fair-mindedness had long since reasserted itself. Sailor was who she was: impulsive, occasionally reckless, a rule breaker. It was part of her charm. But he was hypervigilant on the subject of drugs; his mother, whom he had loved with the wholehearted devotion of a ten-year-old, had died of an overdose. She hadn’t meant to, but she was dead nevertheless, leaving him with the knowledge that he must never fall in love with a woman with a drug problem.
But Sailor didn’t have a drug problem. He knew it as soon as he’d calmed down. She had a pathogen problem. And a crisis requiring her to burn the candle at both ends. Síúlacht was to the Elven what a triple espresso was to a mortal. Or a couple of triple espressos.
But she hadn’t told him about it, and that had pissed him off.
Once outside the Hollywood station, she headed for a skinny stretch of grass and took off her shoes and socks, letting her feet sink into it. The sky was overcast and she looked up and breathed deeply. A squad car pulled up, and a policeman hopped out and opened the back door. Jonquil, his leash flying behind him, bounded over to them, knocking Sailor onto the grass in his enthusiasm. She thanked the cop and retrieved her keys, then hugged Jonquil. Finally she stood and for the first time looked at Declan.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You’re welcome. Come on, I’m parked the next block up.”
She fell in beside him but kept a bit of distance. “How did you find me?” she asked.
“Reggie Maxx. He didn’t have the cash to bail you out.”
She threw him a sideways glance. “Why would Reggie call you?”
“He and I are doing some business together. He knows I’m a friend of yours, and knows I have money.”
She went back to not quite looking at him. They headed toward Hollywood Boulevard with Jonquil now between them in the manner of a chaperone. “I’ll pay you back,” she said.
“Why? You plan on skipping bail?”
That got a smile out of her. But she was being uncharacteristically quiet.
“How bad was it for you, being locked up?” he asked.
“You mean the Elven aspect of it? Bad. But I don’t suppose anyone loves jail.”
“But you didn’t teleport out. You must have wanted to. So that took discipline.”
Sailor shrugged. “It would have been stupid. And getting arrested used up my quota of stupid for the day. For the week, in fact. Actually, getting my friend Julio killed—”
“Sailor.” He touched her shoulder and could feel her resistance, but she let him stop her, facing him there on the sidewalk. Jonquil, looking up at them, sat.
“What?” she asked.
“We all have our time to die. Julio’s was three o’clock this morning. Yes, you can let that bury you in guilt and grief. Or you can accept that it’s part of life as a Keeper and move on. And maybe save someone else from dying.”
“I am moving on.”
“You’re taking crazy risks. Breaking the nose of a security guard.”
“That wasn’t a risk. That was just me getting mad. He was physically restraining me.” She looked pointedly at his hand on her arm.
He smiled and let go. They reached his car a minute later and with difficulty persuaded Jonquil to squeeze into a space not intended for a human, let alone a large dog. Sailor told him where she’d parked the Peugeot, and he pulled into midday traffic. “I talked to Brodie twenty minutes ago,” he told her. “They lifted prints off your car that match prints found in Gina Santoro’s trailer.”
“That’s not much of a surprise, is it?”
“Not to us,” he said. “But now every Other in law enforcement knows about the car bomb and that it’s connected to the celebrity deaths, which means every Other in the general population knows, too. There’s a spate of emergency Council meetings coming up today. Everyone but your Council, presumably, because you met just yesterday. Rhiannon’s already at hers, and I need to be at mine in half an hour, along with Barrie. We’re going to be devising a contingency plan in case the Elven turn against us.”
Sailor stared at him. “Is that likely to happen?”
“It could. The clues are pointing to a shifter. The first attack on you—”
“—could have been a vamp. It could easily have been a bat that clawed me.”
“But the killer wasn’t a vamp,” Declan pointed out. “So shifter’s a good theory. It would explain how one guy could get onto three closed movie sets, for one thing,