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

by Harley Jane Kozak

  “No, I— It’s giving me the creeps,” she said. With her arms pinned to her sides like this, she could feel the sheath holding Alessande’s knife. “I—”

  “Come on,” he repeated. “If any of this stuff belongs to Wainwright, we have our proof.”

  “Let’s call the police,” she said, which was a stupid thing to suggest because it was the last thing he would agree to. And she wanted him to stay agreeable.

  “No. We have to deliver this guy to the Elven Circle, right?”

  “Yes. True.” She needed to get the knife out. She slipped her hand inside her jacket. “Okay, after you,” she said.

  He reached to open the door, a rickety affair, but he didn’t take his eyes off her. Shit. This would get physical the moment he realized she was on to him. Her fight training was in stage combat for the most part, where the point was to avoid hurting your fellow actor.

  For the most part, but not entirely.

  “Come on,” he said, and reached over, putting a hand on her waist. It was so intimate a gesture, and so repellent to her, that she had to force herself not to jerk away. How had she found him even mildly attractive? How had four dead women?

  He was propelling her into the shed.

  Once inside, she stepped away from him. She freed the knife from its sheath, keeping it inside her jacket.

  A small window provided light, enough for her to make out a mattress on the floor. The mattress was bare, its patterned fabric marred by dark stains. The floor around it was also stained, and even the wall behind it. She could discern handprints. She gripped the knife, keeping it close against her rib cage, and stared, unable to look away.

  The dark stains were blood, and there was so much of it she could hardly comprehend it.

  Play your part, she told herself. Stay in character. “What—” She cleared her throat. “What kind of evidence should we be looking for?”

  “Well, there’s this,” he said.

  She turned to see him pull a vial from his jacket pocket. It was ancient, ornate, scarlet-colored. She stared, paralyzed, but also fascinated by the small glass bottle responsible for so much blood and death.

  Reggie stepped forward and grabbed her.

  He spun her around, and the knife fell from her jacket and skittered across the floor toward the mattress. Reggie was substantially bigger than she was and strong; he maneuvered her until he was behind her and holding both her arms behind her back. She felt him moving, and she knew he was trying to get a rope around her wrists.

  Fat chance.

  She lifted her knee and stomped down hard on his running shoe with enough force that Reggie let go of one of her hands. She turned toward him. He was bent over in pain, and she drove her elbow downward, onto his back. He grunted at the blow, then stood up fast, some part of him catching her on the chin.

  She wasn’t sure what happened next because the shadows were swirling around her, and then she was falling. Reggie came down, too, going for her hands again, but she squirmed like mad, knowing what he was trying to do, and got them in front of her, holding them against her stomach. He wrestled her onto her back and then sat on her, his weight crushing her, but she kept squirming, moving her arms back and forth to stop him from tying her up. Then he backhanded her across the face, hard, and while she was waiting for the lights in her head to stop flashing he got the rope around her wrists and knotted it.

  When he was done, he stood, towering over her. Breathing hard.

  “Try teleporting now,” he said, smiling.

  A moot point. Under this much stress she couldn’t teleport three feet. What concerned her more was that bound like this, she couldn’t even run, not effectively. “You overestimate my abilities,” she gasped out.

  “Really? Your father used to say you were half Elven.”

  Thinking of her father made her want to cry. Stop it, she told herself.

  Reggie took out his cell and walked toward the doorway to look out. He put the phone up to his ear. “I got her,” he said. “She’s tied up, but she came here in Declan Wainwright’s car.”

  Sailor was stunned. Reggie had a partner? How could that be? What could be in it for someone else? The person on the other end apparently began talking, and Sailor rolled onto her stomach and inched her way toward the mattress. Thank God her hands were bound in front.

  “It’s a fucking Lamborghini, he’s gotta have some kind of LoJack system. He apparently tracks everything. I gotta get it away from here, drive it a few miles, maybe send it down a cliff.”

  The knife was on the far end of the mattress, out of Reggie’s line of sight. In the scuffle, it was possible he hadn’t seen it or heard it drop, wasn’t even aware she’d had it.

  “Not until she’s in the car,” he continued, picking up the conversation. “I’m not dragging another corpse up that hill. It’s brutal. And she’s bigger than Charlotte. Wherever she gets dumped, she’s getting there on her own two feet.”

  Sailor reached the knife. She grasped it in her bound hands, sharp edge up, tip pointed toward her. She slashed awkwardly.

  The rope held—but it frayed.

  “I will if I have to,” Reggie said from the doorway, “but I’d rather not. It’s going to be a loud fucking noise.... All right.” He was winding up the conversation. And walking toward her.

  She slashed again. The rope frayed some more. Halfway there. It would have to do.

  She slid the knife under the mattress a second before he reached down to pull her up by her arm, saying, “Let’s go.” She kept her wrists firmly together, not knowing how much force it would take to break the rope, praying his focus would be elsewhere.

  “Who was that?” she asked.

  “A mutual friend,” he said, making her wonder who else of her acquaintance was a sociopath. He steered her to the door. Outside, the rain was coming down at last.

  “What if I don’t want to go?” she asked, resisting. Reggie let her go so abruptly that she lost her balance and fell.

  He laughed. “Then I shoot you,” he said, pulling a gun from his jacket pocket.

  He was holding it wrong, too low on the grip. Random details penetrated her fog of fear. The gun was a 1911, a .45 caliber, which she knew because she’d had one as a prop in an off-off-Broadway production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in 1940s Chicago. A complete turkey of a production, but at least she knew a cocked 1911 from one that was uncocked with the safety on. Reggie, she realized, wasn’t a gun guy.

  There had to be a way to use that. She needed to keep thinking, keep her mind on details and away from the panic that was nibbling at the edges of her brain. She got to her feet awkwardly, her legs as wobbly as fettuccine, and she wondered if she would even be able to run if the opportunity arose. Reggie might not want to shoot her until she was in the car because he didn’t want to carry her dead weight up the hill, but once in the car, she was as good as dead, and it wouldn’t take much expertise to put a bullet into her brain at point-blank range. And that meant she couldn’t get into the car.

  “I wouldn’t have pegged you as a murderer, Reggie,” she said, and pulled her hands apart, testing the rope to see how much strength it had left. So far it was resisting.

  “Me neither. Funny what you discover about yourself. Thought I was just a sex addict with a taste for celebrities. Always going for the bitch who’s out of my league.” He glanced at her. “You’re not much to look at right now, but with your clothes off? You’d qualify. No time for that today, though.”

  “But you enjoyed it?”

  “Which? The sex or the killing?”

  “Either. Both.”

  He laughed. “Are you kidding? Both! Charlotte Messenger. Charlotte Messenger. She couldn’t get enough of me. Me! And then she started bleeding like crazy and I watched the life just drain out of her, and let me tell you something, she didn’t even care. As long as I was on top of her, she didn’t care that she was dying. It’s a fan boy’s wet dream. You can’t even imagine.”

  “You di
dn’t know she’d die?”

  “I knew she might. It’s in the old history books. Highsmith has a library full of that kind of stuff. But it actually solved some problems, their dying. It meant I could go on to the next one without getting caught.”

  Highsmith? What did he have to do with this? Was Highsmith the one Reggie had called? “You’re a Keeper. It didn’t bother you to watch them die?”

  “It did, a little. But I was never a very strong Keeper. Can’t teleport for shit. Anyway, you can overcome your instincts, you know—if you want something bad enough. Question of will. And I wanted them bad. Gina Santoro? You have no idea.”

  “But Ariel and Kelly? They weren’t celebrities.”

  “I’ll be honest, I have a hard time remembering which was which, with those two. But once you get a taste for blood, you just gotta have it....” He shrugged.

  “But the car bomb. The one that killed my friend Julio...”

  “Charles’s idea. He doesn’t like you. I kinda did, up until five minutes ago.” Oh, my God, she thought. Highsmith was a murderer, too. The thought enraged her. Reggie tightened his grip on her arm and pulled her toward him, and she thought, now. She turned into him and pushed with all her weight, her shoulder hitting him in the chest.

  He wasn’t expecting it, and he couldn’t keep his balance, let alone level his gun at her. She kept hitting him with her shoulder, pushing into him, gaining momentum, and when he loosened his grip on her to stop his own backward fall, the rope finally broke, freeing her hands. She elbowed him in the face.

  He spiraled forty-five degrees and fell to one knee, dropping his gun.

  They both went for it, but she was faster.

  She grabbed it and scrambled back out of his reach, then aimed it squarely at him, holding it with both hands and locking her elbows.

  Time froze. Reggie crouched, staring at her, and then he turned and ran toward the Aventador.

  She tried to find the safety, but her fingers wouldn’t work properly, either from the adrenaline pumping through her or from her hands having been bound too tightly. She finally managed it, but then it took several tries before she could pull back the hammer, and by that time he had reached the car and was lifting that crazy door.

  She didn’t know if she had it in her to shoot a man in the back, but she could sure shoot a car.

  Reggie was inside and turning the key in the ignition when she fired the first shot. It missed.

  So did the second. The next produced a distinctive ping, suggesting her aim was improving, but the car was now reversing away from her. She lost count of how many times she fired before the Lamborghini abruptly stopped.

  Reggie hauled ass out of the car, then dropped into a crouch, staring at something behind her. She turned and saw, to her shock, an Elven woman coming out of the shed.

  It was Alessande. She was moving slowly, almost tentatively, and Sailor turned to see Reggie take off running, not to the road, but straight down the hill, into the brush.

  Alessande must have teleported. She would need recovery time before she could give chase, and even longer before she could teleport again.

  And Reggie was heading for the ocean. In less than a minute he would be crossing Pacific Coast Highway. No Elven would follow him there. It was up to her, Sailor realized.

  She took off after him.

  * * *

  Declan returned to the beach house to find both Sailor and his car gone, and Harriet as frantic as he’d ever seen her. What the hell had happened? If Sailor hadn’t been taken against her will, then she’d taken his car and driven...where?

  He was in no shape to shift again so soon, and with no clear intention of where to go, it would have been pointless anyway.

  And then he felt her. As abruptly as it had closed, the window opened, restoring the connection. He felt Sailor’s energy, her unique vibrational energy reaching out to him. Hope. Terror. He could almost hear her thoughts.

  Find me.

  * * *

  Sailor was running well, as well as she’d ever run. It must be the relief of survival. Adrenaline. Or sheer, stupid will. But for the moment she was in her element, even in the rain.

  The clouds parted at the horizon, just enough to show the sun sliding slowly toward the ocean. Another hour, she figured. She watched Reggie cross the highway during a break in traffic. She braced herself to do the same, and less than a minute later she was on the oceanside.

  Being close to the sea again made her feel sick, but she told herself that after Geoffrey’s and the beach house she was building up a resistance to the salt smell, the rotting seaweed, the crabs, flies... Besides, if Reggie could do it, so could she.

  I’m not running to the ocean, she told herself. I’m running to Declan.

  Reggie was leading her along residential roads and back to Point Dume, and her legs pumped hard as she tried to keep him in sight. It helped that she was a runner. They weren’t even into the second mile, so if they kept on course she would run out of land long before she ran out of breath.

  And exactly what, she wondered, would she do when she caught him?

  Get the vial.

  The vial and the Scarlet Pathogen inside would stop the war. Handing that over to the Elven Circle would be proof enough. Even if she couldn’t bring in Reggie—and it was hard to see how she could—the vial itself, plus Alessande’s eyewitness account of Reggie running away, would be compelling proof of his guilt. But what about Highsmith? Who would believe he had played a part in this? The only way to catch him, she was willing to bet, was to catch Reggie and convince him to turn on Highsmith.

  She might run out of time, though. Moonrise was twenty minutes after sunset, and sunset was coming fast. But she had to try. The gun was safely tucked into her waistband, and she would use it to make Reggie relinquish the vial.

  He was leading her along a small street crowded with houses. He turned once to look back, and she was certain he saw her.

  Running always brought her mental clarity, and even now, things started to fall into place. The knife must be enchanted, and the nature of the enchantment, she guessed, was that it could summon Alessande and had made it possible for her to teleport to a place she’d never seen before and couldn’t picture, something that would otherwise be impossible.

  And by now Alessande would have called someone, sounded the alarm, summoned help. Declan. He would find her. But meanwhile she had to keep running.

  Reggie darted between two bungalows and over a fence, and she followed him, finding herself in someone’s backyard. From there he led her through a gate to a path leading downward. Of course. Reggie was a Realtor and the coast was his turf; he knew where he was going.

  He assumed she wouldn’t follow him to the ocean.

  Another wave of nausea overcame her as the path swerved and she saw, spread out below her, the ocean. It’s just fear, she told herself, and remembered her mother telling her that when she was little. “It’s only fear. It’s not the water itself, it’s our fear that keeps us away.” But did it matter what it was? The effect was the same. She wanted to stop. She wanted to vomit.

  How could he keep going?

  Because he wasn’t a strong Keeper. He was a strong man, but the Elven in him was weak, so he had few of their abilities and only a mild aversion to water.

  The path turned into a series of wooden steps leading to the beach thirty feet below. She caught just a glimpse of Reggie as he descended. They were both forced to slow down because the way was steep and the steps slippery from the rain. The roar of the surf and the calls of the seagulls were deafening, and she was as frightened now, in a different way, as she’d been in the shack, fighting for her life. The smell of the salt air sickened her, and the crash of the waves stopped her breath, as if each one presaged a tsunami.

  But she’d come this far, and her rational mind knew she wouldn’t die from this, she wasn’t going into the water, she was just going to follow him until—

  The steps stopped.

&nb
sp; She was six or seven feet above the beach, on a tiny outcrop of rock, and Reggie was nowhere in sight. If she jumped she would land in seafoam, at least a foot of it, maybe two, the waves and rain and tide bringing the ocean all the way to the foot of the cliff. It was a desolate place, cold and increasingly dark.

  She crouched, wondering what to do, wondering where Reggie was, when a hand snaked itself around her foot and pulled her off her ledge.

  She screamed. Her fall was broken by Reggie himself, and as she landed on top of him she was already fighting and kicking, desperate to scramble to her feet, more terrified of the water than she was of him. Once upright, she got the gun out and aimed it at him with both hands, shaking badly. Water was pooling around her calves, knees, soaking her legs, freaking her out.

  “Gonna shoot me, Sailor?” he yelled over the roar of the surf, and he was grinning at her, an awful grin. “Because I don’t think you’ve got any bullets left.”

  She backed up, as much to get to higher ground as to get away from him. But he advanced, and she had no idea how many shots she’d fired at the car and whether he was right, or even whether the gun had gotten wet and if wet guns fired.

  “Let’s find out,” she said and pulled the trigger.

  Reggie was knocked back by the force of the shot, barely louder in her ear than the ocean. An incoming wave had thrown off her balance and ruined her aim, but his shoulder spouted blood.

  He kept coming.

  She pulled the trigger again. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  She was out of ammo.

  She backed up. But she was against the cliff already, so she moved to the right, away from Reggie, who was still coming for her. He was moving slowly, maybe because of his injury, the surf churning around him, and she moved faster, hugging the cliff wall. Then she glanced to the right and her heart sank. In fifty feet the cliff jutted out into the water. Deeper water. She couldn’t believe her own arrogance, escaping death once and now facing it once more because she couldn’t leave well enough alone, she had to try to save the world.