“Wildly high,” the detective admitted, his reluctance obvious. “He thought it was an anomaly.”
“An anomaly that just happens to present in every single one of the victims?” Ryder asked.
Jagger was silent, and Caitlin could tell Ryder’s words grated on him.
Ryder glanced at Caitlin, then back to Jagger. “We saw that last one die,” he said softly. “It looked like his heart was about to explode out of his chest.”
Now Jagger looked to Caitlin—for confirmation, she realized. She nodded silently.
Ryder nodded, too. “And that, right there, is your main clue. That adrenaline overdose is what happens when a walk-in leaves a body.”
Chapter 7
“A walk-in,” Jagger said sharply.
At the same time Caitlin demanded, “What’s a walk-in?”
“Other cultures have other names for them. Devas. Dervishes. Shadow people. Qlippoth.” Ryder’s voice echoed in the chilled room. “They’re disembodied beings, a formless archetypal energy that can take over human or animal bodies. It’s an amorphous energy that craves human form, but once it’s actually in a body, all it does is indulge its senses and wreak havoc, burning out the body so quickly that the human host dies of stroke or heart attack, just as in a massive drug overdose.”
Caitlin’s earlier distraction had disappeared; she was completely focused on the eeriness of what she was hearing and the gravity of the situation.
Ryder looked to Jagger. For a moment all jockeying for position was gone, and the shifter spoke colleague to colleague. “For some reason these particular entities cause a biochemical change in the human host that presents with symptoms of a meth overdose: massive adrenaline jolt, heart failure—but without quite the same resultant chemical residue. This is what you have to know. Drug and alcohol use make it easy for walk-ins to take over. They can most easily get into a human being when that person is weak or in an altered state of some sort: drunk, high, suicidal—or in the middle of sex.”
He didn’t look at Caitlin as he said the last, but she could feel his words sizzle through her body.
“So that makes pretty much everyone on Bourbon Street a target,” Jagger was saying.
“Give the man—excuse me—give the vampire an ice-cold goblet of blood,” Ryder said. Jagger gave him a lethal look but didn’t rise to the bait as Ryder continued. “Bourbon Street is as enticing to a walk-in as it is to a pickpocket or any other predator. Easy prey. And the…excesses of the arena make it easy for them not to be noticed by anyone around them. Weirdness abounds.”
Jagger’s ascetic face was deep in thought. “What are they doing here? Why New Orleans, suddenly?”
“They’re riding the trade winds,” Ryder answered. “There’s a whole group of them that are linked up together by now. I’ve been tracking them from Africa. They blew through the Bahamas, caused some pretty bad damage over late summer and early fall. Do some research into drug-related deaths and you’ll see—same pattern, spread out over various islands and jurisdictions.”
Caitlin could tell from his expression that Jagger would be following up on that immediately.
Ryder continued. “These are not normally the most conscious of beings, but there’s one in their midst which seems to have taken control of the herd. The others have for—whatever reason—coalesced around that one entity.” Caitlin was watching his face intently and saw that he darkened as he spoke. There was something more personal there than he was admitting to; she could feel it in the weight of his voice as well as see it in his expression. Ryder glanced at her briefly, as if feeling her scrutiny, then looked back to Jagger. “They’re following this one, and I think ‘it’ is specifically targeting New Orleans because the feeding is so good. As you said, if you’re looking for drunk, stoned or humping, Bourbon Street is the place to be. Especially on—” Caitlin felt a chill. “Halloween,” she murmured, finishing his sentence. Halloween in New Orleans was by no means the month-long party that Mardi Gras was, but as revels tended to do, it brought out all of NOLA’s bacchanalian fervor.
“Three days away,” she said, feeling ill.
“And every drunk, stoned tourist in town is up on Bourbon Street for the night,” Jagger concluded grimly. The three of them went silent, looking down at the corpse in front of them.
“We have to move fast,” Ryder summed up.
“What is this ‘we,’ Kemosabe?” Jagger asked him, his tone just this side of scathing.
Caitlin was jolted back to the present, surprised at his sudden vehemence.
“What the hell do you care what happens to this city?” Jagger went on.
Ryder’s face closed like a shutter. “That’s none of your business, vampire.”
“It is if we’re going to work together, shifter,” Jagger replied, equally cold.
“I have a job to do,” Ryder said evenly. “This city is where it led me. I have no attachment here one way or the other.”
Caitlin felt as if she’d been stabbed in the heart at his words, and the feeling was frightening. I can’t trust him. He doesn’t care. It’s all a job for him. She scrambled for detachment, to make herself cold. We haven’t done anything but kiss. Why should I feel torn apart?
“And who hired you for this ‘job’?” Jagger demanded.
Ryder didn’t budge. “That’s my business.”
“Then we’re done here, aren’t we?” Jagger said. The two of them faced off, stony and implacable.
Oh, good grief, Caitlin thought. This is why nothing ever gets done in the world. Men.
Even if neither of the men she was now looking at was a man at all, technically speaking.
Jagger turned on his heel to go, a move of dismissal. But Ryder had one more trick up his sleeve.
“You’re not quite done, vampire.”
There was such power in his voice that Jagger turned back. Ryder waited an infuriatingly long moment before he continued.
“I think that entity went after Cait specifically.”
There was instant, electric tension in the chilled room, a palpable blend of Jagger’s disbelief and Caitlin’s sudden jolt of fear.
“There was only one entity going after Cait, as far as I could see,” Jagger responded, his voice dripping sarcasm.
Despite her apprehension, Caitlin felt outrage at the men talking about her as if she weren’t even there. But before she could protest, Ryder was snapping back at Jagger.
“Joke about it if you like,” Ryder said, and his tone could have frozen water. “But once inside a body, walk-ins generally only care about their own pleasure, and the only things they notice are what’s right in front of them. They resort to violence only if someone or something is standing in their way. But that possessed tourist was stalking Cait—he followed her from Bourbon.”
Jagger was motionless, processing. Caitlin’s stomach was roiling, remembering the force of the tourist’s body barreling into her, knocking her down, the hands around her neck, choking the life from her….
Ryder’s eyes were boring into Jagger’s.
“So consider. If these entities want full reign of the city, and if they, or at least their leader, are aware of the Keepers, who do you think they’re going to want to neutralize first?”
Even through her own emotional reaction, Caitlin admired how Ryder seemed to have read Jagger, whose Achilles’ heel was Fiona. If there was anything that would keep Jagger engaged…
But in her own head, Caitlin was a million miles away already. Let the men fight it out on their own. She knew exactly what she needed to do next.
I have to talk to Danny. If we’re dealing with discarnate entities, I need someone who can look into the astral and see what’s really going on. If anyone can find these things…
She felt someone watching her, and looked up sharply to see Ryder looking at her, as if he could hear her thoughts. And for the first time she realized there was a good possibility that he could read her thoughts, or something like it. Not all shifters were psychic, but the more developed their other skills, the more likely they were to pick up on information while passing through the astral.
How psychic is he? Like Danny? If he were half, or even a quarter, as adept, he could be dangerous to her….
“All right,” Jagger said, drawing Caitlin’s attention back to the moment. “All right. What would you suggest we do next?”
Caitlin could tell how much it cost him to ask the question, and she had to admire his willingness to ask.
“If we can get hold of one of the walk-ins while it’s in a body, before the host dies, I may be able to bind it and force it to talk. We need to track down the lead entity.”
Caitlin could see Jagger’s mind working. “That means patrolling Bourbon,” he said, and reached into a suit coat pocket. “I need to make a phone call,” he said, and Caitlin could tell by the quiet anxiety in his voice that he was thinking of Fiona. Even as he speed dialed, he was stepping outside the room for privacy.
The instant the door closed, Ryder turned on Caitlin. “What were you thinking, just then?”
“Just when?” she asked innocently, and thought in triumph, So he can’t read my thoughts, not precisely.
“You know very well what I’m talking about,” he said roughly, and in two steps he was towering over her, taking her by the wrists. “What are you holding back?”
She tried to jerk away from him, but he simply pulled her against him, holding her wrists behind her back, his arms encircling her waist, immobilizing her.
“This isn’t a game we’re playing here,” he said.
“I’m not playing,” she snapped at him, and tried to push him away.
“Neither am I,” he said, as he continued to hold her against him, legs against legs, h*ps against hips.
She could feel the live heat of him, warming her body to the core, and his sheer raw power. There was no question that she would not go free until he decided to let her go, and as he stared down at her, Caitlin felt herself turning to liquid, knowing he was going to kiss her again.