Undying

by V. K. Forrest

  But she was alone.

  Of course she was. It was better this way, really.

  The clock beside the bed said ten after ten.

  She stared at the water-stained ceiling tiles, realizing he’d probably been gone for hours. Good for him. He was one of the brighter ones. He understood his purpose, understood when he’d worn out his welcome. Macy hated it when she had to push men out the door.

  She got up and walked naked to the bathroom. As she passed the sink on her way to the john, she saw that there was coffee in the coffee maker. She touched her hand to the glass carafe. It was still warm. He had made her coffee? Then she saw the pack of powdered sugar donuts—they looked like they’d come from the vending machine in the hotel lobby.

  He left her coffee and donuts? The thought made her smile.

  Then, just as she turned to step into the bathroom, she saw a plastic cup. Filled with water, it held a single scraggly daisy.

  Flowers, too. Who was this nutcase?

  Macy lifted the flower from the cup of water and touched it to her cheek, wishing she still knew how to cry.

  “Mary Kay.” Arlan walked into the airy dining room and kissed the top of Fia’s mother’s graying head.

  “Arlan, thank Sweet Mother Mary you’re here. You’re a savior.” She beamed up at him. “Let me get you something to eat. You must be starved.”

  “Don’t get up,” he said as she started to rise from her chair. “Sit right where you are.” He touched her shoulder lightly, easing her back into her chair. “Eat your lunch. I’ll get something myself.”

  “Fia’s in the kitchen,” she called after him. “But I’m so glad you’re here. I told Fia you needed to come home. I knew you would know what to do.”

  “No word from Regan?”

  She shook her head, reaching for her glass of homemade iced tea with a sprig of mint in it. “Chicken salad in the ice box. Made with grapes and walnuts, just the way you like it.”

  “Bless you. I’ll be right back. You relax.” He pushed through the swinging door that led from the bed and breakfast’s dining room to the gourmet kitchen.

  Fia’s parents, Mary Kay and Tom, had been running some form or another of a hotel ever since they arrived in the New World hundreds of years ago. First it was just a coach stop, but later, an inn, then a boarding house and finally, in the seventies they remade themselves once again. With bed and breakfasts so popular with vacationing Americans, the couple made a healthy living in the seaside town of Clare Point as modern day innkeepers. Each day, Mary Kay baked and cooked and cleaned and played hostess, and Thomas sat on the back porch, smoking one cigarette after another, waiting until it was time to walk up to the pub for his daily dose of stout.

  Arlan found Fia standing at the kitchen’s center island, scooping chicken salad onto a bed of lettuce on a plate. “Hey,” she called as he walked in. She didn’t look up. She didn’t have to. She knew it was him.

  “Hey,” he called.

  “Chicken salad?”

  “You makin’? Sure.” He watched her take another plate from the cupboard. “Your mom said you haven’t heard from Regan. Fin heard from him?”

  Fin was the oldest of her siblings, after her. Besides Fin and Regan, there were actually three more boys, currently teens, who she also considered her brothers. The younger boys had been left orphans after the massacre in Ireland and Mary Kay had taken them in as her own children.

  “I haven’t talked to Fin. He’s on assignment, but I left him a message on his voice mail.”

  Arlan watched her tear lettuce from a head of Romaine and arrange it on the second plate. “Hey, I want a croissant.”

  She scooped chicken salad onto the lettuce. “Too bad. Too many carbs.” She offered him the plate.

  He looked down at the small serving of chicken salad on the lettuce. “But Mary Kay always makes me chicken salad on a croissant,” he protested.

  “Suck it up.” She walked past him, smacking him in the stomach with the palm of her hand as she went by. “Literally. You’re getting soft, my friend.”

  He pressed his free hand to his abdomen. He worked out regularly. He had great abs. What was she talking about? “I am not getting soft. Try me again. I wasn’t ready.” He thrust out his chest, sucking in his stomach.

  She returned the gigantic aluminum bowl of chicken salad to the restaurant-sized refrigerator. “You sure Regan didn’t say anything about going somewhere after Athens?”

  “Hey, we’re not done with the jelly belly discussion yet.”

  “We’re done.” Skirting him, she sidled up to a drawer and pulled out two forks. “Ma’s already got iced tea in the dining room.”

  He followed her through the swinging door. “He didn’t say anything about going somewhere else.” Upon his arrival in Athens, Arlan had met with Regan and the others briefly; that was the last time he had seen her brother.

  When Arlan spoke, he left out the name of the city where they had convened. Fia knew where the men had been because she was presently a member of the High Council, but Mary Kay wasn’t privy to that information. Thirteen sept members served the High Council at a time. To protect the town, certain facts regarding the criminals they stalked remained confidential. Mary Kay rarely knew where the sept sent her sons. The individual investigations were secret, as were the executions.

  Arlan took a seat at the massive antique oak dining table with seating for twelve, across from Mary Kay and beside Fia.

  “I’m sure Regan’s fine, Mary Kay.” Arlan took a bite of the chicken salad. It was good, but would have been better on one of her buttery homemade croissants. “You know Regan.” He kept his tone light. “He’s never where he’s supposed to be when he’s supposed to be there.”

  Fia’s mother refused to be comforted. “When he called, he said he was in deep trouble. We got disconnected before he could say anything else.” She poured two more glasses of iced tea from a pink carnival glass pitcher. “I thought for sure he would have called back by now,” she worried.

  The front door opened and a balding, forty-something man in plaid shorts walked through the foyer and into the dining room. He was carrying a teary-eyed toddler in his arms. A human guest staying at the B and B.

  “Gosh, you have company. I’m sorry, Mary Kay. I was wondering if you could help us out.” He jostled the child. “Seems Todd got stung by a bee. I was wondering if you had some tweezers or something to get the stinger?”

  Mary Kay was already out of her chair, wiping her mouth with a pressed yellow cotton napkin. “Of course, Bradley. This is just my daughter and nephew.” She waved him toward the kitchen, ever the good hostess, even in the middle of a possible crisis with one of her children. She’d been through a few over the centuries. “Come right this way. I’ve got a first-aid kit in the kitchen.”

  Arlan watched the door swing closed behind them before he turned to Fia. He lowered his voice. “You think Regan’s really in hot water?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. You know Regan. He exaggerates. I came home for Ma, not Regan.”

  She was eating cubes of Mary Kay’s delectable chicken with bites of lettuce. Arlan was trying his damnedest not to contaminate perfectly good chicken salad with the rabbit food.

  “You want to tell me about Maggie?” She put the last forkful of salad into her mouth and rose, grabbing her iced tea as she left the table. “Come on. Outside. Away from nosy tourists.”

  Arlan grabbed his glass. Left his lettuce. He joined Fia on the front porch, where she’d settled on the swing.

  “What did Maggie have to say?” Fia asked.

  “She wasn’t happy about you not being there.” He dug his heels into the floorboards and they glided backward.

  “But she talked to you?”

  “Eh.” He shrugged, sipping his tea. “Sort of.”

  She looked at him. “So she did talk to you or she didn’t?” She watched him for another second and then punched him hard in the shoulder. “You jerk! You slept with my i
nformant?”

  “Ouch!” He rubbed his arm and then ran his hand over his T-shirt where he had spilled iced tea. “Fee, that hurts.”

  “So you’re saying you didn’t sleep with her?”

  When he didn’t answer, she slapped the arm of the wooden swing. “Damn it to bloody hell, Arlan. Why is it always like this? Why can’t you keep your dick in your pants?”

  “You used to like it when I didn’t keep my dick in my pants.”

  She groaned and looked away. “So, you get anything out of my informant, before you slept with her? After, maybe?”

  “I have to tell you, she’s not much of an informant, Fee.” He was trying to tease her, but she obviously wasn’t in the mood.

  “So that’s a no.” Fia still wouldn’t look at him.

  “Actually, I think she knows something, but I’m not sure how easy it’s going to be to get it out of her.”

  “And you know this how, Mr. Man-whore?”

  He smiled. “You’re jealous.”

  She looked straight ahead. “I’m not jealous, Arlan. I’m annoyed with you. I have a potential witness to multiple homicides and you’re screwing around with her. Literally and emotionally. I expected better out of you. I thought you could handle this. That you could do it for me.”

  “But I did do it.” By the time the words were out of his mouth, he realized he’d made one joke too many.

  Fia glared.

  “I tried, okay? I was upfront with why I was there, Fee. She wanted to talk to you, not me. Remember, if it wasn’t for this issue with Regan, you could have been there yourself,” he chastised gently.

  The swing came to a halt. Neither pushed it again.

  “So she didn’t want to talk to you about the murders, but she wanted to sleep with you?”

  He hesitated, setting his empty glass on the floor beside the swing. She was right of course. Fia was right. She always was. “Yeah. She wanted to sleep with me. She’s the one who came on to me.”

  Fia looked at him doubtfully.

  “She did,” he defended. “I swear on my mother’s grave.”

  Fia scowled, putting her own glass down. “You do anything else to her?”

  “Anything else?” he asked innocently.

  She was referring to bloodletting. It was against sept law, they all knew it. And they all, on occasion, broke the law. Even Fia. He knew that for a fact. Fia had a little problem with stalking men in bars and feeding on them, an act doubly forbidden by the sept. At least she had before her current boyfriend.

  “No. No, of course not,” he said, trying to sound offended, feeling guilty at the same time for the dark thoughts that had crept through his mind this morning while Maggie lay asleep in his arms. “I just had sex with her. Plain old intercourse. Just the ol’ in and out. Nothing else.”

  “I suppose that’s something.” Fia exhaled. She gazed out at the nicely trimmed green lawn in front of the rambling Victorian house. “I don’t suppose she gave you a way for me to contact her? A phone number? An e-mail address?”

  “No. But she said she’d call you.”

  “So you just left her. Screwed her and left her?”

  “Fee, what was I supposed to do?”

  She shook her head. “You could have not screwed her. What if you scared her off? What if she doesn’t call me? This is five more murders. This guy is a bad one and the human authorities are no closer to catching him than they were last year. I can tell you that right now.” She rose from the swing and walked over to the porch rail.

  Arlan followed her, unable to explain to Fia the connection he’d felt to Maggie last night. She would never understand, even if he tried to explain it. But then how could she when he didn’t understand himself? “I really am sorry. I screwed up.”

  “You’re right. You did.” She put her hands on the rail and leaned forward.

  “But she’s going to call you. I know she is. She wants to talk to you. She wants to help catch this freak.”

  “And you know this how?” She looked up at him.

  He reached over and rubbed her back gently. “I don’t know. I just have a feeling about her. You’ll hear from her again.”

  “I sure hope you’re right.” She shifted her gaze from him to the lawn again.

  He leaned on the rail next to her. “So what do you think we should do about Regan?”

  “Nothing we can do. I think I convinced Ma of that last night. We just have to wait. You know him. He’ll pop up.”

  Arlan realized this was the perfect opportunity to tell Fia that Regan had probably gone AWOL prior to the kill. But still, it seemed like tattling. It wasn’t the first time Regan hadn’t showed. And in every previous instance, he’d been off playing when he should have been working. Regan was just immature. He’d work his way into the job.

  But what about the call home?

  It wouldn’t be the first time Regan had called someone drunk, babbling some overblown story.

  But he didn’t usually call his mother.

  “You…you want me to see if I can find out when his flight was supposed to leave?” Arlan asked. “See where he was going? I’m not even sure he was coming back to the States. We’ve still got several active investigations going on in that part of the world.”

  “I can do it,” she said.

  “No. You’re busy. You’ve got this case.” He lowered his hand. “Other cases,” he added, remembering she wasn’t officially on the Buried Alive case.

  “Yeah, I talked to the Baltimore guys about letting me in on the investigation. Just as a consultant. Of course, their bosses have to talk to my bosses. It might work out. Might not.”

  “Having Maggie would get you in.”

  “Probably.”

  “She’ll call.”

  Fia’s cell rang and she slid it out of her jeans pocket. She checked the caller ID and looked at him.

  “Lover boy?” he asked.

  “Excuse me,” she said curtly, and walked away. “Glen,” she said into the phone.

  Arlan watched her move to the far side of the porch, talking quietly to her boyfriend. Her human boyfriend. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and went down the porch steps, fighting the urge to look back. Fia didn’t need to be jealous over him sleeping with a human. Arlan had enough jealousy bottled up inside him for both of them.

  Chapter 9

  Women. They always were his downfall. Arlan knew that. If he could just swear them off for good, he’d be better off. Arlan kept himself busy the rest of the day so as to not think about Fia or Maggie, but he didn’t have much success.

  He loved women. He loved them in all shapes and sizes and colors. Young women to old women; it made little difference to him. And in all fairness, they liked him.

  A carpenter by trade, when he wasn’t on sept business, he did light construction work in town. After giving an estimate to repair a deck and construct a built-in entertainment center, Arlan stopped at the market and bought a steak, a bag of potatoes, and some frozen green beans. He passed on the sour cream he wanted for his baked potato. He knew Fia was just teasing; he was certainly not growing a paunch. But it was never too soon to start a healthier lifestyle.

  At home, he emptied out his refrigerator of containers with unidentifiable foods, put a potato in the oven, and washed the crusty dishes he’d left in the sink when he went to Greece. With the kitchen in order and the stinky garbage in the outside bin, Arlan went out on his back deck to light a fire in his barbeque grill. Most people had gone to gas grills, but he was a purist at heart. He loved the smell of charcoal burning and the smoky taste of his rare steak, flavored by the embers.

  Arlan carefully stacked the briquettes he removed from the bag and then pulled his trusty lighter from his back pocket. Charcoal fires got a bum rap because they took so long to prepare. However, match-light charcoal was a miraculous innovation. In twenty minutes he’d have a perfect bed of coals to cook that perfect steak.

  He flicked the lighter and nothing happened. He flic
ked it again. Then he realized the safety switch was on. He slid the switch and flicked the trigger again. He was rewarded with a small blue flame. He could smell his baked potato roasting in the oven and could imagine the taste of the T-bone, bloody rare and barely warm in the center.

  The blue flame on the end of the lighter went out. He looked closer. The briquette hadn’t lit. He flicked the lighter, impatiently. It took three flicks to get a flame again. The fluid inside had to be running low. “Come on,” he muttered. He was getting hungry. “Light.”

  The cold black tower seemed to mock him.

  “Damn it,” he muttered. He’d been fine all day after being chastised by Fia for sleeping with Maggie. He’d been fine. He could deal with disappointing Fia. But what he could not deal with tonight was charcoal that wouldn’t light. He flicked the lighter again and again.

  “Bloody bastard.”

  The latch on the gate in his backyard clicked and the heavy gate swung open. “Arlan, that you?”

  He recognized the woman’s voice. After living with the same people for centuries, everyone knew everyone else’s voice, their smell, the sound of the way they walked. “Hey, Peigi.” He poked one of the charcoal briquettes with the end of the lighter and flicked the trigger repeatedly, his irritation rising. Click, click.

  “I rang the doorbell.”

  “Broken.” He flicked the trigger. Click, click. “It’s on my to-do list.” Had been for at least two years. It was a long list, but when life went on forever, two years was barely a drop in a very big bucket.

  Peigi was a short, lumpy woman of about sixty. Her gray hair was styled in a sensible bowl cut and she wore baggy shorts, a striped T-shirt, and sensible shoes. She looked like a middle-aged model for L.L. Bean. Peigi Ross was a sensible woman. “Having trouble lighting that?” She pointed to the round charcoal grill.

  “Nah.” He clicked the lighter. “What can I do for you?”

  “We have a favor to ask.”