Keeper of the Moon

chapter 11



Inside the Snake Pit, Declan took Sailor by the hand and led her through a door she’d never seen, through the back, down a hallway and up a private stairway to a loftlike room. His office, she realized. It had a waist-high wall, like a box at the opera. He showed her the vista below, of the Snake Pit in full open-for-business mode, crowded with people dancing and drinking. A blues singer crooned something into her microphone, a song in a language Sailor could only guess at—Portuguese?—but understood nevertheless. She was singing about love. Or sex. Or love and sex. And possibly heartbreak.

Declan stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her, holding her tight. The sensation of his hands on her abdomen sent a thrill through her. Then one hand slid up and found her breast, and the effect was so electrifying she could hardly stand still. He kissed her neck, her shoulder, her ear. She turned her head so he could kiss her cheekbone, and then he pulled her back, out of sight of the crowd below, and turned her so that they were face-to-face, six inches apart, the air between them pulsing with the need to touch.

They looked long and deep into each other’s eyes, seeing how long they could go telling the truth, revealing exactly how they felt about each other. Waves of heat and telepathy vibrated between them. When she couldn’t bear it any longer, Sailor moved closer until she couldn’t see him clearly, until there was nothing to do but close her eyes and find his mouth. And then his tongue. His teeth. He bit her lip and she bit him in return, and then the pent-up feelings of the day overcame them both and their hands took over, gripping, feeling the heat through their clothes, shoulders, backs, arms....

The craving for skin was too much. Sailor unbuttoned his white shirt until he grew impatient and pulled her hands away, then grabbed the hem of her black lace T-shirt and pulled it over her head. She pushed his hands away and pulled his shirt off without bothering with the last of the buttons. His bare torso was far more muscled than she had imagined, and she ran her hands over his shoulders and biceps wonderingly, hardly believing he was hers to touch. His abdominal muscles caused her to gasp. She’d never touched anything like them.

He seemed to be feeling the same way. His hands were on her waist, then her rib cage, his eyes on her body as he reached the black lace of her bra. Her own eyes closed, and she let out a sigh that turned into a shudder. And then she couldn’t stand it anymore.

She grabbed his belt buckle and undid it, then unsnapped his jeans and pulled down his zipper. He was about to be more naked than she was, and she could see him register that. He immediately slipped his fingers through her belt loops and pulled her close enough to unsnap her jeans. She tried to kick off her boots, but she’d forgotten about the ankle sheath and the knife. And then he’d apparently had enough of the vertical striptease because he picked her up and carried her across the office, into the darkness.

He had more strength than she had any idea he possessed.

Sailor was tall, and she hadn’t been lifted off the ground by a man since her childhood. She felt herself blush all over at the sensation of helplessness, and she resisted, her body tensing until he said, “Get used to it,” his voice low. She didn’t know how he could read her mind in the dark, but she did relax, and then she was being carried through a doorway into another room, lit by low, sultry lights. The next thing she knew she was on a bed, on her back, looking up at the ceiling, the voice of the Portuguese singer giving way to a saxophone.

He pulled off her boots, one by one, tossing them on the floor. Pulled out the knife and placed it on the bedside table. Ripped off the sheath and tossed it alongside the boots.

Pulled down her jeans.

His hands were on her hips now, on the silk of her panties, and she put her knees up so he could slip them off. And then the bit of lace that was her bra was gone, and she didn’t even know how he’d done that, but she was naked now. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, and she watched him push his own jeans down and off, his swimmer’s body naked now, too, as he moved onto the bed, straddling her, that gorgeous chest above her. She reached up and pulled him down to her, and the whole of him covered her with warmth and skin and muscle.

His arms tightened around her and crushed her to him, and they were as close as it was possible for two people to be. In a moment she felt him between her legs, the hardness of him, and she snaked her legs around his back and reached down to guide him into her, gasping as she found him and felt his answering gasp. And then he was deep inside her, and her gasp turned to a cry. She didn’t recognize her own voice.

He stayed silent, looking at her, moving rhythmically inside her, and she knew he loved making her cry out with pleasure at the feel of him, loved making her lose control, and she decided there were worse things in life than letting a man take over and rule the world for a few minutes. And as the Portuguese singer raised her voice in a crescendo of passion, Sailor rose with her and then, at the high note, let go. Let the world come crashing down beautifully around her, let him take her for his own pleasure, his own crescendo, his own loss of control.

Their arms were still wrapped around one another and stayed that way for a long time, as if they were alone in the world and did not dare to let each other go.

* * *

Some time later, Declan didn’t know how much later, a phone rang somewhere on the floor next to the bed. Sailor’s phone, not his. He reached for it and held it to her ear as she smiled up at him.

He watched her smile fade, listening to the urgent words that he could hear, too.

“Sailor, it’s Rhiannon. Where are you? The police are looking for you. Your car was at the House of Illusion, and someone set off a bomb in it. And, Sailor, there was a man inside.”

* * *

The crime scene was chaos, and Sailor couldn’t get closer than a half block away, even with Brodie there, alongside Rhiannon.

“They won’t let you near, Sailor,” Brodie said. His tall, commanding presence would have been reassuring, were it not for his grave expression. “Bomb squad’s in there. When the detectives need to question you, they’ll come get you.”

“But I need to see him,” Sailor said. “Or at least try to help—”

“Sweetie, you’re blaming yourself, I know you are,” Rhiannon said. “And it’s not your fault.”

Sailor said nothing. Standing outside the crime scene with her were cops and civilians of all kinds, even at four in the morning, and a fair number of House of Illusion staff, customers and magicians. She was engulfed with guilt and grief, and couldn’t do anything but stare in the direction of the mess that had once been employee parking, that had once been her Jeep.

Had once been Julio.

He had a mother, she knew. And probably siblings. A girlfriend. But most of all a mother. When would they show up here, his family members? Would she witness their cries? She could hear them in her imagination, and she couldn’t bear it. She’d hardly spoken as Declan had driven her here. He’d understood and dropped her off as soon as she saw Rhiannon waving at her from the street, then gone to hunt for a place to park.

He joined them now and put an arm around Sailor, pulling her close. There were no sexual overtones in it, but it was territorial, and she saw Rhiannon take note of it.

“Sailor!” A woman called. It was Lauren, her fellow waitress. “Did you hear? God, isn’t it awful? I can’t believe he’s dead.” She came running over and hugged Sailor in the strange way of people who aren’t on hugging terms until tragedy hits.

“Is his family here?” Sailor asked. “Do they know about it?”

“I don’t know. I heard about it from Tafiq.”

Eventually a detective escorted her to a squad car to interview her. She threw a glance over her shoulder at Rhiannon, Brodie and Declan. They were all, she knew, worried about what she might give away, emotional as she was. But emotional didn’t equal stupid.

She studied the detective, using her powers of perception to see if he was were or shifter, but he had none of the telltale signs. Vampires and Elven were so obvious, she didn’t even have to wonder. He wasn’t a Keeper, either. When she gave her name, he merely asked her to spell it. A Keeper would recognize “Gryffald” the way the residents of Hyannis Port knew the Kennedys, and he would have indicated in some way that he was a colleague.

But he was merely mortal.

His name was Grant Mulligan, and she played it straight with him—or as straight as she could, given that she was withholding information like crazy. No, she had no idea why anyone would plant a bomb in her car. No, she had no enemies. She’d hardly been back in town long enough to make any. She couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to harm Julio, either. Everyone had loved Julio.

Ironically, the most difficult thing to explain to Mulligan was that she’d given Julio her car keys simply out of friendship. This, she could see, he found suspicious. He was also staring at her eyes more than she thought necessary, which meant that they were changing color again. He was probably thinking “drugs,” so she told him that she had a rare optical condition, which he could verify with her physician, Kimberly Krabill, who was probably working the graveyard shift at Cedars-Sinai.

After taking her contact information and advising her not to leave town, he gave her his card and a copy of his preliminary report for her insurance company. “The bomb squad will keep your car, what’s left of it,” he said, “but you can get started on your claim.” With that mundane advice, he let her go.

By now the sun was rising. Brodie had gone off to inform the detectives working the Scarlet Pathogen murders that this was a new development in their case, and not some random car bomb. Rhiannon explained that while sitting on the curb with Declan and wearing his jacket, obviously freezing. Sailor herself was immune to the cold, her physical sensations subordinate to her emotional distress.

“How did it go?” Rhiannon asked, and Sailor told them she’d gotten through it well enough, mentioning Mulligan’s curiosity as to why she’d given Julio her car keys.

“Yes, why did you?” Declan asked.

Sailor felt a spasm, a kind of retroactive horror at what she’d done, the part she’d played in Julio’s fate. But there was no question of covering up with these two as she had with the cops. She plunged ahead, telling them about the síúlacht that Julio had given her in the parking lot.

“You took a pill tonight?” Declan asked, frowning.

“Síúlacht, yes,” Sailor said, “Look, I teleported today more than I’ve done in the last year, I was truly worn out, and—”

“But you didn’t mention to me that you’d taken something,” Declan said. “Why?”

“Because I knew you’d disapprove and—”

Rhiannon, looking from one to the other, said, “But síúlacht, surely it’s—”

“As legal as aspirin,” Sailor said. “And as innocuous.”

“Not if you’ve got any Elven in you,” Declan said. “Then it’s powerful. Enough to repress the symptoms of the pathogen.”

“You make it sound like I do drugs, Declan,” Sailor said. “I don’t. Alessande Salisbrooke gave it to me, Kimberly Krabill said it was a good choice, and—”

“The point is, you didn’t tell me.”

“I’m telling you now. I gave Julio my car keys because he’s my friend. Was my friend,” she amended, and felt an intense pain behind her eyes. “I thought I was helping him out. I didn’t know.”

Declan looked at her steadily for another long moment, then turned to Rhiannon. “Can you take her home?”

“Of course.”

“And activate your security system?”

“It doesn’t work,” Rhiannon said. “We didn’t pay the bill.”

“It works now,” he said. “Your bill is paid.”

“You paid the bill?” Sailor asked.

“We’ll repay you, Declan,” Rhiannon said. “And don’t worry about Sailor. Barrie and I are there, and Brodie will be back, too, once he’s off work tonight. We have weapons, and we’re all well-trained in their use. We’ll keep her safe.”

He nodded. “Okay. She shouldn’t go running around tomorrow, either.”

“Stop!” Sailor said. “‘She,’ as you put it, can take care of herself and—”

“You’re doing a hell of a job,” Declan snapped. A spark had ignited between the two of them and it had nothing to do with the fire they’d felt an hour earlier. “That car bomb was meant for you. Those body parts scattered around that lot? That was supposed to be you, Sailor.”

Rhiannon held up a hand. “If I may just say something here?”

“Sorry, no.” Sailor, to her horror, found she was about to cry. It was so unusual that the prospect further upset her. “What would you want me to do about it, Declan? Don’t you think I wouldn’t undo it all if I could?”

“I want you to take this seriously.”

“I’m completely serious,” Sailor said. “I couldn’t be more serious. Do I seem casual?”

Mulligan approached and Sailor stopped. Mulligan looked at the three of them and said to her, “The bomb technicians found a cell phone they believe came from your Jeep. What’s left of Julio’s was in his pocket. Yours?”

“No, I’ve got mine.”

“Any idea whose?”

“No idea at all,” Sailor said. “Could it belong to the person who planted the bomb?”

“Could be,” Mulligan said. “I’m a little concerned about your safety. We should talk about protective custody.”

“No,” Sailor said.

“She’s got family,” Rhiannon said. “We’ll be looking out for her.”

“You change your mind, call me,” Mulligan said, and took off.

Declan held out his hand for the police report. “May I?” he said. He’d calmed down, Sailor thought, but he still wasn’t looking anything like the man who’d made love to her that night.

He read the report and said, “Rhiannon, if you see Brodie before I do, tell him not to worry about the cell phone. It’s mine.”

“Yours?” Sailor asked. “No, it’s not. You’ve got yours.”

“I have several. I put one in your Jeep this afternoon.”

“Why?”

“Easiest way to track you.”

She gasped. “You put a tracking device in my Jeep?” She felt herself growing hot with anger. “Why the hell would you do that?”

He turned to her. “Isn’t it obvious? I can’t trust you to take care of yourself.”

She drew herself up to her full height. “I’m a Keeper, Declan, like you are. I’m not a kid. I thought you knew that.” She walked away, throwing over her shoulder, “Rhiannon, I’ll meet you at your car.”

“I’m coming with you,” Rhiannon called back.

* * *

To reach Hollywood Boulevard, where Rhiannon’s Volvo was parked, they had to walk down the long drive, passing a handful of House of Illusion staffers gathered on the drawbridge. Those on the closing shift who hadn’t left the premises prior to the explosion were now stuck there until their cars were released when investigators were done. Some people were crying. Others greeted Sailor, but she was too distressed to stop and chat. When someone touched her arm, she jumped.

“Sorry to frighten you.” It was Dennis, the bartender. “You okay?”

“No, not even close. This is a nightmare.”

“Is it true? It was your car that blew up.”

She nodded.

“Are you guys parked on Hollywood?” he asked. “Come on. I’ll walk with you.”

She was glad of his company. She’d worked with Dennis for months and never had a conversation outside of work, but he’d known Julio, and that was all that mattered right now.

“You have the sickness, don’t you?” he said, as Rhiannon left them to talk and headed more quickly toward her car. “The Scarlet Pathogen.”

She looked at him. “You know?”

He nodded. “Your contact lenses tipped me off. Rumors have been running rampant among my people.”

Sailor often forgot Dennis was a gnome. Gnomes were notoriously well-connected and incorrigible gossipmongers. Bartending was a natural profession for them; tabloid journalism was another. She needed to watch herself with him.

“Yes, I have the pathogen,” she said.

“And Julio needed the síúlacht tonight for you.”

“Yes,” she said. “But I’d appreciate you keeping that to yourself. I didn’t mention it to the cops, for obvious reasons.”

“I won’t either.” They walked past a few onlookers; there weren’t many, due to the lateness of the hour, but she was surprised there were any at all. “I wanted to talk to you,” Dennis continued, “because Julio came to me a few hours ago. He’d sold me a couple of síúlacht pills earlier today and wanted to buy one back. I figured it was for you.”

“Why would you buy síúlacht? Does it have an effect on gnomes?”

Dennis shook his head. “I have an Elven girlfriend. She gets migraines. Hey, you’re shivering.” He took off his jacket and put it around her.

“No, I’m okay,” she said, trying to understand what Dennis was telling her. “But what does this have to do—”

“Here’s the thing. Julio asked me if by any chance I knew who made the síúlacht. Said it was important to him to find out. So I figured that if the síúlacht was for you, it was you who wanted the information.”

“Right, I did. Do. What did you tell Julio?”

“I told him I had no idea who made the stuff, that he should ask his supplier.”

“Maybe the supplier made them,” Sailor said. She recalled what Dr. Krabill had said. “If it’s hard to make síúlacht as a tea, it would take someone very good to make it into a pill.”

“‘Very good’ doesn’t cover it. Genius. And not just genius, but genius with access to the recipe, which is hidden away in some document as old as the Dead Sea Scrolls. We’re talking the stuff of myth and legend. My girlfriend says it has to be an Ancient.”

“A what?”

“Ancient. Like the underground, they support themselves dealing in what we’d call the black market. Off the books. Herbs, magic, healing potions. Nothing the IRS would ever see.”

“What underground? And what’s an Ancient?”

“You don’t know?” Dennis asked.

Sailor thought of Great-Aunt Olga’s window ornament. The symbol of the Ancients, Aunt Olga had called it, but she had never explained the term and Sailor had never thought enough about it to be curious. “No. Tell me.”

A police officer approached, and Dennis waited until he had passed. “There are those who don’t subscribe to the laws of the Councils,” he explained. “Some are outlaws. For some, it’s a political philosophy, to remain independent of Keepers. That’s the Underground. A fringe element is the Ancients, Elven who shun technology and progress—and mortals. They live in the canyons, for the most part. Everything between here and the ocean.”

“My God, why am I just hearing this for the first time?” Sailor asked.

“Well, you’re new on the job,” Dennis said. “And they don’t ordinarily cause trouble, because their whole mission is to be left alone. But the thing to know about the Ancients is this—they keep the old texts. They’re the historians, the librarians. They have ancient manuscripts, brought across the sea from the Old Lands, and they keep a tight grip on them. Word on the street, or at least at the bar, is that there are mentions in those texts of the Scarlet Pathogen. That it’s a disease that’s made the rounds before.”

She nodded. “I’ve heard rumors of that. How do I find these Ancients?”

“Well, that’s the problem. Except for a precious few—the drug supplier, for instance—they don’t want to be found. According to my girlfriend, it would be dangerous even to look.”

“It’s also dangerous to start a car,” she said, shivering. “But, Dennis, you’re not suggesting Julio knew any of this.”

“No way. But his supplier might.”

“And who is that?”

Dennis looked around and lowered his voice. “You never heard this from me, okay? Julio buys—bought, I mean—from Magdy, the guy in the kitchen.”

“Who?” Sailor asked. “Oh, wait. The werewolf dishwasher?”

Dennis nodded. “Magdy didn’t work tonight. I’m guessing Julio called him at home, couldn’t reach him, whatever. So he came to me. But now I’m coming to you.”

“Why?”

“Because someone’s killing Elven women, and that needs to stop. And now someone just blew up your car hoping to kill you and got Julio instead. All this secrecy, all these little separate factions among the Others, everyone holed up, nobody talking to anybody—that’s just adding to the problem.”

“Okay. So I have to go deep into the woods,” Sailor said, “and track these people down, then get them to talk to me.”

Dennis nodded. “Just don’t go alone and don’t go unarmed. You have no idea what lives in your canyons.”

* * *

An hour later Sailor was home, with her cousins sleeping in the bedrooms down the hall, unwilling to leave her alone in the house. She put on her pajamas, called Jonquil, who was euphoric to be allowed up on the bed, and crawled under the covers. Soon Jonquil was snoring, but Sailor lay in the dark, desolate. Her body retained the memory of Declan, the feel of him on her, in her. His smell, his sounds, all hers now. It had been the best night of her life, and then it had become the worst, every beautiful thing overridden by the sounds of crying, the smell of smoke.

And apart from the horror of Julio’s death was another kind of shock, much smaller, but plaguing her nevertheless. That Declan had tracked her. Without her knowledge. It made her feel like an animal. It touched something primal in her she knew was part of her Elven nature: the terror of being trapped, watched, spied upon. This man to whom she had given herself without reservation, what else was he keeping from her?

She realized she shouldn’t have trusted him nearly as much as she had. For all the reasons Barrie had given, she should not have let down her guard with him, shouldn’t have let herself dream.

Because now she felt utterly bereft.

She got out of bed and opened the door to her room, quietly, so as not to wake her cousins. “Merlin,” she said softly. “Merlin, are you around?”

He was in front of her almost immediately. “Yes?”

“Come in, please,” she whispered, and invited him into her bedroom. He stood in his polite and formal way until she was back under her covers, then seated himself on an old mahogany armchair.

“You’ve had a difficult night,” he said.

“The worst possible,” she said. “Merlin, what should I do?”

“About your young friend who crossed over tonight? Nothing, child. His passing was quick and painless. He has made peace with it, and you must do so, too.”

She shook her head. “I can’t.”

“You will. Give it time.”

“And what about the four Elven women?”

“Ah,” he said. “They suffered a different sort of death. Much more personal, face-to-face with their killer. Those women are urging you on, wanting to help, but they are unskilled in communication. They’re still traumatized, which is not uncommon in the case of violent death, especially murder. Also, where there is illness involved, there can be confusion and disorientation. They haven’t, well, settled yet. It’s particularly hard on Elven, who tend to live much longer lives. There is something so unfinished about the young ones who die. One thing seems clear. If I understand them correctly, the words ‘location, location, location’ are shared by all four of the dead women. It is what they had in common.”

“But they didn’t have it in common,” Sailor said. “They were killed in different places. Except maybe in Charlotte’s case, because we don’t know where she was killed.”

“Nevertheless, that is the connecting thread. They repeat it like a chorus. And they chatter at me, they send me...orders. ‘Look for the cap,’ ‘Return the call.’ One of them screams, ‘Listen to the messages!’ which is presumably what you’re attempting to do. Another insists, ‘Don’t go near the water!’ which I don’t expect you ever to do.”

Sailor sat in bed, hugging her knees to her chest. “But this is crazy,” she said. “None of that means anything to me. Is the Spirit world always so chaotic?”

“Not always, no. But consider with whom we are dealing—three actresses and an agent. While I love theater as much as anyone and more than most, thespians can be a bit high-maintenance and very dramatic. I should let you sleep, dear.”

“Yes, but would you—would you mind staying?” she asked. “Until I doze off?”

“Not at all,” he said kindly.

She thought she was too upset to sleep, but her body decided otherwise, and as the moon was setting she began to dream of cars on fire, of eyes glowing red and crows flying outside her window.