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

by Harley Jane Kozak

  “I’m sure you’re quite capable of it. Sir,” she added, with as much sarcasm as she could fit into one syllable. She walked away before he could respond, pleased to have the last word.

  Go home? Ha. She had things to do, and going home was far down on the list.

  * * *

  Declan knocked on the door of the first of the two guesthouses he came to, interrupting what he imagined to be the early stages of foreplay between Rhiannon Gryffald, the Canyon vampire Keeper, and Brodie McKay, her Elven lover. He was on good terms with both, so he spent a minute in friendly conversation before saying to Rhiannon, “Where’s your cousin?”

  “Which one?” she asked, innocence written all over her lovely face.

  “Sailor.”

  “Oh.” She smiled. “Work, I expect. She waits tables at the House of Illusion. The late shift.”

  She went to work? In her condition? Declan hid his reaction and asked, “Did you see her tonight?”

  Rhiannon hesitated for a fraction of a second. “We don’t run into each other as much as you’d think.”

  Declan saw Brodie raise an eyebrow, which told Declan a several things: Rhiannon knew about the attack on Sailor, but she wasn’t about to tell him, because she hadn’t even told her fiancé. And her fiancé, who happened to be a cop, would no doubt ask her why she’d just lied to a friend and fellow Keeper as soon as Declan was out the door.

  And if Rhiannon was able to keep secrets from an Elven who would be looking her right in the eye, she was very talented indeed. Telepathy through eye contact was an Elven specialty, right up there with a strong sexual appetite. Declan wondered how his friends would reconcile the two tonight.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Have a nice evening.”

  * * *

  The House of Illusion sat atop a hill on Hollywood Boulevard, east of Laurel Canyon. It was fully illuminated in all its medieval glory, turrets and battlements beckoning tourists and natives, skeptics and believers, devotees and the merely curious.

  Declan had a soft spot in his heart for the place, having first seen it as an eighteen-year-old on his first night in L.A. He’d since outgrown its brooding kitschiness, but the tapestries, silvery mirrors and brocade sofas gave him a feeling of history, of Olde England, even—were he sentimental—of homesickness. Many of the furnishings had come from the British Isles, from castles fallen on hard times. The stained glass and stone fireplaces retained bits of history and, in some cases, magic.

  The bar was an ornately carved mahogany affair, and Dennis, the gnome tending it, dressed for the period in a striped shirt and high-waisted trousers with suspenders. Declan would never require a uniform for his own waitstaff, and the guy had his sympathy.

  Declan took a seat at a barstool, ordered a club soda and said, “Do you know a waitress named Sailor Gryffald?”

  Dennis said, “Sailor? Sure. She’s due in—” He glanced at the clock behind the bar. “Seven minutes ago.”

  * * *

  Sailor had made the trip up the long winding drive to the House of Illusion more times than she could count. As a child she’d come with her parents, eyes wide, heart pounding, both terrified and mesmerized by the gargoyles, the heavy wooden doors, the moat that snaked around the castle. These days she didn’t drive over the ornate drawbridge that was the public entrance but around the back to employee parking.

  Her waitress training had required her to memorize the history of the place, some of which overlapped with her family history. Ivan Schwartz, its founder, was the magician who went by the stage name of Merlin and was now their family ghost-in-residence. His star was rising in the 1920s, when he built not only the House of Illusion, but the House of the Rising Sun estate, his personal kingdom. He was a social creature, keeping friends in residence, foremost among them Rhys Gryffald, Sailor’s grandfather, for whom he’d designed Gwydion’s Cave. But whereas Rising Sun was welcoming even in its current state of semi-decay, the House of Illusion was modeled after the haunted Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. It was meant to evoke chills, and it generally succeeded.

  Tonight, though, her chills were from another source. Whatever Alessande had given her was fast leaving her system, taking with it energy, heat and mental clarity. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since sunset, and Sailor couldn’t stop shivering, although the wound on her chest was now hot to the touch. She’d covered it with a gauze pad and buttoned her black velvet waitress dress up to her throat to hide it. It hurt, but pain she could handle. This weakness was another story.

  Tough it out, she told herself, as she tied on her apron and reported to her manager, Kristoff, to be assigned a station. He was staring at his table chart and barely acknowledged her. “You’re late. You’ve got station two, but Lauren’s busy with a bachelorette party, so take the four-top for her and the deuce next to it.” Then he looked up. “What on earth?” he said, and she instantly looked away. “What’s going on with your eyes?”

  “Yes, sorry, Kristoff, had trouble with my contacts tonight.”

  He frowned. “Are your pupils completely dilated? Are you on something?”

  “No, just colored lenses. My cousin talked me into them.”

  “Black? Black contact lenses?”

  They weren’t black, they were green, but in combination with the scarlet of her irises they resulted in a shade of mud. She’d borrowed them from Barrie, and while Barrie’s prescription was mild, it was enough to make Sailor nauseous.

  “Dark brown, actually. Yes, okay, not my best look.”

  “It’s a terrible look. Customers will think you’re a drug addict.”

  She wanted to tell him she didn’t much care, as long as they tipped her, but flippancy didn’t go over well with Kristoff. “Sorry,” she said. “You really don’t want me working blind. I’d be walking into walls.”

  He shook his head. “We’re wasting time. Get to work.”

  She breathed deeply, trying to adjust to the noise, pace and stress of the restaurant, an atmosphere she ordinarily found bracing. Tonight, though, it felt like an assault. She looked at her watch. Twenty minutes until the second dinner seating, which preceded the midnight magic show. A half hour from now she would either be working at a fever pitch or falling hopelessly behind, and the latter could cost her her job. Kristoff wasn’t her biggest fan.

  There were no other Elven on staff, thank God. And if any came in as customers and Kristoff seated them at her station, she would just have to get Lauren to switch tables with her. Lauren was her friend, but a mortal, so Sailor would have to come up with some plausible excuse.

  But first she had to stay awake.

  She was taking the drink order at the deuce when she overheard a snippet of conversation behind her. “...only thirty-three. Her whole career ahead of her. I heard it was food poisoning,” a man said, to which his companion replied, “I heard it was a parasite picked up on location. Both of them were working overseas.”

  She knew they were talking about the dead actresses, but when she cast her eyes around the candlelit room, she couldn’t figure out which table she’d been listening to. The vampires at table six? Ivan Schwartz had been, among other things, a ventriloquist, so he’d played with acoustics when building the House of Illusion, with results that were sometimes magical and sometimes maddening.

  The dead Elven. Her heart hurt to think of them, had hurt all week, because she was tied to them in ways she didn’t even understand. But now her conscience hurt, too. She should have been more proactive. Even believing their deaths were from natural causes, as had been reported, she should have asked questions. Now that she knew they were dead precisely because they were Elven—Gina and Charlotte, and the other two, the acting student and the talent agent—she was appalled at her earlier inattention. How irresponsible could she be? For the first time she was glad that her dad was on the other side of the world, because she couldn’t bear to see his disappointment.

  “Hey, sister. Y’okay?” It was Julio, her favorite busboy,
clearing plates from the table next to her.

  “I’ve been better.”

  “You look bad, baby.”

  “I feel worse.”

  “You need something?”

  “About fourteen hours of sleep.”

  “You change your mind, want something else, you let me know.”

  “I don’t do drugs, Julio.”

  He looked affronted. “Hey, I’m a full-service dealer. Herbs, homeopathic, healthy stuff. Legal, even. Chinese medicine. Not just party powders and pharmaceuticals.” He looked over her shoulder. “At the bar. El turista. I think he wants you.”

  Sailor turned. A customer, swiveling on his barstool, was snapping his fingers, signaling her. El turista was what Julio called any customer he considered too ignorant to be local and this one confirmed the designation by drawling, “Waitress, hand me one of the menus you got there.”

  “Customer,” she said, “I’d be happy to.” She strolled toward him, holding out a laminated menu. “But is that how you get your wife’s attention, by snapping your fingers? Because here in L.A. that’s how we summon our dogs. And I’m not your golden retriever.”

  Before she could reach the customer, Kristoff stepped in front of her, taking the menu. He handed it to el turista, then steered Sailor toward the kitchen. “I don’t know if you’re sick or hung over or what your problem is,” he hissed, “but talking to a customer like that? I’d fire you right now if we weren’t overbooked tonight, with two waiters calling in sick. You’re on very thin ice. Are we clear?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. You’d better give me a five-star performance the rest of your shift. I see three tables in your section needing attention. And I believe your appetizers are up.”

  He marched off, leaving her to retrieve two burning-hot plates laden with crab cakes. He was filling up her section all at once, and she wasn’t going to be able to handle it, not in her condition. But she couldn’t handle being fired either. Jobs were scarce, and it had taken footwork, luck and family connections to score this one. She wasn’t letting it go without a fight.

  “Julio,” she said, before heading back out onto the floor. “There’s this tea made of twigs and things, and—”

  “Chinese?”

  “No. It’s some Gaelic word, starts with an s. Tastes awful. I know it’s a long shot, but—”

  “Síúlacht.”

  Her eyes widened. “That’s it.”

  “Yeah, I have some. Not the tea. Capsules. My supplier, he gets them from some Druid lady in the Valley. Hang tight, mija, I’ll get them.”

  * * *

  Other than being clearly exhausted, Sailor looked good, Declan thought, watching her from the far end of the bar. She looked better than good, in fact, communicating with Dennis in waitress/bartender shorthand, garnishing the drinks on her tray with speed and precision. She was dressed as someone’s idea of a French maid, a sleeveless dress in black velvet, with a ridiculously short skirt. Someone’s idea of sexy.

  Okay, she was his idea of sexy, too. Especially her long legs, in black stockings with a seam down the back, stockings that showed a bit of thigh at the top. Her wild hair was pinned up, with one errant lock in her eyes, but she didn’t have a free hand to deal with it, so she kept tossing her head, which didn’t solve the problem but gave her the look of a spirited filly. He wondered what she would do if he walked over and pinned it back for her. By his calculations she had to be close to the breaking point, and he searched for an opportunity to step in and...what? Stop her from keeling over, perhaps, when the síúlacht abruptly left her system. What he would like to do was pick her up and carry her into one of the back rooms and lay her down on a Queen Anne sofa.

  From there his thoughts turned to darker, more erotic images.

  * * *

  Julio found Sailor while she stood at the bar, waiting for a drink order, eyes closed, asleep on her feet, like a horse.

  He slipped the síúlacht into her pocket.

  She opened her eyes with a start, pulled one of the pills from her pocket and sniffed it, then nodded. The pills were rough to the touch, and she imagined grass and twigs compressed hundreds of times, hardened into a caplet. “They smell just like the tea,” she said.

  He nodded. “The same, I promise. I gave you two. You take one now, you save one.”

  “I owe you.”

  Julio shrugged. “You take care of me, mija, so I take care of you.”

  She felt as if she was going to go into a coma waiting for Dennis to fill her drink order and knew she was fast reaching the point where she wouldn’t care about her job, her customers or the state of the world so long as she could close her eyes. She looked at the glass of ice water on her tray, took a quick glance around the bar and then, satisfied that no one was looking at her, popped a pill in her mouth and swallowed. She knocked back the water, placed the glass on the bus tray, then replaced it with a fresh one from the bar.

  Dennis came back with two white wines. “You okay, Sailor?”

  “Give me ten minutes. I’ll be fine.”

  It was síúlacht, all right. The aftertaste was unmistakable, and with it came the same memory of her mother giving it to her when she was a child. But now she wasn’t feeling the effect—

  And then it kicked in, like a hockey puck to the stomach. Within seconds she was wide-awake, ears buzzing. She could focus and move, and ten minutes later she was not only on top of her station, she was helping Lauren with hers. It was when she was ordering three Irish coffees for the bachelorette party that she saw, at the far end of the bar, Declan Wainwright.

  Her heart skipped a beat. And then another.

  * * *

  Damnit.

  Declan had been watching her for half an hour, waiting for the moment to step in and get her out of there without creating a scene. He’d done a glamour on himself, nothing taxing, not full-on invisibility, just enough so that she wasn’t aware it was him at the bar, seeing him only as some random customer.

  And then she’d popped a pill.

  He’d seen the surreptitious glance around, her eyes disguised with colored contact lenses—where on earth had she gotten those?—that told him the pill was something other than aspirin.

  He was sure that no one else saw, but at that point he was locked onto her and could practically hear her thoughts: I hope this works. As an Elven Keeper, she had the Elven transparency, both sending and receiving thoughts telepathically. He wondered if she was gifted in all aspects of Elvenry, including their version of witchcraft.

  Damn the girl. She was tainting her own blood, clouding the best clue they had to whomever was killing the species she was supposed to be protecting. And she’d done it right before his eyes. He was angry enough that his glamour fell away before he realized it, leaving him openly staring at her.

  And now she was staring back.

  * * *

  Sailor literally stopped breathing.

  If there was a man living who was more erotically appealing than Declan Wainwright, more her type, better able to take her breath away, she didn’t want to meet him. One was enough for this lifetime. When she was around him she wasn’t herself, and self-consciousness, painful for anyone, was particularly bad for an actress. It killed creative energy. Her attraction to him rendered her graceless, inarticulate and gauche—and that made her defensive.

  Breathe, she told herself.

  And why was he here? It was one thing to encounter him after hours at his own nightclub, where a drink or two could ease her awkwardness. Here she was at a disadvantage, dressed in an absurd French maid uniform—with sensible shoes—perpetually in danger of being yelled at by Kristoff. How embarrassing.

  Her cousins considered Declan a friend, especially Rhiannon, but Sailor had gotten off on the wrong foot with him years earlier, and then again a few months ago, and now every encounter seemed to make it worse. She’d pegged him as someone with a bias against actors/waiters, against any artist who wasn’t—yet—A-list. Which pissed
her off.

  What pissed her off even more was how susceptible she was to his charms, like nearly every woman in L.A., which made her a cliché. She had no defense against his rakish appeal, his jet-black hair and sky-blue eyes bordered by laugh lines, the early warning signs of middle age. He was close to forty, Sailor knew, a decade older than she was, but he didn’t look it. His body, surfer-lean, was always in jeans and a T-shirt. And he had a timeless aura of...cool. As the owner of the Snake Pit on Sunset, he was a staple of the late-night club scene, as well as being a producer, entrepreneur and unerring judge of talent in the indie music world. A star maker.

  And he had all the confidence that came with that. He was used to women coming on to him, and she wasn’t going to join that club. He was never going to know how she felt about him, not if she had anything to say about it.

  What was he was doing at the House of Illusion? It wasn’t to see her, that was for sure. She wasn’t in his social sphere. But he was staring at her now, so she could hardly ignore him. They were acquaintances. It would be too weird. Damn.

  She served her Irish coffees, asked Lauren to keep an eye on her station, then wiped her hands on her apron, brushed her hair from her eye, and—heart pounding—walked over to him.

  “Mr. Wainwright?” The formality was tongue-in-cheek, acknowledging the prickliness of their relationship.

  Declan swiveled on his barstool to face her. “Miss Gryffald,” he said drily. The way he pronounced her name betrayed his Celtic origins. The guy had an accent that would make a tax code sound seductive.

  “I wanted to ask you—” Damn. She was shaking. “I’m wondering if there’s anything you could tell me about Gina Santoro or Charlotte Messenger.”

  “Why?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why would I?” he asked.

  “Why would you know anything about them? Or why would you tell me?”