The Shifters

Caitlin started across the crowded floor and was gratified to turn several male heads as she made her way, not so much needing the attention for herself but because it made Case instantly notice her.

He leaned in toward the musician type hunched on the bar stool beside him and said something—the guy grabbed his drink and stood, moved away.

As Case looked down at her, she felt her face flush, remembering the night before.

Except that wasn’t him, remember? She forced the thought of Ryder and his shapeshifting trick away, climbed the stairs and slid onto the stool beside Case.

“My lucky night,” he said, with that twisted grin.

The bartender immediately stepped up, and she told him, “Jack and Coke.”

Case quirked an eyebrow, and she lifted her hands. “Not playing tonight?” she asked, just to have something to say.

“I’m always playing, cher.”

“True,” she said, and felt a wave of impatience. Why does this always have to be so hard? Why can’t he just tell me where Danny is, instead of these constant games?

The bartender set her drink in front of her, and she slid it over to Case.

“Thanks for the donation. Still looking for Danny, are we?” he said, reading her. “That hurts my feelings.”

“What feelings?” she snapped, before realizing that it was probably not the best way to get him to cooperate.

But, ever unpredictable, he grinned at her.

“Good point.” He picked up the drink she’d bought him and took a large swallow.

She sighed. “Come on, Case, I don’t want to play. What do I have to do?”

He leaned back on his stool. “Depends. What is it you need to know so bad?”

Caitlin was about to say that she’d told him last night, but stopped herself just in time. Good thing you didn’t say anything just now, because he would have been all over that for sure.

“Those tourists aren’t dropping dead from meth. There’s a band of rogue entities in town—they’re called walk-ins. They’re made up of disembodied energy that craves human form, but once one’s actually in a body, all it does is indulge its senses and wreak havoc, and burn out the body so quickly that the human host dies of stroke or heart attack.”

“Party entities,” Case murmured. “My kind of Other.” His sharp features were thoughtful in the flickering light from the candle on the bar. “What does Danny have to do with any of this?”

Caitlin was encouraged that at least he hadn’t turned her down flat. Yet.

“These things are completely formless. They spend all their time in the astral. And you know no one’s better than Danny at reading the astral.”

Case was silent, sipping his drink. Caitlin forced herself to be still, to wait for whatever he would say.

Finally he spoke. “How did you come to know all this?”

Caitlin had a weird wave of déjà vu—it was the same question Ryder had asked as Case the night before, almost as if he’d seen this conversation in the future.

Caitlin answered the same way she’d answered Ryder. “There’s a shapeshifter in town who says he’s been hired to track them.”

Case’s eyes narrowed in the dark. “So that’s Mallory’s excuse for being in town,” Case muttered, and Caitlin felt an electric thrill.

So he does know Ryder, and he knows he’s here.

“That’s no one you should be trusting, cher,” Case added, and it was all Caitlin could do not to roll her eyes.

How many people do I need to hear that from?

“I don’t,” she said, vehemently enough that Case flinched slightly. “But something’s going on, for sure. That’s why I want to talk to Danny.”

Case regarded her with shifter eyes, then drained his drink and stood. “All right, then. Let’s go.” Dazed that it was going to be this easy, but not about to argue, Caitlin slipped off her stool and followed.

It was a beautiful night for a walk, the almost-full moon—there was the moon again—stark and white in the sky, and the air was warm, with only the slightest whisper of wind. They walked, of course; there was really nothing in the Quarter that it wasn’t easier to walk to than drive. Case didn’t tell her where they were going and Caitlin knew better than to ask; he’d only taunt her and not tell her anyway.

They headed straight down Chartres— “Charters,” as the locals pronounced it—past shopkeepers lounging on the stoops of their stores, Case smoking and nodding to just about everyone. It was home for him, for her, and when he threw his cigarette away and reached to take her hand, she let him. And why not? She felt comfortable with him, nothing like the confusion she felt with Ryder, who was only in town for a job, after all—he hadn’t been in NOLA for…what? A hundred years, give or take? If she was doomed to be with a shapeshifter, at least she could find one who was actually in town more than once every hundred years, couldn’t she?

Case glanced at her, as if suspicious that she was being so compliant. “What is this really about? What are you up to, cher?”

She sighed. “We’re alike, Case. You’ve said it before. We understand each other. Maybe there’s nothing so wrong with that.”

He nodded thoughtfully and tightened his grip on her hand.

They turned down the next street—Dumaine—and Caitlin thought, I should have known. Dumaine was the most overtly magical street in the Quarter, at least if you were going by square shop footage. There were voodoo shops and witch shops and vampire/ghost/cemetery tour shops, and even one that veered toward the Satanic.

Case stopped in front of one of the witchcraft shops, The Occultist, and opened the door for her with mock-gallantry. Caitlin shook her head at his sudden chivalry and stepped past him into the shop. She’d been there before, of course. It catered a little too much to the dark side for her own taste, starting with the blatant pentagram and messages painted on the sidewalk outside, but it was popular with the teenagers and pagans.

The outer shop was small, holding mostly books and wands and jewelry; it did its real business in the back rooms, where readings and séances could be had for the right price.

Case put a hand on her back and walked her through the shelves, past a few tattooed patrons in black clothes and dyed black hair, past the counter where he nodded to the pierced and studded black-clad clerk falling asleep on his stool at the register, and lifted the back black velvet curtain to allow Caitlin into the back of the shop.

She felt a shiver as she stepped into the narrow, candlelit hall, a frisson of unease and anticipation. There were several shadowy doors leading off it; she could hear several people chanting behind the first. She had a weird sense of being in an old-time brothel, only a psychic one. Step right up and pay for your plea sure. And in New Orleans, who was to say that this hadn’t been a real brothel at some point? Sex and the supernatural so often crossed; it often felt like the same energy was at the heart of both.

Case had moved down the hall and opened the last door, and now he was standing there waiting for her. Caitlin moved toward him, stepped past him into the room.

The long, rectangular room was black—painted-black ceiling, black floors and black candles in standing candelabra provided the only light. As Caitlin’s eyes adjusted to the dancing flames, she saw that the room was dominated by an oval table in the center of the floor, on which were placed a bell, book and candle, ancient accoutrements of the séance.

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….”