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

by Harley Jane Kozak

  He needed her clothes off, she knew. They were nearing the point of no return. He pushed the long skirt up her thigh, his hand finding bare skin, her hipbone, her—

  A noise froze them. The sound of a door opening around the corner of the building was followed by the chatter of students being released from class. The moment was broken. In seconds they could be discovered.

  Declan set her back on her feet, and she pulled her skirt back down. He stepped back and looked at her, and then, without taking his eyes off her, buttoned her sundress back up.

  Sailor took a deep breath. Her temperature had dropped. She reached up and smoothed his hair, which looked as wild as she felt, and smiled.

  The answering smile came immediately. He said, “I’m not finished with you.”

  “Not by a long shot,” she said.

  They walked hand in hand back to the parking lot. They were silent, letting their heightened awareness of one another replace words, until their breathing steadied. The sounds of traffic, the songs of birds, a helicopter in the sky sounded like music to her. She was suddenly in no hurry.

  But when she clicked her car keys, the little chirp of the Jeep broke the spell and brought her instantly back to the real world, where a killer was targeting Elven women.

  “So here’s the plan,” she said. “We’ll do it both ways, yours and mine. Right now I’m going to Cal Arts to talk to Ariel MacAdam’s friends. Ariel’s the one with the least obvious connection to the other three victims, so if we find that link, the others should be easier to—”

  “Here’s another plan,” he said. “We work together rather than competing.”

  “Okay, but time is critical. It doesn’t make sense for both of us to go—”

  “It doesn’t make sense for either of us to go to Cal Arts. That’s way north, near Magic Mountain. And you want to go look for random friends of a woman you don’t know? You’ll be there till midnight.”

  “Can’t. I have to be at work at nine.” She sighed. “Got a better idea, then?”

  “Several, but you’re not dressed for them. You’re half-naked.” He looked her up and down appreciatively, making her blush, then opened her car door for her. “You’ll be freezing once the sun goes down. Go home, change and pack your waitress clothes. I’ll pick you up in an hour.”

  “And you called Tony Brandt autocratic,” she said, getting into the Jeep. “Does everyone in your life just fall in line when you order them around like that?”

  “Everyone but you, love.” He closed the door.

  She started the engine and rolled down the window. “Where are you parked? Can I give you a ride?”

  “No. Just get home fast, but drive safely.” He leaned in and gave her a gentle kiss on the mouth. “An hour ago, I’d have said your partnership skills left a lot to be desired, Ms. Gryffald. But you’re starting to win me over.”

  * * *

  Declan was back at the club on Sunset in no time at all. Flight, for a shapeshifter, was less debilitating than teleportation for an Elven, but even so, he was drained. He had a shower in his office at the Snake Pit, and a closetful of clothes, and when he was changed he felt better. After a steak and a salad he felt better still. Harriet had done some investigative footwork, via phone and computer, with her usual stunning efficiency, and within the hour he was heading up Laurel Canyon, with the sun on the driver’s side starting its slow descent to the ocean. He made phone calls until reception hit a bad patch, then hit the off button and tossed the cell aside. Only then did he allow his thoughts to take over.

  All his thoughts were of Sailor.

  So Alessande had been right. She generally was. Why was he so surprised? Maybe because his feelings for the girl had risen up out of nowhere and hit him with the force of a gale wind. It had begun when he’d seen her unconscious and vulnerable on Alessande’s sofa. And meeting her as Vernon, unencumbered by their history of contentious encounters, had been illuminating. Sailor had been no less spirited but far friendlier dealing with his stockbroker than with himself.

  And now? “Friendly” didn’t begin to describe her. She had all the erotic energy of the species she was responsible for, and he wasn’t going to fight his response to her. True, it was bad timing, but he was only human—well, more or less—and he wasn’t in the habit of repressing his nature.

  Declan looked at the darkening sky and sensed a rare storm gathering its forces. Not tonight. Tomorrow, maybe. Tonight he and Sailor would be doing their work—and perhaps play—by the light of the moon.

  Chapter 9

  Gwydion’s Cave was like a time capsule of the Roaring Twenties, all marble and mahogany and ornate decadence. Every time Sailor walked in she felt like a flapper. Her cousin Barrie, in contrast to her surroundings, was wearing her work uniform: sweatpants, socks and an old sweater. She was glued to her computer screen in her tiny office space, Sophie the cat on the desk next to her, with Wizard and Jonquil sharing a Chippendale chaise longue. She looked up at Sailor’s entrance. “At last,” she said. “I’ve been worried.”

  “Where’s Rhiannon?” Sailor asked.

  “Mystic Café. Singing.” Barrie pushed back her chair. “Leaving me instructions to find out everything that’s going on. So come on. I need food.”

  Sailor followed her into the Cave’s small kitchen, suddenly ravenous. She hopped onto the counter and helped herself to a handful of M&M’S from an antique bowl and started talking. There was plenty to discuss. She kept eating, moving from M&M’S to potato chips as she described the strange episodes of the Scarlet Pathogen and what she’d learned about the investigation, and when the chips were nearly gone she took a deep breath and told Barrie what she most wanted to talk about, which was what was happening between her and Declan Wainwright.

  “Okay, this is more like it,” Barrie said, her green eyes lighting up. “Enough with disease and death. Making out with Declan Wainwright? I love it. I can’t believe it, but I love it.”

  “Why can’t you believe it?” Sailor asked. “Should I be offended?”

  “It’s not that you’re not adorable, sweetie. But he’s a friend of the family, and I thought he’d consider us off-limits. Professional courtesy.”

  “What do you mean ‘off-limits’?”

  “You know, as a—plaything.”

  Sailor raised an eyebrow and Barrie raised one in response. “Sailor Ann, Declan is notoriously...active. Classic shifter energy. He is not a guy to fall in love with. You know that, right?”

  It was like being drenched with ice water.

  “Well, right. Of course. Fall in love with Casanova? No.” Sailor pasted a smile on her face. “What did we used to say when we were fifteen? ‘A kiss is not a contract.’ I know that.”

  Barrie peered at her. “Do you, sweetie?”

  “Yes. Declan doesn’t take it seriously. Neither do I. It’s a flirtation. A circumstantial flirtation, because we’ve been thrown together. For a while I thought it might be these intermittent pathogen-based attacks of, well, fascination. With everyone and everything. Which I thought were winding down, but then I had one on the 101 North just now, becoming interested in everyone in the fast lane. Have you ever just looked, really looked, at drivers on the freeway? Spellbinding. Collectively, we Californians are a very attractive bunch.”

  Barrie was staring at her, so Sailor helped herself to a glass of water, dropping eye contact. “Okay, back to murder.”

  “Not so fast,” Barrie said. “Your eyes are looking less scarlet, by the way. But maybe it is the Scarlet Pathogen, these feelings. On the other hand, you’ve had a crush on Wainwright since you were nineteen.”

  “Seventeen. Oh, Barrie. Has it been that obvious? All these years?”

  Barrie nodded. “The tough-girl routine. Dead giveaway.”

  Sailor sighed. “Okay, I’m going to play it out, because I don’t have enough willpower not to. But I know it’s not going anywhere, I know not to trust him romantically, I know not to have expectations. I’m fine.”
>
  “Okay, right answer,” Barrie said. “And I’m here if you need me to remind you. So what’s next, investigation-wise?”

  “I want to retrace the steps of the four victims, figure out who they knew in common. For Charlotte Messenger, I need to get onto the set of her movie, talk to her boyfriend-slash-director. How can I do that, do you think?”

  “Easiest thing in the world. Don’t you know who packaged Knock My Socks Off?”

  Sailor’s blinked. “GAA?”

  Barrie nodded. “Writer, producer, director and female lead, all represented by Darius. He could get you onto that set in a heartbeat. Of course, getting Giancarlo Ferro to talk to you is another story entirely. He’s temperamental, to put it kindly.”

  Sailor stood, reached over to hug Barrie and grabbed the last of the M&M’S. “You are a doll. And I’ve got to go.”

  “Sailor?” Barrie said. “Just be careful. With everything, especially your heart.”

  As soon as she’d shut the door of Gwydion’s Cave, Sailor let the cheerfulness drop. She was sick with disappointment. Barrie was absolutely right, and she’d been stupid not to have reminded herself of that. It was going to be impossible to get through this partnership thing without heartbreak. Equally impossible to resist Declan Wainwright. The best she could do was act the part of someone in it for a fling and not the long haul. The best she could hope for was to save face and exit gracefully when it was over.

  The worst-case scenario? She would never get over him. Never be the same.

  Meanwhile, the object of her obsession was on his way to pick her up and she had work to do. She left a phone message with Darius’s supercilious assistant, requesting that he call her. Then she left a voice mail for Reggie Maxx, a sort of courtesy call, saying she planned to visit two film sets in the next twenty-four hours if she could pull it off, at least one of them in his district. She told him she would report back in the morning. She stuffed her spare waitress uniform in her oversize bag, making a note to do laundry at some point, and was looking for her favorite jeans when she heard a particular rat-a-tat on the door. She called out, “Come on in, Merlin.”

  A dignified and delightful, if somewhat disembodied, white-haired gentleman entered and bade her good evening.

  “Merlin, I would love to chat,” she said, “except that I have no time, because I have to get dressed.” Merlin was too well-bred, even in death, to converse with an unclothed woman, even one he’d known since her infancy.

  “Just checking on your health, my dear,” he said. “Your cousins are concerned. But I shall leave you.”

  “No, wait,” she said. “There’s something you could help me with. If the spirit of a recently dead woman is trying to send me a message and I can’t understand it, could you?”

  “Maybe. What is the message?” he asked. “And who is the dearly departed?”

  “The message is three words. ‘Location, location, location.’ And the woman is Gina Santoro. She spoke to me last night through a medium, a complete stranger, but that’s all she said. And I have no idea what it means.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Merlin said. “Of course I know who Gina Santoro is, although we never met in person, and I would have described her as very earthbound. For someone like that to have any facility at communicating with the living after death? That’s going to take some practice.”

  “It didn’t take you much time at all,” Sailor said.

  Merlin smiled modestly. “I’m not just anyone, however. I worked on it well before my death, and if I may say so, I am extraordinarily talented. Those with little natural ability, if they have a burning desire to send messages to someone on earth, must use go-betweens. Psychics, so-called ghost hunters, sometimes the mentally ill, and often animals. And, of course, inanimate objects. Freeway signs, falling tree branches, shattered mirrors. All riddles brought to you from the dead. But they are rarely able to communicate in full sentences or instructions. It’s too much to ask. You must interpret their symbols the way you interpret dreams.”

  “But how?” she asked. “Obviously it’s important or she wouldn’t go to the trouble of communicating, but I need more than ‘location, location, location.’”

  “I shall snoop around on the astral plane and see what I can discover,” he said, and left her.

  “Location, location, location,” she mumbled, as she started unbuttoning the two dozen tiny buttons that ran the length of her sundress, from neck to handkerchief hem. When she was three-quarters through, she stepped out of it, letting it drop to the floor. The bedroom window was open, admitting a pleasant breeze, and something drew her to it. She gazed down at the estate’s garden—or what had once been a garden, terraced and well-tended. Now it grew wild with rose bushes and orange trees. No one had bothered to pick weeds since the days her mother had lived here.

  An owl hooted in a tree, and Sailor’s heart skipped a beat. But she was in no danger here, she told herself. No creature would attack her here at the House of the Rising Sun. She closed the window anyway, and when she saw herself reflected in the glass in her silk bikini panties, she closed the shutters, too. And then she crossed the room and reached under her pillow for Alessande’s dagger. She quickly pulled on jeans and then an ankle sheath, into which she tucked the blade.

  As her dad liked to say, you didn’t have to understand a sensation to heed it.

  * * *

  Ariel MacAdam had grown up on an old tree-lined street south of Ventura Boulevard, west of Laurel Canyon. Declan parked the Aventador a block from the house. The ride from Sailor’s had been short and their conversation minimal because he’d been on the phone doing business most of the way. As they approached the MacAdams’ bungalow on foot, a man walked down the driveway toward them. He was middle-aged, in a checkered shirt and, as an Elven, undoubtedly good-looking under normal circumstances but currently unshaven and hollow-cheeked. He scrutinized Sailor. “You the Keeper?”

  “Yes,” she said. She didn’t shake his hand, Declan noticed. She was being careful, in case she was contagious.

  “This one,” the man said, nodding to Declan, “says you two are working together, but I’ll talk to you, if you don’t mind. I have no love for shifters. I’m Hank MacAdam.”

  Sailor said, “I’m very sorry about your daughter.”

  “I don’t care about your sorry,” Hank said. “I care about you doing your job. Come on this way.”

  He led them into a two-car garage apparently in the midst of a packing project, with kitchenware and bedding all over the concrete floor. From a cardboard box he pulled out a scrapbook. “We’ve got more of these inside the house. Dozens. Ariel and her mother, they put them together over the years. Those two, they never threw away a single program, kept every play she ever did, every cast photo. It’s all here. Her whole life.”

  Sailor said, “Thank you for meeting with us.”

  “Well, I don’t want you bothering my wife. She won’t talk to you anyway. Says an Elven Keeper should have done more to keep our girl alive.”

  “She’s right,” Sailor said. “I should have. I suppose the police have interviewed you?”

  “Yeah. Worthless. They found her way out on Las Virgenes Road. Wanted me to tell them, did she have any friends who lived out there? Hell, no friend of hers did that to my girl. Slept with her, sunk his teeth into her, then watched her bleed to death? I know well enough who did it.”

  Sailor threw a startled look at Declan. “Who?”

  “Someone on that movie shoot. Some man. Few weeks back, she was spending the night here, came home all excited, said she met someone on the movie who could help her career.”

  “What movie?” Declan asked.

  “Some stupid thing called Six Corvettes.”

  “Did she mention the man’s name?” Sailor asked. “Or what his job was?”

  “If she did, it didn’t stick in my head. She was always going on about the grips and the gaffers and the what-nots. All those movie jobs, she knew what all of them were.
”

  “It wouldn’t be a grip or a gaffer,” Sailor said, “if he was able to help her career. Or an actor, for that matter, unless he was A-list.”

  “No, he wasn’t an actor. I think he was more in the business end of things.”

  “Where was the movie shooting?” Declan asked.

  “Hold on.” Hank walked over and called into the house, “Gigi, you want to come out here a minute?” He turned back to them. “That was the tough part for her. It was on the beach. Not anywhere near the water, of course, or she wouldn’t have been able to do it. Ariel was in the beach-volleyball scene with the star. She was a good little athlete. Said the people were real nice to her, not like you’d expect, treated her real good. Especially the guys. That I can believe.”

  The screen door opened, and a young African-American woman came bounding out of the house. Vampire. Early twenties, Declan guessed.

  “This is Gigi,” Hank said, putting an arm around her and giving her a squeeze. “She was Ariel’s roommate. Drove all Ariel’s stuff down from Cal Arts this afternoon. All the stuff she and her mom bought for her dorm room three years ago.” His voice wavered. As tough a guy as he was, everyone had his limits, Declan realized.

  “Gigi,” Sailor asked, “did Ariel talk to you about the guy she met on Six Corvettes?”

  “Yeah, of course. And the cop who came to talk to us on campus, I told him they should look for this guy and the cop was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, sweetie, whatever,’ blowing me off. Stupid were.”

  Sailor visibly winced, no doubt at the girl’s casual prejudice, but only said, “He blew you off? That’s crazy. If the victims were all in the film business, that’s probably how this guy met them. What did Ariel tell you about him?”

  Gigi took a fast look at Hank, and Declan could see her calculating how much or little to say in front of a grieving father about his little girl. She turned back to Sailor.