“Sailor, would you mind giving me a ride home?”
“My car is blocking yours,” Mark Valiente said to Sailor. “I can give the Elven a ride home.”
The Elven?
Alessande was speechless. The last thing she wanted to do was get in a car with the vampire cop who was behaving as if she was a schoolgirl with no sense.
But before she could protest, Sailor said, “Mark, that would be great of you. Declan will be here soon—we’re having dinner with a few of his shapeshifter friends, and it might be even more important now to see if any of them knows anything. Alessande is right up Mulholland Drive. I mean, I wouldn’t mind at all, but since you offered…”
“No problem,” Mark said. He smiled at Sailor, as if he felt real affection for her. She smiled back at him.
Great, Alessande thought. They were all just wonderful friends here. No doubt Declan Wainwright, a friend of Sailor’s long before he’d fallen in love with her, also respected Mark Valiente.
If she turned the ride down, she would only appear to be unreasonable and unpleasant.
“Thank you,” she said regally.
“I’ll get her home,” Mark said, “and then Brodie can meet me at the old Hildegard Studio and we’ll check it out.”
“I’ll go with you,” Alessande said.
Brodie protested. “What are you, Alessande? A glutton for punishment? I’ll give Mark some time to get you home, and then he and I—and only he and I—will look around the studio. I understand what you’re saying about the police, but Mark and I are not your usual cops.”
Did it matter, she wondered, if she were there, so long as Brodie and Mark could help, if needed, while searching the place? She couldn’t avoid feeling, however, that she had done the work; she was the one with the passion to save a life—and they were just taking over.
She determined not to waste time and energy arguing anymore.
“They took me yesterday—they meant me to be a sacrifice. But you—and they—underestimated my abilities. I would have gotten out. The thing is, I believe Regina was meant to die last night before they caught me snooping around. That means she’s probably still alive. But for how long? We have to find her.”
“We’ll search the old studio thoroughly, Alessande,” Brodie promised her. “If she’s there, we’ll find her.”
“I doubt she’s being held there any longer,” Alessande said.
“Then we’ll find the clues that will lead us to where she is being held. Not to mention that we arrested several people at the mausoleum,” Brodie said.
“You already interrogated them for hours,” Alessande said. “I know, because you kept me sitting there the whole time. Luckily I had some of your human colleagues to…talk to. Let’s see, the tall ‘dude’ from Texas, along with his sister and girlfriend, claim to have met a man in a coffee shop who told them about a really cool role-playing ghost tour. Yeah, they were a lot of help. Then there was the junkie who didn’t even know he’d been there. And last, the college student who had come to take photographs for the college paper to use for an article on old Hollywood. They were a lot of help.”
“Someone has to know something,” Mark said.
“You arrested five human beings. I doubt a human being is running things,” Alessande told him.
“True enough. But right now we’re looking for Regina,” Mark replied. “And we’re in a better position to do that than anyone else, even you, Alessande. You’re not a one-woman army. We can help, so let us.”
“All of us can help,” Rhiannon told her.
“Help? The way you talk, only the police and Keepers are any use. Those of us who aren’t part of those groups need to be good little Others and stay out of the way.”
“Alessande, be reasonable. We need to act fast if we’re going to break this case,” Sailor said. “We need to bring all of the councils up to speed, make everyone in our community aware of what’s going on, since it seems as if at least one rogue Other is involved.”
We know that Others are involved, Alessande thought. She opened her mouth to say so, but Mark beat her to it.
“Sailor, Barrie, I believe that shapeshifters are involved and—”
Barrie interrupted him with a weary groan.
“And,” Mark repeated, “perhaps vampires. I didn’t see any Elven other than Alessande—though the Others in the congregation managed to disappear pretty quickly, and God knows a seasoned Elven can teleport in the blink of an eye. But I think it’s possible that there’s a conspiracy among those Others who resent the fact that the international council of Keepers is now working on establishing a universal legal code.”
“We’ll have to get in contact with the rest of the L.A.–area Keepers about this,” Rhiannon said. “And we’ll have to call our own councils to discuss the matter. Someone out there somewhere knows something. We just have to find out who.”
“And anyone who’s not equipped or trained to deal with criminal activity needs to stay out of it,” Mark said, turning to look at Alessande.
She fought hard to control her temper.
Maybe it didn’t help that he was so tall. As an Elven, she stood eye to eye with most men, but not him. Valiente was six foot four or so. He probably made a good cop. He was muscular and imposing, with ink-dark hair and the yellow-gold eyes that were frequently found among his kind, plus many striking features.
The better to terrify jaywalkers, she couldn’t help but think.
“Shall we?” he offered.
She walked to the door and paused before turning back. “Brodie, if you and Mark are both going to the old studio, who’s going to continue interrogating the humans you brought to the station?”
“Brodie already questioned them while you and I were speaking with the lieutenant,” Mark told her. “Besides, you’re the one who just said that they were basically worthless as sources of information.”
“I know I did, but…didn’t you learn anything? I couldn’t hear everything that they were saying to Brodie,” she said.
“Strange, it sounded like you did,” Mark said casually.
“Most of them thought it was a show, something to amuse the tourists,” Brodie explained. “The junkie said he thought he’d joined up with a religious group performing a ritual. Only thing he heard that impressed me was that he thinks they believed they could bring Sebastian Hildegard back to life—that he’s a new messiah.”
“And he thought nothing of an ostensibly unconscious woman lying on top of a sarcophagus?” Alessande asked.
“He thought you were part of the group, that you were just there to greet Sebastian when he came back to life,” Brodie told her. “He thought the knives were merely symbolic.”
