The Shifters

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  “Don’t fight,” Caitlin said, feeling light-headed, about to pass out. “Just shut up.”

  “What are you doing here with these clowns?” Ryder demanded.

  “Hey,” Case growled.

  “What is that? Crack?” Ryder continued inexorably, as if Case wasn’t there. “Do you know what happens when you enter the astral in an altered state?”

  “Entering the astral is alteration,” Danny said from the circle.

  Ryder turned to look at him, without letting up the pressure on Caitlin’s arm.

  “You put her in danger,” he said, his face like stone.

  “It’s always dangerous,” Danny said. “Cait knows.” He looked unblinkingly at Ryder, his eyes dilated with the drug. “If you want to do the seeing, we should do it now. There’s been blood spilled in the circle. It will strengthen the calling.”

  “He’s right,” said Caitlin and Case simultaneously.

  “No seance when you’re high,” Ryder said.

  Danny smiled strangely. “I’m never not high.” The smile disappeared. “Don’t tell me how to do the work. She came for me. If you could do it, you would have done it.”

  Caitlin pulled away from Ryder’s arm, lifted his hand so she could look at the cut. “I’m fine. Barely bleeding. Ryder…” She looked at him beseechingly. “It’s our best chance….”

  “I don’t like it,” he growled softly.

  “I know,” she said, and deliberately let herself lean into him so that her breath brushed his ear. “But it really is our best chance. Please.”

  She felt his breath and his pulse quicken. He pulled back with an effort and looked at her. “I don’t like it,” he repeated, but she knew she had won.

  They reassembled in the circle, four of them now.

  Ryder seemed huge across from the other two, a hulking, disapproving presence.

  “Keep your place, bounty hunter,” Case said.

  “Don’t test me,” Ryder shot back.

  Danny’s voice silenced them both. “Goddess Moon, Divine Nyx, we step into your darkness. Take me, Sister Moon. Papa Legba, let me pass. Mistress Hecate, walk with me through the crossroads….”

  Caitlin found herself holding her breath, unable to move. The air in the room was shifting, rearranging; there was a cold front, and then a breath of wind, like a door literally opening in the middle of their circle. Danny straightened, his spine lengthening as if he were rising from his chair…and then his body dropped limply back against the seat, as if he’d passed out, but it felt as if something was gone from him.

  Beside her, at the next point of the star, Ryder looked as riveted as she felt.

  Then Danny suddenly sat up again, but abruptly, not a human movement, but the jerky motion of a marionette.

  “Who seeks counsel?” The croaking voice that came from his mouth was not Danny, was not anyone Caitlin had ever heard before. She felt a chill in the darkness.

  “I see you there, children, standing beyond this portal,” the voice continued, rasping, sly. “You seek me and have no questions? Or perhaps you seek to entrap?”

  Ryder suddenly sprang up with an incoherent growl, knocking his chair over with the violence of the movement, and Caitlin gasped to see his face: it was a mask of rage, and his whole body was taut with fury. He started toward Danny, and Caitlin was suddenly certain he was going to attack him, kill him.

  “What the hell?” Case said, alarmed.

  “Ryder, no!” Caitlin cried out.

  At the sound of her voice, Ryder halted. She could see him struggling to get hold of himself. And then he planted his feet and held his arms out. “Phasmatis obscurum, ego redimio vos ut is vas. Subsisto insquequo ego impero vos progredior!”

  Caitlin recognized the Latin; it was a binding spell, to keep a spirit in a body.

  Danny writhed in his chair as if some great serpent had invaded his body. Caitlin gasped out. It was the same uncontainable movement she had seen in the tourist before he died.

  “No!” she cried out in sudden fear. “Get it out of him!”

  “Wait…one…minute,” Ryder gasped. His body strained, struggling against nothingness, and it seemed as if he was somehow holding the spirit bodily, though in fact he held nothing.

  “Ask, then,” Case said, in the dark. Caitlin could feel his agitation. “Be quick about it.”

  “Where are you?” Ryder demanded of Danny.

  “I have many hosts.” The thing spoke from inside Danny’s body, a voice that snarled and purred at the same time, an alien sound. Danny’s features were distorted, reptilian, his body lashing like a cat’s tail.

  “Where are you now?” Ryder pressed.

  “This lovely city.” Not-Danny spoke with snakelike sibilance.

  “What do you want?” Ryder ground out, as if in intense pain.

  “The body. The body. The human life.”

  Caitlin flinched at the lascivious pleasure in the creature’s voice.

  “Where are you now?” Ryder asked again.

  “In the body,” the creature taunted.

  “The truth!” Ryder roared.

  The thing inside Danny thrashed and coiled like a captive snake, and Caitlin realized Ryder’s spell was working; the spirit was effectively bound, compelled to obedience. “This body, that body…” It sounded angry, but it answered nonetheless. Danny’s eyes, flat and dead, slid to Caitlin, and crawled over her, suddenly sly again. “That body will do…. Yes, that will do well….”

  Caitlin felt a wave of revulsion and sensed Ryder drawing near to her.

  “Never,” he ground out.

  “Never?” the thing inside Danny taunted him. “More are coming. More will come. Some are pre vented, but the door is opening, and many can pass.”

  “What door?” Caitlin asked, unable to help herself.

  Danny’s body suddenly seized and contorted, a backbend that looked both boneless and hideously painful.

  “Enough!” Case shouted. “Get it out of him!”

  “No,” Ryder said, his eyes fixed on the young shape shifter’s body. “We’ve got it trapped. I can banish it—do an exorcism.”

  The thing in the chair lashed again, with an angry hiss.

  Case turned on Ryder, his face savage. “And kill Danny—that’s what you’re saying. No way. Undo the binding spell now.”

  Danny spasmed again, that impossible backward arch. He was mewling now, a hideous, animal sound.

  “Ryder, please!” Caitlin cried. “He’ll die!”

  Ryder shot a look at her, torn, tormented…. Then he turned to face Danny’s body as it roiled in the chair and launched back into Latin. “Sis modo dissolutum exposco, validum scutum! Diutius nec defende a manibus arcam, intende!” he shouted.

  Danny’s body arched and contorted again, and then he collapsed back into the chair. This time, though, his body didn’t look vacant; he was recognizably human again as he breathed rapidly and shallowly. Simultaneously Caitlin and Case leaped to his side. Case pulled a phial from his coat pocket, uncorked it and waved the small bottle under Danny’s nostrils. The three of them hovered over him, watching, suspended in waiting.

  Then Danny’s head jerked up and away from the phial, and he gasped in a huge lungful of air, a painful but human sound. Caitlin felt weak with relief.

  “Okay, man. You’re okay,” Case muttered. Danny rose abruptly from the chair, swayed…

  “Easy,” Case said, and slung an arm around Danny’s waist to guide him to the sofa, where he collapsed again, still breathing shallowly.

  Caitlin couldn’t help but see the frustration and disappointment on Ryder’s face, and felt a wave of unease that the entity was loose again, out there in the astral somewhere, and now full of rage on top of that. But Danny could have died, she argued with herself. Her hands were trembling…no, her whole body, shaking with adrenaline.

  She looked around the room for water or anything else to drink. Not seeing anything, she bolted for the door, slamming into the inner hallway, w
here she found a small bathroom and a water cooler. She filled several paper cups and walked quickly and awkwardly down the hall, juggling them, and slipped back into the room.

  Ryder and Case were standing over Danny on the couch, arguing.

  “You got what you wanted. Leave him the hell alone.”

  “I need to talk to him while it’s fresh in—”

  Caitlin pushed past both of them and crouched in front of the couch to give Danny the water she’d brought. He clutched at the first cup and drank gratefully.

  “Easy,” she started, but too late; he was already gagging.

  Ryder turned from Case, looking disgusted. “I need to talk to him,” he said to Caitlin curtly.

  “Ryder,” Caitlin began, but Danny interrupted her.

  “Then talk, bounty hunter.”

  The older man looked down on the younger, whose face was as pale as a ghost’s in the darkness of the room.

  “Where did you find that entity?”

  Danny smiled without humor. “The astral is not a where.”

  “It was in you, and you have no sense of where it came from?” Ryder snapped, disbelieving.

  “Did you come to learn or not?” Danny asked.

  Caitlin could feel Ryder seething and held her breath as the two of them locked eyes. This constant male jockeying for power was exhausting.

  “The entity has found a host,” Danny said, finally.

  Caitlin saw the shocked look on Ryder’s face. “That’s not how they work,” he said brusquely. “Walk-ins burn out human bodies within a day.”

  “This one is evolving. It’s able to contain itself, to metabolize the body more slowly.”

  “So it’s maintaining one host?” Ryder demanded.

  “That’s what I said,” Danny said.

  “Who?”

  “I didn’t see,” Danny answered obliquely. “The entity moves. It leaves its host in suspended animation while it wanders at will.” Danny paused, drank more water—this time without gagging. “But it intends to stay. The feeding is so, so good. Irresistible.”

  It was basically the same thing Ryder had said earlier, but the sly way Danny spoke made the words chilling. Caitlin shuddered.

  Ryder paced, glanced at Case. “The door is opening,” he muttered. Caitlin recognized the phrase; it was what the entity had said.

  “I heard it.” Case spoke up from where he stood in a corner of the room, and Caitlin realized that as antagonistic as his tone sounded, the two of them were communicating. “And yes, it’s started.”

  “What’s started?” Caitlin demanded.

  “Samhain. The door is opening,” Danny said, and the three shapeshifters looked at each other in silent agreement.

  Caitlin scrambled to comprehend. Samhain was the pagan word for Halloween, one of the holiest of holidays in the pagan calendar.

  Case looked at her, and for a moment it felt as it had when he was teaching her shapeshifting ways. “At Samhain the veil between the spirit world and the ordinary world is the thinnest….” Caitlin knew that, had known that for quite a while. But she was still struggling to understand what the other three apparently already knew.

  Ryder told her, “You can feel the change happening, days before. It’s already started. The veil lifts. The door opens. It’s the easiest time of year to shift.”

  Case stared at Ryder. “That’s why the urgency. Halloween. Massive party. People will be even drunker than usual, and no one’s gonna notice if people are out of control. And then the door opens… It’s Bourbon Street squared.”

  Ryder nodded acknowledgment at him. “We’re looking at the possibility of a horde of virtual zombies on Halloween.”

  All four of them were silent in the dark room, con tem plating the scenario.

  Then Case’s face closed and he shrugged. “No skin off my ass, dude. Just a bunch of tourists anyway. Who gives a shit if a few more of them drop dead?”

  In the candlelight Caitlin saw anger on Ryder’s face, quickly neutralized. “No, not your problem. On the other hand, you’ve got a pretty cushy deal in this city. No one looks too hard at anomalies like people turning into other people and things they’re not. Anything out of bounds, you’ve got that vampire in the police department and the Keepers here—” he glanced at Caitlin “—keeping on top of things, solving problems under the radar.”

  Caitlin felt warm from the praise and the fact that he’d actually noticed.

  Ryder turned from her back to Case, and his features hardened. “But if dozens or hundreds of people drop dead over Halloween? You’re talking nationwide—worldwide—attention. You really want to see the Quarter end up a massive crime scene on national television?”

  Caitlin knew exactly what he was getting at. After Katrina, the Others had had to lie low for over a year, some even leaving town, because of the massive influx of law enforcement and journalists.

  Case’s face was dark, no doubt as he envisioned the same scenario. “It would suck,” he acknowledged belligerently. “I’m still not seeing how it’s my problem.”

  Ryder shrugged. “It’s not your problem. But if you’re looking to save yourself some inconvenience, you and your friend there…” He glanced at Danny, who had fallen asleep like Alice’s dormouse. “You might want to be on the lookout for where these things might be. If Sleeping Beauty gets any more hits, you could let me know.”

  “And me,” Caitlin said quickly.

  Ryder glanced at her, then back to Case. “They’re going to be after the Keepers, you know. There’s already been an attack on Caitlin.”

  Something flickered on Case’s features. Caitlin knew him too well to think it was concern, but it was still…something. He turned to her. “Told you you shouldn’t be wandering around in the dark, little sister. Never know what’s gonna reach out and grab you.”

  He said the last while deliberately eyeing Ryder.

  “I’m fine,” Caitlin muttered.

  “You can brush it off if you want to, but your sisters are in danger, too,” Ryder said to her, and even as the adrenaline spiked her pulse, she admired the fact that he knew exactly what buttons to push to make her react, too.

  Now he turned to Case again. “And the whole city’s up a creek if the Keepers get taken out.”

  Case shrugged, the picture of nonchalance. “We can keep an eye out—why not? No skin off my ass. Now, if you don’t mind, Danny should rest.”

  Ryder stepped forward and handed him a business card that seemed to have materialized from nowhere. Case took it, and the two men eyed each other.

  Then Ryder turned and opened the door for Caitlin, waiting for her.

  She looked toward Case. He made a courtly, mocking gesture. “Thanks for stopping by, little sister. Hope you got what you were looking for.” Again he slid a knowing look at Ryder, which made Caitlin’s face burn.

  Ryder was still waiting by the door. She hesitated…then stalked out.

  Chapter 14

  Ryder followed Caitlin out through the dark corridor, past the bookshelves of the pagan shop. The sleepy-or-stoned clerk barely turned his head as they walked by.

  Outside on the sidewalk, in the balmy night air, Ryder reached for Caitlin’s arm. “I’ll take you home.”

  “I’ll be fi—” she started.

  “There’s an entire swarm of malevolent entities out here looking for you, and you think you’ll be fine,” he said, shaking his head. “There’s an outer limit to independence, and you’re it.”

  She opened her mouth again, and he put his fingers on her lips. Just that mere touch flooded her with fire, and she was as speechless as if he’d bewitched her.

  “This isn’t a discussion,” he said. “I’m taking you home.”

  Slowly he withdrew his hand, and she turned numbly to start walking down to Royal.

  He fell into step beside her, but thankfully didn’t touch her; her heart was already racing. The cobblestone walks were lit by electric lamplight, and their footsteps echoed against the walls
of the shops.

  Ryder spoke quietly. “You should call your sisters, let them know you’re all right.”

  She looked at him, startled; it was the last thing she would have expected him to say. She was about to protest, but he cut her off.

  “If you don’t, I will. I had a hell of a time persuading Fiona to let me go after you alone, and I owe her that.”

  She narrowed her eyes, then stopped under one of the electric lamps and pulled out her cell phone. She wasn’t about to talk to anyone, though; instead she texted Fiona, using a code phrase the sisters had set up to let Fiona know it really was her texting, and left a message that she was all right and headed home. She clicked off the phone irritably.

  “Satisfied?” Then she realized that was entirely the wrong word to use.

  His smile curved, slow and sensual. He said nothing, but he didn’t have to—the look he gave her was pure, slow, searing heat.

  She started walking again, shakily, but her heart was pounding now, and other parts of her were throbbing, too. And of course the Quarter wasn’t helping. It was a sublimely perfect night, warm as bathwater, and perfumed, too, lilac and lavender and sugar candles and gardenia, the soft colored lights from the closed shops, music floating down from Bourbon Street, and a soft, enticing wind.

  They walked for a while in silence, passing a drunk couple dreamily entwined, a group of laughing young men crossing the street in every direction but straight. But when she started to turn on Royal, she felt Ryder touch her waist, which sent another shock wave of sensation through her.

  “This way,” Ryder said beside her. He nodded his head down Dumaine Street, toward the river. Caitlin hesitated.

  “I just want to take a look…feel the wind,” he said.

  It could have been a ploy, but Caitlin knew what he meant. It was in the wind that she could always feel things, too. She fell into step beside him, and they started toward Jackson Square, the looming shadows of trees behind the iron bars.

  “That was an unbelievably stupid thing you did, you know that,” he said without looking at her.

  Caitlin knew what he was talking about, and who, and why, but she stayed stubbornly silent.