bride.
He felt his limbs grow heavy with fear and denial. He tried to run, but the fog was like sludge, and he couldn’t reach her quickly enough. She was lying upon the altar, her face alabaster and her hair gold, flowing beneath her head and shoulders and falling in curls as if on a white pedestal at a wake.
Her eyes were closed and she lay in beauty, as if sleeping.
But she wasn’t sleeping.
A red ribbon seemed to adorn her neck, but it wasn’t an accessory.
And it wasn’t a ribbon.
It was a line of blood that streamed from her throat to the floor, and then ran and created the very runner beneath his feet.
He screamed, but his scream was silent, no matter how hard he tried to make it into sound. He fought the mist And shadow mire that held him back, and he tried to run to her, but he kept slipping in the blood. Her blood. And the shadow creatures seemed to be holding on to him, throwing their heavy weight against him, keeping him from moving forward. She was dead, or dying, and he couldn’t reach her… .
“Mark!” The hushed sound of his name was like an off button for the scene unfolding in his mind.
He started as someone poked his arm.
He blinked. It had been so real, that…well, vision was the only word he could think of.
“Let’s go.” That was Brodie speaking.
Time, Mark knew, was a deceptive concept. That vision had seemed to go on forever, but, he realized now, only split seconds had passed in which he had either dozed off or been daydreaming. He wasn’t in a church; he was in an unmarked police car parked off the road cutting through Starry Night Cemetery, and he and Brodie had been in the car, drinking coffee to stay alert—there was irony for you—since four in the afternoon.
Now his partner had seen something, something he should have seen, as well.
Brodie was already out of the car. Mark quickly followed suit.
Brodie headed for the Hildegard vault. Built by Sebastian Hildegard in 1920, it now housed several dozen bodies. Bodies belonging to a long line of lords and ladies of illusion and their various offspring.
Shapeshifters. Hell, yeah, they made great magicians.
Brodie motioned to him, and Mark nodded; they’d worked together often enough over the years to develop a silent shorthand. Brodie would take the front, while Mark slipped in by the rear door. Brodie had the power of his strength, while they both knew that Mark had a different means of entry. He’d perfected the powers of his kind years ago and was almost as adept at illusion as the Hildegard family.
They parted ways. Starry Night had been a private cemetery for the first seventy-five years of its existence, until Able Hildegard had taken over the family’s holdings at his father’s demise. The cemetery had been sold, and the then-living had scrambled to buy up plots and vaults so they might rest eternally with the famous who had found their way into the glorious grounds where illusionists and stars of stage and screen—silent and otherwise—had come for the peace of the ages. The truly dead did lie here, while others merely…rested. But, most of the time, it was a place of peace.
Or had been.
Until the living had begun to go missing and then turn up dead—and the trail of clues had led them here.
As Mark neared the iron-gated rear entry to the grand mausoleum, he could hear chanting. He edged closer, at first just listening and letting his eyes adjust so he could see what was happening inside the imposing vault. Night had fallen, but there was light within, spawned from torches that burned in the hands of those who stood around the sarcophagus of Sebastian Hildegard.
The marble lid of the sarcophagus was sculpted to resemble the grand patriarch of the family; in effigy Sebastian lay with his hands folded over his chest, the long flowing robe of a magician almost real due to the energy of the artist’s creation. But as Mark watched, a caped figure, with a golden face mask, stepped forward carrying a burden—a woman. She was blonde, and she wore a white halter dress. With her hair falling around her, it was impossible to tell whether she was unconscious…or dead.
Her fingers twitched. So, she wasn’t dead, Mark thought.
Yet.
No sign of Brodie, but the chanting in the tomb was growing louder. Friends in the Otherworld of the Los Angeles area had warned them that they’d been hearing tales about the old Hildegard tomb. There was a cult growing up around the famous magician, a belief that blood sacrifices made on the altar of his sarcophagus would bring him back to life, and bring stardom, power and glory to those who worshipped at his feet.
Bull!
A dead shapeshifter was a dead shapeshifter.
But that didn’t mean there weren’t those out there who were willing to believe.
The woman was draped over the marble effigy of Sebastian Hildegard.
He feared they were out of time.
The gate was locked. No matter. It was old and easy to force. The iron hinges must have been kept well-oiled, because they didn’t even squeak until he was in, and once there, he was ready.
“LAPD! Stop where you are!” he ordered.
Someone let out a shriek of fury. A flutter of cloth and shadow erupted in the room; the woman was left behind as figures began to scramble and torches fell.
“There are silver bullets in this gun,” Mark warned. “Stop!”
That wouldn’t mean a lot to a number of those here, but to some—the Others in the group—it would be fair warning.
Something flew at him. It was a caped skeletal figure with a monstrous face, screaming as it moved. He raised his customized gun, aimed and fired just as it reached him. The thing disappeared, and his bullet crashed into the concrete slab of a tomb in the wall.
One figure tried to race past him, a human. He went down in a whining sprawl as Mark casually punched him, and then Mark cuffed him quickly before tackling another. The place was in chaos. Mist filled the room, and a horde of hooded figures and insubstantial shadows came at Mark, screeching incoherently. In the background, he could hear humans screaming and crying, followed by the sounds of Brodie intercepting those who tried to escape by the main entrance.
The fog began to clear. He met up with Brodie, and they looked around. Five humans—three men and two women—lay cuffed on the ground. The Others had gone, vanished, disappeared into thin air.
Or the mists of illusion.
“Maybe one of them will talk—tell us something we can use,” Brodie said. Even he was breathing hard.
“Maybe,” Mark agreed. But they both knew they had failed. Whoever was at the head of this mess wasn’t one of the human beings lying cuffed on the floor And waiting to be taken to the station.
But the head of this particular operation was a shapeshifter. And they had missed him.
Or
