding the entrance was listening to the concert, and she slipped by easily.
She walked carefully. The house was dark, with all the lights focused on the orchestra, but the full moon illuminated the way and made her aware of the occasional Elven. How contagious was she? She hadn’t infected Alessande, so surely an accidental touch wouldn’t do it, but how to be sure?
She made her way to the Garden Boxes, where her father had season tickets, hoping that Highsmith was there, too, and once again her luck held. Highsmith was on the aisle, wineglass in hand.
Under normal circumstances she would have been embarrassed to spoil anyone’s concert experience, but now she touched Highsmith on the shoulder and met his affronted look calmly. The full moon would highlight her scarlet eyes, which she hadn’t yet hidden behind her cousin’s contacts. She needed no mirror to tell her how frightening she must appear. It was written all over his patrician face.
“Remember me?” she said. “I’m Sailor Gryffald.”
They walked to the exit in the near dark, accompanied by the notes of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. Highsmith led the way. He was an inch or so taller than she was, with an athletic body and a commanding presence that was almost military, even when he was wearing khakis and a polo shirt. His muscular back registered displeasure, which Sailor chalked up to a control freak facing a situation not of his making. She found the man intimidating and—okay, this was weird—attractive. Was that some síúlacht side effect?
In the parking lot he led her to the VIP section and clicked a remote at a black Rolls-Royce Ghost. He let her in the passenger side and turned on the lights. “Look at me.”
He studied her eyes in a clinical manner. She in turn registered a man in his fifties with a hard, handsome face and close-cropped, steel-gray hair. For a split second he looked at her, rather than her eyes, but before she could see his thoughts he switched off the interior light and opened his car door.
“Don’t you want to know how it happened?” she asked, but he was out of the car and opening her door before she knew what he was doing.
“Let’s take a walk.”
“Why? Is your car bugged?” she asked, but she climbed out.
He didn’t answer until they were several yards away. “Cars are vulnerable. That much electronic circuitry makes it difficult to cloak with protective spells. Tell me what happened, please.”
She recited the facts once more, striding through the parking lot. The night had grown cold, but she knew she was running a temperature and welcomed the chilly breeze. Highsmith listened without comment, asking for only a few points of clarification. When she’d finished, he said, “How did you find me here?”
She ignored that, not wanting to get his assistant fired. “The question is, why didn’t I know about the Scarlet Pathogen until I became infected with it?”
“We’re giving no official response while events are still unfolding.”
“Events are unfolding right into my bloodstream,” she said. “And anyway, who’s ‘we’? I’m part of the Council. Shouldn’t I be one of the official responders?”
“No. The executive committee takes care of that.”
“Are you serious?”
“It’s protocol.”
“And who’s the executive committee? You?”
“Keep your voice down.”
Sailor looked around. A chauffeur stood outside a limousine talking on a cell phone twenty yards away, the lone human in sight. She lowered her voice, but not her intensity. “I was attacked. Deliberately infected, which means that maybe those dead Elven women were deliberately infected, too. Maybe they didn’t just pick up the disease on location, which is what the news reports suggest. I expect you would know. I expect you have contacts in the law enforcement community. Because you’re the head of the Council.”
He looked at her speculatively. Then he nodded. “Yes. The police are investigating the deaths, and if they haven’t yet been ruled homicides, they will be any day now.”
“Who are their suspects?”
“If my sources shared that kind of confidential information with me, do you really think I would share it with you?”
“If it would help us find a killer, yes. Don’t you think I have a right to know?”
“I think you’re a novice in a job you neither understand nor appreciate, despite your pedigree. Being the victim of an attack doesn’t change that.”
“But it’s motivating me,” she said. “And I’m a fast learner.”
“Congratulations.”
His sarcasm was like a slap in the face, and Sailor felt her temper rise. “My assailant was a winged creature, a bird or a bat. That’s either a shifter or a vampire, and once word of that gets out—and that’s my call, isn’t it?—all hell will break loose. So you and your executive committee and your protocol and your old boys’ network can shut me out, Charles, but you’ll be doing so at your own—”
“Young woman.” His voice stopped her cold as he turned and looked at her face-to-face. “You’ve been through a disturbing experience. I’ll make allowances for that. But don’t think for a moment that you are my equal simply because you bear your father’s name. I’m the Council’s President and you are its youngest member, and you haven’t earned the right to address me by my given name, let alone speak to me in that manner.”
She was now seriously pissed, but he held up his hand. “If you intend to make an enemy of me so early in your career, you’re not just rude, you’re ignorant.”
Sailor closed her mouth, anger and embarrassment fighting it out inside her.
“Word of this must not get out,” he continued, “or you will cause a great deal of damage. Keep your mouth shut. You should stay out of sight, as well. Your eyes will attract attention.”
“Shouldn’t you be worried I’ll transmit the disease to the Elven?”
His eyes narrowed. “Naturally,” he said, and looked at his watch. “I’ll call for a Council meeting within twenty-four hours, and you’ll hear from me in the next twelve. Until then, stay home. I’ll send my own physician to your house tomorrow to examine you. Where are you parked?”
“I don’t need an escort, thank you.”
“Then I’ll return to the concert, where my absence will have been noted. You’ll have been recognized, as well. That’s how rumors begin. It was an unfortunate move on your part, coming here. That’s why it’s imperative you go home now. I’ll have to do some damage control.”
“I’m sure you’re quite capable of it. Sir,” she added, with as much sarcasm as she could fit into one syllable. She walked away before he could respond, pleased to have the last word.
Go home? Ha. She had things to do, and going home was far down on the list.