The Shifters

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  There was a sagging couch at the far end of the room, and on it was a body that could have been a vampire, so still it was and so pale the face, and with long, shimmering dark hair….

  Danny. Asleep or dead…but strangely angelic in the candlelight.

  At that moment Caitlin’s heart broke for the innocence in him.

  And then she felt fury. Her brothel image had been correct. Case was pimping Danny out, selling his extraordinary gifts to any bidder.

  She turned on Case, and her rage must have been evident, or he was reading her, because he caught her wrist before she even knew she had raised her hand.

  “He makes his own choices, cher. Do you really think he doesn’t?”

  “I think you push him down the hole,” she said, trying to pull her arm away.

  But he held her hard, blue eyes gleaming.

  “And don’t you want the same thing from him now as everyone else?”

  Caitlin felt a rush of confusion—and guilt….

  And then a soft, dreamy voice came from the dark at the other end of the room. “Is that Cait?”

  Both she and Case stopped their fighting, like parents interrupted by a waking child. Danny was sitting up on the couch, looking still half asleep.

  Caitlin pulled her arm out of Case’s grasp and moved toward Danny. He reached his arms up to her, and she stooped to hug and kiss him, feeling an ache in her heart. The baby-roundness of his face was deceptive; he was so thin she could feel his bones through his clothes.

  “You haven’t been to see us in a while,” he complained, and she wondered if he thought they were at his and Case’s apartment—or crib, as they called it—which in her opinion was truer than they probably meant it to be.

  “I’ve been—” she started, and then didn’t know how to complete the sentence. I’ve been…what? I’ve been too much of a wreck since Case dumped me to stand seeing you? It took me forever to just be able to listen to music again, even in the most casual way? I didn’t want to see anyone because I screwed up so badly when my sisters needed me the most? I don’t want to see you destroying yourself?

  He seemed to hear her and hugged her harder. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, and he might have meant it didn’t matter that she’d been away, but she thought it meant that none of the other things mattered, they were unimportant.

  Then he released her and pulled back. “So you’re here about the creepy crawlies.”

  Caitlin was startled. “You know about them?”

  He smiled with a blank and distant look, made more ominous by the play of candlelight on his features. “They’re hard to miss. Bad intentions reek out there….”

  He meant in the astral.

  “What…do they look like?” she asked. Impossible question, she knew. What Danny saw was some vision of his own. But curiosity overwhelmed her.

  “Bad,” he said simply. “Nothingness.” Something played across his face, and he withdrew even deeper into himself. “And hungry,” he said tonelessly. “Endlessly hungry.”

  Caitlin felt a chill. The candles flickered.

  With visible effort, Danny focused back on her. “So you want me to go out there and look and see what they’re up to.”

  Caitlin felt a sharp stab of guilt about using him and was almost ready to forget the whole thing right there. “I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do,” she said.

  He smiled that sweet, distant smile and said, “I want to help.”

  Case moved impatiently in the dark behind them. “If you two are finished with the love fest, we could actually try to get on with things.”

  Danny nodded.

  “What do you need, bro?” Case asked.

  “Move the table aside,” Danny said.

  Case looked at Caitlin, and she went to join him in moving the long oval table to the front of the room, against the wall and out of the way. Caitlin turned back to the center of the room just in time to see Case throwing back the rug to reveal a pentagram painted in gleaming white on the black floor, about six feet in diameter and inscribed in a circle.

  Danny moved two chairs into the circle, then grabbed a third and placed it to form a triangle within the five points of the star.

  “Sit,” he said. Not a command, but compelling nonetheless.

  With a glance at each other, Caitlin and Case took their seats within the circle.

  Danny crossed to the candelabra and took candles from them one by one, cupping his hand to protect the flame as he placed one lit candle at each point of the star.

  Caitlin felt a dark thrill of excitement. Danny had read for her before, and she’d observed him reading for others, but she’d never been with him for an actual séance. She had the eerie sense of something momentous about to happen.

  Danny looked at her with that dreamy, not-quite-there look. “There is danger here, Caitlin. You will be vulnerable in the astral. Your life force is strong, as is your psychic force, and your Keeper powers will draw spirits of all kinds.”

  Caitlin swallowed. “I’ll be fine.” A hollow and stupid claim, she knew; there were no guarantees in the astral.

  Case spoke up, roughly. “Sister Goldenhair is tough. I’ll be looking out for her. Let’s get this show on the road.” He reached into the inner pocket of his leather jacket…and Caitlin’s eyes widened as he drew out a crack pipe.

  “Ready for liftoff? He smiled at her, a slow, dangerous smile.

  Chapter 12

  It was twenty after nine, and no sign of Caitlin.

  Ryder prowled restlessly in the great room of the main house, part of the common area that the sisters shared.

  The dignified elder were, whom Ryder now knew as August Gaudin, had himself delivered Ryder to the Keepers’ private compound. Jagger DeFarge had arrived almost immediately after, and Ryder was left in the main room while the two Keepers, the detective and the were retired to some inner room, presumably to discuss him.

  There was much to admire about the MacDonald sisters’ tastes; the large room Ryder had been left in managed to be homey and sensual and magical all at once, a fitting house for the sisters’ ancestral profession. The walls and bookshelves showcased mystical objects from all over the world: goddess figures, green men, filigreed mirrors, symbolic fetishes, intricate mythological tapestries. The candles were fragrant, herbal as well as floral, and Ryder noticed that the colors had been specifically chosen for intellectual focus and spiritual protection.

  And the sisters themselves, Fiona and Shauna, were jewels: gorgeous, gracious, powerful beyond ordinary mortal women, both in spiritual radiance and sensual personal charm. Women he would have been irresistibly drawn to in any other situation. Instead he found himself thinking obsessively of the one absent sister, finding his very body missing Caitlin with a hunger that both startled and concerned him.

  Every minute that passed was making Ryder more anxious, not for himself, but for Caitlin.

  He stopped his restless pacing in front of a full-length oil portrait of an attractive couple—the sisters’ parents, no doubt. The woman’s beauty was a prototype for the three Keepers. August Gaudin had said enough on their drive over that Ryder understood that the werewolf had acted as godfather and protector to the young Keepers after the deaths of their parents, whom Ryder was startled to hear had sacrificed their own lives to avert full-blown war among the Others just ten years ago. Which meant that the sisters had taken over the responsibility of three hostile communities of supernatural beings when they were not only just teenagers, but teenagers trying to recover from a terrible tragedy. Ryder couldn’t help but feel admiration, an uncomfortable feeling to consider on top of other more urgent feelings he had for Caitlin.

  The thought of her made him frown and look to ward the back hall where his hosts/captors had disappeared. He glanced again at the clock on the mantel.

  It had been too long.

  He had a good idea of where she would have gone; his deception of the night before had netted him the information that s
he would seek out the younger musician, Danny, whom Ryder gathered was a gifted psychic, as some shapeshifters were. But he’d already called the club where he’d seen Caitlin with the shifter-musicians, and neither of them was playing that evening, nor did Caitlin respond to his page.

  He turned from the portrait as the Keepers, Jagger and Gaudin reentered the room.

  Jagger glanced at him briefly. “I take it you think the death of the were was the work of one of these entities.”

  Ryder knew that Jagger had not yet examined the body; he’d gathered that Gaudin and the other weres had no intention of involving the police in any official way.

  “I think you’ll see for yourself,” he answered the vampire.

  “Do walk-ins often inhabit werewolves?” Shauna demanded.

  Ryder had to suppress a smile at the youngest Keeper’s blunt manner. “I’ve never seen it before,” he told her. “Walk-ins go for humans, and weak humans at that, those whose defenses are lowered by alcohol or drugs.”

  “Yet you believe that Louis was killed by one of these…entities,” Gaudin said.

  “The were-body might process the intrusion differently, but an autopsy should reveal enough similarities to the human deaths.” Except that the vampire and the others undoubtedly had no intention of subjecting the werewolf to an official autopsy, either.

  “We’re about to find out,” Jagger said, his gaunt face set.

  Ryder glanced from the men to the Keepers. “How do you manage that?”

  It was a perennial problem for the Others to maintain at least one skilled doctor from each of the communities who understood the particular…needs of each species that would not have been addressed in a “Human Anatomy” class, but an autopsy was something else again.

  Gaudin answered him. “The were-doctor will perform the autopsy behind closed doors. He’s been trained.”

  Ryder noticed that Fiona had not said a word since the quartet had come back into the room; she had been checking her watch with increasing distress.

  “Excuse me,” she said abruptly, and moved toward the kitchen.

  Ryder watched her go. Though the younger sister, Shauna, remained jaunty and upbeat, Ryder could tell from the elder sister that something was seriously off. And he didn’t trust Caitlin not to have done something impetuous and dangerous.

  He had been wrong, completely in the wrong, to deceive her the night before. He knew she had every right to be angry, and worse, that she might have responded to his violation of her trust by going off on her own.

  But justified as her reaction might be, she would be putting herself in inconceivable danger. The walk-ins were looking for her, hungering for her power.

  If she was out there in the night, he had to find her. The thought became a need, and the need became urgent.

  He stuck a hand in his jacket pocket and thumbed his phone so that it rang, pulled it from his pocket and pretended to check the number, then smiled distantly toward the table where Jagger and Shauna were locked in intense discussion of the dead werewolf’s last known whereabouts, and Gaudin was pacing while speaking into a cell phone, presumably with the were-doctor.

  Ryder stepped into the hall as if for privacy and made a quick phone call himself.

  Then he walked noiselessly toward the kitchen and looked in through the doorway to see the elder Keeper standing at the sink biting a nail as she stared out the window into the courtyard.

  Fiona turned as soon as he stepped into the doorway, and he could see the effort in her smile as she said, “I’m so sorry. It’s not like Cait to—”

  “We have to find her.” He cut her off, too impatient to bother being polite. “I don’t want to alarm you, but as worried as you are, you need to be more worried.”

  Fiona looked at him, startled, instantly alert. “Do you know where she is?”

  “Do you know a shapeshifter named Danny?”

  Fiona raised an eyebrow. “The keyboard player? He and Cait used to be friends. I don’t think she’s seen much of him since…” Her face shadowed. “Well, there were drug issues.”

  There’s a shock, Ryder thought cynically. Aloud he asked, “Do you know where to find him?”

  “He plays at a club on Bourbon called—”

  Again Ryder cut her off. “I’ve called Bons Temps. Their band isn’t on tonight. The one he’s in with that other shifter.”

  “Case,” Fiona said, and her tone was layered, ambivalent.

  “Right,” Ryder said, responding more to her tone than to the name. “Exactly.”

  “But what does she want with them?”

  “I believe she has some idea that this Danny will be able to help her locate the walk-ins.”

  “Cait would never go off on her own like that, not before we even had a meeting about it,” Fiona protested.

  Ryder smiled thinly. “Are we talking about the same Caitlin? It seems to me that’s exactly what she would do.”

  Fiona opened her mouth to protest, and for a moment Ryder got the idea that the Irish temper really did run in the family. And then she closed her mouth and studied him. “You’re an interesting man, Ryder Mallory,” she said.

  “Your sister would say I’m not a man at all,” he said, without cracking a smile.

  “My sister has a lot to learn about men,” Fiona said dryly. Again that speculative look. “And you might be the man to teach her. But if you hurt her, you’ll be answering to me, shapeshifter.”

  There was primal power in her words, and Ryder felt it to his core. He met her eyes. “Understood, Keeper.”

  They regarded each other silently, then Ryder said, “Now, where do I find these shifter friends of hers?”

  “You mean we,” Fiona said, her eyes blue fire.

  “I mean me,” Ryder said.

  Chapter 13

  In the dark cave of the séance room, Caitlin stared at Case from her chair in the candlelit pentacle, alarmed by the crack pipe in his hand. “No,” she said automatically.

  “It’s how it’s done,” Case said jauntily. “How else do you think you’re going to get into the astral, little sister?”

  Caitlin knew that using drugs of any kind was acutely dangerous in a summoning or a séance. Though no doubt it opened doors, it also weakened spiritual boundaries, and opened the participants up to any number of negative forces and entities.

  “Negative entities are exactly what we’re after, cher,” Case said, reading her mind in that infuriating way he had. “We’re not going to summon them with warm milk and sugar cookies.”

  Caitlin could see the logic in that, but she still felt a strong pull of warning. Case obviously considered the matter closed; he took a square of foil and a small vial from his inside jacket pocket and shook a white rock out into the foil, preparing the pipe.

  Caitlin turned to Danny, hoping for backup. Instead, he reached for the crack pipe without looking at her; his eyes already had that glazed anticipation that she so hated to see, the greediness of the addiction, like an animal inside him. Case flicked his lighter and bent to light the pipe, the bow formal, a ritual in itself.

  The smoke from the pipe was billowy, white, enticing. Danny sucked at it and immediately dropped his head back onto the chair, sinking into a dreamy trance. Case reached across the pentagram and took the pipe from him. He turned to Caitlin.

  “Well, Keeper? Coming with us or not?”

  She stared at the pipe, roiling with emotion. Part of her felt reckless, out for revenge—and desperate to prove herself. Another part was screaming a warning.

  “I’ll make it easy for you, cher,” Case offered, and stood, holding the pipe. He took two steps to stand in front of Caitlin’s chair, and, looking down at her, he fired his lighter, touched the flame to the bowl. White smoke curled sensuously from the pipe. Case inhaled the smoke…and then suddenly bent over Caitlin as if to kiss her. She realized he meant to blow smoke into her mouth, blow the drug into her lungs.

  And then suddenly Danny’s eyes flew open and his body
jerked up straight.

  “Someone here. Someone else…” he croaked. His eyes were black pools, pupils dilated to the edge of the iris.

  Case spun, searching the shadows. “Where?”

  Caitlin’s heart was pounding, every sense on alert. Is this part of the séance? Or a real intruder? She could see nothing human in the wildly wavering candlelight.

  Case spun, and Caitlin could see the gleam of met al in his hand. A knife. “Show yourself,” he hissed into the dark.

  Caitlin called on her own senses. She suddenly felt someone, too. There were only the three of them in the room, so the intruder must be spirit. She felt tremendous power and anger. But there was also some thing about the feeling she had that wasn’t threatening. Something familiar. She suddenly spoke aloud, repeating Case’s command. “Show yourself.” And something inside her made her add, without realizing she was going to, “I know you, shifter.”

  She saw a spider glowing on the wall, and then the glow grew larger and materialized…into a man.

  Ryder.

  Before she could even register his form, Case was leaping toward him with the knife. Caitlin shouted, “No!” and lunged between them. She felt a sting and wetness, and an arm seizing her, pulling her back, and somehow it was now Ryder between her and Case, and his face was a mask of fury, and she thought through dizziness that he was about to kill Case. Then the fury dissolved into alarm, and suddenly she was being scooped up, as Ryder took her out of the circle and set her down on the couch. Caitlin realized blood was pouring down her arm; she’d been cut.

  “She’s hurt!” Ryder raged at Case, pulling off his jacket and pressing it hard against Caitlin’s arm, with his other arm wrapped around her back, holding her up against him. She could feel his heart beating wildly, charged with adrenaline.

  Behind him, she could see Case pacing sullenly. “And whose fault is that? You’re the intruder here, bounty hunter. Nothing would have happened if you hadn’t interfered.”