The Shifters

“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.



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 cursed 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.