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Keeper of the Dawn
Heather Graham
A deadly killer on the loose…Alessande Salisbrooke has heard that human sacrifices are being carried out in LA by the followers of a shape-shifting magician. As a Keeper, Alessande understands the risks of investigating, but she can’t shake the feeling that the killings are tied to a friend’s recent murder…With the help of Mark Valiente, a dangerously sexy vampire cop, Alessande narrowly escapes becoming a sacrifice herself. But as the bodies pile up, drained of blood, one truth becomes clear: no one – not even those you care about the most – is who they seem.
His bride.
She lay upon the altar. Her face was alabaster, and her hair was gold, flowing behind her, beneath her, and falling in curls from the altar where she lay as if on a white pedestal at a wake.
Her eyes were closed, and she lay in beauty, as if she were sleeping.
But she wasn’t asleep.
A red ribbon seemed to adorn her neck, but it wasn’t a fashion accessory.
And it wasn’t a ribbon.
It was a line of blood. Blood that streamed from her throat to the floor.
He screamed, but his scream was silent, no matter how hard he tried to make it into sound. He fought the mist and shadow mire that held him down as he tried to run to her, but he couldn’t reach her…
“Mark!” The sound of his name was like an off button for the scene unfolding in his mind.
About the Author
New York Times bestselling author HEATHER GRAHAM has written more than a hundred novels, many of which have been featured by the Doubleday Book Club and the Literary Guild. An avid scuba diver, ballroom dancer and a mother of five, she still enjoys her south Florida home, but loves to travel as well, from locations such as Cairo, Egypt, to her own backyard, the Florida Keys. Reading, however, is the pastime she still loves best, and she is a member of many writing groups. She’s currently vice president of the Horror Writers’ Association, and she’s also an active member of International Thriller Writers. She is very proud to be a Killerette in the Killer Thriller Band, along with many fellow novelists she greatly admires. For more information, check out her website, theoriginalheathergraham.com.
Keeper of the Dawn
Heather Graham
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Dedicated with deep appreciation
to Katherine Ware Wolniewicz.
Thanks for all you do!
Prologue
Illusion and Truth
Mark Valiente slowly became aware of himself, as if he were emerging from a trance where he had forgotten all movement and sense of place. He heard music, the volume slowly rising in his head. It was beautiful music—harps and violins, guitars and an organ playing while a drum kept the beat. He recognized songs, popular and classical, being performed as if for an audience.
Mist seemed to clear around him, and he realized he was in a church. It was beautiful, old, designed in the Gothic style, with elegant stained-glass windows. As he walked in, he saw that it was crowded with people. The men were dressed in suits, and the women were beautiful in dresses of what he thought of as spring colors, white and pastels, as well as hats and heels. Their heads turned, and they all smiled and looked benignly at him.
He walked down the aisle. Dead ahead, he saw that Brodie McKay was there, near the altar, grinning sheepishly and watching him as if Mark were about to do something that would change the world. The place, the people, the music, the very vibe…everything was absolutely beautiful, filled with light and promise. Colors seemed to spill through the stained-glass windows and paint the church, the red velvet runner, and everything and everyone around him, in a flow of bright and gentle tones. He glanced to his side, and he didn’t see the people in the pews. Instead he saw a rather pale reflection of himself in one of the windows—which, of course, with the light streaming through, wasn’t really possible. But there he was. Dressed in a charcoal-gray, somewhatold-fashioned tux, red vest with a white shirt beneath. His tawny hair was neatly clipped and his face shaved. He almost smiled, thankful that he had cleaned up well for the event.
The event…
It was a wedding. His wedding. He would walk through the church and greet the crowd, and take his place next to Brodie, who was certainly his best man.
And then she would walk down the aisle.
Yes, he was waiting for her. He felt as if he were trembling; he had fallen in love. She was beautiful, and he dreamed of lying beside her naked, feeling the softness of her skin and the desire she awakened in him. And the way he felt when they’d made love and when he awoke to see her eyes. He was going to marry her…and she was the dream that had filled his soul. This moment, this marriage, would be consummate magic, an affirmation of all that lay between them.
He knew that he loved her.
He just…
…didn’t know her name. Didn’t even know who she was.
Somewhere in the back of his mind he mocked himself for the daydream.
He wasn’t even dating anyone in particular.
And yet…
He could feel this; it wasn’t just a vision in his mind’s eye. It seemed to be something that was real to all his senses and in his soul.
Somehow he knew that they had chosen music from Zeffirelli’s 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet for that moment when she would walk down the aisle.
But even as he moved forward, the light from the windows began to change. What had been bright now turned to dark, swirling purple and shades of gray. What had seemed like a glow of happiness and expectation filling the church became fear and dread. He saw the people around him, saw the smiles fade and the horror creep onto their faces… .
And then those people evaporated. Brodie was gone. The music was strident and off-key, quieting to silence as the shadow colors merged to near-total darkness, leaving odd shapes and illusions to creep and crawl in the midst of a gray miasma.
He was still in the church. The only color that remained was the red runner beneath his feet. Before him, he saw something on the altar. Something in a shimmering mist of crystals and pearls and white.
His bride.
He felt his limbs grow heavy with fear and denial. He tried to run, but the fog was like sludge, and he couldn’t reach her quickly enough. She was lying upon the altar, her face alabaster and her hair gold, flowing beneath her head and shoulders and falling in curls as if on a white pedestal at a wake.
Her eyes were closed and she lay in beauty, as if sleeping.
But she wasn’t sleeping.
A red ribbon seemed to adorn her neck, but it wasn’t an accessory.
And it wasn’t a ribbon.
It was a line of blood that streamed from her throat to the floor, and then ran and created the very runner beneath his feet.
He screamed, but his scream was silent, no matter how hard he tried to make it into sound. He fought the mist And shadow mire that held him back, and he tried to run to her, but he kept slipping in the blood. Her blood. And the shadow creatures seemed to be holding on to him, throwing their heavy weight against him, keeping him from moving forward. She was dead, or dying, and he couldn’t reach her… .
“Mark!” The hushed sound of his name was like an off button for the scene unfolding in his mind.
He started as someone poked his arm.
He blinked. It had been so real, that…well, vision was the only word he could think of.
“Let’s go.” That was Brodie speaking.
Time, Mark knew, was a deceptive concept. That vision had seemed to go on forever, but, he realized now, only split seconds had passed in which he had either dozed off or been daydreaming. He wasn’t in a church; he was in an unmarked police car parked off the road cutting through Starry Night Cemetery, and he and Brodie had been in the car, drinking coffee to stay alert—there was irony for you—since four in the afternoon.
Now his partner had seen something, something he should have seen, as well.
Brodie was already out of the car. Mark quickly followed suit.
Brodie headed for the Hildegard vault. Built by Sebastian Hildegard in 1920, it now housed several dozen bodies. Bodies belonging to a long line of lords and ladies of illusion and their various offspring.
Shapeshifters. Hell, yeah, they made great magicians.
Brodie motioned to him, and Mark nodded; they’d worked together often enough over the years to develop a silent shorthand. Brodie would take the front, while Mark slipped in by the rear door. Brodie had the power of his strength, while they both knew that Mark had a different means of entry. He’d perfected the powers of his kind years ago and was almost as adept at illusion as the Hildegard family.
They parted ways. Starry Night had been a private cemetery for the first seventy-five years of its existence, until Able Hildegard had taken over the family’s holdings at his father’s demise. The cemetery had been sold, and the then-living had scrambled to buy up plots and vaults so they might rest eternally with the famous who had found their way into the glorious grounds where illusionists and stars of stage and screen—silent and otherwise—had come for the peace of the ages. The truly dead did lie here, while others merely…rested. But, most of the time, it was a place of peace.
Or had been.
Until the living had begun to go missing and then turn up dead—and the trail of clues had led them here.
As Mark neared the iron-gated rear entry to the grand mausoleum, he could hear chanting. He edged closer, at first just listening and letting his eyes adjust so he could see what was happening inside the imposing vault. Night had fallen, but there was light within, spawned from torches that burned in the hands of those who stood around the sarcophagus of Sebastian Hildegard.
The marble lid of the sarcophagus was sculpted to resemble the grand patriarch of the family; in effigy Sebastian lay with his hands folded over his chest, the long flowing robe of a magician almost real due to the energy of the artist’s creation. But as Mark watched, a caped figure, with a golden face mask, stepped forward carrying a burden—a woman. She was blonde, and she wore a white halter dress. With her hair falling around her, it was impossible to tell whether she was unconscious…or dead.
Her fingers twitched. So, she wasn’t dead, Mark thought.
Yet.
No sign of Brodie, but the chanting in the tomb was growing louder. Friends in the Otherworld of the Los Angeles area had warned them that they’d been hearing tales about the old Hildegard tomb. There was a cult growing up around the famous magician, a belief that blood sacrifices made on the altar of his sarcophagus would bring him back to life, and bring stardom, power and glory to those who worshipped at his feet.
Bull!
A dead shapeshifter was a dead shapeshifter.
But that didn’t mean there weren’t those out there who were willing to believe.
The woman was draped over the marble effigy of Sebastian Hildegard.
He feared they were out of time.
The gate was locked. No matter. It was old and easy to force. The iron hinges must have been kept well-oiled, because they didn’t even squeak until he was in, and once there, he was ready.
“LAPD! Stop where you are!” he ordered.
Someone let out a shriek of fury. A flutter of cloth and shadow erupted in the room; the woman was left behind as figures began to scramble and torches fell.
“There are silver bullets in this gun,” Mark warned. “Stop!”
That wouldn’t mean a lot to a number of those here, but to some—the Others in the group—it would be fair warning.
Something flew at him. It was a caped skeletal figure with a monstrous face, screaming as it moved. He raised his customized gun, aimed and fired just as it reached him. The thing disappeared, and his bullet crashed into the concrete slab of a tomb in the wall.
One figure tried to race past him, a human. He went down in a whining sprawl as Mark casually punched him, and then Mark cuffed him quickly before tackling another. The place was in chaos. Mist filled the room, and a horde of hooded figures and insubstantial shadows came at Mark, screeching incoherently. In the background, he could hear humans screaming and crying, followed by the sounds of Brodie intercepting those who tried to escape by the main entrance.
The fog began to clear. He met up with Brodie, and they looked around. Five humans—three men and two women—lay cuffed on the ground. The Others had gone, vanished, disappeared into thin air.
Or the mists of illusion.
“Maybe one of them will talk—tell us something we can use,” Brodie said. Even he was breathing hard.
“Maybe,” Mark agreed. But they both knew they had failed. Whoever was at the head of this mess wasn’t one of the human beings lying cuffed on the floor And waiting to be taken to the station.
But the head of this particular operation was a shapeshifter. And they had missed him.
Or her.
“The woman…She can’t be dead… . They needed her alive,” Mark said, stepping over a cuffed man to reach the tomb of Sebastian Hildegard.
He lifted her carefully. Blond hair fell around her shoulders, revealing her face.
He nearly froze.
He’d already seen her tonight.
He’d never seen her in the flesh before, but…
She had been the woman in his daydream, the bride at his blood wedding… .
“Alive?” Brodie asked him anxiously.
Her eyes opened, and she stared at Mark. They were sea-green and beautiful, and she looked disoriented.
Then she screamed and began to fight him, and she was damned good at it, belting him in the jaw and raking her nails across his face in fury. She stood on her own now; she seemed to have the strength of a thousand demons.
“Hey!”
Brodie came to his aid, catching her arms. “We’re the cops! We’re here to save you.”
As Brodie spoke, they heard sirens in the night; his call for the bus, to haul those they had caught to lockup, was being answered.
The young woman blinked. She inhaled, staring at Mark. He realized suddenly that she wasn’t human; she was Other. She was Elven.
Brodie whispered, “My God—Elven,” just as Mark thought it. But then, to Mark’s amazement, Brodie added a name. “Alessande Salisbrooke!”
Maybe it was natural that Brodie knew her; he was Elven, too.
She spun and looked at Brodie, and let out a sigh of relief. “Brodie. I didn’t realize—”
She stopped midsentence and stared at Mark, heat and anger emanating from her. “Vampire,” she said. “And you’re a cop?”
