LITMIR.BIZ

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alike, what is it we’re thinking?”

      His luminous green eyes met hers and held them. “I’m thinking about last night.”

      Immediately her heart was racing again, and she was finding it hard to breathe. She struggled for distance and control. “Last night was—inappropriate. Adrenaline rush, the circumstances…it happens, but it doesn’t mean anything. If you want to team up on this, then we have to focus on the case and the story.”

      For a moment she thought she saw a flash of amusement on his face, but he nodded seriously and said, “Per-fectly understood. Strictly business.” He held out a hand for her to shake.

      She hesitated, then put her hand in his. “Strictly business,” she echoed, even as a betraying rush of lust raced through her veins at his touch. She pulled her hand away quickly. “So, what are we thinking? About the case?”

      “That the same person killed Mayo and that poor kid,” he said softly, and she felt a jolt, realizing that he did know about Tiger, and more than that: he seemed to care. He continued, still holding her gaze. “That someone didn’t want the remake of Otherworld to go forward, so that someone hired Tiger to lure Mayo to his death, dose him with a fatal exotic cocktail, and then the killer fed Tiger the same stuff.”

      She had to hand it to him: it was exactly what she was thinking. But she wasn’t about to let him know that. Not yet.

      “Is anyone saying there was a third person in that bungalow at the Chateau?” she demanded. If he wanted to work with her, he had to prove he had something to offer besides lethal charm.

      “Not that I’ve been able to find out. Most of the rest of the town is so focused on Mayo they’re not looking anywhere else.”

      “And someone went to a great deal of trouble to make Mayo and Tiger look like unrelated cases,” she pointed out.

      “Someone who knows how the LAPD is structured,” Mick agreed. “Mayo’s case went straight to Robbery Homicide, while the Hollywood division detectives who caught Tiger’s case just accepted the obvious.”

      Damn, he was good. Barrie could feel herself weakening, even though she knew it was madness. But how much did he know? That was the question.

      “So, why do you think this someone used Tiger to get to Mayo?” she hedged, probing.

      Mick looked grim. “Mayo wouldn’t be the first power player to have a taste for underage prostitutes. Word is this Tiger had some kind of resemblance to Johnny Love,” he said distastefully. “Which explains the bellhop saying he saw Johnny with Mayo. Add a touch of pseudo necrophilia to Mayo’s list of perversions.”

      So, he’s assuming Tiger looked like Johnny Love. She was relieved, but also suddenly deeply conflicted.

      What am I doing? I can’t work with a mortal.

      It was against all the rules. One of her primary duties as a Keeper was to guard the existence of the Others. She couldn’t very well team up with Mick without revealing far too much unless she flat-out lied to him. And that was just too risky. As discreet as she knew how to be, it would be too hard to keep up the front if they were actually working together. She felt a kind of pang, too, a surprising realization that she didn’t want to lie to him.

      Yes, the real puzzlement here was this pull she had to work with him, even knowing that it would be nothing but trouble, that it would violate every aspect of her job.

      Mick was watching her. “What’s wrong?” he asked directly, and she realized she hadn’t said anything for several moments.

      “I just…I’m sorry, I have another appointment,” she said lamely. “Not related to the case,” she added quickly, in case he decided to follow her, although so far there didn’t seem to be any way to stop him. “But I have to go.”

      “Are you sure you don’t want to sit somewhere and talk?” he asked, and those green eyes were on hers again. “I think I can spring for coffee at the Farmers’ Market.”

      “Can I get a rain check?” she hedged, and immediately regretted it. Now she would just have to fend him off again. And the problem was, she didn’t want to fend him off.

      It was all too confusing. She had to think.

      “I have to go,” she repeated gracelessly, and left him, hurrying over the bridge, past the luxuriant fake white roses.

      She was upset enough over the encounter that she decided to drive straight home. She needed to remember who she was. It was absolutely crazy to bring a mortal into Keeper business; there was something wrong with her head that she had even been contemplating it. But she was sure her cousins could set her straight.

      She made one stop, though, on her way up toward the canyon: the great Amoeba Records on Sunset, where she bought a collector’s edition DVD of Otherworld.

      She had homework to do.

       Chapter 6

      Barrie staggered into the main house, her arms loaded down with bags of microwave popcorn, M&M’s, ice cream bon bons—all her favorite movie foods—plus a bottle of good red wine and the Otherworld DVD. She’d made another spur-of-the-moment stop on the way back to the house for munchies—might as well make work fun—and also called her cousins, requesting an emergency meeting. Luckily both of Rhiannon’s employers were Keepers themselves, though of different districts, and were accommodating of her sometimes unusual schedule. And Sailor didn’t have to be at the House of Illusion, her night job, this week because she’d landed a voice-over gig.

      “I’ve got treats, too,” Sailor told Barrie, standing by the butcher-block table in the kitchen and waving a knife. Barrie dumped her bags on a counter and peered over her cousin’s shoulder suspiciously. As usual, Sailor’s idea of treats was not Barrie’s—everything looked morbidly healthy and low-fat and sugar-free: cut-up fruit and vegetables and fat-free dips.

      Barrie sighed pointedly, and Sailor leveled the knife at her. “Just because you have the metabolism of a hum-mingbird…”

      Not true, of course, it was just that Barrie often forgot to eat. “I do some of my best thinking on sugar,” she justified, ripping into the M&M’s.

      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

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