The Shifters

Page 28

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 directions, 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.