Keeper of the Dawn

though.”

Mark nodded. “Yeah, well...hey. It’s just a car, right?” He knew that Brodie was laughing at him. Too bad. He really did like vintage Mustangs.

“We’ll go to the Hildegard estate,” Brodie said.

“You’d better get this one solved quickly,” Edwards told them. He shook his head. “I hate it when Others cause trouble. So messy. Damn.” He pointed a finger at them. “Move it!”

* * *

By the time the Gryffald cousins, accompanied by Declan Wainwright and Mick Townsend, made it up to the guest room in response to Alessande’s summons, the “change” that had taken place had already diminished.

“I’m completely confused,” Barrie said. “You changed? Into what?”

“A giant! An angry giant!” Merlin exclaimed.

“Elven don’t shift,” Sailor said flatly.

“You are Elven, right?” Rhiannon demanded.

“You know I’m Elven!” Alessande said. “And I didn’t change into an angry giant.”

“Okay, so—” Barrie continued.

“Angry giant,” Merlin insisted.

“All right, I’m worried—obviously, or I wouldn’t have called you up here. I...got bigger,” Alessande admitted.

“Fat?” Sailor asked.

“No—all of me. I was about seven feet tall...and I did look a little peeved,” Alessande said.

Declan spoke softly. “Baby shapeshifters and occasionally even shapeshifter Keepers do it sometimes,” he said softly. “When they’re hungry, scared...they suddenly appear bigger. Not giant, but...bigger,” he repeated. “As infants, they can’t control their shifting.”

They were all staring at her. “I’m not a shifter! I remember my mother, and she was Elven.”

“But your father died when you were very young,” Barrie said. “Are you just as sure about him?”

“Stop staring at me, all of you. I feel like a sideshow at the circus,” Alessande said.

“If we have children,” Sailor said, looking at Declan, “they’ll be...mixed.”

“Mixed Keeper—fairly common,” Declan said.

“Who was your father?” Rhiannon asked speculatively. “If he were a shifter Keeper, that might explain why you never showed the ability until now. Think about it. Every living creature—human, Other, animal—gets a quarter of his or her DNA from each grandparent. Sometimes a brown-eyed parent and a blue-eyed parent have a blue-eyed baby, and sometimes they have a brown-eyed one. And sometimes our Otherworldly powers come out later in life,” Rhiannon said.

“She can’t be half Keeper,” Barrie said. “She’s Elven—we all know Elven when we see one. Besides, if she’d been born to be a Keeper, she’d have the birthmark,” Barrie said. “We’re all born with the mark of the race we’ll grow up to manage and whose talents we’ll share.”

“There! I have no birthmark!” Alessande said. “And I’m not stripping to prove it.”

Declan laughed. Mick, a shapeshifter himself, studied Alessande. “Half-breed,” he told her. “You must have the mark somewhere. Somewhere you don’t see.”

They all stared at her as she insisted, “Hey, I meant it. No pat downs, no body inspections.”

“Where do people never see themselves?” Rhiannon asked, looking at Barrie.

“Um, the butt?” Barrie suggested.

“Stop!” Alessande protested.

Rhiannon laughed. “I wasn’t thinking of anything quite so—well, quite so whatever. I was thinking the bottoms of the feet.”

“It wouldn’t be too intimate or personal a question if we were to ask to see the bottoms of your feet, would it?” Declan teased.

“Knock yourselves out,” Alessande said, sitting at the foot of the bed and lifting her legs.

They all stared.

And then they looked into her eyes.

“What?” Alessande cried.

“Shapeshifter,” Barrie said softly. “You may be Elven, but you were also born to be a Keeper for the shapeshifter community.”

“She’s right. It’s faint, but the mark is there,” Declan said.

They all backed away, still staring at her. “Your mother never told you that your father was a shapeshifter Keeper?” Sailor asked her.

“No! I thought it wasn’t even acceptable for Others to...well, you know, have relationships with different races of Others until just recently,” Alessande said.

“Acceptable or not, I’m sure it’s happened throughout time,” Rhiannon told them. “People have always intermingled—whether it was socially acceptable or not.”

“And,” Sailor added thoughtfully, “while we may all want to believe we’ve magically become open-minded, the play Avenue Q has it right. Everyone is a little bit racist.”

Alessande winced, her lashes veiling her eyes. Yes, she admitted to herself, it was true. She herself had been down on Mark Valiente for being a vampire.

“Do you think they hid their relationship, afraid of what other...Others might think?” Barrie asked.

“My mother died when I was seven. Maybe she meant to tell me when I was older,” Alessande said. “Maybe she didn’t want me knowing—afraid of how I’d be accepted in the Elven world if I let it slip.”

“If you think about it, this is really a great thing,” Barrie said. “You have the power of the Elven and the power of shifting, too.”

“I can’t shape-shift. Whatever happened was a total accident. And that’s bad—really bad,” Alessande said.

“No, we’ll work on it. You need to practice, learn to concentrate,” Mick told her.

“You have Mick, Declan and me. We’ll help you,” Barrie assured her.

Alessande looked at them. And then the magnitude of what was happening slowly swept over her. She hadn’t known how to mind read or teleport as a small child; she’d learned from her mother and then from her stepparents. It was like learning to walk, to talk....

“You won’t be a shapeshifter,” Mick said.

“You’ll still be Elven,” Sailor assured her.

“You’re just destined to be a Keeper, as well,” Rhiannon said.

“Which means that you can master the ability to shift,” Barrie assured her.

And if she could do that, Alessande thought, how much more effective would she be to enter the world of illusionists—and the bizarre cult that had grown up around Sebastian Hildegard?

* * *

The Hildegard estate was a relic of old Hollywood, set on a hill and guarded by heavy iron gates—much like the House of the Rising Sun.

Sebastian Hildegard had built the place with materials brought over from the Bavarian section of Germany and had filled it with antiques from the same region. It looked like a truly Gothic version of one of Mad King Ludwig’s fairy-tale castles.

As Brodie maneuvered the car toward the drive, his phone rang. “Rhiannon,” he told Mark briefly, pulling over to take the call. He frowned as he listened, occasionally asking cryptic questions. “Really?...Is that possible?...What does it mean?”

When he hung up, he was silent.

“Well?” Mark demanded.

“It’s Alessande.”

“Is she all right?” Mark asked, wondering why his heart had started pounding so suddenly when he found her to be such a nuisance.