Keeper of the Moon. Harley Jane Kozak

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “She probably ran into a tree,” Barrie said.

      “With arms outstretched,” Rhiannon said.

      “Very common among runners,” Barrie added. “It’s why they don’t route marathons through forests.”

      The two women looked at Sailor expectantly, and for the first time got a good look at her face.

      “Holy hell!” Rhiannon screamed. “What’s with your eyes?”

      “Good God,” Barrie said. “Are those … colored contact lenses?”

      “No. But if you have a spare pair, Barrie, I need to borrow them.”

      “If you want to borrow anything,” Barrie said, “start explaining.”

      Sailor sank into the sofa as a wave of weakness rolled over her. “I need coffee.”

      “I’ll make coffee, you talk,” Rhiannon said, walking across the kitchen.

      Barrie plopped down on the sofa alongside Sailor. “This isn’t some extreme ploy to get the night off work, is it?”

      “Damn. Work.” Sailor sat up on the sofa. “What time is it?”

      “Eight-twenty.”

      “Okay. I’ll make this fast. Something happened tonight, which—”

      “Is it to do with us?” Rhiannon asked.

      “Tangentially, yes. It has to do with the family business.”

      “Oh.” This time the two spoke in unison.

      The cousins were all Keepers. Born in the same year, one red-haired child to each of the Gryffald brothers, the girls came into the world with the birthmarks of their fathers. Barrie’s destiny was to oversee the shapeshifters, Rhiannon’s the vampires. The girls had shared childhood memories, holidays and vacations, then gone separate ways as adults. Now they were back together and living in the family compound rent-free, if not expense-free. Their Otherworld work didn’t come with a paycheck, and all three of them had real-world professions—for Sailor, acting. Which meant, at the moment, waitressing.

      “The thing is,” Sailor said, “I’m not sure I should talk about it.”

      “Screw that,” Barrie said.

      “Okay, but what if I tell you what I know and you feel you’re honor-bound, as a Keeper, to discuss it with—”

      “Who?” Rhiannon asked from across the kitchen.

      “Whom,” Barrie said. She was a journalist, and she believed in precision.

      Sailor shook her head. “Shifters. Vamps. Your fellow Keepers.” She looked at Rhiannon. “Your fiancé. Especially him. You tell Brodie, he’s going to want to talk to me, and he’s got to stay away from me. Because he’s Elven.”

      Rhiannon frowned. “What’s that got to do with—”

      “You know what I hate?” Sailor continued. “Someone swears you to silence and tells you something, and then it turns out they themselves were sworn to silence, which means they’re expecting more of you than they expect of themselves.”

      “You hate that?” Barrie asked. “Because I don’t have a problem with it. Everyone does it.”

      “But isn’t it much better,” Sailor persisted, “if someone were to ask you later, to be able to say, ‘Golly, I didn’t know anything about it’?”

      Barrie nodded. “Yes, if I were the sort of person who’s ever said ‘golly.’”

      “I’m going with Barrie on this one,” Rhiannon said. “Screw that. We’re family.”

      Sailor took a long look at her cousin Rhiannon in her strange clothes and another look at her cousin Barrie, and the two of them looked back at her with Gryffald eyes.

      After a deep breath, she told them the story of her evening.

      Declan Wainwright stood outside the gates of the House of the Rising Sun. He’d parked off Lookout Mountain and hiked the few hundred yards to this spot, where he could see into the main house—Sailor’s house—one of several on the compound and the only one showing movement. He counted three people and assumed they were the Gryffald cousins. He was waiting for Sailor to be alone, to pass out from fatigue, as Alessande had predicted, so that he could make his way into her bedroom and extract some blood. He’d worked his way through college as an EMT, so that would be easy. If she was deeply asleep, she wouldn’t even wake. He would return in the morning to get her to Kimberly’s lab, recruiting her cousins to help, if necessary. But for now, he needed her blood.

      And, to be honest, he needed to see that she was safe.

      He wasn’t used to waiting. Harriet excelled at expediting things for him, a perk of money and power. He’d spent the past hour texting with her, rearranging his calendar, rescheduling meetings planned for the next morning and setting up two for tonight. One was with Kimberly Krabill, the physician, and the other was business. He glanced at his watch.

      He would have to break in. If there was as much magic here at the House of the Rising Sun as Alessande had indicated, he couldn’t do it by shifting. He’d once become a sparrow and encountered an enchanted force field so strong that he’d lost his shift energy, felt his wings fail and fallen twenty feet to the ground. Better to take his chances as a normal burglar. The grounds had a dilapidated aura, suggesting that nonmagical security was minimal. Declan liked trespassing anyway; it made him feel like a kid again.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ