The Shifters by Alexandra Sokoloff Page B

years, give or take? If she was doomed to be with a shapeshifter, at least she could find one who was actually in town more than once every hundred years, couldn’t she?
    Case glanced at her, as if suspicious that she was being so compliant. “What is this really about? What are you up to, cher ?”
    She sighed. “We’re alike, Case. You’ve said it before. We understand each other. Maybe there’s nothing so wrong with that.”
    He nodded thoughtfully and tightened his grip on her hand.
    They turned down the next street—Dumaine—and Caitlin thought, I should have known. Dumaine was the most overtly magical street in the Quarter, at least if you were going by square shop footage. There were voodoo shops and witch shops and vampire/ghost/cemetery tour shops, and even one that veered toward the Satanic.
    Case stopped in front of one of the witchcraft shops, The Occultist, and opened the door for her with mock-gallantry. Caitlin shook her head at his sudden chivalry and stepped past him into the shop. She’d been there before, of course. It catered a little too much to the dark side for her own taste, starting with the blatant pentagram and messages painted on the sidewalk outside, but it was popular with the teenagers and pagans.
    The outer shop was small, holding mostly books and wands and jewelry; it did its real business in the back rooms, where readings and séances could be had for the right price.
    Case put a hand on her back and walked her through the shelves, past a few tattooed patrons in black clothes and dyed black hair, past the counter where he nodded to the pierced and studded black-clad clerk falling asleep on his stool at the register, and lifted the back black velvet curtain to allow Caitlin into the back of the shop.
    She felt a shiver as she stepped into the narrow, candlelit hall, a frisson of unease and anticipation. There were several shadowy doors leading off it; she could hear several people chanting behind the first. She had a weird sense of being in an old-time brothel, only a psychic one. Step right up and pay for yourplea sure. And in New Orleans, who was to say that this hadn’t been a real brothel at some point? Sex and the supernatural so often crossed; it often felt like the same energy was at the heart of both.
    Case had moved down the hall and opened the last door, and now he was standing there waiting for her. Caitlin moved toward him, stepped past him into the room.
    The long, rectangular room was black—painted-black ceiling, black floors and black candles in standing candelabra provided the only light. As Caitlin’s eyes adjusted to the dancing flames, she saw that the room was dominated by an oval table in the center of the floor, on which were placed a bell, book and candle, ancient accoutrements of the séance.
    There was a sagging couch at the far end of the room, and on it was a body that could have been a vampire, so still it was and so pale the face, and with long, shimmering dark hair….
    Danny. Asleep or dead…but strangely angelic in the candlelight.
    At that moment Caitlin’s heart broke for the innocence in him.
    And then she felt fury. Her brothel image had been correct. Case was pimping Danny out, selling his extraordinary gifts to any bidder.
    She turned on Case, and her rage must have beenevident, or he was reading her, because he caught her wrist before she even knew she had raised her hand.
    â€œHe makes his own choices, cher . Do you really think he doesn’t?”
    â€œI think you push him down the hole,” she said, trying to pull her arm away.
    But he held her hard, blue eyes gleaming.
    â€œAnd don’t you want the same thing from him now as everyone else?”
    Caitlin felt a rush of confusion—and guilt….
    And then a soft, dreamy voice came from the dark at the other end of the room. “Is that Cait?”
    Both she and Case stopped their fighting, like parents