Читать книгу Keeper of the Night - Heather Graham, Heather Graham - Страница 8

Perception, to paraphrase the old saying, is nine-tenths of the law.

And so the world happily—well, mostly happily—accepts the truth of that. And, perception, of course, is the main duty of those born to be Keepers and maintain order among the paranormal races.

As centuries slipped by, man became a “show me” species and lost his belief in what he couldn’t see plainly with his own eyes, and that was good for all the decent and law-abiding creatures. As the twenty-first century progressed, populations exploded. Human beings covered the earth, with birth rates at an all-time high.

And other beings flourished, too, learning how to coexist in a world where the magic of the earth and skies was no longer recognized, and human credence was more and more limited to one particular sense: sight. Many people began to lose faith not just in the unexplainable or unknown, but even in their own omnipresent God.

While those of an…unusual bent had once headed strictly to places like New Orleans, where even many among the human population believed themselves to be vampires or other denizens of the night, many places in the world became the destinations of choice for the truly different. The well-known among the races—vampires, werewolves and shapeshifters—were ready to expand their territory, as were Others who had once chosen to remain in their native lands, the Elven, gnomes, leprechauns, fairies and more.

With that expansion came the need for an international council, the first of its kind, to keep order, and Keepers from across the world were selected to meet at a secret rendezvous in order to construct a code that would be universally accepted. They would serve as the last word when it came to events that could disturb the status quo, because even the Otherworld races considered the most vile and beastly in human mythology were trying to blend in and survive.

With so many of the most experienced Keepers serving on the council, some of the most promising young Keepers were thrown into difficult situations with little warning.

And since so many of the paranormal races still liked to settle where the abnormal was the norm, where theatrics abounded, even the most absurd people and situations frequently went unnoticed, it was no wonder that the population of the Otherworld exploded off the charts in one particular place: La-La Land, also known as Hollywood, California.

City of dreams to many, and city of lost dreams for too many others. A place where waiters and waitresses spent their tips on head shots, and the men and women behind the scenes—the producers—reigned as the real kings.

So many of the paranormal races—the vampires, the shifters, the Elven and more—traveled there, and many stayed, because where better to blend in than a place where even the human beings hardly registered as normal half the time? With so much going on, no one set of Keepers could control the vast scope of the Greater Los Angeles Otherworld, and so it was that the three Gryffald cousins, daughters of the three renowned Gryffald brothers, were called to take their place as peacekeepers a bit earlier than had been expected.

And right when L.A. was on the verge of exploding with Otherworld activity.

Hollywood, they were about to discover, could truly be murder.