The Shifters. Alexandra Sokoloff

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СКАЧАТЬ you were invisible.

      She was entirely unnoticed by the drunk revelers, the break-tap-dancing teenagers…the buskers holding signs advertising Huge Ass Beers To Go and the opposing signs waved by religious crazies: God Punishes All Sinners. Caitlin squeezed quickly by the sign wielders, grimacing…. Then, as she was passing a blind street musician wearing sunglasses à la Ray Charles, he stepped right in her path and bowed, a breathtakingly courtly gesture, and spoke. “Lovely lady.”

      Caitlin froze, as confused as the crowd of tourists around her, who looked around them with comic doubletakes, having no idea who or what the musician was talking to, unable to even wrap their minds around the idea that he was seeing anyone at all. It could all just have been part of the show to them.

      No big surprise, Caitlin told herself. There were psychics of all kinds in NOLA—either the city drew them or actually bred them—and it wasn’t much of a stretch that a blind man would have learned to use other senses.

      But she had her own mission, so she quickly sidestepped the jazzman and continued on into the crowd.

      Behind her on the sidewalk, Ryder straightened in his Ray Charles body, swept up the hat containing his tips, and followed her at a distance, tapping his cane for show.

      The glamour was a good one, he would give her that. It demonstrated as high a level of skill as unmasking him in the shop earlier that day had done. If this Keeper’s sisters were as good as she was, there was a strong Keeper presence in the city, as strong as he’d seen in any town for a long time…as strong as their parents’ had been rumored to be.

      That didn’t mean he trusted her. She had issues, this one, obviously. But she might be useful, down the line. And she was on a mission tonight—first the vampire detective, now this obvious continuance of her investigation, which, whatever it was, required a glamour. Which made it his business to investigate.

      Besides, invisible as she may have been to the others around them, for him, the view from behind wasn’t bad at all.

      Ryder was enjoying being on Bourbon again. The sights and sounds were intoxicating…neon lights in all colors and the sparkling, feathered costumes of the revelers…the long, sleek legs of the showgirls, the bright, glazed eyes of the tourists, the smells of chocolate and piña coladas….

      His impulse was to follow every impulse.

      Instead he focused and followed Caitlin.

      Caitlin weaved forward through the crowd, her jaw now clenched grimly. It was probably the influence of Halloween coming up, but it was barely nine o’clock and the partiers seemed even more out of control than usual. The drunk guy on the balcony to her right, blatantly taking camera phone shots of his girlfriend’s crotch. The college crowd on the left balcony dangling beads off the railing, shouting “Show me your tits!” and “Give me sumpin'!” to everyone passing by. The stumbling drunk bridal parties, one group right now passing Caitlin with a sullen bride in the middle wearing a T-shirt reading I’m The Bride, Those Are The Bitches.

      And Caitlin knew it was just beginning. As the night and the bon temps rolled on, more and more people would be holding their friends up as they stumbled from one bar to the next, stopping to partake of every “Huge Ass Beer!” and Hurricane and Hand Grenade and Jello shot offered to them. I Got Bourbon-Faced On Shit Street T-shirts were popular souvenirs for a reason. So many wasted lives—literally.

      Caitlin put on speed as she saw her goal ahead of her. The music literally rocked her as she approached; Bons Temps was one of the loudest clubs on Bourbon, and that was saying a lot.

      She stepped through the doors and saw that there was a cover band up on stage, and even at this decibel range, the musical talent was obvious; the best musicians flocked to New Orleans just as surely as they did to Nashville and L.A.

      These particular musicians, no surprise, were clearly altered: drunk, stoned, high.

      Wasted.

      The lead singer, Case, had a falsetto to rival Steve Connor and an Iggy Pop tilt to his slim hips; in his bandanna and artfully ripped T-shirt, he was a pirate who expertly twirled the mike in his fingers and charmed the female patrons with a mad and manic gleam in his eyes. The very young keyboard player, Danny, wore a Megadeth T-shirt and looked like an angel with his long, shimmering hair and beatific face…until you noticed his completely empty eyes.

      Caitlin’s stomach heaved, and she had to turn away from the stage.

      The floor was always packed at Bons Temps; no other Bourbon Street club was so crowded, so consistently. Not just because the guys were great musicians; they were, but there was a little something extra. When Case sang Aerosmith, sometimes you could swear you were looking at Steven Tyler. A Police number? It might have been that third Hurricane, but sometimes you would bet your life it was a young Sting up there singing. Eminem, Bono, Flo Rida…it was a subtle thing, but wildly effective with the drunk crowds….

      Because Case and Danny were shapeshifters. The most skilled species: shifters whose expertise was taking on different human forms.

      And Caitlin had a long and ambiguous acquaintance with these two shifters.

      Shapeshifters were rarely productive members of society; their sense of self was too amorphous, and because of that inconstancy and lack of center, they tended toward indulgences of all kinds. But they were also wildly charismatic, in no small part because they could subtly alter their physical form to match other people’s fantasies, and they were often excellent psychics, because they passed through the astral, a parallel dimension of spirits and entities, easily used for transportation between planes of reality, every time they shifted. And in the astral, all kinds of things could be gleaned: past, present and future.

      The rowdy lead singer, Case, was the charismatic. But Danny…Danny was the psychic. One of New Orleans’ best, which was saying a hell of a lot—that is, when he was straight enough to concentrate, which was almost never, these days.

      Wasted, Caitlin thought again. Such a waste.

      She pulled her eyes away from Danny and concentrated on Case: skinny as Keith Richards, for the same reasons, in pencil-leg black jeans, sporting alligator boots with outrageously long toes. He was leaning into the crowd with Danny now, threatening to topple off the stage into the throng, and shouting, “Somebody freakin’ scream!”

      And then, as he straightened, his eyes fell on the corner where Caitlin stood…and he stopped for an instant, staring. Then his smile curved.

      Caitlin thought, He’s good. He saw her. Of course he did; he always could. She let the glamour slip away from her like a cloak, and he gazed full into her face. Then he lifted the mike again and shouted, “Somebody make some noise!”

      As the crowd went wild on the floor beneath him, he turned the mike over to the guitarist for a solo and dropped off the stage, landing hard on those ridiculous boots and swaggering out into the crowd, stopping to let some drunk sorority girl kiss him, openmouthed and sloppy.

      Caitlin turned away and walked out the back door, into the small inner courtyard, away from the noise. The courtyard was mostly used for storage. Cases of booze were stacked to the eaves against the inner wall, but there was a small outdoor bar, framed by white strings of Christmas lights, tonight unmanned and deserted.

      Case pushed out through the double doors and into the dark. He was already flicking a Zippo, lighting a cigarette, dragging hard, and Caitlin СКАЧАТЬ