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

by Harley Jane Kozak

“I’m going, I’m going,” she told him, working to hold on to her temper. “There’s no need to manhandle me. Let go, okay?”

  Instead, his grip tightened, and he jerked her hard, making her trip and fall against him. That angered him, and he jerked her again.

  But if he was angry, Sailor was livid. “Get your hands off me!” she yelled. “Let go of me!”

  Instead of acquiescing, he jerked her a third time, at which point she turned and hit him with a right hook.

  He let go.

  She was as shocked as he was that she’d actually hit him, especially with a hook, which wasn’t her best shot. Clearly those boxing classes had paid off. The thing she was supposed to do now, she knew from her boxing coach, was to take off running, and she did, but three guards were approaching from different directions, and even with great hamstrings, quadriceps and calves, she had no chance against them.

  From somewhere she heard a siren, and she had a bad feeling it was coming for her.

  * * *

  The jail at the LAPD’s Hollywood Division wasn’t the worst place in the world, Sailor told herself. It wasn’t like Men’s Central, where prisoners were known to die before being charged with anything. And the list of celebrities who had been brought here was illustrious.

  Or so she told herself. But what she felt was that she might start screaming any second.

  She had just enough Elven in her to abhor being locked up. Elven were creatures of earth and could not be separated from it for more than a day without growing weak. Three to four days and they died. That was why they hadn’t come to America from their native British Isles until the arrival of transatlantic flight in the 1920s. They were incapable of teleporting over such a vast body of water as the Atlantic, and ships took too long to cross the ocean. In the late 1800s, if the tales were true, there were Elven who tried to sail across the sea, only to experience a yearning for earth so desperate that they threw themselves overboard to reach the ocean floor. Sailor had found those rumors too fantastical because the Elven terror of water was truly pathological. But she was beginning to see how panic could override sanity.

  The cops weren’t brutal, not like the Metropole security guards. But neither were they interested in Sailor’s protestations that she was at heart nonviolent and breaking the guard’s nose had been mostly accidental, possibly because people had watched her throw a nice right hook when she had no legitimate business on the set, and the gate guard had no record of her coming through, which suggested trespassing.

  So here she sat in a cell. She’d used her one phone call to try Rhiannon, but she’d gotten voice mail. At least the cops had let her try again. She didn’t call Barrie, who would still be doing her GAA interview and didn’t need to be bothered by a cousin in the slammer. Plus, if news of her behavior reached Darius’s ears—which it was pretty much bound to eventually—it would be a disaster. Nor would she call Brodie. He wasn’t quite family, not yet, and she’d blithely disregarded his advice, which would probably irritate him. Instead she called Reggie Maxx, who, God bless him, answered his phone.

  “I’m running a bit late for our meeting,” she told him. “And I have a small favor to ask.”

  Reggie, God bless him again, said he would spring her ASAP. She congratulated herself on having found the one person in her life willing to help who wouldn’t be either hopping mad at or deeply disappointed in her. She was also grateful that she’d persuaded a kindhearted officer to send someone to rescue Jonquil from the Peugeot.

  “What you lookin’ at, bitch?”

  The voice came from the cell next to her. A wall separated the cells, so Sailor couldn’t see the speaker. As she was wondering if the question had been rhetorical, it came again. “Bitch! I’m asking you a question! Who you lookin’ at?”

  The woman was clearly having a bad day, and Sailor didn’t think this attempt at conversation would improve things. The woman apparently felt otherwise. “I’m askin’ you for the last time, bitch!” she yelled. “What the bitchin’ hell you lookin’ at?”

  Sailor sighed. “If you’re talking to me,” she called, “what I’m looking at is a phlegm-colored concrete wall with a steel toilet attached to it. What I’m not looking at is you, which you’d know if you were looking at me, which you aren’t, unless you can see through walls.”

  This did not stop the woman from responding, but Sailor put her hands over her ears so it turned into a drone of words, every fourth one being “bitch.” She wanted to teleport in the worst way. Any Elven who found herself jailed faced the primal urge to simply relocate her physical body, and it was a Keeper’s responsibility to bail her out before that happened. Sailor could recall her father getting calls in the middle of the night and running out with his checkbook. Not only did teleporting make the perp a fugitive from justice, but it also alarmed the cops to have people simply vanish from their jail cells. “Bad for business,” her father would say, whenever a Keeper failed in his or her primary objective, which was to hide the very existence of the species. Yet it happened. At any given moment there were several Elven on the lam, and that made things stressful for the community at large.

  “Bitch!” The scream penetrated despite Sailor’s hands over her ears. “What you lookin’ at? I’m not asking you again!”

  “I would love to believe that,” Sailor yelled back, “but you’re not making it easy.”

  The problem with teleportation in her case, in addition to being a bad idea for the usual reasons, was that she wasn’t Elven. The least talented among the Elven could teleport fifty miles; many Keepers couldn’t penetrate a few inches of drywall. She was a prodigy in this respect, but the most she could do was a few miles, and she had to be completely relaxed, which at the moment she was definitely not. For that matter, an Elven wouldn’t be here, because they would have teleported away from Metropole the minute they sensed danger, an impossibility for Sailor, who’d been filled with too much adrenaline.

  “Location, location, location,” the woman in the cell yelled. “Shifters aren’t the only shifty ones! Beware the winged ones! Check your messages!”

  Sailor blinked. “What did you say?” she called, but now there was only silence.

  Okay, she knew what this was about. She was being sent help from beyond. It was just as Merlin had said: spirits used anyone receptive to them as channels. They chose those with few defensive mechanisms: mediums, meditators, children, animals, anyone who was high or had mental problems.

  “Did you hear me?” the woman called. “Listen to your message!”

  “I am listening to the message,” Sailor called back. “If only I could understand the message.” This was what she found maddening about the spirit world: it was never straightforward, never “Here are this week’s winning lotto numbers.” No, it was all real-estate clichés and “beware the winged ones.” And people wondered why ghosts got such a bad rap.

  Okay, so what would happen next? What was the penalty for assaulting someone? How could she afford a lawyer? What on earth was the matter with her? These things never happened to Rhiannon or Barrie. They had adventures, they did good Keeper work, they were great people and they stayed out of jail. The only smart thing she’d done was leave her dagger in the car.

  “Quit lookin’ at me, bitch! Just quit it!”

  “Listen up!” Sailor called. “I’m doing my best to make lemonade out of lemons over here, but I am just about done being chipper, so if you want to have a screaming contest, bring it on because I am the queen of catharsis. I went to a top-tier acting school, I played Medea—who murdered her children and fed them to her husband for dinner—I can scream for eight shows a week without even straining my voice, and if—”

  The door opened. Sailor stopped screaming and jumped up, praying it was Reggie coming to rescue her.

  Instead, it was Declan Wainwright.

  * * *

  Declan nearly laughed, watching Sailor go from hopeful to shocked, apprehensive and finally sheepish, all in the course of thirty seco
nds.

  She wisely kept quiet as the police went through the release procedure, probably gauging his mood. When she’d last seen him, he realized, he’d been bloody angry, but his fair-mindedness had long since reasserted itself. Sailor was who she was: impulsive, occasionally reckless, a rule breaker. It was part of her charm. But he was hypervigilant on the subject of drugs; his mother, whom he had loved with the wholehearted devotion of a ten-year-old, had died of an overdose. She hadn’t meant to, but she was dead nevertheless, leaving him with the knowledge that he must never fall in love with a woman with a drug problem.

  But Sailor didn’t have a drug problem. He knew it as soon as he’d calmed down. She had a pathogen problem. And a crisis requiring her to burn the candle at both ends. Síúlacht was to the Elven what a triple espresso was to a mortal. Or a couple of triple espressos.

  But she hadn’t told him about it, and that had pissed him off.

  Once outside the Hollywood station, she headed for a skinny stretch of grass and took off her shoes and socks, letting her feet sink into it. The sky was overcast and she looked up and breathed deeply. A squad car pulled up, and a policeman hopped out and opened the back door. Jonquil, his leash flying behind him, bounded over to them, knocking Sailor onto the grass in his enthusiasm. She thanked the cop and retrieved her keys, then hugged Jonquil. Finally she stood and for the first time looked at Declan.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome. Come on, I’m parked the next block up.”

  She fell in beside him but kept a bit of distance. “How did you find me?” she asked.

  “Reggie Maxx. He didn’t have the cash to bail you out.”

  She threw him a sideways glance. “Why would Reggie call you?”

  “He and I are doing some business together. He knows I’m a friend of yours, and knows I have money.”

  She went back to not quite looking at him. They headed toward Hollywood Boulevard with Jonquil now between them in the manner of a chaperone. “I’ll pay you back,” she said.

  “Why? You plan on skipping bail?”

  That got a smile out of her. But she was being uncharacteristically quiet.

  “How bad was it for you, being locked up?” he asked.

  “You mean the Elven aspect of it? Bad. But I don’t suppose anyone loves jail.”

  “But you didn’t teleport out. You must have wanted to. So that took discipline.”

  Sailor shrugged. “It would have been stupid. And getting arrested used up my quota of stupid for the day. For the week, in fact. Actually, getting my friend Julio killed—”

  “Sailor.” He touched her shoulder and could feel her resistance, but she let him stop her, facing him there on the sidewalk. Jonquil, looking up at them, sat.

  “What?” she asked.

  “We all have our time to die. Julio’s was three o’clock this morning. Yes, you can let that bury you in guilt and grief. Or you can accept that it’s part of life as a Keeper and move on. And maybe save someone else from dying.”

  “I am moving on.”

  “You’re taking crazy risks. Breaking the nose of a security guard.”

  “That wasn’t a risk. That was just me getting mad. He was physically restraining me.” She looked pointedly at his hand on her arm.

  He smiled and let go. They reached his car a minute later and with difficulty persuaded Jonquil to squeeze into a space not intended for a human, let alone a large dog. Sailor told him where she’d parked the Peugeot, and he pulled into midday traffic. “I talked to Brodie twenty minutes ago,” he told her. “They lifted prints off your car that match prints found in Gina Santoro’s trailer.”

  “That’s not much of a surprise, is it?”

  “Not to us,” he said. “But now every Other in law enforcement knows about the car bomb and that it’s connected to the celebrity deaths, which means every Other in the general population knows, too. There’s a spate of emergency Council meetings coming up today. Everyone but your Council, presumably, because you met just yesterday. Rhiannon’s already at hers, and I need to be at mine in half an hour, along with Barrie. We’re going to be devising a contingency plan in case the Elven turn against us.”

  Sailor stared at him. “Is that likely to happen?”

  “It could. The clues are pointing to a shifter. The first attack on you—”

  “—could have been a vamp. It could easily have been a bat that clawed me.”

  “But the killer wasn’t a vamp,” Declan pointed out. “So shifter’s a good theory. It would explain how one guy could get onto three closed movie sets, for one thing, and seduce four women.”

  Sailor shook her head. “Listen, I figured this out. He didn’t have to seduce them, he only had to buy them a drink. And then he spiked it and let the Scarlet Pathogen do the rest, making him irresistible to them. I really believe that’s what happened, that the effect was that intense. So in the case of Charlotte and Gina, he could have offered them a drink on the set at the end of the workday. Right? Gina was found dead in her trailer.”

  “Charlotte wasn’t.”

  “No, but her Mercedes was left at the location. So maybe she had just enough champagne to get into his car with him after work. It wouldn’t take a shifter to pull that off.”

  “Charlotte wouldn’t be swilling champagne at work with a grip.”

  “No, but look, here’s what I noticed when I was on the lot at Metropole. It’s a closed environment. There’s a social hierarchy, but it’s a safe location. All the riffraff, the fans, the paparazzi, they’re kept out by security—it was the same on Technical Black. Anyone on the set is there because they belong, they’re part of the team. Charlotte’s guard would have been down. Gina’s, too. Charlotte might not drink with a grip, but she wouldn’t think twice about accepting a glass of champagne from one. Or from a sound guy, or even a production assistant. Also, they’d have wrapped by then. There’s a reason they call the last shot of the day the martini shot. It would have been the most natural thing in the world to have a glass of champagne as she’s changing out of wardrobe. And when she finishes, there’s the guy who gave it to her standing outside her trailer, saying, ‘Come on, I know a place we can watch the sun set.’ By then the effects of the pathogen are kicking in, hard, and she thinks, ‘Yeah, why not?’”

  She was right, he thought. He could picture Charlotte doing just that. “And with the other two victims, it would have been even easier.”

  Sailor nodded. “Much easier. If they met on the set and were standing around talking, they would have agreed to meet up with him at a bar later. Simple. Ariel’s roommate told us as much. The only problem is, this theory opens up the field rather than eliminate anyone, so we’re back to square one. What I should do is sit down with cast and crew lists and compare all three films—Ariel’s included—and look for common denominators.”

  “All right. Meanwhile,” Declan said, “our theory notwithstanding, the rumors are flying and shifters are the favorite suspects. At any point the Elven could take things into their own hands.”

  They’d reached the Peugeot, and he pulled into a loading zone and turned off the engine.

  She got out of the car and, with his help, coaxed Jonquil to follow, her mood subdued. She would, he knew, understand the seriousness of the situation. Peacekeeping in the Otherworld was a priority among the Keepers, but they were far outnumbered by their constituents, many of whom distrusted the other species.

  She looked up at the overcast sky, then at Declan. “So we have a killer on the loose and the possibility of secondary violence. Which do we address first?”

  “We have another issue to address,” he said, moving to her. “The killer is targeting you.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.” She regarded him steadily, eyes green as glass, with only flecks of scarlet in the irises. She was so lovely. Even weary and tormented, she was as desirable to him as... His gaze traveled down her neck and stopped.

  “Did I give you that last night?” he ask
ed, touching the red spot in the corner between her neck and shoulder.

  She pulled on the neckline of her T-shirt, as if to cover the spot. “No. A were gave me that. This morning.”

  It was like someone had whacked him with a baseball bat. “Are you trying to drive me bloody crazy?” he asked.

  “Hey, it’s not like I— It wasn’t a date. It was a sticky situation, but I handled it.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Don’t.” She shook her head, and he could see it in her eyes, the memory of something frightening. “Leave it. We have real problems to deal with. This isn’t one of them.”

  Strong emotions welled up in him: protectiveness toward her, rage at her unknown assailant. “I should have left you in jail,” he said. “At least you’d be safe there.”

  “I wouldn’t have lasted. I would have teleported. Listen, Declan.” She stopped and took his hands in hers. “I’m sorry about last night. That I didn’t tell you about taking the síúlacht. I wanted to go on that film set after work. And even more, I wanted to be with you. To do exactly what we ended up doing, which we couldn’t have done if I’d been dead asleep. So I don’t regret taking it, but I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. Okay?”

  He thought of how she’d looked, naked, lying beneath him. He didn’t regret it, either. “Okay,” he said.

  “And I was mad at you, too, for tracking me. Seriously mad. Only now, in the light of day, it doesn’t seem so important. But I have to keep investigating, just like you. I won’t go anywhere else alone. But I’m not sitting around waiting, either. You’re going to have to live with that.”

  “When this is all over,” he said, taking her car keys from her, “we’ll talk about what we can and can’t live with. For now, okay. Stick close to Reggie, who’s big enough to discourage anyone who wants to harm you. Now stand back.” He pressed the alarm fob, unlocking the doors.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Starting this car. Move back, would you?” He got in.

  “Oh, so in case there are any bombs in there I can watch you blow up?” she said. “Like hell I will.”