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

by Harley Jane Kozak

  And then, as clear as if someone had whispered into her ear, came the words.

  Listen to your message.

  Sailor’s eyes sprang open. Alessande’s eyes opened, too. “Did you hear it?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Sailor said. She didn’t know which was more thrilling, that she’d heard the voice herself or that she finally understood, because of the exact inflection, what it meant.

  She took out her cell phone, hit the voice mail icon and found the saved message she knew was the one she needed. It was from Justine Freud, who had left a number.

  Sailor called it.

  Chapter 14

  From the 101 West, Alessande and Sailor exited the freeway at Lost Hills and made their way to a dirt road that dead-ended into a creek.

  “Now,” Alessande said, “I imagine we walk.”

  “To where?” Sailor asked. “This is complete wilderness.”

  “No, there’s a path. Look. Once, I believe, it was even a road. Beneath all this sage and these poppies. In the winter I suspect you can see it.” Alessande pointed to what was invisible to Sailor.

  “But how can anyone live here? How do they get in and out?” Sailor plunged into the brush after her.

  “I’m guessing they teleport,” Alessande said.

  As if on cue, an Elven boy appeared in front of them. He carried a water bottle that he immediately began to drink from. He was barefoot, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and his long, uncombed hair revealed extremely pointed ears. It was so unusual to see unaltered Elven ears that Sailor had to work on not staring. But he didn’t appear to notice, merely saying, “This way,” and taking off down the invisible trail.

  Twenty minutes of hard hiking later, they came to a property with two barns, a corral and some horses. A stone house stood in the distance, and solar panels and generators were visible everywhere. The boy pointed to the far barn, then took off in the other direction toward the horses.

  In the barn, milking a cow, was Justine Freud. The elderly Keeper looked up at their entrance, pleased. “At last,” she said.

  Sailor and Alessande both shook hands with her, and then Justine said, “So you are looking for Catrienne Dumarais. May I ask why?”

  Sailor said, “I’m told that she makes síúlacht. In pill form, which my friend Alessande tells me is nearly unbelievable.”

  “If it’s true,” Alessande said, “then she is some kind of pharmacological savant. With access to—”

  “The Ancient manuscripts,” Justine said. “Yes, that’s true. That’s where she learned the technique.”

  “And she herself is an Ancient?” Sailor asked.

  Justine shook her head. “Used to be. Thirty years ago. But then she fell in love. The Ancients reject mortal society, even Keepers, so Catrienne was ostracized. Lucky for you, because if she was still one of them, she’d never talk to you. In those days, if you’d found your way here, she would have struck you dumb.” She smiled. “Anger issues.” Justine stood, gave the cow a pat and retrieved the bucket of milk, then covered it and carried it to a refrigerator. “Do you drink milk?” she asked.

  Sailor shook her head.

  “Nor do I,” Justine said. “I’m vegan, except for the occasional milk chocolate, my passionate weakness. But I study milk. I’m a biologist.” She glanced at them. “Yes, yes, I can see you’re in a hurry. Follow me.”

  Justine led Sailor and Alessande down a rock-bordered pathway to a yurt. She moved to knock on the door, but while her hand was still inches away, the wooden door opened and a woman confronted them. She had stark white dreadlocks and eyes of such light gray they seemed to be part of the clouds overhead. She was as old an Elven as Sailor had ever seen, and she was scary.

  “Go away,” she said unceremoniously.

  “Come now, my love,” said Justine. “This is Sailor, the young Keeper. The one with the illness. And Alessande is your kinswoman, although she was unaware of it until this moment. So don’t be difficult, Catrienne.”

  Catrienne turned and walked away, and Justine held the door for Sailor and Alessande.

  The yurt was more spacious than it appeared from the outside, but stuffy. A standing fan was on, but it wasn’t up to the task of cooling a place whose walls absorbed the day’s heat. Everywhere Sailor looked were bottles and test tubes, glass jars of dried herbs and grasses, others filled with pills and capsules. The scents were overwhelming, complicated, alive. It was part laboratory, part sweat lodge.

  “Catrienne is a healer, a true genius,” Justine said. “I would say that even if I did not love her. She has no formal education in medicine, but is smarter than any doctor you could find. Catrienne, they’re here about the shúile scarióideach. Tell them.”

  “You tell them,” the Elven woman replied, her voice gruff.

  Justine sighed. “A man visited,” she said, turning to Sailor and Alessande. “A month ago, just before the full moon. A man we’d done business with many times, half Pixie. He deals in antiquities. Catrienne loves antiquities. Of course, she was born in 1798, so they’re not so ‘antique’ to her. This man, Stepanovich, brought a small vial, like a snuffbox, but with a stopper held tightly in place, sealed with wax. Inside the vial was a liquid that appeared to be blood. What was its significance, Stepanovich wanted to know, that this liquid had been preserved all these years? Catrienne is knowledgeable about such things. History and chemistry. She told Stepanovich to come back in a week.”

  Catrienne spoke. “I promised nothing. It took me six hours alone to open the vial without breaking it.”

  “And then?” Sailor asked.

  “And then it nearly killed her,” Justine said. “Just inhaling it.”

  “I felt its potency instantly,” Catrienne said, as if pulled into the conversation against her will. “If Justine had not dragged me out of the yurt into the air, the exposure would have killed me.”

  Justine was visibly distressed by the memory. “I, however, felt none of sensations Catrienne experienced. Which suggested a substance that affects only the Elven. And that was clue enough for Catrienne. It was the shúile scarióideach—scarlet eyes—a plague that killed hundreds of Elven in 1712. Catrienne heard tales of it in her childhood. It was recorded in manuscripts, most of which were lost when the Elven library burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Most, but not all. We possess one such manuscript. It described the disease precisely.”

  “And you told no one?” Alessande asked.

  Justine hesitated, and Catrienne took up the tale. “When Stepanovich came back the following week, I gave him the empty vial. I told him of its effect upon me, its danger. I told him that if he had any more of it to destroy it. He said he had none.”

  “But we had our doubts,” Justine said, “because he wasn’t Stepanovich. He was a shifter.”

  “During his second visit,” Catrienne said, “I saw the glimmer. He was very good. I followed him down the road to see who he was when he shifted back, but I lost him.”

  “Such a pity,” Justine said.

  Sailor thought of the day she’d been attacked, of Vernon Winter, the persona of some unknown shifter. She looked at Alessande. Had she known “Vernon” was not Vernon?

  Alessande’s attention was on Catrienne. “So who was it and what did he—or she—want?”

  “Oh, he was male. Once I recognized the shift,” Catrienne said, “I could feel the energy creating it. And I believe he had more of the liquid shúile scarióideach or he wouldn’t have parted with that sample so easily. I had warned him that the vial as well as the contents might not survive the attempt to open it, but he cared nothing for the vessel itself, only for the liquid inside. He wanted it identified.”

  “I contacted the real Stepanovich,” Justine said, “at his shop in Santa Monica. I showed him a photo we’d taken of the vial, and he recognized it at once as the work of a Viennese artisan, a vampire named Teodoro Lapizio, destroyed in 1797 during a religious purge. His vials became collectors’ items. Stepanovich was quite excited to s
ee it. He’d heard rumors of others being found recently.”

  “But, Justine,” Sailor said, “you didn’t say any of this in the Council meeting.”

  Justine looked startled. “Give information to Charles Highsmith? I wouldn’t give that man a French fry if I owned a potato plantation.”

  “And what about Sailor?” Alessande said heatedly. “She has the disease.”

  “Exactly so,” Justine said. “Which was why I phoned her immediately after the meeting. She ran out so quickly that day. I wanted to tell her she was in no danger.”

  “The pathogen,” Catrienne said, addressing Sailor, “will leave your system within the week. It was true for the Elven, as well, according to the old texts. If they avoided cutting themselves and bleeding, they survived.” She turned to Sailor. “There were also Keepers infected in the past centuries, but for them it was mild, as it is for you now, and never life-threatening.”

  “That’s a relief,” Sailor said. “Thank you.”

  “But at moonrise,” Alessande said, “there will be a hostage-taking. Unless we can find the killer.”

  “We cannot help you,” Catrienne said.

  “Then we’ll be on our way,” Sailor said. “I’m sorry to be abrupt, but we’re in a hurry. Thank you for your help,” she added, although she was far from sure what help they’d actually been given.

  She and Alessande were soon navigating their way back—apparently the return trip didn’t merit a guide—and Sailor said, “What was the point of that exercise, do you suppose? Not a lot of useful information. I mean, it’s nice to know that I’m going to fully recover, but—”

  Catrienne appeared on the path in front of them, startling them both.

  “I’ll walk with you,” she said, her voice low. “I did see him. The shifter posing as Stepanovich. He was a young man, one I knew. A breugair.” Her tone dripped contempt.

  “A shifter for hire,” Alessande explained.

  “I’ve seen him at work before,” Catrienne said.

  “What’s his name?” Sailor asked.

  Catrienne looked at her—through her—with her gray-glass eyes. “A name? A man who can change his face for a price has many names. I don’t know his name.”

  “Who has he worked for, then?” Sailor asked.

  “Too many to count. Weres, pixies, vampires. Mortals. A man who owns Century City.”

  Sailor looked at Alessande in surprise. Someone owned Century City?

  “So he was here at someone’s behest,” Alessande said. “But without a name, how—”

  “I followed him all the way to the road, to his auto. It was a black BMW.”

  Sailor said, “Only a few hundred thousand of those in L.A.”

  “With license number 1NJC488?”

  Sailor stopped, staring at her.

  “I won’t have Justine knowing this,” Catrienne said, returning her stare. “I don’t want her playing detective.”

  “So you kept it to yourself,” Alessande said, “for weeks? Sticking your head in the sand, and hers, too, and she’s a Keeper.”

  “She is seventy-five years old. How long do I have her for? Another twenty years, if I’m lucky? Her life cycle is short. Hunting killers is a young person’s game, not hers, and not mine, either. I am a healer.”

  “But she could at least have taken it to the Council,” Sailor said.

  Catrienne laughed. “Your Council? And whom do you suppose the breugair has worked for in the past? Your own Charles Highsmith.”

  Sailor was stunned.

  “You could have told someone,” Alessande said, bitterness in her voice.

  “I am telling you.” Catrienne turned and walked away.

  * * *

  Sailor and Alessande continued hiking as fast as possible. Alessande had no trouble seeing the path they’d taken a half hour earlier and trampled the underbrush with great energy, seething with indignation. “Catrienne and her secrets. But for Justine to agree to tell no one, even what little she knew? She’s been around Catrienne too long. A more antisocial creature I never want to meet.”

  Sailor dialed Brodie and relayed the license plate number, not bothering with encryption, because she couldn’t remember how to do it.

  “Can I ask what this is about?” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Not until I see you. But call me back as soon as you get something. All I need is a name.”

  She hung up and turned to Alessande. “Speaking of shifters, the man in your cabin on Wednesday when I regained consciousness—his name wasn’t Vernon, and he wasn’t a stockbroker. He—or she—was a shifter. Did you know? You must have known.”

  “I knew,” Alessande said.

  “Who was it?”

  Alessande shook her head. “It’s nothing to do with this.”

  “Can’t you just—”

  “No, because I said I wouldn’t. Every vow we break weakens us. Every promise.”

  “My God, you Elven are annoying,” Sailor said. “The secrets. The vows of silence. It’s like the Mafia.” She turned her thoughts to the identity of the shifter. She knew dozens. She probably knew more than she knew she knew, given how shifty they were about acknowledging they were shifters.

  Her cell phone buzzed. It was Brodie. Refusing to say a name, he gave her a series of numbers, which she wrote down as she walked. Fortunately one of three basic default codes she’d memorized worked, turning the numbers into letters. The letters spelled the name of the man owning a black BMW Z3.

  Joshua LeRonde. The assistant to Darius Simonides.

  * * *

  Back in Alessande’s cabin, Sailor phoned Darius and told his receptionist that unless he called her back within the hour, events would ensue that would be “bad for business.”

  Then she paced.

  “Are you mad?” Alessande demanded. “Why warn the man before closing in on him?”

  “I’m not warning him, I’m warning Darius. Who’s my godfather, who I’ve known my whole life. If his assistant is a serial killer, I want Darius to know first, so he can do whatever damage control he needs to. And we may need his help to hand Joshua to the cops.”

  “Sailor,” Alessande said, “we’re not handing him to the cops. The Elven Circle gets him first. But what if it’s not his assistant who’s the killer but Darius himself?”

  “It’s not Darius.”

  “Assistants in Hollywood will do anything for their bosses. Procuring drugs, hookers, covering up criminal behavior, it’s part of the job description.”

  “You really think if Joshua was innocent, he’d organize his boss’s killing spree?”

  “No one at GAA is an innocent. They lose that the first day on the job.”

  Sailor shook her head. “The killer’s not a vampire. The only question is, does Darius know what his assistant’s done?”

  “If he does, it’s a mistake to alert him that we’ve figured it out,” Alessande said. “He’ll more likely continue to protect the breugair rather than turn him over to us.”

  Sailor took out her cell and dialed Declan. It went straight to voicemail, so she disconnected. It would be too risky to explain any of it over the phone, and she didn’t have the patience to try it in code. The strange thing, she realized with a start, was that she trusted Declan’s judgment, and his standards of right and wrong, as much as she trusted her own father.

  And her father had trusted Darius.

  Her cell phone buzzed. She glanced at the screen, and her heart sped up. She pressed the answer icon and said, “Darius?”

  “Sailor.”

  She took a deep breath. “I need to talk to you. In person. I have news that I’m willing to share with you before taking it to our friend Brodie. But it has to be now.”

  There was a small pause. “I am entirely at your disposal. I am currently at Geoffrey’s in Malibu. It’s a restaurant.”

  “I know Geoffrey’s is a restaurant. But I’m in Laurel Canyon, so that’s not convenient for me.”

  “I am packagi
ng a film. It will take an hour at least. That should give you time to get here.”

  Sailor ground her teeth. It was no small victory, getting Darius to return her phone call so quickly, not to mention agree to meet. Geography was another story. In L.A., power in a relationship was determined by which party was willing to drive to the other. Darius would eat a silver bullet before traveling across the Valley to accommodate an actress/waitress.

  “Fine. I’m leaving now.” She hung up.

  Alessande was appalled. “This is all wrong, Sailor. I’ll accompany you as far as Pacific Coast Highway, but I can’t go any farther. I can’t be that close to the ocean. I’d get so weak, I’d be a liability. So you’ll be alone with him.”

  “Alessande, I don’t need an escort, and there’s no point in your coming. I think Darius will tell me the truth. Once it’s confirmed, if Joshua’s the guy, the next step is to find him. And we shouldn’t all be in Malibu in case Joshua’s in Hollywood or Beverly Hills.”

  “I promised your friend I wouldn’t leave you alone.”

  “Reggie? I won’t tell him.”

  “Reggie promised Declan,” Alessande said.

  Something in Alessande’s voice stopped her. The way she said his name. “Are you friends with Declan Wainwright?” Sailor asked.

  “Oh, yes.” Alessande didn’t bother to hide it. It was in her voice, and when Sailor glanced at her, she saw it in her pale eyes, as well. Lovers.

  She looked away, stricken. Past or current? She couldn’t bear to ask. Alessande had no idea that she had fallen for him, and this wasn’t the time to go into it. But why hadn’t Declan mentioned that he knew the woman who’d rescued her?

  She glanced over again to see Alessande studying her.

  “I should hurry,” Sailor said, grabbing her purse. “Can you drive me down the hill? My car is at the Mystic Café.”

  “Take mine. It will save time.”

  “Thanks. Should I take Mulholland or go straight to 101?”

  “Take Mulholland to Kanan. There’s construction on 101. You still have the dagger?”