A Study In Shifters Read online

  Yet, although she defended me fiercely in public, I had seen the disappointment in her eyes that night. I had seen her heart break. The Big Betrayal hadn’t just caused Amaranth her life. It hadn’t just ruined me—it had also torn my mother and I apart.

  Thoughts of that night made my knees buckle, and I couldn’t be weak, not now, not with Balthy at our door.

  “Duchess.”

  I moved to the corner, where I could look at the hallway, and saw Rollins standing there, a smug look on his face. He bowed for my mother, but stiffly, almost like mocking her.

  “Why are you here, Balthazar? I didn’t expect you.” Mother kept her tone neutral, her head held high, looking as regal as a queen.

  Balthy smirked, glancing around as if he wanted to memorize every little detail of our penthouse. He probably already pictured himself moving in once he grabbed what little power we had left and took our throne from us. “It’s quite an urgent matter, I’m afraid,” he said. “And part of it involves your daughter.”

  This caught Mother off guard. Balthy probably didn’t notice it, but I saw it in the way she clenched her jaw. “What do you want with my daughter?”

  “I prefer to not have to repeat myself. Miss Holmes, if you would please show yourself.” He looked straight at the corner I was hidden behind. Curse those snakes and their superior sense of smell.

  My jaguar growled in approval—my inner animal didn’t like snakes either.

  I revealed myself and strode toward them, trying to channel some of my mother’s genes, trying hard to look as queenly as she did. My inner jaguar chuckled at my feeble attempt. Shut it, my mental voice snapped at the jaguar. “What’s the matter?” I said out loud.

  “Miss Holmes,” Balthy sneered as he caressed the top of his cane, and I already knew whatever news he had for me, it wasn’t good.

  “I’m afraid the Conclave has decided that despite your test earlier today, we’re not yet confident that you’ll manage to behave accordingly in the field and that we won’t have a repeat of earlier events. That’s why we’re assigning you to a test case.”

  This was even more shocking than my mother’s display of affection earlier. A test case? So, they’d lied to me. They still wouldn’t let me back in. All the good I’d done for them in the past years had been eradicated by the one time I screwed up. They questioned me, my abilities, and it made me furious because it made me doubt myself even more—and I couldn’t take that right now. If I lost the last ounce of self-esteem I still had, it would probably kill me. My jaguar wanted to rip Balthy apart, and my inner animal’s reaction made my own anger turn into rage.

  “The Conclave told me that if I could solve the case they presented me with, I would be reinstalled as a member,” I reminded him, trying my best to stay calm. They couldn’t go back on their word now. They needed to reinstall me. If they didn’t, I would never be able to redeem myself. I would never be able to make up for the hurt I’d caused.

  “Yes, but in light of the terrible events of your last case, we’ve decided a test case is in order before we can fully grant you member privileges again.”

  “What do you mean with a ‘test case’?” Mother said before I could ask anything else.

  Rollins nodded at her and leaned on his cane while he spoke. Like an evil supervillain in a cheap movie, he walked around with a gold-encrusted cane, as if to show the entire world just how wicked he was. “It means we will send a senior agent, whom I handpicked myself, along with Miss Holmes, to keep track of her actions while she’s solving her next case. If the agent reports back positively, then she’ll get her old privileges back and can go back to solving cases on her own.”

  “You’re putting me under supervision?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  “Yes, Miss Holmes.” He folded his hands on top of the cane. He was enjoying this moment so much, the smug self-satisfaction oozed from his face. “Once we’ve established you are trustworthy enough to work on your own again, we’ll drop the supervision.”

  I usually wasn’t one for violence, but my inner jaguar wanted to rip him apart with her claws. Balthy looked as pleased as a cat who’d hunted down a mouse, and unfortunately for me, this time around I was the mouse.

  My jaguar roared at the metaphor, obviously not liking the fact that for once, I wasn’t the cat doing the hunting.

  “Also,” he said, his sneer growing even wider, “we already have a test case all picked out for you, Miss Holmes. This matter will also be of interest to you, Duchess.”

  Mother raised her eyebrows. Conclave matters rarely demanded her personal attention.

  “What matter would that be?”

  Rollins tapped his cane on the floor. “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss the case right here, Duchess. But the Conclave has invited both of you to our headquarters. A limousine is waiting downstairs for us.”

  Mother’s gaze clouded, and I shared her worry. In all the years I’d worked for the Conclave, only two times had a case come up that they deemed important enough to formally brief my mother—and the previous time had been when my cousin died. They sent monthly reports to Mother and the other clan leaders, detailing all the cases they’d worked on. These reports served to keep the clan leaders in the loop of what crimes were being perpetuated by or on their subjects. But to invite Mother personally to a meeting with the Conclave was beyond exceptional. To invite her to visit our headquarters in the Catacombs? That had never happened before. Whatever was going on, it was something big.

  I didn’t trust Rollins, and I was confident he’d orchestrated the Conclave going back on their original promise and putting me under supervision. However, although I would rather trust a scorpion than this man, he couldn’t be lying about this case being serious.

  And if it was serious enough that the Conclave would involve my mother…

  My knees felt like Jell-O while I followed after Balthy and my mother, and wondered what in God’s name was going on.

  A shiver of dread rolled across my spine, and whatever it was, I hoped and prayed that it didn’t involve Mannix coming back to haunt me again.

  Chapter Three

  Balthy, Mother, and I stood outside the entrance to the catacombs under the shadow of the magnificent Notre Dame, the neo-gothic cathedral towering over the Ile de la Cité. Deep below the streets in the underground labyrinth known as the Catacombs, the Conclave resided, far away from prying eyes, in a world below the real world.

  Around us, night had fallen. Streetlights illuminated the Paris streets. I felt at home here, on these familiar streets where I’d grown up, and I’d stood in this very place probably fifty times before. Despite the horrible news Rollins had just delivered, I felt calmer than I had all day.

  My jaguar not so much, though. The prospect of being cooped up in the Catacombs put her on edge, and she paced back and forth restlessly inside me.

  The darkness outside was nothing compared to the pitch-black hellhole waiting for us when the door leading to the catacombs opened, though. The door resembled a vault, three times as thick as a regular door and crafted from massive stone. Balthy knocked, and the entry slowly creaked open like a vampire’s tomb.

  We entered the catacombs, and my heart pounded in time with that of my jaguar’s. Mother shivered next to me as the unearthly cold rising from the depths below enveloped us—from her shivering I guessed that her own inner animal didn’t like the catacombs, either, but unlike me, Mother was a lot better at hiding it. I pulled my hoodie closer around me and followed Balthy as he led us farther into meandering hallways now and then decorated by bones and skulls scattered around.

  “Is it always this cold down here?” Mother whispered to me. “And I feel… numb.”

  Numb just about summed up the number one reason why my jaguar hated being in this dark place.

  “Being in the Catacombs dulls your senses,” I told her. They were a gigantic maze that I often compared to the labyrinth of the minotaur in Crete – once you entered them, you couldn’t get
out. Not unless you knew every route or took a red rope with you, the way Ariadne had in the Greek legend.

  Every time I entered those tunnels, I lost all sense of direction. The narrow tunnels twisted and turned, compasses never pointed in the right direction, and even my jaguar got all turned around—something it didn’t like at all. I didn’t have this sense of being lost anywhere else.

  “Saldor told me that an ancient spell cloaks the Catacombs.” My voice echoed off the walls as I spoke. “It provides the same effect of losing direction to anyone without the official sigil of the Conclave.” Even as a member, I didn’t have a sigil—only the Sigil Bearers did.

  As if to illustrate my point, Balthy lifted his hand, a large, gold-encrusted ring decorating his finger. “If you want to make it to the Conclave’s gathering chambers below the earth, you’ll need a Sigil Bearer like me to guide you,” he explained to my mother.

  “Basically,” I said, ignoring Balthy’s comment, “our loss of direction means the spell is working properly, and that ought to be a good thing…” But it didn’t feel like a good thing at all, and judging from the expression on my mother’s face, it didn’t make her feel good either. For me, it made me feel stupid. Worthless. Weak. I hated being weak.

  I had never felt as weak as when I watched my cousin die, unable to do anything, unable to move, to help her… When she reached out for me in her final moments…

  I balled my fists, my nails digging into my skin—

  Stay in the present, Marisol. Don’t let the past haunt you.

  In the faint light of torches lining up the walls, Balthy looked smug, a smile frozen on his face, his thin moustache curling up in pleasure. “It feels a little claustrophobic down here in the tunnels, doesn’t it?” he asked. “And at the same time, it feels like no one else exists in the world. One could get lost here and never be found…”

  The way he said it sounded almost like a threat. Snakes didn’t mind small places, but being as sharp as he was, he must’ve realized that jaguars and other catlike animals despised being down here, and Balthy being Balthy, he liked to use any weakness we had against us.

  Mother was right next to me, and I caught her heart skipping a beat. If not for my superhuman senses, I would probably have missed it, but now I realized she was obviously as uncomfortable being in the catacombs as I was—and Balthazar’s veiled threat didn’t help.

  Besides the losing all sense of direction problem, the Catacombs were also pitch-dark, and even with my enhanced sight and the occasional flaming torch, some corners and walls were still cloaked in an impenetrable darkness. Noises travelled in odd directions too here under the ground, making you think that something was to your left while it was actually to your right. And the musty, rotting aroma floating through the hallways dulled all other smells.

  I counted how many times we’d turned left (seven) and right (nine), but still I was willing to bet that later, when we left the vaulted room Rollins had led us into and went back outside, the number of turns would’ve changed. As if the catacombs themselves forged new hallways and rerouted old ones. Fascinating but dangerous all the same.

  A door loomed at the end of the next tunnel, easily three meters high and resembling the entrance to a castle. Balthazar opened the door for us, and then waited in the tunnel until we’d passed through before he entered and closed the door behind himself.

  The vaulted room looked like a medieval dining room. In the center stood a massive oval-shaped table with the Council members sitting around it. The Conclave had hundreds of members, and among those members, a select fifty formed the Council. The Council decided about the everyday operations of the Conclave, of which agent got which case, and so on. Next to the Council, you had the Sigil Bearers—an even more select few—and the Court, an agency that dealt with punishment and imprisonment.

  A gigantic world map decorated the table, and wooden figures were positioned all over the map – field agents working on cases. When I was sent out again I, too, would be represented by one of these wooden figures.

  The Council members got up as we walked in and bowed their heads respectfully for my mother.

  Saldor approached us, his long, earth-colored robes gliding behind him. He, like the other Council members, wore the ceremonial robe they always adorned themselves in during Council meetings, a remnant of the past and the early days of the Conclave. He nodded at me, took my mother’s hands in his, and shook his head, a sorrowful look flashing across his features. “It’s dire news, Leanne.” He was one of the few people allowed to use Mother’s first name, and it felt strange still to hear him say it.

  A sense of dread crawled up my spine, and even my inner jaguar whined at the prospect of this dire news.

  “Thanks,” Mother said, opening her mouth to say something else. Before she could, though, Balthy gestured for her to sit down at an empty seat at the table. I sat down, too, and Balthy took his own seat opposite ours, flanked by two other snake shifters. I didn’t know either of them personally, but I knew they were snakes and probably related to Rollins too—same shape of eyes, slitted pupils, same sharp nose.

  “What is going on?” Mother asked, cutting to the chase.

  Saldor cleared his throat. “Murder, I’m afraid. Elise Felton, the daughter of Michael and Gina Felton, has been murdered in her own school.”

  Mother’s skin paled visibly, and I gasped out loud. Elise Felton. I’d seen her before, several times in fact. She was a leopard shifter. The entire Felton clan was. Royals, too. Powerful. Fierce. Not easily killed.

  Thinking about Elise being murdered instantly conjured up images of Amaranth. Although Elise was my age, not as young as my cousin was, Amaranth had been strong too. Powerful, too. Yet, it hadn’t helped her in the end.

  “How?” Mother breathed, recovering before I could. Her question pulled me back to the present, away from images of the past.

  “We don’t know yet.” Saldor put his hands on the table and pointed at one of the wooden figures—one conveniently shaped as a leopard. “Elise was murdered while attending the prestigious Waynard Academy, a boarding school in England. Local police started an investigation, and we have some people on the scene too. Forensics specialist Morant has traveled there to investigate the body.”

  I knew Morant—we’d worked together before. She was a spider shifter, a very clever but almost emotionless woman in her thirties with more degrees than I could count on both hands.

  “There’s something even more concerning,” Balthazar Rollins interrupted. He smiled as wide as the Joker from Batman, and it made my blood run cold. Whatever he was about to say next, every fiber in my body told me it spelled trouble for my family.

  “All the evidence points to the murderer being…” He paused for a second, looking directly at me and my mother before he uttered the last words. “A jaguar shifter.”

  Mother’s mouth dropped open, and I felt her tense beside me. I took a deep breath. Don’t show weakness. Don’t show surprise. We jaguars had a weak enough position as it was, with the jaguar throne’s heir—aka me—being a half-blood shifter. This could ruin everything. Not only was it terrible news a girl was murdered, but also that a jaguar could be involved.

  While I managed to look somewhat stoic, my inner jaguar was freaking out. Howling, tearing its claws against the walls of my resolve, terrified and lashing out at everything it could, most notably the doors of its cage.

  I saw the pyramid my mother had so carefully constructed for us, built on prestige and family name and power, collapsing. A murder of a shifter by another shifter… I was wrong to think it spelled trouble; it spelled doom for all jaguar shifters.

  But I had to focus on the here and now, on the case, and shove my personal feelings aside. It was what my father would’ve done. It was what I ought to do, what my mother needed me to do.

  I balled my hands into fists until my nails pricked into my skin. Keeping my voice as level as I could, I addressed Balthy. “And what evidence do you have to state
such claims?”

  Balthy cleared his throat and stood up. He obviously relished his moment in the spotlight by the way he took his time to glance at each person around the table before setting his gaze back on me. “Morant already began the autopsy on the body, which confirmed the wounds could only be inflicted by a jaguar. I can show you some evidence that supports this case.”

  He clapped his hands, and the projection screen behind him lit up. An assistant pressed Play on the laptop positioned in front of it. Gasps and shrieks erupted from around us as a grotesque image was projected onto the screen. It showed a young girl’s dead body with large lacerations tearing up her entire torso. Her face was blurred out, and I was thankful for that—I hadn’t been prepared to look at the probably pained expression forever etched on her features.

  She looked a little like Amaranth. Alive, there wasn’t much resemblance. But dead… Her pale, bloodless lips, her heartbroken eyes as her corpse fell down…

  “There are, of course, a great deal more pictures.” Balthy’s voice yanked me back to the here and now, and for once, I was glad he spoke. “But I’m sure no one would like to see those.”

  A few of the Conclave members gagged, and one uttered, “I’m going to be sick.” The image made me nauseous, too, but it also piqued my interest in the macabre, weird way all murder cases did.

  My jaguar retreated to the back corners of my mind, allowing my other side, the logical Sherlock Holmes side of my brain, to take over.

  “How are you so certain it’s a jaguar?” I got up from my seat and walked swiftly toward the projector before my mother, Rollins, or anyone else could stop me. “How familiar are any of you really with the genus pantera?” I said, referring to the large genus group that encompassed my own shifter species. “Can you really tell the difference between a jaguar attack and a leopard attack? And how about cheetahs? Cougars? Heck, even lions and tigers.” I shook my head. “You can’t tell that from a picture. I’ve done extensive research into different bite marks and claw marks, the different species and the minimal differences dividing all of them, and even I can’t tell.”