The Shifters

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  A muscle jumped in Jagger’s jawline, and though he said nothing, Ryder knew the vampire had the same fear he did: that there was no guarantee the entities would wait until the next evening to descend on the street.

  Ryder tried to focus on the plan. They were headed toward Bons Temps. Much as Ryder hated to admit it, the only solid connection they had to the lead walk-in was Caitlin’s druggie psychic shapeshifter friend, Danny. He hadn’t wanted to tell Caitlin, but it was clear that their best bet to trap and bind the lead entity, to perform the exorcism that he had been unable to complete the night of the séance, was to convince the young psychic to do another sitting.

  Caitlin might have been the best person to do that, but Ryder thought that, shifter to shifter, he might just be able to make it happen. Especially if he mentioned that Caitlin had been attacked again.

  The thought made his blood rise.

  He knew she was furious with him for leaving her. But he would risk her wrath to keep her safe. He would be damned if he would lose someone else…

  Someone else I love…to the walk-ins.

  Love. Yes, he really had thought that. Really did feel it.

  He would do whatever he had to do to protect Caitlin MacDonald. And her sisters, too.

  Inside—a warehouse?—was worse than outside. Heavy doors clanged shut, and there was a sudden, crashing silence, broken only by the inhuman shuffling and labored breathing of her captors, who held her with a mass of arms and hands.

  Hooded, blinded, Caitlin ordered her screaming nerves to still and forced herself to take notice of her surroundings. Caitlin could smell must and mold, which, since Katrina, had lingered pervasively in almost every building in the Quarter. There was a wetness to the air, as well.

  She could hear only faintly through the thick wool cloak that encompassed her, but the sounds seemed echoey, as if they were in a very large room, a high-ceilinged room. They didn’t seem to shift direction to avoid any furniture as the cluster of zombies shuffled her on. She was as stiff-legged as they were, frozen into the sheer numbness of terror.

  There was a creaking that could only be a door opening, and a rush of air that she could feel on her calves, the only part of her body not covered by the cloak. She was jostled through into another room—even in her terror, she recognized the sensation of crossing a threshold, the opening feeling that moving through a doorway evoked. And it was a large one, too, tall double doors, she thought.

  There was something instantly different about the atmosphere here; still the mustiness, the dampness, but mixed with a different smell entirely. Sweat and sulfur…ammonia…

  And there were other people in the room, too. The hairs on Caitlin’s arms lifted as she realized…there were not just other people in the room but many others. She could hear breathing, feel their presence, but there were no words, no sounds but their breath.

  Dead? Zombies?

  No. Drugged. The bite of ammonia—it was the acrid smell of crack.

  Her captors inched forward, then stopped, and Caitlin could feel some of them step away, as if they had reached their destination. She felt adrenaline spike through her veins.

  Someone pulled the cloak off her, and she gasped in air, blinking quickly to force her eyes to adjust to the darkness around her.

  It was dim, windowless except for a few narrow slits high above, a huge warehouse space with unfinished walls, intricate systems of pipes and beams high above, and obvious mold stains on the wood. A shell of a building that had been rotting since Katrina. Hazy smoke floated in the air, and she realized why she had been feeling the presence of so many bodies. This was a crack house. The half-present feeling came from unconsciousness.

  Caitlin stared around her through the hypnotic drifting smoke, her nostrils burning from the stinging smell of crack, and felt a surge of horror at being surrounded by addicts. She had a sudden flash of in sight: the Others might not be human, but these street junkies were truly the undead.

  A figure stepped out of the darkness, moving sinuously toward her. The other creatures shuffled around her in a mindless kind of anticipation, and Caitlin went light-headed with fear. She instinctively stepped backward…and felt the pressure of a body behind hers, several bodies, the circle of mindless souls who had brought her into this pit. Then the dim light from the few high windows illuminated the face of the figure standing before her and the features were so familiar that Caitlin had a wave of mind-numbing relief: Danny. That pale, young skin, shimmering dark hair…and those bottomless eyes.

  Caitlin’s relief dissolved into terror as Danny smiled, a smile that didn’t reach his eyes and that was not his own.

  The voice that hissed through his mouth confirmed her worst fear.

  It was the voice of the walk-in.

  “Welcome, Keeper.”

  Ryder and Jagger were crossing Toulouse Street, approaching Bons Temps, when Ryder felt a scream.

  He froze midstride.

  Jagger looked at him sharply. “What?”

  “There was…a scream….”

  Jagger looked understandably perplexed. This was Bourbon Street on a Friday night. People were screaming all around them, screaming to make themselves heard, screaming along with the music, or just screaming to scream.

  “In the astral,” Ryder said, and his heart contracted in pain and terror. “It’s Cait.”

  “Tell me what you want me to do,” Jagger said instantly, and meant it.

  Ryder forced himself to breathe, to focus through his concern. “Call the Keepers. Get back to them. See if they have any idea where she’s gone.”

  “She may be there, you know—” Jagger began, an attempt at reassurance.

  “She’s not,” Ryder cut him off, and the vampire didn’t even try to protest further but lifted his iPhone.

  “Go back to them. If there’s anything they can do, do it, but keep them safe,” Ryder told him.

  “What will you do?” Jagger paused, the phone still in his hand.

  “Find her shapeshifter friends. Find her,” Ryder said, and he shifted into his subtle body and then was gone in a rush of black wings.

  Chapter 21

  The volume inside Bons Temps was approaching apocalyptic as Ryder touched down on the sidewalk in the bird’s body and instantly shifted back to himself. He strode in off the street and muscled his way through the pressed-together, sweating, undulating patrons. He scanned the stage. The band was a ragtag combination of musicians, typical Bourbon Street, hard partiers with impressive music skills.

  The long-haired psychic, Danny, was not on stage, but the front man was instantly recognizable. The anorexic musician’s build and cocky swagger would have been a good hint, but the subtly shifting facial features were a dead giveaway. Case. Even in his state of high anxiety and focus, Ryder had to admire the kid’s control. It took a lot of skill to hold a partial shift like that just on its own, much less while performing, and no doubt high on something—there was something just a bit too manic about his frenzied performance.

  Even so, Case lasered in on him, noticing him in the crowd, electric-blue eyes sizzling from the stage, measuring, calculating.

  Ryder used the connection to project an intent, not a request, but a demand. He saw Case receive it, flinch back slightly, and then those eyes went icy, antagonistic. For a moment Ryder thought he might have gone too far, but then there was a flickering, a shift in the current vibrating between them, and the jolt of antagonism lessened. Somehow the younger man had gotten a deeper message: the urgency of Ryder’s presence.

  Ryder held Case’s eyes, then turned and moved through the crowd toward the back courtyard.

  The night was dark and humid, misty with a diffuse haze that blurred the neon lights of the bar signs, creating an altered-world space appropriate to the occasion.

  Ryder paced the slate stones of the courtyard, unable to keep still. In all likelihood Caitlin had been gone for more than an hour, since the moment he and Jagger had left the sisters’ compound. He curs
ed himself for his stupidity; how could he not have known this about her by now? He could have chained her, and she would have found a way to follow. He only prayed that he would have the opportunity not to make the same mistake again.

  In truth, as a creature of the nineteenth century, he had not caught up to the vastness of change in the feminine consciousness. They were equals now. He was a fool not to have absorbed that.

  He had wounded Caitlin’s sense of duty, her feminine pride, and she had reacted in a completely predictable way that meant he could lose her forever. The city could lose her forever. The world could lose her forever. An irredeemable loss.

  There was no sound behind him, but he sensed a disturbance in the astral, the presence of another shifter. He turned sharply.

  Case stood in the passageway from the back door to the courtyard, slouch-hipped, arrogant.

  The two men stared at each other through the dark; then Case sauntered forward, all Louisiana cool, removing a joint and lighter from an inside pocket and firing up the lighter. As he started to raise the flame, Ryder stepped forward with one long stride and plucked the joint from his lips, tossed it aside.

  Case’s face rippled with rage.

  “What the—” the younger man began in a fury.

  Ryder held up a hand. “Cait’s in trouble,” he said, cutting Case off.

  The musician’s face didn’t change, but Ryder felt the disturbance in his subtle body; it was hard not to.

  “Ask me, she was in trouble the minute she met you, Ace.” Case pulled out a pack of Marlboros and removed one, lit up. Ryder winced at the thought of all that potential, swirling down the toilet of addiction.

  It was hard not to think of himself at that age.

  But all of that was a diversion so that he could not, for a moment, think about what Case had just said. Which he knew in his heart to be true.

  Ryder tried to center himself, to breathe. “She’s disappeared,” he said as calmly as he could manage. “My guess is she’s gone to find your mutual friend.”

  “And?” Case said maddeningly.

  Ryder held his temper. “It’s very dangerous for her out there right now. Dangerous for anyone, but especially for her and her sisters.”

  “And this has what to do with me?”

  “Don’t bullshit me. You care for her. I know you do.” Ryder stared straight into Case’s eyes. “Regardless of how you hurt her, you care.”

  “Who’s bullshitting who, shifter?” Case smiled, a crazy cracked watermelon grin that didn’t quite make it to his eyes. “How I hurt her is nothing compared to what damage you’re about to do. At least I never pretended to be anything but what I am. I never promised anything, in word or deed. Can you say the same thing?”

  Ryder was struck dumb by the young shifter’s insight.

  “Right—tell me you didn’t promise everything, even if you never said a word.” Case waited until he saw that the whole truth had sunk deep into Ryder’s bones, and then he dragged on his cigarette and exhaled, shrugging.

  “But don’t feel too bad about it. It’s our nature, after all, isn’t it? And who knows that better than sweet Cait?”

  Ryder felt sick with the truth of it.

  Case’s face hardened. “Well, maybe she went out there in that crazy little way she has—because she doesn’t care what happens to her. She knows you’ll be gone on the next train, or tradewind. I know Sister Goldenhair. She’ll go out fighting, save everyone she can in the battle—but when her light goes out…”

  He removed the cigarette from his mouth and let it fall to the slate flooring to explode in glowing ash, then crushed the butt out.

  “So no,” he said softly. “Don’t you be guilt-tripping me. I’m the small sin here, shifter. The lesser of two evils.”

  Ryder reached out and grabbed the lapels of Case’s leather jacket, and in that moment, he could have ripped the other man to shreds. But he forced himself to breathe, to steady.

  “So we’ve both done her dirt. Are you going to do something about it? Because I am.”

  He felt Case’s fury, and suddenly he was holding nothing. The young shifter was standing several feet back from him. He’d folded, very skillfully. From the new distance, he stared at Ryder stonily. “Difference between you and me, Ace, is I don’t pretend to be a hero.”

  “Cait doesn’t need a hero. She needs help.”

  “Might as well let her go. You’ll only end up hurting her, because you can never settle for just one life—or girl. That’s a shifter’s nature, and you know it just as well as I do. You’re already looking toward the new city, the new body. It’s our nature to shift…shifter.”

  Ryder summoned every ounce of control he had. “Play the cynic all you want, but I know the truth about you, too. You may be a shifter and a junkie, but you’re capable of loyalty toward your friends. Cait’s in danger, and your pal Danny, too, and I think you’re coming with me.”

  Case stared at him for such a long moment Ryder thought he’d lost, and then the young shifter spoke. “That would imply you knew where to find them, and we both know you don’t.”

  Ryder said, “No. But you do.”

  Chapter 22

  Caitlin stared at Danny-not-Danny through the haze of crack smoke in the warehouse. There was some thing so alien about him that it chilled her—the sinuous way he moved as he slowly circled her, as if there were actually something else inside him using his body in a completely different way, not human, not shifter, but Else.

  As if reading her thoughts, the walk-in smiled, and that was an abomination, too. There was the telltale sibilance in its consonants as it spoke. “Yes. I am pleased with this body. Its powers are more subtle than the older one….”

  Caitlin thought fleetingly that it must have meant Armand.

  “And it knows how to procure its pleasures, this host. I approve.” The creature’s glittering eyes swept over Caitlin’s body, and she suddenly felt naked, exposed. “But time for a new one now, I think.”

  Caitlin’s blood froze, and for a moment, as she envisioned a horrible half-supernatural rape, her mind went black with terror. But then, through the choking nausea of the thought, she realized that the creature wanted something far more lethal than an invasion of her body. It wanted full possession of her.

  Her mind raced through the scenario. If the walk-in had been able to mimic Armand so that not even his own employees or fellow shifters recognized the possession, then the walk-in would be able to use her own body to gain entry to the compound, to walk right into Fiona’s rooms, into Shauna’s….

  She shuddered with fear and rage—and then a cold determination that she would die before letting that happen.

  The creature must have felt the change in her, because Danny’s body shifted, rippled, so that for a moment there was something demonic there, skeletal and rotting, that had only the slightest hint of Danny’s humanity. She could even smell it, a stench like a rot ting corpse.

  “Yes,” it said sibilantly. “Take the Keepers, then take the city.”

  No, she thought violently. I’ll die first.

  Danny’s face tightened in rage. “Hold her!” the walk-in screamed. Two of the zombified tourists moved faster than the others, shockingly fast, and seized Caitlin by the arms.

  Then one said, low and rough in her ear, “Fight. Keep moving.”

  The familiar voice sent a surge of shock and relief through her body. Ryder. She obeyed instantly and began to struggle with her captors with all her might.

  “Seize her! Hold her!” the walk-in shrieked.

  The men holding her were moving in tandem, shoving her between them, but not with an intent to injure, just to create a moving blur of bodies.

  Suddenly Caitlin felt the shimmering, the wave of heat that accompanied a shift, but stronger than she had ever felt it, coming from all sides, enveloping her, and she gasped aloud to see herself in the hands of—herself. Twice. Ryder and Case had taken on her own form. The sight was so startling that she alm
ost forgot Ryder’s directive to keep moving. She had seen herself in mirrors thousands of times, but this was a completely different experience, like meeting herself in a dream, a familiar face and body, but as a stranger. She saw herself fully for the very first time: beautiful, vulnerable, fierce, loving, wanting…things she had never seen in herself before. And powerful. Unbelievably powerful. For a moment she could do nothing but stare.

  A split second later she realized the plan. There were three of her now, and the walk-ins wouldn’t know which of her to grab.

  The thing that was in Danny was prowling, still shrieking, “Seize her!” But the shuffling creatures around them were swaying in their tracks, muttering, confused.

  The three Caitlins ceased their merry-go-round scramble and stood with backs to each other, facing outward.

  “What now?” Case as Caitlin whispered harshly.

  “We incapacitate the leader,” Ryder as Caitlin whispered back.

  “Don’t hurt him,” Caitlin begged, alarmed for Danny.

  “We bind the entity. Follow my lead,” Ryder said.

  Caitlin felt Ryder link his arm through hers and automatically did the same with Case on her other side. She saw Case joining arms with Ryder, forming a living triangle.

  And then Ryder called out in Caitlin’s own voice, “Quod perditum est, invenietur. Te implor, Doamne, nu ignora aceasta rugaminte. Nici mort, nici al fiintei… Lasa orbita sa fie vasul care-i va transporta, sufletul la el. Asa sa fie! Asa sa fie! Acum! Acum!”

  Caitlin followed the words in her head.

  I command you, unclean spirit, whoever you are, to hear and obey me to the letter, I who am a minister of the light despite my unworthiness. You shall not be emboldened to harm in any way this creature of light, or these bystanders. You are bound by my words.