The Shifters

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 she 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.”