Keeper of the Moon - By Harley Jane Kozak Page 0,89

and I’ll be there within twenty minutes. My business in Santa Barbara won’t take long.”

Sailor stared. “You can’t get from Malibu to Santa Barbara and back in under three hours, not on a Friday afternoon.”

“I’m not driving. I’m flying.”

“In what? A helicopter?”

“I can shift, Sailor. I’ll become a bird.”

She stared. “Are you serious?”

He nodded. “I’m very good. I’ll show you sometime. You’ll like it.” He kissed her quickly, stopping her questions. “Promise me,” he said, “that you’ll go from here to the beach house and nowhere else.”

A phrase popped into her head. The one who can fly is not to be trusted. But it couldn’t mean Declan.

“Promise?” he said.

“Promise me,” she countered, “that you’ll be back for me as fast as you can.”

“I promise,” he said.

“Then so do I.”

Chapter 15

Sailor found Darius at an inside table in the Waterfall Room, for which she was grateful. She was sure that the only reason she was keeping her ocean aversion at bay—so to speak—was the bracing effect of having been with Declan for those few minutes. Even then, she’d had a whole building between her and the ocean view. Sitting outside would be tough.

Darius had a pile of contracts in front of him. He looked up as she approached and then stood. And they say chivalry is dead, she thought. Her godfather might be a cold bastard, capable of all manner of ruthless behavior, but nothing interfered with his manners. He pulled out her chair and then took his seat again.

“Well?” he said.

Might as well dive right in, she thought, before she lost her nerve. “Last month your assistant, Joshua LeRonde, had in his possession a vial of the pathogen I’m infected with.”

He raised an eyebrow. “And?”

She was taken aback. “This isn’t news to you?”

Darius leaned back in his chair. The blue of his dress shirt accentuated the pale perfection of his skin, his sharp cheekbones, his aquiline nose. “It is, in fact. Perhaps you’d care to share the source of this story.”

Sailor took a deep breath. “Catrienne Dumarais. She called it—the Scarlet Pathogen—by another name.”

“Shúile scarióideach.”

“Yes.”

He stood. “Let’s take a walk.”

She felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach. “No, I—”

“Not on the beach, my dear,” he said, putting his contracts into a briefcase. “I won’t torture you. But I’ve been in this restaurant quite long enough for one day. Packaging a film is tedious work. This particular director likes to eat while doing business. I kept his martinis coming and was able to talk him into some things that he would not have agreed to sober.”

As he talked, he was leading her out of the restaurant so smoothly that she had no room to protest further. When they passed the maître d’, Darius handed the man his briefcase. She wondered if he’d paid his bill earlier, or if he was so famous that he got to just wander off, like a pope or a president, not bothering with the mundane details of life.

He guided her down a series of steps that led not to the beach, which was some distance away, but to a residential road crowded with small, and no doubt expensive, houses. Walking here was less anxiety-producing than sitting high up in Geoffrey’s, with its panoramic views. The sea smell was sharp and the surf disturbingly loud, but the latter would make audio surveillance difficult, and that, Sailor guessed, was the point of the exercise.

“This vial of shúile scarióideach to which you refer,” Darius said without preamble, “surfaced recently. It was, in fact, buried treasure. Do you recall the Malibu fires of 2007?”

“Yes,” she said.

“A house off Malibu Canyon Road burned to the ground. The owners, disheartened, left town. Last winter the property was sold. As the debris was cleared away, a fireproof safe was discovered, itself an antique, although not nearly as old as what it contained. I imagine the previous owners had no knowledge it was buried on their property. I learned of this discovery, I’m sorry to say, too late to acquire the safe or its contents.”

“How did you learn of it?”

“My assistant, Joshua, has a cousin. Like Joshua, a shifter, but one of some...renown.”

“A breugair?”

He smiled. “Very good. Joshua’s cousin found it necessary to leave Los Angeles a year or two ago, but he returned last month and did a job for client. He borrowed Joshua’s car to do it. When Joshua learned the nature of the job, he thought it might interest me. He was right. At that point I did some