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

by Harley Jane Kozak

  In the courtyard, they sat on a stone bench facing patchy grass decorated with a used intravenous needle, a deflated soccer ball and a tiny broken flip-flop. Magdy pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. “So?” he said, exhaling and looking at her.

  “I need to know where you get your síúlacht pills.”

  “Why would I tell you?” He had a rough vocal quality common among were. The dishwashers were their own subculture in the bowels of the kitchen, so she’d never spoken to him, but now she could see that he was as physically powerful as he was socially insignificant.

  “Because I’m trying to find a killer.”

  He shrugged. What’s it got to do with me? his eyes said.

  “Julio was murdered last night. Did you know that?”

  Nothing to do with me, Keeper.

  She opened her purse and counted out five twenties. “I can pay you. Not much, but it’s all the cash I have.”

  “A hundred dollars.” He gave a short, derisive laugh. “It’s not much, period, to a dead man.”

  “Are you saying someone would kill you if you gave me a name?”

  “It’s what I’d do.”

  “Then I have a problem.” She had more than one problem, she realized, because her temperature was rising, and Magdy was shimmering in the sunlight, looking less dicey and even friendly. She let him see it, knowing her eyes were pulsing and red, and might accomplish what her own powers of persuasion couldn’t. Especially as English was not Magdy’s first language and she didn’t know what was. Something she didn’t speak anyway.

  Magdy’s large brown eyes peered into hers. “So this is it, the sickness?”

  “Yes, in part. My body grows hot, I feel my blood flow faster.”

  A thought struck her. With a sudden intuitive surge, she understood exactly what had happened to the Elven women. The Scarlet Pathogen had entered their bloodstream and made their blood circulate far too quickly, producing in them not just the warm and fuzzy feelings she experienced, but something much stronger: a fever pitch of passion. The sensations that came over her intermittently were for them a deluge. If Magdy looked appealing to her in this moment, then for an Elven woman he would have looked utterly irresistible.

  “I have to know what it is the Ancients know about my sickness,” she said. “Can you just tell me, this source of the síúlacht, is he or she from the Underground?”

  Above her, a crow called out.

  Magdy looked at the sky. “She’s Elven, but she won’t talk to you.”

  An opening, Sailor thought. “Where does she live?”

  He took a drag on his cigarette. “Canyon.”

  “Somewhere between four and seven hundred Elven live in the canyons, more if you count the multiracial,” she crooned into his ear. “Which canyon?”

  “Lost Hills.”

  Outside her district, Sailor thought. Reggie’s territory. And vast. “Narrow it down.”

  “And what do I get?” he said, with a sidelong glance.

  “What do you want?”

  His face grew more wolfen. He grinned. It was an answer of sorts.

  Sailor’s temperature was dropping, and he no longer looked friendly. She thought of the knife she carried and told herself to stay calm. “I’m just asking for a name. No one will ever know it was you who gave it to me.”

  “The woman is Rath.”

  “I need a name.”

  “And what do I get?” he repeated, the words now a snarl. He could change, she realized. Right here, in broad daylight.

  And then, in one swift movement, he moved in and pinned her arms against her sides, then started to suck on her neck. Shit, she thought. That was going to leave a mark. She couldn’t reach the dagger because he was holding her too tightly. This was twice in two days she’d let a guy in too close. The dagger could piss him off anyway, and that could bring on the transformation. And even armed she was no match for a full-on werewolf.

  He kept nuzzling, and she looked around, belatedly thinking, situational awareness. She could scream, but that didn’t mean help would come. This looked like a courtyard where screaming women were routinely mauled by men.

  “Magdy,” she said, summoning up all her bravado, “are you crazy enough to kill me? Because you mess with me, you better kill me, or I will make your life hell. Maybe you’ll lose your job, maybe your visa, but you will lose your balls one night while you’re sleeping, because I know where you live and I’m good with a knife. You wouldn’t mess with an Elven woman, and I’m an Elven Keeper. Think about it.”

  He stopped nuzzling and looked at her appraisingly, and she put all the force of her anger into her stare, knowing her scarlet eyes intensified the effect. It was something a werewolf respected, sheer stupid courage. Sometimes.

  His nostrils flared, but his grip relaxed, and relief coursed through her. She pulled away from him with as much grace as she could muster and stood, moving out of reach.

  “You better get out of here, Keeper.”

  She wanted to bolt. She was shaking. But she made herself stand her ground and open her purse. She pulled out the twenties for a second time and held them out.

  He was silent. Then he stood and looked at her, fixing his eyes on her in a way that demanded her attention. She saw what he was doing, and she took a deep breath and from his mind to hers came the answer she sought. It was as though he spoke it aloud, though he never opened his mouth.

  Catrienne Dumarais.

  He plucked the money from her fingers and sauntered toward the building with an insolent swagger. When he reached the doorway, she called to him, “Can you spell that?”

  But Magdy entered the building without looking back.

  * * *

  Reggie Maxx answered his phone on the second ring. He’d already heard about her car and Julio’s death. “What can I do to help?” he asked.

  “I thought maybe you could give me a tour of some real estate I want to check out in Lost Hills.”

  “You got it,” he said. “And I’ve been doing some research of my own. Where should we meet? I’ll be in Beverly Hills in an hour to get some documents signed. That should take another hour, hour and a half. Then I can be anywhere.”

  “Three hours, then,” Sailor said. “Let’s meet at the Mystic Café.”

  * * *

  Brodie McKay answered his cell on the first ring, sounding both grim and tired. Sailor was driving east, toward Crescent Heights, with Jonquil in the passenger seat, his long ears flying behind him in the wind from the open windows.

  “I’m fine, Brodie,” she said in response to his questions. “Yes, I’m alone, but it’s broad daylight and I have my briefcase with me.” In other words, I have a weapon. At least, she thought that was what it meant. Those Keepers addicted to telecommunication talked on their cells in code. Unfortunately, the codes changed weekly and she rarely remembered to study them, something that would have to change. “Listen, I’m driving and there’s a deli up ahead. I know you’re worn out, but could you...meet me there?”

  “Give me a street address.”

  Less than a minute later she pulled into a parking space to see an extra-large Elven already coming out of the sandwich shop with an extra-large drink in hand. Brodie gave her a hug and indicated an outdoor table.

  “Sorry to make you teleport,” she said, “when you’re already exhausted.”

  “Not a problem. I was close by. What is it you can’t talk about on the phone?”

  “The Ancients.”

  He frowned. “What about them?”

  “I’m not asking you to go into the details of the investigation, but can you just tell me if you’ve interviewed any of them?”

  He shook his head. “No reason to interview them.”

  “I’ve heard they have a bunch of really old documents that might reveal something about the Scarlet Pathogen.”

  He leaned forward, his voice low. “Sailor, we have our hands full pursuing every credible lead we get. Is it possible the Ancients know s
omething? Sure. Anything’s possible. It’s a question of priorities. We have a limited number of Others on the force, and I can hardly send a mortal into the woods looking for a tribe of antisocial fundamentalists who may or may not have an old book somewhere on a shelf with some reference to a plague reminiscent of this pathogen.”

  His tone was kind, but she could see the stress he was under, signs of the all-nighter he’d just pulled. “Okay, Brodie, I get it,” she said. “I know you know what you’re doing, and that you’re doing everything you can. Can you just tell me, have you heard of a woman named Catrienne Dumarais?”

  He stopped, his cup halfway to his mouth. Then he knocked back at least ten ounces of ice water and set it down. “I’ve met her once,” he said quietly. “And it was a long time ago. I don’t know if she’s still alive. If she is, and still living where she lived then, there’s no way in hell you could find her.”

  “Lost Hills, though, right?”

  He shook his head. “It’s been twenty years at least. Somewhere in the Valley, that’s all I remember. But you can’t go wandering around looking for her. I mean it. Hey—” he glanced at the Peugeot “—why are you alone? And Jonquil doesn’t count.”

  “I’m heading to the Mystic Café,” she said, “to meet Reggie Maxx.”

  “Okay. I know Reggie. Once you’re with him, stay with him until one of your cousins gets back. Promise me.”

  “Promise.” It was an easy promise to make. What Brodie didn’t need to know was that en route to the Mystic Café, she was going to make a stop. One that wouldn’t take more than an hour or two.

  * * *

  The problem was, no drive-on pass awaited Sailor at Metropole Studios.

  “No,” the guard said. “Nothing for Gryffald, nothing from GAA, nothing from Darius Simonides. And sorry, but you’re holding up the line. You’ll have to make a U-turn. You can’t come onto the lot.”

  She snarled under her breath. A drive-on pass was the gold standard, allowing a visitor a parking space inside the studio lot. For lesser mortals, including auditioning actors as low in the food chain as she was, there were walk-ons. With those, a visitor had to find her own parking and enter the lot on foot. Even then there was a guard gate to get past, which meant being on a confirmed appointment list and providing photo ID.

  And now Darius wasn’t returning her calls, and at this point his assistants were as sick of hearing from her as she was of talking to them. She could hear the trained politeness in Joshua’s voice reaching its outer limits. No, Mr. Simonides hadn’t left instructions; no, Joshua had not arranged a pass of any sort for her at Metropole; yes, it was possible Mr. Simonides had forgotten his promise. Joshua couldn’t really say.

  Sailor found a parking place two blocks from Metropole’s south entrance gate. In the shade. After a twenty-minute walk Jonquil was happy to return to the Peugeot and work some more on his beauty sleep. The sun was still hidden by clouds and thus not beating down on the car, so Sailor opened the sunroof, cracked the windows halfway to let air in and kissed him goodbye. “I’ll be back soon,” she promised him. On impulse, she left Alessande’s dagger in the car, too. She couldn’t say why, only that her sixth sense told her to, and when it was that strong, she listened.

  As she walked toward Metropole, her thoughts turned to Declan. All morning she’d wondered how to avoid his calls, and now she wondered why he hadn’t called. It was starting to seem silly how angry she’d been at him....

  Why hadn’t he called?

  Surely he wanted to. You couldn’t fake what they’d done in bed, or resist thinking about it afterward and reliving it over and over. Of course Julio’s death had changed everything, but even so, Declan had to be thinking about her. Because she sure as hell couldn’t stop thinking about him. Lying with him in the most intimate conceivable way had been like a mating ritual. She and Declan were very different people. He was older and, by all social and economic standards, more powerful, but on a fundamental level they were equals. And having mated with him, there was no going back. That hour in his bed had changed her, changed her dreams. She had sometimes wondered if she was a woman whose primary passion was her art, a woman for whom romance would always be a distant second, one who would be happy with a succession of lovers kept in the background of her life. She now knew the answer: no.

  Which was a problem.

  Declan had felt it, too, the intensity of their coupling—she knew that. But maybe for him it happened all the time. He was notoriously, famously single, always linked to women, never staying with them, never living with them. Never marrying them. His spying on her wasn’t an expression of love but simple intelligence gathering, along with some control issues. She wasn’t angry about it, as she’d been last night, but she wasn’t fooling herself, either. It showed a lack of trust and a lack of honesty, both of which troubled her.

  But why hadn’t he called?

  She reached Guard Gate #3, the Melrose entrance. She could try talking her way in, but she knew she would be turned down, that any cover story would prompt corroborating phone calls, and the whole thing would end badly.

  She looked at the sky, the clouds racing by, a hawk circling high above, and she pictured herself in a bungalow inside Metropole Studios, one of the old flat one-story buildings that had been built in the 1940s. She knew exactly how they looked from auditions, five in the past six months, and also from a film job she’d gotten once as a teenager. Only a day’s work, but she’d memorized the whole place, the tiny streets, the big soundstages. Everything.

  For teleporting, that was what mattered: the ability to picture the destination.

  She got as close as possible to the wall around the studio, minimizing the distance she would have to travel to conserve her energy. She closed her eyes, loosened her shoulders, relaxed the tension in her face, took five deep breaths and let herself dissolve as she pictured just where she wanted to be.

  And then she was there.

  Chapter 13

  Metropole was bustling with activity. Sailor knew, from having checked the trades on line that morning, that two features were currently shooting there, along with another three TV shows.

  Two hefty guys moved a wall-sized flat on wheels across a cobblestone street, and she asked them if they knew where Knock My Socks Off was shooting. One said, “Never heard of it,” which was probably a lie, but whatever. A block later she asked a Goth-type girl she took for an actress or maybe a designer, who said, “Follow me. I’m headed that way.” The Goth girl turned out to be in the accounting department. Sailor considered asking her about Charlotte Messenger, but the chance of the film star being friends with someone in accounting were so remote as to be nonexistent. The Goth pointed to a building marked 51 and then peeled off to a bungalow.

  “And...action!”

  Sailor heard the words but couldn’t see their source because they were amplified. She stopped so as not to inadvertently walk into a shot.

  A few minutes later she heard “And...cut” and resumed walking, circling Building 51 to find the film crew in an alley they’d created behind the huge soundstage.

  She’d done her research, so she knew what Giancarlo Ferro looked like. And she’d grown up around movie sets, so she understood the working/not working phenomenon. A movie crew was a huge group, everyone doing different jobs. Someone’s job was to maximize the number of people working at the same time, so that while a shot was being set up by the camera department, actors were in Makeup and Hair, and sets were being constructed for an upcoming scene. Still, at any point there were people who weren’t working. And when someone wasn’t working, they were killing time, which meant they welcomed diversions.

  Giancarlo Ferro wasn’t working; he was waiting. It was now or never.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Ferro...Giancarlo,” Sailor said, walking right up to him. “My name is Sailor Gryffald. Can I talk to you for just a minute? It’s about Charlotte Messenger.”

  It was a risky approach, and the minute the words were out o
f her mouth she realized how crazy they sounded, how unprepared for this she was. Stupid, stupid.

  Giancarlo’s face clouded over. “Who are you? What are you doing on my set?”

  “I’m not a journalist or anything.”

  “What are you, then?”

  “I’m—” She could hardly tell him she was a Keeper; Giancarlo was entirely mortal and unaware he’d been dating an Elven. Saying she was an actress was also not an option. Unemployed actors were Hollywood’s Untouchables. “I have information you might be interested in.” She took off her sunglasses.

  He looked at her eyes and blanched. “What’s wrong with you? What are you, some kind of freak?”

  “I have a mild version of the illness that killed Charlotte.”

  “Get away from me.” He backed away from her, looking around wildly. “Get her away from me! I can’t get sick! I have a film to finish!”

  Immediately, three or four people converged on Sailor, crew people with clipboards and headsets, and demonstrating varying degrees of belligerence, either real or for the benefit of their boss. She put up her hands. “All right, all right. I’m not contagious, and I’m not here to make him sick or upset him, I just want to—”

  “What’s your name? How did you get on the lot?” a man asked, his voice shrill, and another one yelled, “Security! What the hell kind of preschool operation are you people running here?”

  “I’m here because of what killed Charlotte Messenger— Okay, look, never mind, I’m leaving right now,” she said, backing up when the heftiest man there moved forward threateningly. “I don’t want to cause problems.”

  But before she could break free of the crowd, a studio security guard had her firmly by the arm and was pulling her away from the alley.