Keeper of the Shadows (The Keepers: L.A.)

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  And then there was no question as a ghostly shape began to materialize in the mirror.

  “Oh...my...God,” Sailor said so softly Barrie wasn’t even sure she’d spoken aloud.

  In a backwash of light, they could now see a luminous figure: the unmistakable pale skin, blond hair and blue eyes of an Elven, silky blond strands falling in his face, the long golden smoothness of teenage muscles. The figure was hazy, but he didn’t seem to be wearing any clothes at all, and he was as beautiful as an angel. And so familiar...

  “Johnny,” Barrie breathed. Her heart was beating a mile a minute.

  “You called,” he said. His voice was faraway, not quite on this plane, but that mocking, teasing inflection was unmistakable. The image in the mirror rippled.

  “We did. We wanted to talk to you....” Barrie suddenly found she was crying. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

  “Ah, that’s sweet of you, love,” Johnny said in that rich and ever-so-slightly Irish voice. “It’s not so bad, really. Might even be getting used to it.”

  “We—” Barrie started, and then she realized she had no idea at all how she was supposed to address a ghost. “Johnny, we miss you here. We want you to be happy. We want you to be at peace. But your—” she groped for the right word “—your passing was so hard, for so many people. We want to make it right, on this side.”

  “I don’t understand,” the beautiful image in the mirror said dreamily, then wavered. For a moment Barrie was afraid he would disappear. But the image shimmered and clarified, and his blue eyes looked out from the mirror again.

  “Johnny, were you murdered? Did someone kill you?”

  The image in the mirror shook his golden hair in confusion. “Did someone kill me?” he repeated.

  “You don’t know?” Barrie asked, equally confused. She could feel her cousins stir uneasily on either side of her; it was all so puzzling.

  “How I got here?” He shimmered again, liquid gorgeousness, and his exquisite face turned haunted. “It’s so hard...so long ago...so dark...so much chaos...”

  Barrie could barely see through her tears, but she could feel Sailor trembling by her side and saw tears running down her cousin’s face. And when she looked to Rhiannon, it was to see that she was fighting sobs, as well. The feeling she and her cousins shared galvanized her. She blinked through the water in her eyes, and she made her voice soft and strong.

  “Johnny, I don’t know if you can see us. But we loved you. We love you. So many, many people loved you. We want you to be at peace.”

  Barrie could feel Sailor and Rhiannon on both sides of her, their hands tightly squeezing hers. They were nodding, aligned with her.

  “We do, Johnny.”

  “We want to make it right.”

  “We all do,” Barrie said. “Please, if you can, tell us...tell us what you know of your passing so we can make it right.”

  Merlin said softly, “He may not know. He may not be able to say. That’s often the way in death by trauma.”

  Maybe it was wrong, but Barrie had to know. She had to push. She leaned forward, looking into the mirror. “Johnny, did someone hurt you? Did someone kill you?”

  “How very many ways there are to kill....” the golden reflection mused. “I can’t tell you, love. I would if I could.” And the beautiful, ethereal being stared out of the mirror, his presence so intense, so real, that Barrie froze and forgot that she was looking at a ghost, just a reflection of a ghost.

  And he was looking back at her just as intensely, and suddenly a strange and knowing look crossed his face.

  “But someone can. Oh, someone so close to you. Someone who was there. Ask Robbie,” the beautiful specter whispered.

  “Robbie?” Barrie stammered.

  Sailor and Rhiannon were frozen at her sides, their hands clenching hers.

  “How can I ask Robbie?” Barrie asked, bewildered. “Robbie is dead.”

  Across the table from her, Merlin said softly, “I think perhaps not, my dear.”

  “Oh, you know Robbie. You know Robbie,” the beautiful ghost said. And the second repetition carried an inflection so carnal that Barrie understood what Johnny was saying.

  Robbie.

  Mick.

  Mick was Robbie.

  She felt herself losing her grip, even losing consciousness. The room around her no longer felt substantial.

  “Ask Robbie,” said the ghost of Johnny Love. “Ask Robbie what happened.”

  And everything went black.

  Chapter 18

  Barrie blinked her eyes open...and found herself on a sofa in the dim great room of Castle House. Rhiannon was sitting on a footstool beside the couch; she held a cool, wet washcloth pressed to Barrie’s forehead. Sailor was pacing in the shadows of the room but started forward in relief as Barrie moved.

  Barrie’s first instinct was to sit up, but Rhiannon put a hand on her shoulder, gently keeping her still.

  “Hold on, hon. Just lie back.”

  Barrie’s head was pounding, but it wasn’t from fainting. “He said...”

  “I know, sweetie.”

  “But it can’t be, it can’t be.” Even as Barrie was denying it, she felt the sick sense of truth in her gut. All the mystery. Mick’s uncanny knowledge of the movie, his strange asides about the film, about Johnny, about DJ, his knowing just who to talk to to get the information they needed. He knew too much. She had always been aware that he just knew too much.

  Mick was the long-lost Robbie Anderson.

  She struggled to get up again, and this time Rhiannon let her, but she was looking concerned. “Sweetie, I think you’re in shock. Why don’t you just sleep here tonight?”

  “You can just crawl in with me,” Sailor encouraged. “We can all sort this out in the morning. Everything’s always easier in the morning.”

  Their loving concern made Barrie want to weep; it felt as if someone had scraped off all her skin, and she didn’t want anyone looking at her.

  “I want Sophie,” Barrie said, and stood shakily. “I want my own bed.” Sometimes a cat was the best comfort you could hope for. But she also knew that Mick was coming over, and she wanted to be alone to confront him, although she wasn’t about to tell the other two that.

  Her cousins exchanged a glance, and Barrie flared up. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine. Look in on me all you want to but just let me sleep.” And she didn’t look at them, so she wouldn’t have to see in their faces how not fine she was.

  * * *

  She was in bed with the cat, in that half sleep where things were happening that could only happen in dreams but you were still half-awake and you couldn’t tell the real from the dream. Johnny Love was in her room, but there were no walls. She was in the werewolf murder scene from Otherworld, only the werewolf hanging on the stone wall was alive, growling and writhing and powerful enough to spring—

  A door opened somewhere, and Barrie was shocked into full reality; it was her own bedroom door.

  And Robbie walked in.

  She hadn’t given him a key, she hadn’t left her door open, but of course none of that mattered to a talented shifter. He could turn into an ant, a mite, and get in pretty much however and wherever he wanted. Certainly he’d gotten into her, she thought bitterly.

  He just stood at the foot of the bed, as if waiting for her to give him permission to come forward, and he was reflected in all the mirrors of the room, illusion on top of illusion. She was silent as she just looked at his face, really looked at him. He didn’t look like Robbie Anderson. He had copper hair and green eyes, unlike Robbie Anderson’s gold-brown hair and golden gaze. His features were different. It was only the surreal beauty of him that gave him away.

  He looked at her in the bed, and she felt the familiar fire in her body. It wasn’t fair.

  “I’ve been calling,” he said, his voice low. “You haven’t picked up for hours. I was worried.”

  He moved closer, and she knew she had to say something then, to stop him, because in t
he next second it wouldn’t matter who he was or what he intended to do to her, it could be anything, as long as he touched her again.

  “I know who you are,” she said, her mouth dry and her heart pounding off the charts.

  He didn’t stop in his tracks, exactly, but he was suddenly very still.

  “Johnny told me. He couldn’t say if you killed him, but he did say you would know what happened.” She picked up the cat then and hugged her close to her chest.

  “Johnny told you? What did you do, have a séance?” He stopped, and Barrie could tell he understood. To his credit, he didn’t try to pretend he didn’t know what she was talking about. And in a million years she couldn’t have interpreted the look on his face.

  “How is he?” Mick asked abruptly, and if she hadn’t been so completely confused about everything, she would have said his voice was longing.

  She shook her head and felt tears close by. “He’s...lost. Unresolved. He doesn’t actually know what happened to him.”

  “I didn’t kill him, Barrie,” Mick said, and as he shook his head, the mirrors in her bedroom reflected him, hundreds of images.

  “I don’t even know who you’re trying to be!” she cried out. “How can I believe you?”

  “Just let me explain,” he said. She waited, and he paced the room, his reflections pacing with him, and it was a long time before he stopped and spoke.

  “You have to understand. I don’t think of myself as Robbie Anderson. Ever. I left him behind fifteen years ago.”

  “But how could you just disappear? You were so famous.”

  The moonlight through the French doors caught his face, and for a moment he looked as ghostly as Johnny had. “I shifted. I shifted into someone else permanently. Someone different. Someone I could actually want to be.”

  Barrie was silent, just looking at him.

  “I was afraid what happened to Johnny would happen to me.”

  She stared at him. “You thought someone would kill you?”

  “That and...other things.” He began to pace again, laughed without humor. “I thought I could lose my soul. I know that sounds dramatic.” He shook his head. “I told you I used people. When you’re as famous as we were, the three of us, so young, you have a lot of people lining up to be used. It was like...realizing I was hooked on a drug and I needed to quit, go cold turkey, before someone really got hurt. Like me. And about a dozen other people.”

  His voice lowered, became raw, painful. “Johnny had just died. No one said it was murder, just that he’d OD’d. DJ was so coked out, speeded out, whatever else he was doing, I couldn’t even talk to him anymore. I didn’t know what I wanted or who I could trust, all I knew was that everyone was wanting something different from me and it was going to destroy me just as surely as it had destroyed my friends. So, I just—disappeared.”

  “Where did you go?” she asked in spite of herself. She was wary, but fascinated.

  “It’s not like I had an actual plan,” he said wryly. “I just got in the car and drove. I went north. I don’t know, I was thinking Yosemite, the redwoods, anything. Which turned out to be good thinking, if there had been any thought behind it at all, because a few people remembered seeing me on the coast road, a gas station guy and someone in a diner, and when people started looking for me and couldn’t find me some people assumed I’d been in a car accident, that I went off a cliff or something, only they couldn’t find the car or me.

  “When I got myself together enough to read the papers, I realized that’s what they thought and that I could use it. So, I drove the car back down the coast and pushed it off a cliff. I had the windows open and a door open, and I figured people would find it and think my body washed away. But no one ever found the car. It’s still there, I guess, off Highway One, somewhere near Santa Cruz.”

  He had his hands on the windowsill and was leaning on it, and Barrie thought it looked as if he were looking out over that cliff. He smiled thinly. “But crashing the car that night was like burying myself. I never went back to that person.”

  “Then what?” she asked reluctantly, but compelled.

  “I had some time before people started looking for me. Since no one found the car, no one knew for sure I was gone until I didn’t show up for my first day of shooting on the new movie Darius had lined up for me. I feel terrible about that now, how disruptive it must have been for everyone involved, but back then I didn’t think anything of it at all. It was like none of it had anything to do with me anymore, like Robbie was another person already.

  “Anyway, I had time—I had all this time to clean out my bank accounts. I was emancipated from my father, who never did give a damn about anything but the money he could make off me, anyway. I was only renting a place in the Hollywood Hills, had no possessions that really meant anything to me.” His smile twisted. “I did, however, have a pile of money. Darius had gotten me top dollar for my last couple of roles. So, I was set, as far as that goes. I had plenty of time to figure out what to do with myself. I ended up out in the desert, in Joshua Tree.” He gave her a faint smile. “I always was a U-2 fan. I rented a cabin, did some hiking, but mostly sat looking out at the desert and the stars—that’s the real stars—and practicing holding a shift for hours, days, weeks...until I could just be that person full-time without even thinking about it.”

  It was such a fascinating story that Barrie was forgetting to be angry. It was a remarkable thing to have done at sixteen. Desperate and lifesaving and crazy and eminently sane, all at the same time.

  “There are a lot of Others out in the desert, the ones who can’t take city life—or don’t want to. I met an old guy, werewolf, who ran a whole slate of recovery groups that served a whole lot of little towns around the national park, and that’s when I started thinking that I could use all that money I’d piled up to do some good for other Others.”

  “How long have you been back in L.A.?” she said, too curious not to ask.

  “Oh, a while. Eight or nine years. I went to Europe first, there was a lot of capital there for a long time, and a lot of private interest in foundations for Others. That’s where I started to build a base of endowments. But I missed California, and I finally had enough time and distance to come back.”

  He turned from the window and looked at her. She was still sitting up in bed, holding the cat, watching him. “And that’s it.” He looked drained, as if he had relived every moment as he was telling her about it.

  “That’s a lot,” Barrie said.

  He moved toward the bed, but then stopped. “Barrie, I didn’t kill Johnny. He was my best friend, the closest thing to a brother I’ve ever had. It nearly killed me when he died.”

  She pressed her back against the headboard of the bed. “But you knew that someone did kill him.”

  He hesitated. “I thought so. But not until I’d killed myself off—at least as far as the real world was concerned—and had time to think about it. It took me months to even be able to look at the whole thing.”

  He’d been sixteen. Barrie’s heart ached for him.

  “But I don’t know who killed him, I swear. By the time I’d worked it out that someone might have, it was too late to look into it. I didn’t exist anymore, anyway.”

  And finally he was silent.

  Barrie’s mind was whirling; she didn’t know what she was feeling or thinking. And evidently she was squeezing the cat just a little too hard, because Sophie meowed in protest and pulled away from her, jumping off the bed in a huff. Deserted, Barrie looked at Mick. “Were you ever going to tell me?” she asked in a small voice.

  He looked at her. “I’m not sure,” he admitted.

  She felt as if he’d knifed her in the heart. “That’s honest, I guess,” she managed.

  “Barrie, please understand. Robbie died when Johnny died. I buried him so long ago.”

  “But I can’t...” She struggled with what she was trying to say. “We can’t be anything together unless you tell me everything. I need to know you.
All of you.”

  “I want you to know all of me.” He moved slowly closer to the bed and sat on the edge of it without touching her. “Can we start over, one step at a time?”

  Barrie was roiling with emotion and confusion. She knew she should be remembering that no matter what he said, Robbie Anderson could be Johnny’s killer. And if he was Johnny’s killer, he could have killed Saul Mayo and Tiger, and Travis Branson, too.

  But she didn’t believe it. At least, she didn’t believe he’d killed Johnny.

  It was a little easier to believe that he might have killed Mayo. Certainly there were things Mick, or Robbie, wanted to stay hidden: his whole new identity and life, for example. And the plans for a remake of the movie might have threatened that. But would he go so far as to kill to protect his anonymity?

  His whole life seemed to be about helping others—and Others. As much as Barrie knew that she needed to be careful, she just couldn’t believe he was a killer.

  But maybe he had devoted his life to helping others to make up for having killed Johnny.

  It was all so much to take in, and she wasn’t doing very well at it. Especially because the only thing she wanted to do was reach out for him, to hold and comfort the haunted man who had been that haunted boy, and who was looking at her now, asking her to love him....

  “No,” she said. She threw back the covers to get out of bed, and he stood with her.

  “Barrie...”

  “No.”

  She tried to push past him, but he caught her hand and she froze. He stood still in the dark, looking down at her hand in his. Then he bent his head, and his lips were on her wrist, kissing her palm, and she could feel tears on his face. She reached with her other hand, touching his bowed head, feeling the softness of his hair, and he sank to his knees as if he could no longer stand. She stood there as he twined his arms around her legs and pressed his head against her waist, and the feeling was so sensual and so desperate that her own knees buckled and she swayed against him. He caught her, held her.... She looked down at him...

  ...and he drew her down, into his lap, into his arms, and his mouth crushed down on hers and she was lost.