“It appears to be a coma,” Caitlin told the Council. “Armand is alive, but his body was ravaged by the possession.”
Murmurs spread throughout the crowd.
She held up a hand, and was surprised to see there was still blood on her arm from the attack of the cat demon. She pulled her eyes away from the red streaks and looked out over the crowd. “So with the death of Louis Grenville yesterday and the possession of Armand this evening, it’s clear these entities, the walk-ins, are not only attacking humans but Others.”
“But not vampires,” Mateas Grenard said, and there was a murmur from the vampire contingent.
Jagger stepped forward sharply. “Do you know that for sure? I don’t.”
Grenard shifted sullenly from foot to foot. “So what are you suggesting we do?”
Now Fiona spoke. “All the Communities should be on full alert. You must spread the word to your constituencies of the danger of potentially hazardous behavior, such as drug and alcohol abuse….”
“And use your own traditions of protection to repel possession,” Shauna added. “Charms, candles, rituals—use the ancient wisdom.”
“It’s simple. Stay off the streets and let the entities take humans instead,” Mateas Grenard said loudly.
Jagger stepped forward to take control. “First things first. Tonight we go home and inform our Communities of the danger as quickly as possible. Everyone needs to know about the threat, and we need to urge our own to report any suspicious behavior, illnesses, deaths or disappearances in the last week. Then we meet again tomorrow morning, early, to share what we’ve learned and make a plan for tomorrow night. At Underworld,” he finished, naming a jazz club owned by the vampire David Du Lac. “At 9:00 a.m.” Jagger shot a glance at David to confirm, and David nodded.
“Go, then. Go quickly,” Jagger said. “And take care.”
The wind snaked through the magnolia trees in the MacDonald sisters’ garden, rustling the waxy leaves, casting pointillist shadows on the bricks of the courtyard below.
Inside the great room, Jagger DeFarge stood in front of the fireplace.
“You three are not going anywhere. Period,” he said to the sisters.
Ryder stood against the opposite wall, radiating silent and infuriatingly male solidarity.
Jagger was immediately besieged by three angry Keepers. Fiona set the coffeepot she was holding down on the table with a crash. Shauna whirled from her restless pacing before the picture window. Caitlin jumped up from the high-backed chair where Fiona had insisted she plant herself after she’d cleaned out the scratch wounds on Caitlin’s back and arms with antiseptic, antibiotic and a supercharged energetic healing powder.
And all three sisters’ voices overlapped in protest.
“You can’t tell us what to do, Jag, this is our job.”
“I think we’re perfectly capable of making whatever decisions we have to make for the sake of our own Communities.”
“Are you seriously trying to keep us out of this? Seriously?”
“Fiona,” Jagger said, and to Caitlin’s fury, just that was enough for Fiona to stop midsentence and hesitate, waiting. “We can’t risk you. The city can’t risk you,” he said, including the other two sisters in his gaze. “Think of everything your parents worked for—died for. We can’t jeopardize that.”
“What makes you think you can handle it?” Caitlin stormed.
“Caitlin…” Fiona said.
“This is a metaphysical problem,” Ryder said. “What ever happens out there, whatever we can do on the street, that’s putting a Band-Aid on the problem. What we need is a metaphysical solution. And that’s your job.”
“Yes,” Fiona said slowly. “You’re right.”
Shauna frowned but said nothing.
Caitlin felt herself blazing. “You’re just trying to protect us. We don’t need protecting.”
“But the city does,” Jagger said.
Ryder nodded terse agreement. “We need to find the lead entity. If we cut off the head of this beast, the others will have nothing to coalesce around. But the rest of the entities will still have to be banished and kept out of the city, or they’ll remain and continue to feed. They’re mindless and will take whatever’s in front of them.”
“You’re talking about casting a circle,” Shauna said, realization in her eyes.
“A circle big enough to surround the city,” Fiona finished. There was excitement in her voice—and doubt, as well.
Caitlin understood what her sisters were saying. A circle of protection could be cast around a person, a house or a building. What Ryder was suggesting was a circle to protect the entire city. It was an immense undertaking.
“The whole city…” Shauna frowned, clearly having the same misgivings as Caitlin.
“If all the Communities work together…” Fiona answered, thinking.
“It’s not going to help until we get the leader,” Caitlin’s voice was hard. “And if it’s so interested in me, then I’m the one who should be out there drawing it out.”
“No.” The other four all spoke at once.
Fiona and Jagger exchanged glances that said as clearly as if they had spoken aloud, “I’ll handle her,” and “Thank you.”
“Caitlin, we can’t do a circle without your help. It makes more sense for you to stay and work with us on that,” Fiona said patiently.
“August will be here shortly, and I’ve already posted several alphas at various points of the compound,” Jagger said. “The sooner there’s a plan for a circle or whatever form of protection you three can devise, the better.”
“We’ll be checking in regularly,” Ryder said, and without another word, the men turned and walked out into the garden.
Caitlin turned on Fiona. “Don’t you see what they’re trying to do, keeping us here? It’s our city. We’re the Keepers. We can’t just stay here, and you can’t make that decision for all of us.”
She ran for the door, wincing at the sharp pain from the scratches in her back as she twisted the door knob and ignoring Fiona’s sharp, “Cait, no!”
The garden was windy and shadowed in the moonlight, magnolia leaves trembling, the breeze misting water from the fountain, as Caitlin burst out the door and followed the men across the bricks of the garden, livid. “You can’t just leave us here.”
“Watch,” Ryder said, without looking back at her.
Jagger was more placating. “Caitlin, the entity has attacked you. You’ve dreamed it’s after you. It told you flat out through your friend that it wants you, and it’s just as likely your sisters are in equal danger. I’m not risking that. No one else is, either.”
They had reached the front gate, and Jagger opened it. Caitlin kept walking, fully intending to leave with them. Just try to stop me.
Ryder stopped in the gateway, towering over her, blocking her with his considerable frame. Caitlin dodged left, trying to get around him. He picked her up by the waist and, as she struggled in his hands, walked forward and set her down beside the fountain. With his hands still firmly around her waist, he pulled her hips forward into his and bent to kiss her, hot, slow, carnivorous. He straightened slowly, and she opened her eyes, heart racing….
And then he was gone and on the other side of the gate, a folding trick she had only seen once in her en tire life.
Caitlin was momentarily stunned; then she charged the gate, but Ryder slammed it shut, whipped a key from his pocket and touched it to the lock. One of those charmed skeleton keys. Caitlin threw herself at the gate and pulled at it, but it was locked solid.
She turned and ran for the fountain, where she scrabbled along the bottom of the rim to find the hidden spare key. She hurried back to the gate and tried the key, but it wouldn’t turn for anything, and the gate was as immoveable as if it had been soldered shut.
She kicked the gate, pounded on the bars…but Jagger and Ryder were long gone.
“Damn you both!” She finally leaned against the bars of the gate, breathing hard,
spent. She could feel the scratches in her back burning, blood seeping again.
How dare they? The bars of the gate only added to the feeling that she—they—were under house arrest. Metaphysical problem my ass.
She wasn’t just furious but humiliated. It wasn’t entirely true anymore that this was her responsibility, that she was the Keeper by right and duty who must oversee the repelling of this attack. All the Communities were involved now, even the vampires.
But still…
It was more her purview and charge than anyone else’s, being that Ryder, their main source of in formation, was a shifter, the most recent victim was a shifter, and it was Danny, another shifter, through whom they had contacted the lead walk-in.
That makes it a shapeshifter case, and that makes it mine.
She felt the sudden sense of a presence, then heard a step behind her, and whirled around…to see one of the were guards who’d accompanied them home from the restaurant.
“Ms. MacDonald, let me take you inside,” the young buck said, politely enough for a wolf, but there was no mistaking that this was not a request.
Caitlin narrowed her eyes. All right, fine. I’ll play along.
She turned to the were, shrugged and smiled. “Yes, let’s go.”
Inside her own wing, Caitlin locked the door and breathed in deeply. She’d begged an hour for a shower and a nap, pleading exhaustion from her wounds, and although she could see Fiona’s deep suspicion of her sudden compliance, she wasn’t entirely faking; she had lost some blood, and the adrenaline crash from the attack and its aftermath was making her shaky.
Although food was the last thing on her mind, she knew some protein wouldn’t hurt. After all, she had a long night ahead of her. She started for her private kitchen, then stopped.
The light-headedness she was experiencing would make an invisibility glamour that much easier to conjure. A glamour worked better on an empty stomach. And invisibility was her ticket out.
The MacDonald family had owned the compound for three generations, and over more than a century, various secret passageways had been added to the property, in case of attack. Unfortunately for Caitlin, Fiona had shared all the family secrets with Jagger, and as she slipped through the compound, masked by the glamour, she encountered a werewolf or vampire sentry at every potential escape point. If the guards had been human, Caitlin would have risked slipping by one of them, but vampires and weres had heightened senses, not to mention that extra sixth sense, that could detect her, and she didn’t want to risk apprehension. She only had one shot.
Seething with frustration, she stopped in the dark courtyard to consider her options, as the wind skittered leaves across the bricks and the water whispered in the fountain.
One of the cats padded across the mossy garden stones and stopped in front of Caitlin, meowing up at her as if she could see her.
Not now, Chloe, Caitlin whispered in her head.
And then she stopped, thinking….
The young were stood dutifully but restlessly at his post in front of the garden gate. Sentry duty was an honor, but standing still was agony for a werewolf, any werewolf, much less one barely out of his teens, with all his animal hormones raging.
Then suddenly his head snapped up as he caught the soft padding of steps hurrying across the stones behind the fountain, quick and quiet, barely audible to a human but perfectly discernible to lupine ears.
The young were leaped toward the sound, loping around the fountain, snout lengthening and teeth starting to emerge in anticipation….
The were rounded the corner and stopped in his tracks.
Three pale shapes looked up at him from the garden stones—three cats.
The were looked them over in puzzlement. Was that the sound he’d heard?
While he contemplated the cats, Caitlin moved silently and invisibly past the fountain and touched her skeleton key to the gate.
The lock clicked open, the gate swung out…and she was gone.
Chapter 20
Caitlin walked through the raucous neon carnival of Bourbon Street, cloaked in her glamour. On some level she knew without a doubt it was a stupid thing to do, an impulsive act prompted by anger, spite, resentment, payback…and that nagging feeling of inadequacy that never left her, the need to prove her self, to be worthy of her position, her charge, her family, her city.
But also, she could not help thinking, could not stop thinking, that Ryder and Jagger were simply wrong. It would do no earthly good for them to go out on the streets looking for these creatures, these entities. There were only two occasions when any of them had been in direct contact with the lead walk-in: in the séance with Danny, and when Armand had talked to her, just before attacking her.
And the séance was the only time they had been able to actually summon the thing. Danny had known exactly how—and where—to go, and he had done it within minutes.
So it only made sense that if they were to catch the lead entity, what they needed was not an army of Others patrolling the streets or encircling the city with a magic spell. What they needed was Danny.
And that was her plan. She would get Danny, bring him back to the compound, and they would summon the entity through him, with him. Ryder could finish the ritual that had been interrupted the night of the séance, and once the thing had been cast into outer darkness, they could work on protecting the rest of the city.
Simple.
Bourbon was packed, of course, this being the night before Halloween, so many people in costume that the date seemed to be a technicality. But Caitlin knew that whatever looked like excess now would be exponentially excessive by tomorrow night.
There was already a Halloween feeling hanging over the street, though, and Caitlin didn’t like it. She preferred to celebrate Samhain with quiet, restorative rituals in the woods, cloaked in soft night, under the pure moon, to celebrate god and goddess and the earth with dancing, blessings, healing charms. A far cry from the throngs screaming to be heard over “Psycho Killer” and “Werewolves of London” and “The Monster Mash” and “Thriller,” all blasting from the open doors and windows of various clubs.
Although she could see some charming, playful costumes—fairies, Harry Potter characters, silver-screen stars—there were far too many that Caitlin found disturbing: serial killers from slasher movies, “victims” with fake hatchets seemingly buried in their heads. Zombies were particularly prevalent this year, some cultural trend that Caitlin was unable to wrap her mind around.
Why people had to concentrate on the negative on this night, she’d never been able to understand. On a pagan holy day, especially the equinoxes and solstices, there was such a power for magnification and manifestation. Who in their right mind would want to manifest an ax in the head?
And perhaps she was simply still shaken from the demon attack, but tonight Bourbon, with its cacophony of music and kaleidoscope of lights, seemed to take all the ugliness of Halloween and magnify it—the flaming jack-o’-lanterns, the spiders, the serial killers. And of course, there was the alcohol. Always the alcohol, and there were other substances, other highs, in evidence here, as well—revelers so stoned their eyes were dead as they stumbled past like the zombies some of them were dressed as. Every drunk tourist seemed malevolent. Exactly the circumstances Ryder had been talking about, the danger…
The crowd had become so thick that Caitlin’s feet had slowed almost to a standstill; the intersection was swarmed with people in all four directions, and no one was moving. So far it had not been an issue to brush against people on the crowded streets; no one had freaked at coming into contact with an essentially invisible person, because there were so many other people about that any time Caitlin had accidentally bumped into a passerby, there was always someone else—someone visible—right beside her who could have made the contact.
But now she was surrounded so closely that she was being pressed on all sides. And the pressure was only getting stronger, as the crowd was surging forward in all directi
ons, a crushing rush…and there were so many tall people around her that she was no longer able even to see anything. And more than that, there was a feeling, an ominous feeling, of threat.
Feeling desperate, Caitlin swiveled her head…and with a dawning horror realized that every person around her was menacing…every one with disturbing eyes…the black, malevolent eyes she had seen in Danny during the séance, and in Armand just before he shifted into the cat demon. And they were all staring at her. They could see her—even through her glamour.
These revelers were not fake zombies. They were the real thing. Possessed.
As Caitlin opened her mouth to scream, a cloak was thrown over her head and pulled tight around her face. Darkness descended, and strong, cruel arms grabbed her around the waist and shoulders, and shuffled her forward.
No one heard her scream over the clashing layers of music.
The cluster of zombies moved in a solid group, with Caitlin pinioned between arms and legs and torsos in the center, barreling forward and driving through the crowd in front of them, which parted slowly, like a sluggish wave, and before Caitlin could think, they had swept her into what she somehow sensed was an alley and through a waiting open door.
“She’ll never stay put,” Ryder worried aloud as vampire and shapeshifter strode, tall and long-legged, through the crowds on Bourbon, toward Bons Temps. The people were packed wall-to-wall—it was only the combined intimidating presence and grim looks of purpose of the two men that cleared them a path through the costumed revelers.
“Don’t worry about Caitlin. She’s a handful, but Fiona will take care of her,” Jagger assured him.
“I don’t doubt Fiona can handle just about anything,” Ryder answered. Everything except her sister. I can’t even handle her sister.
The tight feeling in his stomach intensified. He stared out over the crowds before them. “It might as well be Halloween,” he said aloud. A human would not have been able to hear him in the raucous crowd, but a vampire could literally hear a pin drop, even with a din like this.
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