Keeper of the Shadows. Alexandra Sokoloff

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      Rhiannon floated in through the back door, her face lit up like a Roman candle, a sure sign she’d just been on the phone with Brodie. Sure enough, the first words out of her mouth were “Brodie can’t make it till later. But he’s looking into everything he can on his end.”

      Barrie murmured, “Bless him.” She liked her cousin-in-law-to-be very much, but it was especially useful to have a homicide detective in the family.

      How’s that for connected? she said silently in her head, and then realized, unnerved, that she was talking to Mick.

      “This is going to be flashback city,” Rhiannon said, reaching for a freshly made bowl of popcorn as Barrie opened the wine.

      They trooped into the great room, where Sailor already had a fire blazing atmospherically in the fireplace, and turned off the lights and fired up the Otherworld DVD, then settled in on the couch, like the thirteen-year-olds they had been, for a gory, sexy flashback of a night. Made fifteen years earlier, the film still held up, from the vertiginous, exhilarating swoop of the opening shot to the hazy, erotic, psychedelic underground party scenes, to the thrilling climax on Catalina Island. The story had been written and directed by the werewolf Travis Branson, and it followed the exploits of a young vampire, shape-shifter and Elven, decadent young princes of the Otherworld who topped each other in hedonism and rivalry until they were forced to come of age and join forces to defeat a threat to the underworld kingdom in a supernatural Three Musketeers–like final battle.

      All Barrie’s thoughts of Mick Townsend vanished as she gave herself over to the thrills of the film. There were times when the cousins gasped aloud at how close the movie came to revealing secrets that, as Keepers, they were sworn to protect. And they all sighed over The breathtaking beauty of the three stars, each magnetic in his own right but soul-meltingly charismatic together. The cousins shrieked and clutched each other during iconic scenes, like the one in which Johnny Love crawled across the floor toward the screen with deliciously predatory intent, and screamed at the gruesome death by crucifixion of a werewolf who had been captured by the bad guys, sparking off a war.