Keeper of the Shadows (The Keepers: L.A.) Read online

  In their new Keeper roles, these extraordinary women must balance the fate of the world with their desires….

  As a crime beat reporter, Barrie Gryffald’s work is risky enough when she’s investigating mortal homicides. But when a teenage shifter and an infamous Hollywood mogul are both found dead on the same night, her Keeper intuition screams, Otherworldly.

  Reluctantly, she enlists her secret crush, Mick Townsend, a journalist with movie-star appeal. Together, they dig up eerie parallels to a forgotten cult-film tragedy. But it may be too late. With a cast of suspects ranging from vampire junkies to the ghosts of Hollywood past, no one can be trusted. Least of all Mick, who may well prove to be as unpredictable as the Others Barrie is sworn to protect….

  Mick Townsend.

  A newbie on the paper, and a thorn in Barrie’s side from the instant he showed up. For one thing, jobs were scarce enough without extra competition. But that wasn’t even the start of it.

  There was something almost preternaturally beautiful about him. Dark gold hair and green eyes, cheekbones you could cut glass with. The way he held himself, that casually aristocratic elegance that was the territory of actors and, well, aristocrats.... He moved like a cat, strong as a panther and just as lithe.

  Mick Townsend stopped right in her path, towering over her in an alarmingly commanding way. “Gryffald.”

  Barrie put up all her defenses as she coolly replied, “Townsend,” and was proud that she didn’t blush.

  “You’re looking very Audrey Hepburn tonight,” he said lazily, and looked her over, a direct look that managed to be slow and sexy and aloof all at the same time, which didn’t help her state of mind at all.

  Books by Alexandra Sokoloff

  Harlequin Nocturne

  *The Shifters #99

  **Keeper of the Shadows #159

  *The Keepers

  *The Keepers: L.A.

  ALEXANDRA SOKOLOFF

  is a California native and the daughter of scientist and educator parents, which drove her into musical theater at an early age.

  At U.C. Berkeley (a paranormal experience all on its own) she majored in theater. After college, Alex moved to Los Angeles, where she has made an interesting living writing novel adaptations, and original suspense and horror scripts, for numerous Hollywood studios.

  The Harrowing, her debut ghost story, was nominated for both a Bram Stoker Award (horror) and an Anthony Award (mystery) as Best First Novel. She is the author of the paranormal mystery/thrillers The Price, The Unseen and Book of Shadows, and is the winner of a Thriller Award for her story The Edge of Seventeen.

  Alex is also the author of Screenwriting Tricks for Authors, a workbook based on her internationally acclaimed blog and writing workshops.

  Keeper

  of the

  Shadows

  Alexandra Sokoloff

  Dear Reader,

  Okay, I must admit I freaked out a little when Heather Graham suggested we set the second set of Keepers books in L.A. I’ve lived and worked there for so much of my life that the idea of creating an underground paranormal community in L.A. seemed both daunting and unbelievable. But then again, how else to describe Hollywood other than “supernatural?”

  And part of Heather’s incredible talent is that she always knows the next right thing to do, no matter how improbable it seems. Since all three of us have worked in various aspects of the entertainment industry for a very long time, we could write about Hollywood and we could be funny, we could be ironic, and we could be real.

  I am so glad to be an author now, but working on this book let me look back at my screenwriting career and the whole film industry with—dare I say it?—affection. No matter what other creatures one might come across in the movie business—and oh, yes, one does come across some interesting creatures—Hollywood is also full of people like Heather and Harley: brilliant, talented, generous, loving—and willing to fight for both their loved ones and total strangers to make a better world.

  Welcome to the world of The Keepers: L.A.

  Alexandra Sokoloff

  This one’s for my beautiful and wildly talented

  co-authors. Sisters, cousins, whatever you are,

  Heather and Harley, I love you forever.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 1

  There is nothing more beautiful than the city at night, thought Rosalind Barrymore Gryffald as she hit the freeway toward downtown.

  Being that the city was Los Angeles, it was easier to feel that way late at night, the later at night the better, because traffic did let up eventually, even if it was sometimes well after midnight. But then, oh, then, the city was all hers, in all its shimmering glory.

  L.A. Lotus Land. The dream machine, the end of the rainbow. Was there anything in the world more romantic?

  And Rosalind Barrymore Gryffald—Barrie for short, which unfortunately she was; pixieish, people tended to say, to her eternal exasperation...a copper-eyed, copper-haired sprite of a girl—loved her town.

  Oh, she knew L.A. had its detractors, the ones who were always joking that there was no there there. But those people just didn’t know where to look. She knew where to look. In fact it was her job to look.

  Not only did she live in the most exciting city in the world, she also knew its most secret excitements: there was a world within the world, even more magical than the movies. And that world was her job.

  Her day job...well, her day job was actually a night job, the night shift on the Los Angeles Courier where she worked as a crime beat reporter. But her secret job, her all-the-time job, her passion, her calling, was Canyon Keeper of the shape-shifters of Los Angeles.

  She was startled out of her thoughts when the digital billboard on the Wilshire Grand Building suddenly loomed up in the dark, a twenty-story-high architectural lighting tour de force featuring car-size butterflies flitting across a rainbow landscape. She was at the downtown turnoffs already.

  She steered her vintage Peugeot—which she’d wheedled out of her father when he’d left the country—to the right and took the Third Street exit into the island of glittering skyscrapers that was downtown. L.A. was made up of those dense clusters of tall buildings sticking up in the middle of the relatively flat residential neighborhoods around them, a landscape that was never so apparent as at night.

  Downtown L.A. was the oldest and most decrepitly grand of those islands, and the Courier building was right in the middle of it.

  It was always a thrill to drive up to the historic Art Deco building in the heart of downtown, lit up like a wedding cake at night, to drive under the building using her very own official parking card.

  Barrie charged up the escalator from the garage and breezed past the huge decorative globe in the center of the domed lobby. Ten-foot-high murals towered above her—her cousins would say everything towered above her, but she had a long history of ignoring them.

  She rode the decadent Deco elevator up to the sixth floor and felt her heart lurch a little as the ancient contraption jerked, then settled.

  Somethin
g was up; she could tell from the second she stepped into the newsroom. The entire floor was buzzing.

  Her reporter’s mind scrolled through the possibilities. Terrorist attack? Stock market crash? Assassination?

  Or, seeing as this was L.A....Celebrity death?

  She grabbed the sleeve of the nearest scrambling reporter, tall, thin, redheaded Steve from Metro.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Saul Mayo,” Steve said breathlessly, and yanked his arm away.

  Saul Mayo, head of World International Pictures, one of the town’s six major movie studios.

  “What about him?” Barrie demanded, turning to yell after him.

  “Dead!” he called over his shoulder, and skittered away.

  Barrie relaxed, at least as much as she ever relaxed. Not that it wasn’t big news; in an industry town, a studio head in his relative prime dying was not just big news, it was huge.

  But it wasn’t the kind of news that she was in journalism to pursue. There was only one kind of story that interested her, and that was anything concerning the Others and the Otherworld.

  Because Barrie, along with her cousins Rhiannon and Sailor Ann Gryffald, was a very new member of a very old tradition. They were Keepers, from a long line of Keepers, charged with an ancestral duty to guard and keep peace among the communities of vampires, shape-shifters, werewolves, Elven and all non-human beings—the Others, who lived all over the world, hiding in plain sight among mortal populations.

  As anyone who knows anything about paranormal beings might guess, there was a large population of Others in Los Angeles. Just as mortals were lured by the shining promises of the city, so, too, were Others drawn here, some hoping to exercise their talents and find the spotlight as actors, musicians and other artists, some seeking protective camouflage in this famously eccentric town. There was a saying that “Everyone in California is from somewhere else.” So not true; Barrie herself was a proud native Californian. But in a community of outsiders, no one looked twice at someone different, and that made Others relatively safe in their conspicuousness.

  And almost since the first appearance of an Other, there had also been families born with the mark of certain beings, indicating their potential as Keepers: mortals with some of the powers of the beings they were marked with who could communicate and facilitate between the worlds.

  Keepers were sworn to uphold the Code of Silence: to keep the secret of the existence of the Otherworld. And to that end, if there was trouble or outright crime in the Otherworld that threatened to spill over into the human world and expose the existence of the Others, it was the Keepers’ duty to keep the peace—quietly.

  Barrie had been waiting to take on that duty all her life. Even so, it had been a shock when it happened so quickly, just months ago, when her father and his two brothers, Keepers of the shifters, vampires and Elven of the L.A. canyon districts, were called to the newly established international Council of Keepers in the Netherlands. Barrie, Rhiannon and Sailor had suddenly been thrust into the Keeping of the Canyon.

  Now, instead of the endless waiting and training, it was all real. Rhiannon and Sailor had already been instrumental in solving two recent cases, a series of murders committed by a power-mad vampire and the mystery of a rare blood disease killing off Elven.

  Every morning—well, some days more like afternoon—since Barrie had taken the oath in front of the local Keepers’ Council, she’d woken up with a fluttery feeling of exhilaration, almost like that feeling you get when you know you’re going to meet...someone. It wasn’t that she wanted trouble, or crime, of course not, but trouble was inevitable, and when it came, she would be ready for it.

  Until just recently she’d been struggling along doing “filler” stories on the Courier, and in the current journalistic climate, with newspapers shutting down all over the country, she’d felt lucky to get those. But a piece she’d done on the string of vampire murders that her cousin Rhiannon and Rhiannon’s now-fiancé, LAPD homicide detective Brodie McKay, had solved, had not just solidified her job but moved her up to the crime beat.

  Barrie’s job on the paper perfectly complemented her Keeper duties. As a crime beat reporter—well, actually, crime beat stringer, but she would get there eventually—she was able to get a first look at police reports to scan them for Other-related crimes that needed immediate attention or intervention, to ensure that: 1) humans were not harmed by out-of-control Others, and 2) the Others and the Otherworld remained a secret from the human population of the city.

  So, Saul Mayo the movie mogul, being a human, or formerly human, didn’t interest her.

  Good riddance, anyway, she thought uncharitably. Mayo hadn’t been known for his humanitarian efforts.

  She steered away from the swarm of her colleagues and was headed for the local crime editor’s desk when she saw the one person she didn’t want to see coming toward her.

  Mick Townsend.

  A newbie on the paper, and a thorn in Barrie’s side from the instant he’d shown up. For one thing, jobs were scarce enough without extra competition. But that was only the start of it.

  Townsend was waaay too good-looking to be a journalist, and too stylish, too. In a city of surreally gorgeous people, he was truly heart-stopping, if you liked men who were a combination of all the best parts of young Leo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman.

  Only movie stars were supposed to look like that; there was something almost preternaturally beautiful about him. Dark gold hair and green eyes under perfectly arched eyebrows, cheekbones that could cut glass. The way he held himself, that casually aristocratic elegance that was the territory of actors and, well, aristocrats.... He moved like a cat, strong as a panther and just as lithe. He was tall, too, which made Barrie glad she was wearing some serious heels—tonight, Chanel pumps to go with the little Balenciaga number she’d found in her favorite thrift store in Echo Park. Vintage was a particularly good look for her. People were smaller then, too.

  Mick Townsend stopped right in her path, blocking her way and towering over her in an alarmingly commanding way. “Gryffald.”

  She put up all her defenses as she coolly replied, “Townsend,” and was proud that she didn’t blush.

  “You’re looking very Audrey Hepburn tonight,” he said lazily, and looked her over, a direct examination that managed to be slow and sexy and aloof all at the same time, which didn’t help her state of mind at all.

  She sidestepped him and kept walking toward the crime editor’s desk. Unfortunately, he turned and walked with her.

  “A lady on the scent of a story, if I ever saw one.”

  “Looks like there’s only one story tonight,” she said, glancing at their huddled coworkers.

  “Ah, yes. The Prince of Darkness. Requiescat in pace,” Townsend added. Rest in peace.

  But there was a bitter quality to his voice that belied his words, and made Barrie stop and look at him for a moment; it seemed more than mere journalistic cynicism, but some deeper feeling.

  Interesting, she thought. I wonder what that’s about?

  “But that’s not a story you’re interested in,” he said.

  “No point. Even if he was murdered, they’re not going to give it to a rookie like me,” she answered innocently. “Enjoy your night.”

  She sidestepped him and continued to her boss’s desk where she snagged the police blotter while he paced and talked on the phone a few desks down. She caught his eye and held up the blotter, and he nodded at her distractedly. Now that she’d checked in, her time was hers for the rest of the night.

  She had a desk of her own in an anonymous row of desks, and she settled down at it with the blotter while her coworkers swarmed on the Mayo story.

  Unfortunately, her hormones didn’t settle down with her; her pulse was racing out of control from that brief encounter with Townsend.

  What kind of name is Mick Townsend for a journalist, anyway? she thought irritably. It sounded more like a rock star. And she had a rule: no
musicians, no actors. In L.A., that was simple survival.

  But she didn’t really think Townsend was an actor. She had darker suspicions: he was a spy from corporate, skulking around to find more people to give the ax. The newspaper would be all of three pages long by the time the suits were through with the bloodbath; it seemed never-ending these days, the worst time in the world to be a journalist. She’d had to fight tooth and nail for the tiny bit of turf she had on the paper.

  Fortunately, as a Keeper, she had more than a passing acquaintance with tooth and nail, or fang and claw, or just about any variation on the above. And bloodbaths, come to that. When a person dealt daily—or at least weekly—with the loves, lives, deaths and turf wars of vampires, werewolves, shape-shifters, Elven and whatever supernatural creatures happened to present themselves, a little backbiting among journalists was small potatoes.

  Well, okay, it wasn’t the backbiting that was the problem this time, it was Townsend’s charm.

  Barrie really hated the fact that he made her uncomfortably aware that she hadn’t had sex in...she didn’t even want to think about it. Except that she was being forced to think of it—constantly. With Rhiannon engaged to Brodie McKay and Sailor newly engaged to nightclub owner Declan Wainwright, the House of the Rising Sun was a literal hotbed, licit though it might be. Barrie frowned and thought darkly, Might as well rename it House of the Rising—

  All right, enough of that, she told herself, and forced herself to stare down at the police blotter.

  The list of the night’s crimes was already long: Burglary/Theft from Motor Vehicle. Grand Theft. Vandalism. Battery. And the usual collection of oddities: the owner of a La Brea Avenue business reported that someone tipped over a Porta Potty and attempted to break into a storage barn; a Vista Street woman reported a female who had delivered pizza to the address the night before had shown up at 2:00 a.m. with blood dripping from her nose and asking for money; a resident of Orange Grove Avenue reported an unknown person stole four solar lights and a garden gnome from his yard.