Ravenous

by Forrest, V. K.

  “Please? Just read it. You should know what everyone is talking about, at least.”

  Kaleigh reluctantly accepted the book and crammed it in her backpack.

  “And then we can watch the movies together. I have all the DVDs!”

  “I’m not watching the movies with you,” Kaleigh warned.

  Katy exhaled. “Change of subject. You taking the SATs tomorrow?”

  “My mom paid the money, but I don’t know.” She started picking her schoolbooks up off the floor and sticking them into her backpack.

  “You don’t know what?”

  “I don’t know if I’m taking them.”

  “You don’t know if you’re taking your SATs? Kaleigh, this is our last chance! College applications have to be in soon. You can’t go to college if you don’t take your SATs.”

  Her books packed, Kaleigh worked the zipper of her backpack. The stupid thing stuck all the time.

  Katy watched her. “You’re not really considering not going to college, are you? We finally all get permission to leave town for college and you don’t want to go? Are you out of your cotton-pickin’ ”—she glanced around the mostly empty shop to make sure she saw no humans—“bloodsucking mind? Me, I’m going. I’m going as far as I can get from here. Stanford’s at the top of my list.”

  “Stanford isn’t on the list. We can only go to colleges approved by the General Council. It has to be a place where they think we’ll be safe, where there’s one of them close enough to get there if we get into trouble.”

  Katy sat back in her chair, crossing her arms over her chest. “Guess they better add Stanford to the list, because I just might get in. And if I do, I’m going, and those old farts on the Council aren’t going to stop me.”

  “Weren’t you one of those old farts a couple of years ago before you were reborn?”

  “We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you, Kaleigh.” She leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Why wouldn’t you go to college?” she asked, softening her tone.

  “I have responsibilities here. The world’s changing. It’s getting harder and harder to keep our cover and the humans seem to be cranking out more psychos every year. It’s more dangerous when we’re spread thin, all over the world. I think my place is here.”

  “Bullshit, Miss Wisewoman. If you’re going to help us keep our cover, you need to be a part of the world. You need to know what we’re facing.”

  Kaleigh knew Katy made a good point; she just didn’t know if it was good enough. “Mom already paid, so I guess maybe I’ll go.”

  “Great. Can you drive? We have to be at Cape Henlopen High School by seven forty-five.”

  “You grounded again?” Kaleigh laughed, finishing her iced tea. “What’d you do now?”

  “Total misunderstanding.” Katy got up, taking her backpack off.

  “I can borrow Arlan’s truck. He and Fia went somewhere for the weekend.”

  “Cool. See you in the morning.” She pulled a couple of wrinkled bills out of the pocket of her jeans and left them on the table. “My turn. You pay next time.”

  Kaleigh took her time getting her stuff together. As she pulled her sweatshirt over her head, she watched the window across the street. She could still feel Liam’s presence. It was hard to miss. He wasn’t a weirdo like Katy said, but he was one of the darkest souls she knew. She respected him a great deal. She even liked him, but he scared her sometimes.

  She didn’t believe the nonsense about him eating those guys in Paris. But she had questions. And sooner or later, whether either of them liked it or not, she was going to have to walk through the door of the antiques shop and he was going to have to start talking.

  Chapter 2

  It was almost two in the morning when Liam’s cell phone rang, but he was still awake. Particularly vivid nightmares like the one the night before tended to cause insomnia in a man, or a beast.

  Still, the phone startled him. He didn’t get a lot of calls. He wasn’t even sure where his phone was. He rarely answered it, to the frustration of both his fellow Kill Team members and his mother.

  Who would call him at two in the morning while he was in the States?

  He got out of bed and walked toward the sound. By the light of the moon coming in through the bare window, he saw a pair of jeans on the floor. The jeans were ringing.

  He glanced at the lit screen on the phone. It didn’t identify the caller. He wasn’t generally a curious man; curiosity was dangerous, but he answered it anyway.

  “Yeah?”

  “Liam?” The voice was tiny and filled with emotion. It scratched the surface of his memory, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

  “This is Liam,” he said cautiously.

  “Liam . . . it’s Mai. I. . . Remember me? I came into the shop today. I’m sorry to call you in the middle of the night.” She took a breath. She had the quiet calm in her voice of someone on the verge of losing it. “I didn’t know who to call. Your number, it was on my hand. I . . . just dialed it without thinking.”

  He sat down, leaning against the wall; the floorboards were cool under his bare butt. “What’s the matter, Mai?” He was good in an emergency. The best.

  “The . . . the police are on their way. My uncle Donato. My dad’s brother who’s been living with us. He’s dead. Murdered.”

  Liam felt his jaw tighten, though the rest of his body remained relaxed. “Who killed him?”

  “I. . .I don’t know. Oh, God, there’s so much blood. You wouldn’t think an old, skinny man like him would have this much blood.” She seemed to be talking more to herself than to him now. “Who would do such a thing? Kill a harmless old man?”

  Liam thought he heard the sound of police sirens in the background.

  “Liam?” she whispered. “I’m scared. There’s no one else I can call. Could . . . could you come?”

  “Come?”

  “Here. I. . . don’t know if I can do this alone. I don’t want to get my cousins involved. Oh, God,” she muttered. “The police are coming and they’re going to ask questions and . . .” She let the sentence trail off into silence.

  Of course Liam couldn’t go to the human’s house in the middle of the night. He was sorry her uncle had been murdered, but that wasn’t his problem, was it? He was in enough trouble with the sept as it was; he couldn’t go running around in the middle of the night, running to the rescue of HFs. Not even pretty ones.

  “They’re here,” she whispered. “Could you please come?”

  It was on the tip of his tongue to say no. Surely there was someone she could call: a friend, a relative. But he could tell from her tone of voice that when they met, she had felt the same inexplicable connection he had. Had this been their fate from the moment she walked into his shop?

  He got her address.

  Liam didn’t like cops, policia, jingcha, gingchaat. Which was okay, because they didn’t like him either. He arrived on his motorcycle, a 1936 BMW R5 he’d taken off the hands of a serial killer in Berlin not long after the war. No need to waste such a great bike on a dead man.

  He parked a good way down the street and entered the property from the back. Dogs usually got chased away from crime scenes, but no one seemed to pay any attention to common housecats. No one noticed the tabby that walked past the six state and town police cruisers, the ambulance, and the fire truck. What the hell the fire truck was doing there, he didn’t know.

  He smelled the blood before he walked through the open door of Mai’s shop. She was right. It was a lot of blood. It was arterial blood, thick and sweet. He had to take a deep breath to keep from getting lost in the scent of it.

  Inside the cute little antiques shop was human chaos at its worst: local and state police, EMTs, the firemen who had apparently gotten lost on the way to a fire and stopped at a murder scene, neighbors who had slipped in before the police had time to put up the familiar yellow tape, all talking, walking in circles. Expressing their disbelief.

  Liam slipped und
er a nice pre-1900 Victorian rosewood sewing table to get a better look. Amid the mostly male voices, he heard Mai’s. She was talking softly, but he refused to allow himself to focus on her voice. It was too distracting. He padded to the body, then around it, taking care not to get his kitty paws bloody.

  In the end, they had killed the old man by simply slitting his throat. Once you cut the carotid artery, the victim has only minutes to live because the blood comes directly from the aorta, pumping hard from the heart. When you bleed out from your carotid, you don’t just leave a nice, neat pool of blood. It spurts. It splatters. On the floor, on your bathrobe, on the Sheffield armoire you were held against as your throat was cut. Bastards. Mai was right. Why would someone kill a harmless old man in a ratty flannel bathrobe? In an antiques shop in the middle of the night in a sleepy town in southern Delaware?

  Tail straight in the air, he leaned in to the body to get a better look at the only apparent wound on the body. The blood smelled heavenly.

  Upon closer feline inspection, he saw that there were, barely visible, additional marks on the old man’s neck, inflicted antemortem. Somebody had been trying to get him to talk. . . .

  Mai wrapped her arms around herself. Everyone was talking at once and she felt light-headed. They had her father seated behind the store’s counter, his little rat terrier cradled in his arms; an EMT was taking his blood pressure.

  “I want to see my brother.” Her dad kept saying it over and over again. “Where’s my brother? Where’s Donato?”

  “Ma’am?”

  Mai looked up at the state trooper addressing her. She hadn’t caught the question. “I’m sorry. What?” She wiped her snotty nose with the balled-up tissue in her hand. Her feet were cold. She was wearing her old terry scuffs, no socks.

  “About what time was it when you got up to check on your uncle?”

  “I. . .I didn’t get up to check on him. I got up to pee, and then I was thirsty, so I was going downstairs to get a glass of water. His bedroom door was open. That was when I realized something was wrong and I went in to check on him.” She didn’t tell them that the old man usually locked his door when he went to bed.

  “And what time was that?” He was taking notes, writing on a little pad of paper in itty-bitty handwriting.

  “Um. About one-forty. Maybe one forty–five.” She tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear. A lot of hair from her ponytail had come down and it kept falling in her eyes.

  “You searched the house for him first?” The guy was tall. Not bad looking.

  “Sure. I checked the usual places first: the bathrooms, the kitchen. When I didn’t find him, I checked the other rooms in the house.”

  “And you found your father, Mr. Ricci, but not your uncle?”

  “My father was asleep in his bed. He woke up when he heard me walk into his room. I asked him if he knew where Uncle Donato was and he said he didn’t. I told him to stay put and I would find him.”

  “And then you checked here? Why did you come into the store, Miss Ricci?”

  Okay, so he was cute, but he was also obtuse. Mai looked up at him, knowing it wouldn’t be a good idea to sound like a smart-ass, considering the circumstances. “Because he wasn’t in the house. It was the next logical place to look. There’s a breezeway between the house and the back door to the shop. I followed the breezeway and found the door unlocked.”

  “So you just walked in?”

  “It’s my shop. I just walked in.”

  “Were the lights on or off?” the other trooper asked.

  She had to think for a minute. “Off. I walked in, called his name, and flipped on the light switch.”

  “You weren’t concerned there was an intruder?”

  “My uncle wasn’t in his bed. The door to the shop was open and I keep a set of keys in the kitchen, which were missing. I assumed he’d used the keys to let himself in.”

  “Your uncle walk around in the middle of the night often?”

  She thought for a second, then lifted her gaze to meet the trooper’s. “Actually, he did. “

  He waited for her to go on. She waited for his next question.

  “And this is exactly how you found the body?” He glanced in the direction of Donato, still lying on the cement floor.

  “Right there,” she answered.

  “You didn’t move him, check for a pulse or anything?”

  “No, I didn’t touch him. It was pretty obvious he was dead.”

  “And how did you know he was dead?”

  Really obtuse.

  “That’s obviously a lot of blood.” Her arms still clasped around her, she motioned in that general direction with her elbow. “And his eyes were still open, only I could tell he wasn’t seeing anything.”

  “Hey! Get that cat out of here!” a voice shouted from the direction of the body. Someone was taking pictures. The flash kept going off.

  “Can you tell me what’s missing here in your store?” the trooper continued.

  “Not for sure, not without doing an inventory, but like I said when you first arrived, I’m sure that a chest of Italian silver plate is gone. It was there in the window.” She indicated the window the burglar had broken. He must have reached through it to unlock the dead bolt on the front door.

  “And your alarm system?”

  She sighed. She’d answered this question before, too. “I guess my uncle shut it off when he let himself into the shop.”

  “You’re trying to tell me your uncle was nutty enough to wander around in the dark in his bathrobe, but smart enough to shut the alarm off when he entered the building?”

  “You know anyone in the early stages of dementia?” she asked, trying to keep her building anger in check.

  “She’s got a point, Dan,” the other cop said. “My mother-in-law, she’s got Alzheimer’s. She knows exactly what day of the week and what time Dancing with the Stars is on, but she keeps eating cat food. The wet kind, out of the can.”

  Mai felt like she was going to scream. Uncle Donato was dead on the floor and she knew damned well they hadn’t killed him for silverware. But she wasn’t going to tell the cops that. Couldn’t. She took a breath. “You think I could go to the bathroom?”

  “Sure. I guess so.” The trooper made eye contact with the other one and they both nodded.

  Mai went to the little half bath in the back of the store. After she washed her hands, she splashed water on her face and glanced into the pretty little mirror over the sink. She looked scared. Maybe because she was.

  Her dad had been pretty unresponsive when the police arrived. Which was okay with her. She really didn’t want him talking to the cops before she had a chance to talk to him. But even if he hadn’t been out of it, she doubted he would have given them any information about Donato. The Ricci boys might have had their differences over the years, but they were still brothers with an oath of loyalty she’d never quite been able to understand.

  When she walked out of the bathroom, wiping her hands with a paper towel, she spotted Liam. The minute she saw him, she realized what an idiotic thing it had been to do, calling him. She didn’t know what she had been thinking. She hadn’t been thinking, of course. She had just wanted someone here, and she hadn’t wanted to involve her cousins, for more reasons than she could list, the first and foremost being that they had all been against Uncle Donato moving in with her and her father. So she had called Liam’s number. It was as simple and ridiculous as that. She rubbed at his phone number on her hand with the paper towel. It didn’t even smudge. Good old Sharpie.

  She wondered if she could just sneak by him and hope the cops sent him home. Which of course was silly. You don’t invite a guy to a murder scene and then give him the slip. She was lacking in dating experience these days, but she was pretty certain that was a hard and fast rule. Even on a first date.

  He didn’t give her the chance to give him the slip. He turned and looked at her, making eye contact with those intense, black eyes. “Hey,” he said quietly.


  He was smokin’ hot and she was embarrassed to have even noticed, given the circumstances. Narrow jeans, black sneakers, and a leather jacket. His hair was inky dark and a little long at the nape of his neck. Very European.

  She remembered him saying something about having just gotten back to the United States.

  “Hey,” she managed, letting her gaze slide to the floor. She crumbled the paper towel in her hand and bit down on her lower lip. She hadn’t cried yet. Not a tear, but suddenly she felt like the floodgates were about to open.

  Having some weird sixth sense, he saw it, too, and before she could muddle over the propriety of it, he opened his arms and she walked right into them. He was tall and strong and warm, none of which she was.

  “I . . . I’m sorry I called you.” His leather coat was open and she rested her cheek on the soft T-shirt he wore under it. She could feel his heart beating; it was strangely slow, compared to the pounding in her own chest. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  He didn’t say anything. No “it’s okay,” or “I’m glad you called.” He just stood there, his arms around her, giving her a minute to compose herself.

  Snuggled against him, it occurred to her that she was wearing nothing but a pair of flannel pajama pants and a long-sleeve T-shirt advertising a 5K she’d run in about a hundred years ago. No bra. Not exactly the way she wanted a cute guy or half the town to see her. But what exactly did a girl wear to her uncle’s murder?

  “Mai, I think they’ve got more questions for you,” Liam said finally. “You up to it?”

  “The sooner I answer their questions, the sooner they’ll leave?” she asked, reluctant to pull herself out of his warm arms and reenter the lion’s den.

  “Something like that.” He hesitated. “You’re best to just keep answering their questions straight up, but don’t volunteer any information they don’t ask for. That’ll just lead to even more questions.”

  That had been her thought exactly.

  “You’ll stay until they’re gone?” She backed out of his arms, looking up at him. He seemed like a confident guy. Trustworthy. Though just a little scary on some level; where she was getting that vibe, she wasn’t sure.