At the age of ten he’d told his foster parents that he would rather eat what came out of a garbage can than what came out of their frying pan, which had resulted in a hard kick to his gut. “Compared to what that drugged whore of a mother fed you,” his foster father had bellowed, “this is the dining hall of the Q.E. Two.”
Declan had waited until nightfall, climbed down the fire escape and made his way to Southampton’s docks, which he knew well enough, his mother having numbered a few sailors among her client base. When he’d found the Queen Elizabeth II in her berth, his curiosity grew.
He’d turned himself into a swallow and flown aboard.
The ship had delighted him. He’d reverted to human form and stayed aboard and in his body all the way to New York. For him, it was second nature to steal food, sleep in small places and keep out of the way of grown people. He could do it all without resorting to his abilities, most of which he didn’t understand, a few of which scared him. His mother, in one of her lucid moments, had told him that there were others like him, maybe not in Southampton, but in big cities and also in America, quite a lot of them. Keepers, she’d called them. With birthmarks like his.
She’d been right. America was filled with them. Keepers and shapeshifters and Others of all sorts, creatures that looked human but had other qualities and talents, magical, fascinating, at times frightening to a ten-year-old.
Few things frightened him now.
The lights in the house went out. A door opened, and he could hear two people saying goodnight to one another. That would be Rhiannon and Barrie, he thought. They all lived on the compound, so it was likely they’d left Sailor in the main house and were heading to their own. Their voices trailed off, along with the sound of footsteps on a stone path. When it was quiet, he scaled the wall easily and made his way to the main house.
Entering the house—a small castle, really—required only the removal of a window screen and crawling through. He used his cell phone flashlight to look through a stack of mail on the kitchen table, confirming that it was Sailor’s house. Then the dog appeared—Jonquil, she’d called him—greeting him like an old friend. Apparently he and “Vernon Winter” smelled the same.
“Where is she?” he whispered, scratching Jonquil’s soft ears. “Upstairs? Asleep?”
Jonquil, as if he understood, bounded up the winding staircase. Declan followed, his footsteps disturbingly loud on the creaking stairs. He searched each room, and while he found Sailor’s bloodstained jogging clothes on the floor of the master bedroom, he did not find her.
Where the hell was she?
Chapter 3
Sailor made it to the Hollywood Bowl, resplendant under the full moon, in seventeen minutes. Parking was a nightmare, of course, but she would be leaving long before the rest of the crowd, so she blocked someone’s Acura and left her Jeep, moving fast before parking security could bust her.
She was determined to see Charles Highsmith, the head of the Elven Keeper Council.
Learning Highsmith’s whereabouts had been simple: a call to his office pretending to be a veterinary assistant concerned about one of his polo ponies had yielded the information that he was at the Hollywood Bowl, had been there since six at an open-air preconcert “business picnic” and was unreachable. Of course, one person’s “unreachable” was another’s piece of cake, Sailor decided. The Hollywood Bowl wasn’t the Staples Center; because the criminal element was less addicted to the Los Angeles Philharmonic than to the Lakers, security was lax. She was prepared to use her limited powers of Elvenry and her considerable powers of lying to make her way in, but the usher guarding the entrance was listening to the concert, and she slipped by easily.
She walked carefully. The house was dark, with all the lights focused on the orchestra, but the full moon illuminated the way and made her aware of the occasional Elven. How contagious was she? She hadn’t infected Alessande, so surely an accidental touch wouldn’t do it, but how to be sure?
She made her way to the Garden Boxes, where her father had season tickets, hoping that Highsmith was there, too, and once again her luck held. Highsmith was on the aisle, wineglass in hand.
Under normal circumstances she would have been embarrassed to spoil anyone’s concert experience, but now she touched Highsmith on the shoulder and met his affronted look calmly. The full moon would highlight her scarlet eyes, which she hadn’t yet hidden behind her cousin’s contacts. She needed no mirror to tell her how frightening she must appear. It was written all over his patrician face.
“Remember me?” she said. “I’m Sailor Gryffald.”
They walked to the exit in the near dark, accompanied by the notes of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. Highsmith led the way. He was an inch or so taller than she was, with an athletic body and a commanding presence that was almost military, even when he was wearing khakis and a polo shirt. His muscular back registered displeasure, which Sailor chalked up to a control freak facing a situation not of his making. She found the man intimidating and—okay, this was weird—attractive. Was that some síúlacht side effect?
In the parking lot he led her to the VIP section and clicked a remote at a black Rolls-Royce Ghost. He let her in the passenger side and turned on the lights. “Look at me.”
He studied her eyes in a clinical manner. She in turn registered a man in his fifties with a hard, handsome face and close-cropped, steel-gray hair. For a split second he looked at her, rather than her eyes, but before she could see his thoughts he switched off the interior light and opened his car door.
“Don’t you want to know how it happened?” she asked, but he was out of the car and opening her door before she knew what he was doing.
“Let’s take a walk.”
“Why? Is your car bugged?” she asked, but she climbed out.
He didn’t answer until they were several yards away. “Cars are vulnerable. That much electronic circuitry makes it difficult to cloak with protective spells. Tell me what happened, please.”
She recited the facts once more, striding through the parking lot. The night had grown cold, but she knew she was running a temperature and welcomed the chilly breeze. Highsmith listened without comment, asking for only a few points of clarification. When she’d finished, he said, “How did you find me here?”
She ignored that, not wanting to get his assistant fired. “The question is, why didn’t I know about the Scarlet Pathogen until I became infected with it?”
“We’re giving no official response while events are still unfolding.”
“Events are unfolding right into my bloodstream,” she said. “And anyway, who’s ‘we’? I’m part of the Council. Shouldn’t I be one of the official responders?”
“No. The executive committee takes care of that.”
“Are you serious?”
“It’s protocol.”
“And who’s the executive committee? You?”
“Keep your voice down.”
Sailor looked around. A chauffeur stood outside a limousine talking on a cell phone twenty yards away, the lone human in sight. She lowered her voice, but not her intensity. “I was attacked. Deliberately infected, which means that maybe those dead Elven women were deliberately infected, too. Maybe they didn’t just pick up the disease on location, which is what the news reports suggest. I expect you would know. I expect you have contacts in the law enforcement community. Because you’re the head of the Council.”
He looked at her speculatively.